Unvarnishing Reality

Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire

Derek C. Maus

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781570039850
• eBook ISBN: 9781611172263
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria politica

Unvarnishing Reality draws original insight to the literature, politics, history, and culture of the cold war by closely examining the themes and goals of American and Russian satirical fiction. As Derek C. Maus illustrates, the paranoia of nuclear standoff provided a subversive storytelling mode for authors from both nations—including Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Vasily Aksyonov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Vladimir Voinovich, Fazil Iskander, and Sasha Sokolov.

Maus surveys the background of each nation's culture, language, sociology, politics, and philosophy to map the foundation on which cold war satire was built. By highlighting common themes of utopianism, technology, and propaganda, Maus effectively shows the ultimate motive of satirists on both sides was to question the various forces contributing to the cold war and to expose the absurdity of the continuous tension that pulsed between the United States and the Soviet Union for nearly half a century. Although cold war literature has been studied extensively, few critics have focused so keenly on comparisons of satirical fictions by Russian and American writers that condemn and subvert the polarizing ideologies inherent in superpower rivalry. Such a comparison reveals thematic and structural similarities that transcend specific national and cultural origins. In considering these works together, Maus locates a thoroughgoing humanistic refutation of the cold war and its operative doctrines as well as a range of proposed alternatives. Just as the cold war combatants ultimately reconciled in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, Maus seeks to bring these two literary canons together now. Their thematic scope transcends cultural differences, and, as Maus demonstrates, these writers saw that there was not only the atomic bomb to fear, but also the dangers of complete national militarization and the constant polarizing threat of emergency. Thus their cold war critiques still resonate today and invite further comparative studies such as this one.

The Role of Literature
during the Cold War

In [Gertrude Stein’s] probing of nothingness and in her undoing of dichotomous paradigms, she establishes one fundamental role for the imaginative writer . . . in the nuclear age: to confront annihilation’s otherness without capitulating to its seductive power.

John Gery, Nuclear Annihilation and
Contemporary American Poetry (1996)

The Historical and Cultural Context
of the Cold War

The widespread adoption of satire as a medium for fictional expression stems from a number of factors that arose in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the years of the cold war. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have attempted to unravel the dynamics that altered the American and Soviet cultural landscapes so drastically between 1945 and 1991. Although they often differ greatly in their ideas about the means by which cultural phenomena influence artistic representations, scholars of the cold war generally agree that these two factors are part of a cause-and-effect cycle. Satirical literature reflects aspects of the culture(s) in which it is produced and subsequently aspires to bring about changes in that/those culture(s), an endeavor that in turn instigates new literary developments, and so on. Such notions concerning the relationship between literature and culture have attained especial (but not exclusive) credence among the New Historicist school of literary criticism. In Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999), Hayden White states his understanding of New Historicism: “[It] has advanced the notion of a cultural poetics and, by extension, a historical poetics as a means of identifying those aspects of historical sequences that conduce to the breaking, revision, or weakening of the dominant codes—social, political, cultural, psychological, and so on—prevailing at specific times and places in history. Whence their interest in what appears to be the emergent, episodic, anecdotal, contingent, exotic, abjected, or simply uncanny aspects of the historical record” (63). All of the cold war satires discussed in this study diverge from and often seek to undercut the aesthetic and political norms (that is, the “dominant codes”) of their time, which is why I have adopted White’s notion of a “historical poetics” to analyze them.

In my view a comparative historicist approach is essential to greater understanding of the nature of satirical fiction in an era during which control of language became a powerful (arguably, the primary) weapon for conducting the cold war, both domestically and internationally. Self-contradictory expressions such as “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” were commonplace in the governmental and military rhetoric of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the extreme propagandization of language during the cold war drastically destabilized the semantic and semiotic values of words. The formal and thematic qualities found in the satires that arise from this cultural context are directly linked to their creators’ distrust of language (sometimes including, in true postmodernist fashion, that of their own satires) in the post–World War II world.

Whether considered as the dawn of the “atomic age” or as the “first cold war,” the historical period following the Hiroshima- and Nagasaki–induced conclusion of World War II created a radically new cultural context in both the United States and the Soviet Union. E. B. White’s comments from the August 18, 1945, issue of the New Yorker clearly convey the unsettling sense that a new era has suddenly begun: “For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed” (108). White understood that the significant shift in the military balance of power was minimal compared with the necessary recalibration of cultural norms in the wake of the atomic bomb’s creation and use. During the late 1940s he advocated tirelessly for a unified “world government” as a pragmatic response to the state of global affairs in the nuclear era.

The intensifying political and military rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States was not the only source of “disturbing vibrations” resonating through the cultural landscape after 1945, though. Postwar literature about the Holocaust implicitly responds to Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted assertion that it would be “barbaric” to continue to write poetry as though Auschwitz had never happened; a similar principle holds true for nuclear-themed literature after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As in the literature of the Holocaust, a transformation takes place over time in the language of fiction that attempts to come to terms with the significance of the atomic bomb. In both cases the emphasis shifts appreciably from largely mimetic (usually realistic or biographical) narratives toward more abstract representations. Whereas Holocaust literature serves primarily as a simultaneously reproachful and memorializing chronicle of a hitherto unimaginable atrocity from the past, the bulk of nuclear fiction speculates about a future global atrocity that could result from prevalent attitudes.

Lawrence L. Langer and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi clarify the connection between works about the Holocaust and works about Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Langer writes in The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978) that the “Hiroshima bomb, perhaps even more than Auschwitz, changed the quality of war and hence the quality of life and of survival itself” (61). He expands this analysis in the introduction to Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995): “Language, of course, has its limitations; this is one of the first truths we hear about Holocaust writing. . . . The question we need to address, dispensing with excessive solemnity, is how words help us to imagine what reason rejects—a reality that makes the frail spirit cringe” (3–4). Applying this assessment of the potential of language to Holocaust texts, Langer writes that the “most compelling Holocaust writers reject the temptation to squeeze their themes into familiar premises: content and form, language and style, character and moral growth, suffering and spiritual identity, the tragic nature of existence—in short, all those literary ideas that normally sustain and nourish the creative effort” (6). In The Age of Atrocity, Langer posits the dilemma facing the post-Auschwitz / post-Hiroshima world in terms of a “disruption”: “With the disruption of a familiar moral universe, the individual must find ‘new’ reasons for living and ‘new’ ways of confronting the prospect of death introduced into reality by atrocity. Such disruption mars not only an ordered universe, but the identity of one’s self, one’s conception of where he fits and how (and why) he is to act as a human being in a dehumanized world” (62). Thus the “familiar premises” of literature are rendered “barbaric” in the sense that the “familiar moral universe” that they described has been revealed to be literally and figuratively atrocious.

Ezrahi uses a similar idiom of dehumanization in By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (1980) as part of a discussion of Saul Bellow’s work, stating that he “deplor[es] the threat to the self, the loss of identity, which both the Nazi and the nuclear forms of mass extermination represented” (177). Albert Einstein’s 1946 admonitions about the widespread failure to recognize the altered state of the postbomb world serve as yet another point of comparison: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled disaster” (quoted in Dewey 7). These comments all indicate the value of language — including fiction—as a medium in which to track how and why “modes of thinking” changed in response to events that established forms of reasoning cannot comprehend.

In essence the Holocaust generated literature aimed at making it impossible for its readers to forget what happened or to allow something similar to recur, whereas most early nuclear literature served as a warning to prevent the apocalyptic events it depicts from ever occurring. As Stanley Kubrick explained in describing his motivations for making Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), “It was very important to deal with this problem dramatically because it’s the only social problem where there’s absolutely no chance for people to learn anything from experience” (quoted in Whitfield 219). The subversive satirists who wittingly or unwittingly followed Kubrick’s lead extended this task toward a general critique of the dehumanizing processes at work within the cold war.

The cold war period is unusual in the way that both Russian and American literary cultures responded to the inherent novelty of the times. Whereas American literary expressions of the post–World War I zeitgeist generally adopted the “high” artistic forms associated with modernism (as with the fiction of the Lost Generation or the highly intellectual poetry of Eliot, Pound, and others), a substantial part of the initial literary response to the cold war occurred in “low” or “popular” forms such as science fiction and espionage thrillers. The vastly decreased cost of mass-producing books coupled with the burgeoning film and television industries assured greater opportunities for publishing and consuming literature in the decade after World War II than in the decade after World War I. The traditional university-educated and/or university-employed American literary elite began to engage extensively with cold war themes extensively in fiction only in the early 1960s, in the process drawing significantly on the “low” forms that came before. Whereas the initial responses generally engaged with the historical and political events of the early years of the cold war (or extrapolated the effects of such events into futures, usually utopian or dystopian ones),¹ the subversive satires that begin springing up in the early 1960s engage with the period in more oblique terms, critically examining the underlying philosophy and language that shaped the more visible historical and political domains.

Even though the later elite works have generally still become the canonical texts, the influence of popular culture is much more pronounced and direct because of this process of incorporation. Philip E. Simmons discusses the direct connection between mass culture and literature in his Deep Surfaces (1997):

With the vertiginous self-consciousness and skepticism that belong to the postmodern historical imagination, writers as different in style and approach as Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Don DeLillo, Nicholson Baker, and Bobbie Ann Mason not only write about the present while writing about the past, but construct histories of their own novelistic methods, of the conditions of their texts’ production, and of their own approach to representing the past. In these constructions, mass culture—particularly film, television, and the consumer culture built on advertising—shows up as a significant historical development in itself. Enabled by new technologies and multinational organizations of capital, mass culture has become the “cultural dominant”—the force field in which all forms of representation, including the novel, must operate. (1–2)

Simmons later includes literary forms such as science fiction and pulp magazines as part of “mass culture.” While Simmons does not directly associate the cold war with the transition of the “cultural dominant” from the elite to the masses, many factors his study claims as distinctly “postmodern” are ones I attribute primarily to that sociohistorical correlation. The combination of greater and faster media saturation, increased literacy among the general population, and the tremendous rhetorical and physical power unleashed by the development of the atomic bomb all contributed to the rapid development and entrenchment of a belief that the world was in a radically new era.

In the Soviet Union, the sense of living in a fundamentally changed world was initially delayed by Stalin’s continued rule. The rigorous state control over literature and the widespread annihilation of the intelligentsia during the “great terror” (yezhovshchina) of the late 1930s ensured that the post–World War II literary scene in the Soviet Union did not resemble that of the highly innovative 1920s in either its artistic or intellectual merit. Until Stalin’s death in 1953, the party’s control over literary form and content was relatively unquestioned and nearly complete. This situation improved somewhat during the Thaw (Ottepel’), a period of relaxed governmental control from roughly 1954 to 1963, but the relative candor of this time also contributed to discontent by continually providing reminders of how tenuous and restricted the new freedoms were.

Although token dissenting works such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Ne khle-bom edinym (1956; Not by Bread Alone) and Yuri Bondarev’s Tishina (1962; Silence) were published and a number of previously outlawed writers were rehabilitated (either in reputation, if dead, or in person, if alive), the Thaw’s limitations were still exceedingly clear to authors who wished to criticize something other than the excesses of Stalin’s rule. The relaxation of censorship never expanded beyond a few politically expedient internal targets,² thereby allowing the party and its organs to retain full control over legal means of publication, especially from the end of the Thaw through glasnost. Thus the literary response, satirical or otherwise, to the cold war inevitably remained divided into official and unofficial branches. This phenomenon implicitly imparted political undertones to nearly all works of Russian literature, undertones that were defined by the extent to which a work sought and/or received official sanction. The generation of young writers who got their first glimpse of what was possible beyond Socialist Realism during the Thaw included Aksyonov, Dovlatov, Iskander, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Sasha Sokolov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Alexander Zinoviev, each of whom went on to produce subversive satirical works that were published outside the official literary organs of the Soviet Union.

“When night seems thickest and the earth itself an
intricate absurdity”: Literature as a Reaffirmation
of Life in an Increasingly Dangerous World

According to many U.S. and Russian historians, the cold war reached its zenith during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The Soviet Union and the United States came into unprecedented direct conflict over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba as well as the United States’ deployment of missiles in Turkey.³ In his exhaustive political memoir/history Danger and Survival (1988), McGeorge Bundy, special assistant for national security affairs in President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet, maintains that this was the “most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age,” although he downplays the actual danger by stating that “the largest single factor that might have led to nuclear war—the readiness of one leader or another to regard that outcome as remotely acceptable—simply did not exist” (453). Whether or not this assertion is accurate, the resonating aftereffects on the collective psyche of Russian and American society demonstrate the power contained within the perceived threat of imminent total destruction.

The extreme anxiety engendered by the standoff in Cuba served as a stimulus for a literary response that followed closely behind. As Paul Boyer outlines in his two excellent cultural histories, By the Bomb’s Early Light (1985) and Fallout (1998), fictional works with nuclear themes were fairly commonplace before 1962. Most of these works, though, had been classified in the traditionally “low” literary category of science fiction and thus had flown under the critical establishment’s radar. Of the “familiar titles” of nuclear-themed fiction from the precrisis period listed by Albert E. Stone in his Literary Aftershocks, only the works of two British authors, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), generated any stir within critical circles.

Although the possibility of nuclear war had been the overt source of anxiety during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the satires that arose in its wake did not necessarily limit themselves just to criticizing the dangerous practices of nuclear brinksmanship; they also decried the underlying cultural forces that made such risky practices possible in the first place. The number of works of satirical fiction increased dramatically in the wake of the precrisis publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and the release of Dr. Strangelove in 1963. The eleven years immediately following the Cuban Missile Crisis witnessed the production and publication of the following works: Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963), Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists (1966), Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967) and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1971), Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1971), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). All of these works of fiction, and many others like them, contain satirical elements that are part of a broad criticism of American cold war culture in toto in a period when a number of other factors (the Vietnam War, civil rights, and so on)⁴ led to a “sudden fading of the nuclear-weapons issue . . . whether as an activist cause, a cultural motif, or a topic of public discourse” (Boyer, Fallout 110). Whereas Boyer sees the years between 1963 and 1980 as the “Era of the Big Sleep”⁵ because of a “sharp decline in culturally expressed engagement with the issue [of nuclear war]” (Bomb’s Early Light 355), I contend that this decline, if it can be said to have happened, was far from a comfortable slumber.

To his credit Boyer admits as much when he qualifies his remarks: “This is not to suggest that nuclear fear ceased to be a significant cultural force in these years. Robert Jay Lifton may well be right in his speculation that the denial of nuclear awareness . . . affects a culture as profoundly as acknowledging it does” (Bomb’s Early Light 355). In my v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Role of Literature during the Cold War
• 2 The Intersection of Literature and Politics during the Cold War
• 3 “The Bind of the Digital” and Other Oversimplified Logic
• 4 Cold War Critiques of Utopia
• 5 Totalized Distortions and Fabrications
• Epilogue: There Is Still Time
• Appendix: Time Line of Events and Publications
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index