Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II

Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II

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Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II Paul Crosthwaite

© Paul Crosthwaite 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20295–5 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–20295–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crosthwaite, Paul, 1980– Trauma, postmodernism and the aftermath of World War II / Paul Crosthwaite. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20295–5 ISBN-10: 0–230–20295–0 1. World War, 1939–1945 – Literature and the war. 2. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 3. American fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 4. War in literature. 5. Psychic trauma in literature. 6. World War, 1939–1945 – Psychological aspects. 7. War and literature – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 8. War and literature – United States – History – 20th century. 9. Postmodernism (Literature) – Great Britain. 10. Postmodernism (Literature) – United States. I. Title. PR888.W66C76 2009 823⬘.91209358—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1

1

War, Trauma, Postmodernism

15

2

Gravity’s Rainbow and Traumatic Models of History

45

3

‘A Secret Code of Pain and Memory’: Traumatic Repetition in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard

76

4 5

Total War and the English Stream-of-Consciousness Novel: From Mrs Dalloway to Mother London

115

Their Fathers’ War: Negotiating the Legacy of World War II in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Atonement

145

Conclusion: Writing/Reading World War II After 9/11

175

Notes

182

Select Bibliography

213

Index

219

v

Acknowledgements This book began as a doctoral thesis written at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. My study at Newcastle would not have been possible without the generous support of the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am also grateful to the Council for additional funding that allowed me to present ideas arising from the project at a conference in the United States. Further financial support came from the School of English Literature, Language, and Linguistics at Newcastle, which funded several conference trips and provided opportunities for teaching. The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin permitted me to view a number of letters by Thomas Pynchon; my thanks to the staff at the Centre for their assistance. Michael Moorcock kindly responded to my queries regarding his use of the ‘stream-ofconsciousness’ technique in his novel Mother London. The book has benefited greatly from the guidance of my doctoral supervisor, John Beck. John’s reading of my work was consistently careful and rigorous, and his constructive criticisms contributed enormously to the development of my ideas. Our wide-ranging discussions remain amongst my most valued memories of my time at Newcastle. Since joining Cardiff University in 2007, my thinking has been enriched by conversations with colleagues and discussions with students taking my ‘Contemporary American Fiction’, ‘War and Memory’, and ‘Literature and Film After 9/11’ modules. These have often suggested new and intriguing angles on the material. I have benefited from the advice, guidance, and support of many people, both inside and outside the academy. I particularly wish to thank Tom Theobald, Leen Maes, Stacy Gillis, Andrew Shail, Anne Whitehead, Mark Gillingwater, Bob Stoate, Becky Munford, Vike Plock, Ann Clifford, Al Smith, Daniel Johnson, Andrew Montgomery, Trevor Rapley, Alex Wilkinson, Peter Nicholls, John Armitage, Ryan Bishop, Douglas Kellner, William Rasch, Wilfried Wilms, Diederik Oostdijk, and Markha Valenta. I am deeply grateful to my family – David, Bernie, Mark, and Mary Crosthwaite – for their immense love and support and the faith that they have always had in me. Finally, I wish to thank Melanie Waters, whose warmth, wit, intelligence, and love have sustained me during the years spent working on this project. vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Parts of chapters 4 and 5 have previously appeared in the publications below. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint this material. ‘“Children of the Blitz”: Air War and the Time of Postmodernism in Michael Moorcock’s Mother London’, in Bombs Away!: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, ed. by William Rasch and Wilfried Wilms (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 233–247. ‘Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, ‘Velocities of Power’, ed. by John Beck and Paul Crosthwaite, special section of Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007), 51–70. The cover image, Head of a Man (1956) by Nigel Henderson, is © Tate, London and the Estate of Nigel Henderson, 2008. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from the following copyright material: Mother London by Michael Moorcock, copyright © Michael Moorcock and Linda Moorcock, 1988, reprinted by permission of Michael Moorcock. Prisoner’s Dilemma by Richard Powers, copyright © Richard Powers, 1988, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Gravity’s Rainbow (Vintage UK) by Thomas Pynchon, copyright © Thomas Pynchon, 1973, 2001, reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency, L.L.C.

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Introduction

This book constitutes the first sustained attempt to locate Anglo-American postmodernist fiction in relation to World War II. As such, it aims to redress a marked disparity between the pervasiveness of the war’s legacy within those realms of literary production typically identified as ‘postmodernist’, and the relative lack of critical attention this relationship has received. More significantly, though, it argues that full acknowledgement of the integrality of the Second World War to the postmodern ‘force field’ substantially strengthens the case for a thoroughgoing reassessment of the very structure and character of this cultural and aesthetic movement itself. This wider imperative to interrogate prevailing readings of the postmodern has been pursued by a number of scholars in a range of areas over the last decade, and I aim to make a contribution to this emerging interdisciplinary project in this study. Here, as in several of the most significant works in this field, productive tools for rethinking postmodernism are found in the models of temporality and history that arise from psychoanalytic theories of trauma. Trauma, as a paradigm of the historical event, possesses an absolute materiality, and yet, as inevitably missed or incompletely experienced, remains absent and inaccessible. This formulation offers a way of conceptualizing postmodernist culture’s effacement of the referent or the originary moment, whilst at the same time affirming its sensitivity to the reality of historical experience. I elaborate this theoretical position in detail in Chapter 1, before pursuing close readings of texts by six authors – Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Richard Powers, and Ian McEwan – for whom World War II, in its vast scope and ferocity, exerts a profound influence. Beyond their shared preoccupation with the war, these figures have been selected on the basis of two sets 1

2

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

of criteria. Firstly, as I will explain in a moment, their writings serve, individually, not merely to demonstrate but to positively exemplify the various waves of fictional response to the Second World War that have succeeded one another over the last sixty years. At the same time, these writers evince a range of discernible associations – whether thematic, formal, professional, or personal – that recommend them for discussion as an, albeit loose, group or cluster. While Woolf may initially appear as an anomalous figure, for reasons including age, gender, class, and the conventions of cultural periodization (her writing being typically held up as a paradigmatic expression of ‘high’, rather than ‘post-’, modernism), what I try to show in my analysis of her work in Chapter 4 is how strikingly her concerns with technology and militarization, and the forms of anxiety and disorientation they engender, anticipate the preoccupations of the later novelists under discussion. Indeed, in their own renderings of these issues, Moorcock, Ballard, and Pynchon are demonstrably informed by the tradition of radical literary experimentation they inherited from their modernist predecessors. Particularly in their work of the 1960s and 1970s (though also in later texts such as Moorcock’s Mother London [1988], Ballard’s Empire of the Sun [1984], and Pynchon’s Vineland [1990]) their speculative or fantastical approaches to questions of technology, war, paranoia, and aberrant subjectivity also border on, or indeed fall within, the generic boundaries of science fiction. Here, the connections between these three writers become all the more concrete: as editor of the British SF magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1971, Moorcock presided over the emergence of the so-called New Wave of artistically sophisticated SF, of which Ballard has often been identified as the definitive exponent, and with which Pynchon (whose first British publication was in New Worlds) has also been associated. Richard Powers, in turn, is one of a number of contemporary American novelists (one thinks also of the likes of William T. Vollman, David Foster Wallace, and Neal Stephenson) whose dense, encyclopaedic, technoscientifically suffused novels would be unthinkable without the work of Pynchon. McEwan, for his part, is similarly self-conscious in his responsiveness to the history of twentieth-century literary innovation, while his notorious penchant for the grotesque, violent, and bizarre bears the imprint of Pynchon and Ballard. With the exception of Woolf, another point of commonality amongst these writers is the fact that they were either children during World War II or else were born only after its conclusion; of their fictional responses to the conflict, the earliest texts I discuss date from the 1960s,

Introduction 3

while the majority were written at a still greater remove from the period of the war itself. What I hope to make apparent, however, is that these texts are every bit as much ‘World War II’ novels (that is, novels that register, gauge, or express the war as traumatic event) as those produced during or immediately after the conflict by writers who saw active combat. The texts I examine in the chapters that follow demonstrate that, far from being circumscribed in time and space, the effects of the war continue to shape the webs of signification in which literary writing is enmeshed. As I show in Chapter 1, the scholarly project of relating World War II and the postmodern has rightly prioritized the significance of the Holocaust and the inaugural deployment of the atomic bomb. The insights that have emerged from this field of study strongly inform the theoretical framework elaborated here. Whilst in no way attempting to diminish the importance or distinctiveness of these events, this book aims, however, to focus attention, for the first time, on a crucial strand of advanced post-war fiction that is obsessively preoccupied with how, for millions of individuals (both ‘combatants’ and ‘civilians’), exposure to battle became, in the ‘total war’ of the 1940s, a necessary existential condition of everyday life. Though the legacy of these escalations in the nature of warfare is a pervasive, mistakenly neglected, dynamic in literary culture, this legacy receives its most nuanced registration not at the readily surveyable levels of plot and theme, but rather in the minutiae of textual, and particularly formal, detail. Hence my selective approach, which rests on the wager that what a close analysis of a small group of texts may sacrifice in comprehensiveness will be more than compensated for in critical insight. It is important, though, that the texts I discuss in detail be located within a wider literary milieu, and to that end I will sketch a brief history of ‘advanced’ or ‘experimental’ fictional responses to the Second World War.1 As Lyndsey Stonebridge notes, during the war and in its immediate aftermath ‘a handful of British writers [risked] an encounter with the limits of the novel form’.2 The most notable works include Henry Green’s Caught (1943), Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude (1947), Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), and Elizabeth Bowen’s two collections of short stories, Look at all Those Roses (1941) and The Demon Lover (1945), and novel, The Heat of the Day (1948). Central to this cluster of texts is a sense that the experience of war pressures the division between private and public, self and other. Adam Piette has identified an ‘invasion’ of the private imagination by war as the characteristic

4

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

preoccupation of the fiction of the period.3 As Stonebridge suggests, however, and as I try to show through a reading of Woolf’s Between the Acts in Chapter 4, the definitive experience of the ‘imagination at war’, at least from a psychoanalytic perspective, would rather appear to be the ‘roughing’ or even ‘explosion’ of the very distinction between private and public, so that both categories ‘are called into question’.4 This sensibility is, moreover, one that persists far beyond the war itself, as Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988), which also receives detailed consideration in Chapter 4, attests. Mention should also be made here of three further novels of the war years and immediate post-war period, one British – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) – and two American: Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941) and John Hawkes’ The Cannibal (1949). Though each is notoriously idiosyncratic, these texts all participate in a profound interrogation of the boundaries of subjectivity, and share, too, a palimpsestic vision of history and a handling of wartime scenes (whether set in Mexico, the United States, or Germany) which hovers uneasily between the realistic and the hallucinatory. In all these respects, they anticipate later novels by the likes of Pynchon, Ballard, and Moorcock. From the late 1940s until the late 1960s, realism prevailed as the dominant mode of fictional response to the war. The period saw the publication of such critical and popular successes as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (1951) and The Thin Red Line (1962), Anton Myrer’s The Big War (1957), Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (1952, 1955, 1961), Elizabeth Jane Howard’s After Julius (1965), and Anthony Powell’s The Military Philosophers (1968). Referring specifically to Britain, but identifying a tendency that was paralleled in the United States, Bernard Bergonzi remarks that the literary culture that emerged after the war was to a large extent reactive: novelists wanted to get back behind modernism to Edwardian or Victorian or eighteenth-century models. [ ... ] These retrogressive attitudes [...] can, I think, be attributed to the wartime sense of personal and collective disruption, persisting beneath the surface of returning prosperity.5 Paradoxically, then, one way of construing the kind of terse, unflinching representation of combat that appears in this realist wave of post-war fiction is as an attempt to domesticate the most extreme horrors of the war. As I suggest in Chapter 1, the problematization of mimesis evident in the modernist response to the First World War can be interpreted as a

Introduction 5

defensive move, but one whose very adoption testifies to the challenge posed by twentieth-century warfare to inherited forms of representation, a challenge that continued adherence to these forms can be seen as struggling to resist or deny. A willingness to respond to this challenge was intermittently evident from the early 1960s, particularly in the United States: consider, for example, the disordered temporal sequence and antic violence of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), or the puzzling interfusion of alternate histories of World War II in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). It was not until the turn of the decade, though, that a radical fictional response to the war coalesced. It did so most compellingly and most visibly in three landmark novels: Kurt Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive (1969), J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). The conflict had been an incipient presence in the writing of all three since their novelistic careers began. In the famous metafictional first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut reflects on the way his experience of the fire-bombing of Dresden has long lingered, insistent but inchoate, at the peripheries of his writing, and on the inadequacy of realist reportage as a means of expressing it: When I got back from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. [ ... ] But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then – not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either. [ ... ] I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about[.]6 Rather similarly, as I show in Chapter 3, Ballard’s early work, published over the course of the 1960s, continually manifests a simultaneous attraction and resistance to the wartime atrocities he witnessed as a child in Shanghai. Pynchon’s exposure to the war was considerably less acute (born in 1937, he was a resident of Long Island, New York, during the war years), but his first two novels, V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), also display a persistent concern with the conflict, most notably in the lengthy chapter of V. set in wartime Malta,7 and in the figure of Dr Hilarius in The Crying of Lot 49, a psychiatrist who turns out to have been a Nazi doctor.

6

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

As I have suggested, the Second World War subsequently becomes a preoccupation for these three authors, but even at this point it by no means hoves squarely into view. On the contrary, the war only assumes its full effectivity in their work when it is overcoded by the proliferating crises of the mid- to late 1960s, of which the war in Vietnam and the parallel protest struggles in the United States and elsewhere are perhaps the most significant examples. As such, these texts crystallize developments in the wider culture: ‘the war on the war in Vietnam inaugurates the externalization of the response to the Second War – the beginning of the end of the repression of the experience of the war’, as the poet and critic Charles Bernstein puts it in his important essay ‘The Second War and Postmodern Memory’.8 What makes Vonnegut, Ballard, and Pynchon’s writings of this period particularly striking – what distinguishes them as ‘postmodern’ in the sense I will advocate in this study – is the way in which they stage the dislocation and dispersal of the moment of originary rupture through an eerie intertwining of their own historical moment with that of the war. Not only is the referent projected by these novels often shrouded or obscure, it is rarely singular, so that the works enact the inseparability, in psychic temporality, of chronologically divergent historical moments. Indicative of the significance of Slaughterhouse-Five is the assiduousness with which its 150 pages have been mined by critics.9 Gravity’s Rainbow, of course, is one of the few works of post-war fiction to have received greater scholarly attention, but its sheer capaciousness is such that it offers considerably greater scope for fresh insight. The Atrocity Exhibition, meanwhile, like Ballard’s oeuvre as a whole, has received a paucity of critical scrutiny relative to its literary-historical significance. It is on Pynchon and Ballard’s texts, therefore, that I focus my attention in this study. These three novelists in many ways made the Second World War available as a subject for the formally ambitious members of the literary generation that followed them. The influence of Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Ballard is frequently evident in the fictional responses to the war that proliferated from the late 1970s onwards, though the younger generation also exhibits its own characteristic preoccupations. As A.S. Byatt has suggested, for the group of male writers who rose to prominence in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s – Julian Barnes (b. 1946), Ian McEwan (b. 1948), Martin Amis (b. 1949), Graham Swift (b. 1949), and Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954) – the fascination of the war lies in its status as ‘their fathers’’ war:10 how to perceive and commemorate a conflict whose effects on the self and the wider world are so palpable, but which

Introduction 7

one did not in fact live through? The ambiguous predicament of the ‘baby boom’ generation with respect to the war is also a significant issue in a number of American novels of the last two decades, such as Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988), Bradford Morrow’s Trinity Fields (1995), and Curtis White’s Memories of My Father Watching TV (1998). Within this wave, McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma, which I examine together in Chapter 5, are particularly distinguished by their intense self-reflexivity, whereby their own status as late-twentieth-century reconstructions of World War II becomes the privileged object of their meditations. In the United States, a concern with this condition of ‘coming after’ has been paralleled by, and has at times intersected with, an interest in the various ways in which the Second World War both destabilized and re-inscribed normative structures of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. One thinks, in particular, of the portrayals of disillusioned Native American veterans in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), of the juxtaposition of the United States’ war on fascism with its own history of racial oppression in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), and of the exploration of gender relations as they have been reshaped by the wars of the ‘American Century’ – from World War II to Vietnam – in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams (1984). A similar determination to explore the wartime experiences of marginalized groups has recently become visible in British fiction. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), for example, reflect on the complex interactions that arose from the widespread incorporation of non-white colonial subjects into the British war effort. Michèle Roberts’ Daughters of the House (1992), Liz Jensen’s War Crimes for the Home (2002), and Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (2006), meanwhile, address the war’s release of a reckless, death-haunted sexuality. The fascination that the war continues to hold for both British and American novelists is demonstrated, too, by texts as different as Neal Stephenson’s dense interweaving of World War II code-breaking and contemporary technoscience, Cryptonomicon (1999); Lawrence Norfolk’s mythically infused evocation of the Balkans spiralling into chaos in the 1940s, In the Shape of a Boar (2000); Michael Frayn’s vivid conjuring of wartime childhood, Spies (2002); Christopher Priest’s extravagant, Philip K. Dick-esque alternate history narrative, The Separation (2002); William T. Vollman’s sprawling, overtly Pynchonian vision of a continent wracked by war and totalitarianism, Europe Central (2005); and A.L. Kennedy’s angular portrait of a shattered former RAF gunner and POW, Day (2007).

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Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

My aim in the foregoing paragraphs has been to situate the works I discuss in detail in this book within a wider literary-historical context. The list of titles I have offered is itself highly partial, however, for the fictional response to World War II is not reducible to texts that are ‘about’ the conflict as such. Randall Stevenson makes this point in his recent history of English Literature since 1960: The shock of the war was among several factors contributing to selfquestioning, postmodern uncertainties about all theories, narratives, and representations of life. [ ... ] Writing of this kind was by no means confined to novels in which the history of the Second World War was directly an issue. [ ... ] For much of the period, uncertainties created by recent history confirmed and coalesced with postmodern thought: post-war and postmodern influences coincided in a selfdoubting, self-questioning idiom particularly evident in novels of historical interest, even when these were set outside the twentieth century altogether.11 The texts that receive close scrutiny in the following chapters are exemplary in that they explicitly display an intention to engage with the event of the war and its aftermath, whilst, at the same time, self-consciously foregrounding the recognition that precisely such engagement, if it is to be effective, must somehow resist simply responding to the war in any direct or literal way. As I have already intimated, this departure from univocality is closely bound up with what I take to be these texts’ distinctively ‘postmodern’ aesthetic. This view implies a particular conceptualization of the postmodern, which I will now begin to elaborate. When did the ‘postmodern’ begin? From a theoretical perspective, the question appears misconceived, most obviously because it would seem to presuppose a coherent understanding of the term in question, whereas, as Tony Myers notes, it is precisely ‘the inconstancy of the “postmodern” (in whatever form: “-ity”, “-ist”, or “-ism”) that is generally held up as its primary characteristic’.12 Moreover, even insofar as some consensus does surround the idea of a distinctively ‘postmodern’ sensibility, one of its most commonly remarked features must be its critique of the very notion of ‘beginnings’ and ‘origins’, and its insistence, instead, upon the elusive temporality of the ‘always already’, or the ‘always yet to come’. Indeed, as Peter Osborne has argued, there can be no more paradigmatically ‘modern’ assertion than that of the radical overcoming of the modern itself. Any attempt to posit the postmodern as a condition that follows, or supersedes, that of the ‘modern’ in

Introduction 9

chronological succession is self-defeating, on a theoretical level, since it merely recapitulates the periodizing logic and the preoccupation with the birth of the New through which the modern conceived of itself.13 For Osborne, the question of the postmodern is not, first and foremost, one of content – of whether this or that mutation of the social, cultural, or artistic field is sufficiently radical as to mark a break with that which has hitherto been considered ‘modern’, and thus to demand the term ‘postmodern’. Rather, it must primarily consist of an attempt to pressure the form – the very temporal and historical model of linearity, causality, chronology, and succession – which structures such narratives of change and innovation. Despite these marked conceptual difficulties, however, a number of scholars have attempted – to varying degrees of specificity, and with varying levels of empirical rigour – to date the emergence, inauguration, or coalescence of, if not the ‘postmodern’ in toto, then of one or other strand of that broader zeitgeist. Amongst the seismic moments that have been cited are the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963;14 the demolition of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme in St Louis at 3.32 pm on 15 July 1972;15 the global economic and political turmoil of 1972–1973;16 the final evacuation of US forces from Saigon on 29 April 1975;17 and the collapse of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001.18 Other critics, meanwhile, have traced the coming into being of the postmodern condition to a considerably earlier historical moment: the mid-1940s. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, for example, write: There are good reasons to nominate August 1945 as the beginning of the postmodern adventure since it marked the end of European fascism, the advent of the Atomic Age, and the acceleration of an arms race that intensified the co-construction of science, technology, and capitalism.19 For Walter A. Davis, too, the year zero of the postmodern intersects with the ground zero of nuclear annihilation: Virginia Woolf said that ‘in or about December 1910 human nature changed’. She would have recorded a similar shock in August of 1945. The change Woolf witnessed has now, of course, been safely domesticated and has a local habitation and a name: modernism. The second change also has a name – postmodernism.20

10 Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

As Andrew J. McKenna notes, though, It is not only from Hiroshima, and the prospect of its planetary repetition, that we derive our sense of living on, of being survivors, of being as survival. Other events mark 1945 as the beginning of the postmodern; these are events, ‘on the western front’ so to speak. 21 Mark C. Taylor offers a perspective that similarly encompasses events at both ends of the globe: A century that began with utopian expectations every bit as grand as those of nineteenth-century romantics and idealists is eventually forced to confront the flames of Hiroshima and the ashes of Auschwitz. In the dark light of those flames and the arid dust of those ashes, modernism ends and something other begins.22 For Ihab Hassan, it is the onset of the World War, rather than its conclusion, that presents itself as the pivotal moment: ‘We would not seriously claim an inaugural date for [postmodernism] as Virginia Woolf pertly did for modernism, though we may sometimes woefully imagine that postmodernism began “in or about September 1939”’. 23 Like Davis and Hassan, Richard Dellamora also invokes Virginia Woolf, but here it is her death that emerges as a turning point for a particular narrative of the postmodern: In cultural history, there are a number of moments that provide an allegorical figure of a particular movement or style. The suicide of Virginia Woolf in March 1941 is one such moment. Woolf died expecting the invasion of Britain by the German army and knowing the violent ends which in that case awaited her and Leonard Woolf, her Jewish socialist husband. Woolf’s death seems to sound the knell for the refined aesthetic modernism of novels such as To the Lighthouse and, more generally, for the form of middle-class dissidence summed up in the word ‘Bloomsbury’. [ ... ] If Woolf’s death seems to signal the end of literary modernism, the suicide several months later of the Jewish, Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin has become a touchstone of postmodernity. Benjamin killed himself in the Spanish border village of Port Bou in order to avoid being returned to the hands of the Gestapo in Nazioccupied France. His act testifies to the end of the capability of the

Introduction 11

Euro-American world historical movements – communism, fascism, and liberal or socialist democracy – to dominate human meaning.24 As Dellamora observes, an attempt to ‘theorize the cultural construction of postmodern time from a ground zero in the Europe of World War II’ is a recurring feature of contributions to his collection Postmodern Apocalypse.25 Even Jean-François Lyotard, for all his insistence upon the protean temporality of the postmodern, mentions 1943 as a possible date for the inauguration of this new epoch, on the basis of the conjunction of the Final Solution and new war technologies.26 What, then, are the key issues that arise from this selection of creation narratives of the postmodern, which punctuate a timeline stretching from the mid-1940s to the beginning of the twenty-first century? Firstly, it is important to note the more or less explicit acknowledgement – even on the part of those who invoke historical phenomena of truly global magnitude – that the specific events cited in these accounts are manifestly inadequate, in and of themselves, to explain the emergence of anything but the most particular and localized facets of the postmodern. This, of course, is a matter of the most basic historiographical principles of proportion and causality. More pertinently, the texts from which the extracts quoted above are drawn might themselves be seen as symptomatically ‘postmodern’, insofar as they self-consciously present themselves as, in Peter Knight’s words, ‘symbolic fictions of origin’, whose effectiveness arises not simply from their putative ‘truth value’, but from their ability to imbue the abstract issues under discussion with the drama, resonance, and weight of lived historical experience.27 Conversely, though, as Knight suggests, it may be that such fictions are necessary;28 indeed, if the ‘postmodern condition’, in its broadest sense, is above all characterized by a contradictory and bewildering profusion of signs, meanings, and identities, it is easy to see how this experience might instil an irresistible, if ultimately futile, urge to unearth the origins of this confusion – to locate ‘the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; [ ... ] the “When-it-all-changed”’29 – even as this impulse runs contrary to the anti-foundationalist tendencies of more strictly theoretical construals of the postmodern. Even at a theoretical level, though, a compelling defence can be mounted of attempts to ‘see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that’.30 If scholars have been inclined to perceive the postmodern as ‘ahistorical’, this must be attributable, in no small part, to the resistance that those thinkers who have most often

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Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

been viewed as emblematically ‘postmodern’ – the likes of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard – have themselves mounted against historicist strategies. The work of such figures has the invaluable virtue of highlighting the propensity of historicist criticism for reductive interpretations of rich and multifaceted cultural forms. Certainly, all of the condensed ‘historicizations’ of the postmodern cited above could, viewed individually, be accused of greater or lesser degrees of reductionism. Taken as a group, however, the sheer variety of the epochal moments cited demonstrates that the postmodern cannot be understood aside from its historical conditions of possibility, but that it is, equally, irreducible to any unitary, time-bound determinant, regardless of scale. The ‘postmodern’, in other words, is a thoroughly overdetermined phenomenon, and if it is a notoriously inconsistent one, too, this may be a consequence of its being required to somehow register, absorb, and contain responses to successive waves of diverse historical change. Yet this is still to posit the ‘postmodern’ as a positive entity, however contradictory, diffuse, and multifaceted, which is ‘produced’ by an array of historical forces. Following Peter Osborne, in contrast, it might be more useful to conceive of the postmodern not as a multitude of ideas, artefacts, and institutions that circulate within the contemporary life-world, but as the very condition of colossal and disorientating overdetermination registered by these divergent forms, an overdetermination whose vectors of causality are perceived not as unidirectional, but instead as issuing simultaneously – in complex, interweaving patterns – from the past, the present, and even the future. The ‘postmodern’ can best be grasped, then, as a particular mode of temporality, though one characterized not (as the term itself has tended to suggest) by the coming into being of a new epoch beyond or after the ‘modern’, but by an experience of misapprehension, retroaction, anticipation, and deferral that disrupts the forward march of the modern ‘from within’.31 Furthermore, as I have already asserted, and as the myths of origin of the postmodern that I chose to foreground above suggest, it is apparent that of the myriad historical dynamics under whose pressure the temporality of the postmodern sustains its warps and distortions, particular significance must be accorded to those spiralling out from the catastrophe of the twentieth century’s second (and history’s pre-eminent) total war. The central objective of this book is to demonstrate how this contention is borne out by a range of works of mid-twentieth- to early twenty-first-century British and American (that is, United States) fiction.

Introduction 13

The book comprises five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 attempts to articulate a theory of the postmodern that accords due significance to the spasmodic outbreaks of catastrophic violence that marked the twentieth century, amongst which the Second World War is unparalleled. It engages with a wide range of theoretical and historical debates, but does so in the pursuit of two core objectives: firstly, to locate and account for the differing positions occupied by World War II in the discourses of the postmodern that have developed in continental Europe, on the one hand, and Britain and North America, on the other; and secondly, to show how Fredric Jameson’s alignment of the historical referent with Jacques Lacan’s notion of the Real points the way to an understanding of the postmodern as convergent with the post-traumatic – a theorization that Jameson’s own reading of postmodern culture discounts. Chapter 2 demonstrates how psychic trauma functions as a structuring principle for the conceptualization of history offered by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). I begin with a discussion of the periodizing concept of ‘late capitalism’, which both Theodor Adorno and, uncharacteristically, Jameson himself, elaborate in implicit relation to Freudian models of trauma – models that, as Cathy Caruth observes, characterize ‘the traumatic experience in terms of its temporal unlocatability’. I show how Gravity’s Rainbow similarly invokes the notion of trauma in its own delineation of the new networks of military and corporate power that emerged from the Second World War. This manifests itself, I argue, both in overt representations of traumatic experience and its treatment, and also, more subtly yet more pervasively, in the ‘temporal unlocatability’ of the narrative’s setting itself – its tendency to refer, simultaneously, both to the convulsions of World War II, and to the Cold War era of the text’s own production. Chapter 3 explains how fictional and non-fictional texts written by J.G. Ballard over a period of three decades from the early 1960s obliquely evince their receptivity to a condition of psychobiographical trauma born of his experiences during World War II. This dynamic is signalled, I argue, not simply by the prevalence, in a wide array of narratives, of particular scenes, images, and scenarios, but, most arrestingly, by the peculiarly heavy symbolic weight these repetitive signifiers are often made to carry. I trace the ways in which the symbolic associations evoked by these signifiers alter over time, paying particular attention to the traumatic intensifications they undergo amidst the violent public and personal upheavals to which Ballard was subjected in the mid-1960s to early 1970s. I also discuss two later, avowedly semiautobiographical narratives – Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness

14

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

of Women (1991) – which, I argue, can be read as both tracing and enacting a process of ‘working through’ the traumatic material with which earlier texts are invested. Chapter 4 reads innovatory uses of the stream-of-consciousness technique by Virginia Woolf and, more recently, Michael Moorcock as means of responding to the traumatic upheavals of total war. The chapter focuses, in particular, on theorizations of trauma that view it as entailing a collapse of the distinction between public and private realms. I show how the expansion of the scope of warfare over the first half of the twentieth century rendered this boundary increasingly precarious. In Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Between the Acts (1941) and Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) these developments are formally registered through a steadily more profound blurring of the ‘public’ voice of the narrator and the ‘private’ voices of the characters. In Mother London, this ‘traumatic’ interfusion of public and private is accompanied by an equally unsettling convergence of past and present. Chapter 5 is divided into two parts, each of which focuses on a novel that overtly dramatizes the situation of the generation born in the aftermath of World War II. Both Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) ask what kind of access members of this generation might have to the devastating historical events of the 1940s. They signal that the challenge of representing the war at the end of the century turns on a profound incompatibility between realism and the Real. If, as Jacques Lacan contends, the traumatic encounter with the Real opens up an incomprehensible and unsymbolizable void in experience, its occurrence is most effectively marked, these texts suggest, in the act of disrupting and diverting realism’s drive to mimetically delineate the world. A recurrent concern throughout the book is with the various ways in which the fictional texts under discussion intertwine the legacy of the Second World War with states of anxiety or crisis unfolding in the present of composition. The Conclusion opens the project out onto the contemporary moment by exploring how associations between the cataclysmic upheavals of World War II and the devastating terrorist insurgencies that mark our own era have begun to manifest themselves in literary culture. Such associations are evident both in new writings by the likes of Michael Moorcock, Ian McEwan, Iain Sinclair, Deborah Eisenberg, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Mohsin Hamid, and in the altered responses that texts such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow inevitably elicit in the wake of 11 September 2001.

1 War, Trauma, Postmodernism

I begin, then, by exploring the status of World War II within the multifarious debates that surround the notion of the ‘postmodern’. Perhaps the most obvious point to be made is that even while the conflict was still underway, the Second World War was identified as an unprecedented crisis of Enlightenment modernity. Since 1945, this view has often been reiterated, with particular emphasis being placed on what Charles Bernstein calls the war’s ‘two poles’, ‘the Systematic Extermination Process’ and ‘the dropping of the H-Bomb’.1 The basis of this argument has been not so much that the war marked an aberrant departure from Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress, however, but rather that its most destructive tendencies followed a logic deeply inscribed within the project of modernity itself.2 Within this branch of scholarship, the horrors of World War II are viewed as arising from, and rendering all too apparent, the inherently antagonistic character of the nation state; the dominance of instrumental rationality within modern bureaucratic, administrative, and logistical systems, and the consequent adaptability of such systems to the mass reification, and ultimately extermination, of human life; the capacity of political and military institutions to dominate, discipline, and control the natural environment and its human inhabitants; the propensity of scientific and technological expertise to be channelled into the production of highly efficient technologies of war and genocide; the co-construction of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism; the liability of ‘western’ culture to objectify, oppress, and eliminate its ethnic and racial ‘others’; and the bloody futility of attempts to make over the world in the image of some grand, Utopian vision, whether of the right or of the left. The ‘postmodern’ response to the Second World War would consist, then, of attempts both to demonstrate the imbrication of the war in 15

16

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

the logic of modernity and to chart a course of cultural, social, and philosophical renewal along lines divergent from those of the now discredited modern project. 3 Again, though, it is the particular model of temporality around which the modern/postmodern axis is structured that primarily concerns me here. In an essay addressing continental philosophers’ responses to the Holocaust, John McCumber posits the Nazi genocide as the ‘master rupture’ of twentieth-century history and ‘the historical origin of “post-modernity”’.4 As I have tried to argue, though, the concept of the ‘postmodern’ assumes its radical force only insofar as it is understood as contesting the notion of some ‘master rupture’, or single, chronologically determinable point of origin. There is something compellingly categorical about the idea that the Holocaust marks an absolute break or decisive turning point, which instantaneously, by its very occurrence, transforms all human thought and experience. In key writings by the likes of Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, however, the Second World War in general, and the Holocaust in particular, tend to be figured rather differently. The task of thinking the event of the war in its most radical dimensions, these philosophers suggest, demands a willingness to question the coherence, clarity, and temporal fixity implicitly attributed to it by models of originary rupture. In an important essay of the early 1960s on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, which reads the play as an oblique meditation on the material and philosophical desolation of the post-war world, Adorno writes: After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realizing it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made reflection on one’s own damaged state useless.5 Adorno’s argument here is not simply that western societies have failed to fully acknowledge the moral catastrophe of the war, preferring instead to continue acting out the conventions of ‘ordinary’ life in a grotesque charade. More profoundly, he suggests that the war marks an absolute divide (it destroys everything; it is, strictly, ‘unsurvivable’), but one that somehow remains perpetually suspended, unrealized, and incomprehensible. This paradoxical formulation has become paradigmatic in more recent, ‘postmodern’ continental philosophy. Reflecting on how the Second World War bears upon the temporal preoccupations

War, Trauma, Postmodernism

17

apparent within this field, Andrew J. McKenna observes: The question of the postmodern in its most far-reaching implications, which are nonetheless the most concrete, is the question of survival, of living on after the dead. A postmodern consciousness is indissociable, for demonstrable, concrete reasons bearing on the recent past as they affect the possibility of a future, from the consciousness of being a survivor, of living on. The consciousness of being as presence as being somehow or other belated, nachträglich, après coup, may be the consequence of our deconstructive activity. It is also, I argue, a matter of decisive historical consequence.6 Peter Nicholls has also noted the importance of the model of traumatic temporality Freud termed Nachträglichkeit (‘deferred action’, ‘retroaction’, ‘belatedness’, ‘afterwardsness’; French: après coup) within ‘a certain theory of the postmodern for which concepts of time and memory are of central importance’.7 This concept receives its most systematic elaboration in the famous case history of the ‘Wolf Man’. The neuroses suffered by this man, Freud postulated, arose from a delayed response to his having witnessed, as a small child, the ‘primal scene’ – the unintelligible sight of his parents engaged in sexual intercourse: At the age of one and a half the child receives an impression to which he is unable to react adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be moved by it when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him.8 As Nicholls insists, the psychic mechanism of Nachträglichkeit is ‘not simply a matter of recovering a lost memory, but rather of the restructuring which forms the past in retrospect as “the original site [ ... ] comes to be reworked”’.9 It resonates with the anti-foundationalism of much postmodern theory in that its retroactive logic refuses to accord ontological primacy to any originary moment. Since the shock of the first scene is not felt directly by the subject but only through its later representation in memory we are dealing with, in Derrida’s words, ‘a past that has never been present’.10 Belatedness, in this sense, creates a complex temporality which inhibits any nostalgia for origin and continuity – the ‘origin’ is now secondary, a construction always contained in its own repetition.11

18 Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

The model of Nachträglichkeit has allowed Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida to evoke a post-war condition that unfolds in the vicinity of events so unfathomably horrific as to have excluded the possibility of punctual comprehension, and which, for that very reason, insistently demand expression, even as such expression betrays its utter incommensurability with those events by seeking to weave minimal threads of signification around a yawning absence of meaning.12 In a much cited passage from The Writing of the Disaster (1995 [1980]), Blanchot refers to the Holocaust as the absolute event of history – which is a date in history – that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up, where the gift, which knows nothing of forgiving or of consent, shattered without giving place to anything that can be affirmed, that can be denied. [ ... ] How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust where all was lost, including guardian thought?13 Blanchot notes the implacable fact of the Holocaust as an empirical occurrence, precisely located in time and space, and argues, moreover, for its status as a categorical break (‘the absolute event of history’). As in the extract from Adorno quoted above, however, there is a sense that the most profound significance of this rupture inheres in its perpetual deferral with respect to the claims of knowledge or understanding. An acute tension arises, then, between the infinite density of the Holocaust, as historical event, and its absolute vacuity of meaning or intelligibility. As Robert Eaglestone has shown,14 Derrida also draws on the connotations of consumption by fire carried by the word ‘holocaust’ in his incantatory invocations of ‘cinders’ and ‘ashes’ – the last fragile remains that mark the occurrence of the ‘all-burning’.15 In James Berger’s apt phrase, the Holocaust is performatively figured by Derrida (as by a range of recent continental philosophers) as an ‘absent referent’, its dimmest outlines visible in the intricate contours of his prose.16 A rather different problematization of the referential status of the Holocaust, and of the broader devastations of World War II, appears in the work of another leading continental theorist of recent decades: Jean Baudrillard. In The Transparency of Evil (1993 [1990]), Baudrillard challenges the kind of ruptural reading of the war discussed above: It is really only because we have disappeared politically and historically today (and therein lies our problem) that we seek to prove that

War, Trauma, Postmodernism

19

we died between 1940 and 1945, at Auschwitz or in Hiroshima – which at least makes for a strong history.17 As I have noted, the likes of Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida also resist interpretations of the war couched in terms of finality and termination – on the grounds that they implicitly foreclose those spectral returns from the disasters of mid-century that pervade post-war consciousness. These theorists suggest, moreover, that the persistent power of the Holocaust, in particular, to compel thought, analysis, and representation derives from its ultimate intractability with respect to those forms. In Lyotard’s vivid analogy: Suppose that an earthquake destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly. The impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a very great seismic force.18 Baudrillard’s position is markedly different. For him, the reason that the war cannot be posited as the decisive, defining event of our era is because its ‘ruptural energy’19 has entirely dissipated, and dissipated precisely into the conflict’s numerous visual and discursive renderings. In a short essay prompted by the television drama Holocaust (1978), for example, Baudrillard argues that televisual recreations of the genocide effect the ‘same process of forgetting, of liquidation, of extermination, same annihilation of memories and of history, same inverse, implosive radiation, same absorption without an echo, same black hole as Auschwitz’. 20 This notion – that the outbreaks of atrocious destruction that marked the twentieth century are themselves somehow destroyed, as substantial historical events, through their subsequent representation – is a recurrent one in Baudrillard’s work.21 Discussing the advent of near-instantaneous (‘real time’) systems of information dissemination, he remarks, Real time is our mode of extermination today. It’s every bit the equal of the other. It isn’t as bloody, but it’s a form of the inhuman. The final solution was at Auschwitz, but it was also in the film Holocaust, which retraced the memory, and thus gave the illusion of memory. [ ... ] It’s the same with Hiroshima. An exhibition was held showing photos of the city before the bomb, of the city annihilated, and of Hiroshima as it is today. Now, it’s true that Hiroshima is a city

20

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

reborn, but this new Hiroshima is also a part of its being definitively wiped out. The traumatic event has been whitewashed. All archives are whitewashing devices. The event is distanced from us once and for all by the very means available to us for remembering it. This is a form of fatality. [ ... ] We’re abandoned to a system which no longer allows us to recapture an objectivity, a historicity of things.22 Similarly, in the Berlin of the mid-1980s – ‘at the pinnacle of history self-exposed by its violence’ – ‘everything is eerily quiet’: The most amazing thing is that history is being antiquated as vague terrain. One can remember it like some nightmare, that is, like fulfilling a desire, but the signs have long since become a true battlefield. [ ... ] It is no longer the buildings that go up in flames and the cities that collapse; it is the Hertzian relays of our memories that crackle.23 In the same essay, Baudrillard argues that the nuclear epoch inaugurated at Hiroshima need not inspire ‘fear’, ‘despair’, or ‘panic’, since, through the dematerializing, ‘simulatory’ processes of the mass media, everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporized. The explosion has already occurred; the bomb is only a metaphor now. What more do you want? Everything has already been wiped off the map. It is useless to dream: the clash has gently taken place everywhere. 24 Images of ‘liquidation’, ‘extermination’, ‘irradiation’, ‘vaporization’, and ‘nuclearization’ pervade Baudrillard’s evocations of the derealizing effects of an ever-expanding media realm, even where a concern with the catastrophic events of the mid-twentieth century is not obviously apparent. For example, in the short book Simulations (1983), still his best known work, he refers repeatedly, but unspecifically, to the ‘liquidation’,25 ‘extermination’,26 or ‘death sentence’27 of the referent or the real. Baudrillard’s wilfully scandalous equation of the systematic, industrialized murder of millions during the Second World War with a putative process via which these events are consumed by their own representations, as well as his more general metaphorizations of the war’s atrocities, might be taken as attempts to performatively demonstrate the decisive disappearance of the real into a purely discursive realm that these images of liquidation, vaporization, and so on themselves

War, Trauma, Postmodernism

21

stand to signify. The prevalence of this imagery in Baudrillard’s writing can, I think, be read rather differently, however, particularly in light of remarks in The Transparency of Evil. Here, he employs the same conception of the Second World War as traumatic ‘primal scene’ that is operable in Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida’s appropriations of Freudian psychoanalysis. The war, Baudrillard argues, is undergoing a transition from the historical stage to a mythical stage: the mythic – and media-led – reconstruction of all these events. And in a sense this mythic conversion is the only possible way [ ... ] to absolve us in phantasy from the guilt of this primal crime. But in order for this to be achieved, in order for even a crime to become a myth, the historical reality must first be eradicated. Otherwise, since all these things (fascism, the camps, the extermination) have been, and remain, historically unresolvable for us, we should be obliged to repeat them for ever like a primal scene.28 Baudrillard’s characteristically cool, detached, and ambiguous irony is in evidence in this observation that the waning of the ‘historical reality’ of the conflict is not to be resisted, but rather to be welcomed, even encouraged, since it need then no longer threaten the anaesthetic tranquillity of contemporary culture. It might, though, be possible to open up a suggestive fissure in Baudrillard’s theoretical edifice by turning this irony against itself – that is, by reading this passage as a programmatic statement of Baudrillard’s agenda in his wider reflections on the aftermath of the Second World War. Understood from this perspective, his insistence that the catastrophes of the 1940s are being inexorably hollowed out, to leave merely the empty shells of their own simulations, would appear as urgent attempts to enact, endorse, or precipitate this very process, and so ward off the conflict’s traumatic reviviscence. And, moreover, the recurrent deployment, across Baudrillard’s texts, of images that cannot help but recall Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the wider atrocities for which they have become synecdochic would (whether consciously or not) signal the peculiar potency still possessed by these events, even (or rather, precisely) as they are evoked in the process of asserting the erasure of historicity, referentiality, and the real. The possibility that a ‘simulacral’ rendering of the events of World War II might testify as much to the necessity of averting their persistent traumatic force as to their attenuation and eclipse is one that will be pursued in the material that follows. Baudrillard’s work is also particularly significant because, within the strand of contemporary theory

22

Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

I am tracing, his (as I read it) ambiguous response to the war positions him as a pivotal figure between the likes of Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida – for whom the disasters of the 1940s are compelling, if often obliquely registered, incitements to thought – and the theorist who – in part because the Second World War and its legacy remain almost entirely extraneous to his conception of the postmodern – will figure most prominently in this study: Fredric Jameson. The issues with which Jameson finds postmodernism to be most intimately bound up coincide with my own primary interests. In reading postmodernism’s formulation of history, temporality, and referentiality in terms of pure depthlessness, amnesia, pastiche, and simulation – themselves under the sway of the relentless logic of late capitalist reification – however, Jameson has established a prevailing paradigm with which I will take issue. Furthermore, Jameson’s work – of necessity, I argue – exemplifies a tendency common to all of the leading theorizations of Anglo-American postmodernist culture; that is, the elision of the Second World War and its legacy from what Jameson calls the ‘postmodern force field’. 29 While, as I indicated in the introduction, a number of British and North American scholars have located postmodernist culture in relation to World War II, these positions remain on the peripheries of debates in this field. My objective, however, is not to establish the war as a hitherto largely neglected dynamic within a postmodernist matrix that otherwise continues to look much the same. Rather, I will suggest that to recognize the full significance of the conflict for a range of cultural practices typically understood as ‘postmodern’ is to acknowledge the necessity of reassessing some of the central assertions of Jameson’s enormously influential theorization of postmodernism, and thus of much of the wider scholarship in the field. As I will explain in detail in Chapter 2, World War II is implicated in Jameson’s account of the emergence of postmodernism, if only insofar as it prepares the way for a transition in the global organization of capital, which provides, in turn, the conditions of possibility for the flourishing of the new ‘cultural dominant’. With this preliminary structural or systemic shift, however, the effects of the war appear to be spent; certainly, they play no part in what Jameson calls ‘the psychic habitus of the new age’.30 One can only assume that for Jameson (as, apparently at least, for Baudrillard) the Second World War is simply another fragment of the historical past that finds itself passively consumed by its own representations, grist to the mill of the realm of spectacle and simulation. Understood as such, the conflict appears not as a force within the culture of postmodernism, but rather, one might say, as

War, Trauma, Postmodernism

23

a mere victim of it. But if, as I suggest in this book, the reverberations of World War II can still be felt across the postmodern landscape, the holographic depthlessness of its scenery begins to look less straightforwardly attributable to the machinations of capitalist reification, and more akin to a psychic ‘defence-formation’, which, dialectically, in its very adoption, functions as the clearest indicator of the conflict’s troubling legacy. In pursuing this argument, I aim to build upon pioneering work by the likes of Cathy Caruth, Hal Foster, and Slavoj Žižek, which has begun to map out ways in which the apparently depthless surfaces of many contemporary cultural artefacts might be read as serving simultaneously to ward off and to register a range of insistent, unresolved historical traumas. What I have tried to suggest in the preceding paragraphs is that, in addition to the numerous stylistic and methodological differences that distinguish the major continental thinkers of recent decades from the most prominent Anglo-American theorists of postmodernism, another notable point of divergence concerns the degree of significance granted to World War II. Clearly, this disparity must be closely related to the differing levels of material, social, and psychological devastation suffered during the war by the nations of continental Europe, on the one hand, and the United Kingdom and the United States, on the other. On the continent, the experience of the Second World War was, and in many ways remains, defined by atrocities, whether these were perpetrated, suffered, or – more commonly and ambiguously – merely acquiesced in. The historian Gordon Wright reports that ‘at least one psychiatrist, on returning to the Continent in 1945, contended that almost every inhabitant of occupied Europe showed some traits that might be described as neurotic or even psychotic’.31 The historical consensus has long been that the United Kingdom and the United States emerged comparatively unscathed – both materially and psychologically – from the conflict. In the case of the US, the nation took its place in the post-war world enormously strengthened, economically, ideologically, and geopolitically. Though the UK, in contrast, was faced with the prospect of its eclipse as an imperial power, both nations could justifiably claim the honourable status of non-aggressors and prosecutors of a necessary war (even more so when the scale of German atrocities against Jews and other minority groups began to come to light). Perhaps most importantly, victory, of a less ambiguous kind than that enjoyed by other Allied nations, has done much to cast the war in a positive light in British and American cultural memory. All these factors combine in the influential mythic narrative of World War II as a heroic, unifying, and beneficent undertaking, one

24 Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

evoked by a range of familiar slogans: ‘the Good War’, the ‘Greatest Generation’, the ‘Blitz’ or ‘Dunkirk spirit’. As Baudrillard argues, it is a short step from this kind of mythologization of the war to its thorough absorption into purely representational codes. This is not to suggest that the leading theorists of postmodernist British and American culture necessarily accept this mythic narrative of the war, or the idea that the conflict has been decisively displaced by its own representations. What does, if only implicitly, emerge from their work, though, is the assumption that, whatever the actual nature of the war, its impact on cultural practice has now almost entirely dissipated, or else is in some way incompatible with, or extraneous to, the postmodernist problematic.32 The former position quickly begins to look untenable in light of several trends in recent cultural history of the conflict. First, a number of so-called revisionist scholars have demonstrated that, even for the British and Americans, the war was far more brutal, divisive, disillusioning, squalid, and traumatizing than both popular, ‘mythic’ renderings and earlier historical accounts have allowed.33 A significant, though rarely foregrounded, strand of the ‘popular’ memory of World War II revolves around scenes of horrific violence witnessed, or perpetrated, as a matter of day-to-day existence. Marianna Torgovnick has recently discussed this condition in terms of what she calls the ‘war complex’. Another core component of this complex, she suggests, is the continued uneasiness apparent in Britain and America with respect to their governments’ own questionable policies during the war: the mass internment of Americans of Japanese origin; the ‘strategic’ (in reality, closer to ‘carpet’) bombing of German cities, primarily by the Royal Air Force; the American firebombing of Japanese cities; and the deployment of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Torgovnick argues that, fully as much for the United States (the primary focus of her study) and Britain (to which she also devotes significant attention) as for other nations, ‘wartime consciousness permeated the twentieth century and [persists] into the twenty-first’.34 Like Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida, Torgovnick recognizes the resonances between theories of psychological trauma and her model of ‘World War II in our time’. She suggests, though, that in clinical terms, relatively few people, and most of them survivors, display or ever displayed as a result of World War II the full list or even most of the clinically certified symptoms of trauma. It would be more precise and more fruitful, then, to speak of trauma-like rather than traumatic reactions in our culture at large to World War II.35

War, Trauma, Postmodernism

25

Torgovnick is, of course, right to note that acute symptoms of ‘posttrumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) (such as hallucinations, nightmares, flashbacks, and compulsive re-enactments) have been the exception, rather than the norm, amongst responses to the Second World War. She goes further, however, by implicitly drawing a qualitative distinction between psychological trauma, on the one hand, and a kind of ‘cultural’ trauma for which the psychological model can only be invoked at the level of metaphor, simile, or analogy (‘trauma-like’). This formulation is, I think, of only limited theoretical usefulness. One alternative might be to entirely reject the notion of trauma as a tool for socio- cultural analysis, on the grounds that it is obfuscatory and psychologistic. I wish to take the reverse approach, however, by suggesting that trauma is best grasped not simply as an individual, psychological experience that might be analogous with certain aspects of social existence, but rather as a phenomenon that is, by definition, equally, if not primarily, social. As Yannis Stavrakakis has recently shown, a conceptualization of this kind is amongst the most valuable insights – from the point of view of social, cultural, and political theory – to arise from the psychoanalytic teachings of Jacques Lacan.36 Central to this aspect of Lacan’s thought (as to all of his work) is the concept of the ‘symbolic order’ – the ‘universe’ of laws, institutions, conventions, codes, customs, and modes of representation and communication, chief amongst them language, which collectively comprise social reality. Subjectivity, for Lacan, is constituted by immersion in the symbolic order; thus, as Phillipe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy observe, ‘there is no subject according to Lacan which is not always already a social subject’.37 As Lacan’s work makes clear, the contingency of existence continually gives rise to events with the potential to inflict psychic trauma on those individuals exposed to them. Yet trauma is always inter-subjective (even, strictly speaking, if it is never communicated), because it manifests itself as damage to the symbolic order, which constitutes the subject and in which the subject is embedded. The injury done to the symbolic order at the level of the subject will, in many cases, ripple out from the site of trauma to disturb the wider symbolic network. This process may be initiated by the testimony of those most immediately exposed to the traumatic event (‘testimony’ which is as likely to take the oblique form of catatonic withdrawal as of direct, linear narration). It may also develop through the word-of-mouth dissemination of accounts by witnesses or bystanders – those removed from the full impact of the traumatic event but nonetheless subject to its force – or via an array of institutional,

26 Trauma, Postmodernism, and World War II

discursive, and media channels. Where a single traumatic event of sufficient magnitude occurs (the assassination of a political leader, for example), or in a situation where smaller disasters proliferate on a massive scale (war, revolution), the entire symbolic fabric of a society – the intersubjective medium in which individual subjects have their being – may undergo distortion, corrosion, or even collapse. This is not in any way to suggest that trauma is felt with equal intensity across the social field. Only in the case of certain individuals or groups (most likely, though not necessarily, those located at the very vortex of the traumatic event) will the tissue of the symbolic order be utterly shredded, precipitating a terrifying plunge into psychosis; such damage to the symbolic order is rarely, if ever, precisely confined, however, and in the case of truly colossal catastrophes, even those individuals remote in time and space, and with only the dimmest grasp of the event, are nonetheless inescapably subject to its realignment of the parameters of speech and thought. Perhaps the most prominent measure of the symbolic damage wrought by any historical event is the extent to which ideological resources have been mobilized to domesticate, cover over, or ‘suture’ its impact. As Stavrakakis puts it, The articulation of a new political discourse can only make sense against the background of the dislocation of the preceding sociopolitical order or ideological space. It is the lack created by dislocation that causes the desire for a new discursive articulation. [ ... ] Every dislocatory event leads to the [ ... ] articulation of different discourses that attempt to symbolize its traumatic nature, to suture the lack it creates.38 Understood from this perspective, the concerted mythologization of World War II that has been so evident in British and American culture over the last half century testifies to the intense pressure that the conflict has exerted upon the structural integrity of the symbolic order. As I have argued, a ‘postmodernist’ aesthetic response to the Second World War arises where the symbolic disturbances generated by the conflict intersect and resonate with reverberations initiated by a range of other historical dynamics. I noted earlier, too, that the foundational contributions to debates around postmodernist art, literature, and culture in Britain and North America pay relatively little attention to the war and its aftermath. Those studies that do consider World War II in this context have understandably prioritized the climactic use of the atomic bomb or, more frequently, the genocidal programme waged against the

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European Jews.39 An important definitional issue arises here, however, in that some historians reject the idea that the diverse processes and events referred to collectively as the ‘Holocaust’ are to be understood as constituent phenomena within the wider world war.40 By locating the Holocaust, like the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, within the global conflict as a whole I do not intend in any way to question the distinctiveness of these events.41 Nor, in what follows, do I wish to diminish their significance, if only by the act of comparison. I would suggest, though, that in the areas of cultural scholarship with which I am concerned, the sheer magnitude of these events may, understandably enough, have partially obscured the radical intensification and expansion undergone by what can only (inadequately) be termed ‘conventional’ forms of combat during World War II. The prolonged aftermath of the Holocaust, and, to a lesser extent, the advent of atomic warfare, have rightly been central to attempts to theorize postmodernism in relation to historical catastrophe. The extensive ramifications in recent experimental fiction of the broader military engagements of the Second World War – particularly those campaigns in which civilians were routinely drawn into the sphere of battle – have not yet been systematically traced, however, and it is to this area that I primarily direct my attention in this book. Having established some of the historical and theoretical framework of my project, I wish now to focus in more detail on Fredric Jameson’s influential reading of postmodernism, and, in particular, on his identification of the postmodern moment as the climactic stage in a long-term process that the art historian Hal Foster has aptly dubbed the ‘passion of the sign’.42 Jameson has identified his theorization of this process, elaborated incrementally in texts spanning several decades, as his most significant contribution to twentieth-century cultural history.43 Its conceptual underpinnings can be found in his attempt, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to stake out a position on another key issue for cultural analysis: namely, to affirm, in the face of what Linda Hutcheon terms the ‘semiotic idealism’ of some forms of poststructuralism,44 that ‘history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but [ ... ], as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form’.45 In order to do so, Jameson aligns history with Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘the Real’.46 As Jameson notes, Lacan famously observed of the Real that it is ‘what resists symbolization absolutely’.47 ‘Nonetheless’, Jameson remarks, it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply History itself; and if for psychoanalysis the history in

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question here is obviously enough the history of the subject, the resonance of the word suggests that a confrontation between this particular materialism and the historical materialism of Marx can no longer be postponed.48 Both of these ‘materialisms,’ Jameson argues, are marked by ‘the stubborn retention of something the sophisticated philosopher was long since supposed to have put between parentheses, namely a conception of the referent’.49 He continues: [F]or an intellectual climate dominated [ ... ] by the conviction that the realities we confront or experience come before us preformed and preordered [ ... ] by the various modes in which human language can work [ ... ] it is clear that there must be something unacceptable about this affirmation of the persistence, behind our representations, of that indestructible nucleus of what Lacan calls the Real, of which we have already said above that it was simply History itself.50 History – the Real – is ‘fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational’;51 it is the abyssal ‘realm of time and death’,52 or, as Jameson pithily puts it in The Political Unconscious, ‘what hurts, [ ... ] what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis’.53 He repeatedly cautions, though, that ‘in terms of language we must distinguish between our own narrative of history [ ... ] and the Real itself, which our narratives can only approximate in asymptotic fashion and which “resists symbolization absolutely”’.54 There are strategic reasons for proposing to take Jameson’s reading of Lacan seriously in this book, for my argument will be that it is precisely in light of the logic established by Jameson in his writings on the Real that his subsequent arguments for the effacement of History in postmodernism appear most questionable. Additionally, though, like Michael Clark, George Hartley, and, more guardedly, Steven Helmling,55 I incline towards the view that Jameson’s appropriation of Lacan, though undoubtedly audacious, nonetheless offers a genuinely valuable heuristic tool for conceptualizing, and affirming, the non-discursive dimensions of historical being in the wake of poststructuralism. Significant criticisms have been levelled at Jameson’s theoretical gambit, however, and they are worth addressing, since they help to clarify not only the uses and limitations of this specific reading of Lacan, but also the complexities that attend the notion of ‘the Real’ more broadly.

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As Jameson notes, perhaps Lacan’s most famous statement regarding the Real is one that appears to foreclose the very possibility of a positive definition: the Real is that which ‘resists symbolization absolutely’. Accordingly, Lacan’s other most commonly cited characterizations of the Real stress its intractability and persistence, but otherwise remain enigmatic: ‘whatever upheaval we subject it to, [the Real] is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it’;56 ‘there is no absence’ in the Real;57 the Real ‘is absolutely without fissure’;58 the Real ‘does not wait [attend], especially not for the subject, since it expects [attend] nothing from speech’;59 the Real ‘doesn’t stop not being written’;60 the Real is ‘the impossible’.61 The ambiguity that surrounds the notion of the Real is compounded by the fact that ‘whenever Lacan’s terms acquire new meanings, they never lose their older ones; his theoretical vocabulary advances by means of accretion rather than mutation’. The Real, in particular, ‘undergoes many shifts in meaning and usage throughout his work’.62 Jameson, however, clearly takes Lacan’s notion of the Real to designate a purely material, objective ontological ground – a fundamental level of ‘reality’ that persists (albeit inaccessibly) outside of any psychological or symbolic projection. Hence Jameson’s association of the Real with the referent, the ‘real thing’ for which the Saussurean sign (inadequately) stands. According to Sean Homer, this view immediately undermines Jameson’s position, for ‘we must dismiss the notion that Lacan’s conception of the Real has anything to do with empirical reality. For Lacan, the Real is unknowable, it is that which is beyond language and resists symbolization absolutely’.63 This point is commonly asserted in Lacanian scholarship. Michael Walsh, for example, similarly remarks that the Real ‘is not actual external reality, not any simple sense of the given or the lived; it is rather that which is outside the structuring symbolization of the subject, that which is not symbolized’.64 These dismissals may be overly sweeping, however. For Dylan Evans, the Real undoubtedly ‘has connotations of matter, [ ... ] of an objective, external reality, a material substrate that exists in itself, independently of any observer’.65 As Evans suggests, this would seem to be the implication when, for example, Lacan identifies the Real as the realm in which ‘things [ ... ] run together in the hic et nunc of the all in the process of becoming’.66 Pursuing this line of thought, Yannis Stavrakakis argues that we can distinguish between ‘nature [ ... ] as a social construction, and nature as real, as that which is always located outside the field of construction and has the ability to dislocate it by revealing its limits’.67

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Stavrakakis refers approvingly to the distinction drawn by Neil Evernden ‘between “Nature”, that is to say our signifying construction through which we attempt to represent nature, and “nature” as the “amorphous mass of otherness that encloaks the planet”’.68 Likewise, Catherine Belsey remarks that one understanding of the Lacanian Real might be ‘the immensity of the cosmos’.69 The identity of the Real and the referent that Jameson argues for is also evident in Lacan’s work. In Seminar XX, for example, Lacan argues that it is as an inhabitant of the Real that the referent always eludes the processes of signification: ‘At the level of the signifier/signified distinction, what characterizes the relationship between the signified and what serves as the indispensable third party, namely the referent, is precisely that the signifier misses the referent. The joiner doesn’t work’.70 As Peter Dews notes, Lacan’s aim here is to emphasize ‘that there is no point at which language abuts directly on the real, since the reference of a term always requires interpretation’.71 One function of the concept of the Real in Lacan’s work, then, is, as Jameson suggests, to gesture towards a realm of irreducible materiality, of sheer Being, which neither this signification, nor any other, can fully capture. As Lacan emphasized, however, his theory does not aspire to the status of a universal ontology: ‘Psycho-analysis is neither a Weltanschauung, nor a philosophy that claims to provide the key to the universe. It is governed by a particular aim, which is historically defined by the elaboration of the notion of the subject’.72 The Real, as pure, boundless physicality, is therefore of primary interest to Lacan only insofar as it threatens the structures of subjectivity. The experience of confronting the absolute impersonality and contingency of the physical world, or the brute materiality and mortality of the human body, is inherently traumatic, Lacan suggests. In a seminar of the early 1960s,73 he refers to such an event as the tuché, a term borrowed from Aristotle’s Physics, where it denotes that which is contingent, random, or accidental (Malcolm Bowie offers the banal but helpful example of a roof tile falling onto a person’s head).74 The proximity of the subject and the Real is readily apparent where exposure to a violent material upheaval results in bodily wounding or laceration; as Slavoj Žižek observes, ‘one of the definitions of the Lacanian Real is that it is the flayed body, the palpitation of the raw, skinless red flesh’.75 It is the revelation of this proximity, however, and not the sheer fact of physical injury, which is traumatic, and is itself located in the Real. Accordingly, in the aftermath of trauma the Real persists within the realm of subjectivity itself, as a hard, intractable ‘rock’ or ‘kernel’ (Žižek’s favoured terms), which rends the network of signifiers that constitutes the subject, and may also, as

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I suggested earlier, destabilize the wider symbolic structure. Trauma, then, is one of the ways in which the modality of the Real identified by Homer and Walsh becomes perceptible: the Real, that is, as devoid of physical substance, but forming, in psychic space, a dense mass around which the symbolic order gravitates. As Dylan Evans observes, ‘the real is thus inside and outside’.76 Lacan makes this point most clearly when he speaks of ‘the primordial real, [ ... ] a real that we do not yet have to limit, the real in its totality, both the real of the subject and the real he has to deal with as exterior to him’.77 Malcolm Bowie offers a clear summary of the complexities I have tried to tease out: For Lacan, [ ... ] the Real is that which lies outside the symbolic process, and it is to be found in the mental as well as in the material world: a trauma, for example, is as intractable and unsymbolizable as objects in their materiality. [ ... ] The traumatic event proper [ ... ] is as extrinsic to signification, as unassimilable to the pursuit of pleasure, as any foreign body encroaching upon the human organism.78 Similarly, according to Teresa Brennan, ‘the real for Lacan is the realm of both the natural order and the realm of aberrant psychotic perception’.79 Or, in Catherine Belsey’s words, ‘the real [ ... ] is that silent or silenced exteriority which is also inside us, and which we cannot symbolize, delimit, specify, or know’.80 Jameson is not mistaken, therefore, in aligning the Real with external, objective reality. But his model does overlook the way in which, for Lacan, the Real may also lodge internally, as an alien object within the sphere of subjectivity and the symbolic. As Walter A. Davis remarks (with reference to Jameson’s famous conflation of History and the Real in The Political Unconscious), ‘history is not just what hurts, and then conveniently proves unknowable to the conceptual, “symbolic” order. It is what shatters and wounds us with traumatic force’.81 If a certain separation between history, or the Real, on the one hand, and the symbolic, on the other, is built into Jameson’s model of ‘normative’ signification (history is figured as the horizon of human experience, which recedes at every attempt to approach it), the literary and art historical trajectory he will trace in later writings is one in which this inherent disarticulation of sign and referent is steadily exacerbated. Of all the various modes of literary narrative that have accompanied the processes of modernization, it is (unsurprisingly enough) realism that, for Jameson, comes closest to an ‘open and explicit relation to history in the sense that realist narratives attempt to represent, at the

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limit, the movement of history itself’.82 In an early intervention into the postmodernism debate, Jameson sketches a narrative of the progressive waning of the referential confidence of realism. This trajectory takes in two key ‘moments’ – the shift, first, from realism to modernism, and then from modernism to postmodernism – and is directly ascribed to the processes of capitalist reification: In a first moment, reification ‘liberated’ the sign from its referent, but this is not a force to be released with impunity. Now, in a second moment, it continues its work of dissolution, penetrating the interior of the sign itself and liberating the signifier from the signified, or from meaning proper. This play, no longer of a realm of signs, but of pure or literal signifiers freed from the ballast of their signifieds, their former meanings, now generates a new kind of textuality in all the arts [ ... ] and begins to project the mirage of some ultimate language of pure signifiers which is also frequently associated with schizophrenic discourse.83 In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson describes an expanded version of this passage as ‘a kind of myth’ (presumably because of what Hal Foster describes as the narrative’s overtly ‘aggressive’, and thus reductive, historicism).84 Despite Jameson’s disclaimer regarding the truth value of his remarks, however, this is only the most vividly dramatized formulation of a position that is repeatedly asserted throughout Postmodernism. Jameson goes on, for example, to remark that, today reality seems no longer to occupy a ‘mode of existence’ separate from the ‘sentimental and romantic “cultural sphere”’. Today, he continues, ‘culture impacts back on reality in ways that make any independent and, as it were, non- or extracultural form of it problematical [ ... ], so that finally the theorists unite their voices in the new doxa that the “referent” no longer exists’.85 Indeed, postmodernist culture is here seen to confirm the poststructuralist position resisted so forcefully by Jameson in The Political Unconscious: ‘In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as “referent” finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts’.86 Jameson has continued to propound this position in subsequent work. In ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ (1996), for example, he speaks of a ‘stereotypical postmodern language’, which suggests a new cultural realm or dimension which is independent of the former real world, not because, as in the modern (or even romantic) period,

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culture withdrew into an autonomous space of art, but rather because the real world has already been suffused with it and colonized by it, so that it has no outside in terms of which it could be found lacking.87 Jameson’s narrative of relentless reification and derealization is undoubtedly compelling, but, as Hal Foster, discussing the Jamesonian ‘myth’ quoted above, observes, ‘there are always [ ... ] other stories to consider’.88 One such alternative, if perhaps yet more baleful, ‘story’ might begin with this observation by Slavoj Žižek, made in an essay written in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001: The ultimate and defining experience of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality – the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality.89 At no time did the ‘experience of the Real’ proliferate more widely than during the two world wars. The mass catastrophe of the Great War has long been integral to attempts to historicize the advanced art and literature of the early twentieth century, in a way that the Second World War never has been for the study of later forms of aesthetic experimentation.90 I will return to this disparity shortly, but I first want to ask what it is about war, and twentieth-century warfare in particular, that produces this immersion in the Real, and why, in turn, this experience carries an unusually potent traumatic charge. Obviously enough, warfare exposes the subject to the colossal power possessed by matter, and demonstrates the horrifying fragility and permeability of the human body (war, one might even say, adopting Jameson’s terms, marks the sublime outer limit of historical experience, the realm in which, albeit momentarily, the social, symbolic ‘reality’ of ideological conflict, diplomatic manoeuvring, or military strategy places itself at the mercy of the contingent machinations of History itself – History as, simply, ‘what hurts’).91 In History After Lacan, Teresa Brennan quotes Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary evocation of the nature of combat during World War I; this passage, Brennan suggests, captures the way in which the military harnessed the vast, impersonal energies of the Real of nature in the pursuit of maximum destruction: Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape,

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new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were buried in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. [ ... ] In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families. One need recall only the velocities by virtue of which mankind is now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior of time.92 In this reference to technological ‘velocity’, Benjamin gestures towards a property of modern warfare that, beyond its capacity to channel sheer physical force, lends it a heightened potential for inflicting psychic trauma. In the seminar on the tuché, referred to above, Lacan argues that trauma constitutes a missed encounter with the Real.93 The encounter is (necessarily) missed partly because the Real is fundamentally unassimilable to the symbolic order that structures subjectivity, and partly because, as Malcolm Bowie comments, the Real’s intrusion upon the subject ‘cannot be anticipated or forestalled’.94 The essential unexpectedness of the traumatic encounter receives its most systematic theorization in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1955 [1920]), a text which underpins Lacan’s own account of trauma,95 and which, significantly, orientates itself in relation to the experience of mass, mechanized warfare – the chaos of ‘the heavy bombing-raid’, as Lacan puts it.96 Freud’s essay mounts an investigation into the condition – so common in veterans of the First World War, ‘the terrible war which has just ended’ – of ‘traumatic neurosis’: the repetitive, involuntary recapitulation of ‘accidents involving a risk to life’.97 He finds a model for the development of the human mind in ‘a living organism in its most simplified possible form’.98 ‘This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli’.99 Attributing a comparable structure to human consciousness, Freud suggests that ‘we may, I think, tentatively venture to regard the common traumatic neurosis as a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli’.100 This breach is inflicted not simply by the intensity of the stimulus surging in upon

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the subject, but by lack of any preparedness for anxiety, including lack of hypercathexis of the systems that would be the first to receive the stimulus. Owing to their low cathexis those systems are not in a good position for binding the inflowing amounts of excitation and the consequences of the breach in the protective shield follow all the more easily.101 Such overwhelming influxes of stimuli tend to bypass consciousness, Freud argues; their persistence in the unconscious, however, is betrayed by the fact that ‘the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic neuroses lead them back with such regularity to the situation in which the trauma occurred’.102 These repetitions, Freud postulates, are ‘endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis’.103 In her work on trauma, the literary theorist Cathy Caruth has been much concerned with both Freud’s and Lacan’s theorizations of the unexpectedness of the traumatic encounter.104 Discussing the model elaborated by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she observes that, the barrier of consciousness is a barrier of sensation and knowledge that protects the organism by placing stimulation within an ordered experience of time. What causes trauma, then, is a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time. [ ... ] The breach in the mind [ ... ] is not caused by a pure quantity of stimulus, Freud suggests, but by ‘fright’, the lack of preparedness to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly. It is not simply, that is, the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late.105 Earlier in the same text, Caruth suggests that trauma is ‘experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor’.106 This theorization, then, inscribes a relationship between trauma and speed – the traumatic event is that which is experienced ‘too soon’, ‘too quickly’, or too fast. Precisely because it is missed or incompletely experienced at the time that it occurs, however, the event may be relived, with great clarity, through such insistent, involuntary phenomena as intrusive thoughts,

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nightmares, flashbacks, or hallucinations. It is in these post-traumatic repetitions that the Real that was missed at the time of the trauma belatedly manifests itself. As I noted earlier, Lacan draws the notion of the tuché – the unpredictable, radically contingent event through which the distorting pressure of the Real is exerted upon the fabric of the symbolic order – from Aristotle’s meditations on accidental causality. Lacan’s concept thus closely coincides, both in meaning and in point of derivation, with the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s notion of ‘the accident’.107 Whereas, in most spheres of human activity, the potential for the accident, or the tuché, is disavowed or denied, in the military realm it is positively embraced and cultivated. As Virilio puts it, ‘war produces accidents. [ ... ] What are war machines? They are machines in reverse – they produce accidents, disappearances, deaths, breakdowns’.108 During the two world wars (the foremost examples of the phenomenon Virilio terms ‘total war’), a radical proliferation of the accident or tuché was an inevitable consequence of the widespread deployment of progressively faster and more destructive weapons systems. In the case of World War I, one thinks, in particular, of the prevalence of sudden sniper or gas attacks, heavy artillery bombardment, or the walls of machine gun fire that confronted soldiers emerging from the trenches. During the Second World War, this escalation was most dramatically apparent in the sphere of aerial warfare. The sheer concentration of firepower that could be summoned by the air forces of all the leading nations was awesome enough in its own right, but its potency was intensified by the sharply reduced delivery times of the bombers, fighters, and rockets developed prior to and during the conflict. As Virilio emphasizes, the faster the device, the greater the possibility of achieving the ‘defeat of the unprepared adversary’.109 The escalation of total war was, furthermore, marked by the development of aircraft capable of reaching targets at distances of several hundred miles. As the German officer Lieutenant-General von Metsch had opined in the 1930s: ‘in total war, everything is a front!’110 Under these conditions, many millions of city dwellers could no longer hope for the immunity from direct exposure to combat that earlier generations had enjoyed. For these citizens, the shock of high-speed aerial attack – with its potential for inflicting severe psychological trauma – became an established fact of urban existence. As I have already noted, the technologically accelerated carnage of the First World War is widely considered to be a (if not the) core determinant of the waves of artistic innovation that swept Europe and North America

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in the early twentieth century. As Vincent Sherry remarks, A consensus understanding continues to represent the Great War of 1914–18 as the signal event of artistic modernism. In this account, the war stands as a watershed episode: it draws a line through time, dividing the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries; thus it provides the shaping occasion for artists who take novelty, invention, and precedent-dismaying energy as their establishing aim and motive. The readiness of the connection does not discredit it. Global in scope, shattering in its impact on national traditions as well as class structures and gender identities, this first world war scored a profound disruption into prevailing standards of value and so opened the space in cultural time in which radical artistic experimentation would be fostered.111 Similarly, in Trudi Tate’s words, ‘modernism after 1914 begins to look like a peculiar but significant form of war writing’.112 Perhaps even more frequently asserted than modernism’s constitutive dependence upon the First World War is the view that, as Hal Foster puts it, ‘the dominant logic of modernist art was [ ... ] to bracket the referent’, in order to ‘approach an autonomy of the sign’.113 ‘Modernist art, in all its forms’, Linda Hutcheon suggests, functioned ‘to the detriment of the referent’, by ‘emphasizing the opacity of the medium and the self-sufficiency of the signifying system’.114 As I have indicated, Fredric Jameson ascribes the ‘liberation’ of the sign in modernism to the processes of capitalist reification. The modernist displacement of the referent has more often, however, been construed as a strategic response to historical conditions (colonialism, revolution, and, above all, war) which were perceived to be so chaotic, horrifying, and extreme that artists neither could, nor wished, to attempt their representation through the ‘transparent’ codes of an earlier, realist mode. The Great War left the painter Paul Klee ‘sickened by the very thought of reality’. ‘I dally in that shattered world only in occasional memories’, he wrote in 1915. ‘The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is these days) the more art becomes abstract.’115 In their monumental Art Since 1900, Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alan Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh remark that ‘modernist art’s drive toward abstraction might not signal its withdrawal from reality so much as reality’s withdrawal from it’.116 This is not a question of the putative waning or attenuation of reality envisioned by Jameson and Baudrillard, however, but of a crisis in the capacity of art ‘to represent a reality transformed by

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technology and war’.117 In his history of modern art, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes similarly writes, All along the Somme, our fathers and grandfathers tasted the first terrors of the twentieth century. In the Somme Valley the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into industrialized death.118 In poetry, too, as Charles Bernstein comments, ‘the crisis of representation, which is to say the recognition that the Real is not representable, is associated with the great radical modernist poems of the period immediately before and after the First World War’.119 In the field of fiction, the paradigmatic statement of what Amy J. Elias calls ‘modernist alienation from history-as-trauma’120 belongs to Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’.121 Joyce’s delight in parody, word play, and the exhilarating movements of language itself, his shift of historical focus from the present to the recent past, and his arrangement of his narrative within a template drawn from ancient myth have all led generations of critics to read Ulysses as an attempt to realize the imperative voiced by its chief protagonist. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated the extent to which Joyce’s text registers the violent upheavals that transpired, both in Ireland and on the continent, during the period of its composition. Robert Spoo, for example, argues that ‘on careful examination’, the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses (in which Stephen’s famous repudiation of history appears) ‘reveals remarkable traces of the historical situation contemporaneous with its composition, an inscribing of the nightmare of the war within the ostensible neutrality of the 1904 narrative, so that the actualities of 1917 reverberate weirdly, almost allegorically, within the fictive time frame’.122 Ulysses (to which I return, in a slightly different context, in Chapter 4) exemplifies what Marianne Dekoven terms modernist fiction’s ‘suppression of the referent’. ‘A good deal of modernist fiction generally considered to have escaped (repudiated, denied) history has instead suppressed it’, Dekoven argues. ‘The historical referent is far from fully or successfully neutralized’ in the modernist novel; on the contrary, [ ... ] we are regularly and disturbingly, if subliminally, aware of these referents [slavery, colonialism, class conflict, war] as we read. In fact, the most powerful moments in these fictions are often

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the moments of veiled representation of the suppressed historical referent. [ ... ] The complex, powerful techniques of figuration available to modernist fiction writers allowed them simultaneously to turn away from the devastating facts of modern history – a gesture of survival as well as denial – and at the same time to render those facts with greater power than direct representation would give. Because they simultaneously muffle and assert the historical referent, these fictions make us experience it as an unassimilable, subterranean dissonance, denying us any illusion of clarity, mastery, or resolution. Any content that insists on remaining unclear, unmastered, unresolved is far more troubling, persistently troubling, and therefore powerful, than that which can be understood, assimilated, explained – it stays with us, undermining complacency, demanding attention. In the very act of suppressing history, these modernist fictions make it subversive.123 In recent years, a number of scholars have mounted comparable attempts to conceptualize the still greater distantiation of the referent evident in more recent cultural production. For Hal Foster, whose The Return of the Real (1996) is paradigmatic here, this task requires us to reflect critically on ‘our two basic models of representation: that images are attached to referents, to iconographic themes or real things in the world, or, alternatively, that all images can do is represent other images, that all forms of representation (including realism) are auto-referential codes’.124 The latter, ‘simulacral’ position has held sway in western intellectual circles since the 1970s, not only because of the dominance of the poststructuralist thinkers who have been read as espousing it, but also because, as Jameson suggests, the innovative art of the period has appeared to confirm it. Dissatisfied with this binary opposition, Foster, like others, has attempted a bold synthesis that makes it possible to read a range of contemporary aesthetic artefacts as ‘referential and simulacral, connected and disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent’.125 He is by no means alone in proposing that the necessary mediator in this project is the notion of trauma. The pertinence of trauma in this regard is found, once more, in its Lacanian articulation as a missed encounter with the Real. That, in the traumatic encounter, the Real is negated – rendered absent or ‘impossible’ – lends the encounter a certain ontological indeterminacy, as Slavoj Žižek explains: [The] traumatic event [is] a point of failure of symbolization, but at the same time never given in its positivity – it can be constructed

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only backwards, from its structural effects. All its effectivity lies in the distortions it produces in the symbolic universe of the subject [ ... .] In a first approach, the Real is a shock of a contingent encounter which disrupts the automatic circulation of the symbolic mechanism; a grain of sand preventing its smooth functioning; a traumatic encounter which ruins the balance of the symbolic universe of the subject. But, as we have seen with regard to trauma, precisely as an irruption of total contingency, the traumatic event is nowhere given in its positivity; only afterwards can it be logically constructed as a point which escapes symbolization.126 As Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler astutely note, if, for Jameson, ‘History is what hurts’ then, as a ‘paradigm for the historical event’, the traumatic encounter – ‘what hurts by definition’ – would appear to guarantee the stubborn irreducibility of the historical referent. At the same time, though, ‘the traumatic event bears a striking similarity to the always absent signified or referent of [ ... ] poststructuralist discourse, an object that can by definition only be constructed retroactively, never observed directly’. Trauma, Douglass and Vogler argue, thus allows a return to the real without the discredited notions of transparent referentiality often found in traditional modes of historical discourse. This combination of the simultaneous undeniable reality of the traumatic event with its unapproachability offers the possibility for a seeming reconciliation between the undecidable text and the ontological status of the traumatic event as an absolute signified.127 As Lyndsey Stonebridge remarks, One of the strengths of contemporary trauma theory lies in its articulation of a nuanced and subtle historicity, read through both psychoanalysis and literature, which allows the humanities to reconnect with historical violence, without (supposedly) falling into the pitfalls of a naive historicism.128 In the words of one of the central figures in this movement, Cathy Caruth, it is here, in the [ ... ] widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma – both in its occurrence and in the attempt to understand

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it – that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference). Through the notion of trauma [ ... ] we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not.129 Along similar lines, Michael Rothberg offers a theory of ‘traumatic realism’ – ‘a realism in which the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic extremity that disables realist representation as usual’.130 ‘Traumatic realism’ is the phrase that Foster also proposes for his synthesizing model.131 He constructs it on the basis of Lacan’s definition of trauma as a missed encounter with the Real, and elaborates it principally through a reading of Andy Warhol’s macabre ‘Death in America’ screen prints of the early 1960s. Foster is particularly interested in the way in which each of these works is made up of the same violent image repeated several times. He relates this artistic strategy to the way in which trauma, according to Lacan, instils a compulsion to repeat certain ‘signs’ or pathological symptoms, a tendency Lacan terms the automaton, also in allusion to Aristotle. Lacan explains how the automaton may periodically give way to the return of the tuché – the encounter with the traumatic Real itself – which exists outside the symbolic order, beyond ‘the insistence of the signs’.132 Foster finds ‘visual equivalents’ of this irruptive resurgence of the Real in the distortions, tears, or ‘pops’ that mark Warhol’s canvases.133 Foster explains his model as follows: As missed, the real cannot be represented; it can only be repeated, indeed it must be repeated. ‘Wiederholen’, Lacan writes in etymological reference to Freud on repetition, ‘is not Reproduzieren’; repetition is not reproduction. This can stand as an epitome of my argument too: repetition in Warhol is not reproduction in the sense of representation (of a referent) or simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier). Rather, repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need points to the real, and it is at this point that the real ruptures the screen of repetition.134 If, for modernism, the referent exists to be suppressed, but as such nonetheless persists in its positivity, its presence evident in the very symbolic obliquities that obscure it, a key facet of the departure of much post-war aesthetic production from modernist paradigms may, then,

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be the way in which the referent, as originating entity and ontological ground, is condemned to a still more extreme marginality – absented, nullified, effaced – and yet simultaneously perceived as possessing the potential to rupture the symbolic plane itself, to inscribe itself directly in the work of art. Foster observes that through the ‘pokes’ and ‘pops’ on Warhol’s prints ‘we seem almost to touch the real, which the repetition of the images at once distances and rushes toward us’.135 Several of the texts I discuss in the following chapters momentarily hover on the verge of a similar yielding of the symbolic to the indexical. Foster’s intimation that Warhol’s apparently detached, depthless images may in fact work to screen (that is, conceal, obscure, ward off) an insistent traumatic Real – which, precisely in so doing, they serve to channel – is shared by a number of commentators on postmodernist culture, and on the poststructuralist theory that has so often been read in tandem with it. Foster quotes Žižek’s articulation of ‘the fundamental ambiguity of the image in postmodernism: it is a kind of barrier enabling the subject to maintain distance from the real, protecting him or her against its irruption, yet its very obtrusive “hyperrealism” evokes the nausea of the real’.136 Rather similarly, Walter A. Davis writes: The Trauma is the Real. All symbolic strategies for displacing that recognition were blasted to bits by the Bomb. That is why culture today moves in the medium of the hyperreal, the simulated, the landscape of the waking dream become collective nightmare in a vertigo of psyche where the mad proliferation of self-cancelling texts conceals and reveals the effort to turn horror into the only possible comfort: that of the void, the absence of reference – the endless free play of the signifier. [ ... ] In the Bomb the Symbolic order was realized, exposed, and shattered. Reference had finally been attained. Which is why after Hiroshima ‘language’ becomes the culture’s overriding obsession as we seek words to deny the Real and render reference impossible.137 Amy J. Elias describes the postmodern historical imagination as a ‘post-traumatic imaginary’, ‘a reaction formation to the trauma of history itself’.138 According to James Berger, too, ‘the postmodern is a veil thrown over a set of traumatic social relations’.139 For Peter Middleton and Tim Woods the anxiety (expressed by Jameson, Baudrillard, and others) that, in postmodernism, the historical past is being lost is merely the obverse of the fear that ‘it is not lost enough’, that ‘the successfully repressed past will return as a terrifying present’.140 Michael Rothberg

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observes that, the greater part of the postwar period has been characterized in intellectual life by a suspicion of questions of reference and a flight from the links between discourse and the materiality of history – procedures of avoidance that, as productive of insight as they have been, seem also to be symptomatic of submerged traumatic histories.141 Christine van Boheemen-Saaf seeks to historicize poststructuralist theory ‘as itself a product of a certain resistance against the trauma of history’. ‘There is more to textuality than just language’, she suggests; ‘the poststructuralist attempt to circumscribe the world as text, the psyche as language, may paradoxically backfire to draw our attention precisely to what it excludes in its originary repression’.142 As I intimated in the introduction, the historical upheavals that post-war art and theory have been read as functioning simultaneously to ward off and to register are numerous and diverse. The critics I have just discussed point, in particular, to events clustered within two distinct historical periods: the early to mid-1940s (the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the wider world war), and the 1960s to early 1970s (the Vietnam War, the oppression of counter-cultural radicals, the violent backlash against the civil rights movement, and a series of highprofile deaths, most significantly those of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe). An intriguing feature of the culture of the latter period is the way in which its own upheavals seem repeatedly to dictate a return to those that transpired twenty or thirty years earlier, a dynamic that evokes the retroactive temporality of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit. As Lyndsey Stonebridge has recently noted, Freud not only identified the capacity of a shocking occurrence to realize the effects of an earlier trauma in the present (the theory of Nachträglichkeit), but also argued that anxiety – expectation of a future danger – itself possesses the potential to summon up painful memories of the past. Anxiety, Stonebridge remarks, is ‘predicated on the repetition of a past trauma: anxious anticipation has the potential to plunge the ego into traumatic anxiety anew and to devastate its defences. “Dreading forward”, for Freud [ ... ], carries the seeds [ ... ] of a past trauma’.143 Rather similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the after-effects of the Second World War are intensified not only by the disasters of the present, but also by a disaster yet-to-come: the always anticipated, always deferred, onset of nuclear annihilation. This strand of sixties and seventies culture is one manifestation of a series of convergences or collisions – between the past, the present,

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and the future; between reference and simulation; between reality and representation; and between subject and world – which I trace across a range of texts of the last sixty years in the chapters that follow. These convergences follow varying trajectories, but nonetheless display a marked commonality, both in their implication of the catastrophes of the Second World War, and in their more or less explicit occupation of the modality of trauma. Nowhere are these traumatic convergences more apparent than in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and, accordingly, it is with this uncircumventable novel that I begin my detailed analysis of postmodernist renderings of World War II.

2 Gravity’s Rainbow and Traumatic Models of History

How are historical shifts and ruptures experienced, registered, and understood? Whether implicitly or explicitly, this question is central to the work, conducted in such diverse disciplines as aesthetics, social theory, philosophy, and fiction, of Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, and Thomas Pynchon. In this chapter, I aim to juxtapose, and place into ‘dialogue’, several key passages and thematic strands drawn from the work of these three writers, all of which consider the role played by the wars of the twentieth century in the reconfiguration of historical consciousness, and the notion that such changes might be conceptualized in terms drawn from psychoanalysis, specifically from Sigmund Freud’s studies of trauma. It is my contention that these texts’ very different articulations of these issues nonetheless speak to one another in mutually enriching ways, which challenge any strict prioritization of ‘theory’ over ‘fiction’ in terms of their respective ‘truth value’ in relation to the experiential conditions of life in the twentieth century. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first begins by locating passages from Adorno’s wartime writings within the context of the Frankfurt School’s theory of ‘late capitalism’. Adorno’s conceptualization of this term is compared to that adopted by Jameson; both perspectives resonate with aspects of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), though recent criticism of the novel has overwhelmingly emphasized its affinities with the latter. I then proceed to critically assess Jameson’s invocation, in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), of the mode of retroactive psychic temporality Freud terms Nachträglichkeit. While this allusion to trauma as a model for the experience of recent history is highly suggestive, Adorno’s and Pynchon’s own appropriations of Freud hint at the partiality of Jameson’s account – its 45

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premature bracketing of war and militarization, of the revenant past and the catastrophic present. In the second part of the chapter, I focus on Pynchon’s novel, but continue to weave Jameson’s and Adorno’s writings into my analysis. Against readings that would either characterize Gravity’s Rainbow as a war novel of the European theatre of World War II, or as an allegory of conflict in the United States and abroad during the Cold War, I argue that the text should be understood as staging a radical collapse of these two historical periods into one another, and, in so doing, as enacting the complex temporality of trauma, which the narrative also explicitly addresses at the level of content. I begin, then, in the autumn of 1944, when Theodor Adorno, then in exile from Nazi Germany in Los Angeles, recorded this meditation on the implications of the ongoing world war for the Enlightenment ideology of progress, whose most systematic elaboration he here, as so often, finds in Hegel: Had Hegel’s philosophy of history embraced this age, Hitler’s robotbombs would have found their place beside the early death of Alexander and similar images, as one of the selected empirical facts by which the state of the world-spirit manifests itself directly in symbols. Like Fascism itself, the robots career without a subject. Like it they combine utmost technical perfection with total blindness. And like it they arouse mortal terror and are wholly futile. ‘I have seen the world spirit’, not on horseback, but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel’s philosophy of history.1 The philosophical position that these advanced weapons are taken to refute is, of course, one in which each development in human history is viewed as a step towards that attainment of absolute knowledge and freedom with which history has – in the form of an innate, animating ‘world spirit’ (Weltgeist) – always been pregnant. Adorno’s remarks here typify his adoption of a contrary position, according to which ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘progress’, though laudable principles in themselves, have provided ideological justifications for the development of scientific, technological, and economic systems whose overwhelming tendency has been to reinforce conditions of domination and reification, both of humanity and of nature.2 Adorno’s alignment of the German ‘robot-bombs’ (the rocket-propelled Vergeltungswaffen: ‘vengeance’ or ‘retaliation’ weapons) with a prevailing historical tendency towards ever greater destructiveness that runs

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contrary to the progressivist Hegelian dialectic resonates closely with several passages in Gravity’s Rainbow. In a scene set in the closing stages of the war, the Pavlovian experimental psychologist Ned Pointsman reflects on the deaths, by successively more advanced technologies, of five colleagues: The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro ... auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2, and Pointsman has no sense but terror’s, all his skin aching, for the mounting sophistication of this, for the dialectic it seems to imply.3 Later, the narrator observes of Pointsman, ‘how it haunts him, the symmetry of these two secret weapons, Outside, out in the Blitz, the sounds of V-1 and V-2, one the reverse of the other. [ ... ] What sickness to events – to History itself – can create symmetrical opposites like these robot weapons?’ (144). Pynchon also shares with Adorno an acute awareness of the close interrelationship between military campaigns and capitalist expansion. The entry from Adorno’s Minima Moralia in which the passage quoted above appears (entitled ‘Out of the firing-line’) begins with this bitterly ironic paragraph, which anticipates Pynchon’s identification of the ‘true war’ as a ‘celebration of markets’ (105): Reports of air-attacks are seldom without the names of the firms which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster feature where once the talk was of cuirassiers, lancers and hussars. The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating it and for destroying it, is exactly the same, and accordingly industry, state and advertising are amalgamated. The old exaggeration of sceptical liberals, that war was a business, has come true: state power has shed even the appearance of independence from particular interests in profit; always in their service really, it now also places itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief contractor in the destruction of cities, helps to earn it the good name that will secure it the best commissions in their rebuilding.4 The complicities that Adorno points to in this passage are characteristic of what he and other members of the Frankfurt School termed ‘late capitalism’. They located the rise to dominance of this mode of

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economic organization in the 1930s; it was during this period that governments and businesses in the advanced industrial nations began to enter into unprecedentedly cooperative relationships in order to undertake massive infrastructural projects in the spheres of transportation, communications, energy, and the military, which had the twin effects of generating surplus value and extending bureaucratic control. If military technologies were the prioritized products of such arrangements during World War II, then, according to Adorno, their significance only grew in the post-war – Cold War – era. In a lecture of 1968 on the subject of late capitalism, he remarks: We should [ ... ] remind ourselves that it is the concern for profit and domination that has canalized technological development: on occasion it coincides in a disastrous way with the need to exercise control. Not for nothing has the invention of weapons of destruction become the new prototype of technology.5 In the introduction to Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson notes the Frankfurt School’s coinage of the term ‘late capitalism’. For them, he observes, the conception stressed two ‘essential features’: ‘(1) a tendential web of bureaucratic control [ ... ] and (2) the interpenetration of government and big business (“state capitalism”) such that Nazism and the New Deal are related systems (and some form of socialism, benign or Stalinist, also seems on the agenda)’.6 In an essay on Gravity’s Rainbow, Jeffrey S. Baker quotes this passage by way of corroborating the links Pynchon draws between Nazi Germany and the Roosevelt-era United States.7 Baker argues, though, that Pynchon’s depiction of the economic and political forms emergent at the end of World War II anticipates, in important respects, Jameson’s ‘very different’8 use of the term ‘late capitalism’.9 Jameson argues that, No one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, ‘natural’ fact of life. What marks the development of the new concept [of late capitalism, which Jameson associates most closely with the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel]10 over the older one (which was still roughly consistent with Lenin’s notion of a ‘monopoly stage’ of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers.11

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Over the last fifteen to twenty years, prompted, whether directly or indirectly, by Jameson’s groundbreaking approach to postmodernism (first outlined in 1983–1984),12 readings of Gravity’s Rainbow have increasingly tended to configure the text’s socio-political critique in a manner consistent not so much with a Frankfurt School notion of late capitalism, as with Jameson’s theorization of a fully globalized capitalist system, with its attendant transformations of the contemporary life-world. Thus, at the level of politics, recent readings have seen Pynchon’s text as dramatizing less the consolidation of power in a collusive pact between state and business than the former’s supersession by the latter, and the resultant mystificatory dispersal of power across vast networks of information, technology, and capital.13 At the level of culture, the novel has been read as positing media forms not simply as ideological distorters of the reality of social and political antagonism (as in Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’ thesis), but rather (as in Jameson and Baudrillard) as ‘simulatory’ traces of a historical reality now somehow desiccated or expired.14 And, at the level of the subject, Pynchon’s characters have been viewed as exhibiting an instability far in excess of the condition of eroded selfhood or ‘ego-weakness’ that Adorno and Horkheimer considered the characteristic psychological experience under the disciplinary regime of the militarized late capitalist state, and reminiscent instead of the thoroughly decentred, ‘schizophrenic’ subject envisioned by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the ultimate expression of contemporary capitalism’s delirious, ‘deterritorializing’ flows.15 Jameson’s and Adorno’s conceptualizations of the notion of late capitalism are markedly distinct, then, and recent Pynchon scholarship has clearly emphasized Gravity’s Rainbow’s affinities with the latter. What I find particularly suggestive in the specific texts by Jameson and Adorno on which I have so far focused, however, is a shared concern with modes of historical experience that are somehow inassimilable to punctual understanding – a condition both theorists elaborate in implicit relation to Freudian theorizations of trauma. In Jameson’s case, which I wish to consider in some detail before turning to Adorno, Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit is invoked; Jameson’s usage is consistent with the initial, broad definition of the concept offered (under the translation ‘deferred action’) by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis in their The Language of Psycho-Analysis: Term frequently used by Freud in connection with his view of psychical temporality and causality: experiences, impressions and memory traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development. They may in

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that event be endowed not only with a new meaning but also with psychical effectiveness.16 Jameson writes: In periodizing a phenomenon of this kind [that is, postmodernism, in its relation to late capitalism], we have to complicate the model with all kinds of supplementary epicycles. It is necessary to distinguish between the gradual setting in place of the various (often unrelated) preconditions for the new structure and the ‘moment’ (not exactly chronological) when they all jell and combine into a functional system. This moment is itself less a matter of chronology than it is of a well-nigh Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or retroactivity: people become aware of the dynamics of some new system, in which they are themselves seized, only later on and gradually.17 He begins to detail this complex process as follows: Mandel suggests that the basic new technological prerequisites of the new ‘long wave’ of capitalism’s third stage (here called ‘late capitalism’) were available by the end of World War II, which also had the effect of reorganizing international relations, decolonizing the colonies, and laying the groundwork for the emergence of a new economic world system. Culturally, however, the precondition is to be found [ ... ] in the enormous social and psychological transformations of the 1960s, which swept so much of tradition away on the level of mentalités. [ ... ] The psychic habitus of the new age demands the absolute break, strengthened by a generational rupture, achieved more properly in the 1960s.18 One key question that arises from the stratified pre-history of the postmodern sketched by Jameson is whether it is possible to identify a quality, peculiar to this period, which justifies the invocation of the Freudian theory of Nachträglichkeit; or whether, conversely, the condition of registering historical change ‘only later on and gradually’ is simply characteristic of historical experience in general. The latter position is adopted by Kalí Tal in a critique of a more sustained and overt, but comparable, attempt to conceptualize history in terms of trauma mounted by Cathy Caruth. Tal quotes this passage from Caruth: For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put

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it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.19 Tal comments: Those trained as historians might scratch their heads in puzzlement at Caruth’s claim. One could easily assert that this definition is as true of history generally, as it is true of a history of trauma, since history is a compendium of past, and therefore inaccessible events – events not fully perceived as they occur – given meaning later in a process of narrative construction. Caruth’s description of this inaccessibility as somehow unique in regards to trauma (rather than as another instance of the ongoing process of generating narrative meaning out of an irretrievable past) is both unwarranted and misleading.20 While Tal is correct, I think, to question a tendency towards the conflation of history, in general, with trauma evident in Caruth’s work, it is nonetheless demonstrably the case that certain, peculiarly intense and precipitous, forms of historical experience present exceptionally acute challenges to punctual registration and assimilation, both on the individual and collective levels. Lending at least partial support to Jameson’s implicit attribution of such status to the development of the socio-economic conditions of postmodernism, the Marxist geographer David Harvey has assembled substantial empirical evidence to the effect that the intensity of time-space compression in Western capitalism since the 1960s, with all of its congruent features of excessive ephemerality and fragmentation in the political and private as well as in the social realm, does seem to indicate an experiential context that makes the condition of postmodernity somewhat special.21 The question remains, though, of how to assess Jameson’s attempt to account for the distinctiveness of the transformations he cites through reference to a theory relating predominantly, if not exclusively, to the experience of trauma. Jameson’s use of the concept of Nachträglichkeit is, as I noted earlier, consistent with Laplanche and Pontalis’ preliminary definition, but they go on to insist on the ‘precision’ of Freud’s term, arguing that ‘it is not lived experience in general that undergoes a deferred revision but, specifically, whatever it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context. The traumatic event is the epitome of such unassimilated experience’.22 The

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central, traumatic, understanding of Nachträglichkeit posits a relationship between two temporally separated moments of ‘shock’, whereby the first is suddenly re-experienced, with a new intensity, only with the onset of the second. In Jameson’s model, in contrast, the object of individuals’ belated cognisance is not some past rupture, but rather a prolonged, and ongoing, process of structural change. Likewise, people are described as ‘gradually’ becoming aware ‘of the dynamics of some new system in which they are themselves seized’, or experiencing the ‘dawning collective consciousness of a new system’, prompted not by some abrupt mass catastrophe, but instead ‘deduced intermittently and in a fragmentary way from various unrelated crisis symptoms such as factory closings or higher interest rates’.23 If, then, the historical process sketched by Jameson has a legitimate affinity with the model of Nachträglichkeit, it is only to the extent that it corresponds to the term’s secondary, non-traumatic sense of a ‘deferred revision’ of ‘whatever it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context’. Jameson’s recourse to Freud’s Nachträglichkeit in his archaeology of the postmodern is profoundly suggestive – but suggestive, precisely, of a condition antithetical to Jameson’s own model. It thus becomes necessary to interweave his thesis with strands of post-war culture that are apparently incompatible with its claims. The work both of Pynchon and of Adorno makes clear the importance of such an adjustment. The lacunae in Jameson’s account that their writings show up are war, and militarization in its broader manifestations. As I indicated earlier, the material effects of World War II stand, at several levels of remove, behind the emergence of postmodernism in Jameson’s account. His brief reference to the war condenses Mandel’s detailed demonstration of how the decimation of Europe’s industrial infrastructure created the space for the vital expansion of unscathed American capital during the postwar reconstruction process. The outcome of the war determined that while late capitalism would be thoroughly global or multinational in character, it would be so under the hegemony of American capital, military leadership, and the imperious sway of the dollar.24 There are also significant differences in emphasis between Mandel and Jameson with respect to their analyses of the technological prerequisites of this new system. For Mandel, as Nick Heffernan succinctly explains, the outbreak of the Second World War revitalized large-scale industrial production and stimulated a new burst of (militarized) technological

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innovation (with research and development costs being for the first time almost completely underwritten by the state). [ ... ] The institutionalization after 1945 of what Mandel calls the ‘permanent arms economy’, providing guaranteed profits for capital investment, devolves entirely upon the state. So heavily does the state underwrite the production of military commodities that Mandel identifies this sector as a new and distinct department of production – Department III, producing means of destruction.25 Jameson’s move, at the outset of Postmodernism, to downplay the importance of the expansion of the state sector – he describes it as something ‘no one particularly notices [ ... ] any longer: it seems a simple, “natural” fact of life’ – is designed to distinguish the Frankfurt School conception of ‘late capitalism’, in which great emphasis is placed on precisely this tendency, from a more recent (Mandelian) use of the term. This remark belies, though, the central significance granted by Mandel himself to what he views as an extraordinarily rapid and widespread increase in state intervention in all areas of the economy, and thus elides a significant point of contact between these distinct understandings of the concept of ‘late capitalism’. The mass militarization of western, and particularly American, culture, on which Mandel places such particular emphasis, remains almost entirely extraneous to Jameson’s concerns throughout Postmodernism. He acknowledges, at an early stage, that, this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.26 Later, he will identify the conflict in Vietnam as the ‘first terrible postmodernist war’, claiming that it effected ‘the breakdown of any shared language through which a veteran might convey such experience’, and inaugurated a ‘new and virtually unimaginable leap in technological alienation’.27 Absent from this text, however, is any direct analysis of how the horrors of military conflicts in South East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere, as well as the arms race and the ratcheting up of the nuclear threat, have impinged upon this ‘global, yet American, postmodern culture’, compromising the distantiation of its immaculate, gleaming surfaces from the taint of carnage and torment.

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On this point, Michael Bibby remarks: Jameson’s inability to delineate and concretely account for this ‘underside’ suggests a fatal blindness that haunts his attempts to periodize postmodernity [ ... ] [His] narrative overlooks the ways in which the military industrialism of World War II was maintained and, indeed, expanded during the fifties – which made it possible to wage war against Vietnam – and neglects to consider how the effects of war-making during the Vietnam era bore directly on the material conditions possible for cultural production.28 Rather similarly, James Berger observes that, insofar as Jameson’s theory of the postmodern tends to ‘focus on developments in [ ... ] economics and lose sight of more concrete social and political disasters’, it is itself ‘symptomatic of the traumas [it fails] to mention’.29 Gravity’s Rainbow, in contrast, is acutely sensitive to the profound impact of the Vietnam War, in particular, as well as of wider Cold War tensions, on the culture from which it emerges. At the same time, it registers disturbing associations between these shocks and anxieties and the persistently troubling legacy of the Second World War. As I have noted, the material effects of the upheavals of World War II are strongly implicated in Jameson’s account of the emergence of postmodernism. The war’s devastating psychological effects, however, are apparently unassimilable to postmodern culture, at least as Jameson conceptualizes it. As I suggested in Chapter 1, this lacuna is virtually guaranteed by the perspective on this culture that Jameson adopts. In contrast to the irreversible dwindling of the historical past theorized by Jameson, Gravity’s Rainbow registers a disturbance of the symbolic order by the resurgence of traumatic memories of the Second World War, memories that reverberate, moreover, with contemporary horrors and hazards whose mass mediation in western culture, it is implied, demonstrates not so much the remoteness and inaccessibility of the Real as the necessity of holding its disruptive energies in abeyance behind the miasmic play of sign and image. Pynchon’s text conceptualizes the individual and collective experience of total war in terms of a radical challenge to punctual perception and comprehension. This condition is anticipated, in certain important respects, by Adorno’s Minima Moralia. The passage in question is complex, and worth quoting at some length: This [ ... ] war falls into discontinuous campaigns separated by empty pauses. [ ... ] Its rhythm, the alternation of jerky action and total

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standstill for lack of geographically attainable enemies, has the same mechanical quality which characterizes individual military instruments. [ ... ] But this mechanical rhythm completely determines the human relation to the war, not only in the disproportion between individual bodily strength and the energy of machines, but in the most hidden cells of experience. Even in the previous conflict the body’s incongruity with mechanical warfare made real experience impossible. No-one could have recounted it as even the ArtilleryGeneral Napoleon’s battles could be recalled. The long interval between the war memoirs and the conclusion of peace is not fortuitous: it testifies to the painful reconstruction of memory, which in all the books conveys a sense of impotence and even falseness, no matter what terrors the writers have passed through. But the Second War is as totally divorced from experience as is the functioning of a machine from the movements of the body, which only begins to resemble it in pathological states. Just as the war lacks continuity, history, an ‘epic’ element, but seems rather to start anew from the beginning in each phase, so it will leave behind no permanent, unconsciously preserved image in the memory. Everywhere, with each explosion, it has breached the barrier against stimuli beneath which experience, the lag between healing oblivion and healing recollection, forms. Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals. But nothing, perhaps, is more ominous for the future than the fact that, quite literally, these things will soon be past thinking on, for each trauma of the returning combatants, each shock not inwardly absorbed, is a ferment of future destruction.30 The theoretical material underpinning this discussion derives from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where Freud defines ‘traumatic neurosis’ as ‘a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli’.31 Adorno’s discussion of veterans of the First World War – the conflict whose massive infliction of traumatic neurosis was itself the catalyst for the speculations that make up Beyond the Pleasure Principle – is broadly consistent with Freud’s theory: the awesome forces with which these individuals are confronted defy direct, conscious experience, and the process of reckoning with these events is protracted, painful, and fragmentary. In the case of the ‘Second War’, however, though ‘the barrier against stimuli’ is routinely breached, the subject will retain no trace of the war experience, even ‘unconsciously preserved’. Yet precisely because of this perceived lacuna in memory – the inability

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to register, on any level, the war’s disjunctive dynamics – Adorno anticipates some catastrophic mass recapitulation of the conflict. As his later writings on the subject of ‘late capitalism’ confirm, preparations for a renewed convulsion of this kind would, in the form of the nuclear arms race, soon be underway. In Minima Moralia, this passage almost immediately precedes that discussing the German ‘robot-bombs’ and Hegel’s philosophy of history, and the concern of the former with war and temporality must inevitably inflect our reading of the latter. In light of the earlier passage, the later one suggests a notion of the German rockets as not simply refuting a progressivist reading of history, but also, in their speed and capacity for inflicting shock, as challenging what Kazys Varnelis calls ‘the Hegelian (modernist) historian’s idea of the fully-unfolded and immanent “now” ’32 – a challenge for which the V-2, with its uncanny temporal effects, is (as Pynchon will make abundantly clear in Gravity’s Rainbow) a particularly apposite symbol.33 Gravity’s Rainbow also recalls Adorno’s text in presenting the legacy of the war as a disruptive force that is as likely to be vented through violent, material outbursts as internalized for melancholic contemplation. Pynchon’s novel corroborates the presence, in western, and specifically American, culture of what Marianna Torgovnick has recently referred to as a persistent ‘war complex’. (She, too, takes as her point of departure an aspect of Freud’s reflections on shock and violence, in this case his ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’):34 Picking up on a speculation Freud makes in 1915, I want to claim that the altered state of consciousness produced by large-scale war, what Freud calls wartime and I call wartime consciousness, can last beyond the end of hostilities. For World War II, it persisted after 1945 through the Cold War, and (with lapses during periods of Soviet-US détente and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall) remained ready to be reanimated on 9/11. [ ... ] The war complex arises when death comes to too many, too quickly, often through technological means and with rhymes and reasons that remain arbitrary and even meaningless. [ ... ] It intensifies our natural fear of death, the bracketing off of death that has become routine in many Western cultures – and it ups the ante by not just killing bodies, but sometimes burning or vaporizing them. The war complex shows up as gaps or ellipses in public discourse around histories of quick, technological mass death – which have nonetheless become our familiar.35

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These ‘holes in memory’, Torgovnick suggests, ‘guarantee that the past will have a place to loop back into the present’.36 She goes on to argue that a failure to fully reckon with the catastrophe of the Second World War has permitted the conflict to be invoked as a legitimation for, and as a gird to, subsequent acts of military aggression, from the stockpiling and threatened deployment of nuclear weapons, to the slaughter of civilians in Vietnam, to, in more recent years, a series of reckless Western interventions in the Middle East. Gravity’s Rainbow is clearly attuned to the unresolved legacy of the mass devastations visited upon both soldiers and civilians during World War II; the majority of the text’s contemporary references and allusions are also directed towards bitter conflicts – between the superpowers of the Cold War, between the North Vietnamese Army and the occupying American forces, and between countercultural, antiwar radicals and the United States government. The relation between these two moments crucially hinges, I will argue, on the concept of trauma. Both theoretical and experiential accounts of trauma testify to its profoundly unstable temporality. Cathy Caruth, for example, discussing the theory of trauma elaborated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, notes that, for Freud, ‘the shock of the mind’s relation to the threat of death is [ ... ] not the direct experience of the threat, but precisely the missing of this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known’.37 She comments: Freud’s temporal definition of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle seems to be an extension of his early understanding of the trauma as being locatable not in one moment alone but in the relation between two moments [that is, the theory of Nachträglichkeit]. What the two models share is the description of the traumatic experience in terms of its temporal unlocatability.38 Consistent with this logic, in Pynchon’s narrative the unassimilated shocks of the 1940s and the later upheavals of the 1960s and seventies undergo a thoroughgoing, and, for the reader, intensely disconcerting, interpenetration. I should emphasize that in positing the concept of trauma as an interpretive model in relation to Gravity’s Rainbow I do not mean to attribute the condition of traumatization – at least in its more acute, clinically diagnosable manifestations – to Pynchon himself (though I will have cause to refer to some of the, notoriously sparse, details of his biography as my analysis unfolds); my argument, rather, is that the text responds

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to and enacts a symptomaticity evident in the wider culture, which, as I suggested in Chapter 1, is as much a facet of trauma as individual psychopathology. As I will show, a reading of this kind is, moreover, suggested by the text’s own sustained concern with the theory and experience of trauma. I noted earlier that Pynchon scholarship of the last fifteen to twenty years has tended to align Gravity’s Rainbow with a Jamesonian reading of postmodernism. More recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a comparatively small, but nonetheless significant, critical movement aimed at demonstrating how the text’s undoubted performance of spectacle, simulation, and schizophrenia is, paradoxically, striated by a receptivity to trauma, war, and the insistence of the Real.39 I locate my own analysis of the text within this developing strand of Pynchon criticism; like the studies it follows, and like this book as a whole, my reading reflects, responds, and aims to contribute to a broader interest, evident across the humanities, in the preponderance of traumatic modes of representation in ‘postmodern’ culture. The opening sequence of Gravity’s Rainbow exhibits both a direct concern with war trauma and, more broadly, that quality of ‘temporal unlocatability’ that will be the novel’s characteristic mode of historicity, and which is itself readable as registering a climate of traumatic anxiety pervading the historical moment of the text’s production. It is instructive to consider how one would interpret this scene with no prior knowledge of the novel’s historical setting(s). The novel begins, famously, with the sentence ‘A screaming comes across the sky’ (3). Apparently a city is under attack, presumably from the air, and an ‘Evacuation’ (3) is underway. The geographical location of this city is unclear: the impending ‘fall of a crystal palace’ (3) suggests (though perhaps only in retrospect) England, specifically London,40 while the gothic, labyrinthine, and palimpsestic cityscape, with its ‘girders old as an iron queen’, its ‘archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete’ (3), and its layers of ‘city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city has denied, threatened, lied to its children’ (4), appears to be a characteristically Old World environment. Only one direct temporal marker features: amongst those being evacuated are ‘old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete’ (3). Appropriately enough, this detail merely compounds the reader’s disorientation: 20 years from when? ‘Ordnance’ has a faintly archaic ring (even in 1973, when the novel was first published) – perhaps pointing to the early years of the twentieth century – while ‘shock’ inevitably suggests ‘shell shock’, famously the characteristic psychological malady of the 1914–1918 war. Yet in 1973, much of the military hardware with which the Second World War was fought was ‘20 years obsolete’ – while some,

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on the other hand, such as the ballistic missile (of which the German V-rockets were the first examples), had assumed world-historical significance. In this regard, it is intriguing that the evacuation column is described as passing out of ‘downtown’, and that the road is expected to open out into a ‘broader highway’ (3).41 These words have distinctly North American associations: the OED describes ‘downtown’ as originating in the United States and chiefly in usage in North America, while ‘highway’ has little vernacular currency outside this region. It is worth recalling, furthermore, that the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways – the Interstate Highway System – was constructed, in part, so as to facilitate the evacuation of major urban centres in the event of a nuclear strike on the United States. That this scene gestures towards such an occurrence is further indicated by the narrator’s speculation as to whether ‘it’ (presumably whatever projectile is falling towards the unnamed city) ‘will bring its own light [ ... ] Will the light come before or after?’ (4) – an image that inevitably calls to mind the dreaded ‘nuclear flash’. Thus this scene evokes, simultaneously, a European city, most likely London, during World War II, and a city in the United States coming under attack in the opening salvo of World War III; it offers, moreover, no guidance as to how these references might be ordered or prioritized. Of course, after less than two pages this scene of mass evacuation abruptly gives way to a description of a man waking from sleep: ‘his name is Capt. Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice’ (5), and the preceding scene has, presumably, been his dream. In this, ‘real world’ scene (hardly in fact a stable category in Gravity’s Rainbow), precise geographical and historical markers are quickly furnished: Pirate wakes to ‘London light’ (4), and is soon identified as an agent of the Special Operations Executive (5), the British covert actions organization operational during the Second World War. In contrast to the studied opacity of the opening sequence (and with the exception of a number of fragmentary, phantasmagoric passages, which appear with increasing regularity as the text approaches its climax [see, for example, 698–699, 735–736, 751–752]), the novel will hereafter be replete with historico-referential material. That its historical setting continues to exhibit a disconcerting instability, however, is a consequence in large part of the fact that whilst the majority of this material is traceable to World War II-era Europe, a substantial portion points elsewhere, in particular towards the United States of the 1960s and early 1970s. The dominant critical response to this potentially discomfiting phenomenon has been to attempt to stably locate the narrative in one period or another through

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a tactic of prioritization. These approaches can be placed at two poles. On the one hand, and most straightforwardly, Gravity’s Rainbow has been read as projecting a vision, first and foremost, of World War II and its immediate aftermath, albeit one that is demonstrably informed, often to an overtly anachronistic degree, by the context of its composition, and which thereby seeks to emphasize the resonances and continuities between these two historical moments.42 The second, more daring, reading reformulates this arrangement such that the text is viewed as only ostensibly addressing the World War, while the later period emerges as the true object of its critique; the text’s ‘anachronisms’ (no longer really classifiable as such) then serve to signal the necessity of this allegorical reading.43 There is nothing in Gravity’s Rainbow that categorically debars these hierarchical approaches, and no doubt much that can be made to support them, but in my view they succeed in rendering the text ‘readable’ – in accordance with established exegetical procedures – only at the expense of what is most challenging and interesting about the novel’s poetics. What if, in contrast, the absolute undecidability with respect to the prioritization of historical reference, and hence to the question of setting, displayed by the opening sequence turned out to be Gravity’s Rainbow’s abiding mode? One might then conceive of the very warp and woof of the narrative’s spatio-temporal fabric as subject to persistent contortions in accordance with abrupt shifts in the text’s referential coordinates; or rather of this fabric as somehow continually suspended between distinct historical moments, and thus reducible to none. What if, in other words, the text’s characteristic temporality were not anachronism but achronism, the site it occupies a ‘zone’ in the American historical imaginary located outside chronological time? Such a conceptualization is threatening to the two established critical positions I have outlined here because it seems to challenge the model of resemblance and ‘proximity’ to specific moments of historical reality on which they are implicitly based: an overabundance of reference paradoxically casts the text adrift from history itself. What I want to stress, though, is that this apparent slippage into ahistoricism needs to be understood as propelled precisely by the force of history’s catastrophic upheavals. Peter Nicholls observes that, according to the theory of Nachträglichkeit, the occurrence of separate traumatic events gives rise ‘to a complex temporality in which the subject is always in more than one place at any time’;44 so, I want to argue, with the narrative of Gravity’s Rainbow. My analysis will focus upon a series of passages from the novel in which this condition is both performed and self-reflexively foregrounded. Prior to that, however, I

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wish to show how Pynchon’s text explicitly locates itself within a discourse of shock and trauma. As Stefan Mattesich notes, Gravity’s Rainbow is suffused, both at the levels of content and expression, with mechanisms theorized by psychoanalysis.45 In particular, both Mattesich and Eric Cassidy find resonances with (and, in Cassidy’s case, a direct source for) key aspects of the novel in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.46 While Mattesich’s primary concern is with the relevance for Gravity’s Rainbow of Deleuze’s use of Freud in his writings on masochism, and Cassidy’s with the implications of Freud’s conception of the death drive, I intend to focus my attention on the intriguing model of temporality suggested to Freud by the phenomenon of ‘traumatic neurosis’. Freud considers the key predictor of traumatic neurosis to be ‘fright’ (Schreck), the condition of being unprepared for, and hence surprised by, danger. ‘Anxiety’ (Angst), in contrast, ‘describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it. [ ... ] There is something about anxiety that protects its subject against fright and so against fright-neuroses’.47 As I noted in Chapter 1, this model suggests a direct relationship between the speed with which phenomenal events unfold and their capacity to inflict trauma. Accordingly, in Gravity’s Rainbow, it is precisely because of their unprecedented capacity to outstrip conscious registration that the V-2 rockets ‘bring with them chances for public terror no one has sounded’ (GR 40).48 The rockets’ psychological effects are direct consequences of, and are also suggestively paralleled by, their physical effects: as noted early in the novel, the V-2 ‘travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you’re still around, you hear the sound of it coming in’ (7). Later, a passage of free indirect speech relates the reflections of Tyrone Slothrop, the closest thing the novel has to a protagonist, on the differing experiences of bombardment by the German ‘buzzbomb’ (the V-1, also known as the ‘doodlebug’ or ‘doodle’) and the V-2: This last summer [the Luftwaffe] started in with those buzzbombs. You’d be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off suddenly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops [ ... ] if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson – then it’s begun its dive, sloshing the fuel aft, away from the engine burner, and you’ve got 10 seconds to get under something. Well, it wasn’t really too bad. After a while you adjusted – found yourself making small bets, a shilling or two, with Tantivy MuckerMafflick at the next desk about where the next doodle would hit ...

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But then last September the [V-2] rockets came. Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier, sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he’d been taken for a sucker. Christ, it wasn’t supposed to keep on like this. (21; emphasis in original) In Freudian terms, the condition of being ‘really scared’ suffered by Slothrop combines both ‘fright’ – inflicted by the succession of unanticipated rocket impacts to which he has been exposed – and high ‘anxiety’ or ‘hypercathexis’, a perpetual state of which seems to offer the only means by which he may be assured of confronting the next impact with some level of preparation. The unendurable and unsustainable nature of this experience of continual anticipation and deferral is betrayed, however, by the breakdown of Slothrop’s speech as he attempts to articulate it: ‘jeepers, Tantivy, listen, I don’t want to upset you but ... I mean I’m four year’s overdue’s what it is, it could happen any time, the next second, right, just suddenly ... shit ... just zero, just nothing ... and ...’ (25). Life has, in Adorno’s words, ‘changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals’. Many of the most severely traumatized survivors of rocket explosions are treated in the ‘war-neurosis ward’ (47) at St. Veronica’s hospital in London’s East End by a neurologist named Kevin Spectro. Spectro and his colleagues subscribe to a theory of ‘abreaction’ (GR 49, 75). This term, coined by Freud and Josef Breuer, denotes a discharge of pathogenic affect achieved through a process of recalling or re-experiencing traumatic events.49 Though ‘the exclusive emphasis on abreaction as the key to psychotherapeutic effectiveness is above all typical of the [early] period of Freud’s work which is known as the period of the cathartic method, [ ... ] the notion is retained in the later theory of psycho-analytic treatment’.50 The theory of abreaction is notably implicated, for example, in Freud’s claim, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the repetition of trauma whilst dreaming constitutes a means of mastering ‘the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis’.51 In his attempts to induce ‘catharsis’ in his patients, Spectro is prompted to wonder ‘how many times before it’s washed away, these iterations that pour out, reliving the blast, afraid to let go because to let go is so final [ ... ]?’ (50). A vivid representation of one such ‘iteration’ appears during a scene set at the hospital, as a conversation between Spectro and Ned

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Pointsman momentarily lapses: Silence comes in, sculptured by spoken dreams, by pain-voices of the rocketbombed next door, Lord of the Night’s children, voices hung upon the ward’s stagnant medicinal air. Praying to their Master: sooner or later an abreaction, each one, all over this frost and harrowed city ... ... as once again the floor is a giant lift propelling you with no warning toward your ceiling – replaying now as the walls are blown outward, bricks and mortar showering down, your sudden paralysis as death comes to wrap and stun I don’t know guv I must’ve blacked out when I come to she was gone it was burning all around me head was full of smoke ... and the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery, the snowy roofslates fallen across half your bed, the cinema kiss never completed, you were pinned and stared at a crumpled cigarette pack for two hours in pain, you could hear them crying from the rows either side but couldn’t move. (49; italics in original) The complex and ambiguous manner in which this sequence unfolds at the grammatical level assists in its evocation of the disturbing experiential dislocations typical of trauma. It begins with a reference to the hospital’s patients in the third person; then, after an abrupt shift (marked only by Pynchon’s characteristic ellipses), the second-person pronoun is adopted, addressing (presumably) one, or perhaps more, of these patients as they undergo a nightmare recapitulation of a rocket impact.52 While these lines are explicitly identified as describing a flashback-type repetition of an earlier explosion (‘replaying now’, ‘once again’) – a collapse not of the walls of the hospital, but of the past into the present53 – the following, italicized section, which appears to be a scrap of dialogue delivered by a survivor of the blast to an attending official, is ambiguously located: has the scene momentarily shifted to the aftermath of the actual bombing, or is this fragment itself a repetition, in the mind of one of the patients, of an earlier conversation? As so often, the text seems simultaneously to invite, frustrate, and perhaps even wholly invalidate such speculations. It is precisely in the tension between, on the one hand, the urgency and horror that this line conveys, and, on the other, its refusal to yield up its own ontological status (‘real’ dialogue or oneiric recollection) – such that the very notion of narrative time and space (whether physical or psychic) begins to seem dubious, and these signifiers to appear as mere ‘material marks on the page’54 – that the complex symptomaticity of trauma, in its postmodern moment, is captured.

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Even insofar as a distinction between past reality and present re-enactment remains a meaningful one with regard to this passage, the final section persists in staging an unsettling collision between the two categories. One’s initial sense, I would suggest, is that the first two clauses of this section present something of the actual bombing, even as they suggest the influence of the circumstances under which this experience is repeated – an uneasy condition mirrored by the ambiguity, in the absence of stative verbs, of the tense. However, a further displacement soon occurs as references to ‘a cinema kiss never completed’ and ‘the rows [of seats] either side’, along with the modulation to the past tense in the final two clauses, suggest that the actual explosion took place not while the victim was lying in bed, but whilst attending a film showing, and that the ‘bed’ across which the ‘snowy roofslates’ are perceived to have ‘fallen’ is in fact a hospital bed at St. Veronica’s: the images presented in the first two clauses of this section are decidedly identified, then, as hallucinations. Yet this move does not serve to resolve the uncertainties with which this passage is laden; rather, the thoroughgoing interpenetration of past and present, real trauma and traumatic nightmare, that characterises it is exemplified by the reference, in the final line, to ‘the rows either side’, which, as Brian McHale observes, suggests not only ‘rows of seats in a theatre’, but also ‘rows of beds in a hospital ward’.55 In a later scene, a shift in grammatical tense is again employed to evoke the disruption of temporal continuity wrought in the subject by a sudden, acutely threatening occurrence. Here, the playful intimacy of two lovers, Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico, is interrupted by a rocket explosion in the vicinity of a house they are occupying: She hunches, squirming out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making a nice recovery, and by now she’s ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle, elbow – But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed. (GR 59) The abrupt shift from the simple present to the present perfect that occurs with the first sentence of the second paragraph serves to emphasize the fact that the rocket’s incursion can only be registered belatedly – that, in Caruth’s words, it poses a ‘threat’ that is ‘recognized as such by the mind one moment too late’. Though physically unharmed, Roger and Jessica cannot escape the violence inflicted on their spatial (‘the air’) and temporal (‘the time’) orientation by this high-speed weapon.

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A similar dynamic is evident in a passage that appears towards the end of the novel, though here it is shown to be manifest on a much larger, indeed world-historical, scale. This lengthy, immensely detailed sequence catalogues the characteristics and ramshackle belongings of the numerous national and ethnic groups that compose the great columns of displaced persons despondently roaming the desolate ‘zone’ of central Europe in the aftermath of the war. It ends with this sentence: ‘so the populations move, across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried, hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don’t yet know is destroyed forever’ (551). There is a doubleness to this remark that, I would suggest, is detectable throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. On the one hand, the text evinces a desire to evoke the condition of being overwhelmed by precipitous events, whilst, on the other, it gestures towards the larger meanings and implications of these events, which are only apprehensible from the posterior, panoptic perspective that the narrator here implicitly adopts. Elsewhere, the text points more overtly still to what Mattesich terms ‘the time of writing itself, [ ... ] the “present” of a textual recapitulation of history’.56 An instance of this appears during a celebrated sequence towards the end of Part One, in which, around the focal point of an evensong service at a church “Somewhere in Kent” (127) in December 1944, the narrative performs a series of concentric spatial movements, as it simultaneously merges this historical moment with others that both pre- and post-date it (127–136). During this sequence, the following passage appears: In the stations of the city the prisoners are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances – stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. (132)

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As Eric Meyer suggests, this passage displays a ‘subtly-coded doublefocus’.57 On the one hand, it contains specific references to the culture of World War II-era England – to Herbert Stanley Morrison, Home Secretary in Churchill’s wartime coalition cabinet, as well as to Alasils, a popular brand of painkillers. At the same time, though, as Meyer observes, the references to ‘Indo-China’ and ‘Tonkin’ would, ‘for the contemporary reader’, not merely identify the ‘prisoners’ as veterans of the British campaign against the Japanese in South East Asia, but would also ‘serve [ ... ] as allusions’ to the Vietnam War.58 In addition, Frederick Ashe notes that in describing these POWs as ‘light as [ ... ] men on the moon’, Pynchon ‘employs a simile recent televised moonwalks had made much more concrete’.59 As I suggested earlier, this condition of historical overdetermination has a paradoxically derealizing effect, since it untethers the text from direct identification with any specific cluster of referents. Meyer goes further, however, invoking Jameson’s theory of a connection between ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, in which due to the effect of advanced reification the signifying chain has disintegrated and the sign has been objectified and commodified as an imagesimulacrum, and the aesthetic form of pastiche or collage characteristic of postmodern artistic production. This postmodern condition appears stylized in [Pynchon’s text]. The stylistic register of [this passage] reproduces the cultural dominant of a linguistic economy that has lost connection with the material conditions of lived historical experience. [ ... ] Individual experience becomes hallucinatorily decentred [ ... ] and history is eclipsed or reduced to a flux of imagesimulacra that lack any referential content.60 But there is also in this passage, Meyer argues, a sense that behind the slide of signifiers there is a Real that eludes representation yet produces and informs the text. And that ‘absent cause’ of the text is The War, which appeared in American culture in the late sixties in just such a form: as derealized signs and images on TV screens and in magazines, and as the absent cause behind the invisible forces of disintegration and death operating beneath the surface of the chrome-plated postmodern American landscape.61 Similarly, earlier in the same essay he argues that Gravity’s Rainbow demonstrates that behind ‘the schizophrenic flux of consumer

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commodity-fetishes [ ... ] lurk the spectres of mass death and starvation, insurrection and perennial subsidized warfare in the Third World, with above it all the Damoclean sword of nuclear annihilation’.62 This being so, I would suggest that if Gravity’s Rainbow – both in this passage and elsewhere – displays, in Meyer’s words, a ‘proliferation of signs that displaces simple referentiality’,63 then this may testify not so much to the inaccessibility of the historical Real under conditions of late capitalist reification, as to its searing immediacy in an era circumscribed by the threat, and the reality, of mass catastrophe. The text’s propensity for opacity would then be understood as functioning, apotropaically, to screen, contain, or ward off the Real. But, in Hal Foster’s words, ‘this very need points to the real, and it is at this point that the real ruptures the screen’, and ‘we seem almost to touch the real’.64 On precisely this point, I would like to consider the intriguing suggestion in the passage from Gravity’s Rainbow that a ‘rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down’, a line that Meyer italicizes for emphasis, but does not directly comment upon. There is no indication, either prior or subsequent to this passage, that would suggest that it is to be understood as a written account within the narrative frame (one recorded by a character, reflecting on the imminent threat of aerial attack); rather, the self-reflexive assertion of the act of writing – ‘even now as the words are set down’ – appears to constitute part of this frame. The emphasis upon inscription, moreover, also invites the reader to reflect on the ‘time of writing’ – the present of the text’s composition – a moment itself imperilled by a looming threat of instantaneous devastation. This line, then, along with the oblique allusions to Vietnam and the space race, again places strain upon the spatio-temporal integrity of the text, causing it to gesture, in accordance with the logic of trauma, not simply towards the privations and convulsions of the Second World War, but towards the geopolitical conflicts of the late 1960s, the fetishized core ‘object’ of which – the nuclear warhead, descendant of the ‘German rocket’ – threatens a catastrophic fusion of signification with the Real, even as such an occurrence remains, in its perpetual deferral, ‘fabulously textual’, as Jacques Derrida famously remarked.65 If this passage does indeed gesture towards the incidence of its own inscription, the historical record would suggest that the site thus signified is located somewhere in the environs of Los Angeles.66 In his important essay of 1966, ‘Inside the Mind of Watts’, a reflection on the experiences of those living in this deprived, and recently riot-torn,

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district of Los Angeles, Pynchon observes that, From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts – and in a curious way, besieges it – looks [ ... ] a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the LA Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the ‘action’ everybody mills along the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.67 Here, in an intriguing anticipation of Derrida’s assertions, as well those of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio,68 and others, even the technological preparation for war takes on a ‘textual’, depthless quality. The slippage towards a scene of writing shadowed by the threat of aerial attack, evident in the passage from Gravity’s Rainbow quoted above, however, testifies to a residual anxiety over the potential for a catastrophe that might instantaneously transform into a universal condition ‘basic realities like disease, like failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen – and can afford – to ignore’.69 This anxiety will, of course, become all the more palpable in the novel’s famous final image of a projectile falling towards a Los Angeles cinema occupied by ‘us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?)’ (760). It is resonant, too, that it was as a (reluctant) resident of LA – the very epicentre of the ‘culture industry’ – that Theodor Adorno, in Minima Moralia, anticipated a future paroxysm already incipient in the ruins of the Second World War.70 If Pynchon and Adorno have, mercifully, been inaccurate in their direst predictions, their work has nonetheless proven to be prophetic of the recognition – now widely voiced in theory and criticism – of what Slavoj Žižek describes as ‘the fundamental ambiguity of the image in postmodernism: it is a kind of barrier enabling the subject to maintain distance from the real, protecting him or her against its irruption, yet its very obtrusive “hyperrealism” evokes the nausea of the real’.71 Gravity’s Rainbow’s own role as a refractor of past and present traumas is signalled again as the narrative approaches its conclusion. Here, a lengthy passage is presented as a transcription of remarks made by ‘a spokesman for the Counterforce’ (the radical grouping that strives to undermine the power of the vast, dominant ‘They-system’) ‘in an

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interview with the Wall Street Journal’ (738). Part way through, this enigmatic aside appears: [Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying them all ... the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus. Spread by your tireless Typhoid Marys, cruising the markets and the stations. We did manage to ambush some of them. Once we caught some in the Underground. It was terrible. My first action, my initiation. We chased them down the tunnels. We could feel their fright. When the tunnels branched, we had only the treacherous acoustics of the Underground to go on. Chances were good for getting lost. There was almost no light. The rails gleamed, as they do aboveground on a rainy night. And the whispers then – the shadows who waited, hunched in angles at the maintenance stations, lying against the tunnel walls, watching the chase. ‘The end is too far’, they whispered. ‘Go back. There are no stops on this branch. The trains run and the passengers ride miles of blank mustard walls, but there are no stops. It’s a long afternoon run ...’ Two of them got away. But we took the rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971, I tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this part in?] (739) According to Jeffrey S. Baker, the ‘Underground’ in which this ‘chase’, ‘ambush’, and ‘capture’ unfolds should be understood as a figurative trope, which alludes to ‘the radical counterculture “movement” (the “Underground”) of the 1960s’.72 Yet, as so often when Pynchon is apparently at his most metaphorical, the scenario presented by this passage displays a curious materiality (albeit one with distinctly fantastical overtones). The pursuit of an enemy through a labyrinthine network of ‘tunnels’ evokes, for example, the activities of the so-called tunnel rats, American soldiers who undertook missions inside the extensive tunnel systems dug by the North Vietnamese Army. The reference to ‘rails’, on the other hand, lends this subterranean realm the appearance of an underground railway system; given the close association of Pynchon’s narrative with World War II-era London, one might recall that it was in the London tube network, the world’s oldest and most famous ‘Underground’, that many thousands of vulnerable citizens sought refuge during the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids. Whether this scene is read figuratively or literally, however, the question of the historical period to which it corresponds is seemingly resolved by its ‘point[ing]

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up [of] a very specific historical context (1966–1971)’.73 Plainly, German bomb attacks on London are chronologically incommensurable with the period demarcated by these dates, and Baker suggests that, Pynchon’s cryptic question, ‘Do you want to put this part in?’ addressed apparently to those ‘editors’ whom he claims to know so well, is appropriate in the sense that ‘this part’ shifts the focus of the entire novel from its apparent setting of World War II to one that transforms Gravity’s Rainbow into a political tract that rails against the American government of the Vietnam-Nixon era.74 Indeed, noting Pynchon’s ubiquitous yet ambiguous use of the term ‘the War’ in the novel, Baker argues that the question of ‘what war Pynchon was writing about’ is conclusively answered by this passage: it is the (near) civil war between countercultural radicals and the United States government, fought out in relation to, and in some sense as an extension of, the conflict in Vietnam. I would also advocate reading this passage as a reflection on the novel’s own historiography, but without equating its speaker with Pynchon himself, as Baker appears to, and in order to move towards a distinctly different interpretation. I take my lead on this point from Eric Cassidy, who notes in passing that the dates 1966–1971 correspond not simply to the height of the counterculture and the Vietnam War, but also to the period in which Pynchon composed the bulk of Gravity’s Rainbow.75 It is here, at the level of textual production – a production that, as I have argued, enacts the perplexing temporality of trauma – that the conflicts of 1940s Europe and 1960s America enter into a spectral co-existence between these rigid chronological ‘station-marks’. A question that has been implicit throughout this chapter is that of the nature of causality in trauma, and in particular in the theory of Nachträglichkeit, and it is on this issue that I now wish to focus my attention. According to Freud’s theory, as Jean Laplanche emphasizes in an interview with Cathy Caruth, ‘trauma consists of two moments’, the second of which prompts the first to be re-experienced with an intensity unprecedented even in its actual occurrence.76 This conceptualization gives rise to a perplexing dilemma: does the second moment simply effectuate the release of a surge of pathogenic affect that the subject has always carried, in latent form, since the initial occurrence; or, conversely, might the force of the experience of trauma be primarily attributable to the second event, whose overwhelming intensity precipitates the displacement and projection onto a past experience of a

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cathectic charge that this earlier moment will then seem always to have possessed? The paradoxical implication of Freud’s work, as a number of commentators have argued, is that neither interpretation can be privileged. Ned Lukacher, for example, observes: Deferred action demands that one recognize that while the earlier event is still to some extent the cause of the later event, the earlier event is nevertheless also the effect of the later event. One is forced to admit a double or ‘metaleptic’ logic in which causes are both causes of effects and the effects of effects.77 Similarly, Peter Nicholls notes that Nachträglichkeit ‘calls into question traditional notions of causality – the second event is presented now as the “cause” of the first – and its retroactive logic refuses to accord ontological primacy to any originary moment’.78 As Hanjo Berressem argues, a similar logic also governs the trajectory of the rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow.79 Although the V-2’s impact is, of course, an effect of its descent towards its target, its supersonic speed means that its explosion is perceived to precede – to cause – its approach: Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out ... a few feet of film run backwards ... the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound, then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning ... a ghost in the sky. (GR 48; italics in original; see also, for example, 7, 23, 139) The problematization of causality implied by the theory of Nachträglichkeit also bears upon the broader question, with which I have been concerned throughout this chapter, of Gravity’s Rainbow’s historical determinants, insofar as they can be understood as ‘causes’ of the text’s inscription. As I have noted, two conflicting positions on this issue have emerged, which mirror those pertaining to Freud’s theory. The first views the text as first and foremost a response to the unresolved legacy of World War II in American, and western, culture (what Marianna Torgovnick has recently identified as a persistent ‘war complex’) – a legacy thrown into sharp relief by contemporary geopolitical and social antagonisms. The second, in contrast, interprets the novel as impelled primarily by precisely these latter tensions and conflicts (the Cold War, Vietnam, the clampdown on countercultural radicals in the United States), whose

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overwhelming immediacy necessitates a displacement onto the era of the Second World War, and invests the depiction of this period with an affective intensity in excess of any still exerted upon the contemporary imaginary by the World War itself. The relation between, and relative importance of, these two historical moments within Pynchon’s narrative is dramatized in its final sequence. I have tried to demonstrate that the setting of Gravity’s Rainbow continually partakes of both the 1940s and the 1960s–1970s, defying attempts at straightforward prioritization. Its closing pages (754–760), however, stage the apparent splitting off – suggestive of a cell dividing – of an overtly contemporary scenario from the text’s main narrative trajectory, whose setting has tended to be, and will remain, most closely aligned with World War II-era Europe. For the allegorists, this climactic move serves as confirmation that the novel has been about the present all along; once more, however, and consistent with the logic of trauma, the closing sequence is figured in such a way as to render such categorical claims highly questionable. Gravity’s Rainbow’s main narrative strand concludes with a young German soldier, Gottfried, being launched inside a specially adapted V-2 rocket by his master and lover, Captain Blicero, on what a number of textual details identify as Easter Sunday, 1945.80 This event is depicted in a series of short, individually titled scenes. One such passage describes Gottfried’s state of mind as he lies in the tail section of the rocket, awaiting its launch (754). It ends with the words, ‘Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well’ (754). This exhortation most obviously relates to Gottfried’s imminent entry into the spectacular, sado-masochistic apotheosis concocted for him by the maniacal Blicero. It is suggestive, however, that the next scene is the first to be explicitly identified as located in the contemporary United States (754–757): its opening words are ‘LOS ANGELES’, and the character it introduces, Richard M. Zhlubb, the night manager of a cinema named the Orpheus Theatre, is a clear caricature of Richard Nixon, as Jeffrey S. Baker and David Cowart, amongst others, have noted.81 Those searching for confirmation that the Nixon-era United States is the primary concern of Gravity’s Rainbow in its entirety might thus wish to reinterpret the words that immediately precede this scene as announcing the narrative’s, and the reader’s, own ‘awakening’ into the historical moment that has ‘always’ been the text’s ‘real’ subject. The order of priority apparently established by the transition between these two scenes is seemingly strengthened, in turn, by the next shift in focus. The sequence featuring Zhlubb/Nixon concludes with the

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dawning realization that the city is under nuclear attack: The sound of the siren takes you both unaware. Zhlubb looks up sharply into his mirror. ‘You’re not holding, are you?’ But the sound is greater than police. It wraps the concrete and the smog, it fills the basin and mountains further than any mortal could ever move ... could move in time ... . ‘I don’t think that’s a police siren.’ Your guts in spasm, you reach for the knob of the AM radio. ‘I don’t think –’. (757) The narrative then immediately returns to the German rocket troops’ preparations for the firing of Gottfried’s V-2. It is inviting, then, to read this transition as enacting the traumatic displacement onto the Second World War of a nuclear threat too overwhelmingly acute to be directly confronted, and thus as modelling a manoeuvre supposedly performed by the text as a whole. Shortly thereafter, however, the directionality of the text’s closing sequence is apparently reversed. Two successive scenes, entitled ‘The Clearing’ and ‘Ascent’ (757–758, 758–760), depict the launch of the rocket containing Gottfried, and its parabolic flight. The narrative then makes a final movement back to the Orpheus Theatre; ‘the film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out’, and the audience is calling for it to restart (760). ‘And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t’ (760). Clearly, a historical trajectory is traced here, though critics have disagreed over whether ‘the Rocket’ in this passage should be understood as identical with the V-2 launched by Captain Blicero, or simply as a technological descendant (the scene is headed ‘Descent’) of the German weapon: an intercontinental ballistic missile. Leaving this no doubt irresolvable question aside, it is plainly the case that, at a figurative level, the reader is invited to interpret the rocket that falls towards the theatre as a fragment of the traumatic past homing in on the mass consciousness of the present. Viewed as such, the climactic pages of the novel thus evoke a historical condition that those critics who emphasize the impact of the prolonged aftermath of World War II on Gravity’s Rainbow would wish to attribute to the text at large. Yet a further reversal remains, as Laurent Milesi argues: That ‘final’ missile about to explode on the Orpheus Theatre, either delayed V-2 of the Second World War or future nuclear ICBM of

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the 1970s, re-enters Pirate Prentice’s dream of an evacuation after bombing, which, after the final (rehearsal of an endlessly repeated) annihilation, we may cyclically go back to and reinterpret. [ ... ] At the physical end of gravity’s downward pull (the ‘Descent’ section [GR 760]), the rocket’s arc is transfigured [ ... ] into a circular return as it fictitiously (through the required work of its readers’ imaginations) burrows underground, back to the re-beginning of its textual course.82 No sooner, then, has the rocket emerged from the past into the present than it is redirected; but its fate is to undergo not so much a reversal as a dispersal and reconfiguration, as it collides with a narrative moment (the opening scene of the novel) which is itself, as I argued earlier, ambiguously poised between past and present. The climax of the narrative thus ultimately negates attempts to enlist it in support of global interpretations of the novel that emphasize its concern with either World War II or the Cold War. Rather, if this ending, which is also a beginning, confirms anything about Gravity’s Rainbow as a whole, it is that the text demands to be read as the product, in large part, of a traumatic confluence of past and present conflicts, in the ambit of which questions of priority and causality will be cast in perpetual doubt. This state of endless suspension bespeaks, too, the insistence – anticipated by Adorno and simultaneously signalled and elided by Jameson – of an impacted traumatic kernel at the core of the ‘postmodern’ imagination. In producing these effects, Gravity’s Rainbow exhibits an extraordinary sensitivity to anxieties that cut across the length and breadth of the social field. The fiction of J.G. Ballard, to which I now turn, also channels disturbances that pervade the symbolic totality. To a much greater extent than in Pynchon’s writing, however, these wider tremors resonate, in Ballard’s work, with preoccupations that are demonstrably born of immediate personal experience. In the mid-1970s, Jameson observed of Ballard’s fiction that it ‘is one immense attempt to substitute nature for history, and thus a kind of dizzying and ecstatic feeling of inevitable natural eschatology for that more troubled sense of collective historical death which someone so steeped in the British colonial experience must of necessity feel’. ‘That part of Ballard’, Jameson uncharacteristically asserts, ‘we surely cannot recuperate by attaching [ ... ] to “socioeconomics”’.83 I agree with this claim, and not only because a reliance on ‘socioeconomics’ here (like that exhibited by Jameson himself in his writings on postmodernism) might elide the acutely violent character of the crises suffered by British colonialism in

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the Far East in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This is significant, but there is an additional issue at stake: given his immersion in some of the fiercest convulsions of the twentieth century, much of the history to which Ballard’s writing responds is peculiarly refracted through the prism of personal experience, meaning that a commandment that will later become a Jamesonian slogan, ‘always historicize!’,84 yields, in this case, to the alternative imperative, ‘biographize’. As Jameson puts it, Ballard’s work demands that we ‘envisage a different kind of approach, some deeper kind of reading which makes the relationship between Ballard’s talent and his concrete experience of history more accessible and visible to us’.85 The following chapter attempts to take up this, as yet unfulfilled, challenge.

3 ‘A Secret Code of Pain and Memory’: Traumatic Repetition in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard

The thesis of this chapter is that much of J.G. Ballard’s writing shows itself to be shaped by traumatic events experienced by its author as a child during World War II. As I will show, similar claims have been asserted elsewhere, but this is the first attempt to mount a defence of this position that is both sustained in its pursuit of textual corroboration and rigorous in its theoretical underpinnings – as it must be if it is to sustain the various cogent critiques that have been levelled at it. Part of my argument will be that the post-traumatic character of Ballard’s oeuvre is most persuasively signalled by texts that bear no ostensible relation to the war; if my analysis at times leads into territory that appears obscure or tangential, this will be because obliquity is perhaps the primary characteristic of Ballard’s symbolic registration of his war experiences. I will attempt to keep the contribution that each textual detail makes to my overarching perspective on Ballard continually in view. At the outset, I wish also to note not only that I consider Ballard’s literary output to constitute the most sustained and compelling expression of the postmodernist response to the Second World War, but also that I view it, more broadly still, as exemplifying the different modalities – from ‘acting out’ to ‘working through’ – that the writing of trauma may take. I should emphasize at this point that my objective is not to produce a psychological profile of J.G. Ballard, a ‘case history’ that would establish the circumstances, nature, and extent of his putative traumatization. Nor is it to apply such a profile in order to explain aspects of his writings – the standard model of ‘psychobiographical’ criticism. My contention, conversely, is that close scrutiny of both Ballard’s fictional and non-fictional texts 76

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suggests that in order for them to fall into an intelligible arrangement one must posit the occurrence of a biographical trauma, even as its character – indeed its very ontological status – remain indeterminable. The situation is well described by Slavoj Žižek: Trauma is real – it is a hard core resisting symbolization, but the point is that it does not matter if it has had a place, if it has ‘really occurred’ in so-called reality; the point is simply that it produces a series of structural effects (displacements, repetitions, and so on). The Real is an entity which must be constructed afterwards so that we can account for the distortions of the symbolic structure. The most famous Freudian example of such a real entity is of course the primal parricide: it would be senseless to search for its traces in prehistoric reality, but it must nonetheless be presupposed if we want to account for the present state of things.1 The question inevitably arises, though, of whether the necessity of positing a traumatic origin for Ballard’s writing also requires us to assume that its production is somehow involuntary, compulsive, or ‘automatic’. Recent criticism has been careful to distinguish between literary writing, where the capacity for the conscious, intentional selection and shaping of material is assumed, and the psychopathological condition of trauma, for which the impulsive, repetitive marking of the traumatizing event is taken to be symptomatic. J. Stephen Murphy, for example, remarks, ‘the writer of poetry or fiction might desire to distort reality and conventions of narrative and logic, but the survivor [of trauma] is seemingly unable to do anything but’.2 Similarly, Dominick LaCapra observes that, ‘writing trauma is a metaphor in that writing indicates some distance from trauma (even when the experience of writing is itself intimately bound up with trauma)’.3 Clearly, ‘writing’, as we understand it, could not occur if its producers lacked a degree of conscious autonomy; conversely, though, writing (like any mode of communication) always transpires within a ‘symbolic universe’ whose horizon is circumscribed in such a way that certain significations make themselves readily available while others are withheld or excluded. In Ballard’s case, the markedly disproportionate frequency with which certain clusters of signifiers are inscribed in his texts is one of the characteristics that lead one to infer the distorting effects of trauma upon the symbolic network from which these texts are assembled. This tightly delimited sphere of authorial autonomy is, in fact, doubly inscribed in Ballard’s writing. That certain recurrent images serve to signal a constriction of the

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symbolic order around a cluster of traumatically invested signifiers is suggested not only by their sheer repetitiveness, but also by the way in which they are often associated, at the level of content, with the return of a primordial or atavistic past. These often elaborate thematizations suggest a significant degree of latitude in the compositional process, but it is telling that Ballard’s imaginative resources are here mobilized only to confirm the determining weight exerted by past experience upon present signification, what Lacan terms the ‘insistence of the signs’.4 It is also intriguing to note that Ballard has often asserted his determination to relinquish what conscious control he does possess, so as to allow the ‘obsessions’ that ‘spring straight from [his] childhood’5 to range untrammelled across his writing. Under global conditions bequeathed by the technological nightmares of World War II, such a strategy is, he argues, a necessity: Since, say, 1945, where the spectres of mass psychosis stride across the communications landscape (the spectres of the atom bomb, of the Nazi death camps, of the misuse of science, and so forth) I think that one no longer can be objective. [ ... ] I think one needs to take a wholly subjective viewpoint, and press one’s obsessions almost to the point of madness, if not to the point of madness.6 This obligation for the writer to ‘[offer] the reader the contents of his own head’7 arises, Ballard claims in the famous introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974), from the fact that, paradoxically, the subjective realm now constitutes the sole repository of ‘reality’: I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. [ ... ] The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.8 ‘Given these transformations’, Ballard argues, the writer can no longer ‘leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own

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motives, prejudices, and psychopathology’.9 As Slavoj Žižek, commenting on this passage, notes, there are resonances here with the Lacanian idea that the Real is not simply ‘the hard kernel which resists symbolization’, but also ‘coincides with its opposite, the so-called “inner”, “psychic” reality’. Ballard has often reiterated his willingness to permit this inner ‘reality’ to unrestrictedly inform his writing. The development of his distinctive style, for example, was, he says, ‘totally unconscious. [ ... ] One writes the way one feels’.10 When he is in the process of composition, Ballard tells the novelist Iain Sinclair, ‘there’s not much element of conscious choice. [ ... ] One tends to follow one’s obsessions, hunches. It’s all laid down years in advance’.11 If a private, psychic ‘reality’ has indeed been liberated to course through Ballard’s writing, however, its most compelling indicator is the very fact that the signifiers that express it are so often disengaged from any simple form of psychobiographical reference. If the insanity of World War II on the largest scale – the atomic bomb, the Holocaust – contributed to Ballard’s determination to pursue an aesthetic driven by his inveterate, obsessive impulses, much of the troubling psychic material that is thus inscribed in his texts shows itself – albeit in indirect ways – to be attendant upon his personal exposure to that conflict. What, then, are the established facts of Ballard’s life during the war, the period around which so many of his writings orbit, and which is distorted, obscured, and (occasionally) revealed by those writings? James Graham Ballard was born on 15 November 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father managed the Shanghai subsidiary of a Manchester firm of textile manufacturers. The family’s prosperous, privileged existence in the city’s International Settlement was threatened by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1937. From this time, the young Ballard inhabited a landscape strewn with the human and mechanical wreckage of war, circumscribed by the restrictions on movement imposed by the Japanese, and charged with expectations of the even greater conflict to come. In 1942, shortly after the outbreak of war between the Empire of Japan and the Allies, Ballard, his younger sister, and his parents were interned by the Japanese in a civilian prisoner-of-war camp at Lunghua airfield, on the outskirts of Shanghai. They were held there for the remainder of the war, witnessing and enduring extremes of hunger, disease, and brutality. The family survived, however, and in 1946, Ballard left China for England, a country he had never seen before, and which struck him as absurdly sedate after the violent chaos of wartime Shanghai.12

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These experiences famously provided the basis for Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984), as well as for the opening sequence of its sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991). Roger Luckhurst notes that, ‘the dominant media reception of these works clearly deployed them as autobiographical decoding machines’.13 Reviewers observed of Empire of the Sun that it was ‘the key to the rest of an extraordinary oeuvre and central to his project’,14 and ‘the first stage in a comprehensive decoding’.15 Martin Amis has more recently remarked that, ‘Empire showed us where Ballard’s imagination had come from. The shaman had revealed the source of all his fever and magic’.16 For Jason Cowley, too, Empire of the Sun belatedly explained ‘what trauma lies behind Ballard’s unsettling visions’.17 Similarly, on the publication of Kindness, it was said that the novel ‘provides a framework for comprehending much that is disturbing in his writing’,18 that it ‘loops together all the strands of a story that, in the course of fictionally processing his life, reveals how and where Ballard acquired his distinct gallery of images for his literature’,19 and that it now becomes ‘tempting to see all his earlier fiction as a kind of displacement activity’.20 Such assertions have not been confined to the realm of literary journalism: in a scholarly article, Robert L. Caserio makes the comparable claim that ‘because of the link between Jim [the protagonist of Empire] and James G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun throws a retrospective light on Ballard’s SF and fantasy, revealing his past work as the formally organized displacement of a response to World War II’.21 Luckhurst, Michel Delville, and Iain Sinclair are all sceptical, however, about the notion that these two texts can be made to straightforwardly ‘decode’ Ballard’s earlier work.22 As Luckhurst explains, critics who advocate such a reading of Empire and Kindness seek to detach the ‘autobiographies’ in order to give them the textual sanction to operate as decoding machines for the oeuvre. And yet Empire and Kindness slip the fixity of the division that would render transparent the fictional code because they are, of course, autobiographical novels. [ ... ] The fictionalising goes much further than the alteration of a few facts: Kindness often contradicts, rewrites, and even erases sections of Empire. No simple identity, either, can be established between J.G. Ballard and the Jamie/Jim figure in the texts. [ ... ] What the initial reviewers believed they had found in these texts – the key to unlock the opacity of the fictions – already founders over the indeterminate zone between fiction and autobiography which Empire and Kindness occupy.23

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I agree that these discrepancies critically undermine the texts’ supposed status as ‘decoding machines’. What I will argue, though, is that their ‘failure’ to function in this way by no means invalidates the notion that Ballard’s literary output is shaped by biographical preoccupations. On the contrary, there is an abundance of textual evidence, dispersed throughout Ballard’s work, which supports – indeed demands – such a reading. I want to begin to flesh out the position I have outlined above by considering the various ways in which Ballard has characterized the experience of historical and personal time in the post-war era. For Jameson, the postmodernist contraction of the significatory and referential dimensions of language to a terminal point in the form of the ‘material signifier’ is bound up with the contemporary ‘disappearance’ of the past, ‘along with the well-known “sense of the past” or historicity and collective memory’, and the reduction of temporal experience to a series of momentary, hallucinogenic intensities.24 As Scott Bukatman has noted, several of Ballard’s early pronouncements on the contemporary culture of time strikingly anticipate Jameson’s own.25 Most notably, in the introduction to Crash, Ballard suggests that, The main ‘fact’ of the 20th century is the concept of the unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past – the irrelevancy and even death of the past – and the limitless alternatives available to the present.26 The future, too, ‘is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’: We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyles, travel, sexual roles, and identities, can be satisfied instantly.27 Similarly, in the prose poem ‘What I Believe’, Ballard writes: ‘I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present’.28 As early as 1970, Ballard had prophesied this condition: The past will disappear and the future will go next. People will soon be living only in the present and will not be interested in the future at all. [ ... ] One will be able to lead a completely quantified life; the

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present will contain its own limitless future [ ... ] A child going into an amusement arcade does not think, ‘What will I do and where will I play in five minutes?’ – he is merely in the flux of alternatives. Life is like that.29 Contemporaneous with Jameson’s first identification of ‘the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past’30 as the only residual form of historical consciousness available in postmodernism, Ballard refers to the past as ‘just a kind of anthology of design statements that one dips into as the mood takes you. It doesn’t have any real validity; you don’t have the sense of a road stretching behind us in the rear-view mirror of life’.31 Similarly, several years later he claims that people are now only interested in the past in a sort of theme-park-like way – they ransack the past for the latest design statement. There’s no sense of a continuity to which one owes a certain sort of obligation or duty or feels one’s self shaped by; one just sort of picks and chooses what elements of the past one wants to exploit for one’s purposes.32 These categorical dismissals of the existential weight of the past sit uneasily, however, with a range of statements in which Ballard affirms the powerful influence exerted on his literary project by his own past experiences, particularly those undergone during the war. In a major interview conducted in 1975, for example, he claims, The whole landscape out there [that is, in Shanghai] had a tremendously powerful influence on me, as did the whole war experience. All the abandoned cities and towns and beach resorts that I keep returning to in my fiction were there in that huge landscape. [ ... ] There was a period when we didn’t know if the war had ended, when the Japanese had more or less abandoned the whole zone and the Americans had yet to come in, then all of the images I keep using – the abandoned apartment houses and so forth – must have touched something in my mind. It was a very interesting zone psychologically, and it obviously had a big influence.33 Ballard goes on to describe how, on their way to a makeshift school that was set up in an unused area of the camp, he and his companions ‘used to walk through this totally empty zone. It had been deserted for years. I’m sure that that again must have had a great impact on me. There were curious psychological overtones. One’s the product of all these

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things.’34 Further examples abound (the following constitute merely a selection): ‘I think all that [the chaotic experience of war] was fed into my psyche and when I started writing science fiction [ ... ] the imaginative elements I was trying to extract from any given situation tended to be those that corresponded to the experience I’d had earlier’;35 ‘I think much of my fiction is an attempt to remake the landscapes of Western Europe and America so that they resemble the landscape of wartime Shanghai, where I presumably glimpsed some truth about myself and the human beings around me’;36 ‘My imagination was hardwired by the time I was fifteen, shaped by my experiences during the war. In all my fiction I’ve gone on re-using that, in that I perceive everyday reality as if it is some kind of continuation of [World War II] by other means’.37 Asked to assess the influence of the war on his work in an interview of the mid-1990s, he simply remarks that it is ‘too vast to sum up in a single reply, since it pervades almost all my fiction’.38 It is only through close examination of Ballard’s fictions themselves that his internally riven conceptualization of temporal experience assumes a certain symptomatic expressivity, for here, I will argue, it is precisely the evisceration of the past and of historicity that most persuasively signals the potency of the biographical referent. I will begin by focusing on two sets of images that, as David Pringle observes, have been identifiable as distinctively ‘Ballardian’ since the earliest stages of his career: flooded environments and drained swimming pools.39 My contention is that these repetitively inscribed images demonstrably function as metonyms for a traumatic core at the centre of Ballard’s wartime experiences that is itself stubbornly resistant to articulation. I will argue that their screening, concealment, or denial of their traumatic origins serves, paradoxically, to confirm them. How, then, do Ballard’s repetitions of these scenes ‘screen’, in Hal Foster’s words, ‘the real understood as traumatic’? They do so, firstly, I want to suggest, simply by virtue of the fact that neither they nor, most often, the narratives in which they are embedded suggest any obvious connection with the events of the Second World War. Ballard’s key ‘flood’ text, The Drowned World (1962), for example, is set in a radically altered mid-twenty-first-century world, while a story in which drained pools appear on almost every other page – ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982) – is ‘manifestly’ concerned with the attractions and perils of space travel. In the case of the empty pools, in particular, there is, moreover, an element of the mundane, even the trivial, which would seem to render them unlikely candidates to bear a great weight of historical or biographical meaning. Indeed, what symbolic functions

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these latter images do clearly serve would seem to militate against the notion that they enact the belated incursion of a troubling past experience. In relation to the short story collection Vermilion Sands, whose stories are replete with such images, Ballard has remarked, The chief characteristic of [the eponymous] desert resort, not abandoned but forever out of season, is that everything is over. Its past lies behind it, and nothing that can happen in the future will substantially change it again. It has come to terms with its past, and now lies there on its deck chair beside a drained swimming pool, somewhere in the middle of this endless afternoon.40 If the drained pools contribute, in these and other texts, to the creation of a detemporalized mood of affectlessness, placidity, and languor at the level of plot, they also guide the reader to defer to the texts’ tendency towards detachment from the materiality of history itself – their own will to dehistoricization. On this evidence, one might wonder not so much how these repetitions serve to screen a preoccupation with the experience of war, but rather whether it can be convincingly demonstrated that they bear any relation to that experience at all. What evidence, then, can be produced in support of such a connection? Firstly, and most straightforwardly, we might be willing to posit a link of this kind for the simple reason that Ballard himself has done so. For example, as early as 1963, Ballard writes, it seems to me that the image of an immense half-submerged city overgrown by tropical vegetation, which forms the centrepiece of The Drowned World, is in some ways a fusion of my childhood memories of Shanghai and those of my last ten years in London.41 In a later interview he speaks of the ‘big influence’ on his fiction exerted by ‘the semi-tropical nature’ of the landscape in the vicinity of the internment camp: lush vegetation, a totally water-logged world, huge rivers, canals, paddies, great sheets of water everywhere. It was a dramatized landscape thanks to the war and to the collapse of all the irrigation systems – a landscape dramatised in a way that it is difficult to find in, say, Western Europe.42 Similarly, in another interview, he notes that, ‘all those drained swimming pools that I write about were there [that is, in Shanghai after the

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outbreak of war], I remember going around looking at drained swimming pools by the dozen’.43 These passages, then, find Ballard offering a referential interpretation of his own imagery. They suggest an appealingly circular understanding of representation, in which a relatively straightforward progression from experience to memory to textual inscription is mirrored by a chain of reference that retraces this movement in reverse. Ballard problematizes this model, however, in a recent reflection on the preponderance of such images in his texts. In conversation with Iain Sinclair, he comments, People think Empire of the Sun is straight autobiography and that therefore they can go back [ ... ] through my early fiction and reinterpret it. ‘Oh, now we know ... the swimming pools.’ Of course, in a city like Shanghai there are a lot of drained swimming pools. But I hardly noticed them at the time – any more than the abandoned houses and ruined buildings and the rest of it.44 This must be understood, in part, as an exasperated, and perhaps disingenuous, rebuttal to the simplistic re-readings of his oeuvre that accompanied the publication of his first (avowedly) autobiographical novel. That these remarks have a bearing upon the question of biographical reference in Ballard’s work is clear, however, and they demand to be taken seriously on that level. On first appearance, the model of representation that these observations most closely resemble is a simulacral one. His fictions, Ballard suggests, are unrelated to his biographical experiences; indeed, how could they be related when he was not aware of, and so did not commit to memory, the scenes that are supposedly represented in his texts, and to which those texts supposedly refer? It is precisely this notion of an event that is missed or incompletely experienced ‘at the time’, however, that I consider to be the most intriguing feature of this passage. It suggests not so much a simulacral understanding of representation as a traumatic one, according to which Ballard’s repetitive deployment of these images would be a function precisely of those scenes having been only partially apprehended as the disruptions of the war unfolded. Ballard’s denial of a relationship between his childhood experiences of war and his fictional imagery therefore has two key implications: firstly, that his own pronouncements cannot be relied on to confirm a straightforward, referential connection of this kind, and secondly, that if it is possible to demonstrate such a link it will only be by relinquishing a referential model of representation in favour of a traumatic realist one.

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In his reading of Warhol’s ‘Death in America’ prints, Hal Foster senses a degree of affect invested in their images of violence and death that belies the artist’s claims for the works’ cool impassiveness. Foster stresses, though, that, ‘I mean my use of “affect” not to reinstate a referential experience but, on the contrary, to suggest an experience that cannot be located precisely’.45 Similarly, I want to argue that Ballard’s repetitively inscribed images are invested with a palpable affective charge, even as the origins of this charge remain indistinct and unstable, and the fictions in which these images appear thematize a pervasive ‘death of affect’.46 In support of this position, I firstly want to suggest that the sheer frequency with which Ballard repeats certain images in his texts – a frequency that, as Roger Luckhurst notes, invites the terms ‘obsessive’ and ‘compulsive’ – would seem to indicate that they carry a peculiar psychic or symbolic significance.47 Furthermore, even considered within the context of a single narrative or scene, such images frequently appear to be loaded with a heavy, even overdetermined, burden of signification. More suggestively still, their primary significatory function is often to betoken a notion of time, duration, or memory. This may be most clearly discerned in the case of Ballard’s flood imagery. The submerged or saturated landscapes that recur in his texts are typically integral to the narratives in which they appear, and could not be mistaken for mere incidental details. Moreover, as David Pringle notes, these images most often serve, quite explicitly, to symbolise the past.48 The Drowned World (1962) is certainly Ballard’s single most sustained work in this regard. It concerns a future ecological catastrophe in which fluctuations in solar radiation have caused global temperatures to rise and the polar ice-caps to melt; almost the entire planet is consequently submerged, or overgrown with dense jungle. The narrative traces the complex, ambivalent response of the protagonist, Robert Keran to this radical transformation of his existence. Rather similarly, in the story ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1963), the main character, Richard Mason, is prone to sleep-walking episodes in which he imagines that his town is being flooded by the sea. Despite the fact that the nearest sea is a thousand miles away, Mason becomes convinced of the reality of his visions. During one such experience he encounters a strange, cadaverous woman. Frightened, he falls into a disused mine-shaft. An archaeologist working at the site informs a policeman searching for Mason that, ‘during the Triassic Period 200 million years ago [ ... ] there was a large inland sea here’. He also reveals that he has recently discovered ‘two skeletons, a man’s and a woman’s’, which he identifies as belonging to ‘two Cro-Magnon fisher people who lived on the shore

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just before it dried up’.49 The reader, however, understands the man to be Mason himself, mysteriously reabsorbed into evolutionary history. As David Pringle argues, the encroaching waters in these and other texts are clearly associated with the notion of a return to an originary point in the past. Pringle remarks: The meeting-place of water and the past in Ballard’s imagination is the womb, where the fetus hangs suspended in warm amniotic fluid. Another such meeting-place is the sea itself, whence came all plant and animal life many millions of years ago.50 If these images overtly evoke a sense of the furthest individual or collective past – if they constitute a series of ‘primeval scenes’ – they also point towards a ‘primal scene’ – the traumatic childhood event theorized by Freud. That Ballard’s swimming pools also function as potent symbols in his work, and that they, too, are frequently associated with a recrudescent past, is much less obvious. As I have suggested, one might expect images of this kind to be employed to set a scene, or to evoke a certain mood, but not to play any significant narrative or thematic role. Furthermore, insofar as these images do determine the mood of the texts in which they feature, they would appear to be consistent with a marked tendency in Ballard’s aesthetic towards detemporalization and enervation. If, as Pringle argues, water symbolises the past in Ballard’s work, the absence, in a drained pool, of the one would seem to imply a corresponding absence of the other. Under these circumstances, a swimming pool is revealed to be an object composed not of water but of concrete – a Ballardian symbol, in Pringle’s typology, of the present.51 Viewed from this perspective, then, these scenes serve to conjure up a mood of torpor, affectlessness, and temporal exhaustion. A sensibility of this kind is often held – not least by Ballard himself – to be characteristic of contemporary artistic and literary culture, as well as of his specific contributions to it. I want to suggest, however, that the ‘death of the past’ and the concomitant ‘death of affect’ that Ballard and others have proclaimed and enacted may be understood as responses to, and defences against, an unstably located but persistent and painful past. That it is precisely the volatility and force of the past that result in its mislocation or denial in contemporary aesthetics is testified to by Ballard’s texts, in which the very narrative devices whose role it is to obviate the past demonstrate themselves to be products of it.

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The empty pools that recur in his work are particularly significant in this regard. The symbolic association of water with time, and in particular with the past, is logical (for reasons that Pringle outlines in the quotation above), and has long been established in western (and other) cultures.52 If, therefore, the anterior orientation of Ballard’s flood imagery points, as I have suggested, towards a personally significant element of the past, it also gestures towards a broader, transindividual understanding of elapsed time. Within a traditional typology (and even, according to some scholars, within Ballard’s own symbolic system), drained swimming pools, would, as I have noted, seem to suggest precisely the opposite: the disappearance of the past. That, in some of Ballard’s most significant fictions, an association between drained pools and a revenant past is apparent, therefore implies that this association must inhere almost exclusively at a personal level; as such, it is particularly suggestive of the traumatic imperative that, I have argued, is operative in his repetitive inscription of these images. A series of examples will illustrate this argument. ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962) initially bears out the association between drained swimming pools and a state of detemporalized torpor that Ballard makes in his comments on Vermilion Sands, the volume in which this story was first collected. The preponderance of empty pools in Vermilion Sands is noted in the text’s opening paragraph. Their drained condition is shown to be a consequence – and serves as a symbol – of the rapid disappearance of the resort’s glamorous past.53 The story narrates the breakdown of the marriage between Howard and Fay Talbot that occurs after they move into a ‘psychotropic’ house in the town – a building whose structure is shaped by the emotions of its present and previous inhabitants. The Talbot’s new home was the site of the infamous murder of the millionaire architect Vanden Starr by his film star wife Gloria Tremayne. Fay and Howard find themselves recapitulating the destructive dynamics of this past relationship. Finally, the house enters into a convulsive spasm that duplicates ‘the expiring breaths of Vanden Starr after he had been shot’.54 This violent re-enactment of an ‘original traumatic situation’ is accompanied by the rapid draining of the house’s swimming pool.55 ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982) is another story whose setting is defined by the exhaustion of the past – here, the narrative unfolds amidst the ruins of the Space Centre at Cape Kennedy, which has been deserted in the wake of the abandonment of the US space programme. Again, the empty pools that scatter this desolate landscape ostensibly serve to reinforce this mood; in passages where these drained structures

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occupy the focus of the narrative, however, they are associated precisely with a departure from the present. For example, watching shadows bisecting the floor of an empty pool, the protagonist, Roger Sheppard, senses that ‘the complex geometry of this three-dimensional sundial seemed to contain the operating codes of a primitive time-machine, repeated a hundred times in the drained swimming pools of Cape Kennedy’.56 Later, he realises that he has ‘entered a city of yantras, cosmic dials sunk into the earth outside each house and motel for the benefit of devout time-travellers’.57 Drained pools were first figured in these terms in ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960) – one of Ballard’s most admired and discussed stories.58 Its protagonist, Robert Powers, a former neurosurgeon, suffers from the mysterious narcoma syndrome that is sweeping the globe. In his increasingly narrow periods of consciousness, he visits and ponders the enigmatic carvings made on the floor of an empty swimming pool by his colleague, Whitby, before he committed suicide. Powers finds himself compelled to construct his own ‘ideogram’ or ‘mandala’ at an abandoned Air Force weapons range. The purpose of Whitby’s carvings in the pool, and of Powers’ compulsive duplication of them, is revealed to the reader (and to Powers himself) at the end of the story: the mandala functions as a ‘cosmic clock’, which exposes Powers to the immensity of geological and cosmological history, and absorbs his consciousness as his body finally succumbs to the sleeping sickness. Fredric Jameson reads this story as emblematic of the spatialization of temporality that is, for him, central to the shift from the modern to the postmodern.59 High modernism, Jameson argues, assumed the possibility of access to ‘deep time’ and ‘deep memory’ – to the roots of the Bergsonian longue durée. Ballard’s story, he suggests, stages a collision between this modernist impulse and the radically altered temporal conditions of the postmodern: From this nostalgic and regressive perspective – that of the older modern and its temporalities – what is mourned is the memory of deep memory; what is enacted is a nostalgia for nostalgia, for the grand older extinct questions of origins and telos, of deep time and the Freudian Unconscious.60 Under this reading, then, Powers’ apotheosis appears as a parody or simulation of a modernist initiation into the mysteries of deep memory; the same might also be said of the ultimate absorption of the protagonists in Ballard’s flood texts, especially given the strong modernist association

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between water and the durée. The mode of affect that Jameson thus detects is ‘a sense of loss’ and ‘pathos’ – the ‘sharp pang of the death of the modern’ that accompanies ‘this whole new world of spatiality’.61 The encounters with the past that the flood waters and drained pools trigger in these narratives cannot, however, simply be understood as modernist (revivifying explorations of deep memory) or postmodernist (simulacral imitations of such experiences), but must also be read as traumatic. True, these texts dramatize, by turns, a desire for union with the past, and a melancholy sense of its inaccessibility. What a Jamesonian approach to these narratives overlooks, however, is the extent to which the past is also figured as a frightening, disturbing force that threatens to utterly overwhelm and annihilate the subject (this point is illustrated particularly clearly by the cadaverous woman who clutches at the protagonist at the close of ‘Now Wakes the Sea’, forcing him to his death in the ‘hurtling darkness’ of a prehistoric sea, or by the convulsing house that almost kills the protagonist of ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ as it re-enacts the violence of a decade-old murder). It is the charge of traumatic affect released by these repetitively inscribed scenarios that invites the reader to intuit them as enacting the resurgence of a troubling fragment of the author’s own biographical experience. There are, therefore, a range of factors that imply the existence of a traumatic referent for these key Ballardian images. Under the reading that I have proposed, however, it would be a consequence of this referent’s traumatic character that the referential gesture performed by these images remains incomplete. Paradoxically, it may be precisely the refusal of these images to be tied to a referent that functions as a guarantee of their imbrication in history and biography. I have suggested, then, that as far back as Ballard’s first important short story, ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960), and second (and first major) novel, The Drowned World (1962), the troubling pressure of his wartime experiences can already be detected. The war’s images, scenarios, and terrain assume a new centrality in his imaginative landscape from the mid-1960s, however. Clearly, this development has something to do simply with Ballard’s maturation as a writer – his growing ability, and willingness, to handle this disquieting material in his fiction. I think, though, that it must also be attributable to the personal and public catastrophes to which he was exposed in this period; these shattering events, I want to suggest, endowed his fictional repetitions of war with a new force, potency, and visibility. Again, there are affinities here with the Freudian condition of Nachträglichkeit, or ‘belatedness’, which, as Peter Nicholls remarks, is ‘a product of the excessive character

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of the first event which requires a second event to release its traumatic force’.62 Ballard’s wife, Helen Mary Ballard (née Matthews), died from pneumonia on a family holiday in Spain in 1964, aged 34. Like the war previously, his wife’s death demonstrated to Ballard the brute materiality of human existence and the fundamental indifference of the material realm to human ‘reality’: ‘Nature committed a terrible crime. I’m very well aware of that’.63 This familial tragedy occurred within a wider cultural milieu that – as a result of such upheavals as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe – was itself pervaded by a mood of dread, shock, and grief. It appears that it was this climate of catastrophe that triggered the emergence of an earlier shock – that of the war – as a thoroughly traumatic theme in Ballard’s work. Some of the most striking features of Ballard’s texts of the period are strongly suggestive of such a relay between present preoccupations and past upheavals. Particularly intriguing is the way in which, from the mid-1960s, images whose modes of affect have been ambiguous or multifaceted assume a decidedly traumatic character. With the exception of ‘Myths of the Near Future’, the stories that I have discussed so far were written prior to 1963. In them, flooded landscapes or drained swimming pools carry associations of both euphoria and pathos, as well as of terror and anxiety. In writings of the later 1960s and of the 1970s, however, the mood of these images tends to become more clearly malign. A number of texts prompt us to read this shift as a process in which existing imaginative elements are acted upon by the catastrophic climate of the period. No Ballard text partakes of this atmosphere to a greater degree than The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a novel that is positively suffused with the grotesque iconography of accident, assassination, and apocalypse. Imagery that, in a story such as ‘The Voices of Time’, extends an invitation towards transcendence and fulfilment as much as annihilation, here enframes a scene of condensed horror, mitigated only by a characteristically scorched, atemporal blankness: Epiphany of these Deaths. The bodies of [Trabert’s] wife and Karen Novotny lay on the floor of the empty swimming pool. [ ... ] Yet in the contours of his wife’s thighs, in the dune-filled eyes of Karen Novotny, he saw the assuaged time of the astronauts, the serene face of the President’s widow.64 Similarly, in High-Rise (1975), the descent into barbarism of the inhabitants of a luxury apartment block is paralleled by the deteriorating

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condition of its two swimming pools. The atavistic forces that are about be unleashed are first signalled by the vindictive drowning in one of the pools of a pedigree dog belonging to one of the building’s wealthier inhabitants.65 As violent chaos ensues and maintenance work on the building ceases, the water levels of the pools steadily fall and they accumulate increasingly gruesome debris.66 At the close of the novel, when all but a handful of the high-rise’s inhabitants have fled or been killed, one pool, its water ‘long since drained away’, is simply a ‘bonepit’, ‘covered with the skulls, bones, and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses’.67 In a grotesque re-enactment of Powers’ disintegration and dispersal in ‘The Voices of Time’, the architect of the building, Anthony Royal, who has witnessed the decline of his creation from the vantage point of his penthouse suite, is last seen ‘moving towards the steps at the shallow end of the swimming pool, as if hoping to find a seat for himself on this terminal slope’.68 The flood and water imagery that defines such texts as The Drowned World and ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ also takes a markedly traumatic turn in this period. This is apparent, for example, in ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964). Set at some point in the near future, this story delineates the distorted perceptions of Traven, a former H-bomb pilot who, driven by an obscure logic, has sought out exile on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, a former atomic bomb test site. A particularly chilling feature of the landscape of the island is its network of ‘target-lakes’, in which float ‘the broken bodies of plastic models’ who have played the role of civilians during the tests, ‘their half-melted faces [ ... ] contorted into bleary grimaces’69 Like Royal in High-Rise, Traven acknowledges his own status as one of the ‘dead’ when he hides amongst the plastic bodies to evade a search party that has been despatched to find him.70 The watery landscape of ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969) has a similarly grim quality. This text imagines that, ‘thirty years after the original conflict’ in Vietnam, campaigns of ‘national liberation’ against American neocolonialism are underway across the globe. The specific setting is a squalid patch of English countryside, where members of the British National Liberation Army are preparing to confront the occupying American forces. Pulverised by artillery fire, the banks of the river beside the rebels’ camp have collapsed: ‘water [leaks] across the meadow, stained by the diesel oil from the fuel tanks’ of an ambushed American personnel carrier.71 The water ebbs ‘around the [ ... ] carrier, stirring the legs of the corpses’ of its crew.72 Imagery of this kind also appears at the conclusion of ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966), another tale of environmental catastrophe. Here, the protagonist, Mallory, is confronted with the

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victims of a riot that occurred during an evacuation: he pointed to the basin of the sewer, where a dozen half-submerged forms lay heaped together. Bludgeoned by the sea and wet sand, the corpses were only recognisable by the back-and-forth movements of their arms and legs in the shifting water.73 If the flooded environments and drained pools that appeared in Ballard’s texts in the early sixties signified a resurgent and, to a degree traumatic, past, by mid-decade they were themselves ‘past’, in that they now constituted established elements of Ballard’s constellation of images. Similar scenes in works of Ballard’s ‘atrocity’ period of the mid sixties to late seventies need, therefore, to be understood as (modified) repetitions of earlier images that themselves seem to refer to a formative, if unspecified, past experience. In the era of ‘The Terminal Beach’, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, High-Rise, et al, these images are re-inscribed in a decidedly traumatic mode – a process that can be seen to be impelled by the catastrophic zeitgeist of that period. A key issue remains unresolved, however. It would appear to be the case that the texts I have referred to stage intersections between imagery carried forward from an earlier stage of Ballard’s career and the grim iconography current at the time of composition. Under this reading, existing, in part benign, images are inflected (or ‘infected’) by the horrors of the present: hence, the enigmatic drained pools of ‘The Voices of Time’ become littered with a wife’s body – evocative of the face of Jacqueline Kennedy – in The Atrocity Exhibition, or with the victims of an outbreak of urban psychosis in High-Rise, and the mysterious expanses of water of The Drowned World become the watery graves of atomic test dummies (‘The Terminal Beach’), or slaughtered American soldiers (‘The Killing Ground’). Equally, though, the examples I have noted permit an alternative reading, according to which the threats and disasters that the texts thematize are understood as catalysts for the release of a heightened charge of traumatic affect whose latent presence is apparent within these images from their earliest appearances in Ballard’s work. The horrific form they take in later texts would be a product, then, as much of the traumatic character of the early biographical events they have long obliquely referenced as of the present shocks to which they ostensibly refer. Again, the referential gestures performed by these images are complex and far from transparent; per the logic of trauma, they are suggestive of a ‘tension between [an] old scene and [a] recent scenario’.74

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Images of death and putrefaction do not merely augment established scenarios in Ballard’s writings of the 1960s and seventies, but also develop into distinctive chains of repetition in their own right. Scenes of crashed military aircraft – at times appearing in conjunction with images of death and decay – also begin to be repetitively deployed in his texts from the mid 1960s. As with the submerged landscapes and drained pools in Ballard’s earlier fiction, the corpses and crashed planes that repetitively feature in his works of this period typically signify the past – a past that, moreover, is palpably, and in this case thoroughly, ‘traumatic’. In some texts, the encounter with death or aerial disaster occurred in the past, but continues to haunt the present; in others, the protagonist discovers a corpse or wrecked plane that embodies the past in which it once functioned. In either case, it is striking that the protagonist’s present awareness (whether direct or remembered) of past violence is often in some way prompted or exacerbated by an immediate crisis or disaster. As such, these texts thematize the revivification of past trauma by present catastrophe that, I argue, they can also be seen to enact. My first example, in which the two chains of images I have just identified converge, is again drawn from The Atrocity Exhibition. In a key sequence, it emerges that Traven – himself a mere shard of a protagonist who is comprised of at least six other personas – was seriously injured when the bomber he was piloting crashed. Unlike four other members of the crew, Traven was not killed outright, but ‘in the operating theatre his heart and vital functions failed’.75 His colleague Captain Webster comments: ‘In a technical sense he was dead for about two minutes’.76 The psychological effects of this encounter with death are profound and persistent: Now, all this time later, it looks as if something is missing, something that vanished during the short period of his death. Perhaps his soul, the capacity to achieve a state of grace. [Doctor] Nathan [Traven’s psychiatrist] would call it the ability to accept the phenomenology of the universe, or the fact of your own consciousness. This is Traven’s hell.77 The psychic fissures opened up by this experience are widened by Traven’s exposure to more recent disasters – most notably the assassination of JFK. His desire to reintegrate his own consciousness – ‘to build bridges between things’ – manifests itself, paradoxically, as a compulsive urge to re-enact violence: ‘He wants to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense’.78

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If the injunction to read many of Ballard’s texts as gesturing towards a biographical trauma is strengthened, in this period, by the grim turn taken by his core imagery, this shift is underscored – given the wellknown facts of his life – in several texts that feature an encounter with (or, perhaps, a hallucinatory vision of) a corpse or downed plane that the protagonist dates to the Second World War. The circumstances (in particular, the geographical locations) of the extremities undergone by these figures or machines diverge to such an extent from anything actually witnessed by Ballard, though, that these texts continue, in accordance with the notion of ‘traumatic realism’, to screen a traumatic Real towards which they simultaneously point. As I have argued, however, precisely this refusal to refer unequivocally to biographical reality may itself be interpreted as a function of the traumatic imperative informing the texts’ composition. Ballard has said of his 1964 story ‘The Terminal Beach’ that, ‘it marks the link between the science fiction of my first ten years, and the next phase of my writings that led to The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.’79 A number of features mark the text as a departure for Ballard. One is the preponderance of real and simulated corpses, whose scattered presence contributes to an atmosphere of utter physical and psychic desolation. Another is the way in which it reckons, in a considerably more direct manner than any of his previous narratives, with the global legacy of World War II. As I noted earlier, the text’s protagonist, Traven (the model for the figure of the same name in The Atrocity Exhibition – another indicator of the story’s key significance), has exiled himself on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, a former atomic bomb test site. Although set in an imaginary post-Cold War era, the narrative is perceptibly imbued with the heightened mood of nuclear anxiety – brought to a pitch by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 – that attended its composition. Indeed, for Traven, Eniwetok, with its static, artificial landscape of blockhouses, bunkers, runways, and target lakes, exists in a perpetual present, a ‘zone devoid of time’, in which the Cold War or ‘The PreThird’ – ‘an Auschwitz of the soul whose mausoleums [contain] the mass graves of the still undead’ – continues interminably.80 In phrases that resonate with Fredric Jameson’s characterization of postmodernist temporality as a series of ‘pure and unrelated presents’, the narrator remarks that in this thoroughly militarized environment, ‘all sense of time soon vanished’ and Traven’s ‘life became completely existential, an absolute break separating one moment from the next like two quantal events’.81 For Traven, there is no ‘forward motion in time’, and it frequently seems that he has entered a ‘zone of non-time’.82 The overwhelmingly vivid

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presents that engulf Traven in the nuclear wasteland of Eniwetok are, however, in tension with, and intermittently invoke, a ‘return to the past’.83 In Peter Nicholls’ words, an instantaneous onrush of ‘excessive affect’ renders the subject incapable of absorbing the present of experience, and opens up a ‘wound’ within subjectivity through which the past, which has itself not been ‘directly experienced (it is not remembered as “present”) suddenly surges back into the self, causing pain and anxiety’.84 This mode of oscillation at the level of narrative mirrors what I take to be the characteristic referential dynamic of this and other Ballard texts. Particularly persistent, in ‘The Terminal Beach’, are Traven’s memories of his dead wife and son, and of the World War II bombing raids on Japan in which he participated.85 This process of remembrance culminates in a hallucinatory encounter with the corpse of ‘a male Japanese of the professional classes’, a figure that channels a host of past traumas, and which thereby imbues this scenario – so recurrent in Ballard’s texts of this period – with a peculiarly powerful, and thus psychobiographically suggestive, affective charge.86 In a ‘conversation’, presented in play script form, that ensues between Traven and ‘Dr Yasuda’, Traven attempts to apologise for his role in the death of ‘your sister’s children in Osaka in ‘44’.87 Yasuda’s reply is gentle, but he explains that, for him, his two nieces and nephew, like Traven’s son, continue to ‘die each day’; ‘your son, and my nephew’, he adds, ‘are fixed in our minds forever’.88 A similarly charged meeting occurs in ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978). The protagonist of this story, David Ogden, is holidaying on the Normandy coast with his wife Angela and their friend Richard Foster, whom Ogden suspects of being his wife’s lover. Angela is unmoved by her husband’s announcement that their villa overlooks one of the beaches targeted by the Allies on D-Day – ‘Utah Beach ... [ ... ] I’d forgotten about the war’ – but Ogden is fascinated by the landings and by the vast concrete blockhouses of the Atlantic Wall, which, ‘like the shells of the steel pontoons embedded in the wet sand, [have] pulled an unsuspected trigger in his mind’.89 On his solitary walks amidst the blockhouses, taken, he realises, to ‘[encourage] Angela and Richard to come together [ ... ] to bring matters to a head’, Ogden is keenly aware of ‘the violence here, the scale of the conflict between the German armies and the allied armada’; it is ‘as if nothing [has] happened in the intervening thirty years’.90 Ogden’s sense that the battle continues to pervade this eerie landscape is literalized when, having had his suspicions about his companions’ affair confirmed, he falls on to the weapons platform of the blockhouse he is exploring and discovers the corpse of a young

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German gunner, ‘in some way preserved by the freezing air, or perhaps by the lime leaking from the hastily mixed concrete’.91 Ogden’s shock turns to terror when he realises ‘that the young soldier’s eyes [are] watching him’.92 When the soldier speaks, his utterances – ‘what time is it?’, ‘today?’, ‘here?’, ‘too much noise’ – give voice to the temporal and spatial dislocation and sensory overload characteristic of trauma: ‘Hören Sie ...’ The voice was flat, as if coming from an almost erased recording tape. ‘Wievel Uhr ist es?’ He looked up with a kind of exhausted impatience. ‘Verstehen Sie? Quelle heure ... ? Aujourd’hui? Hier?’ Dismissing Ogden with a contemptuous wave, he murmured, ‘Zu viel Larm ... zu viel Larm ...’.93 This encounter impels Ogden to re-enact the violence of the D-Day landings. He plans to assist the soldier in gunning down Angela and Foster as they return from making love in a boathouse on the beach: ‘By the time he reached the villa ten minutes later Ogden had already decided on both the tactics and the strategy of what he knew would be the last military action of World War II.’94 The plan backfires, however, when Foster evades the shots fired from the blockhouse and shoots Ogden dead. When Foster and Angela investigate the blockhouse there is no sign of the dead soldier; they merely find Ogden’s corpse, dressed – in a final act of communion with this scene of carnage – in a German army uniform. The story ends with Angela’s remark: ‘He must have thought we were coming ashore. He was always talking about Utah Beach.’95 Damaged military aircraft occupy a key role in Traven’s traumatized psyche in ‘The Terminal Beach’, as they do in that of his namesake in The Atrocity Exhibition. In the earlier story, one of the recurrent memories summoned up for Traven by the bizarre environment of Eniwetok is of piloting a bomber in ‘the great night raids on the Japanese mainland’ during the Second World War; this recollection fills Traven’s ‘first months on the island with images of burning bombers falling through the air around him’.96 At the end of the story the traumas of the present and past converge and fuse, as Traven, awaiting the appearance of his dead wife and son, contemplates ‘the great blocks whose entrance [is] guarded by the dead archangel [the Japanese doctor, Yasuda]’, while ‘the waves [break] on the distant shore and the burning bombers [fall] through his dreams’.97 ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975) opens with the announcement that the world’s largest airliner, carrying 1,000 passengers, has exploded in midair over Mexico, probably as a result of sabotage. The protagonist and

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narrator, a photojournalist attending a film festival in Acapulco, realises that ‘this [is] the greatest disaster in the history of aviation, and a tragedy equal to the annihilation of a substantial town’.98 The plane is assumed to have crashed into the sea, and the protagonist sets out for the coast to accumulate the images of floating debris that will accompany news of the disaster as it is relayed around the globe. A tip-off, however, suggests that the plane may in fact have gone down in the mountains, and he decides to turn inland to pursue this lead. Repeated confirmations of this story by the increasingly poor and primitive villagers he meets convince the protagonist that he is on to a scoop, but, when he reaches the crash site, high in the mountains, he discovers not the vast passenger jet, but the remains of a three-engined military aircraft, its crushed nose and cockpit buried in the rocks. [ ... ] Obviously it had been here for more than thirty years [presumably, as Peter Brigg notes, since World War II],99 presiding like a deity over this barren mountain. Somehow the fact of its presence had passed down the mountain from one village to the next.100 The protagonist’s shock at discovering this sombre scene of decades-old disaster is compounded, when, in response to his enraged admonition that ‘there should be bodies everywhere, hundreds of cadavers’, the villagers disinter the corpses of their family members for his inspection.101 The mood of macabre recrudescence that hangs over this sequence is further heightened by the primitive, even pre-human appearance of both the living villagers – all of whom are unusually ‘small’ – and the dead, the first of whom resembles ‘a monkey wrapped in a shawl, staring sightlessly at me’.102 It is as if the protagonist has slipped back from the age of jet plane bombings and globally broadcast disaster footage to an atavistic (though perhaps no more callous) stage of evolution. Once again, it is these key Ballardian scenarios – crashed military aircraft, scattered corpses – that carry such powerful associations with the reemergence of a disturbing, yet originary, past. A similar nexus of imagery features in ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974). The protagonist of this story, Melville, has been discharged from the Air Force after an ‘accident’ that, along with most of his other past experiences, has been erased from his memory by a prolonged period of electroshock treatment. During his convalescence he has developed a fascination with Wake Island, an American airbase occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and now used as a refuelling point

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for trans-Pacific passenger jets. As Peter Brigg notes, Melville’s ‘powerful but ambiguous’ attraction to ‘the total psychological reduction of this man-made landscape’ recalls Traven’s obsession with Eniwetok in ‘The Terminal Beach’.103 Following his discharge, Melville has taken up residence in a beach-house on the south coast of England. He obsessively wanders the sand-flats around the house, inspecting the fragments of the World War II fighters scattered there. A group of warplane enthusiasts are excavating an intact Messerschmitt; Melville is invited into the cockpit, bringing on his ‘first fugue’, in which ‘certain complex digital skills that he [wants] to forget [begin] to reassert themselves’.104 Eventually, Melville makes his own discovery in the sand: a buried, but almost undamaged, wartime B-17 bomber. He resolves to excavate and renovate the plane, and fly in it to Wake Island. However, he comes to realise that ‘the aircraft emerging all around him’ – the Fortress and the Messerschmitt, as well as the Cessna owned by Helen Winthrop, the ‘over-serious aviatrix’ with whom he begins an affair – are bringing ‘fragments of the past’, ‘elements of an unforgotten nightmare’, ‘to the surface of his mind’.105 As Melville ‘[works] on the Fortress, high among the dunes, [ ... ] he [remembers] other aircraft, he [has] been involved with, vehicles without wings’.106 Finally, the bomber is sufficiently exposed for him to enter the cockpit. He hopes that the presence of Helen Winthrop will ward off a repeat of his experience in the Messerschmitt, but, seated at the controls, he hears ‘the engines of the Fortress starting up within his head’, and an horrific flashback ensues: ‘as if watching a film’, he recalls ‘his years as a military test-pilot, and his single abortive mission as an astronaut’, during which, ‘by some grotesque turn of fate, he [ ... became] the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space’, developing the belief that there was a mysterious fourth figure on board the three-man craft, whom he killed.107 Again, then, the discovery of a forsaken warplane is paralleled in this text by the emergence of a terrifying remnant of trauma. I now wish to focus on several of those moments – extremely rare in Ballard’s pre-1980s work – at which these chains of obliquely referential images give way to depictions of disturbing incidents actually witnessed by him in Shanghai during the war. In order to do so, I draw once more on the model of ‘traumatic realism’ developed by Hal Foster. Foster notes that in the 1964 seminar on the Real, Lacan distinguishes between Wiederholung (repetition) and Wiederkehr (return). Foster writes: ‘The first is the repetition of the repressed as symptom or signifier, which Lacan terms the automaton [ ... ] The second is [ ... ] the return of a traumatic encounter with the real, [ ... ] which [ ... ] Lacan calls

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the tuché’.108 The first, the repetition of the symptom, ‘can contain or screen the second, the return of the traumatic real’, but ‘this very need also points to the real’.109 The scenes from Ballard’s texts that I have so far discussed are analogous with Lacan’s automaton in that they never refer directly to a traumatic encounter in Ballard’s own biographical experience, whilst simultaneously – through their sheer repetitiveness, their often gruesome character, and their tendency to signify a resurgent past that threatens to overwhelm the subject – gesturing towards such an occurrence. Foster draws a connection between Lacan’s notion of the automaton and the repetition of gruesome images in Warhol’s ‘Death in America’ screen prints; he associates the tuché, on the other hand, with certain techniques by which these images are distorted or ‘popped’, such as the tear that effaces a crash victim’s head in Ambulance Disaster (1963).110 Through these ‘pokes or pops’, Foster suggests, ‘we seem almost to touch the real, which the repetition of the images at once distances and rushes towards us’. I want to argue that comparable forms of rupture occur when Ballard depicts scenes of violence or death, which, unlike those that feature so repetitively elsewhere in his fiction, closely correspond to actual biographical occurrences. It is The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) – that uniquely compacted agglomeration of bodily and psychic wounding – that is the site of the most significant ruptures of this kind. The novel – both in its initially published form and, particularly, in more recent, annotated versions – also casts into particularly sharp relief the question of automatism versus autonomy in the compositional process, which I identified as an unavoidable issue in relation to Ballard at the beginning of this chapter. The Atrocity Exhibition is divided into fifteen chapters, each of which is composed of a series of typographically (and often diegetically) separated paragraphs headed with a more or less enigmatic word or phrase in bold type. They depict a bizarre, phantasmagoric post-industrial environment dominated by motorway flyovers, military installations, vast billboards, and sinister, circling helicopters, and suffused with mass-media images of atrocity, disaster, and death. A desperate attempt to comprehend and master this threatening landscape is mounted by the text’s ambiguous, multiform protagonist – a figure variously named Travis, Talbot, Traven, Tallis, Trabert, Talbert, and Travers, and variously characterized as both a lecturer and a patient at a psychiatric institute, as a former nuclear bomber pilot, and even as ‘the second coming of Christ’.111 As Brian McHale notes in Postmodernist Fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition is decidedly non-mimetic: it offers an alternate world to our own, and one constituted as much by a set of formal procedures as by

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conventions of setting and characterization.112 Ballard’s text, McHale suggests, represents an example of ‘art in a closed field’.113 It is, however, scattered with direct references to actual people and events, most notably the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. There are, furthermore, a number of points in the novel at which depictions of these shocking mass-mediated events are juxtaposed with scenes of violence and death that closely correspond to events actually witnessed by Ballard as a child in Shanghai during World War II. Below are two of the text’s many fragmentary, cryptic lists, which catalogue the shattered protagonist’s preoccupations. The passages I have italicized draw on aspects of Ballard’s wartime experiences. Pirate Radio. There were a number of secret transmissions to which Travis listened: (1) medullary: images of dunes and craters, pools of ash that contained the terraced faces of Freud, Eatherly, and Garbo; (2) thoracic: the rusting shells of U-boats beached in the cove at Tsingtao, near the ruined German forts where the Chinese guides smeared bloody handprints on the caisson walls; (3) sacral: V.J.-Day, the bodies of Japanese troops in the paddy fields at night. The next day, as he walked back to Shanghai, the peasants were planting rice among the swaying legs. Memories of others than himself, together these messages moved to some kind of focus. The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier. His presence exhausted Travis. (5) Landscapes of the Dream. Various landscapes preoccupied Talbert during this period: (1) The melancholy back [sic] of the Yangtse, a boom of sunken freighters off the Shanghai Bund. As a child he rowed out to the rusting ships, waded through saloons awash with water. Through the portholes, a regatta of corpses sailed past Woosung Pier. (2) The contours of his mother’s body, landscape of so many psychic capitulations. (3) His son’s face at the moment of birth, its phantom-like profile older than Pharaoh. (4) the death-rictus of a young woman. (5) The breasts of the screen actress. In these landscapes lay a key. (82) The novel not only repeatedly references Freud, as well as the work of the Surrealists, but also, Ballard suggests, draws on their clinical and artistic methods in the process of generating sequences such as these. In a note appended to the second passage – part of a significant body of annotation that first accompanied the text in an edition published in

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1990114 – Ballard observes that ‘the many lists in The Atrocity Exhibition were in effect free-association tests’ (89). We are thus encouraged to read them as produced in the absence of conscious filtering or control; moreover, given that, as the term suggests, psychoanalytic ‘free association’ is also concerned with generating analytically suggestive chains of association between apparently random ideations, Ballard’s remark also invites close consideration of the images with which wartime scenes are juxtaposed in these lists. Viewed as such, it is particularly intriguing that the two autobiographical fragments in the extracts quoted above appear alongside scenes that refer to the climate of actual and impending catastrophe that attended the text’s composition in the mid to late 1960s. Again, this would seem to suggest the operation of a mechanism akin to the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, in which a formative trauma is invested with renewed force by a subsequent one. The first passage is preceded by a landscape suggestive of the aftermath of a nuclear explosion – ‘images of dunes and craters, pools of ash’ – which contains ‘the terraced faces of Freud, Eatherly, and Garbo’ (Major Claude Eatherly was the pilot of the B-29 reconnaissance plane Straight Flush, which assessed the cloud cover over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and determined that this city be the target of the atomic bomb carried by the following Enola Gay; having suffered a series of breakdowns and suicide attempts, by the 1960s Eatherly was popularly perceived as an avatar of the insanity and self-destructiveness of the nuclear era – a characterization that evidently informs Ballard’s repetitive invocation of his name in The Atrocity Exhibition). The entries in this list eventually move ‘to some kind of focus’, associated with ‘the dead face of the bomber pilot’ (an enigmatic yet recurrent figure in the text, who appears to be one of the protagonist’s own alter-egos); he is described as ‘the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier’. The second wartime scenario cited above represents one of several landscapes in which lies ‘a key’; another is formed by ‘the breasts of the screen actress’ – presumably Marilyn Monroe, one of the central tragic figures of the novel, whose breasts, Ballard suggests in an annotation, ‘loomed across the horizons of popular consciousness [ ... inciting] our imaginations to explore and reshape them’ (184). Rather similarly, a later paragraph begins with the protagonist, here named as ‘Travers’, viewing a series of macabre film clips (‘auto-disasters’, ‘plane crashes’, ‘montage landscapes of war and death’, ‘newsreels from the Congo and Vietnam’, ‘execution squad instruction films’, ‘a documentary on the operation of a lethal chamber’), and shifts to a recollection of ‘the eager deaths of his childhood’ (111–112; italics in original);

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the following section begins, ‘Of this early period of his life, Travers wrote: “Two weeks after the end of World War II my parents and I left Lunghua internment camp and returned to our house in Shanghai”’ (112). This passage (the longest in the novel, as Luckhurst notes)115 goes on to hint at an American atrocity committed against a ship-load of Japanese prisoners awaiting repatriation (American servicemen are witnessed neglecting or abusing the prisoners; later, the craft is seen burntout, with smoke rising from the cargo well where the prisoners had been held) (112–114). In a prefatory note to The Atrocity Exhibition, dated 2001, Ballard suggests that it was not merely the novel’s many enumerated lists that were produced by free association, but the text in its entirety. He advises readers ‘daunted by the unfamiliar narrative structure’ of the novel to ‘simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. [ ... ] In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written’ (vi). Again, then, with this in mind it is tempting to read this section as inscribing a posttraumatic episode – an episode in which the process of cataloguing a series of contemporary horrors triggers the sudden re-emergence and recording of a disturbing, unassimilated childhood memory. Such an interpretation is apparently supported by the uncharacteristically truncated, unadorned sentences that compose the sequence, which suggest urgency, or rather, perhaps, automatism: [ ... ] I left the ship and walked back through the darkness to the empty stockades. The trucks were loaded with gasoline drums. A week later my father returned. He took me on the Mollar line ferry to the cotton mill he owned on the Pootung shore, two miles down-river from the Bund. As we passed Yangtzepoo the L.C.T. was still on the mudflat. The forward section of the ship had been set on fire. The sides were black and heavy smoke still rose from the cargo well. Armed military police were standing on the mudflat. (114) Accepting, for a moment, the Surrealist fantasy that, through techniques of ‘automatic writing’, one might effect a complete circumvention of the mediations of literary composition, thus rendering authorial neurosis and textual inscription coterminous, it would nonetheless be reckless to take Ballard too literally here, and to treat the passages I have discussed as faithful transcriptions of free association sessions. At least a degree of selection, elaboration, and editing is evident on Ballard’s part; it is worth noting, for example, that in each extract he is sufficiently in

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control of his material to transpose on to his protagonist his own childhood situation, and render its re-emergence, under the pressure of lurid scenes of contemporary disaster, psychologically credible for this figure, in the narrative. Moreover, even if we understand these passages as constituting acts of autobiographical revelation, they might equally be read as conscious, perhaps even (as the novel’s title implies) ‘exhibitionist’, displays of extreme authorial experience, and their fragmentary sentences as skilful, performative evocations of post-traumatic testimony. Pushed to its limits, this reading would conceptualize the figure of the traumatized artist as merely one guise or subject position among many, to be adopted and discarded at will. It is important to note, though, that such a display might also be viewed, paradoxically, not as a playful enactment of the multiplicity of the self, but as a strategic attempt to validate an authentic substratum of subjectivity – one guaranteed precisely by this assumption of the role of trauma victim. Viewed from this perspective, Ballard’s original novel would be understood as anticipating – and its annotations as coinciding with and affirming – a key movement in contemporary culture theorized by Hal Foster in terms of a ‘return of the real’.116 Foster describes this sensibility (evident in recent art work by the likes of Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Kiki Smith, and Mike Kelley) as partaking of dissatisfaction with the textualist model of culture as well as the conventionalist view of reality – as if the real, repressed in poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as traumatic. Then, too, there is disillusionment with the celebration of desire as an open passport of a mobile subject – as if the real, dismissed by a performative postmodernism, were marshalled against the imaginary world of a fantasy captured by consumerism. [ ... ] For many in contemporary culture truth resides in the traumatic or abject subject, in the diseased or damaged body.117 In the annotation to the section of The Atrocity Exhibition from which the second autobiographical fragment quoted above is extracted, Ballard – in a remark that itself represents an intriguing act of retroaction – observes that, ‘what I find surprising after so many years is how [his “free-association tests”] anticipate the future themes of my fiction. Item 1 shows my wartime experiences in Shanghai surfacing briefly, before disappearing again for nearly two decades’ (89). As I have suggested, there is good reason to suppose that, though rarely ‘surfacing’, these experiences are registered, albeit obliquely, in many of his texts

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written both before and after this one. It should be noted, moreover, that, contrary to Ballard’s suggestion here, less than a decade separates the composition of this section of the Atrocity Exhibition from that of the next of his fictions in which his ordeal in Shanghai during the war can be seen to play a manifest role: this text is the short story ‘The Dead Time’, published in 1977. Within the narrative of Ballard’s career that I am delineating, this story stands as a key anticipatory moment, whose realization comes with Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Before I turn to discuss these three texts in detail, though, I wish first to outline my understanding of the relationship between Empire and Kindness, on the one hand, and Ballard’s earlier works, on the other. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Roger Luckhurst argues that Empire and Kindness occupy an ‘indeterminate zone between fiction and autobiography’.118 In the most significant departure from fact, the protagonist, Jim, is separated from his parents in the novels, whereas Ballard was interned with his family. A particularly notable discrepancy between the two texts is that the ‘death march’ inflicted on the British civilian POWs by their Japanese captors at the end of Empire never occurs in Kindness; instead, the Jim of the later novel learns from television reports that the Japanese had merely planned to march the prisoners out of the camp. Reflecting on these divergences, Luckhurst writes: ‘both “autobiographies” [ ... ] take elements of the same compulsively repetitive landscapes, scenarios, and images and recombine them in fictions which yet teasingly and forever undecidably play within the frame of the autobiographical’.119 For Luckhurst, Ballard’s ‘autobiographical’ novels are ‘playful’, ‘teasing’ constructs in which actual and fictional personas and scenarios circulate neutrally and interchangeably. My position, though, is that this very tendency to distort, alter, or rearrange the facts of Ballard’s life is born of the implacable claims of biographical experience. Empire and Kindness evince their affinity with a psychic reality composed of ideations so potently cathected that they may only be ordered, and thus pacified, at a fictional remove. In the psychoanalytic treatment of ‘traumatic neurosis’, the primary goal is for patients to incorporate the fragmentary, unmoored memories that beset them into coherent, temporally ordered narratives of their lives. Naturally enough, in the early decades of the psychoanalytic movement, it was widely held to be a necessary corollary of this objective that the patient’s account be a truthful, empirically accurate ‘recollection’ of their traumatizing experience. As Freud says, ‘the psycho-analyst, on this view, suggests to [the patient] that when he was

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a child he had some experience or other, which he must now recollect in order to be cured’.120 Freud’s great theoretical breakthrough in the famous case history of the ‘Wolf Man’ (1918), however, was to argue that analysis in fact works to elicit accounts that are not authentic ‘recollections’ of remote events, but are – and are recognized by the analysand as being – ‘constructions’ of those events, whose fidelity to empirical reality is secondary to their therapeutic value. In Freud’s words, ‘these scenes from infancy are not reproduced during the treatment as recollections, but are the products of construction. [ ... ] Previously unconscious recollections [ ... ] may be [true]; but they are often distorted from the truth, and interspersed with imaginary elements’.121 Similarly, insofar as Empire and Kindness serve a therapeutic function, this is primarily an effect of the way in which they integrate many of the most characteristically ‘Ballardian’ images and scenarios – which are scattered across his earlier texts, or else clustered in discrete groups (Pringle’s water images, concrete images, and so on) – into two (relatively) coherent and continuous semi-autobiographical narratives. Understood as such, the degree to which these occurrences within the texts correspond to the objective facts of specific experiences undergone by Ballard is of secondary – even, conceivably at least, incidental – significance. In actuality, it is apparent that the settings of Empire and Kindness, in which these scenes appear, closely correspond to the locations in which their initiators were first perceived (that is, in and around wartime Shanghai). It is equally clear, however, that the specific details of individual scenes – as well as certain key aspects of the texts’ narrative arcs – depart to some extent from the realities of Ballard’s experiences. I have just suggested that the process of synthesizing an array of previously dispersed images that Empire and Kindness carry out may be more significant than the narratives’ veracity. I want to argue, further, that the texts’ distortions of facticity might be understood as positively beneficial. In this regard, I draw on the work of the neurobiologist Bessel A. van der Kolk and his collaborators, whose significance for literary study has been convincingly established by Cathy Caruth.122 Van der Kolk observes that for traumatized individuals, merely uncovering memories is not enough; they need to be modified and transformed [ ... ] Thus, in therapy memory paradoxically needs to become an act of creation rather than the static recording of events. Because the essence of trauma is that it once confronted the victim with unacceptable reality, the patient needs to find a way of confronting the hidden secrets that no one, including the patient, wants to face.

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Like memories of ordinary events, the memory of the trauma needs to become a (often distorted) part of a patient’s personal past.123 Elsewhere, van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart suggest that patients may gain particular benefits from envisaging ‘less negative or even positive’ scenarios. They describe how, for example, the psychiatrist Pierre Janet encouraged a patient, ‘who was traumatized at the age of seventeen by the sight of horrendous nude corpses of victims of a cholera epidemic, to visualize these corpses with clothes on’, and even to picture one of them getting up and walking away. They comment: ‘Once flexibility is introduced, the traumatic memory starts losing its power over current experience. By imagining [ ... ] alternative scenarios, many patients are able to soften the intrusive power of the original, unmitigated horror’.124 The numerous depictions of discarded corpses that appear in Empire, Kindness, and also ‘The Dead Time’ can be seen to enact such a process of ameliorative revision. In earlier texts, as I noted above, dead bodies either feature simply as brute, implacable objects or else serve as harbingers of a resurgent, ominous past. In contrast, the corpses that appear in Empire, Kindness, and ‘The Dead Time’ rarely, if ever, symbolize the past – a fact that, in itself, suggests that these images are here aligned with the historical period during which their initiators were first encountered. Further, while these bodies are at times described in terms as gruesome as anything in Ballard’s earlier work, their condition is also very often refigured – typically through the use of the subordinating conjunction ‘as if’ – in an alternative, indeed positive, manner. The following are notable examples: Stretched out on the frayed grass were some fifty corpses, laid out in neat rows as if arranged with great care and devotion. Around [the body of a nun], like the members of her flock, were three children, heads to one side as if they had fallen asleep before death. [A truck-load of corpses dumped by the protagonist of ‘The Dead Time’] lay on the bank like a party of exhausted bathers, in a strange way almost refreshed by their journey down the canal.125 In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.126

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Meadows of paper flowers drifted on the running tide, and clumped in miniature floating gardens around the old men and women, the young mothers and small children, whose swollen bodies seemed to have been fed during the night by the patient Yangtze. (ES 41) As if celebrating, a regatta of corpses turned on the tide. The bodies of scores of Chinese, each on a raft of paper flowers, surrounded the Idzumo, ready to escort the cruiser to the mouth of the Yangtze. (ES 87) Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts. (ES 205–206) Dead infantrymen lay everywhere in the drowned trenches, covered to their waists by the earth, as if asleep in a derelict dormitory.127 I mounted the stairway of rotting coffins, with their small skeletons asleep under quilts of silky mud. (KW 50) Private Kimura [a Japanese prison guard befriended by Jim] lay in the water fifty feet away, a red cloud unfurling from his back like the canopy of a drowned parachute. (ES 286) [The] lips [of a dead Japanese pilot encountered by Jim at the climax of Empire] were parted around his uneven teeth, as if expecting a morsel of fish to be placed between them by his mother’s chopsticks. (ES 337) [A young Chinese man tortured to death by Japanese soldiers at a derelict railway station] raised his head and looked at me in a fevered way, as if we were fellow passengers who had missed our connection. (KW 59) These lyrical passages have a number of intriguing implications. Firstly, of course, they are indicative of the confused psychological states of the texts’ protagonists, their inability to establish a clear boundary between life and death.128 They also, though, hint at a certain relationship between themselves, as fictions, and the actual experiences on which they are based. With some notable exceptions (namely, the final three passages quoted above, the last of which appears to be directly modelled on an incident actually witnessed by Ballard),129 the bodies depicted in these scenes are not differentiated or individualized. Clearly, they function as types: that is, as representatives, but not as direct representations, of actual figures. It would thus clearly be misguided and futile to attempt to establish precise correspondences between them and specific scenes of carnage encountered by Ballard in Shanghai. This conceptualization resonates with the particular use of simile that is the

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most striking feature of these extracts. The disconnection between the cadaverous figures depicted here and any precisely locatable historical referents is signalled by these textual figures’ ambiguous characterization as deceased and yet somehow simultaneously imbued with agency or vitality: unlike the actual dead, whose life-spans are precisely circumscribed, they inhabit an ontological plane on which, having never, in fact, been ‘alive’, they can, similarly, never ‘die’. These passages, then, draw attention to their own fictional status and suggest a determination to hold the traumatic Real in abeyance, even as a version of it is rendered in narrative. If one considers the remarks of Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart quoted above, it is significant, moreover, that the similes used in relation to these corpses gesture, without exception, towards a less horrifying, even a comforting, condition (not dead but sleeping, not bloated but nourished, and so on). The passages thus need to be understood not simply as distortions of reality but as attempts, albeit wholly imaginary, to pacify or redeem actual horrors in the process of narrating them. I have argued that, in a process suggestive of what Pierre Janet terms ‘narrative memory’, ‘The Dead Time’, Empire of the Sun, and the first part of The Kindness of Women incorporate a wide range of Ballard’s most repetitive images into narratives whose settings resemble – but, significantly, do not precisely reconstruct – the circumstances under which the originators of these images were first witnessed. Janet observed, though, that in order for ‘narrative memory’ to function, The teller must not only know how to [narrate the traumatic experience], but must also know how to associate the happening with the other events of his life, how to put it in its place in that life-history which each one of us is perpetually building up.130 The subsequent parts of Kindness can be seen as enacting an affinitive process. Again – more so even than ‘The Dead Time’, Empire, or the first part of Kindness itself – these sequences depart in important respects from the actual trajectories of Ballard’s life; accordingly, while they incorporate a range of potent ideations from earlier texts (amongst them, crashed cars, dead film stars, presidents, and spouses, the threat of nuclear holocaust, war in Vietnam) they do not aim to accurately reconstruct the entry of these key preoccupations into Ballard’s imagination. This may, once more, be attributable to a strategy of holding reality at a remove precisely in order to work through its shattering impact (the substantial differences between the actual circumstances of

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the death of Ballard’s wife, Helen Mary, and those depicted as befalling Jim’s wife, Miriam, in the novel are particularly suggestive of such an imperative). Nonetheless, in their broad outlines, the psychic ruptures, shifts, returns, and renewals traced by Kindness clearly resonate with those suggested by many of Ballard’s earlier texts. Part Two – ‘The Craze Years’ – begins with an account of Jim’s life at Cambridge University in the early 1950s; he is described as ‘still preoccupied by wartime events that now seemed to be reimposing themselves on the calm Cambridgeshire landscape’ (89). He abandons his medical studies after two years; in an attempt to reckon with ‘the war years’, which ‘still set the hidden agenda’ of his life, he joins the RAF: ‘I was looking for a means of recreating the pearly light I had seen over the rice-fields of Lunghua beside the railway station, and which seemed to hover so promisingly over the American airbases near Cambridge’ (105). After crash-landing a plane, however, Jim is discharged from pilot training in Canada and, determined to ‘forget Shanghai [ ... ] and the flash of the Nagasaki bomb’, returns to England (119). There, he marries his girlfriend from Cambridge, Miriam, and settles into a contented family existence in the London suburb of Shepperton. He remarks that on the day of his third child’s birth, some time in the early 1960s, the ‘warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua [ ... ], but the light that filled the splashmeadow emanated from a kinder and more gentle sun’ (127). Jim’s rejuvenation is overturned, though, when Miriam dies after a fall whilst on a family holiday in Spain. ‘The past, on which I had turned my back on the day of my marriage, had rushed up and now stood behind me. Miriam’s death joined me once again to all those nameless Chinese who had died during the Second World War’ (164). As the sixties progress, and Jim enters into the maelstrom of the counterculture, his memories of Shanghai are acted on, too, by a ‘volatile landscape’ of assassination, atrocity, suicide, and impending apocalypse, which makes ‘a virtue of psychic damage’ (182). It is only in Part Three, which opens in the late 1970s, and whose title, ‘After the War’, ambivalently, as Luckhurst notes, ‘references the 1960s, its televisual violence, Miriam’s death, as well as the haunting reminders of World War II’,131 that some movement towards the resolution of Jim’s inveterate obsessions is achieved. Essential to this is not simply the writing of his unnamed book ‘about Shanghai’ (that is, Empire of the Sun), but its production as a Hollywood film (Steven Spielberg’s adaptation, scripted by Tom Stoppard, which was released in 1987). For

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Jim, this production introduces, in van der Kolk and van der Hart’s words, an extra degree of ‘flexibility’:132 The city of memory whose streets I had redrawn within the limits of the printed page had materialised in a fusion of the real and the super-real. Memory had been superseded by a new technology of historical recovery, where past, present and future could be dismantled and reshuffled at the producer’s whim. (331) While the producer’s reconfiguring of the temporal continuum is imagined as casually playful, Jim describes seeing the film’s ‘masterly recreation of Shanghai’ as ‘the last act in a profound catharsis that had taken decades to draw to a close’: All the power of modern film had come together for this therapeutic exercise. [ ... ] In my mind the image had fused with its original, enfolding it within its protective wings. Looking at the great hotels along the Bund, unchanged after fifty years, I could almost believe that my memories of Shanghai had always been a film, endlessly played inside my head during my years in England after the war. (345–346) As the novel closes, Jim observes, ‘The time of desperate stratagems was over, the car crashes and hallucinogens, the deviant sex ransacked like a library of extreme metaphors. Miriam and all the murdered dead of a world war had made their peace’ (347). The Kindness of Women traces, then, its protagonist’s movement from childhood traumatization, through adolescent repetition, to partial recovery, and then from a second period of overwhelming experience, which reawakens the first, through a prolonged process of ‘working through’, to eventual psychic restoration. If Ballard’s own literary output is bound up with a similar trajectory – as I have suggested it appears to be – then precisely the narrativizing function performed by Kindness itself stands as an essential, if not culminative, stage in this process of reintegration. Luckhurst, however, whilst acknowledging that recovery from trauma ultimately emerges as this text’s key thematic, argues that ‘given the complex, obsessional repetitions within the “autobiographies”, [Kindness] displays rather a textual anatomy of melancholic compulsion’.133 In my view, though, this position fails to take into account both that Ballard’s ‘autobiographical’ texts need to be read not simply as repeating earlier materials but also as synthesizing

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them, as well as the extent to which, far from being unchanging over time, these materials are figured in markedly different forms over the course of Ballard’s career, such that in the ‘autobiographies’ they largely support, rather than belie, a thematic of restoration. Having illustrated these contentions through an analysis of the numerous corpses that feature in ‘The Dead Time’, Empire, and Kindness, I now wish to turn to a point in the latter text at which another characteristically Ballardian object – a crashed fighter plane – appears. In this scene, Jim and his childhood friend and former RAF colleague David Hunter witness the excavation of a World War II Spitfire and its dead pilot in the East Anglian fens. As Luckhurst observes, the sequence is overtly symbolic of a process of disinterring and ‘pacifying’ troubling memories of the war.134 Conjuring a distinctly elegiac mood, the account of the pilot’s funeral has Jim thinking of the crashed Japanese and Chinese planes at Hungjao aerodrome, and of how as a ten-year-old I had often climbed into the cockpit of a forgotten fighter pilot lying in the long grass. I had played with its rusty controls at about the same time as Pilot Officer Pierce sat in his Spitfire at the bottom of this Norfolk creek. (297) Jim hopes that the burial of the pilot’s bones has ‘laid to rest more than one young pilot’ (297), referring both to David, whose childhood in ‘that cruel city’ – Shanghai – Jim blames for triggering ‘a logic’ that ‘led inevitably’ to a fatal car crash (293), and also, implicitly, to himself. It is true that this stricken plane and its cadaverous occupant stand in a long line of repetitions stretching back to the mid-1960s. Crucially, though, the recovery and acceptance of the past evoked in this sequence contrasts sharply with the possession of the subject by a post-traumatic irruption figured by earlier variants. Thus, while this downed warplane – as well as the corpses that feature in the first part of Kindness and in Ballard’s other two ‘autobiographical’ fictions – can be seen as rehearsing scenes from earlier texts, they appear not so much as compulsive repetitions, but rather as deliberate reformulations, whose function is precisely to recapitulate these earlier scenes in a manner divested of their pathogenic potency. Understood as such, therefore, these recapitulations are consistent with the overarching movement towards psychobiographical resolution that The Kindness of Women can itself be read as both charting and enacting. Dominick LaCapra observes that for victims of trauma, ‘possession by the past may never be fully overcome or transcended, and working

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through may at best enable some distance or critical perspective that is acquired with extreme difficulty and not achieved once and for all’.135 For evidence that any pacification of past trauma achieved through the composition of Empire and Kindness was only partial, and did not fully curtail Ballard’s repetitive impulses, one need look no further than the continued prevalence in more recent novels and stories of just one familiar object: the drained swimming pool.136 What is striking, however, about the rendering of these images in texts of the last ten to fifteen years is the fact that they no longer carry their long-standing association with a disturbing, resurgent past; indeed, they are no longer imbued with any notable symbolic weight. For the first time, drained swimming pools appear in Ballard’s texts as mere facets of setting or background: they lend mood or texture to the narrative, but have ceased to be objects whose dense thematic overcoding is out of all proportion to their quotidian mundanity. To this extent, then, Empire and Kindness may indeed have succeeded in creating ‘conditions in which working through, while never fully transcending the force of acting out and the repetition compulsion, may nonetheless counteract or at least mitigate it in order to generate different possibilities – a different force field – in thought and life’.137 It was within this ‘different force field’ that, over the course of 2007, Ballard wrote his autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, which was published in February 2008. Here, the pacification of his repertoire of key images seems to have reached a new stage. If, in the novels of the mid-1990s to early 2000s, these images are inert, neutral, divested of any affective charge, in Miracles of Life they become objects for contemplation in their own right, phenomena that, held now at the appropriate distance and in the correct perspective, can be dispassionately surveyed and examined. Ballard patiently reflects, for example, on the significance he has long attached to the drained swimming pool at his family’s home in Shanghai, as well as to the ‘great many’ other drained and half-drained pools he saw around the city. He considers ‘the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away’ – symbolism he was ‘unaware of’ at the time because ‘faith in the British Empire was at its jingoistic height’ – before concluding, ‘I think now that the drained pool represented the unknown, a concept that had played no part in my life’.138 Gone, in this text, are the agonized contortions around the question of attributing such recurrent images to the experience of the war. At the end of the book, Ballard notes the consensus amongst readers of Empire of the Sun that ‘the trademark images that I had set out over the previous thirty years – the drained swimming

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pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers – could all be traced back to Shanghai’. He continues: ‘For a long time I resisted this, but I accept now that it is almost certainly true. The memories of Shanghai that I had tried to repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet, and had slipped quietly into my fiction’.139 No longer torn, in symptomatic fashion, between an urgent assertion of the weight of his wartime experiences, and an equally strident dismissal of them, Ballard here exhibits a new equanimity and measuredness of tone as he accepts, on balance, the influence on his fiction of his ‘repressed’ memories, whilst at the same time consigning their insistent disruptions to the past. In the final chapter of Miracles of Life, Ballard reveals that in June 2006, at the age of 75, he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. With characteristic directness, he remarks that the specialist treating him ‘has always been completely frank, leaving me with no illusions about the eventual end’. He goes on to write movingly of his gratitude to this physician, Professor Jonathan Waxman of the Hammersmith Cancer Centre in London, under whose care ‘my last days will be spent’. It is poignant to be writing these lines after Ballard’s announcement of his terminal illness. His disclosure calls forth the language of eulogy and valediction, whilst these forms remain, for now, premature. In the impossibility of any adequate conclusion, I will simply observe, then, that the enormous textual corpus Ballard has amassed over fifty years of writing suggests that as he moves into his ‘last days’, he does so having – as he says of a return visit to Shanghai itself in 1991 – ‘walked up to a mirage, accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight through it to the other side’.140

4 Total War and the English Stream-of-Consciousness Novel: From Mrs Dalloway to Mother London

A notable facet of Pynchon’s and Ballard’s fictional reconstructions of World War II is a sense that the conflict is peculiarly threatening to the division between public and private realms of experience and temporality. In Gravity’s Rainbow, this conception is taken to its logical extreme in the description of a patient at the ‘White Visitation’ mental hospital, a ‘long-time schiz [ ... ] who believes that he is World War II’.1 The man resists the intrusion of the public realm via the media – he ‘gets no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wireless’ – but, for him, World War II is uniquely all-encompassing and all-pervasive: ‘still, the day of the Normandy invasion somehow his temperature shot up to 104°’. In this context, war appears not merely as a phenomenon constituted by invasions, but as an invasive force in its own right – one that breaches the psychological ‘border’ that separates the subject from its external environment, evacuates and occupies, and eventually dissolves the border completely. Accordingly, the extent of the man’s temporal horizon is that of the war itself: as the end of the war approaches – ‘as the pinchers east and west continue their slow reflex contraction’ – he speaks of ‘darkness invading his mind, of an attrition of self ...’. Ultimately, ‘he’s to die on V-E Day’. A less extreme, but nonetheless comparable, permeability of selfhood is evident in Ballard’s characterization of Jim in Empire of the Sun. On the opening page of the novel, for example, we are told: Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, 115

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and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city; in the foyers of department stores and hotels the images of Dunkirk and Tobruk, Barbarossa and the Rape of Nanking sprang loose from his crowded head.2 Similarly, the narrator later observes that a ‘small part of [Jim’s] mind [ ... lies] forever’ within the runway that he has been forced to construct at Lunghua airfield, and that the American B-29 bombers that target the site ‘appear without warning in the sky above his head, as if summoned by Jim’s starving brain’.3 In this chapter, I show how a novel written during the war itself – Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) – evokes a similar dissolution of subjective boundaries, and does so not only at the level of content, but also at the level of form or expression – specifically through a radical reinvention of the high modernist ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. As such, I argue, the novel builds upon the formal strategies employed by Woolf in an earlier text, Mrs Dalloway (1925), to register the comparable crisis of public and private experience that prevailed during the First World War. I then go on to discuss Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988), which demonstrates the persistence of this mode of response to the experience of total war and its adaptability, too, to the registration of traumatic forms of memory. As I noted in the introduction, the resistance of high modernist art and literature to realist conceptions of mimesis and reference has often been construed in terms of an attempted distantiation of the aesthetic realm from an era marked by imperialist oppression, revolutionary tumult, and, above all, the paroxysms of global war. Scholars have suggested, moreover, that this dynamic is paralleled, within high modernist discussions of subjectivity, by a prevalent tendency to reject historically embedded, ‘public’ modes of existence, in favour of a retreat into the shadowy recesses of a deep interiority.4 This fascination with the mysterious strata of subjectivity and psychological time is discernible, for example, in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, in certain strands of Freudian psychoanalysis, in the novels of Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, and in the paintings of Salvador Dalí. Broadly speaking, this modernist conceptualization saw the public or exterior realm as defined by the relationship between, on the one hand, a rigidly linear, mechanistic temporality (evident in such phenomena as the industrial assembly line, the railway, and the

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military march or drill) and, on the other, a discontinuous, irruptive temporal mode, most notably instantiated in the ‘standardization’ or ‘Taylorization’ of industrial labour (its division into small components of motion, with a standard time determined for each), the bewildering heterogeneity of experience in the urban environment, the spatiotemporal disjunctions produced by new electronic communications systems, and the violent chaos of the trenches.5 In response, many modernists sought to capture the unfolding of a rich, ‘organic’, private temporality, which, in its sinuosity and inexhaustible capacity for creation and innovation, as well as its durability and persistence, would challenge both the linearity and the fragmentariness of public time.6 Anna Snaith has convincingly argued that this severance of public and private experience finds notable expression in the modernist fictional technique of direct interior monologue (often taken as a synonym for the broader term ‘stream of consciousness’).7 In the sense that ‘a narrator orders and moves the narrative focus’, Snaith suggests, ‘he or she is a public speaker: one who describes and presents for the benefit of others’. If, therefore, ‘narrators might be said to speak with a public voice, then a character’s internal thoughts might be said to constitute a private voice’.8 Thus, direct interior monologue, in which a character’s consciousness (or rather, as Erwin R. Steinberg emphasizes, a linguistically-constructed simulation of consciousness)9 is conveyed directly to the reader, without being reported or mediated by a narrator, can be thought of as privileging the private realm over the public. The ‘separation between author and characters’ that arises from the use of direct interior monologue is exemplified, Snaith suggests, by Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). She notes that ‘Ulysses does not use direct interior monologue exclusively’, but quotes Hugh Kenner’s remark that ‘within fifty pages we are so entoiled in his [Stephen Dedalus’] subjectivity that nothing much is happening save internal events, alterations of cadence and image, gestures of a mobile ego’.10 The most celebrated, and most frequently cited, example of direct interior monologue appears in Ulysses, but represents the wandering consciousness not of Stephen Dedalus but of Molly Bloom, as she drifts into sleep at the end of the June day that comprises the narrative. The continuous, almost entirely unpunctuated passage, which lasts for forty pages, begins: Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to be made interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and he never left us a farthing for all

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masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments.11 If the valorization of private over public experience implied by Joyce’s prevalent use of the direct interior monologue technique can be seen to mirror the novel’s (partial) displacement of the grim historical realities that attended its composition, texts by other modernist writers display both a more direct engagement with their immediate historical situation (albeit one rendered through innovative formal techniques), and a greater receptivity to the dynamic interplay of public and private temporalities. Virginia Woolf, for example, expressed concern over the dehumanising pressures that seemed increasingly to define the public sphere, but considered a strict separation between public and private existence to be neither possible nor desirable. This is evident in her own use of narrative voice. Woolf disliked Joyce’s use of the direct interior monologue technique, viewing it as an expression of ‘the damned egotistical self’.12 She sought, instead, a method that would enable her to capture the complex interweaving of public events and private perceptions, memories, and emotions. The method of indirect interior monologue, which Woolf used in eight of her nine novels, provided precisely this facility.13 Where indirect interior monologue (often also referred to as ‘free indirect discourse’, or by the German term ‘erlebte Rede’) is employed the ‘private’ realm of characters’ thoughts and perceptions is entangled with the ‘public’ voice of the narrator. As Snaith comments, indirect interior monologue can be signalled by the narrator with, for example, ‘she thought’, or the move into the character’s mind can be left to the reader to locate. In either case the reader has to be alert for signs such as the character’s idioms, components of direct speech such as exclamatory phrases, and signs of internal thought such as free association and fragmented sentence structure.14 In indirect interior monologue, consciousness may be, as Snaith puts it, ‘transcribed verbatim’, but the presence of the narrator prevents it from being direct interior monologue. ‘However direct indirect interior monologue may seem, it is not so; the consciousness is always reported or mediated’.15 Mrs Dalloway (1925), on which I wish initially to focus, is not only the paradigmatic example of indirect interior monologue in Woolf’s oeuvre, and perhaps in the English novel, but also anticipates significant mutations in the method that emerge more fully in her later work, and in that of more recent writers like Michael Moorcock.

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Set, like Ulysses, on a single June day (though in this case in 1923), Mrs Dalloway begins with its eponymous protagonist leaving her Westminster home to buy flowers for the party she will host that evening. The following two passages, which appear as Clarissa Dalloway makes her way towards St James’ Park, exemplify the technique of indirect interior monologue, which, as Dorrit Cohn defines it, renders ‘a character’s thought in his [sic] own idiom while maintaining the thirdperson reference and the basic tense of narration’:16 For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason; they love life. The War was over, except for someone like Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House must go to a cousin; or Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed; but it was over; thank Heaven – over.17 What is particularly striking about these extracts (and it is a characteristic of the novel in general) is that they are not simply organized, at the level of form or expression, around the combination of the ‘private’, idiomatic voice of the character and the ‘public’ voice of the narrator, but that their content also traces this same interaction between the public sphere (the bustle of urban life, war, the law, affairs of state, the aristocracy, property rights) and the private (recollection, grief, sympathy, exultation). The intervention into private or internal experience of what Paul Ricoeur, in his reading of the novel, calls ‘monumental time’,18 in the form of the chiming of Big Ben, occurs for the first time here, and will punctuate the remainder of the narrative.19 Another significant interruption occurs as Clarissa, having reached the florist’s shop, is startled by the ‘violent explosion’ of a motor car tyre outside (fittingly, the vehicle contains a prominent public figure, though his or her identity

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remains unclear). Again, the occurrence is conveyed through indirect interior monologue: And as she began to go with Miss Pym from jar to jar, choosing, nonsense, nonsense, she said to herself, more and more gently as if this beauty, this scent, this colour, and Miss Pym liking her, trusting her, were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred, that monster, surmount it all; and it lifted her up and up when – oh! a pistol shot in the street outside!20 This incident, and the persistent interplay of external stimuli and internal consciousness that distinguishes Woolf’s novel as a whole, exemplify what Tim Armstrong, Hal Foster, Mark Seltzer, and others have identified as a modernist aesthetic of ‘shock’.21 In an essay that traces the development of this concept, in both medical and artistic fields, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Armstrong characterizes it in terms of those shock-effects which exist within an economic, everyday conception of the body, which [ ... ] represent the flow and processing of its interchange with its environment (the feeling we have when the phone rings for the sixth time in ten minutes). The paradigm [ ... ] is the quotidian attenuation and fraying of a self which is nonetheless granted some a priori integrity; the self in time, most of the time, we feel we have.22 So, just as the voice of the narrator, in Mrs Dalloway, punctuates, but does not obscure, the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and other characters, so the various external stimuli that impress themselves upon the characters (such as the noise of the motor car, the chimes of Big Ben, and the sound and motion of a sky-writing plane)23 can only momentarily interrupt the flow of private consciousness. For Hal Foster, too, the discourse of shock presupposes a certain integrity and autonomy of selfhood: For many critics [Foster cites Walter Benjamin as a prime example], shock was key to the relation between modernism and modernity; it was one way to think the new forces of capitalist modernity in particular – industrial processes, urban developments, military regimes, imperialist campaigns, and so forth. Within this discourse modernity was seen as an assault, as a force that attacks – shocks – the subject

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from outside. In shock discourse, then, there was a dichotomy of outside and inside: the social lies outside, the subjective inside.24 The ‘shocks’ exerted by modernization might, as Foster puts it, cause a ‘rupture’, or even a ‘breakdown’, of ‘the “protective shield” of the subject’, with the result that temporal experience would be disrupted. Yet the essential alterity of the external and the internal, the social and the subjective – and, as Foster goes on to add, the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ – remained unchanged.25 Accordingly, just as it is always possible, in indirect interior monologue, to identify the presence both of the external or public voice of the narrator and of the internal or private voice of the character, so it is self-evident, when reading indirect interior monologue attributed to Clarissa Dalloway, which thoughts arise from fantasy, memory, or reverie, and which correspond to actual events in the narrative’s external world. Thus, when Clarissa hears the car tyre explode, she initially misunderstands the sound – ‘oh! a pistol shot’ – (only to be immediately corrected by the florist Miss Pym), but there is never any confusion, whether on the part of the character or of the reader, as to whether an unexpected event has indeed occurred ‘in the street outside’. This may appear to be an obvious point, but it is precisely the challenge to this elementary distinction that characterizes an alternative aesthetic of trauma, and which defines the experience of another central character, Septimus Warren Smith, in Woolf’s novel. If the discourse of shock offers, as Armstrong puts it, an ‘everyday’, ‘quotidian’ model of psychic life, notions of trauma are, in contrast, ‘grounded in the catastrophic wounding of the body or the psyche’. The paradigm in this case ‘is the splitting or fragmentation of the self, with the survival of unaccountable traces of trauma, seemingly outside time but re-worked in memory and fantasy’.26 Foster elaborates on the ‘catastrophic’ shattering of the subject suggested by the concept of trauma: Although etymologically it means ‘wound’, trauma is not a simple matter of a rupture of the ‘protective shield’. In trauma, the opposition between inside and outside, between subject and world, breaks down, and as it becomes confused, so do other oppositions such as private and public.27 Similarly, Mark Seltzer observes that, the notion of [ ... ] trauma [is] bound up with a fundamental breakdown in the autonomy of the subject: a fundamental shattering or

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breaking-in of the boundaries between the external and the internal [ ... ]. The understanding of trauma [ ... ] is inseparable from the breakdown between psychic and social registers – the breakdown between inner and outer and ‘subject’ and ‘world’.28 As I have suggested, Woolf’s rendering of the figure of Septimus Smith indicates how such a conception might function within literary narrative.29 Septimus first enters the novel in the moments after the dignitary’s car suffers its burst tyre; walking along Bond Street with his Italian wife Lucrezia (‘Rezia’), he is strangely transfixed by the stationary vehicle. Eventually, Rezia draws him away and they make their way to St James’ Park. There, Septimus abruptly experiences this gruesome, and enigmatic, vision: ‘There was his hand; there the dead. White things were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the railings!’30 If this passage maintains both narratorial and characterial voices, the distinction between external events and internal thoughts that the indirect interior monologue technique ordinarily makes plain is here less than distinct. Given the presence of several earlier indications of Septimus’ delusional tendencies,31 the implied reader assumes, I think, that the irruption of this bizarre scene into the novel’s naturalistic narrative is to be understood as a mental projection by the character onto his environment. It does not seem, though, that Septimus himself ever reaches this realization, in the few short hours before he throws himself to his death from the window of a Bloomsbury lodging-house,32 and even the reader must wait almost fifty pages for confirmation of the incident’s hallucinatory character, and an explanation of its origins. At this latter point, it becomes apparent, via Rezia’s reflections, that Septimus’ vision constitutes a post-traumatic response to his devastating experiences as a soldier during the Great War: Evans is – or rather was – a comrade and ‘great friend’ of Septimus’, who was killed in the conflict.33 If a gulf separates Clarissa Dalloway (who has no difficulty in drawing a distinction between the dynamics of her own consciousness and the events of the external world) from Septimus Smith (who, in the aftermath of shattering trauma, is apparently incapable of determining such a division), a further, still more substantial, shift can be discerned between Woolf’s characterization of this latter figure and that of several of the main characters in her last novel, Between the Acts (1941) – and this for two reasons. Firstly, whereas Septimus’ condition entails the projection of his own agonized subjectivity onto the physical environment that surrounds him, characters in Between the Acts apparently transmit

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their anxious reflections intersubjectively, between one another’s minds. And, secondly, in contrast with Mrs Dalloway, where Septimus’ visions of Evans are ultimately shown to be delusions, and thus ‘normalized’ or ‘naturalized’, the reader of Between the Acts is forced to entertain the possibility that the apparently telepathic abilities of the novel’s characters are to be understood as ‘real’ within the world projected by the narrative. Far from merely expressing a shift in aesthetic sensibility, this transition demands to be historicized in relation to developments in the nature of warfare as they unfolded in the interwar era, and into the early period of World War II. The very different psychological conditions displayed by Septimus and Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway reflect the divergent positions assigned to them within the spatial organization of combat during the First World War. As a soldier serving in the trenches, Septimus has suffered the kind of catastrophic fragmentation of selfhood so common amongst the war’s front-line troops, for whom subjective autonomy was continually imperilled by absorption into a landscape pervaded by the gruesome sight and stench of putrefaction, the eerie fog of gas and smoke, the relentless rumble of shelling, and the perpetual imminence of annihilation. In contrast, Clarissa – a female member of the British uppermiddle-class – is one of those London civilians whose direct exposure to combat was limited to the Zeppelin, and subsequently aeroplane, raids on the capital.34 Certainly, she has been affected by the war: in the opening sequence of the novel, quoted above, she rejoices that the conflict is ‘over; thank Heaven – over’; but the very finality of this phrase underscores her separation from Septimus and the shell-shocked hordes he represents, for whom the war can never be decisively consigned to the past.35 As I explained in Chapter 1, the next war’s vast escalation of civilian bombardment would see the mass pulverization of physical and psychic space become a defining characteristic of urban existence. And in Woolf’s writings of the late 1930s and early 1940s it is possible to detect the shading of a discourse of ‘shock’ into a discourse of ‘trauma’, as she inscribes an awareness both of the increasing pressure exerted by public forces upon private experience, and of the concomitant ‘opening out’ of private selves onto what Mark Seltzer has referred to as a ‘pathological public sphere’ – a realm characterized by the ‘collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound’. In terms that resonate suggestively with Woolf’s reflections during this period, Seltzer detects within this ‘pathological public sphere’ or ‘wound culture’, ‘the model of a sociality bound to pathology. [ ... ] The opening of relation to others (the “sympathetic” social bond) is at the same time the traumatic

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collapse of boundaries between self and other (a yielding of identity to identification)’.36 Woolf’s use of indirect interior monologue in her characterization of figures such as Clarissa Dalloway presupposed a fine balance between the public and private aspects of everyday life. In the late 1930s, as war between Britain and Nazi Germany grew increasingly likely, Woolf perceived this balance to be under threat, both in her own life and, by extension, in those of her contemporaries. The build up to war coincided with a rapid expansion of the mass media (which principally consisted, at this time, of newspapers and radio). This expansion was, in itself, a contributory factor in a widely felt crisis of the public/private relationship, and its effects were reinforced by the growing number of articles and bulletins concerned with such decidedly public issues as international diplomacy and militarization.37 In an essay of the period, Woolf compared her own experience to that of an earlier generation of novelists, for whom ‘immunity’ from war was still possible: ‘Neither [Scott nor Austen] heard Napoleon’s voice as we hear Hitler’s voice as we sit at home of an evening’.38 If the immediacy and intrusiveness of war reporting was greater in Woolf’s time than it had been in Scott’s and Austen’s, the disparity between their experiences of war itself was even more marked. Huddling in air-raid shelters as German bombers passed over-head, wandering amongst the ruined buildings of her beloved London, or picking through the rubble of what had once been her own home, Woolf was acutely aware of the total nature of the war, of its unprecedented capacity to shape day-to-day experience.39 It occurred to her, indeed, both in the months preceding the war and after its outbreak, that the threat of annihilation from the air was sufficiently overwhelming as to effect a curious collective, or ‘public’, convergence of private experience. She notes, for example, ‘the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing – this horror of war – at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull & one lapses again into private separation –’.40 Elsewhere, she writes: ‘Everybody is feeling the same thing: therefore no one is feeling anything in particular. The individual is merged in the mob’.41 Such moments – of ‘horror’ and of ‘community’ – play a significant role in Between the Acts. The novel is set in mid-June 1939; that is, six weeks before the start of the war, which had, by the time of the text’s ‘completion’,42 lasted for more than a year and a half.43 The action centres around a village pageant, which traces the history of England from the time of Chaucer to the time of its own performance. In the intervals – ‘between the acts’ – gossip predominates, yet deep-seated anxieties arise regarding

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the destination of the royal family in the event of an invasion,44 the political climate in Russia, Italy, and Germany (74, 91), and the predicament of ‘the Jews, people like ourselves, beginning life again’ (74); later, a formation of fighter planes passing overhead reminds the audience of the imminence of an aerial attack (114–115, 117–119). As the diary entries and other writings that Woolf produced whilst working on Between the Acts make clear, she was preoccupied during this period with what she considered to be the growing instability of the public/private barrier under the threat of aerial bombardment. This perception is, I would suggest, registered in Between the Acts through a radical use of the indirect interior monologue technique, in which everyone – or at least a group of characters – is shown to be, quite literally, ‘thinking the same thing [ ... ] at the same moment’. The example I wish to focus on concerns three characters: Giles, his wife Isa, and their guest William Dodge. All three are particularly aware of the threat of war. Giles is horrified by news of atrocities in Germany (30), imagines Europe ‘bristling with guns, poised with planes’ (34), and anticipates the aerial bombardment of the village: ‘at any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly’ (34). Similarly, in conversation with Isa, William refers to ‘the doom of sudden death hanging over us’ (70). Towards the end of the novel the three characters gather. Giles’ fears of imminent invasion, and his sense of vulnerability and impotence in the face of it, reach a pitch: ‘He said (without words) “I’m damnably unhappy.”’. The following lines appear immediately afterwards: ‘So am I,’ Dodge echoed. ‘And I too,’ Isa thought. (105) There are several points of interest in this brief passage. Though the fact that the characters’ thoughts are reported by an omniscient narrator indicates that these are indirect interior monologues, they bear all the hallmarks of direct discourse (present tense, first person, enclosed in quotation marks). If the narrator’s voice represents the public sphere – a public sphere that expands threateningly under conditions of total war – then the unusually direct form of indirect interior monologue employed here might be understood as registering resistance to that expansion through the assertion of a distinctly private consciousness. If this is the case, however, this resistance is crucially undermined by the most striking feature of the passage, what Patricia Ondek Laurence terms its ‘telepathic’ element.45 As Ondek Laurence notes, this is one of several

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moments in the novel at which the indirect interior monologue of one character is apparently ‘heard’ by another.46 Such examples transgress a fundamental ‘rule’ of the technique. In its established form, indirect interior monologue integrates ‘private’ and ‘public’ voices insofar as characters’ internal thoughts are reported by a narrator; however, few exponents of the technique, at least within the realist or modernist traditions, would make characters’ thoughts accessible, or ‘public’, to one another – a move that would seemingly pitch a text into the realm of what Tzvetan Todorov terms the ‘marvelous’, where the physical laws governing our own world do not apply.47 The function of Woolf’s radical, anti-mimetic use of indirect interior monologue in Between the Acts is, I would suggest, to hyperbolize the increasingly permeable boundary between private and public temporality, which she took to be an effect of the German aerial assault. What she dramatizes, though, is not so much, or not merely, the intrusion of a public realm and a public temporality defined by war into private experience, but the collapse of these dichotomous spheres into one another, such that, at the same time as the threat of attack from the air penetrates Giles’ consciousness, thoughts emerge from his mind and float freely between him, Isa, and William. This simultaneous implosion and explosion of subjectivity and temporality, which contributes to what James Naremore and Mark Hussey identify as a ‘communal’ or ‘group’ stream of consciousness running through the novel,48 is best understood, I think, as a metaphor for Woolf’s vision of community in war. Under the threat of aerial invasion, Woolf was, as Hermione Lee comments, ‘intensely aware of the dissolving of her private feelings into those of the community’.49 There is no doubt that she felt the ‘herd impulse’50 that the war generated to be a threat to her individuality. Yet, as her use of indirect interior monologue indicates, Woolf had never insisted upon the strict demarcation between public and private experience to which some of her modernist contemporaries adhered. Indeed, as Mark Hussey notes, from A Room of One’s Own (1929) onwards, Woolf displayed a growing fascination with, and enthusiasm for, communal experience; the closing words of that essay encapsulate this position: ‘I am talking about the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals’51 Though the ‘communal feeling’ that Woolf noted in 1939 was a consequence of the ‘horror of war’, she nonetheless resolved to make a virtue of necessity and to explore, in Between the Acts, how the replacement of ‘I’ by ‘we’ that the war imposed might have positive repercussions.52 The progressive potential of this radically

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communalized climate is enacted in the passage from the novel discussed above. As I have suggested, the ‘telepathic’ exchange between the three characters registers an erosion of subjective boundaries under the threat of war. But it also implies that this same process may carry with it an element of consolation, since it opens up the possibility of establishing new connections between individuals, of sharing one’s pain and anxiety with others, and of generating new, hybrid configurations of temporal experience. In Between the Acts, Woolf dramatizes the tension between two conflicting urges: to retreat into psychic isolation so as to preserve one’s autonomy in the face of potential annihilation, or to risk that autonomy in order to embrace the intimacy that a common fear of annihilation fosters. As this dialectic played itself out in the composition of the novel, the same dilemma grew increasingly acute in Woolf’s own life. Woolf finished work on Pointz Hall, and renamed it Between the Acts, on 25 February 1941. Just over a month later, on 28 March, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near Rodmell.53 The extent to which the German aerial assault on Britain – the imminence of which is felt so keenly in Between the Acts, and the reality of which Woolf had lived with for six months by the time of her death – contributed to the period of mental illness that led to her suicide has been much debated by biographers and critics.54 All, however, agree that, at the very least, Woolf’s experience of war exacerbated the anxiety and depression to which she was prone. Several have wondered how, if at all, Woolf’s suicide might be considered an act of resistance to the apparently relentless devastation of the Blitz. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two main tendencies with regard to this question are related to the two options for the self under conditions of war explored in Between the Acts. It seems that Woolf underwent an alarming dissolution of identity in the weeks prior to her death; in a letter to her husband Leonard, most likely written immediately before what appears to have been a first attempt to drown herself on 18 March 1941, she stated that she was beginning to ‘hear voices’.55 Several commentators have suggested that for Woolf, paradoxically, suicide represented the only means by which she felt able to assert the autonomy and integrity of her own psychic life, which intense bombardment – both real and imaginary – threatened to overwhelm.56 Another argument, however, which has been most notably advanced by Roger Poole, claims that her suicide should instead be understood as a voluntary embrace of dissolution, disintegration, and flux.57 In Between the Acts, Woolf implies that some consolation for ‘the doom of sudden death hanging over us’ (BA 70) might be

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found in new configurations of identity, community, and temporality. Yet what she expressed hope for in her fiction was not to sustain her in her life. As the threat of annihilation from the air eroded Woolf’s sense of psychological coherence, she saw few compensatory or emancipatory inter-subjective bonds established, but rather witnessed the dismantling of those communal structures that had previously helped to support her. As Poole writes, running side by side with the actual fear of bombs, of being hit by a bomb and being physically exploded [an event that Woolf vividly and terrifyingly imagined in her diary]58 runs the sense that an entire world has disappeared, crumbled, disintegrated, a world of people, friends, values, common history and common meaning.59 Ultimately, Poole suggests, Woolf considered herself to be facing a choice between ‘death by shrapnel or death by water’;60 if the invasiveness of war rendered unrealizable her vision of the integrated unfolding of individual and communal experience over time, she was compelled, instead, to immerse herself in the element whose simultaneous ability to expand, flow, combine, and yet endure had, throughout her life, made it a powerful symbol for this vision.61 This is just one interpretation of Woolf’s suicide. As Val Gough has noted, myriad factors – historical, social, biographical, psychological, and biological – must have been involved, in unfathomable combinations, as Woolf walked to the banks of the River Ouse, put a stone in her pocket, and allowed herself to sink beneath the surface.62 Yet there is no doubt that ideas of public and private existence, of communal and individual temporality, and of their relationship with the experience of aerial bombardment were circulating in Woolf’s mind, and in her work, in the days, weeks, and even years before her death. These same concerns, though in different configurations, would inform Michael Moorcock’s writing when, nearly half a century later, he came to address his own experiences of the Blitz and its aftermath in his novel Mother London (1988).63 Michael John Moorcock was born on 18 December 1939 in Mitcham, South London. In Mother London, David Mummery – whose childhood, as Moorcock has acknowledged, is closely based on the author’s own64 – remarks that his ‘first clear memory’ is of an ‘air battle’ between Spitfires and Messerschmitts unfolding overhead65 (this is presumably an incident from the Battle of Britain, which lasted from July to October 1940). This may well be an imaginative

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reconstruction on Moorcock’s part, but if he was too young to meaningfully register, or to remember, the dogfights of the Battle of Britain, or the devastating bombing raids of September 1940 to May 1941 (the period generally referred to as ‘the Blitz’), which so disrupted the life of Virginia Woolf, the effects of these assaults – the landscape of bombed out buildings and crashed planes, and the emerging mythology of death, terror, and resilience – were certainly amongst his formative memories.66 So too was the ‘rocket blitz’ (also known as the ‘Battle of London’) of June 1944 to March 1945, a campaign in which Mitcham’s neighbouring suburb, Croydon, suffered greater devastation than any other part of the capital.67 This latter period was considered by many to have been even more psychologically debilitating than the Blitz itself; the narrator of Mother London remarks of another South London district – Brixton – that, ‘the bombs fragmented her identity as they have broken up so much of London. [...] When news came that Hitler was beaten South London began to stir again; then came the rockets. The rockets almost finished her. The rockets threatened to drive her mad’ (211).68 Moorcock’s early years were spent with a mother who tolerated her son’s desire for adventure, and a ‘feckless’ father, who would desert his wife and child at the end of the war,69 an experience that is also dramatized in Moorcock’s portrayal of David Mummery’s childhood (see ML 21). Liberated from the strictures of the traditional bourgeois nuclear family, Moorcock’s formative years were, he suggests, defined instead by the ‘peculiar’, ‘malleable’ environment of the bomb sites, which he and his friends tirelessly explored,70 and by the bombardment of the rocket blitz;71 he comments: ‘wartime London had an enormous effect on my imagination. [ ... ] That kind of landscape [ ... ] probably is the single greatest effect on my writing’.72 Moorcock implies, indeed, that the ‘public’ realm of the war played a role in the formation of his consciousness normally occupied by a child’s parents – an idea that is explicitly expressed in Mother London. In the novel, a character remarks, ‘I thought of the Blitz as a person. The Blitz was like a mother to me. I never had so much attention’ (434) – a perception that is both intriguing and disturbing in its Oedipal implications. Similarly, David Mummery describes his generation of Londoners as ‘children of the Blitz’ (172). Certainly, given the unprecedented shifts in family structures that the war, temporarily, effected – as men were drafted to serve overseas and unprecedented numbers of women entered the workplace to fill the resulting vacancies – the kind of wartime childhood that Moorcock experienced, and depicts in Mother London, was

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not uncommon. He alludes wryly to this phenomenon in the novel, when he has David Mummery say of his parents, He waited until the end of the War before leaving my mother who refused to tell me he had gone. Later she explained that since everyone’s father was away she had assumed I wouldn’t notice his departure. It seems not to have occurred to her that I might wonder why my father had left when everyone else’s was coming home. (21) Moorcock describes the effects of the war on London, and on the psychological development of its young inhabitants, in terms of flux, indeterminacy, and a radical instability of boundaries: ‘Growing up during the Blitz, you became used to seeing whole buildings and streets suddenly disappear. After the Blitz, new buildings and streets appeared. The world I knew was malleable, populated, violent and urgent’; consequently, ‘your entire memory is one of something in transition: something between one thing and another’.73 Though Moorcock, as Jeff Gardiner notes, found growing up in this environment at times terrifying,74 his memories of it are, for the most part, distinctly positive; acknowledging the importance of wartime London in his work, he comments, ‘It’s nostalgia as much as anything, it really is. I loved it’.75 This ambivalence regarding the legacy of the war is encapsulated in a passage in Mother London narrated by David Mummery: The bombs brought me security, sexuality, escape and adventure. We children of the Blitz are not to be pitied. We are to be envied. We are to be congratulated because we survived; so if you must pity someone then pity the relations of the dead and the parents of my dead contemporaries, my friends; but we were happier than any generation before or since. We were allowed to play in a wider world. (172) Mother London explores, with great subtlety, the capacity of aerial bombardment to unravel durable, singular, and unified modes of consciousness. Frequently, the results are shown to be madness, or even, where the Blitz penetrates the private realm in the most literal sense, the complete annihilation of consciousness. Conversely, though, Moorcock, like Virginia Woolf, suggests that more permeable forms of subjectivity may allow for greater plurality and mutuality in temporal experience. Most radically of all, it is implied that these apparently divergent consequences of the Blitz – insanity and community – may, in fact, be closely allied.

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Moorcock’s text follows the lives of three characters – the theatrical, flamboyant Josef Kiss, the timid, depressive David Mummery, and the ethereal Mary Gasalee – as well as the evolution of London itself, from the time of the Blitz to the novel’s (mid-1980s) present day. Its episodic, elliptical narrative, which traces a series of movements backwards and forwards in time, laments London’s sombre, battle-scarred condition in the late 1940s, celebrates the exuberance of the city’s counter-cultural heyday in the 1960s and early seventies and decries the greed and hypocrisy of the Thatcherite 1980s. When they are not confined to mental institutions on the basis of the psychological abnormalities they share (of which more later), the three main characters interact, in their own small ways, with these broader movements, whilst negotiating the complex demands of the love triangle that develops between them. The novel closes on a muted note – part comic, part tragic – but affirms the value of communal experience in the face of an increasingly ruthless political culture and hostile urban environment. The novel’s two central chapters (‘Late Blooms 1940’ [222–237] and ‘Early Departures 1940’ [243–265]), which mark the limit of the text’s historical retrogression and the ‘pivot’ around which the narrative turns,76 powerfully testify to the ferocity of the Blitz. In particular, Moorcock emphasizes the tendency of distinctions between public and private existence to dissolve under conditions of aerial assault. In a scene that depicts the first raid of the Blitz (which occurred on 7 September 1940), two sisters, Beth and Chloe Scaramanga, discuss the Germans’ intentions. Chloe assumes – or rather hopes – that the attack will target purely logistical sites, as in the ‘limited’ warfare of an earlier era:77 ‘They’re going for munitions plants and stuff. It would be a waste to do anything else’ (233). Beth, however, recognises that the terrorization of civilian populations is integral to the strategy of Blitzkrieg: ‘They mean to break our spirit, same as Spain and Poland. [ ... ] It’s that sort of warfare. Aimed at civilians’ (233). This sequence is preceded by an epigraph, taken from a text of the period, which identifies precisely this element of total war: like the Great Plague, the Blitz gives ‘an insecurity to daily life’ (ML 241).78 Similarly, David Mummery wryly notes that, ‘like everyone’ in London during the war, ‘I was used to the idea of being killed’ (412), while another of the central characters, Josef Kiss, recalls, ‘the bombs never seemed to stop pounding out of the sky, one batch after another’ (387). The most significant bombing raids in the novel are those in which the three main characters, David Mummery, Josef Kiss, and Mary Gasalee, are caught up. Each experiences an intrusion of the conflict

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into his or her private world that is so physical, and so intense, as to almost realise the threat of sudden death with which they are so familiar; these incidents continue to shape their lives into the novel’s (mid-1980s) present day. As a child, David narrowly survives the devastating impact of two V-2 rockets (he narrates the incident in a flashback [411–412]). His preoccupation with this event is evident from the opening pages of the novel, which catalogue the ‘great collage’ that decorates his study: at the centre of it hangs a ‘framed newspaper photograph of a V2 rocket flying over London’ – his ‘private memento mori’ – which, ‘he believes’, ‘might even be one of the bombs which almost killed him as a child’ (6). Later, we learn that ‘the Blitz, our bombs’ are the central subject of his latest literary effort, a work that, appropriately enough, he refers to as his ‘bloody memoirs’ (20), and that, even over thirty years later, he is prone to slipping into reveries about ‘the Streatham V2’ (411). An account of Josef Kiss’ first, and most overwhelming, exposure to the force of the Blitz appears in the second of the novel’s two central chapters. In this scene, driven to the brink of insanity by the carnage occurring around him, Josef attempts, without guidance or training, to defuse an unexploded bomb using a pair of garden shears (257–261). Indicative of a profound collapse of normal categories in his mind is Josef’s conviction that the bomb has a ‘crude brain’ that he may ‘read’ (258). As elsewhere in the novel, however, Josef’s ‘madness’ proves effective where more ‘rational’ forms of perception fail. His success in defusing the bomb suggests that he may not be so much mad as ‘gifted’ with unusual powers; at the very least, the incident implies scepticism about the efficacy of a strict separation between subjective and objective processes. Despite his triumph, though, Josef continues, long after the fact, to brood on the role played by his wartime experiences in the emergence of his aberrant psychology (186). The Blitz is a pivotal period in David Mummery’s and Josef Kiss’ lives, but its impact on the other central character, Mary Gasalee, is even more significant. The house in which the sixteen-year-old Mary lives with her husband and baby daughter is hit by a bomb in December 1940 (33); her husband is killed outright, but Mary carries her daughter from the blazing building (this apparently miraculous escape is related to her for the first time twenty-five years later, by one of the Auxiliary Firemen who witnessed it [435–439]). Immediately after their emergence from the flames, however, Mary succumbs to shock and falls into a coma, from which she finally wakes fourteen years later (140). As one would expect, these events come to define Mary’s understanding of her own biography: ‘sometimes, when asked to state her own or her

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daughter’s birthday she would automatically give the date of the night her husband was killed, when she emerged from the incendiary debris, Monday 30 December 1940’ (33). In another passage that attributes generative properties to the destruction of the Blitz, Mary observes that ‘my life, my real life, began in fire’ (37; italics in original). As a consequence of her long period of unconsciousness, Mary’s biographical awareness is disorientatingly concertinaed; in 1956, fifteen years after the events – but less than one year after waking from her coma – the bombing of her home, her separation from her daughter, and the death of her husband occurred, in her mind, ‘last week’ (140). The devastating ordeals suffered by the three main characters during the war profoundly exacerbate a range of psychological abnormalities, the symptoms of which include lurid hallucinations (like the ‘crazed horsemen’, ‘naked giants’, and other ‘beasts of the apocalypse’ that Josef Kiss sees in the flames over London during the first raid of the Blitz [245–246]) and, most notably, the ‘delusion’ that they have telepathic powers. I employ scare quotes here because the ontological status of the characters’ condition is continually in doubt. As Moorcock comments, ‘there’s never an unequivocally supernatural scene’ in Mother London, as there are in Moorcock’s earlier works in the science fiction and ‘sword and sorcery’ genres;79 equally, though, an interpretation of events that invokes supernatural phenomena is never entirely precluded, either. Jeff Gardiner rightly notes that the ‘telepathic’ element of the novel is a ‘fantastic’ device in the sense defined by Tzvetan Todorov; that is, it remains suspended in a state of uncertainty between natural and supernatural explanations.80 However, the primary significance of the device is found not so much in the question of its reality or unreality, but in the figurative function it serves within the narrative. As Moorcock himself remarks, ‘the telepathy element [ ... ] is a specific use of a science-fictional notion to amplify the theme, instead of literally, or for its own sake’.81 Moorcock’s appropriation of this ‘science-fictional notion’ contributes to the thematic economy of the novel in a range of significant ways. I want, firstly, to indicate how its presence (like the use of a similar device in Between the Acts) imaginatively transfigures – so as to make powerfully manifest – a disorienting, ‘traumatic’ interfusion of public and private temporalities arising from the turmoil of aerial bombardment. This function of the ‘telepathy element’ of the text is clearly apparent, for example, in the section set during the first attack of the Blitz. In this nightmarish sequence, Josef Kiss’ ability to distinguish between the activities of his own mind and the dynamics of the external world is hopelessly eroded

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by the ferocity of the assault, which he feels must be imagined, and yet cannot be, because it is ‘unimaginable’ (246). In this permeable condition, his consciousness is assailed by, and merges with, the anguished thoughts of the ‘dying city[‘s]’ inhabitants, whose intensity rivals that of the bombing raid itself: All at once a wave of voices hit him and he gasped as if winded. [ ... ] The voices came again, fiercer and more urgent than before, striking him with such force he almost fell. Each voice was an individual, each one in such terrible confusion, such ghastly physical pain, such psychic agony, that he found he too was shouting with them; his voice joining the millions to form a single monumental howl. The noise was like a bomb-blast, hot and ravening, threatening to tear the clothes off his body. [ ... ] He might have been kicked in the groin as he doubled up, the breath pouring out of him. (246) The central characters’ experiences of the Blitz permanently reconfigure their perceptions of public and private temporality. This reconfiguration is not merely described, as in the passage quoted above, but is also indicated through the use of a variation on the stream-of-consciousness technique that is at least as radical as the one found in Between the Acts. Where Woolf takes a method – indirect interior monologue – that, even in its conventional form, blends ‘public’ elements with ‘private’, and interweaves these elements more tightly, Moorcock adopts a decidedly ‘private’ technique – direct interior monologue – and sets about ‘opening’ it to the public sphere. There are around 150 passages in Mother London that could be described as ‘stream-of-consciousness’, each of which is italicised. Some are as short as a single line, while others, like the one from which the quotation below is extracted, comprise several hundred words. Occasionally, a passage will represent the consciousness of a single, identifiable figure; more often, however, the thoughts of an indefinite number of anonymous individuals are strung together in a single, continuous ‘stream’. This is the case in the following extract, which appears as Mary Gasalee arrives at a friend’s party: dropped her in the canal the little minx and teach the lot of them a lesson ws ki bat per mat jao yeh ciz ws ke kam aegi call himself expert of what me say dema a mi spar-dem and that’s good enough know what I mean su carne es del color de un calavera blanqueada open-heart surgery he said you’d better check there’s one in there first I said enien frohlichen [sic]

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Tag im Bett do you have any broken no way that sod’ll come back in here I don’t care how many sixpacks of Extra Strong he’s got in his boot baby was you mouth sewed up Miss Freezer and Mr Sebidey you are a very bad habit et vous? (383) This passage conforms to the conventions of direct interior monologue in as much as it makes frequent use of the first- and second-person pronouns and is not reported or mediated by a narrator. It differs significantly, however, from the quintessentially ‘high modernist’ use of the technique evident, for example, in the closing pages of Ulysses.82 The final sequence of Joyce’s novel, from which I quoted earlier, represents the shifting consciousness of a single, readily identifiable character, Molly Bloom. It is self-evidently the case that the emotions, memories, dreams, and desires that flit through Molly’s mind should be interpreted as her own. The reader of Mother London is not able to make such an assumption, however. The following extract characterizes the strange mental state – so different from that of Molly Bloom – that the stream-of-consciousness sequences in Mother London represent: ‘[Mary’s] mind, not exactly wandering, was filling with all kinds of words and pictures. These often brought flashes of clarity, distinct memories, fresh as if she were living them, and she could hear many voices, some evidently nearby, from the bus and the street; others from her past. Within her mind time was no longer linear’ (118). In Moorcock’s novel, both the framing narrative, which invites the reader to ascribe telepathic powers to Mary and her friends, and the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ passages themselves, which, like the one quoted above, are characterized by particularly jarring shifts in emotional tone, dialect, and even national language, cast doubt on the unity of the consciousness in question. Of the thoughts and memories that make up the direct interior monologue extract above, only some (it is unclear which) belong to the consciousness – Mary’s – in which they are registered. Where Joyce attempts to accurately render the sinuous unfolding of an autonomous, continuous, and richly-layered consciousness over time, Moorcock offers a hyperbolic representation of a disrupted, fractured, and heterogeneous form of temporal experience. At this point, I wish to consider some of the intersections between the ‘traumatic’ model of subjectivity with which I have aligned Mother London’s use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, and the theorization of the ‘postmodernist’ subject offered by Fredric Jameson. Hal Foster notes that a traumatic aesthetic is identifiable within the culture of

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modernism – as the work of the Surrealists, for example, demonstrates – but argues that it was a discourse of shock that dominated understandings of the aesthetics of psychic injury in the first half of the twentieth century (that is, during the era of modernism), while a distinctively ‘traumatic’ sensibility rose to prominence only after World War II; as such, it coincided and, in certain important respects, converged with the culture of postmodernism.83 A useful route into a more detailed exploration of these connections is offered by Jameson’s conception of postmodernist ‘schizophrenia’. This he opposes to an earlier mode of ‘cultural pathology’: that of modernist ‘alienation’. In certain important respects, this binary – alienation/schizophrenia – corresponds to that of ‘shock’ and ‘trauma’ identified by Foster and Seltzer. Like the concept of shock, alienation is predicated upon one of several modernist ‘depth models’: namely, that of the ‘inside and outside’.84 In both cases, a clear distinction is drawn between the external world, which shocks or alienates, and the subject, who experiences a shocked or alienated condition. Further, just as, in Foster’s account, the problematization of interior and exterior and public and private realms in the post-war era gives rise to a culture characterized more by trauma than by shock, so the same state of confusion is implicated, in Jameson’s analysis, in the displacement of alienation by schizophrenia. Like other shifts that occur as part of the more general movement from modernism to postmodernism – such as Michel Foucault’s repudiation of the Freudian model of repression – the transition from alienation to schizophrenia entails the replacement of ‘depth’ by ‘surface’.85 Jameson draws a comparison between the suicides, burnouts, drug overdoses, and schizophrenic breakdowns that occurred amidst the upheavals of the 1960s and the experiences of anxiety, isolation, and anomie that characterized the culture of the early twentieth century. This shift can, he argues, be understood as one in which the ‘alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation’.86 This fragmented condition seems to imply the ‘end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual’; that is, the collapse of the conceptual barrier that, in the period of ‘classical capitalism’, and of modernism, demarcated a strict separation between interior and exterior realms (and, by extension, between subjective and social, private and public).87 Jameson suggests that in the context of literary criticism, the ‘waning of affect’, as he terms this process, might also be characterized as ‘the waning of the great high modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries of durée and memory’.88 In order to theorize this attenuation of high modernist temporality, Jameson invokes the model of schizophrenic experience developed by

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Jacques Lacan. Lacan describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the chain of signifiers that generates meaning.89 On this basis, Jameson proposes that, personal identity is [ ... ] the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with one’s present. [ ... ] Such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. With the breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of [ ... ] pure and unrelated presents in time.90 A provisional reading of the stream-of-consciousness passages that appear in Mother London, might, I think, gravitate towards this ‘schizophrenic’ conception of the subject, as much as towards the ‘traumatic’ one elaborated by Foster and Seltzer. Understood in the terms Jameson uses here, the direct interior monologue sequence that makes up the final forty pages of Ulysses is confirmed as a paradigmatic expression of the ‘high modernist thematics of time and temporality’, in that, as the huge, single sentence unfolds, the reader can – for all the numerous shifts in focus – discern an intelligible chain of signification (a memory is triggered by a moment of imagination, which is triggered by a sensory perception, and so on), and hence a certain unity of past, present and future. Apparently, at least, no such unity arises from the streamof-consciousness passages in Mother London; rather, the ‘radical and random difference’ of the text is such that ‘the links of the signifying chain snap’, and we are left with a ‘rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers’, or ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’.91 This reading would appear to be consistent, in turn, with Moorcock’s rendering of the London of the 1980s as a consumer capitalist playground in which, as Jameson puts it, ‘we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach’.92 What I want to suggest, however, is that a core function of the stream-of-consciousness passages in Mother London is in fact precisely to resist, rather than to reproduce, the ‘structural exclusion of memory’ that the reifying forces of late capitalism work to effectuate.93 A critical view of London’s transformation into ‘Disneyland [ ... ], or rather Dickensland’ (391) is not difficult to detect in the novel. Moorcock has satirical fun with the nostalgia industry

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outlets that, by the mid 1980s, littered the city: Big Ben Beef Bars, Professor Moriarty’s Thieves Kitchens, Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes tours, and endless restaurants called The Charles Dickens (470, 466, 418). Particularly delicious is the reinvention of the great prophet of post-Great War modernist angst as pop culture tourist attraction in ‘The T.S. Eliot Tour’ (466). Yet Moorcock’s critique also operates within a more sombre register. David Mummery, for example, remarks that the process by which fragments of London’s history are evacuated of meaning and resonance and offered up for consumption represents ‘the package selling of things constituting [people’s] fundamental sense of identity’ (475). This is, Mary Gasalee reflects, ‘a brutalising process, similar to what happened to slaves taken from their own countries who become dumb and dazed because they have no future’ (475–476). Just as the deracinated, commodified landscape of the city alienates Moorcock’s Londoners from their own past, so it obscures attempts to envisage the future. As I have intimated, the stream-of-consciousness passages that striate Moorcock’s narrative need to be understood as sites in which the force of the historical past – repressed, but not curtailed, by the glassy surfaces of the postmodern cityscape – finds expression. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that many of the disconnected fragments that make up these sequences register not pure, isolated presents, but rather the abrupt emergence of memories and recollections. Nor, despite their apparently free-floating condition, are these re-presentations akin to the depthless pop cultural stereotypes of a once vital historical reality with which the novel’s characters are surrounded. On the contrary, circulating within these passages are numerous memory-traces that seem to have been cast adrift from their moorings in the historical continuum, and even from the psyches in which they originate, precisely because they remain too intensely cathected to be contained. Unsurprisingly, given its centrality to the narrative, it is the troubling legacy of the war that recurs most frequently. For example, in a scene set in 1985, in which the main characters and their friends gather at the home of the Scaramanga sisters, these anguished reflections on the grim days of the Blitz appear: And they never mentioned the looting the predatory armies prowling the city’s streets invading parks gardens and houses. There were murders accomplished under cover of the general slaughter. Were we better or worse than our enemies? But the newsreels showed us all doing our bit, fighting on, taking it, defiant and brave in the face of monsters, only some of the monsters we made ourselves. (389)

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A further key difference between the aesthetics of ‘schizophrenia’ and of ‘trauma’ emerges from the fragmented textual chains that flit across the pages of the novel. As Jameson notes, the conception of the signifying chain that underpins Lacan’s model of schizophrenic experience presupposes the Saussurean principle that meaning is ‘not a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified’ but is instead generated by the movement from signifier to signifier’, by ‘the relationship of signifiers among themselves’.94 Properly ‘schizophrenic’ writing, then, would appear as a chain of ‘pure material signifiers’ – linguistic units so radically unrelated to one another that they are, literally, meaningless. The conception of trauma that emerges from Lacan’s work is markedly different, in that it rests on a minimal relationality amongst signifiers. Along Saussure’s ‘vertical’ axis – that of the signifier and the signified (and, beyond that, the referent) – Lacan aligns the process in which the traumatic encounter with the Real instils a compulsion to repeat a particular signifier, or ‘symptom’.95 Crucially, though, this encrypted fragment of past experience does not recur in isolation; rather, in a process of Nachträglichkeit (‘retroactivity’), it is continually over-coded or imbued with new shades of meaning by the endlessly unfolding – ‘horizontal’ – chain of signification in which the subject is enmeshed. Indeed, Lacan emphasizes the most radical implication of the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit: that the obsessive fixation on the repetitively reproduced signifier only assumes its full, traumatic character as it is worked upon by subsequent experience. As Malcolm Bowie notes, Lacan again illustrates this notion through reference to the structure of the sentence. If Lacan’s model for the experience of schizophrenia is a sentence composed of wholly discrete and discontinuous signifiers, the mechanism of Nachträglichkeit is apparent, he suggests, in the way in which sentences always function retroactively as much as proactively – each signifier inflecting the meaning of that preceding it – and ‘achieve their final “effect of sense” only when their last word has been given’.96 This evocation of the temporality of trauma at the level of the signifying chain is demonstrated with peculiar vividness by a number of the stream-of-consciousness passages in Mother London. Below are two examples, which, characteristically, interrupt the narrative without warning: that’s why I’m so pale the flames need so much yet there’s a consolation I suppose after all how many women have not survived these fires in Dresden in Tokyo in Madrid [ ... ] (312) Dresden Dancers and Coventry Queens. (364)

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Consistent with the narrative’s broader meditations on the communal ramifications of trauma, these passages are interspersed with city names that have become near universal synonyms for the mass atrocities of world (or, in the case of Madrid, civil) war. If these names project such grim associations with particular force here, however, it is not simply because they are embedded in a narrative overtly concerned with the legacy of civilian bombing, but also because of the way they interact amongst themselves in the generation of meaning. Indeed, if these names were isolated and juxtaposed with signifiers that, in ‘schizophrenic’ fashion, bore no meaningful relationship to them whatsoever, they might call to mind a bewildering proliferation of associations, or, conversely, might appear as mere material signifiers, devoid of any meaning. In fact, the gradual, retroactive winnowing of meaning that these signifiers perform upon one another is such that by the end of each passage the sombre historical resonances of these names (and, in the first example, of ‘the flames’, ‘the fires’, and the women they have consumed) are impossible to ignore. In his essay ‘The Belated Postmodern’, Peter Nicholls critiques both modernism’s ‘reformulation of the nineteenth-century poetic of epiphanies and arrested moments’, and Jameson’s rendering of the postmodern as a detemporalized, dehistoricized realm of ‘stylistic appropriation and unmotivated pastiche’.97 Against both aesthetics, Nicholls attempts, by interweaving the fiction of Toni Morrison and the Freudian model of Nachträglichkeit, to ‘discover an alternative postmodernism’, one bound up with the ‘idea of history as a violent intrusion from somewhere else’.98 If Mother London stages a marked departure from high modernist understandings of temporality, Moorcock’s ‘postmodernism’ – like Morrison’s, but distinct from that elaborated by Jameson – is invested, as Moorcock has himself suggested, with a traumatic charge of historicity. Modernist fiction, Moorcock claims, failed to describe ‘what it was like growing up with nothing else but war’.99 For Moorcock and other writers of his generation, including his friends J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss, it was a question of finding a form that was capable of registering and giving voice to their experiences: ‘I’d been through the Blitz, Ballard had been through the Japanese prison camps, Brian Aldiss had been through the Malayan war as a young soldier – so we’d all had this very intense time and there was no fiction which really described it’.100 Consequently, ‘we [ ... ] reject[ed] modernism in most of its aspects for our own work [ ... ]. From our own point of view we needed new ways of dealing with our experience [ ... ] so we were in that sense postmodernist’.101

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The prevalence, in Mother London, of memorial fragments emanating from the conflagration of the war suggests, for all their baleful weight, a consolatory impulse – if only because, in their urgency and force, they work to counter the wholesale dwindling of the historical past into the flickering half-life of the simulacrum. Rather similarly, even as Moorcock’s novel dramatizes ‘the traumatic collapse of boundaries between self and other’, to quote Mark Seltzer, it suggests the ‘opening’, through this very ‘breakdown’ of a ‘relation to others’, a ‘“sympathetic” social bond’.102 In many of its forms, the high modernist valorisation of interiority, subjectivity, and alienation entails not merely a withdrawal from the brutalizing pressures of modernization, but also an estrangement from family, friends, and neighbours: that is, from one’s immediate social environment. Whatever ethical, political, or aesthetic legitimacy this latter move had was undermined, for Moorcock (and, he suggests, for his contemporaries), by the necessity of communitarian action that the Second World War imposed. He remarks that, like him, most of my friends who are writers [ ... ] reject notions of individualism found in so many modernists. [ ... ] The greatest experience most of us who experienced WW2 had was that of community and I do think, in my case at least, that this was formative. I would guess that [Angela] Carter and [Angus] Wilson would have agreed. [Peter] Ackroyd [is] inclined to agree, too. [Iain] Sinclair, too. Experience of community united by fear, perhaps, but also of community overcoming fear, of resisting terror.103 For Josef Kiss, in Mother London, the ability of ordinary, working-class Londoners to organize and cooperate was all that saved the city from defeat during the Blitz:

It was the first I [sic] fully understood how detached governments become from ordinary people. [ ... ] Expecting London to collapse, the authorities made no real provision for defence. The ordinary people pulled the city through. They forced the tube stations to give them shelter. Against official disapproval they set up street groups, volunteers, amateur firefighters. It wasn’t Churchill or the King of bloody England who kept up our morale. It was men and women whose homes and families were bombed to bits discovering their own resources. (386)

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Similarly, in the scene depicting Josef’s attempts to defuse an unexploded German bomb, Chloe Scaramanga, in whose garden the device has landed, asks Josef, ‘Is there anything else you need?’; ‘Her voice had that oddly intimate note of camaraderie which the War had specifically developed in people. He enjoyed it. It relaxed him’ (258). The telepathic aspect of the novel contributes to Moorcock’s celebration of community in war, as it does to so much of the text’s thematic material. In particular, Josef Kiss’ ability to read the minds of those trapped under rubble, and so locate and rescue them (291, 386–387, 496), serves as a metaphor for the condition of solidarity and empathy with the suffering of others essential to London’s endurance of the Blitz. This sensibility likewise informs the text’s telepathic version of the stream-of-consciousness technique. I have suggested that Moorcock’s method represents the lasting disintegration of identitory and temporal unity in the minds of individuals subjected to the bombardment of the Blitz. Yet this is by no means its only function. In fact, Mother London demonstrates that this motif can also be made to do constructive political and ethical work. As in Between the Acts, the disruption and dispersal of individual temporal experience that the Blitz effects gives rise to the formation of collaborative, inter-subjective temporalities, which have the potential to resist the bombing campaign’s devastating logic. In constructing stream-of-consciousness passages that indissociably blend the thoughts, memories, and impressions of a host of individuals, Moorcock gestures towards a temporal mode that does not, as in a Utopian brand of modernism,104 envisage a clear, foreseeable progression from past to present to future, but is, instead, spontaneous, improvisatory, and mutative. This conception converges with the notion of ‘contemporality’ proposed by Steven Connor.105 Under a ‘contemporal’ mode, Connor suggests, being in the present would be a matter of contemporal being, alongside others in time, in their time as filtered through our time, in our time as folded into theirs. [ ... ] In contemporality, the thread of one duration is pulled constantly through the loop formed by another, one temporality is strained through another’s mesh; but the resulting knot can itself be retied, and the filtered system also simultaneously refilters the system through which it is percolating.106 As the fixation on the legacy of the war within Mother London’s capacious streams of consciousness implies, whatever historical dimension continues to attach itself to the structure of everyday life in the

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simulacral landscape of Moorcock’s late capitalist London likewise inheres at a communal level, though beneath the bankrupt official narratives of the state. Many of the most potent examples of the popular stories that affirm the historical consciousness of the city are forged in the communal endeavour of resistance to the Blitz. ‘Old Nonny’ is a key repository and disseminator of such tales. The novel ends with this catalogue of her repertoire: She tells of uncanny presentiments, impossible escapes and unexpected bravery; she speaks of David Mummery, rescued by the Black Captain;107 of Josef Kiss who read minds and by this means saved a thousand lives, and of Mary Gasalee walking unscathed from the inferno with her baby in her arms. Such stories are common amongst all ordinary Londoners though few are ever noted by the Press. By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad. (496) I have suggested that a key function of Mother London’s streams of consciousness is to register a communal time-sense fostered by the exigencies of air war. Indeed, the preponderance of references to the war within these passages might be taken to indicate that characters who directly experience the conflict are peculiarly liable to the kind of temporal permeability that the method conveys. An opposition is established in the novel between the communitarian ethos of the Blitz-era – an ethos to which some of those who survive the war, including the novel’s three central characters, continue to adhere – and the anti-communitarian social and economic agenda pursued by the British government in the 1980s and collectively named for its leader: Thatcherism. If, Moorcock implies in Mother London, the experience of the Blitz revealed the individualist ethos that informed high modernism to be untenable, an aberrant variation of it nonetheless stages a return in the politics and everyday life of Thatcher’s Britain. Moorcock, particularly through the mouthpiece of Josef Kiss, launches an excoriating attack on the climate of greed, cynicism, and societal division produced by the Thatcherite revolution.108 These attitudes are embodied in Josef’s despised sister, Beryl Male. Beryl’s venal ‘talents’ were, Josef observes, ‘lost [ ... ] during the war’ (289), but they later prove to be assets as she enters Parliament and eventually achieves cabinet office in the Thatcher government. Moorcock is unremittingly hostile towards the debased notion of individualism that emerged from Thatcher’s rejection of the concept of

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society. He speaks in interviews, for example, of ‘our horrible consumerist economic system, which promotes a false idea of “individualism”’,109 and of his abiding desire to attack ‘human greed’, whether on the level of ‘the city’ or ‘the individual’ – the latter representing, for him, ‘the smallest closed universe of the selfish human being’.110 I would like to propose a final way, therefore, in which Moorcock’s over-determined use of the stream-of-consciousness technique might be interpreted: that is, as a model for a communal, empathic temporality, which, he suggests, provided solace during the Blitz, and, to an extent, in its aftermath, but is endangered in the rampantly individualist 1980s. His war-inspired method is, then, not merely ‘traumatic’, or ‘postmodernist’, but also, and in the process, ‘anti-Thatcherite’. What I have tried to show in the second part of this chapter is that the principal objective of Moorcock’s powerful and unjustly neglected novel is to ask what the experience of having witnessed and survived the Blitz might mean at the moment marking the very zenith of latetwentieth-century consumer capitalism. The two narratives to which I now turn, Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), both feature protagonists who are veterans of World War II, and (apparently at least) unfold in large part during the war years. However, whereas the primary aim of Mother London is to provide an insight into the lives of those who, like Moorcock himself, witnessed the dislocations of the war at first hand, Powers’ and McEwan’s novels are at least as concerned with exploring the experiences of the generation – their own – which was born into the world shaped by the conflict, and which has been required to disentangle its reality from the realm of spectacle and myth.

5 Their Fathers’ War: Negotiating the Legacy of World War II in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Atonement

In this chapter, I examine two novels, one American and one British, which demonstrate, and self-reflexively dwell upon, the key issues at stake in attempts by members of the post-war generation to construct narratives of World War II. I have chosen to juxtapose Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) because, precisely in their divergent approaches to this process of narrativization, they exhibit a suggestive dialectical relation. In Prisoner’s Dilemma, actual historical figures are incorporated into a narrative of the war years that departs, often wildly, from the established historical record. The prevalent critical approach to such reconfigurations of facticity has been to interpret them as emphasizing the absolute inaccessibility of the past, or else as enacting the reduction of history to an array of deracinated, endlessly interchangeable signs. I argue, in contrast, that the bracketing of the historical reality of the war performed by Powers’ novel testifies, instead, to the necessity of displacing a legacy that remains palpable and intensely troubling. Prisoner’s Dilemma, then, stages a disarticulation of the textual plane from the Real that paradoxically serves only to demonstrate the persistent force of the war-as-referent. Conversely, McEwan’s Atonement often seems to aspire to a state of absolute verisimilitude, adopting a ‘transparent’ mimetic language that purports to convey the horror of the war ‘as it really was’. Yet, following a logic that mirrors, in reverse, that of Prisoner’s Dilemma, this attempt to directly channel the Real inevitably fails, since, as Jacques Lacan insists, what marks the encounter with the Real is precisely that it is not experienced directly or immediately, but rather evades punctual registration. McEwan’s novel is most effective in 145

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evoking the traumatic conditions of battle when its textual strategies draw closest to those adopted by Powers; that is, when this mode of extreme ‘realism’ yields to forms of representation that are, ostensibly at least, more oblique. I conclude by suggesting that, under certain circumstances, McEwan’s novel may not merely evoke a traumatic encounter but may be productive of symptoms associated with this experience in their actuality.

Prisoner’s Dilemma, Trauma, and the Uses of Historiographic Metafiction Richard Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988) offers an outlandish alternate history of the life and work of Walt Disney during the Second World War. In Powers’ novel, Disney, stirred by the ‘Manichean’, ‘apocalyptic’ battle1 in which his nation is locked, conceives of a populist epic, entitled You Are the War, which will convince every American of the crucial importance of his or her own contribution to the global war effort. The project’s colossal demand for personnel, coming at the height of wartime, also offers an opportunity for Disney to effect the release of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry, unjustly interned by the United States Government in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour. At a meeting in Washington, Disney quickly persuades the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, to fund the film; the filmmaker then plays his trump card, explaining that if Stimson refuses to release ten thousand Japanese Americans from their internment camps in the Southwest, he will embarrass the administration by publicly demanding to be arrested, on the basis that he is himself one-eighth Japanese. Stimson reluctantly agrees, with the proviso that the released workers ‘be kept out of urban areas, under parole, inland, as hidden as possible’ (181). Disney, anticipating this condition, has already settled on a location – a vast, empty tract of land in the Midwest, which his crew will christen ‘World World’. After the teenaged star singled out for the lead role is killed in combat, an unknown amateur, Eddie Hobson, is cast. By the time shooting begins, the film has assumed a yet grander mission – to bring about nothing less than the redemption of humankind amidst a world ravaged by war. Inspired by Frank Capra’s script for It’s a Wonderful Life, which Disney has been permitted to read, the lavishly animated film shows how the apparently insignificant, everyday attention to duty displayed by Eddie Hobson’s character is all that protects humanity from an inexorable descent into paranoia, factionalism, environmental despoliation, and, ultimately, annihilation. As he watches new global

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power alignments begin to form themselves, however, Disney senses that his worst fears may eventually be realized. He is particularly dismayed by the Red Army’s occupation of the Prater amusement park in Vienna. Conscious that ‘the only country that will make it through this conflagration with enough raw entertainment resources to rival our own has a two-thousand-acre leg up on us’, Disney resolves ‘to go beyond animation’ (329–330). He abandons his masterpiece and buys up a huge expanse of land in Anaheim; the narrative leaves him pacing out the boundaries for his own ‘magic kingdom’: Disneyland (330). Needless to say, this narrative is factually untrue in almost every detail. Disney did make a number of propaganda films in support of the US war effort, but the You Are the War project is wholly invented. It is a well-established matter of historical record, moreover, that Disney’s grandfather was not ‘the offspring of a geisha girl and a midshipman on Matthew Perry’s ship Susquehanna’ (180). It would seem clear enough, then, that with its extravagant fabrications of the biography of a major historical figure, its staging of interactions between this individual and a series of wholly fictional characters, and its generally lurid, heightened mode of reality, this narrative invites categorization as an example of what Linda Hutcheon terms ‘historiographic metafiction’, or what other recent scholars have dubbed ‘faction’. Even within the brief plot summary sketched above, however, I think it is possible to glimpse the contours of a different reading, one which would attribute the bracketing off of signification from history, reality, the referent – evident here and across this genre – not simply to a condition of knowing, theoretical sophistication, or to the effects of capitalist reification, but to an imperative to imaginatively reconfigure the catastrophes of the recent past in order to hold their revenant force in abeyance. In order to elaborate this reading of Prisoner’s Dilemma it is first necessary to examine in greater detail the prevailing critical perspectives from which my own analysis departs. As Amy J. Elias notes, the critical consensus on this mode of fiction remains grouped around the perspectives offered by Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson as long ago as the 1980s.2 Central to Hutcheon’s theoretical position is the view that the referent of any narrative, whether avowedly fictional or historical, is not an empirical past reality, but its textualized, documentary ‘remains’ – a fact that realist fiction and traditional historiography elide, but which postmodern ‘historiographic metafiction’ and recent metahistorical theory self-consciously render manifest. Accordingly, she argues, ‘historiographic metafiction plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record. [ ... ] Certain

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known historical details are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error’.3 Fredric Jameson, for his part, devotes a section of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to a discussion of what he terms ‘postmodern historiographic narrative’ or ‘fantastic historiography’.4 Judged on the most basic, objective criteria, at least, Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma appears to conform closely to a key variant of this literary mode. Jameson has in mind novels that ‘shuffle historical figures and names like so many cards from a finite deck’; ‘the purely fictional intent is underscored and reaffirmed in the production of imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-life ones unexpectedly appear and disappear’.5 The conventions of this genre thus allow one to imagine permutations of history in which, for example, Karl Marx witnessed, incognito, the American Civil War.6 The exemplary expression of this form, for Jameson, is E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975).7 Jameson notes the way in which the novel indiscriminately blends historical, fictional, and intertextual figures, all of whom are ‘powerfully and systematically’ reified.8 Ragtime, for Jameson, is ‘in reality a nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of ideologemes in a kind of hologram’.9 I want now to juxtapose Jameson’s influential comments with a recent essay by Hayden White, in which the retreat from referentiality of ‘the new genres, in both written and visual form, of postmodernist, para-historical representation’, is attributed not to the processes of advanced reification, but to the mass irruptions of chaotic violence that have marked the twentieth century.10 White notes that these new genres – ‘called variously “docu-drama”, “faction”, “infotainment”, “the fiction of fact”, “historical [sic] metafiction”, and the like’ – ‘all deal with historical phenomena, and all [ ... ] appear to “fictionalize” to a greater or lesser degree the historical events and characters which serve as their referents in history’.11 Much like Jameson, White argues that, what happens in the postmodernist docu-drama or historical metafiction is [ ... ] the placing in abeyance of the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Everything is presented as if it were of the same ontological order, both real and imaginary [ ... ], with the result that the referential function of the images of events is etiolated.12 What is striking about the ‘representative’ examples of this form listed by White, however, is how many gravitate around historical sites of

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extreme trauma and violence, whether at the relatively localized level of murder and execution (Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood [1965], Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song [1979]), or on the globally reverberating scale of fascism, war, and genocide (D.M. Thomas’ The White Hotel [1981], Luchino Visconti’s The Damned [1969], Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter [1974], Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler [1976–1977], Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List [1993],13 Holocaust [1978]), slavery (Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada [1976], Roots [1977]), or the Kennedy assassination (Don DeLillo’s Libra [1988], Oliver Stone’s JFK [1991]).14 White argues that works of historiographic metafiction and its cognate genres tend to be particularly receptive to ‘the experience, memory, or awareness’ of what he terms ‘modernist’ events. These he defines as events which not only could not possibly have occurred before the twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which no prior age could even have imagined. Some of these ‘holocaustal’ events – such as the two World Wars, the great depression, a growth in world population hitherto unimaginable, poverty and hunger on a scale never before experienced, pollution of the ecosphere by nuclear explosions and the indiscriminate disposal of contaminants, programs of genocide undertaken by societies utilizing scientific technology and rationalized procedures of governance and warfare (of which the German genocide of 6,000,000 European Jews is paradigmatic) – function in the consciousness of certain social groups exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic individuals. This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind, but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group’s capacities to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects.15 So complex, extensive, and overdetermined is the ‘modernist’ event that it challenges ‘any attempt to provide an objective account’.16 By altering even the most rudimentary, uncontested facts of the historical record in their ‘fabulations’ of such events, postmodernist, para-historical fictions hyperbolically emphasize the numerous unfathomable fissures with which our narratives of twentieth-century history are rent.17 In certain respects, then, White’s argument here intersects with that of Linda Hutcheon, for whom past events are fundamentally unknowable

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in and of themselves, and understandable only via the (inevitably partial) documents that surround them. Importantly, though, White’s more historicist theorization suggests that this melancholy epistemological condition may be imposed with peculiar force by the kinds of exceptionally complex and disruptive events that mark the post-nineteenthcentury era. Turning to the question of how such events should best be represented, White argues that traditional, realist approaches might ‘provide a kind of “intellectual mastery” of the anxiety which memory of their occurrence may incite in an individual or a community’. But, because of the inevitable distortions and, worse, normalizations they entail, narrativizations of this kind – ‘however truthful’ – ‘can provide no lasting “psychic mastery” of such events’.18 ‘This is why’, White argues, the kinds of anti-narrative non-stories produced by literary modernism [of which he considers ‘post-modernist, para-historical representation’ to be an extension] offer the only prospect for adequate representations of the kind of ‘unnatural’ events [ ... ] that mark our era and distinguish it absolutely from all of the ‘history’ that has come before it.19 ‘Modernist’ techniques of representation offer a means of ‘de-fetishizing’ catastrophic events: ‘This de-fetishizing can then clear the way for that process of mourning which alone can relieve the “burden of history” and make a more, if not totally realistic perception of current problems possible’.20 An ameliorative function of this kind may be a particularly prevalent characteristic of White’s modernist sub-category, ‘post-modernist, parahistorical representation’. Again, highly suggestive in this regard is the research of the neurobiologist Bessel A. van der Kolk and his associates. As I noted in relation to J.G. Ballard in Chapter 3, van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane observe that for traumatized individuals, ‘merely uncovering memories is not enough; they need to be modified and transformed.21 Elsewhere, van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart suggest, moreover, that patients may gain particular benefits from envisaging ‘less negative or even positive’ scenarios.22 A compelling analogy can, I think, be drawn between this therapeutic technique and the process by which many writers of ‘para-historical’ fictions alter, distort, and reimagine the lives of major historical figures, as well as the wider milieu in which they moved; like the narratives of patients recovering from traumatic experiences, literary texts of this kind often reconfigure the

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facts of the past along less painful lines, suggesting an attempt, however tentative and faltering, to pacify or redeem the grim, intractable movements of history itself. It is easy to detect a dynamic of this kind at work in Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma, which offers a vision – parodic, but only in part – of that great hate figure of the left – Walt Disney – purged of his virulent anti-communism and associations with anti-Semitism, Nazism, and prewar isolationalism, and dedicated, instead, to a heroic, tragically unrealizable, attempt to raise a Utopian epic from the wreckage of world war, and to the redress of one of the most shameful moments in the history of the United States: the incarceration of many thousands of its own citizens purely on the basis of their ethnicity. The challenge posed by such a reading to established theorizations of postmodernist, para-historical narrative can be usefully reformulated within the Lacanian framework that, as I showed in Chapter 1, underpins Jameson’s contribution to the debate. As Jameson makes clear, while the Real, for Lacan, ‘resists symbolization absolutely’, its distorting pressure upon the symbolic order that structures subjective and social reality is continually in evidence. As I explained in Chapter 1, in his seminar ‘Tuché and Automaton’ (1964), Lacan is particularly concerned with those moments at which the Real (for Jameson, of course, History itself) surges uncontrollably into this symbolic universe, shredding its fragile tissue – moments, that is, of trauma. The traumatic encounter (properly, a missed encounter) effects a disturbance in the network of signifiers of which symbolic reality is composed: most significantly, it instils a compulsion to repeat certain ‘signs’, or pathological symptoms. The deliberate process of editing, shuffling, and revision performed by recovering victims of trauma on their painful memories can thus be understood as serving to curtail the signifier or symptom’s slavish registration of the encounter with the traumatic Real. Similarly, in Prisoner’s Dilemma, the signifier ‘Walt Disney’ is not so much reified, in compliance with the relentless logic of capital, but rather strategically released from its associations with the obscene underside of mid-twentieth-century American culture (anti-Semitism, the far-right, denunciations and black-listing), permitting its entry into new, potentially more productive, alignments. The risks of such a strategy are obvious enough: the elision of genuine questions of guilt and responsibility, the indulgence of a desire for cosily beneficent versions of history, the reduction, ultimately, of historical narrative to the condition of euphoric, ‘anything goes’ bricolage described by Jameson in Postmodernism. Yet these objections are, in an important sense, misplaced, since whereas, for Jameson, the retreat from reference signalled

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by the ‘shuffling’ of ‘historical figures and names’ registers the sign’s reification and the concomitant waning of the historical Real, I have been arguing, conversely, that the displacement of the referent performed by a text like Prisoner’s Dilemma may well constitute an apotropaic move in response precisely to a disturbing excess of the Real – a move that thus, paradoxically, betrays, and serves to guarantee, the text’s continued saturation with historicity. My choice of Prisoner’s Dilemma as a text against which to test the thesis elaborated above is, of course, far from innocent – not least because the novel offers a series of implicit commentaries on its own representational strategies that operate within the terms of the debate I have set out. This commentary arises from the interspersal of segments of the Disney narrative between scenes depicting the interactions of a family named the Hobsons, residents of the small Illinois city of DeKalb, in the late 1970s. The account of Disney’s travails during World War II is, it gradually becomes apparent, the invention of the father of the family, Eddie. This narrative, entitled ‘Hobstown’, makes up just a small part of a vast imaginative project named ‘The American Theatre’, which Eddie has spent years dictating into a tape recorder. The novel registers the possibility that the creation of this counter-factual world merely reproduces the simulacral tendencies of the late capitalist culture Eddie inhabits. Yet it becomes clear that this exercise in reshuffling the fragments of the past constitutes Eddie’s only hope of assimilating and ‘working through’ his devastating experiences of the Second World War. These reflections are, in turn, projected onto ‘Disney’, as he labours over his own redemptive epic, You Are the War. The issues that arise from the creation of ‘Hobstown’ and You Are the War thus parallel, and implicitly engage with, those – outlined above – which surround the Disney narrative’s orientation with respect to extra-textual reality, or the referent, itself. In this sense, then, Prisoner’s Dilemma invites characterization as a work of ‘historiographic metafiction’ for two, closely related, reasons. Firstly, its incorporation of a major historical figure into its decidedly fictional texture suggests a ‘theoretical’ position regarding the functions, challenges, and paradoxes of postmodernist historical representation (though this tends along rather different lines to those imputed to this narrative mode by Hutcheon). And, secondly, this position (that the postmodern text may stand as a testament as much to the disturbing persistence of the historical past as to its inaccessibility) is also woven into the discursive fabric of the narrative at several levels.

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At the end of the novel, it is revealed to the reader that Eddie Hobson witnessed the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo during a spell of military service in ‘the wastelands of New Mexico’ (324). He continues to suffer the traumatic after-effects of having witnessed the first, explosive incursion into human reality of the previously unimaginable power inherent within the fabric of the material world: in a phrase with strong Lacanian and Jamesonian overtones, his observation of the Trinity test is described as a ‘small brush with real history’ (250; emphasis in original). The impact of this experience on Eddie’s subsequent life has been all the greater since it followed closely upon the death of his idolized older brother, a pilot, in a freak accident. His youngest son, Eddie Jr., describes this tragedy as ‘one of the central events of his life, as far as I can make out. With him every day, since’ (199). Despite having had no ‘real experience of the time or place’ (327; emphasis in original), Eddie’s children nonetheless sense that they have been infected with the ‘disease of history’ (317) first contracted by their father during the war. Listening to Eddie’s Hobstown recording at the end of the novel, Artie, Lily, and their sister Rachel feel ‘how their lives had been written out by 1946, years before their birth. [ ... ] Somewhere in the layers of sedimented ground the releasing key, the cathartic, firsthand knowledge of where they came from, lay buried’ (327). Earlier in the narrative, even before the origins of their father’s periodic breakdowns have been identified, Artie is conscious of being subject to this process of ‘secondary’ or ‘intergenerational’ traumatization: Artie suspected the trauma that scattered his early memories beyond regrouping and the trauma that instructed him not to bring friends over to the house were the same. Making this connection, Artie understood that his folks [ ... ] must have been compelled by the same decorum to make their steady decline out of sight. (91) The Hobson children are convinced that their father’s expenditure of ‘long hours late at night, inventing a protest, an alternative history’ (209) serves to ward off the threatening and persistent force of history, and thus to affirm, in Artie’s words, ‘the value of escapism in standing ground against the real’ (161). Artie notes that for his father, a lover of ‘the escapist film’, ‘If is now and forever his only weapon against brute realism’. Eddie is aware that ‘he must give in to brute realism in order to turn it around’. But ‘to turn it around, to move the pragmatic world, he must create a somewhere else to wedge the lever’ (248). As he listens to Eddie’s Hobstown tape for the first time, it becomes ‘increasingly clear’ to Artie that ‘Pop’s

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land, [ ... ] however rooted in fact branche[s] into a web of bewildering invention designed for its curative power alone’ (317): The man was fighting for his life: that much was obvious. And more than his life. [ ... ] Dad was trying, in the tape, to cure the permanent condition of mistrust the world fast embraced by creating a domain where escalating suspicion had no place. Hobstown. World World. (317) Essential to the ‘curative’ function of Eddie’s project is his insertion of his own teenaged self as Disney’s lead actor in the film You Are the War. Through this device, Eddie is able to go some way towards imaginatively redeeming the two foundational traumas of his life. In a ‘pivotal’ scene, Disney, seeking maximum naturalism, has an unsuspecting Eddie browse a magazine containing a photograph of his brother’s fatal plane crash. Eddie is devastated and enraged, but Disney eventually persuades him to proceed with the next scene, in which Mickey Mouse visits the grieving Eddie to offer some consolation: ‘Mickey shows how big brother Artie’s death trickles outward and, by putting boys on their cautionary mettle, saves lives. [ ... ] Somehow the boy does it, hallucinating his reconciliation with the meaningless accident, inventing acceptance from the shoals of sorrow’ (268–269). The film’s final sequence has a similar dynamic. As in Eddie’s own life, his character in the movie, an airplane mechanic, is transferred to a remote air base near the Tularosa Valley in New Mexico in 1945. Returning to a late-night game of cards after a cigarette, he is ‘greeted in mid-turn by the glorious light of day. Only brighter’. Eddie, projecting onto his younger self his own willed act of imagination, conjures a magical transfiguration of his encounter with the first atomic flash: ‘In that last, classic hesitation, Hobson cannot tell what is happening. “Fairy Dust” he says to himself. “Only believe”’ (312). As I have suggested, You Are the War is not merely the space in which Eddie Hobson attempts to pacify the calamities that have scarred his life; in addition, the issues that surround ‘Disney’s’ production of his opus mirror those that attend Eddie’s creation of the wartime sequence as a whole. For Eddie’s Walt Disney, the war is ‘unreal’ – and thus demands to be apprehended through ‘fantastic’ (221) modes of representation – precisely because it is too real, unimaginably excessive in its violent transgressions of what is typically taken for ‘reality.’ The narrative is concerned, then, with those aspects of the Second World War that distinguish it as an exemplary instance of what Hayden White terms the

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‘modernist event’: For a moment, [ ... ] Disney sees how immense, amorphous, and undeniably real the war is compared to what he means to do. For a moment, the war seems so ubiquitous and undirected as to make the definite article seem ridiculous. The scope and obscene speed of the unstoppable undertaking all around him splinters its monolithic façade and becomes a bouquet of operations: Overlord, Citadel, Greif, Punishment, Market-Garden, Barbarossa, Sledgehammer, Torch. (216–217) In the face of these mass convulsions, Disney’s project seems, on the one hand at least, woefully inadequate: However technically impressive the World World set, [ ... ] neither steering committee nor cast of thousands really knows whether ‘Wishing might make it so’ has any empirical validity to it whatsoever. [ ... ] The attempt to remedy a world gone madder than a galloping cancer through a medium as silly as documentary cartoon seems ludicrous. (216) The very incomprehensibility of the conflict may also, though (as White, too, suggests), serve to license, and lend a certain legitimacy, to the most outlandish fabulations. In the winter of 1943 Disney receives intimations of the Nazi Holocaust from his friend George Stevens, who is filming with the US Army in Britain. Disney ‘cannot name it’ but knows that ‘the terror deep in Central Europe already spreads outward’: His own country, in the cold light of necessity, considers sending against the Japs incendiary bombs tied to the legs of bats.23 [ ... ] Is the charter of Disney’s film, then, any more fantastic? It is no more desperate, no more urgent, no more surreal, no more irrational, no more hopeless, no more unrealistic, no more misplaced, than the world it hopes to save by simulating. (221) Disney is acutely aware that ‘[a] subterranean current of darkness has made its way to the surface of daily life and can no longer be pushed back down’ (179). Both the grand ambition and the tragic frailty of Disney’s Utopian response to this disturbing violation of everyday reality are conveyed by an early trailer for You Are the War:

[Disney] hears his crew’s own genuine hope in the restorative power of Never-never Land, calamine for a tortured and diseased world intent on betraying itself. He hears his ten thousand fellow internees ask how much a

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band of visionaries, armed with Fairy Dust, can do to correct history. [ ... ] Real death, global snuffing out of people, slaughter for borders, mucked-up national bickering: the whole bloody mess will fall away, the trailer insists, despite knowing better, if we can just tell the story of one person, tell the particular case fully and urgently and honestly, show how all this fellow ever wanted is to get along and assist in the harvest of Goodwill. How can conflagration come of that? (215; emphases in original) It is suggested that the ‘hypnotic hold on the mind of the collective world’ exerted by Disney’s most famous creation, Mickey Mouse, is already attributable, even before You Are the War is conceived, to the necessity of warding off the violent forces unleashed by the global conflict: ‘The air of an old planet even now fills with new names: Blitzkrieg, Radar, Dachau. [ ... ] In a world already lost, he is simply the finest provider of escape from the confusing, opaque, overwhelming, paralyzing, deadly serious, irreversible, and appalling times’ (98). Disney’s electronic recording device, into which he dictates his ideas, is (much like Eddie Hobson’s, on which the Disney narrative is itself to be understood as having been recorded) ‘his alter existence, [ ... ] the secret land where he creates the alternate worlds that give the public safe haven’ (98). Accordingly, the task of You Are the War will be to ‘enchant’ history, to ‘tame’ it, and lead it ‘up the front stoop of America’ (135). To this end, the movie will offer ‘a two-hour slice of everyday life with the ugly spots edited out’; it will ‘manipulate by cropping out, selectively deciding what not to show’ (217; emphasis in original). Its goal will be to create not ‘a replica “just like real life”, but [ ... ] a finished product that fleshes out real life and improves on it’ (183). Ultimately, Disney proposes not only to ‘deny the grip of necessity’, but to go further still – to ‘deny that reality exists’, to ‘live only for escape’ (221). But it is at this point that he confronts the double bind identified by Hal Foster, Slavoj Žižek, and others: the searing intensity of the Real necessitates its deflection and disavowal, but precisely this act of desperate repudiation testifies to the Real’s implacability and persistence. By denying ‘that reality exists’, ‘all the evil he means to outdistance comes creeping back’ (221). I have been trying to show how, via its dramatization, within the space of diegesis, of the vexed production of two works of what Hayden White might call ‘para-historical representation’ (Eddie’s ‘Hobstown’ and Disney’s You Are the War), Powers’ novel – as an example, at least in its Disney episodes, of this same genre – implicitly performs a series of selfreflexive meditations on its own mode of historicity and referentiality. As I have argued, the text’s various alternate renderings of history ultimately affirm their sensitivity to the traumatic pull of the historical Real, even

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(or rather precisely) as they strive to escape its gravitational field.24 These issues assume renewed urgency in the novel’s closing pages. As is well known, many postmodernist novels purposefully transgress traditional conventions of narrative realism, emphasizing what Hutcheon, Jameson, White, and numerous other scholars have shown to be realism’s unfounded or unsustainable claims to mimesis, empiricism, transparency, reference, and so forth. With its carefully drawn, complex, and psychologically credible characters, and its evocation of a recognisable geographic, social, political, and cultural milieu, the Hobson family strand of Prisoner’s Dilemma – in contrast to its Disney episodes – gives every indication of endorsing realist norms. It does so, however, only to thoroughly subvert its own ‘realism’ in its final pages. The central crisis of this sequence of the novel occurs when Eddie Sr. absconds from a veterans’ hospital in Chicago, where he has been admitted in the hope that his mysterious and increasingly severe physical and psychological symptoms will finally be treated. His family eventually determine that he is headed for the location of his originary trauma – the Trinity test site at Alamogordo – and Eddie Jr. sets out in pursuit. Eddie Sr. proves elusive in person, but he has evidently tampered with the public address system at the White Sands Visitors’ Centre, and as his voice booms out across the desert, his son picks up a handful of sand, whispers something into the grains, and casts them into the air: The white sand whipped directly upward at an astounding rate, entered the trade winds, and instantly spread around the earth three times in a girdle of imperceptible thinness. As they fell back to earth, the grains, countless now, entered the eyes of the people of the sleeping kingdom, dislodging the spell that had hung there for hundreds of years. Some say it was at that moment that folks finally began to sit up and see things with some measure of sense. (341) Joseph Dewey, in his reading of the novel, suggests that Eddie Jr. ‘imagines’ this fairy-tale-like sequence,25 yet textual indicators that might locate it within the mind of a character (such as a shift into free indirect discourse) are absent, and the reader is thus forced to conclude that a profound transformation has occurred in the ontological texture of this narrative strand itself, pitching it abruptly into the realm of what Tzvetan Todorov terms ‘the marvelous’. This passage appears within seven pages of the end of the novel, and the Hobson family are further ‘derealized’ in its final scene. By this point it is clear from Artie’s retrospective reflections, with which the novel is interspersed, that Eddie

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Sr.’s psychogeographic odyssey culminates in his death (though the precise circumstances of his demise remain unclear). It is disconcerting, then, that on the final page, in a scene set some five months later, the ‘specter’ or ‘apparition’ of the Hobsons’ dead father should cheerfully let itself in the front door as the family sits down to dinner (348). As Dewey acknowledges, at this point the Hobsons decisively become ‘unsettling cartoons’. They ‘abandon any pretense to being “real” and become manipulated characters, configurations of words’.26 Between these two phantasmagoric episodes a scene appears that would seem to underscore this narrative’s ultimate rejection of a realist mode; yet, once more, it does so in such a way as to reaffirm the text’s responsiveness to the vicissitudes of embodied existence. This one-page chapter describes the gathering of a family that the reader at first naturally assumes to be the Hobsons. Several inconsistencies soon manifest themselves, however: this family includes three brothers, one of whom is at medical school, while the Hobsons number only two – law student Artie, and Eddie, who is still at high school; and one of the two sisters mentioned here has a child, in contrast to the childless Lily and Rachel Hobson. The passage goes on to make an overtly metafictional move: Dad has just died of cancer, the previous winter. No one is sure what caused the disease. Some of us blame his assignment at Alamogordo, thirty-three years before. Others think a more likely culprit to be the style of life he chose in response to a long and unrequited love affair with the world. I, the middle son, going out into the flats on a long post, a deep pass, a bomb, stop short in mid-pattern. I have had an idea for how I might begin to make some sense of the loss. The plans for a place to hide out in long enough to learn how to come back. Call it Powers World. (345) To my knowledge, Powers has neither confirmed nor denied the suggestion that his father was stationed at Alamogordo in 1945, but his death from cancer did occur, as indicated here, in the winter of 1978.27 It is simplistic, however, to suggest, as Arthur M. Saltzman does, that in this scene ‘Richard Powers himself makes a cameo appearance’.28 Plainly, this episode is far from being a slice of authentic autobiography that accurately records the genesis of the foregoing novel. As if its meticulously contrived character were not evidence enough, the course of Powers’ biography indicates as much: his novelistic ambitions would only coalesce in the early 1980s, and then around the very different

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themes of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance; work on Prisoner’s Dilemma would not begin until after the publication of Three Farmers in 1985. We must, then, view this scene as a studiedly dramatized (and self-dramatizing) one, staged for maximum impact and resonance, and partaking of a substantial degree of retroactive projection. Nonetheless, this gesture, however oblique, towards painful biographical experience is highly suggestive. In its wake, it is possible to see that the aggressive repudiation of mimesis that marks the closing sequence of the novel (and to which the sudden interjection of the artificer into his text itself contributes) is performed only so that the analeptic function of the novel’s fictional circumventions – not only of historical catastrophe, but also now of personal bereavement – can be signalled.

Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Atonement A similar imbrication of personal, specifically filial, experience with the wider movements of twentieth-century history has long informed the writing of Ian McEwan. In a recent radio interview, he remarks that his generation (he was born in 1948) ‘very much grew up in the shadow’ of World War II: ‘our parents’ stories’ of the conflict ‘really did dominate our childhoods’. McEwan, and, he suggests, many of his contemporaries, continue to experience a guilty sense of not having been there to help, or some sort of connection to a past that seems alive to us in ways we can’t really account for: we weren’t there and yet we sort of feel we were because our childhoods were so shaped by those stories. It becomes emotionally, I think, quite important, for our generation, to pay our dues, pay our respects to our parents who went through this.29 One indicator of this ongoing preoccupation with the war is its looming presence in works by several of the most significant English novelists of this generation, including Julian Barnes (b. 1946), Martin Amis (b. 1949), Graham Swift (b. 1949), and Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954); McEwan himself has made the war and its legacy the focus of three of his texts: the television play The Imitation Game (1981) and the novels Black Dogs (1992) and Atonement (2001).30 This particularly prolonged imaginative engagement with the conflict may, as McEwan has acknowledged, be attributable, in part, to the decidedly military character of his upbringing. McEwan’s father was a career soldier who, as a member of the

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British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was wounded during the retreat to Dunkirk in the summer of 1940; raised on his father’s vivid accounts of this period, McEwan experienced the war as ‘a living presence throughout my childhood’ and ‘sometimes [ ... ] found it hard to believe I had not been alive in the summer of 1940’.31 These remarks suggest an implicit faith on the part of the young McEwan in the capacity of narrative to evoke, in an immediate manner, a mode of experience as alien and extreme as that of mechanized warfare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the vocation to which he has dedicated himself, McEwan has, to some extent at least, retained a conviction of this kind into adulthood. This is evident in the importance he continues to attach to his father’s war stories, as well as in his responses to historical accounts of the conflict32 and to letters and diaries written at the front. McEwan read a large number of the latter such documents in the Imperial War Museum in London whilst conducting research for the central, wartime sequence of Atonement. In consulting these papers he was ‘looking for [ ... ] what I thought of as the emotional truth of the thing’, a truth that, he suggests, inheres in ‘the particular details’, such as the scenes, in accounts by members of the BEF, of horses being shot and boots, typewriters, and even bibles being destroyed ‘in case they fell into the hands of the Germans’.33 For McEwan, details like these offer ‘a way into the emotional horror of the thing’; in turn, their inclusion in fictional narrative – as in Atonement 34 – bestows a heightened verisimilitude: ‘If you can get these visual details correct, is my theory about this, the rest will follow’.35 I wish to dwell on McEwan’s discussion of these documents for a few moments because one remark, in particular, graphically encapsulates the issues with which I will be concerned in the remainder of this chapter: namely, the potentialities and limitations of narrative, and of representation more generally, as means of capturing and conveying the phenomenological character of modern warfare. McEwan describes how, at the Imperial War Museum, researchers are able to handle letters and diaries written by British soldiers in Northern France on which one ‘can see the ink running from contact with water or even blood stains’. Consequently, ‘you really do feel in touch with the history’.36 This perception of proximity, of a dense and arresting aura of historicity, must, I think, be attributable precisely to the way in which such documents – inscribed on the battlefield and bearing its material presence – seem to embody a reality that the accounts themselves, considered purely as symbolic phenomena, can, no matter how vivid, only gesture towards. Equally, though, the stains on these papers might

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themselves be read – as the merest traces of conditions so violent, chaotic, and terrifying as to be barely imaginable for a growing majority of visitors to such an archive (or, indeed, for a growing majority of readers of literary novels such as Atonement). In one sense, then, these blood stains seem to embody the raw and irreducible materiality of battle; yet in another, they appear simply as additional, albeit indexical and analogical, signifiers whose referents – like those of the symbolic, digital signifiers they accompany – are impossibly remote. In either case, what is highlighted is the incapacity of mere signifiers to channel anything like an authentic sense of the affective and somatic character of combat to today’s reader. As I have noted, however, McEwan has long taken the view that the power of linguistic representation in this regard is, nevertheless, substantial. Accordingly, in Atonement his father’s stories,37 material from letters, diaries, memoirs, and historical accounts,38 and his own imaginative reconstructions are all employed in an attempt to offer as vivid a depiction of war as possible. Taking a more reflexive approach than the pronouncements quoted above might suggest, though, McEwan also has his characters reflect on precisely the difficulties inherent in such a strategy. Indeed, he goes further by suggesting that if, for later generations, the sheer alterity of a phenomenon such as Blitzkrieg has placed it beyond what can be imaginatively apprehended, it may also have been the case that precisely this overwhelming ferocity rendered many of those engaged in the conflict themselves incapable of fully experiencing and processing it as it occurred. Again, this view is hinted at by McEwan’s description of the blood-stained letters and diaries: the corporeal marks they bear testify to the occurrence of events that not only evade attempts to comprehend them by subsequent generations of readers, but which were also, necessarily, inimical to articulation in language by those experiencing them. The blood can therefore be seen to constitute the ‘supplement’ of the text with which it is juxtaposed; it marks the irruption – in wounding, abjection, and pain39 – of precisely what the symbolic order cannot contain: the ‘Real’, that sublime realm of pure materiality, which, as Jacques Lacan defines it, ‘resists symbolization absolutely’. Moreover, McEwan notes that while some of the letters and diaries he read fixate on precise details, many neither attempt to capture the atmosphere of the battlefield nor concern themselves with assessing the broader strategic position of the British forces; instead, they are characterized by a longing for domestic routine40 that is suggestive of what psychologists term ‘dissociation’ or ‘numbing’ – a common mode of

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response to overwhelming experience.41 In addition, the very fact that blood and water were allowed to stain the letters and diaries also attests to the hurriedness of their inscription – an inevitability in the midst of a harried military operation of this kind. Atonement implies that the kinds of absences and elisions discernible in these written documents are symptomatic of a wider ‘crisis of witnessing’42 in which the intensity and the speed of combat combine to outstrip punctual perception, apprehension, and representation. As such, the text resonates suggestively with psychoanalytic theories of trauma. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian conceptualizations of trauma – particularly as they have been put to use in the realm of aesthetics by the likes of Cathy Caruth and Hal Foster – I show how McEwan employs a range of literary techniques in order to evoke, for the reader, the conditions of a traumatic encounter. I begin, though, by providing a brief outline of the events in Atonement that precede its wartime scenes. The opening section of Atonement is set on a single, scorching day in the summer of 1935 at a country house in Surrey. As the narrative opens, Briony, the precocious youngest child of the Tallis family, who occupy the estate, is directing her visiting cousins in a production of her latest theatrical endeavour, which she intends to perform to celebrate a visit by her older brother, Leon. When Leon arrives, he has his friend Paul Marshal, a thuggish, lecherous businessman, in tow. Another arrival at the house is Robbie Turner, the prodigiously talented son of a servant on the estate, whom the Tallis family have put through Cambridge. Over the course of the afternoon, Robbie and the other Tallis daughter, Cecilia, realize that the tension and awkwardness that characterize their relationship mask their intense attraction to one another. Briony, however, interrupts the hurried consummation of their romance. In the evening, two of the cousins go missing. During the search for them, a third cousin, Lola, is raped. The reader immediately recognizes the culprit to be the brutish Paul Marshal, but Briony, having misinterpreted Robbie and Cecelia’s love-making as an assault, identifies Robbie as the rapist. The sequence closes with Robbie’s arrest. As Part Two opens, we find Robbie Turner and two companions attempting to find their bearings in a wood somewhere in Northern France. Five years have passed, and, in exchange for early release from prison, Robbie has joined the army. He is now part of the British Expeditionary Force that is retreating, in disarray, to Dunkirk before the onslaught of the German war machine. The sequence traces the three soldiers’ progress across this ravaged, chaotic environment. Passing through the rubble of a destroyed village, whose gutters and pavements

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are strewn with dozens of corpses, Robbie decides, categorically, that ‘no one would ever know what it was like to be here’. If there is to be any possibility of imaginative reconstruction, however, it must, he feels, foreground the minutiae of the experience: ‘Without the details there could be no larger picture’ (227). There is a self-reflexive quality to this remark, since this is indeed McEwan’s own strategy throughout much of the wartime section of the novel. As I noted earlier, McEwan incorporates into the Dunkirk sequence a host of anecdotes, derived from a range of primary sources, which help to capture something of the sheer urgency, desperation, and – frequently – absurdity of the Allied retreat. What I want to consider here, though, is the unflinching detail with which the narrative focuses in on, and penetrates into, a key site through which the Real – in Lacanian terms – is manifested: the mutilated body. Hal Foster notes that some contemporary art work appears as if it wants ‘the real to exist, in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire, or at least to evoke this sublime condition’.43 This mode of art, which Foster, following Julia Kristeva, terms ‘abject’,44 typically does so by staging a violation of the integrity of the human body that reveals its gross materiality. That Atonement attempts something similar is most obviously apparent in Part Three, which portrays the experiences of Briony Tallis – Robbie Turner’s wrongful accuser – during the early stages of the war. Plagued by guilt over her role in Robbie’s conviction, Briony has forsaken a place at Cambridge and entered nursing training in London. She is on duty when the first casualties from Dunkirk arrive at her hospital. As Briony tends to the wounded, ‘every secret of the body [is] rendered up – bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve’. From this ‘new and intimate perspective, she [learns] a simple, obvious thing she [has] always known and everyone [knows]: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended’ (304). This realization is graphically evoked as Briony dresses the face of a patient whose cheek has been shot away. The cavity is all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate and never intended to be seen. (302) Abject art, Foster argues, employs an aesthetic of ‘the obscene’. For him, this term suggests an act of tearing or peeling back – not simply of the

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membrane of the body, but also of the ‘scene’, the ‘screen’, or the ‘schemata of representation’ on or through which this bodily violation is depicted. Under an aesthetic of this kind, ‘the object-gaze [in Lacanian theory, the gaze that the object directs towards the subject, which Lacan equates with the Real] is presented as if there were [ ... ] no frame of representation to contain it’.45 Rather similarly, in its depictions of broken, punctured, and lacerated bodies, the language of Atonement – unadorned, simple, non-‘literary’ – appears to aspire to a condition of transparency or self-erasure that would allow direct and unmediated apprehension of the horrors depicted. For example, one of Briony’s encounters is described thus: The side of Luc’s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back from the missing portion of skull. Below the jagged line of bone was a spongy crimson mess of brain, several inches across, reaching from the crown almost to the tip of his ear. (308) Attending to another soldier who has lost part of his nose, Briony is able to ‘see through the cartilage into his mouth, and onto the back of his lacerated tongue’ (297–298). If, as Slavoj Žižek observes, ‘one of the definitions of the Lacanian Real is that it is the flayed body, the palpitation of the raw, skinless red flesh’,46 then McEwan’s strategy certainly goes some way towards evoking, in Foster’s terms, an encounter with the Real amidst the carnage of battle. By so doing, however, it invites the reader to overlook the fact that its direct mode of address is itself a sophisticated rhetorical form employed precisely for its tendency to elicit such an effect, rather than for any privileged ability to capture the reality of warfare, much less the Real itself. Moreover, there is a way in which the desire, evident in these passages, to offer up slices of the Real for the reader’s inspection betrays an urge to negate precisely the seething plenitude that is the source of the Real’s threatening power. As Foster remarks with regard to visual art, ‘it might be argued that the obscene is the greatest apotropaic defence against the real, the ultimate reinforcement of the image-screen, not its ultimate dissolvent’.47 What I want to suggest, however, is that the ultimate inadequacy of this technique is a consequence not so much of distance from the Real, but rather of immediacy, understood not in the sense of proximity or directness, but of punctuality. As I explained in chapter 1, for Lacan and other theorists it is a characteristic of the most overwhelming experiences that they outstrip the capacity of the subject to fully experience them as they occur. Assuming, for the time being,

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that the most a literary text may effect is an evocation of the conditions of an encounter with the Real, rather than the realization of such an encounter in its actuality, I will argue that in Atonement these conditions are most effectively evoked when the text relinquishes its aspirations to pure, contemporaneous presence and instead employs tactics of evasion, elision, and belatedness. Foster notes that Ian McEwan is one of many contemporary writers and film-makers who, conceive experience in [the] paradoxical modality [of trauma]: experience that is not experienced, at least not punctually, that comes too early or too late, that must be acted out compulsively or reconstructed after the fact. [ ... ] Often in these novels and films narrative runs in reverse or moves very erratically, and the climax is an event that happened long ago or not at all.48 I intend to demonstrate how Atonement – published in 2001, several years after Foster made these remarks – strikingly bears out the affinities between key contemporary narratives and trauma that Foster argues for. I will suggest that the novel is structured in such a way as to stage the missing, and belated registration, of events – specifically the devastating German assaults on Britain and France in the early stages of World War II – which occur too rapidly to be straightforwardly assimilated to consciousness. The sheer scale of the traumatization inflicted by the war has intriguing and unsettling implications for the reception of a text such as Atonement. At this point, though, I wish to focus on McEwan’s writing in the section of the novel set in Northern France, which powerfully evokes the speed and ferocity of the Luftwaffe’s assault on the retreating British forces. In a particularly striking sequence, which depicts a Messerschmitt attack on a column of soldiers, McEwan employs the technique of ‘delayed decoding’ in order to enact the incapacity of consciousness to grasp a rupturing event that occurs, in Cathy Caruth’s words, ‘too soon’, or ‘too quickly’.49 This method of conveying to the reader something of the psychological shock produced by the rapid unfolding of material phenomena has been particularly closely associated with modernist writers, most notably Joseph Conrad. The Conrad scholar Ian Watt, who coined the term, explains that delayed decoding combines the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive

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process of making out their meaning. Through this device [ ... ] the reader participates in the instantaneous sensations.50 The following passage from Atonement exemplifies the technique: [Robbie] was looking past the major’s shoulder towards the head of the column. Hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by the rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended horizontally, with a bulge in its centre. The major’s words were not reaching him and nor were his own clear thoughts. The horizontal apparition hovered in the sky without growing larger, and though he was beginning to understand its meaning, it was, as in a dream, impossible to begin to respond or move his limbs. His only action had been to open his mouth, but he could make no sound, and would not have known what to say, even if he could. (221) Similarly, Robbie later sees fifteen ‘little dots in the blue, circling above the road’. One of these ‘specks’ peels away from the group and launches into a ‘near-vertical dive’ (235). As it becomes apparent that this object is, in fact, a German Stuka bomber, Robbie and the rest of his column hurry to disperse; through free indirect discourse, the narrator voices Robbie’s intuition that the infliction of psychic trauma is a core objective of such attacks: [the Stuka’s] rising howl commenced. Nightmares had become a science. Someone, a mere human, had taken the time to dream up this satanic howling. And what success! It was the sound of panic itself, mounting and straining towards the extinction they all knew, individually, to be theirs. It was a sound you were obliged to take personally. (236) Rather similarly, Paul Virilio remarks: Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception – that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects. A well-known example is the Stuka or Junker 87, the German dive-bomber of World War Two that swept down on its target with a piercing screech designed to terrorize and paralyse the enemy. It was completely successful in this aim until the forces on the ground eventually grew used to it.51

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Such desensitization seems far off for Robbie and his comrades. Following the raid, the all clear sounds, but ‘no one move[s]’. The narrator remarks of the soldiers, They were too dazed, they were in shock from repeated episodes of terror. Each dive brought every man, cornered and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not come, the trial had to be lived through all over again and the fear did not diminish. For the living, the end of a Stuka attack was the paralysis of shock, of repeated shocks. (238–239) Throughout the sequence of Atonement set in Northern France, Robbie carries an injury, sustained in an earlier Stuka assault. He never ascertains the nature or seriousness of his wound: he speculates that the object embedded in his side is ‘a piece of shrapnel perhaps’ (192), but it is otherwise referred to simply as ‘something’ (192, 222) or ‘whatever’ (202); similarly, the fluid that leaks from the laceration is ‘something, not blood’ (225), ‘blood or some other fluid’ (259). This imprecision has a practical cause – continually on the move, Robbie is unable to thoroughly examine his injury – yet this sheer insistence on the wound’s resistance to detailed description, as well as the text’s broader concern with the relationship between linguistic representation and bodily violation, suggest an emblematic function for this embedded fragment. Like Lacan’s tuché, the abruptly inflicted material rupture that Robbie suffers makes itself felt, also, as a rupture in signification: in contrast to the scenes discussed above, in which an evocation of the Real is attempted through the detailed cataloguing of mutilated bodies, here the reader is forced to recognize that even the most precise anatomization would be inadequate as a means of conveying the true agony of trauma, which inheres precisely in the kernel of unknowability, and unsayability, at its core. Despite Robbie’s pain, however, this part of the novel ends on a tentatively hopeful note. Having narrowly evaded the Luftwaffe’s deadly raids, he reaches the beach at Dunkirk. Though delirious from hunger and from his infected wound, as he slips into unconsciousness at the end of the section he is heartened by the news that he and his comrades will be evacuated the following morning. The reader’s hopes for an uplifting conclusion to the novel are further boosted in the latter pages of Part Three. On a rare day off from the hospital, Briony Tallis visits her sister, Cecelia, who is also now living in London. Cecelia has remained loyal to Robbie throughout his imprisonment and has refused

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to respond to Briony’s attempts at contact. Briony is shocked to find Robbie – recently returned from France – at Cecelia’s flat and a tense scene ensues. Briony vows to do everything in her power to overturn Robbie’s conviction, however, and, as she leaves, a future reconciliation is hinted at. If McEwan’s method in the Dunkirk sequence invites comparison with modernist theory and aesthetics, the novel’s epilogue makes what appears to be a quintessentially postmodernist move. This concluding section, which follows Part Three, is entitled ‘London, 1999’, and is narrated in the first person by a 77-year old Briony Tallis. It reveals that the preceding text is a work of semi-autobiographical narrative obsessively drafted and redrafted by Briony over the intervening decades. As Brian Finney notes, this device struck some reviewers as a self-vandalizing act of metafictional whimsy.52 In contrast, I would contend that (rather like the comparable frame-breaking shift that occurs at the conclusion of Prisoner’s Dilemma) McEwan’s finale in fact retroactively enriches the foregoing narrative and, moreover, contains material that serves to intensify – rather than dispel – the reader’s affective investment in the events narrated. One of the key implications of Briony’s revelation is that her challenge in relation to the Dunkirk section of the text – to effectively render a combat experience that she has not herself undergone – parallels McEwan’s own with regard to the wartime content of the novel as a whole. Furthermore, the sources that Briony has drawn on in order to maximize the ‘verisimilitude’ (359) of her account – veterans’ recollections (353), historical authorities (359–360), even the archive at the Imperial War Museum (353, 356–360) – correspond to those consulted by McEwan himself. Thus, McEwan’s artistic predicament, as well as the development of some of his (partial) solutions, are inscribed into the text itself. More intriguing still is the way in which the epilogue recodes the anatomically precise descriptions that appear in the section of the novel set in Briony’s London hospital. A number of remarks that appear in this sequence suggest a necessary condition of wordlessness in the face of extreme experience that sits uneasily, at least on first reading, alongside the minutely detailed descriptions of bodily wounding that play such a key role in this section. Tending to the first influx of casualties from Dunkirk, Briony and her fellow probationary nurses work for ‘twelve hours without rest’ (304), though time seems curiously accelerated (302). At the end of her shift, she walks to her lodgings with another nurse: overwhelmed by the intensity and the frenetic pace of

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their activities, ‘they could not have begun to describe their time on the wards, or how it had changed them’ (310). Similarly, when Briony visits her sister, she learns that Cecelia – herself a nurse – is working at an Emergency Medical Services hospital, ‘a commandeered place, most likely dealing with the brunt, the real brunt of the evacuation’. Remembering the gruesome scenes that she has witnessed, and intuiting that her sister has been exposed to still greater horrors, Briony is conscious that ‘there [is] too much that [can’t] be said, or asked’ (332). This tension resolves itself, however, when viewed from the perspective of the epilogue. It then becomes clear that the hospital scenes need to be understood as products of a sixty-year process of compulsively repetitive inscription, through which an experience that was somehow unavailable to symbolization as it occurred, and in its immediate aftermath, has both manifested itself in its intense visuality, and been partially tamed or contained within the frame of symbolization. If the disclosure that Briony is the author of the preceding narrative comes as a surprise, a further, more powerful twist occurs within two pages of the end of the novel, when Briony remarks, It is only in this last version that my lovers end well. [ ... ] All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader [ ... ] that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecelia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground Station. That I never saw them in that year. (370) The likely effects of these baleful revelations on a reader correspond in various ways to the temporal structure – though not, it goes without saying, to the intensity – of a traumatic episode. Most obviously, as with Lacan’s tuché or Virilio’s accident, the shock that Briony’s grim admission transmits derives precisely from the reader’s lack of preparedness for it – the abruptness with which it occurs. On a first reading of the novel, the passage quoted above resists punctual assimilation: instead, like the Lacanian tuché, it instils a compulsion to repeat, to re-read, until the full enormity of the information imparted becomes apparent. Thereafter, this compulsion may manifest itself in an urge to re-read the entire novel (an act that suggests a parallel with Freud’s claim, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the repetition compulsions suffered by traumatized veterans of the First World War constituted belated attempts to ‘prepare’ for devastating events that had, in fact, taken

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them unawares).53 Many of the contributors to the discussion board on the official Ian McEwan web site testify to a need to re-read parts or all of the text, as well as to the extent to which, having finished reading the novel, its final revelations preoccupied them.54 Briony’s tacit admission that Robbie and Cecelia died in the early stages of the war presents, then, an initially unassimilable rupture, which demands to be repeated before it can be integrated into the text’s narrative (and the reader’s psychic) economy. More profoundly, perhaps, this revelation confronts the reader with past events that were themselves somehow missed or incompletely experienced as they occurred, and retroactively imbues them with an intense and terrible significance. Again, this effect invites analysis in relation to the model of trauma that Freud terms Nachträglichkeit. Jean Laplanche, who has done much to draw out the implications of this concept,55 offers a particularly apposite formulation of the theory: Trauma consists of two moments: the trauma, in order to be psychic trauma, doesn’t occur in just one moment. First, there is the implantation of something coming from outside. And this experience, or the memory of it, must be reinvested in a second moment, and then it becomes traumatic. It is not the first act which is traumatic, it is the internal reviviscence of this memory that becomes traumatic.56 The temporality of the reading experience structured by Atonement precisely corresponds to that elaborated by Laplanche. As Part Two approaches its close, the implied reader57 of the text is disquieted by the convulsive violence that has characterized the description of the Allied retreat to Dunkirk, and, more specifically, by the pain and delirium suffered by Robbie as a consequence of his infected wound. Yet, as I have noted, the section ends in a spirit of cautious optimism, and the implied reader’s unease is further allayed by the unexpected appearance of Robbie, safe and well (albeit still bitterly angry with Briony), during Briony’s visit to her sister’s London home in Part Three. I would suggest, though, that the reading experience modelled by the text is one in which these anxieties – ‘implanted’, as Laplanche puts it, during Part Two – persist, at an inchoate level, throughout Part Three, and are ‘revivified’ by the revelations that occur in the epilogue. It is only at this point that earlier scenes (I employ the term in both its literary and psychoanalytic senses) assume their full, tragic significance; in particular, certain remarks, such as Robbie’s companion’s observation that, ‘There’s something not right with you, Guv’nor’ (255), and Robbie’s last

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words before slipping into unconsciousness, ‘I promise, you won’t hear another word from me’ (265), are retroactively invested with a macabre charge. Atonement thus stages for the reader a movement from an inadequately grasped encounter with violence, wounding, and death, through a period of ‘latency’ or ‘incubation’,58 to a second moment of rupture, in which the earlier encounter is reawakened in its full potency. While the implied reader’s experience is not remotely equivalent to that of a traumatized war veteran, the former bears affinities with the temporal structure, and even entails some fraction of the affective intensity, of the latter. The text therefore offers a means by which members of McEwan’s generation might approach an emotional and ethical duty that he considers to be particularly incumbent upon them: that is, to attempt to appreciate, as far as possible, the extremities that so many of their parents’ generation not only underwent during wartime, but were condemned to relive in the years and decades that followed. The ending of Atonement also recodes the preceding narrative in an alternative – or rather, perhaps, additional – manner, however, which may be all the more effective, and affective, since it powerfully underscores the actual condition of subsequent generations with regard to the upheavals of the Second World War. This point concerns the notion of narrative distance – the temporal (and psychological) distance between the story-now (the point in time occupied by the characters) and the discourse-now (the point in time occupied by the narrator).59 Throughout the first three parts of Atonement, it is clear that the discourse-now postdates the story-now. Most obviously, this is apparent from the fact that the story is narrated in the past or past progressive tense. More subtly, there are several instances of prolepsis – remarks that demonstrate that the narrator has knowledge of a character’s future; this knowledge extends at least half an hour (156), and as much as many years (40), ahead.60 For the most part, however, this narrative distance is elided. Besides some occasional self-signalling remarks, of which these moments of prolepsis are the most obtrusive, the narration is largely covert. This effect is achieved through an extensive delegation of focalization from the narrator to a number of internal focalizers; in other words, by presenting the story’s events from the point of view of its characters (specifically, Robbie throughout Part Two, Briony throughout Part Three, and a variety of characters – predominantly Robbie, Briony, and Cecelia – throughout Part One). This strategy contributes to the immediacy of the war scenes, in particular. When Briony uncovers the cavity in a patient’s skull in Part Three, for example, the implied reader’s

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perception is of co-experiencing a sequence of unfolding events, in spite of the potentially distancing effect of the past tense narration (308). The epilogue, however, undermines the immediacy conjured up by this mode of narration. Although the implied reader has a sense of having participated with the main characters in their experiences, the epilogue demands a new understanding of the narrative that is also, on some level, a recognition: namely, that the events depicted in the first three parts of the novel predate Briony’s narration of them by a considerable distance – in fact by six decades – as do the deaths of Robbie and Cecelia. This temporal gap precisely corresponds, of course, to that between the composition of Atonement itself and the historical period that is the setting of its first three parts. McEwan’s text ultimately emphasizes, therefore, that no matter how effective they are in their evocations of the experience of combat, war narratives entail, in their very telling, a melancholy awareness on the part of both narrator and recipient that the fighting has already been done, the dead already slain, before the act of narration commences. Amongst Atonement’s most profound effects, therefore, may be the way in which, as its pseudotraumatic reverberations subside, it leaves the reader with a renewedly acute awareness of the historical gulf that separates him or her from the events of World War II – whence, perhaps, what McEwan describes as a ‘guilty sense’, amongst members of his generation, ‘of not having been there to help’. The structure of the reading experience implied by Atonement thus mirrors not so much that of a traumatized survivor of World War II, as that of a ‘secondary witness’ to that conflict, to whom its ruptures have been forcefully conveyed, but who is acutely conscious of not having been present (even, perhaps, of not having been alive) as they occurred. I want to conclude by arguing, moreover, that the process of reading Atonement may, in some cases, be productive of symptoms associated with this condition in their actuality. This mode of experience is not itself implied by the text, but may potentially arise from the interaction between responses that are textually modelled and psychological phenomena that have been carried to the act of reading. In elaborating this argument I draw on the work of the Lacanian psychoanalysts François Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière. As Paul Virilio’s analysis makes clear, during the global conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century the increasing range, power, and speed of the military technologies deployed by the major powers meant that conditions conducive to traumatization proliferated on an unprecedented scale. As he observes in War and Cinema, ‘with the advent of

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strategic bombing everything is now brought home to the cities, and it is no longer just the few but a whole mass of spectator-survivors who are the surviving spectators of combat’.61 Based on their clinical experience, Davoine and Gaudillière argue in their recent book History Beyond Trauma (2004) that many members of subsequent generations, in all parts of the world, continue to be afflicted by traumatic upheavals suffered by their parents or grandparents in these vast waves of devastation. As they acknowledge, the mode of causality at work here is unclear, but they point to the sheer repetitiveness of family members’ war stories, or, more significantly, to their refusals to speak of horrific or shameful episodes that are nonetheless betrayed by unstable emotions, absences of affection, strange habits and compulsions, or disproportionate responses to such apparently banal occurrences as simple household quarrels.62 These behaviours, Davoine and Gaudillière argue, may be mechanisms by which, ‘charging down the course of several generations’, knowledge of ‘the Real [rushes], with an incredible concentration, into a mind and a body too small to contain it’.63 Though the majority of the sufferers of this condition who have been studied by Davoine and Gaudillière have experienced its fullblown emergence in psychosis, the two psychoanalysts doubt, given the extent of the traumatization produced by the catastrophes of the twentieth century (and particularly by the paroxysms of the Second World War), that such intergenerationally transmitted ruptures are limited to psychotics, and argue, instead, that they are most likely carried at a submerged or unconscious level by significant numbers of apparently ‘normal’ individuals across the globe, including, significantly, psychoanalysts themselves.64 In a variation on the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, Davoine and Gaudillière argue that the inveterate traces of trauma borne by these individuals await revivification by an encounter that echoes them in some way. In the case of the psychoanalyst, this may occur through the transference – the stage of the psychoanalytic process in which the analysand compulsively repeats or ‘acts out’ habitual modes of behaviour in his or her dealings with the analyst. Davoine and Gaudillière describe how in their own practice they have frequently attempted to treat patients whose repetition compulsions suggest that they have imbibed the effects of a traumatic encounter first undergone by an ancestor in one of the ‘catastrophic zones’ of the first half of the twentieth century.65 In the process, the two analysts have found themselves afflicted with initially obscure sensations of unease, which they have eventually attributed to the reawakening of troubling traces of the Real transmitted to them by

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their own parents during childhoods overshadowed by the legacy of World War II.66 The psychoanalytically orientated reader-response critic Norman N. Holland has invoked the phenomenon of transference in his explorations of the dynamics of reading.67 As Elizabeth Freund notes, in Holland’s model ‘the encounter of analyst and analysand is seen to correspond to the encounter of reader and text’.68 With Holland’s and Davoine’s and Gaudillière’s arguments in mind, I wish to venture a speculative hypothesis about a potential effect of the experience of reading Atonement, one which might also be applicable to other texts that deal with the mass calamities of the twentieth century. If embedded traumas are anything like as prevalent amongst the offspring of individuals who lived through World War II as Davoine and Gaudillière claim, then it is conceivable that the charge of affect typically released during the process of reading Atonement (a text whose composition is itself impelled by an intense, though not pathological, preoccupation with the war) might, in some cases, be substantially heightened by the attendant emergence of a traumatic remnant, which, though it may not be readily identifiable as such, originates in a parent’s experience of the war itself. Thus, while McEwan’s novel itself is necessarily incapable of producing a tuché through which the reader would be pierced by the Real’s precipitous irruption, the historical conditions that help to shape its field of reception (and inform its production) are such that the text may trigger the reopening of psychic fissures engraved on the reading subject by the Real’s intergenerationally channelled force.69 Such an occurrence would be only the most acute demonstration, though, of the way in which Atonement crystallizes a pervasive, yet ordinarily submerged, process of reckoning with World War II in contemporary or ‘postmodern’ culture.

Conclusion: Writing/Reading World War II After 9/11

A guiding premise of this book has been that literary writing, like all modes of signification, traverses a symbolic field whose zones of particular density and ultimate boundaries are historically contingent. It is no coincidence that the innovative Anglo-American fiction of the last sixty years – that which has most concertedly probed the limits of the symbolic order – should so often have confronted the legacy of World War II. This pervasive sensitivity, in the literary sphere, to the war and its aftermath is indicative of how enduring the conflict’s reconfiguration of the symbolic coordinates of the wider culture has been, even as the event itself recedes towards the horizon of living memory. In the preceding chapters, I have tried to show how a number of representative fictional texts respond to and register a host of ramifying disturbances – both personal and cultural – which emanate from the upheavals of the war years. At the end of the final chapter, however, I gestured towards the correlative process by which literary texts may themselves amplify or reawaken these same traumatic reverberations. It is true that at the level of the social totality the effects of any individual text would typically be barely perceptible. The sheer extent to which a concern with the Second World War has permeated literary fiction, and particularly the work of many of the post-war era’s most talented and celebrated writers, must, however, have contributed to the potency that the war still possesses within contemporary cultural memory. If, moreover, fictional responses to the war have displaced, disavowed, dispersed, or reimagined, the actuality of the conflict as often as they have attempted to render it directly, this serves to remind us, as readers, of the complex negotiations – the celebrations, evasions, mythologizations, and painful reconstructions – that have produced our own, and our wider culture’s, understandings of the conflict. 175

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Drawing on this notion of the necessary embeddedness of the literary text in the shifting planes of meaning that make up a culture, I wish, in closing, to briefly reflect on the particular urgency that narratives of World War II have assumed in an era supposedly characterized by a new, radically divergent ‘world war’: the ‘war on terror’. In her recent study, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (2005), Marianna Torgovnivk claims that the ‘wartime consciousness’ produced by the Second World War ‘remained ready to be reanimated on 9/11’.1 Within the administration of George W. Bush, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. in September 2001 rapidly prompted invocations of the outrage committed against the United States at Pearl Harbour in 1941, and demands for a comparably decisive military response. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair similarly strove to align the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with a powerful narrative of the United States and Great Britain’s Second World War as an epic struggle of liberty against tyranny. 2 Torgovnick suggests, though, that beyond the realm of political rhetoric, the images of World War II summoned up by the events of 9/11 have tended away from the mythic or heroic, and towards the gruesome and distressing: I would say that reactions to 9/11 were conditioned by Auschwitz and the other death camps and also by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cumulative events of World War II. Mass death, coming quickly and even arbitrarily; quick and simultaneous deaths, produced by technology’s baleful side: 9/11 brought those facts home, though they had been with us for some time.3 I have argued in this book that the ‘postmodernism’ of a number of the fictional texts under discussion lies in their dislocation of the event of the war from its position in the historical manifold, and their uncanny interfusion of this moment with states of anxiety or crisis unfolding in the present of composition. With this in mind, it is intriguing to consider how associations between the mass devastations of World War II and the similarly urban- and civilian-orientated terrorist insurgencies that mark the contemporary period might manifest themselves in fiction. That such resonances present themselves to the literary imagination is suggested by a number of recent texts. In an essay written shortly after September 11, Michael Moorcock sounds a characteristically optimistic, even celebratory, note, suggesting that the resilience of Londoners during the Blitz is now being emulated

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by the inhabitants of New York: There is a famous photograph, popular during World War II, of a London bookshop. [ ... ] There is a familiar serenity about the picture. Oblivious of the camera, customers are deeply engrossed in their reading. [ ... ] The only abnormality is that the shop has very little roof left, large parts of walls are now rubble strewn across the floor, fragments of glass are everywhere. [ ... ] A piece of cardboard has been pulled from the wreckage and on it, written in a firm hand, is a single word: OPEN. The shop had of course been V-bombed. Defiantly, [ ... ] London was carrying on as usual. [ ... ] Our civilization and way of life was valued not only in spite of the Nazi bombs, but in some senses because of them. [ ... ] Our Russian allies called their great cities ‘hero cities’ [ ... ]. Now New York has become a ‘hero city’, not simply because of the assault she sustained, but for the spirit with which she met it. This heroic status becomes part of a city’s history. Part of her pride. Part of her sorrow. Part of her cultural understanding of the world. It is subtle credit she can draw on. This particular spirit I celebrated in my 1988 novel Mother London.4 As in Mother London, the mood of solidarity and empathy that arises amongst the inhabitants of semi-ruined cities is here seen to bolster an immanent communal folk memory that subsists beneath a blanket of ‘totalitarian consumerism and its endemic imperialism’.5 A short story by the American writer Deborah Eisenberg, entitled ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’ draws a far more troubling connection between September 11 and the Second World War. At the end of this piece, the narrator wonders whether ‘the whole period’ of global terror spawned by the attacks ‘will sink peacefully away, to be remembered only by scholars’, or whether there is indeed a chance that it will ‘end, instead, in a dire catastrophe’ that recalls ‘the horrible old days in Europe’, when ‘men in jackboots’ chased children to their deaths.6 Here, consistent with Torgovnick’s argument, the devastation in New York recalls the worst horrors of the war much more readily than the heroic, uplifting images that the likes of Bush, Blair, and Moorcock – in their very different ways – wish to evoke. Similarly, but even more unsettlingly, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) suggests that American grief in the wake

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of the September 11 attacks is bound up with unresolved guilt over the mass killing of German and Japanese civilians during World War II. The narrative traces the attempt of Oskar Schell, a precocious nine-year-old, to make sense of the death of his father in the World Trade Centre. Oskar’s paternal grandfather, it transpires, was himself the victim of an earlier urban atrocity – the bombing of Dresden by the American and British air forces in February 1945 – which killed his then fiancée and their unborn child and left him traumatized and mute. The atomic attacks on Japan in August 1945 also resurface in the narrative: prompted by his own exposure to the tragedy of 9/11, Oskar delivers a presentation to his schoolmates about the bombing of Hiroshima. This scene includes a transcription of a harrowing interview with Kinue Tomoyasu, one of the Hibakusha, the survivors of the bomb, in which she describes her daughter dying in her arms. She ends by saying, ‘That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore’.7 The implication of Safran Foer’s juxtaposition of 9/11 with Dresden and Hiroshima is not the simplistic and callous one that America ‘got what it deserved’, that the deaths in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania were just retribution for the suffering inflicted by the United States during the Second World War and since. Rather, through his hyper-intelligent but naïve and unworldly protagonist, Safran Foer is able to dramatize a Utopian act, in which 9/11 becomes the stimulus not for a wave of repression and reprisal, but for a new sensitivity to the United States’ own history of indiscriminate violence, and a heightened sense of compassion for its victims. Mohsin Hamid also configures the World War II-9/11 connection in such a way as to cast light on the United States’ own far from unblemished record during the world war in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). In a key scene, the narrator, Changez, an American-educated Pakistani who has returned in disillusionment to his homeland after September 11, recalls New York at the end of 2001. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me – a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know – but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era

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was fictitious, and whether – if it could indeed be animated – it contained a part written for someone like me.8 Hamid’s narrator is nothing if not unreliable, but his remarks here do contain a penetrating insight into the structures of racial discrimination and exclusion that undermine attempts to cast the Second World War as a uniquely unifying moment in American history. They remind us, for example, of the fact that the US military remained segregated in many of its everyday activities during the war. More scandalously still, perhaps, they recall – like Powers’ Prisoner’s Dilemma – the US government’s decision to forcibly relocate and incarcerate Americans of Japanese ancestry in the wake of Pearl Harbour. So if Americans are growing nostalgic for the Second World War after 9/11, then, whether consciously or not, they are harking back to a period when racial difference was more rigorously demarcated and policed. The progressive developments in American race relations since the war seem imperilled by a renewed suspicion of the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘outsider’. A similar perception of the space of the city as being plunged back into the time of the war is evident in an essay written by Ian McEwan in the immediate aftermath of the bus and Underground bombings in London on 7 July 2005: Now the disaster was upon us, it had an air of weary inevitability, and it looked familiar, as though it had happened long ago. In the drizzle and dim light, the police lines, the emergency vehicles, the silent passers by appeared as though in an old newsreel film in black and white. [ ... ] The mood on the streets was of numb acceptance, or strange calm. People obediently shuffled this way and that, directed round road blocks by a whole new citizens’ army of ‘support’ officials – like air raid wardens from the last war.9 The novelist Iain Sinclair’s reflections on the London bombings, published a week after McEwan’s, adopt a similar language: The ruins we remember from another era – shells of churches, despoiled libraries – survive in romantic monochrome: the comforting lie. Stoic architecture, chippy humans, the Queen Mother like a Pearly Queen visiting the East End. Tumbled masonry, wrecked teeth. War photographers pick their way through the rubble of the new morning making art, framing statuary against a lowering sky’.10

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If these passages seem to suggest a privileging of the iconic cinematic and photographic imagery of World War II over any memory of the war itself, they nevertheless confirm the continued status of the war as the virtually automatic point of reference for the experience of catastrophe in our time. It seems plausible that the widely perceived association between World War II and the global struggle with Islamist terrorism will continue to filter into fictional writing in the years and decades to come. A converse process, in which existing narrative evocations of the Second World War inescapably accrue new meanings in the aftermath of recent violent events, is also already under way. This is testified to by David Rando, who, in his essay ‘Reading Gravity’s Rainbow After September Eleventh’, remarks that, Since the September Eleventh airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, it is difficult to imagine American readers responding to the opening sentences of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in quite the same ways as they had previously. ‘A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now’.11 Similarly, Christopher Benfey writes: I was spooked to find in Gravity’s Rainbow so many anticipations of 9/11, from its familiar opening words (‘A screaming comes across the sky’) to stray details (‘But then last September the rockets came’), and, on the last page, a reference to ‘the Light that brought the Towers low’. Back in 1973, Pynchon gave us our great paranoid dream of a world ruled by ‘The Firm’, where ‘there is a Pearl Harbor every morning, smashing invisibly from the sky’. But he also offers some refuge in the quiet precincts of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, invoked more than once, and in the sheer imaginative arc of his onrushing book.12 Once again, though, this relationship is reciprocal, for if 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ it initiated inflect how we read renderings of the Second World War by the likes of Pynchon, so too might Gravity’s Rainbow and the other texts I have discussed in this book guide our understanding of the conflicts in which Britain and the United States are now engaged. One reason why ‘postmodernist’ fictional responses to World War II have assumed renewed critical potency today is because, in the midst of a culture suffused with ringing valorizations of the righteousness of military force and spectacular displays of the war-machine’s

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technological prowess, they force readers to confront the acute material consequences of mechanized warfare. Equally, though, in figuring the war-zone as a privileged site of trauma, these texts suggest that in the act of waging war, nations risk unleashing forces that are not safely confinable, whether to the past or to the remote, ravaged lands from which ‘we’ – as western citizens – are complacently removed. These symbolic reverberations may echo, instead, down the decades, unsettling the frames within which we think and write.

Notes Introduction 1. With several significant exceptions, I do not attempt to catalogue the numerous fictional treatments of the war that remain within the mimetic conventions of the traditional ‘realist’ or ‘historical’ novel. Nor, for similar reasons of space, do I trace the development of the closely related, but distinct, genre of the ‘Holocaust novel’. For a useful overview, see Efraim Sicher, The Holocaust Novel (London: Routledge, 2005); for more detailed readings of key texts, see Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London: Routledge, 1999). 2. Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s Caught’, Diacritics 28.4 (1998), 25–43 (p. 27). 3. Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995). 4. Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Anxiety at a Time of Crisis’, History Workshop Journal 45 (1998), 171–182 (pp. 180, 180, n. 2). 5. Bernard Bergonzi, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and its Background 1939–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 139–140. 6. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) (London: Vintage: 2000), p. 2. 7. Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963) (London: Vintage, 2000), ch. 11. 8. Charles Bernstein, ‘The Second War and Postmodern Memory’, Postmodern Culture 1.2 (1991) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 10. 9. Three particularly pertinent analyses to have appeared in recent years are Alberto Cacicedo, ‘“You Must Remember This”: Trauma and Memory in Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.4 (2005), 357–368; Christina Jarvis, ‘The Vietnamization of World War II in Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity’s Rainbow’, War, Literature, & the Arts 15.1–2 (2003), 95–117 [accessed 31 May 2008]; Susanne Vees-Gulani, ‘Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.2 (2003), 175–184. 10. A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (London: Chatto, 2000), p. 12; cited in Pilar Hidalgo, ‘Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.2 (2005), 82–91 (p. 88). 11. Randall Stevenson, The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12: The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 448–449. 12. Tony Myers, ‘Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Future Perfect’, New Literary History 32.1 (2001), 33–45 (p. 33). 13. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 3–4. Osborne (p. 13) cites Jean-François Lyotard’s notoriously unsettling formulation of the modern/postmodern problematic: ‘What, then, is the postmodern? [ ... ] It is undoubtedly a part of the 182

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14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

modern. [ ... ] A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant’ (‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, trans. by Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984], pp. 71–82 [p. 79]). Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 116; Ronald F. White, ‘Apologists and Critics of the Lone Gunman Theory: Assassination Science and Postmodern America’, in Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK, ed. by James H. Fetzer (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 1998), pp. 377–412 (p. 407); cited in Knight, Conspiracy Culture, pp. 114–115. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6th edn (London: Academy Editions, 1991), p. 23. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), esp. ch. 1. Michael Bibby, introduction to The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ed. by Michael Bibby (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. ix–xvi (p. x). Bill Brown, ‘The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)’, PMLA 120.3 (2005), 734–50 (p. 734). Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 59–60. Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. xviii. Andrew J. McKenna, ‘Postmodernism: It’s [sic] Future Perfect’, in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, ed. by Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 228–242 (p. 234). Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 46–47; emphasis in original. Taylor later quotes the postmodernist architect Peter Eisenman: ‘Modernism was well into a confrontation with the contingency of its vision and consequently futility of its optimism when, in 1945, it received its final blow’ (House of Cards [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 170). Ihab Hassan, ‘Toward a Concept of Postmodernism’ (1987), in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, ed. by Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 585–595 (p. 589). Richard Dellamora, introduction to Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. by Richard Dellamora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 1–14 (p. 1). Dellamora, introduction to Postmodern Apocalypse, p. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Retour au postmoderne’, Magazine littéraire 225 (1985), p. 43; cited in Laurent Milesi, ‘Postmodern Ana-Apocalyptics: Pynchon’s V-Effect and the End (of Our Century)’, in Approach and Avoid: Essays on Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon Notes 42–43 [1998]), ed. by Luc Herman, 213–243 (p. 231, n. 23).

184

Notes

27. Knight, Conspiracy, p. 116. 28. Ibid. 29. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. ix; the quotation is from William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Spectra, 1988). 30. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 418. 31. See Peter Nicholls, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’, in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Sue Vice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50–67 (p. 52).

1 War, Trauma, Postmodernism 1. Charles Bernstein, ‘The Second War and Postmodern Memory’, Postmodern Culture 1.2 (1991) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 1. 2. The most significant work to articulate this position is Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997). Written ‘during a particular period of their exile in the United States: 1943–1944 – the high point of the industrialized destruction of human beings in concentration camps and on the battlefields’, Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that this very panorama of carnage and devastation needed to be understood as the culmination of western modernity’s instrumentalizing vision (Helmut Peukert, ‘Unconditional Responsibility for the Other: The Holocaust and the Thinking of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, ed. by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998], pp. 155–165 [p. 157]). 3. For an example of an attempt to perform both of these tasks, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. chs. 1–3. 4. John McCumber, ‘The Holocaust as Master Rupture: Foucault, Fackenheim, and “Postmodernity”’, in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, ed. by Milchman and Rosenberg, pp. 239–264 (p. 251). 5. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’ (1961), in Notes to Literature, 2 vols, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–1992), II (1991), pp. 241–275 (p. 244). 6. Andrew J. McKenna, ‘Postmodernism: It’s [sic] Future Perfect’, in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, ed. by Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 229. 7. Peter Nicholls, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’, in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Sue Vice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50–67 (p. 53). 8. Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (‘the Wolf Man’), Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), IX, p. 278, n. 2; quoted in Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 53. 9. Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 54; Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis, and the AvantGarde (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 197. 10. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, revised edn, trans. by Cecile Lindsay and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 58.

Notes 185 11. Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 54. Freud remarks in his study of the ‘Wolf Man’ that ‘these scenes from infancy are not reproduced during the treatment as recollection, they are the products of construction’ (Pelican Freud Library, IX, p. 284; quoted in Nicholls, p. 55). 12. See, in particular, Maurice Blanchot, ‘After the Fact’ (‘Après Coup’), trans. by Paul Auster, in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays, ed. by George Quasha (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999), pp. 487–495; JeanFrançois Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, trans. by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), esp. ch. 1; Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, esp. ch. 2. 13. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 47; italics in original. 14. See Robert Eaglestone, ‘Cinders of Philosophy, Philosophy of Cinders: Derrida and the Trace of the Holocaust’, in his The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 279–299. Eaglestone explains how Derrida’s preoccupation with the ‘cinder’ arises from his earlier concept of the ‘trace’, which itself derives from Emmanuel Levinas’ attempts to pursue philosophical thought in the aftermath of the Holocaust (ch. 9). 15. Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. by Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 43; quoted in Eaglestone, Holocaust, p. 289. 16. See James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), ch. 4. 17. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 1993), p. 90; emphasis in original. 18. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 56. 19. Jean Baudrillard, Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1998), p. 30. 20. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Holocaust’, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), pp. 380–382 (p. 381). 21. In The Illusion of the End Baudrillard observes, ‘we are in the process of wiping out the entire twentieth century, effacing all the signs of the Cold War one by one, perhaps even all trace of the Second World War and of all the political or ideological revolutions of the twentieth century’ (trans. by Chris Turner [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994], p. 32). 22. Baudrillard, Paroxysm, pp. 30, 33. 23. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Anorexic Ruins’, trans. by David Antal, in Looking Back on the End of the World, ed. by Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), pp. 29–45 (p. 35). 24. Ibid., p. 34; emphasis in original. 25. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), pp. 3–4, 43, 95. 26. Ibid., p. 43. 27. Ibid., p. 11. Elsewhere in the same text, Baudrillard describes the Disneyland parking lot as a ‘veritable concentration camp’ (p. 24). 28. Baudrillard, Transparency, p. 92. 29. Alongside Jameson’s own Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), any list of such agenda-setting studies would have to include: Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism,

186

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

Notes Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 2nd edn (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989); E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices (London: Verso, 1988); Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) and Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992); Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992). Jameson, Postmodernism, p. xx. Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 (London: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 253. Jameson apparently accepts, if not the myth itself, then at least a state of untroubled faith in its validity on the part of the American public at large. In A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), he suggests that World War II persists ‘in the American mind as the great Utopian moment of national unification and the lost object of our political desire’ (p. 212). See, for example, Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); Clive Ponting, 1940: Myth and Reality (London: Hamilton, 1989); Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Anxiety at a Time of Crisis’, History Workshop Journal 45 (1998), 171–182. Such texts have, in turn, prompted attempts to ‘debunk the debunkers’: see, for example, Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow, Essex: Pearson, 2004); Robert Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Torgovnick, Marianna, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. xi. Ibid., p. 13; emphasis in original. Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999). Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 30; quoted in Stavrakakis, Lacan, p. 37. Stavrakakis, Lacan, p. 74. In addition to works already cited, notable texts include: Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 5; Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), esp. ch. 8; Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 2, 11, 21, 39–40, 61, 81–82, 127–128, 135–139; Alan Milchman and

Notes 187

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

Alan Rosenberg, eds, Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), esp. chs. 5–6; Susan E. Shapiro, ‘Failing Speech: Post-Holocaust Writing and the Discourse of Postmodernism’, Semeia 40 (1987), 65–91; Efraim Sicher, ‘The Holocaust in the Postmodernist Era’, in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, ed. by Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 297–328 and The Holocaust Novel (London: Routledge, 2005), esp. ch. 6; Barbie Zelizer, ed., Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, for example, remark that, ‘the genocidal events took place during World War II, but were not a part of the war. They were rather the product of an extremist, anti-Semitic worldview that attempted to actualize a “utopian” vision of racial purity, even at the expense of the war effort’ (Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, ‘General Introduction: Theory and the Holocaust’, in The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, pp. 1–22 [p. 3]). For the alternative view that the Nazi genocide ‘was the logical, albeit extreme consequence of the logic of total war’, see Stig Förster and Myriam Gessler, ‘The Ultimate Horror: Reflections on Total War and Genocide’, in A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945, ed. by Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 53–68 (p. 68). The distinctiveness of the Holocaust – in relation both to its immediate historical context and to the long-term history of genocide – is self-evident. Intensive debate, however, surrounds the idea of the Holocaust’s qualitative separation from all other events – its putative ‘uniqueness’. For a useful summary of the various positions on this issue, see Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, introduction to Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, ed. by Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–53 (pp. 24–31). See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), ch. 3. See Fredric Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ (1996), in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 136–161 (pp. 147–148). Hutcheon, Politics, p. 78. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 35; emphasis in original. Though in Lacan’s writings the ‘real’ (le réel) is uncapitalized, I follow the widely used convention (adopted here by Jameson) of capitalizing the word where a specifically Lacanian connotation is intended. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–54, trans. by John Forrester, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 66. Fredric Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject’ (1977), in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. by Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 338–395 (p. 384).

188 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Notes Ibid., p. 387. Ibid. Jameson, Political, p. 82. Jameson, ‘Imaginary’, p. 394. Jameson, Political, p. 102. Jameson, ‘Imaginary’, pp. 388–389. Michael Clark, ‘Imagining the Real: Jameson’s Use of Lacan’, New Orleans Review 11.1 (1984), 67–72; George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), ch. 5; Steven Helmling, ‘Jameson’s Lacan’, Postmodern Culture 7.1 (1996) [accessed 31 May 2008]. Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 11–61 (p. 25). All references to the Écrits will be to this edition; I cite the pagination printed in the margins, which corresponds to that of the original French edition. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 313. Ibid., p. 97. Jacques Lacan, ‘Introduction to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung”’, in Écrits, pp. 369–399 (p. 389). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, trans. by Bruce Fink, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 59. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, trans. by Alan Sheridan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 167. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. x, 159. Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 50. Michael Walsh, ‘Reading the Real in the Seminar on the Psychoses’, in Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious, ed. by Patrick Hogan and Lalita Pandit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 64–83 (p. 79). Evans, Dictionary, p. 160. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits, pp. 237–322 (p. 277). Stavrakakis, Lacan, p. 69–70. Ibid., p. 70; Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. xi. Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London: Routledge, 2005), p. xii. Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 20. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), p. 104. On Lacan’s alignment of the Real and the referent, see also Antoine Vergote, ‘From Freud’s “Other

Notes 189

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90.

91.

92.

Scene” to Lacan’s “Other”’, in Interpreting Lacan, ed. by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 193–221 (p. 202); Joseph H. Smith, ‘Epilogue: Lacan and the Subject of American Psychoanalysis’, in Interpreting Lacan, pp. 259–276 (p. 268). Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 77. Lacan, ‘Tuché and Automaton’, in Seminar XI, pp. 53–64. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana Press, 1991), p. 103. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 116. Evans, Dictionary, p. 160. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, trans. by Dennis Porter, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 118; quoted in Stavrakakis, Lacan, p. 53. Bowie, Lacan, pp. 94, 103. Teresa Brennan, History After Lacan (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 38. Belsey, Culture and the Real, p. 14. Walter A. Davis, Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 30. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, introduction to The Jameson Reader, ed. by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 1–29 (p. 14). Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’ (1984), in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn, ed. by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 292–322 (p. 313). Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 95; Foster, Return of the Real, p. 77. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 277; see also, for example, pp. 25, 150, 93–94. Ibid., p. 18. Jameson, ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, p. 161. Foster, Return of the Real, p. 77. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, The Symptom 2 (2002) [accessed 31 May 2008] (par. 1). Žižek draws on Alain Badiou’s identification of ‘the passion for the real’ as the key feature of the twentieth century in The Century (2005), trans. by Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). Cf. Charles Bernstein in ‘The Second War and Postmodern Memory’: ‘It’s now a commonplace to read the poetry that followed the Great War in the context of the bitter disillusionment brought about by that cataclysm. [ ... ] The effects of the Second War are all the greater than those of the first, but less frequently cited’ (par. 11). Alain Badiou observes that ‘what reveals History as destiny’ – that is, as objective, impersonal process – ‘is almost invariably the experience of war’ (The Century, p. 34). The alternative, semiotic-idealist, position would be Paul de Man’s: ‘the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical events but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions’ (‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ [1970], in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd, revised edn [London: Routledge, 1983], pp. 142–165 [p. 165]). Walter Benjamin, ‘One way street’ (1925–1926), in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by Edward Jephcott and Kinsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), pp. 45–104 (pp. 103–104); quoted in Brennan, History, p. 79.

190 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

Notes Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 55. Bowie, Lacan, p. 110. See Lacan, Seminar XI, pp. 51, 53–55, 62–63. Ibid., p. 51. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XVIII (1955), pp. 1–64 (p. 12). Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), esp. chs. 1, 3, 5. Ibid., pp. 61–62; emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 4. On the Aristotelian origin of this concept, see Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), p. 26; Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, revised edn, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 38; and the discussion in Patrick Crogan, ‘The Tendency, the Accident, and the Untimely: Paul Virilio’s Engagement with the Future’, Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, ed. by John Armitage (London: Sage, 2000), pp. 161–176 (p. 171). Paul Virilio, ‘Speed-Space’, interview with Chris Dercon, trans. by Daphne Miller, in Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. by John Armitage (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 69–81 (p. 72). Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), p. 133. Quoted in Virilio, Speed and Politics, p. 75. Vincent Sherry, ‘The Great War and Literary Modernism in England’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Literature of the First World War, ed. by Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 113–137 (p. 113). Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 3. Foster, Return of the Real, p. 77; emphasis in original. Hutcheon, Politics, p. 32. Quoted in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alan Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), p. 138. Foster and others, Art Since 1900, p. 141. Ibid. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 2nd edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), p. 57. Bernstein, ‘Second War’, par. 13. Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 55.

Notes 191 121. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 34. 122. Robert Spoo, ‘ “Nestor” and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses’, in Joyce and the Subject of History, ed. by Mark A. Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 105–124 (p. 106). On Ulysses and the Great War, see also James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 5; Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny’, Diacritics 30.4 (2000), 59–82 (esp. pp. 73–75); Mark Wollaeger, ‘Seduction and Estrangement: World War I Recruiting Posters and the Politics of Ulysses’, Hypermedia Joyce Studies 2.1 (1999) [accessed 31 May 2008]. 123. Marianne Dekoven, ‘History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction’, ELH 51.1 (1984), 137–152 (pp. 137, 150, 150–151). 124. Foster, Return of the Real, p. 128. 125. Ibid., p. 130; emphases in original. 126. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 169, 171; emphasis in original. 127. Douglass and Vogler, introduction to Witness and Memory, p. 5. 128. Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s Caught’, Diacritics 28.4 (1998), 25–43 (p. 26). 129. Caruth, Unclaimed, p. 11; emphasis in original. 130. Rothberg, Traumatic, p. 106. 131. Cf. Dominick LaCapra: ‘One might [ ... ] speak of the emergence of a traumatic realism that differs from stereotypical conceptions of mimesis and enables instead an often disconcerting exploration of disorientation, its symptomatic dimensions, and possible ways of responding to them’ (Writing History, Writing Trauma [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], p. 186; see also p. 14). 132. Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 53–54. 133. Foster, Return of the Real, pp. 134–136. 134. Ibid., p. 132; emphases in original. The Lacan quotation is from Seminar XI, p. 50. 135. Foster, Return of the Real, p. 136. 136. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’, October 58 (1991), 45–68 (p. 59); quoted in Foster, Return of the Real, p. 268, n. 43. 137. Davis, Deracination, pp. 130–31; see also pp. xviii, 45. 138. Elias, Sublime, pp. xi, xiv. 139. Berger, After the End, p. 41. 140. Middleton and Woods, Literatures of Memory, p. 43. 141. Rothberg, Traumatic, p. 15. 142. Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 2, 71. 143. Stonebridge, ‘Bombs’, p. 35 (see Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety [1926 (1925)], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. by James Strachey,

192

Notes ed. by James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XX (1959), pp. 75–175 (p. 166). On the notion of the anticipation of catastrophe as itself potentially traumatic, see also Saint-Amour, ‘Bombing’.

2 Gravity’s Rainbow and Traumatic Models of History 1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. by E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 55. The allusion is to Hegel’s famous claim, having witnessed Napoleon riding out of the city of Jena after a battle in 1806, that he had seen the ‘world spirit’ mounted on horseback (Hegel: The Letters, trans. by C. Butler and C. Seiler [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984], p. 114; cited in Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History [London: Routledge, 2000], p. 2). 2. As Michael Löwy and Eleni Varikas note, ‘apart from a lecture given in 1962 [‘Progress’ (1964), trans. by Henry W. Pickford, in Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 126–145], Adorno never offered a “systematic” or detailed account of his views on progress. Nonetheless, the critique of “progressivist” illusion runs right through his work’ (‘“The World Spirit on the Fins of a Rocket”: Adorno’s Critique of Progress’, Radical Philosophy, 70 [1995], 9–15 [p. 9]). The key reference is Adorno’s collaboration with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997). See also, in particular, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966), whose critique of Hegelian progressivism includes the famous claim that while ‘no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, [ ... ] there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ (trans. by E.B. Ashton [London: Routledge, 1990], p. 320). 3. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (London: Vintage: 2000), p. 139. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Where appropriate, I employ the abbreviation GR. All unbracketed ellipses are Pynchon’s. 4. Adorno, Minima, pp. 53–54. 5. Adorno, ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?: The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society’ (1968), trans. by Rodney Livingstone, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 111–125 (p. 118). 6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. xviii. 7. Jeffrey S. Baker, ‘Amerikkka Über Alles: German Nationalism, American Imperialism, and the 1960s Antiwar Movement in Gravity’s Rainbow’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40.4 (1999), 323–341 (p. 337). 8. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. xviii. 9. Baker, ‘Amerikkka’, pp. 338–339. 10. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1972), trans. by Joris De Bres (London: New Left Books, 1976). 11. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. xviii–xix.

Notes 193 12. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. by Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–125; ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 146 (1984), 52–92. 13. See, for example, Eric Meyer, ‘Oppositional Discourses, Unnatural Practices: Gravity’s History and “The ’60s”’, Pynchon Notes 24–25 (1989), 81–104; Eric Cassidy, ‘Cyberotics: Markets, Materialism, and Method in Pynchon and Deleuze’, in Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia and Social Control (Pynchon Notes 34–35 [1994]), ed. by Eric Cassidy and Dan O’Hara, 107–128; Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chs. 3, 4; Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, ‘Thomas Pynchon and the Advent of Postmodernity’, in The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 23–56; Stefan Mattesich, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), chs. 3, 4, 5. 14. See, for example, Eric Meyer, ‘Oppositional’, esp. pp. 85–89; Hanjo Berressem, Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), chs. 3, 6, 7, 8; Friedrich Kittler, ‘Media and Drugs in Pynchon’s Second World War’, trans. by Michael Wutz and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, in Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. by Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 157–172; Laurent Milesi, ‘Postmodern Ana-Apocalyptics: Pynchon’s V-Effect and the End (of Our Century)’, in Approach and Avoid: Essays on Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon Notes 42–43 [1998]), ed. by Luc Herman, 213–243 (esp. pp. 224–228); Nicholas Spencer, ‘The “Law” of Simulated War in Gravity’s Rainbow’, in Thomas Pynchon and the Law (Oklahoma City University Law Review 24.3 [1999]), ed. by Shubha Ghosh [accessed 23 November 2005], 681–703. 15. A special issue of Pynchon Notes (34–35 [1994]) entitled Thomas Pynchon: Schizophrenia and Social Control (ed. by Eric Cassidy and Dan O’Hara) approaches Pynchon’s novels in light of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. See, in particular, Steven Weisenburger, ‘Hyper-Embedded Narration in Gravity’s Rainbow’, 71–87 (esp. pp. 82–85); Eric Cassidy, ‘Cyberotics’. See also, Best and Kellner, Postmodern Adventure, pp. 44–45; Mattesich, Lines of Flight, ch. 5. 16. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), p. 111. 17. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. xix. 18. Ibid., xx. 19. Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction: Trauma and Experience’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 3–12 (p. 8). 20. Kalí Tal, ‘Remembering Difference: Working Against Eurocentric Bias in Contemporary Scholarship on Trauma and Memory’, chapter added to Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and available on the author’s web site: [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 16.

194

Notes

21. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 306. The bulk of this evidence is laid out in Part II of Harvey’s study. It is worth noting, though, that Harvey emphasizes the effects of ‘post-Fordism’, which he dates to the end of the 1960s, rather than the earlier emergence of late capitalism (on the distinctions between Harvey and Jameson’s historicizations of postmodernism, see Sean Homer, Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism [Cambridge, Polity Press: 1998], pp. 109–110). Interestingly, Harvey describes this post-Fordist round of ‘time-space compression’ as a ‘trauma’ (pp. 286, 293). 22. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language, p. 112. 23. Jameson, Postmodernism, xix. 24. Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class, and Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 18 (see Mandel, Late Capitalism, esp. ch. 5; see also his The Meaning of the Second World War [London: Verso, 1986]). 25. Heffernan, Capital, pp. 18, 21 (see Mandel, Late Capitalism, esp. chs. 9–10). Marx defined the two fundamental sites of capitalist production as Department I (the sphere of production of capital goods or means of production), and Department II (the sphere of production of wage goods or means of consumption). 26. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 5. 27. Ibid., pp. 44–45. 28. Michael Bibby, ‘The Post-Vietnam Condition’, in The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ed. by Michael Bibby (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 144–171 (pp. 150, 151–152). 29. James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 31. 30. Adorno, Minima, p. 54. 31. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XVIII (1955), pp. 1–64 (p. 31). 32. Kazys Varnelis, ‘Postmodern Permutations’, Thresholds 18 (1999) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 3; emphases in original. 33. It is not entirely clear whether Adorno’s own reference is to both forms of the German ‘robot-bomb’, or specifically to the V-1, whose existence had been common knowledge since its first deployment in June 1944. The first V-2 attack, on London, occurred on 8 September 1944 – roughly coincident with the writing of this passage of Minima Moralia, which is dated Autumn 1944; however, Adorno describes the rocket as flying ‘on wings’ (auf Flügeln), which suggests the V-1, a ‘pilotless plane’, rather than the V-2, a missile with fins (Michael Löwy and Eleni Varikas complicate matters further, however, by substituting ‘fins’ for ‘wings’ in their citation of this passage [see ‘World Spirit’, p. 9]). 34. Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey and others, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 1974), XIV (1957), pp. 273–302.

Notes 195 35. Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 1–2, 10–11. 36. Ibid., p. 4. 37. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 62; emphases in original. 38. Ibid., p. 133, n. 8. 39. An interest in these issues is evident across Luc Herman’s collection Approach and Avoid: Essays on Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon Notes 42–43 [1998]). See, in particular, Steven Weisenburger, ‘Haunted History and Gravity’s Rainbow’, 12–25; Richard Crownshaw, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow: Pynchon’s Holocaust Allegory’, 199–212; Hanjo Berressem, ‘Tristes Traumatiques: Trauma in the Zone:s’, 244–274. 40. See Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 16. 41. Confusing matters still further, the vehicle in which the evacuees are being conveyed is elsewhere described as moving not on road but on rail (which would again seem to place the scene in a mid-twentieth-century setting): it leaves the ‘main station’, emits ‘steam’ (p. 3), and travels along ‘track and switchery’ (p. 4). The presentation of the vehicle thus exhibits the same unstable, ‘flickering’ quality as the scene as a whole (‘flickering’ is a term used by Brian McHale to describe the effect of indeterminacy that Gravity’s Rainbow repeatedly produces [Brian McHale, ‘Modernist Reading, Postmodernist Text: The Case of Gravity’s Rainbow’, in Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 61–86 (p. 70)]). 42. This approach is exemplified by Best and Kellner’s chapter on the novel in The Postmodern Adventure, as well as by Inger H. Dalsgaard, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow: A Historical Novel of a Whole New Sort’, in Into the Zone 2000 (Pynchon Notes 50–51 [2002]), ed. by Dirk Vanderbeke and Bruno Friedrich ArichGerz, 35–50; Khachig Tölölyan, ‘War as Background in Gravity’s Rainbow’, in Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow, ed. by Charles Clerc (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 31–67; and Weisenburger, Companion. 43. See, for example, Frederick Ashe, ‘Anachronism Intended: Gravity’s Rainbow in the Socio-political Sixties’, Pynchon Notes 28–29 (1991), 59–75; Baker, ‘Amerikkka’; David Cowart, ‘Pynchon and the Sixties’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41.1 (1999), 3–12. 44. Peter Nicholls, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’, in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Sue Vice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50–67 (p. 53). 45. Lines of Flight, p. 113. 46. Mattesich, Lines of Flight, pp. 113–121; Cassidy, ‘Cyberotics’, pp. 115–116. 47. Freud, Beyond, pp. 281–282. 48. Laurent Milesi and Hanjo Berressem also note that the V-2’s defiance of preparation invites analysis in terms of trauma (see Laurent Milesi, ‘Postmodern’, p. 216; and Berressem, ‘Tristes’, pp. 246–247). 49. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language, pp. 1–2. The German term is abreagieren. 50. Ibid., p. 2. 51. Freud, Beyond, p. 32. 52. The second-person pronoun might also be understood as addressing the implied reader, and thus as tending to intensify the engagement of actual

196

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

Notes or ‘empirical’ readers with the scene. On Pynchon’s frequently ambiguous use of ‘you’, see McHale, ‘“You Used to Know What These Words Mean”: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow’, in Constructing Postmodernism, pp. 87–114. In fact, as McHale notes, this hallucination proves to be prophetic: St. Veronica’s will be hit by a V-2 and Spectro killed (GR 138; McHale, Constructing, p. 109). Alec McHoul and David Wills, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow and the Post-Rhetorical’, in Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 23–66 (p. 53). McHale, Constructing, p. 284, n. 32. Mattesich, Lines of Flight, p. 1. Meyer, ‘Oppositional’, p. 90. Ibid., p. 103, n. 20. See Ashe, ‘Anachronism’, p. 65. Meyer, ‘Oppositional’, p. 91. Ibid., pp. 90–91. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 90. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 132, 136; emphasis in original. Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’, Diacritics (‘Nuclear Criticism’ special issue) 14.2 (1984), 20–32 (p. 23). Robson, Milesi, and McHoul and Wills discuss Derrida’s essay in relation to the threat, and suspension, of nuclear holocaust in Gravity’s Rainbow, though they do not mention this passage, focusing instead on the novel’s closing sequence (see David Robson, ‘Frye, Derrida, Pynchon, and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction’, in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. by Richard Dellamora [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995], pp. 61–78; Milesi, ‘Postmodern’, esp. pp. 215–218; McHoul and Wills, ‘Fall Out’, in Writing, pp. 211–223). Milesi also associates the rocket with the Lacanian Real (p. 215), as do Berressem and Mattesich (Berresem, Pynchon’s Poetics, p. 191, and ‘Tristes’, pp. 246–247; Mattesich, Lines of Flight, pp. 106–107). As evidenced by a number of letters, and a range of other sources, Pynchon resided in Mexico City from around 1962 until at least March 1964 (letters held at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin; see also, for example, Scott McLemee, ‘Invisible, Inc.’, Lingua Franca 5.7 [1995] [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 1). Pynchon’s previous novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was published in 1966, and it is assumed that the bulk of Gravity’s Rainbow was written after this date; an untitled draft of the novel (which would be published in a virtually unchanged form) was delivered in January 1972 (see Gerald Howard, ‘Pynchon from A to V’, Book Forum [Summer 2005] [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 23). It seems that by 1966 Pynchon had moved to Southern California: in June of that year he published an essay recounting his explorations of the Watts district of Los Angeles (‘Inside the Mind of Watts’, New York Times, 12 June 1966, pp. 34–35, 78, 80–82, 84 [accessed 31 May 2008]). Pynchon was still in Los Angeles in 1969 (see Howard, ‘A to V’, par. 23), and it is thought that the entirety of Gravity’s Rainbow was written in or around the

Notes 197

67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

city. An article by the journalist Garrison Frost suggests that Pynchon wrote much of the novel whilst living in Manhattan Beach (a small coastal city on the South Bay, just outside LA) around 1969 or 1970 (‘Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay’, The Aesthetic [2003] [accessed 31 May 2008], section 3). Pynchon, ‘Watts’, par. 13. See Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. by Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. by Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), and Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, revised edn, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). Pynchon, ‘Watts’, par. 7. On Adorno’s explicit and implicit engagement with the city of Los Angeles in Minima Moralia, see Nico Israel, ‘Damage Control: Adorno, Los Angeles, and the Dislocation of Culture’, Yale Journal of Criticism 10.1 (1997), 85–113. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’, October 58 (1991), 44–68 (p. 59); quoted in Foster, Return, p. 268, n. 43. Baker, ‘Amerikkka’, p. 334. Ibid. For Frederick Ashe, too, this sequence represents a ‘direct violation of the novel’s time frame’ (‘Anachronism’, p. 64). Baker, ‘Amerikkka’, pp. 334–335. Cassidy, ‘Cyberotics’, p. 124. Jean Laplanche, interview with Cathy Caruth, Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 7. Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) p. 35; quoted in Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 71, n. 46. Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 54. Berressem, ‘Tristes’, p. 246. See Weisenburger, Companion, p. 263. Baker, ‘Amerikkka’, p. 330; Cowart, ‘Pynchon and the Sixties’, p. 6. Milesi, ‘Postmodern’, pp. 215, 222. Fredric Jameson, ‘In Retrospect’, contribution to ‘Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes?’ forum, Science Fiction Studies 4 (1974), 272–276; quoted in David Pringle, ‘J.G. Ballard: Early Secondary Sources’ [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 57. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 9. Jameson, ‘In Retrospect’.

3 ‘A Secret Code of Pain and Memory’: Traumatic Repetition in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard 1. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 162. 2. J. Stephen Murphy, ‘Past Irony: Trauma and the Historic Turn in Fragments and The Swimming-Pool Library’, Literature & History 13.1 (2004), 58–75 (p. 63). 3. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 186.

198

Notes

4. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, trans. by Alan Sheridan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 53–54. 5. J.G. Ballard, interview with L. Tarantino (1994); quoted in J.G. Ballard: Quotes, ed. by V. Vale and Mike Ryan (San Francisco: RE/Search, 2004), p. 329. 6. J.G. Ballard, interview with Graeme Revell, in J.G. Ballard, ed. by V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1984), pp. 42–53 (pp. 44–45); emphases in original. 7. J.G. Ballard, introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974), in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, pp. 96–98 (p. 98). 8. Ibid., pp. 97–98. 9. Ibid., p. 98. 10. J.G. Ballard, interview with James Goddard and David Pringle (1975), J.G. Ballard: Twentieth-Century Chronicler web site (2002) [accessed 31 May 2008], part 2, par. 4. 11. Quoted in Iain Sinclair, Crash (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 86. 12. I draw here on biographical sketches in Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), pp. ii–iii; and Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard (London: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 9. 13. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), p. 155. 14. W.L. Webb, ‘An Educated Eye for Atrocity’ (announcement of Ballard as winner of the 1984 Guardian fiction prize), Guardian, 29 November 1984, p. 10; quoted in Luckhurst, Angle, p. 155. 15. Charles Murray, ‘Psychic Alien Aloft in Suburban Eyrie’, review of The Kindness of Women, Literary Review, September 1991, pp. 9–10; quoted in Luckhurst, Angle, p. 155. 16. Martin Amis, ‘Cronenberg’s Monster’, review of Crash, dir. by David Cronenberg, Independent on Sunday, 10 November 1996, pp. 8–9 [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 4. 17. Jason Cowley, ‘Portrait: J.G. Ballard’, Prospect, August 1998 [accessed 31 May 2008]. 18. David Blow, ‘Bloody Saturday and After’, interview with J.G. Ballard, Waterstone’s New Books Catalogue, Winter 1991, pp. 35–37; quoted in Luckhurst, Angle, p. 155. 19. Peter Kemp, ‘Atrocity as Art-Object’, review of The Kindness of Women, The Times Literary Supplement, 20 September 1991, p. 22; quoted in Luckhurst, Angle, p. 155. 20. Lynn Barber, ‘Alien at Home’, interview with J.G. Ballard, Independent on Sunday, 15 September 1991, pp. 2–4; quoted in Luckhurst, Angle, p. 155. 21. Robert L. Caserio, ‘Mobility and Masochism: Christine Brooke-Rose and J.G. Ballard’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 21 (1988), 292–310 (p. 306). 22. Luckhurst, Angle, pp. 151–168; Delville, J.G. Ballard, pp, 75–76; Sinclair, Crash, pp. 18, 92–93. 23. Luckhurst, Angle, pp. 158–159; emphasis in original.

Notes 199 24. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 309, 27; see also, pp. 16, 18–30, 124, 325, 364, 366, 399. 25. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 6. 26. Ballard, introduction to Crash, p. 96. 27. Ibid., p. 97. 28. J.G. Ballard, ‘What I Believe’, in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, pp. 174– 175 (p. 175). 29. J.G. Ballard, in Friends (1970), in Quotes, p. 28. 30. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 18. 31. J.G. Ballard, in Blitz (1984), in Quotes, p. 25. 32. J.G. Ballard, in C21 (1991), in Quotes, p. 25. 33. Ballard, interview with Goddard and Pringle, part 1, par. 4. 34. Ibid., part 1, par. 10. 35. Platt, Dreammakers; quoted in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, p. 160. 36. J.G. Ballard, interview with L. Tarantino (1994), in Quotes, pp. 334–335. 37. J.G. Ballard, in Omni (n.d.), in Quotes, p. 335. 38. J.G. Ballard, ‘J.G. Ballard: Theatre of Cruelty’, interview with Jean-Paul Coillard, Disturb (c. 1996) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 5. 39. David Pringle, ‘The Fourfold Symbolism of J.G. Ballard’, in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, pp. 126–137 (p. 127). 40. J.G. Ballard, introduction to First Voyages (1981); quoted in ‘Ballard: Quotations’, in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, p. 160. 41. J.G. Ballard, ‘Time, Memory, and Inner Space’ (1963), in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, pp. 100–101 (p. 100). 42. Ballard, interview with Goddard and Pringle, part 1, par. 4 43. Platt, Dreammakers; quoted in J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, p. 160. 44. Sinclair, Crash, p. 93 45. Hal Foster, ‘Death in America’ October 75 (1996), 37–59 (p. 41, n. 19). 46. Ballard first used this phrase in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), though it also captures the mood of much of his earlier fiction (see pp. 108, 125). 47. Luckhurst, Angle, pp. 70, 165. 48. Pringle, ‘Fourfold Symbolism’, J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, pp. 127–129. 49. J.G. Ballard, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1963), in The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2002), pp. 472–479 (p. 479). All citations of Ballard’s short stories refer to this text. 50. Pringle, ‘Fourfold Symbolism’, J.G. Ballard, ed. by Vale and Juno, p. 127. 51. Ibid., p. 127. 52. On this connection, see, for example, Stefan Helmreich, ‘Time and the Tsunami’, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6.3 (2006) [accessed 31 May 2008]. 53. Ballard, ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, pp. 305–320 (p. 305). 54. Ibid., p. 318. 55. Ibid., p. 319. 56. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’, pp. 1061–1084 (p. 1069). 57. Ibid., p. 1074. 58. Ballard, ‘The Voices of Time’, pp. 169–195.

200 Notes 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 156. Ibid., p. 156. Ibid. Peter Nicholls, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’, in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Sue Vice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50–67 (p. 54). J.G. Ballard, ‘The Benign Catastrophist’, interview with Susie Mackenzie, Guardian, 6 September 2003 [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 11. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (London: Flamingo, 2001), pp. 74–75. J.G. Ballard, High-Rise (1975) (London: Flamingo, 2003), pp. 18–20. The deteriorating condition of the pools is noted on pp. 86, 83–84, 98, 181–182. Ballard, High-Rise, p. 194. Ibid., p. 195. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, pp. 589–604 (pp. 594, 592). Ibid, p. 600. J.G. Ballard, ‘The Killing Ground’, pp. 781–787 (p. 781). Ibid., p. 783. J. G. Ballard, ‘The Day of Forever’, pp. 669–682 (p. 681). Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. by David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 118; quoted in Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 54. Ballard, Atrocity, p. 50. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Quoted in Peter Brigg, J.G. Ballard (Mercer Island: Starmont House, 1985), p. 56. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, pp. 594, 590. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 27; Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, p. 593. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, p. 592. Ibid. Nicholls, ‘Belated’, p. 57. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, pp. 591, 594, 600, 604; 589, 593, 604. According to the Ballard bibliographer David Pringle, ‘The Terminal Beach’ was completed in 1963; it was published in the March 1964 issue of New Worlds. The text was therefore written before the sudden death of Ballard’s own wife, Helen Mary, which occurred later in 1964. Hence, while aspects of Traven’s predicament may well be autobiographically informed, any apparent connection to this particular event is no more than a tragic coincidence (see Jim Goddard, Rick McGrath, and David Pringle, ‘The J.G. Ballard Short Story Bibliography’ [accessed 31 May 2008]). Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, p. 602. Ibid., p. 603. Ibid. J.G. Ballard, ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’, pp. 972–981 (pp. 972–973). Ibid., pp. 975, 974.

Notes 201 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123.

124.

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 977. Ibid., p. 981. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’, p. 589. Ibid., p. 604. J.G. Ballard, ‘The Air Disaster’, pp. 820–827 (p. 820). Brigg, J.G. Ballard, p. 85. Ballard, ‘The Air Disaster’, p. 826. Ibid. Ibid., p. 827. J.G. Ballard, ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’, pp. 811–819 (p. 813); Brigg, J.G. Ballard, p. 87. Ballard, ‘Wake Island’, p. 812. Ibid., pp. 816–817. Ibid., p. 817. Ibid., pp. 817–818. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 136–138. Ibid., pp. 138, 132; emphasis in original. Ibid., pp. 134–136. J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (London: Flamingo, 2001), p. 129. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 70. Ibid. The Atrocity Exhibition: New Revised Edition (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1990). Luckhurst, Angle, p. 159. Indeed, Foster has himself positioned Ballard within this lineage (see ‘Death’, p. 48). Foster, Return of the Real, p. 166. Luckhurst, Angle, pp. 158–159. Luckhurst, Angle, p. 165. Sigmund Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (‘The Wolf Man’) (1918), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), XVII (1955), pp. 1–123 (p. 52). Freud, Infantile Neurosis, pp. 50–51. See Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane, ‘The Black Hole of Trauma’, in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, ed. by Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth (London: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 3–23 (p. 19). Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Otto van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 158–182 (p. 178).

202 Notes 125. J.G. Ballard, ‘The Dead Time’, pp. 925–939 (pp. 928–929, 929, 933). 126. J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984) (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 32. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Where appropriate, I employ the abbreviation ES. 127. J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (1991) (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 30. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Where appropriate, I employ the abbreviation KW. 128. Luckhurst discusses Empire’s concern with the permeability of boundaries (Angle, pp. 160–162). 129. See the accounts in J.G. Ballard, ‘The End of My War’ (1995), in A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 283–294 (p. 285); Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), pp. 106–107. 130. Pierre Janet, Les médications psychologiques, 3 vols (1919–1925), II, p. 273; quoted in van der Kolk and van der Hart, ‘Intrusive’, pp. 170–171, and Leys, Trauma, p. 111. 131. Luckhurst, Angle, p. 164. 132. Van der Kolk and van der Hart, ‘Intrusive’, p. 178. 133. Luckhurst, Angle, p. 164; emphasis in original. 134. Ibid., p. 164. 135. LaCapra, Writing, p. 70. 136. See in particular, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1996) and SuperCannes (London: Flamingo, 2000). 137. LaCapra, Writing, p. 71. 138. Ballard, Miracles of Life, pp. 26–27. 139. Ibid., p. 251. 140. Ibid., p. 273.

4 Total War and the English Stream-of-Consciousness Novel: From Mrs Dalloway to Mother London 1. See Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (London: Vintage: 2000), p. 131. 2. J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984) (London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 11. 3. Ibid., pp. 188, 233. 4. See, for example, Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century (London: Macmillan, 1990), ch. 1. 5. I draw here on the discussion of high modernist temporality in Ursula K. Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1, esp. pp. 33–38. 6. This duality at the centre of high modernist conceptualizations of time is noted in a foundational study by Hans Meyerhoff and an important recent intervention by Sanford Kwinter (Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960], p. 37; Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001], pp. 39–44).

Notes 203 7. Keith Leopald identifies and discusses the range of commonly used techniques that have been grouped under the term ‘stream of consciousness’: Keith Leopald, ‘Some Problems of Terminology in the Analysis of the Stream-of-Consciousness Novel’, in The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Modern Novel, ed. by Erwin R. Steinberg (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1979), pp. 144–152. The term ‘stream of consciousness’ was first used by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890), and was imported into literary study by May Sinclair in an article on the work of Dorothy Richardson published in 1918; see Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (London: Blackie & Son, 1962), pp. 13–14. 8. Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 64. 9. Erwin R. Steinberg, ‘The Psychological Stream of Consciousness’, in The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Modern Novel, ed. by Erwin R. Steinberg (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1979), pp. 125–139 (esp. pp. 125, 136). 10. Snaith, Virginia Woolf, p. 69. The Kenner quotation is from Ulysses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 41. 11. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 690. 12. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977–1984), II, p. 14. 13. Snaith, Virginia Woolf, p. 69. The one exception, The Waves, consists entirely of soliloquy – an alternate stream-of-consciousness technique; see Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), pp. 14, 37. Woolf’s novels only very rarely feature direct interior monologue. 14. Snaith, Virginia Woolf, pp. 63–64. 15. Ibid., p. 69. 16. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 100; quoted in Snaith, p. 65. 17. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925) (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), pp. 6, 6–7. 18. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Between Mortal Time and Monumental Time: Mrs Dalloway’, in Time and Narrative, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988), II (1985), pp. 101–112. 19. See Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, pp. 54, 79, 104, 130, 141, 166, 205–206. 20. Ibid., p. 16. 21. Tim Armstrong, ‘Two Types of Shock in Modernity’, Critical Quarterly 42.1 (2000), 60–73; Hal Foster, ‘Death in America’, October 75 (1996), 37–59, ‘The Return of Shock and Trauma’, interview with Rubén Gallo, in Violence: Representations of Violence, Violence of Representation (TRANS> 3–4), ed. by Rubén Gallo [accessed 31 May 2008]; Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October 80 (1997), 3–26. 22. Armstrong, ‘Shock’, p. 71. 23. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, pp. 23–25.

204 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

Notes Foster, ‘Shock and Trauma’, p. 2. Ibid. Armstrong, ‘Shock’, p. 71. Foster, ‘Shock and Trauma’, p. 2. Seltzer, ‘Wound’, pp. 10–11; emphases in original. For a discussion of Mrs Dalloway as part of a modernist ‘literature of trauma’, see Karen DeMeester, ‘Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway’, Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998), 649–673. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 28. Septimus also ‘sees’ or ‘hears’ ‘Evans’, pp. 78, 103, 161. Ibid., pp. 18, 25–26. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 74. Later, additional details emerge: Evans was Septimus’ commanding officer, and was killed in Italy, just before the Armistice (p. 96). This is not to downplay the human and material cost of urban bombing during the Great War, which was substantial, or the fear that this new form of warfare elicited. Woolf writes powerfully in her diary of the anxieties provoked by the Zeppelin campaign (Diary, I, p. 32) – anxieties that, Paul K. Saint-Amour has convincingly argued, find their way into Mrs Dalloway (see Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism’, Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 [2005], 130–161 [pp. 142–144]). The situation was also different, of course, for those civilians, like ‘Mrs Foxcroft’ and ‘Lady Bexborough’ (p. 7), unfortunate enough to lose loved ones in the conflict. On this point, see Saint-Amour, ‘Air War’, pp. 141, 146. Seltzer, ‘Wound’, pp. 3, 9 (on the relevance of Seltzer’s model to the experience of the Blitz, see Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Anxiety at a Time of Crisis’, History Workshop Journal 45 [1998], 171–182 [p. 173]). Snaith and Patricia Laurence discuss the effects of the mass communications boom, and its close relationship with war, on Woolf’s life and work (Snaith, Virginia Woolf, pp. 137–138; Patricia Laurence, ‘The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas to Between the Acts’, in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. by Mark Hussey [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991], pp. 225–245 [esp. pp. 226–229, 245]). Virginia Woolf, The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), p. 107. See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 718–744; Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, 4th edn, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 274–277. Woolf, Diary, V, p. 215. Woolf, ‘London in War’, page from Between the Acts notebook, University of Sussex Library, Monk’s House Papers, A20; quoted in Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 718. Between the Acts is, technically, unfinished, since, although the manuscript was complete at the time of Woolf’s death, it had not been revised for printing. See Gillian Beer, introduction to Between the Acts, pp. ix–xxxv (p. ix). Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941), ed. by Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 64. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Where appropriate, I employ the abbreviation BA.

Notes 205 45. Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 205. 46. Ibid., p. 212; other instances include pp. 38–39, 53. 47. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), esp. ch. 2. 48. See James Naremore, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 224–225, 238; Mark Hussey, ‘“I” Rejected; “We” Substituted: Self and Society in Between the Acts’, in Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, ed. by Eleanor McNees, 4 vols (Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994), IV, pp. 242–253 (pp. 249, 252). 49. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 722. 50. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. by Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), p. 302. 51. Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), p. 132; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) (London: Grafton, 1977), p. 108. 52. See Hussey, ‘“I” Rejected’. 53. See the accounts in Susan M. Kenney, ‘Two Endings: Virginia Woolf’s Suicide and Between the Acts’, in Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, ed. by Eleanor McNees (Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994), IV, pp. 203–225 (pp. 203–205), and Lee, Virginia Woolf, pp. 751–760. 54. Those who emphasize the toll that the war took on Woolf’s mental health include Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990); Val Gough, ‘“A Responsible Person like Her”: Woolf’s Suicide Culture’, in Virginia Woolf: Turning the Centuries (Selected Papers from the Ninth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf), ed. by Ann Ardis and Bonnie Kime Scott (New York: Pace University Press, 2000), pp. 183–191 (p. 184); Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 189; Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 134; Poole, Unknown, pp. 245, 278–279; and Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 327–328. Those who downplay the war’s effects include Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 239–240; Karen L. Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 157; Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 766. 55. Quoted in Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 756. 56. See for example, Suzette A. Henke, ‘Virginia Woolf and Post-Traumatic Subjectivity’, in Virginia Woolf, ed. by Ardis and Kime Scott, pp. 147–152 (p. 152), and Kenney, ‘Two Endings’, pp. 222–223. 57. See Poole, Unknown, pp. 259–279. 58. Woolf, Diary, V, p. 326–327. 59. Poole, Unknown, p. 277. 60. Ibid., p. 259. 61. See Poole, Unknown, pp. 259–279, and also Gough, ‘“Responsible Person”’, p. 188. 62. See Gough, ‘“Responsible Person”’.

206 Notes 63. Between the Acts itself may also have informed the composition of Moorcock’s text, though he remarks that ‘if it was an influence it wasn’t a conscious one’ (Michael Moorcock, personal communication via online message board, August 2004 [accessed 31 May 2008]). 64. Michael Moorcock, interview with Mike Whybark (2003) [accessed 31 May 2008] (part 3, par. 18). 65. Michael Moorcock, Mother London (1988) (London: Scribner, 2000), p. 21. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Where appropriate, I employ the abbreviation ML. 66. Michael Moorcock, ‘Michael Moorcock on Politics, Punk, Tolkien, and Everything Else’, interview with Ken Mondschein (2004) [accessed 31 May 2008] (part 3, par. 2). 67. See Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 560; Moorcock mentions this aspect of his childhood in his interview with Whybark, part 1, par. 13. 68. On this point, see also ML 434–435. 69. Moorcock, interview with Whybark, part 1, par. 13. 70. Michael Moorcock, interview with Jeff Gardiner, in Jeff Gardiner, An Interrogation of Fantasy Through the Work of Michael Moorcock (unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Surrey, 2000), par. 2; Michael Moorcock, interview with David Kendall and Graham Evans, The Edge [accessed 31 May 2008] (par. 56). See the vivid descriptions in Mother London, pp. 21, 155–157. 71. Interview with Whybark, part 1, par. 13. 72. Interview with Gardiner, par. 2. 73. Interview with Mondschein, part 3, par. 2; interview with Gardiner, par. 2; see ML 387, 389. 74. Gardiner, Interrogation, p. 26. 75. Interview with Kendall and Evans, par. 56. 76. See Brian Baker, ‘Maps of the London Underground: Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock’s Psychogeography of the City’, Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 1.1 (2003) [accessed 31 May 2008], pars. 12, 14. 77. The classic analysis of the distinction between ‘limited’ and total or ‘absolute’ war is Carl von Clausewitz, On War (1832), ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). 78. The quoted passage is from James Pope-Hennessy’s commentary on photographs of the bombed-out streets of London by Cecil Beaton in their book History under Fire: 52 Photographs of Air Raid Damage to London Buildings, 1940–41 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1941). 79. Michael Moorcock and Colin Greenland, Death Is No Obstacle (Manchester: Savoy Books, 1992), pp. 105. 80. Gardiner, Interrogation, p. 145; see Todorov, Fantastic, esp. p. 25. 81. Moorcock and Greenland, Death, pp. 104–105. 82. Moorcock notes that ‘people have made comparisons between Mother London and Ulysses’ (Moorcock and Greenland, Death, p. 98) (an excerpt from a review of Moorcock’s novel in The Listener, reproduced in the Scribner

Notes 207

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

106.

paperback edition, suggests, for example, that ‘he throws everything in, rather in the encyclopaedic manner of Joyce’). Moorcock insists, however, that while Ulysses is ‘a tremendous, brilliant book, [ ... ] it’s not the same kind of book that I write’ (Moorcock and Greenland, Death, p. 98). Significantly, Moorcock distinguishes himself from Joyce on the basis of the latter’s exclusion of the public sphere: ‘that kind of writer has to work in that way, in isolation from everyone except close friends and supporters’ (ibid.). Foster, ‘Death’, p. 42; ‘Shock and Trauma’, p. 2. On the notion of ‘a modernist culture of shock and a postmodern culture of trauma’, see also Seltzer, ‘Wound’, p. 5, n. 6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 12, 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., pp. 14–15. Ibid., p. 16. See Jacques Lacan, ‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 531–583 (French pagination in margins). Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 26–27. Ibid., pp. 31, 26, 27. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 26. See Jacques Lacan, ‘Tuché and Automaton’, in The Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 1964, trans. by Alan Sheridan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 53–64. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 184 (see Jacques Lacan, ‘Position of the Unconscious’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink [New York: Norton, 2006], pp. 829–850 [pp. 838–839]). Peter Nicholls, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’, in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Sue Vice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50–74 (pp. 56, 52). Ibid., pp. 51, 52. Interview with Mondschein, part 3, par. 3. Michael Moorcock, ‘An Unrepentant Pariah’, interview with Simon Barnard, Cold Print [accessed 31 May 2008] (par. 24). Ibid. Seltzer, ‘Wound’, p. 9. Moorcock, personal communication. For a defence of such a vision see, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 53–54. Steven Connor, ‘The Impossibility of the Present: or, from the Contemporary to the Contemporal’, in Literature of the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. by Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1999), pp. 15–35 (pp. 30–31). Connor, ‘Impossibility’, pp. 30, 31.

208 Notes 107. The ‘Black Captain’ is a South African sailor who rescues David Mummery from the rubble after a V-2 attack. David remains convinced that his rescuer flew in order to come to his aid (ML 411–413). 108. See ML 51, 100, 113, 128, 165, 168, 377–380, 475; Moorcock remains an outspoken critic of Thatcherism and its legacy (see, for example, Michael Moorcock in conversation with Colin Greenland and the Preston SF Group, Kimota 2 [1995], 36–41; interview with Mondschein, part 4, par. 11). 109. Interview with Mondschein, part 3, par. 6. 110. Moorcock and Greenland, Death, p. 83.

5 Their Fathers’ War: Negotiating the Legacy of World War II in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Atonement 1. Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988), p. 134. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. Large sections of the novel are entirely italicized; hence, unless otherwise noted, all italics are Powers’. 2. Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. xix–xx. The model of postmodern historical fiction elaborated by Elias under the banner of the ‘metahistorical romance’ has some similarities with the reading of Prisoner’s Dilemma offered here. 3. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 114. 4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 368, 369. 5. Ibid., pp. 367, 369. 6. Ibid., p. 370. 7. Ibid., pp. 21–25, 369. For Hutcheon, too, Doctorow’s novel is a prime example of historiographic metafiction (see Hutcheon, Poetics, pp. 61–62, 89–90, 136–137, 145–146; The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edn [London: Routledge, 2002], pp. 54, 68, 77, 91). 8. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 22, 24. 9. Ibid., p. 23. 10. Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. by Vivian Sobchak (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–38 (p. 18). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 19. 13. Perhaps a still more pertinent example is the self-consciously ‘factional’ source text for Spielberg’s film, written by Thomas Keneally. On Keneally’s Schindler’s List (originally published in the UK, in 1982, as Schindler’s Ark) as a work of ‘faction’, see Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000), ch. 4. 14. White, ‘Modernist’, p. 18. 15. Ibid., p. 20. 16. Ibid., p. 22. 17. Ibid.

Notes 209 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

Ibid., p. 32. Ibid. Ibid. Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane, ‘The Black Hole of Trauma’, in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, ed. by Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisaeth (London: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 3–23 (p. 19). Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Otto van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 158–182 (p. 178). The so-called bat bomb did indeed receive the support of both the US Military and President Roosevelt, but was not ultimately deployed in combat (see Jack Couffer, Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992]). The gravitational metaphor employed here takes a lead from Cathy Caruth’s essay ‘The Claims of Reference’, in which she shows how the condition of falling functions, in works by Paul de Man, as a figure for the act of reference (see Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. by Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995], pp. 92–105). Joseph Dewey, Understanding Richard Powers (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), p. 42. Ibid., p. 47. See Richard Powers, ‘The Last Generalist’, interview with Jeffrey Williams, Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice 2.2 (1999) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 21; Dewey, Understanding, p. 152, n. 6. Arthur M. Saltzman, The Novel in the Balance (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), p. 111. Ian McEwan, interview on World Book Club, BBC World Service, 28 March 2005 < http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/133_wbc_archive_new/ page4.shtml> [accessed 31 May 2008]. A further novel, The Innocent (1990), is set in a gloomy 1950s Berlin, where the legacy of the war remains palpable. Ian McEwan, introduction to The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), pp. 9–20 (p. 17). It was after reading Angus Calder’s social history of Britain during World War II, The People’s War (1969), in 1978 that McEwan ‘resolved to write something one day about the war’ (introduction, p. 17). McEwan, World Book Club. See, for example, Ian McEwan, Atonement (London; Jonathan Cape, 2001), pp. 219, 242, 243. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will be noted parenthetically in the body of the text. McEwan, World Book Club. Ibid. In Atonement, the main character is passed on the road to Dunkirk by a dispatch rider from the Highland Light Infantry: ‘His bloody legs dangled uselessly, and his pillion passenger, who had heavily bandaged arms, was

210

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

Notes working the foot pedals’ (240). This scene is directly based on McEwan’s father’s description of how, having suffered severe leg injuries, he ‘teamed up with another man whose arms were wounded and between them they drove a motor bike for about 40 miles along the road’ (World Book Club). In the Acknowledgements section of Atonement, McEwan cites as key sources Lucilla Andrews’ memoir of wartime nursing, No Time for Romance (1977), and two historical accounts of the Dunkirk operation: Gregory Blaxland’s Destination Dunkirk (1973) and Walter Lord’s The Miracle of Dunkirk (1982). On the inexpressibility of pain, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Ian McEwan, ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting in the War’, interview with John Sutherland, The Guardian, 3 January 2002 [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 15. See, for example, Bessel A. van der Kolk, ‘Trauma and Memory’, in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, ed. by Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. Macfarlane, and Lars Weisaeth (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 279–302. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992). Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 140; emphasis in original. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Foster, Return of the Real, p. 149. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 116. Foster, Return of the Real, p. 269, n. 49. Hal Foster, ‘Trauma Culture’, Artnet Magazine (1996) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 4. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 4, 62. Ian Watt, ‘Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness’, in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. by Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1987), pp. 311–335 (p. 317). Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. by Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), p. 6. See Brian Finney, ‘Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004), 68–82 (p. 70, n. 6). Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 1974), XVIII (1955), pp. 1–64 (pp. 31–32). These responses were elicited by a message posted by Tim Gauthier of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. [accessed 19 October 2006; no longer available].

Notes 211 55. See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. by David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Seduction, Translation, Drives, ed. by John Fletcher and Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992). 56. Jean Laplanche, interview with Cathy Caruth, Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 7; emphasis in original. 57. A term coined by the reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser. He defines the implied reader as the entity or persona that ‘incorporates both the prestructuring of the potential meaning of the text, and the reader’s actualization of this potential through the reading process’ (Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974], p. xii; quoted in Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism [London: Methuen, 1987], p. 143). 58. See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, trans. by James Strachey, ed. by James Strachey and others (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974) XXIII (1964), pp. 1–137 (pp. 66–68). 59. I make use in this section of Manfred Jahn’s exemplary hypertext project Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative (English Department, University of Cologne, 2005), especially the following paragraphs: N3.1.4; N3.2.2; N3.3.2; N5.1.1 [accessed 31 May 2008]. 60. See Finney, ‘Briony’s Stand’, pp. 75–76. 61. Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 66. 62. François Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), pp. 5, 167, 50, 148. 63. Ibid., pp. 148, 149. Here, Davoine and Gaudillière gesture towards the ambiguities surrounding Lacan’s notion of the Real that I discussed in Chapter 1: their argument indicates that, for all its associations with an irreducible materiality, the Real needs, equally, to be understood as a psychic phenomenon, capable of lodging as an inscrutable and intractable ‘kernel’ at the core of the subject, from whence it may also be transmitted. 64. Davoine and Gaudillière, History, pp. xxiii–xxiv. 65. Ibid., p. 78. 66. Ibid., pp. xxiii, xxvii, 139, 149, 164. 67. See Norman N. Holland, ‘Why This is Transference, Nor Am I Out of It’, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 5 (1982), 27–34. 68. Freund, Return, p. 129. 69. My argument intersects here with Kalí Tal’s claim, in her book Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), that representations of a trauma similar to that undergone by a ‘survivor-reader’ ‘may trigger “flashbacks” [ ... ] derived from the reader’s own traumatic experience’ (p. 16; emphasis in original). Also noteworthy is the reported occurrence in veterans of the Second World War of post-traumatic stress symptoms triggered by viewing Steven Spielberg’s cinematic re-creation of the conflict, Saving Private Ryan (1998). Jo Stanley notes that ‘in the USA in July 1998 the US Department of Veteran Affairs set up a web site offering support to those suffering the movie’s impact. Over 15,714 people visited the site

212

Notes in the first fifteen months’ (‘Involuntary Commemorations: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its Relationship to War Commemoration’, in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. by T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper [London: Routledge, 2000], pp. 240–259 [p. 251]). The implications of Tal’s and Stanley’s findings in the present context are ambiguous, however. Does the potentiality identified by Tal extend only to victims of ‘primary trauma’ (as she contends), or, as Davoine and Gaudillière’s research would seem to suggest, might it also apply to sufferers of ‘secondary’, ‘vicarious’, or ‘intergenerational’ trauma? Similarly, does the broader sensory scope of the cinematic medium endow it with a heightened capacity for eliciting such responses; or, conversely, might the uniquely immersive experience of solitary reading carry the potential for equally powerful affective reactions?

Conclusion: Writing/Reading World War II After 9/11 1. Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 1–2. 2. See, for example, ‘Saddam the New Hitler, Bush Tells Europeans’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 November 2002 [accessed 31 May 2008]; ‘UK Rejects Iraq Missile Move’, BBC web site, 1 March 2003 [accessed 31 May 2008]. See also, David Hoogland Noon, ‘Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7.3 (2004), 339–364; Torgovnick, War Complex, pp. ix–x. 3. Torgovnick, War Complex, p. 142. 4. Michael Moorcock, ‘Triumph of the City’, Booksense.com, 19 October 2001 [accessed 31 May 2008], pars. 1–3, 6–7. 5. Ibid., par. 8. 6. Deborah Eisenberg, ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’, in Twilight of the Superheroes (London: Picador, 2006), pp. 1–42 (p. 39). 7. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 189. 8. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), p. 115. 9. Ian McEwan, ‘How Could We Have Forgotten that this was Always Going to Happen?’, The Guardian, 8 July 2006 [accessed 31 May 2008], pars 3–4. 10. Iain Sinclair, ‘Theatre of the City’, The Guardian, 14 July 2005 [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 3. 11. David Rando, ‘Reading Gravity’s Rainbow After September Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach’, Postmodern Culture 13.1 (2002) [accessed 31 May 2008], par. 1. 12. Christopher Benfey, contribution to ‘Has Art Helped You Make Sense of 9/11?’ forum, Slate Magazine, 7 September 2006 [accessed 31 May 2008]).

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Select Bibliography 215 of Reading: Otherwise, ed. by Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 338–395. ———, ‘Periodizing the 60s’ (1984), in Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn, ed. by Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 292–322. ———, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981). ———, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006). ———, The Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–54, trans. by John Forrester, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988). ———, The Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1991). ———, The Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60, trans. by Dennis Porter, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Routledge, 1992). ———, The Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, trans. by Alan Sheridan, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin, 1994). ———, The Seminar XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73, trans. by Bruce Fink, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1998) LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Laplanche, Jean, interview with Cathy Caruth, Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001) [accessed 31 May 2008]. Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973). Levi, Neil and Michael Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Luckhurst, Roger, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Mandel, Ernest, Late Capitalism (1972), trans. by Joris De Bres (London: New Left Books, 1976). Mattesich, Stefan, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). McEwan, Ian, Atonement (London; Jonathan Cape, 2001). ———, The Imitation Game: Three Plays for Television (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). McHale, Brian, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992). ———, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987). McHoul, Alec and David Wills, Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1990).

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Milchman, Alan and Alan Rosenberg, eds, Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). Milesi, Laurent, ‘Postmodern Ana-Apocalyptics: Pynchon’s V-Effect and the End (of Our Century)’, in Approach and Avoid: Essays on Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon Notes 42–43 [1998]), ed. by Luc Herman, 213–243. Moorcock, Michael, Mother London (1988) (London: Scribner, 2000). Nicholls, Peter, ‘The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison’, in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader, ed. by Sue Vice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 50–67. Osborne, Peter, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995). Piette, Adam, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1995). Plain, Gill, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). Powers, Richard, Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988). Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) (London: Vintage, 2000). ———, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) (London: Vintage: 2000). ———, V. (1963) (London: Vintage, 2000). Rothberg, Michael, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Safran Foer, Jonathan, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) (London: Penguin, 2006). Seltzer, Mark, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October 80 (1997), 3–26. Sherry, Vincent, ‘The Great War and Literary Modernism in England’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Literature of the First World War, ed. by Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 113–137. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999). Stevenson, Randall, The Oxford English Literary History Vol. 12: The Last of England? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Stonebridge, Lyndsey, ‘Anxiety at a Time of Crisis’, History Workshop Journal 45 (1998), 171–182. ———, ‘Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s Caught’, Diacritics 28.4 (1998), 25–43. Tal, Kalí, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Tate, Trudi, Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Torgovnick, Marianna, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno van der Hart, ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 158–182. Virilio, Paul, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). ———, Unknown Quantity, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003).

Select Bibliography 217 ———, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. by Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). Virilio, Paul and Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, revised edn, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) (London: Vintage: 2000). Weisenburger, Steven, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). White, Hayden, ‘The Modernist Event’, in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. by Vivian Sobchak (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–38. Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts (1941), ed. by Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 2000). ———, Mrs Dalloway (1925) (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964). ———, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977–1984). Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 1992). ———, ‘Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears’, October 58 (1991), 45–68. ———, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994). ———, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). ———, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, The Symptom 2 (2002) [accessed 31 May 2008].

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Index 9/11 (11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.), 9, 14, 33, 56, 175–81 abjection, 104, 161, 163 abreaction, 62–3 Adorno, Theodor W., 13, 16, 45–9, 52, 54–6, 62, 68, 74 affect, 39, 86, 87, 90, 96, 136, 161, 168, 171–4 Amis, Martin, 6, 80, 159 anxiety (psychoanalytic concept of), 35, 43, 61–2, 96 atomic/nuclear weapons, 3, 9, 10, 15, 19–21, 24, 26–7, 43, 53, 56, 57, 59, 67–8, 73–4, 78–9, 92–3, 95–6, 100, 101, 102, 109, 149, 153–4, 178 autobiography, 80–1, 85, 99–114, 158–9 Badiou, Alain, 189nn.89, 91 Ballard, J.G., 1, 2, 4, 5–6, 13, 74–116, 140, 150 Barnes, Julian, 6, 159 Barthes, Roland, 12 Baudrillard, Jean, 12, 18–22, 24, 37, 42, 49, 68 Beckett, Samuel, 16 Benjamin, Walter, 10–11, 33–4, 120 Bergson, Henri, 89, 116 Bernstein, Charles, 6, 15, 38 Blanchot, Maurice, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24 Blitz (German bombing of Britain, 1940–1941), 124, 127–34, 142–4, 177 Bowen, Elizabeth, 3 Byatt, A.S., 6 capitalism, 9, 50 and militarism/militarization, 9, 15, 47–8, 52–4

see also commodification; reification Capote, Truman, 149 Caruth, Cathy, 13, 23, 35, 40, 50–1, 57, 64, 70, 106, 162, 165 Cavani, Liliana, 149 commodification, 66–7, 137–8 Connor, Steven, 142 Conrad, Joseph, 165–6 counterculture, 57, 69, 70, 71, 110 Dalí, Salvador, 116 Davis, Walter A., 9, 31, 42 Davoine, François, 172–4 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 61 DeLillo, Don, 149 de Man, Paul, 12, 189n.91, 209n.24 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 67–8 Dick, Philip K., 5, 7 Disney, Walt, 146–7, 151–7 Doctorow, E.L., 148 Eaglestone, Robert, 18 Eatherly, Claude, 101–2 Eisenberg, Deborah, 14, 177 Elias, Amy J., 38, 42, 147 Faulkner, William, 116 Foster, Hal, 23, 27, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41–2, 67, 83, 86, 99–100, 104, 120–1, 136–7, 156, 162, 163–5 Foucault, Michel, 136 Frayn, Michael, 7 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 17, 21, 34–5, 41, 43, 45, 49–52, 55, 56–7, 60–2, 70–1, 77, 87, 89, 90, 101, 102, 105–6, 116, 136, 139–40, 169, 170, 173 Freund, Elizabeth, 174 fright (psychoanalytic concept of), 35, 61–2

219

220

Index

Gaudillière, Jean-Max, 172–4 Green, Henry, 3 Guattari, Félix, 49 Hamid, Mohsin, 14, 178–9 Hamilton, Patrick, 3 Harvey, David, 51 Hassan, Ihab, 10 Hawkes, John, 4 Hegel, G.W.F., 46–7, 56 Heidegger, Martin, 116 Heller, Joseph, 5 historicity, 20, 21, 40, 81, 83, 140, 152, 160 historiographic metafiction, 147–50, 152 Holland, Norman, 174 Holocaust, the, 3, 10, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 23, 27, 43, 79, 149, 155 Howard, Elizabeth Jane, 4 Husserl, Edmund, 116 Hutcheon, Linda, 27, 37, 147, 149, 152, 157 see also historiographic metafiction Ishiguro, Kazuo, 6, 159

Levinas, Emmanuel, 16 Levy, Andrea, 7 Lowry, Malcolm, 4 Luckhurst, Roger, 80, 86, 103, 105, 110, 111–12 Lyotard, Jean-François, 11, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 182n.13 Mailer, Norman, 4, 149 Mandel, Ernest, 48, 50, 52–3 Marx, Karl, 28, 148 McEwan, Ian, 1, 2, 6, 7, 14, 144–6, 159–74, 179 McHale, Brian, 64, 100–1 McKenna, Andrew J., 10, 17 modernism, 32, 41, 89–90, 116–18, 136–7 and World War I, 4–5, 36–9 modernist event, 149–50 modernity, 15–16 Momaday, N. Scott, 7 Moorcock, Michael, 1, 2, 4, 14, 116, 118, 128–44, 176–7 Morrison, Toni, 7, 140 Morrow, Bradford, 7 Myrer, Anton, 4

Jameson, Fredric, 13, 22, 27–33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45–6, 48–54, 58, 66, 74–5, 81–2, 89–90, 95, 136–7, 139–40, 147–8, 151, 153, 157 Janet, Pierre, 107, 109 Jensen, Liz, 7 Jones, James, 4 Joyce, James, 38, 117–18, 135

Nachträglichkeit, 17–18, 43, 45, 49–52, 57, 60, 70–1, 90–1, 102, 139–40, 170, 173 Nicholls, Peter, 17, 60, 71, 90, 96, 140 Norfolk, Lawrence, 7

Kelley, Mike, 104 Kennedy, A. L., 7 Kennedy, John F., 9, 43, 91, 93, 94, 149 Klee, Paul, 37 Kristeva, Julia, 163

Patchen, Kenneth, 4 Phillips, Jayne Anne, 7 Piette, Adam, 3 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 49–50, 51 postmodernism ‘origins’ of, 8–12 temporality of, 6, 12, 16–17, 81–2, 89–90, 95, 136–9 and trauma, 1, 17, 23, 39–43, 49–52, 58, 63 and World War II, 1, 6, 8, 9–12, 16–17, 22–3, 24, 26–7, 140, 180–1

Lacan, Jacques, 13, 14, 25–6, 27–31, 34–6, 39, 41, 78, 79, 99–100, 137, 139, 145, 151, 153, 161–2, 163–4, 167, 169 LaCapra, Dominick, 77, 112 Laplanche, Jean, 49–50, 51, 70, 170

Osborne, Peter, 8–9, 12

Index 221 poststructuralism, 27–8, 32, 39–40, 42–3, 104 Powell, Anthony, 4 Powers, Richard, 1, 2, 7, 14, 144–59, 179 Priest, Christopher, 7 Proust, Marcel, 116 Pynchon, Thomas, 1, 2, 4, 5–6, 7, 13, 14, 44, 45–75, 115, 180 reading, 169–74, 180 Real, 13, 14, 27–31, 33, 39–40, 41–2, 58, 66–8, 83, 99–100, 104, 145–6, 151–2, 156, 161, 163–5 realism, 4–5, 14, 31–2, 145–6, 157–8, 163–5 Reed, Ishmael, 149 referentiality, 6, 22, 28, 30, 37–43, 44, 85, 145–6, 151–2, 161 and trauma, 1, 39–43, 50–1, 60, 86, 90, 93 waning of, 19–21, 32–3, 66–7, 148 see also Real reification, 22, 23, 32–3, 37, 46, 66–7, 137, 147–8, 151–2 Ricoeur, Paul, 119 Roberts, Michèle, 7 Safran Foer, Jonathan, 14, 177–8 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 7 Sinclair, Iain, 14, 79, 80, 85, 141, 179 Smith, Zadie, 7 Snaith, Anna, 117–18 Spielberg, Steven, 110, 149, 211n.69 Stavrakakis, Yannis, 25, 26, 29–30 Stephenson, Neal, 2, 7 Stevenson, Randall, 8 Stone, Oliver, 149 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 3–4, 40, 43 stream-of-consciousness technique, 14, 117–20, 122–3, 125–7, 134–5, 138–40, 142–4 Surrealism, 101, 103, 136 Swift, Graham, 6, 159 Syberberg, Hans Jürgen, 149 Tal, Kalí, 50–1, 211n.69 Taylor, Mark C., 10

terrorism, 14, 33, 175–81 see also 9/11 Thatcher, Margaret, 131, 143–4 Thomas, D.M., 149 Todorov, Tzvetan, 126, 133, 157 Torgovnick, Marianna, 24–5, 56–7, 71, 176, 177 transference, 173–4 trauma, 1, 13–14, 23, 45, 55–6, 61–4, 77–8, 91, 104, 151, 153, 180–1 automatism in, 77–9, 100–4 and breakdown between public and private, 115–16, 120–2, 123–4, 133, 141 causality in, 70–1, 77 collective, 24–6, 70 and postmodernism, 1, 17, 23, 39–43, 49–52, 58, 63, 104 and reading, 169–74 recovery from, 105–13, 150–1, 153–4 and referentiality, 1, 39–43, 50–1, 60, 86, 90, 93 secondary/intergenerational, 172–4 and speed, 34–6, 165–8 temporality of, 13, 17, 50–2, 57, 58, 60, 63–4, 70, 96, 102, 138–40, 165, 170 see also abjection; abreaction; anxiety; fright; Nachträglichkeit; traumatic realism; tuché traumatic realism, 41, 85, 95, 99–100, 191n.131 tuché, 30, 34, 36, 41, 99–100, 167, 169, 174 van der Kolk, Bessel A., 106, 107, 109, 111, 150 Vietnam War, 6, 7, 9, 43, 53–4, 57, 66–7, 69, 70, 71, 92, 102, 109 Virilio, Paul, 36, 68, 166, 169, 172 Visconti, Luchino, 149 Vollman, William T., 2, 7 Vonnegut, Kurt, 5–6 Wallace, David Foster, 2 Warhol, Andy, 41–2, 86, 100 Waters, Sarah, 7 Waugh, Evelyn, 4 White, Curtis, 7

222

Index

White, Hayden, 148–50, 154–5, 156, 157 Woolf, Virginia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 116, 118–28, 129, 130, 134 World War I and modernism, 4–5, 36–9 World War II Anglo-American and Continental experiences of, 23–4

and literary history, 2–8, 159, 175 and postmodernism, 1, 6, 8, 9–12, 16–17, 22–3, 24, 26–7, 140, 180–1 see also Blitz Žižek, Slavoj, 23, 30, 33, 39–40, 42, 68, 77, 79, 156, 164