Page 144 →5 Totalized Distortions and Fabrications

In late October 1984, Pynchon published a brief piece in the New York Times Book Review titled “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” in which he discusses (among other things) his misgivings about the influence of the military-industrial complex on the society and government of the United States. This essay marked Pynchon’s first public commentary on the state of the world since the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow, his controversial magnum opus, in 1973. His essay appeared as a number of historians and journalists were declaring the arrival of “the second Cold War,” a position premised on the notion that détente was a fundamental departure from the geopolitical dynamics of the cold war. Pynchon disputes this view, arguing that the social, economic, and governmental forces that created the cold war in the first place had been consistently functioning ever since.

The ostensible occasion for Pynchon’s essay is the twenty-fifth anniversary of C. P. Snow’s lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” For Pynchon this address was “notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ‘literary’ and ‘scientific’ factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other.” Although Pynchon claims that the ubiquity of technology and “information” had, for better or worse, rendered this distinction largely meaningless by 1984, he felt compelled to address Snow’s “immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion” that “literary intellectuals” were both resistant to and incapable of understanding the Industrial Revolution and were thus “natural Luddites” (Pynchon, “Is It O.K.?” 1). Pynchon wryly recites the origins and history of the Luddite movement and argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a quintessentially Luddite novel because it attempts, “through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine” (41).

While Pynchon never directly refers to his own fictions in answering the rhetorical question that appears in the essay’s title, he discusses a series of Page 145 →themes that recur in his three prior novels. He also replies to his critics by defending the right to disapprove of and even to subvert the existing social system. He argues that those who stand to gain the most from the status quo are the same ones who attempt to use their attendant control over language to marginalize those “literary intellectuals” who oppose it: “The idea of a technosocial ‘revolution,’ in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in ‘Luddite’ they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time” (41). Pynchon’s reclamation of the Luddite moniker directly enters literary discourse when he argues against the ways in which those “people who came out on top” deprecate literary dissidence: “But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature—of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself—then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. . . . The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, ‘But the world isn’t like that.’ These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label ‘escapist fare’” (41). Pynchon not only endorses a quasi-Luddite sensibility but also challenges the belief that opposing “fact” is either irrational or irrelevant, mostly because he doubts the origins of such presumed truths.

Pynchon explicitly connects such critically disregarded genres with political opposition during the cold war: “This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years” (41). He avers that science fiction, which he defines expansively enough to presumably encompass his own works, represents a synthesis of the two cultures that Snow counterpoised. As such it became “one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion” (41). Pynchon views science fiction as an ideal medium for writers in an anxious age to express their concerns with and, more important, their dissent against the governing values of such an age.

He does not equivocate in identifying the source of cold war anxiety, linking it with the cultural milieu that spawned the original Luddites: “By 1945, the factory system—which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real Page 146 →and major result of the Industrial Revolution—had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long” (41). Each of “these three curves of development” appears either implicitly or explicitly in Pynchon’s early novels. Gravity’s Rainbow focuses on the Nazi V-2 rocket program, which Pynchon associates with both the atomic bomb and the Holocaust. The bombing of Hiroshima is mentioned in the course of the search for the mysterious Schwarzgerät, a secret Nazi rocket prototype that seems to promise near-mythic power to its wielder, thereby strengthening the leitmotif associating the V-2 rocket with an ICBM: “We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control finger poised right on Miss Enola Gay’s atomic clit, ready to tickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland Sea” (Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 588).

The Holocaust figures prominently in the novel’s background, both through the omnipresence of IG Farben (whose well-documented use of slave labor and production of poison gas inextricably link it with the Holocaust) and through the setting of the Dora forced-labor camp infamously attached to the rocket production complex at Nordhausen. Pynchon alludes to the Holocaust in V. as well. Herbert Stencil, the narrator of the section titled “Mondaugen’s Story,” points out that German troops attempting to subjugate the native Herero population of Südwestafrika in 1904 claimed sixty thousand lives.¹ Being aware of later German atrocities, Stencil blithely notes that this is “only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good” (V. 245).

To Pynchon the cold war and its accompanying threat of nuclear annihilation are a clear signal that the convergence of the three curves is ongoing, perhaps even accelerating: “Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become—among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies—conventional wisdom” (41). He believes this “conventional wisdom” was opposed by “the people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s” and ascribes a neo-Luddite worldview to such authors: “In the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns—exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions—most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of ‘human’ as particularly distinguished from ‘machine’” (41).

Page 147 →The list of themes he enumerates practically summarizes Vonnegut’s oeuvre dating back to Player Piano, one of the quintessential post–World War II “Luddite” novels. Pynchon’s own fiction, and that of many of his fellow subversive satirists of the 1960s and 1970s, clearly treats these kinds of “more humanistic concerns” as well. Although all Pynchon’s works touch on themes of dehumanization and inanimacy, V. engages them most explicitly. The plot loosely centers around the gradual mechanization of the mysterious figure—an amalgamation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and the Grim Reaper in her uncanny knack for appearing at scenes of violence and political intrigue—whose pseudonym gives the novel its title. Individual episodes further blur the line between humans and machines. The novel’s ineffectual protagonist Benny Profane imagines having a conversation with a glorified crash-test dummy named SHROUD (“synthetic human, radiation output determined” [284]), during which the latter explains that there is little difference between the two of them (286).

Noting that the “word ‘Luddite’ continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind,” Pynchon puts the question in his essay’s title into the cultural context of 1984 by hearkening back once more to the cold war’s early years: “As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way” (41).² He claims that the tremendous power of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex had created a situation in which the only form of dissent possible is the kind of subversion symbolized by the historical Luddites and expressed by the kind of literature he describes in his essay. Although Pynchon limits the scope of his article to American society, his treatment of similar issues in Gravity’s Rainbow suggests that he fully understands their global nature. Soviet government was, if anything, even more fully dominated by a military-industrial complex of a different nature (socialist rather than capitalist) but one that still siphoned off vast, and ultimately unaffordable, quantities of the nation’s economic resources to fight both military and ideological wars. In the face of such a situation, Pynchon argues that not only is it “O.K.” to be a Luddite, but it may even be vital to surviving the nuclear age.

Published only months before “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” Jacques Derrida’s article “No Apocalypse, Not Now” examines the relationship between language and nuclear war. He claims that “the growing multiplication of the discourse—indeed, of the literature, on this subject” has created a world in which nuclear war can be perceived as “a pure invention: in the sense in Page 148 →which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are inventions” (23). In likening the potential annihilation of humanity with literary creations, Derrida does not intend to diminish the gravity of the nuclear threat; rather, he hopes to expose the immense power contained within the language used to defend the policies the cold war. Referring to the contemporary linguistic landscape as a site of “fearful domestication, the anticipatory assimilation of that entirely unanticipatable entirely-other,”³ he repeatedly identifies nuclear discourse as a quasi-literary construct: “You will perhaps find it shocking to find the nuclear issue reduced to a fable, but then I haven’t simply said that. I have recalled that a nuclear war is for the time being a fable, that is, something one can only talk about. But who can fail to recognize the massive ‘reality’ of nuclear weaponry and of the terrible forces of destruction that are being stockpiled and capitalized everywhere, that are coming to constitute the very movement of capitalization. One has to distinguish between this ‘reality’ of the nuclear age and the fiction of war” (23).

J. Fisher Solomon’s gloss of Derrida provides a useful starting point for discussing the ways in which cold war authors criticize the scientific and pseudoscientific rhetoric that promoted the political and economic goals of the cold war. Solomon writes: “Derrida presents us with two peculiarly interrelated phenomena. . . . On the one hand, we have the historical ‘reality’ of a nuclear arms race; on the other we have a ‘fabulous’ representation of a war that has never happened. But the two are difficult to separate from each other, for the ‘reality’ of the arms race has itself been predicated upon the ‘fiction’ of the war. Our nuclear stockpile has been stockpiled in the name of the war, and in the name of deterring that war” (22–23). This interpretation resonates with Chris Hables Gray’s contention that “fallacious [‘gaps’] . . . helped to create and elaborate the nuclear arsenal of the United States” (152), a subject satirized at the end of Dr. Strangelove by General Turgidson’s wildly patriotic and absurdly self-serving warning against the possibility of “a mine shaft gap.” It also informs Stephen Miller’s argument that the “military-industrial complex was able to re-use the dire good-versus-evil confrontation of World War II . . . [to create] a prevalent illusory world outlook that, with the Soviet Union’s explosion of its first atomic bomb in 1949, was paradoxically predicated on the ‘bottom line’ need to prevent the world’s nuclear destruction through the stockpiling of thermonuclear devices and the unacknowledged public works project of defense spending” (44). Each of these views suggest that nuclear reality is founded upon “fabulous,” “fallacious,” and “illusory” language. Gray and Miller explicitly add the concomitant qualification that this manufactured reality specifically benefits a select group of powerful individuals, a situation rife with potential for abuse (and thus also satire).

Page 149 →As Solomon notes, an even greater problem of this deliberate intermingling of fiction and reality is the resultant loss of meaning, especially in the case of scientific knowledge:

There is nothing but doxa, opinion, “belief’” in the face of the nuclear referent, Derrida suggests, because one “can no longer oppose belief and science, doxa and épistémè, once one has reached the decisive place of the nuclear age. . . .” For in “this critical place, there is no more room for a distinction between belief and science . . . nor even for a truth in that sense.” . . .

Perhaps, in the practical pragmatic sense, this is the most disturbing of Derrida’s nuclear aporias, because it essentially undermines the objective, scientific claims of every voice in the nuclear debate. Whose “belief” could claim “truth,” and upon what basis? How could we test the relative merits of our various speculations? (23)

Satirists like Pynchon answered such questions by insisting that the beliefs of those with a political or economic stake in the immutability⁴ of the cold war were the ones afforded the status of truth. This was the case not necessarily because these beliefs were true, but because these powerful stakeholders could impose their truth-values on others, either through overt coercion or through more insidious subterfuge, such as the deliberate distortion of language.

Given the increasingly interconnected nature of government, the military, and science during and after the Manhattan Project, it comes as no surprise that one of the most frequent forms of such linguistic distortion is the use of scientific or scientific-sounding rhetoric to create a semblance of validation for policies beneficial to an existing power structure. Instances in which scientific language was mobilized to provide validation for cold war policy are plentiful, but few are as clear-cut as the development of “deterrence” as the guiding principle of U.S.-Soviet nuclear policy. As both superpowers rapidly expanded their nuclear arsenals throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the viability of civil defense strategies became increasingly suspect.⁵ U.S. policy gradually shifted away from plans for surviving an attack toward maintaining a “balance of terror” (a phrase coined by RAND Corporation strategist Albert Wohlstetter in 1954) that would theoretically prevent attack, since neither side would want to risk touching off a war that led to complete commitment of the other’s atomic arsenal.

In Fallout Boyer discusses the evolution of “the arcane reassurance of nuclear strategy”: “From 1945 to 1950, and continuing into John Foster Dulles’s term as secretary of state, atomic strategy as practiced in Washington was a fairly simple (if often unnerving) matter. By the 1960’s, however, it had become a highly specialized pursuit dominated by a small group of civilian experts under contract to the military and based at semiautonomous research Page 150 →institutes at larger universities or at such ‘think tanks’ as the Institute for Defense Analysis, the System Development Corporation, the Center for Naval Analysis, the Research Analysis Corporation, and the RAND Corporation” (117). He goes on to state that “only the dimmest awareness—analogous, perhaps, to a medieval peasant’s grasp of the theological concepts with which monastic scholars like St. Thomas Aquinas wrestled—filtered beyond the walls of the institutes and think tanks” (117–18). As Gray notes in Postmodern War, the highly specialized forms of knowledge required to comprehend the work of these think tanks included the following: “scenario writing, heuristic programming, computer modeling, linear programming, dynamic programming, problems scheduling, nonlinear programming, [and] the Monte Carlo method” (152). All of these techniques are “borrowed directly or metaphorically from computer science . . . [and] are all ways of simulating (gaming, predicting, calculating) possible futures so as to justify constructing one in particular” (152). Since computer science was a field of inquiry limited to an even smaller set of individuals in the 1960s than today, the direct advisory influence of these modeling techniques on important foreign policy decisions placed an enormous amount of control in the hands of a highly select core group of intellectuals.⁶ Their objectivity is called into question not only by Gray’s implication that the data these individuals produced were designed to justify a favorable outcome, but also by the staggering amounts of money the government was willing to spend on nuclear weapons research, development, and strategy based on their largely speculative models.

As intellectually inaccessible as the strategists’ mathematical projections were to the average citizen, the deliberate physical inaccessibility of information prevented even a rudimentary technical understanding of nuclear energy from developing among the populace. Starting with the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which explicitly classified “any information related to the design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic weapons, the production of enriched uranium or plutonium, or the use of those materials for the production of energy” (Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor 62), the actual science behind nuclear energy and weaponry was known to only a handful of experts given security clearance. As David Holloway elaborately details in his Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (1994), the nuclear elite in the Soviet Union was a similarly select and isolated group. Few ordinary citizens in either country understood even the basics of nuclear science, even though its ramifications affected nearly everyone on the planet. This situation enabled propaganda in both the United States and Soviet Union that overplayed the military threat of the enemy’s arsenal while simultaneously lauding the merits of nuclear energy, but without fully disclosing possible risks or environmental side effects.⁷

As Boyer notes, the exclusive nature of nuclear knowledge struck many observers as patently undemocratic: “As early as 1959, Robert M. Hutchins Page 151 →questioned whether democratic theory retained much relevance in the new era of strategic planning, and similar questions gained force in succeeding years. In the mid-1960s, the political scientist Hans Morgenthau stated: ‘The great issues of nuclear strategy . . . cannot even be the subject of meaningful debate . . . because there can be no competent judgments without meaningful knowledge. Thus, the great national decisions of life or death are rendered by the technological élites, and both Congress and the people retain little more than the illusion of making the decisions which the theory of democracy supposes them to make’” (118).

Morgenthau’s comments echo Maltby’s point about “conceptually impoverished discourses that impede critical reflection on society.”⁸ And indeed the un- or perhaps even antidemocratic nature of this new policy-making process was inherently absurd, since its oft-intoned goal was the defense of democracy from totalitarian Communism. The sense that the strategists, and the military their projections helped support, might have plans for creating a de facto government of their own is echoed in General Ripper’s chilling remark in Dr. Strangelove that politicians “have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.” The potential for undue influence by the military in national affairs was hardly a paranoid fantasy in a country that at the time of Dr. Strangelove’s release had only recently retired a former five-star general as president and was less than a decade removed from a divisive struggle of wills between President Truman and Gen. George MacArthur over military tactics, especially those concerning the use of nuclear weapons, in the Korean War.

Satirical depictions of the undesirable interlacing of the military, big business, and politics are plentiful in cold war fiction. The furious pursuit of the Schwarzgerät in Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, is used to symbolize and satirize the drive for dominance over the post–World War II environment by forces ranging from the victorious Allied governments, multinational corporations like IG Farben and Standard Oil, and a motley assortment of lesser players (as well as tenuous and mutable coalitions within and among these groups). The narrator even reminds the reader that “the real business of the War is buying and selling,” a process that occurs on a number of levels: “The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled ‘black’ by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars” (105).

Pynchon’s mordant tone serves not only to transmit his sense of outrage, but also to point out the dehumanization inherent in perceiving equivalence among the “currencies” he mentions. Foodstuffs and luxuries are commodified to the same degree as humans, who are described in an exploitative Page 152 →context based either on sexual synecdoche (“cunt”) or power imbalance (Jews in Nazi Germany). In The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988), David Seed maintains that this reduction of humans “to the same level as information—mere items in business transactions” speaks to Pynchon’s larger critique of the interconnection of industry and politics: “Pynchon takes as his prime example of big business in action the German multinational I. G. [sic] Farben which he repeatedly links with arms manufacture. We are never allowed to separate the V-rocket from its commercial matrix (supported by I. G.) nor to view I. G. as a non-political institution” (192). By focusing its subversive satire not just on IG Farben but on the philosophy that the company and its collaborators represented, Gravity’s Rainbow forcefully cautions against allowing the distorted truths of any military, industrial, and political cartels to go unquestioned.

Perhaps more than any other institution in U.S. culture, The RAND Corporation exemplifies such a cartel, and Herman Kahn is among the most noteworthy of its strategists. Because of his high public profile Kahn was the first among what Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Alvin Weinberg called the “technological priesthood” (quoted in Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor 58) to be satirized individually. In 1961 Kahn published On Thermonuclear War, a work that used extensive statistical modeling to postulate a variety of “Tragic but Distinguishable Postwar States” based on such factors as civilian casualties and the time required for total “economic recuperation” (Kahn 20). Kahn acknowledges that any nuclear war would be a disaster but adds that, in his opinion, “poor [civil defense] planning” could lead to “an additional disaster, an unnecessary disaster that is almost as bad as the original disaster” (20–21). He maintains that “normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their dependents” are not out of the realm of the possible, despite the increased “amount of human tragedy . . . in the postwar world,” provided that the appropriate preparations are made (21).

Kahn also was a leading proponent of what became known as “escalation theory,” a concept intended to reduce the potential for all-out nuclear war by interpolating a number of gradual steps by which conflict could be intensified (and presumably settled) prior to full nuclear commitment. Kahn’s ideas also helped spur the adoption of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), a strategic doctrine that achieves absolute deterrence through the explicit reciprocal threat of massive and complete retaliation for any form of nuclear attack. This doctrine subsequently informed (at least in public announcements) such bilateral nuclear agreements as the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty), both signed in 1972. Thus while not himself an elected or appointed governmental official, Kahn shaped many of the operative concepts of U.S. nuclear diplomacy.

In addition to providing a framework for international relations, deterrence and escalation theory provided good domestic public relations cover for Page 153 →continuing or even accelerating the nuclear arms race. The reality of weapons research and development (a top secret matter in both the United States and Soviet Union) was vastly different than the public language of treaty making, a dissonance that undercuts the perception of two discontinuous cold wars separated by détente. In his outspoken objection to Soviet ABM research (despite their understandable interest in such technology, given an American warhead superiority of six to one as of 1964), Robert McNamara claimed that an effective ABM system would upset the MAD-maintained equilibrium by eliminating the deterrent consequences of launching a preemptive first strike. Despite this public cry of foul, the largely covert U.S. strategic response to Soviet ABM research (in addition to studying the possibility of producing their own ABM system)⁹ was to concentrate on developing multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) that could deliver up to sixteen warheads from one rocket. MIRVs ultimately proved to be a considerably more feasible and unbalancing concept than ABMs and sparked another stage of rapid acceleration in the arms race. The ABM Treaty guaranteed that “each nation must remain vulnerable to the other side’s missiles,” thus upholding the “mutual suicide pact [that] had become the Golden Rule of deterrence theory” (M. Moore 22). The reality behind this MAD reasoning, though, was that the mere potential for destabilization attributed to wholly unrealized ABM systems had resulted in the very real development of MIRVs,¹⁰ in the process illustrating Derrida’s notion of the nuclear arms race as a self-actualizing fiction.

Whatever Kahn’s original intention, his strategic models, themselves predicated almost entirely on hypothetical statistical modeling and vaguely referenced “objective studies” (21), almost immediately became fodder for satire, first in Fail-Safe and not long thereafter in Dr. Strangelove. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler satirize Kahn in a wholly uncomic manner in Fail-Safe, putting his ideas almost word for word into the mouth of Professor Groteschele, a presidential adviser. Groteschele is an emotionally frigid demagogue who prides himself on the fact that he has “provided a respectable language and theory within which the ‘first strike’ or ‘preemptive war’ could be discussed” (113). From his first appearance Groteschele espouses opinions clearly intended to evoke Kahn; Groteschele’s standing as a strategic adviser, for example, is based primarily on a book, Counter-Escalation, the thesis of which he summarizes during a meeting with high-ranking Pentagon officials:

He reviewed alternative theories of modern thermonuclear war and, with all the deliberateness of a machine gunner, shredded them to pieces. . . .

Without smiling, using his new vocabulary, he presented the alternative of the United States striking first. However, he never quite used those words. He took the people around the table to the edge of the Page 154 →abyss, forced them to look over the edge. Then, his language still cold, he described a situation in which the abyss was not threatening, but was in fact a magnificent and glowing opportunity. (115–16)

His presentation is a rousing success and he quickly becomes a voice of unquestioned authority on matters atomic, both in military circles and in the mass media: “Groteschele knew that he was regarded as a magician. The awesome powers on which he was expert, the facts of life and death and survival, the new cabalistic language of the nuclear philosophers and high scientists, were merely matters of fact. But the layman, the rich socialite, the industrialist, the politician, endowed Groteschele with control of the things he described” (118). This passage echoes Boyer in emphasizing the “cabalistic” nature of Groteschele’s vocabulary and knowledge, while it also makes explicit the potential for power (that is, control) inherent in creating and manipulating such “respectable” language.

Throughout the novel Groteschele justifies nuclear war through his fervent anti-Communism. When informed of an impending attack (inadvertently triggered by a computer malfunction) on the Soviet Union by a squadron of nuclear bombers, Groteschele urges the president to seize the opportunity to rout Communism: “Group 6, however its accident happened, has provided a God-given opportunity. One of our groups is well launched toward Russia with a reasonable chance for success. I am convinced that the moment the Russians realize that, they will surrender. . . . Group 6 has given us a fantastic historic advantage. By accident, they have forced us into making the first move, the move that we would never have made deliberately” (185). Rejecting Groteschele’s entreaties, the president attempts to ward off a full nuclear war by offering to destroy New York to balance the unintended destruction of Moscow, spurring Groteschele to lament the effects this action will have on his prospects for continued employment:

Groteschele thought of his future. If both Moscow and New York were destroyed it would be the end of his present career. After such a catastrophe . . . the world would not tolerate further discussion and preparation for nuclear war. . . .

For a moment he felt a pang of theoretical regret. He really would have liked to see the thermonuclear war fought out along the lines which he had debated, expounded, and contemplated. It was not true, he told himself, that one fears death more than anything. One might be willing to die to see one’s ideas proven. (270–71)

Not just Groteschele’s almost mechanical lack of emotion—even his regret is theoretical—but his unwillingness to put the reality of human suffering ahead of his theory ultimately undermines his ideas. Any sense that he might be chastened by this experience, should he survive, is dashed by the final Page 155 →thought attributed to him in the novel: “Then Groteschele swung his attention to what his future work would be. If there were drastic cutbacks in military expenditures many businesses would be seriously affected; some of them would even be ruined. A man who understood government and big political movements could make a comfortable living advising the threatened industries. It was a sound idea, and Groteschele tucked it away in his mind with a sense of reassurance” (271). Confronted with his culpability in the deaths of tens of millions of people, Groteschele comforts himself with the promise of a “comfortable living” (compare Kahn’s “normal and happy lives” above), one that seems to be based on his far-reaching personal connections within the military-industrial complex.

In his self-serving willingness to risk everything in opposing Communism, Groteschele becomes a satirical exemplar of the norm in U.S. politics circa 1960. While hardly radical in their opposition to this norm, General Black and the President, the novel’s two most likable characters, nevertheless represent a more reasoned and sympathetic position. However, their relative sagacity only limits the destruction rather that forestalling it entirely. They are each ultimately forced to annihilate New York in order to prevent all-out nuclear war. This decision is both personally and societally tragic, as both the president’s wife and Black’s family are visiting New York the day the city is destroyed by a bomb dropped from a plane that Black pilots. Groteschele, on the other hand, ponders his family’s fate in nearby Scarsdale briefly, and only “because he had always heard that in emergencies men thought of their families” (270). This sacrifice emphasizes the great potential for disaster inherent in even the most enlightened nuclear policies, much less those of an unfeeling technocrat like Groteschele.

The novel’s resolution presents a best-case scenario for a nuclear engagement within an escalation-based paradigm, largely because the novel’s crisis arises not because of an emotionally charged military showdown but because of a mechanical failure, something Groteschele repeatedly asserts “is almost impossible” even as the evidence for it becomes incontrovertible (178). Moreover the president’s philosophical depth and the Soviets’ trustfulness under duress differ markedly from the brinksmanship displayed by both sides during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred only months after Fail-Safe was published. The somber ending suggests that setting the distorted logic of escalation theory into motion inevitably leads to monstrous tragedy, no matter how “limited” its scope of destruction.

Dr. Strangelove satirically treats the intentional obfuscation inherent in cold war rhetoric in a manner simultaneously more grim and more comic than Fail-Safe. Kubrick’s film adopts a more totalized satirical perspective in subverting some of the same factors that actually limit the catastrophe in Fail-Safe—in essence, it parodies the nonsatirical elements of Fail-Safe. The mechanism of checks and balances still works well enough to prevent complete Page 156 →destruction in Fail-Safe, but the nuclear apocalypse at the end of Dr. Strangelove is (to use General Turgidson’s euphemism) largely the result of a series of a series of “slip-up[s]” implicating science, politics, and the military in equal measure. These mistakes include the following: General Ripper’s insanely extremist anti-Communist politics (which, as the president complains, should have been screened out by the “human reliability tests” required of all nuclear personnel); the loophole in “Attack Plan R” that allows Ripper to order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without the usual presidential approval; Premier Kissof’s vanity in delaying the revelation of the Doomsday Machine’s existence until the more politically expedient occasion of the Party Congress; Kissof’s licentious impetuosity at the time of the incident; Colonel “Bat” Guano’s dim-witted detainment of Captain Mandrake, which causes a critical delay in transmitting the abort code to the bombers; the disabling of the “CRM 114” encoding device (the sole piece of machinery needed to receive a valid “abort” message) aboard Major Kong’s B-52 by a missile intended to shoot the plane down; and even Major Kong’s extraordinary and unfortunate resourcefulness in performing his duty to the letter.

President Muffley, General Turgidson, and Premier Kissof, furthermore, are all parodies of their comparatively sagacious counterparts in Fail-Safe, and it is largely as a result of their ineptitude, both within and prior to the time frame of the film, that the world ends. To the last both Turgidson and Strangelove espouse strategies derived from Kahn’s works,¹¹ as exemplified by the final dialogue of the film, in which Dr. Strangelove explains to the assembled crowd in the War Room how a small remnant of American society could be preserved in mineshaft shelters.¹² Whereas Fail-Safe criticizes the conventional wisdom of the cold war for relying on absolutely optimal conditions to deter complete annihilation, Dr. Strangelove exposes the ridiculousness of this logic by setting it in motion. Kubrick depicts a plausible though comically exaggerated scenario that causes the failure of all the supposed safeguards built into a system that insists that “Peace Is Our Profession,” as billboards around Burpleson Air Force Base reassuringly state. Both Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove satirize the entire quasi-scientific logical structure of deterrence, especially the ways in which it privileges often ill-conceived and self-serving military concerns over all others to create an inhuman reality.

Although constrained by the dual factors of the backlash that followed in the wake of the Thaw and the high degree of secrecy regarding science in the Soviet Union, Russian writers also found occasion to denounce the deliberate distortion of scientific knowledge in the service of state propaganda. Works such as Tertz’s Makepeace Experiment and Iskander’s Goatibex Constellation that engaged in critiques of this sort sporadically appeared during the 1960s, but the former was published only in tamizdat in France, and the latter limited itself to a relatively mild mockery of agricultural science. On Page 157 →the other hand, Our Golden Ironburg, written in the early 1970s, but unpublished until after Aksyonov’s emigration in 1980, is a much more caustic and far-reaching satire of intellectual corruption in Soviet science. Aksyonov parodies the “industrial novel” and “production novel”¹³ genres in Our Golden Ironburg, but the manner in which he does so expands the scope of the parody to include Soviet governmental rhetoric.

The salient difference between Our Golden Ironburg and most of its satirical forerunners is that Aksyonov not only subverts his narrative through conventional literary parody but also metafictionally uses Memozov, a character identified explicitly as an “anti-author,” to force Kitousov, the novel’s putative “author,” to alter his narrative whenever he lapses into the simple formulas of official Soviet literature. Indeed, Memozov nearly wrests control of the story from Kitousov entirely before being forced to flee near the end of the book. Memozov’s subversive influence on both the plot details and the narrative style—elements the industrial novel inextricably links—from within the text itself helps call attention to the thorough aesthetic and logical debasement of the genre because of its heavy-handed, often nonsensical, expression of ideology. Much as Zinoviev used the absurdly large pants in The Yawning Heights on two levels of satirical signification, the scientific institute and surrounding city constructed in Our Golden Ironburg not only serve as satirical grotesques in and of themselves but also parody the historical creation of “towns of science” like Akademogorodok (literally, “Little Academic Town”) near Novosibirsk in the 1950s.¹⁴ Aksyonov’s simultaneously aesthetic and political satire thus subverts the power of both the literary genre and the nonfictional elements of Soviet society that the genre attempts to glorify, namely, science and the industries it supports.

While some critics have interpreted Memozov as a negative presence (a target of Aksyonov’s criticism rather than its instrument) because of his power to debilitate the narrative,¹⁵ I concur with the more positive assessment of critics such as Stephan Kessler, Per Dalgård, and Nina Kolesnikoff, who see Memozov’s effect on the novel as comparable to Aksyonov’s own role within Russian literature. Dalgård contends that Memozov’s “aim is to rouse brains by unorthodox means” (93), a task akin to DeLillo’s desire to stave off “collective brain fade” in White Noise (see below). Kolesnikoff similarly argues that Memozov is an essential part of Aksyonov’s parody of the industrial novel because he represents the stock character of the “internal enemy” (196) who must be overcome on the road to completion of the “heroic” feat of labor at hand (see also K. Clark 258). As both an aesthetic dissenter against official forms of literature and a political dissenter against the system that requires these forms, Aksyonov is, by Soviet standards, an “anti-author.” Like Memozov, Aksyonov recognizes the patent falsity of the authorial stance required by Socialist Realism (or its somewhat diluted late-Soviet offshoots) and attempts to sabotage it wherever possible.

Page 158 →The “heroic” labor depicted in Our Golden Ironburg is the discovery of a mysterious subatomic particle called the “Double-Few,”¹⁶ although none of the five intellectuals gathered together at the state-of-the-art scientific institute that has been built in Siberia especially for this purpose seems fully to comprehend their task. Even Veliky-Salazkin,¹⁷ the leader of the group of scientists and the driving force behind the search for the particle, understands his research only in an abstract and even romanticized sense: “We really need your fairy, this accursed little particle Double-Few, not for admiration’s sake, not for tickling our minds, but for the nations of the earth to use; and we’ll catch her, this infection, and force her to do something—maybe treat malaria, maybe cut steaks, maybe—I’ll let it out—try to inspire the creative act among the elderly population with it—in general, it won’t be wasted!” (Ironburg 45–46). Even as he acknowledges that it may not exist (by calling it a “fairy”) and reveals his ignorance of its nature, Veliky-Salazkin parodically echoes the rhetoric that extolled the “sunny side of the atom” in his complete faith that the Double-Few contains inherently positive power, whether as a cure for disease, as an aphrodisiac, or simply as a handy kitchen tool.

The novel’s fragmented and meandering narrative ostensibly recounts the conception and construction of Ironburg (Zhelezka) and the surrounding town of Pikhty (literally, “fir trees”), as well as the collaborative search for the “Double-Few.” The institute is named for a small piece of metal (zhelezka is a colloquial term for a piece of iron) found on the site—an island oddly covered in fir trees (hence the name of the town)—at the groundbreaking. Without any corroboration other than hearsay and his idiosyncratic interpretation of subsequent events, Kitousov claims that this fragment is the stove damper from an alien spacecraft that crash landed in Siberia in 1909 and was mistakenly declared to have been the mysterious Tunguska meteorite. This fabulous explanation is an important part of Aksyonov’s satire, as it shows the absurd lengths to which Kitousov will go as an author to mythologize Ironburg. Memozov’s presence disrupts both the work going on at Ironburg and Kitousov’s attempts at shaping the accounts of this work in a manner consistent with the ideological genre conventions of the industrial novel.

Kitousov introduces himself anonymously and in the third person (“The author had to spend a lot of money in order to write this novel” [9]) and shows off his supposed ability to control the events of the novel in the prescribed fashion: “It was important for the author to fit a large group of future heroes into one airplane (they were returning from summer vacations), in order to develop a well-composed exposition by all the rules. He now expresses his thanks to Aeroflot because it was possible to do this without any special effort, and the author only had to use a little of his arbitrariness. Using force on a hero always depresses people, even in our (also) humane profession” (9). As soon as he spots Memozov in the airport, though, it rapidly becomes apparent that the author will indeed have to put forth some “special effort” Page 159 →to maintain his “well-composed exposition by all the rules.” Describing Memozov as “his recent and unpleasant acquaintance . . . a young member of the ‘avant-garde’ who in the last few years had managed to breach his creative citadel three times” (10), the author scraps his plans to write a “calm, third-person narration” and instead “show[s] some cowardice, grab[s] for his tried and true weapon, the ‘I’ and [begins] to drone like the senior scientific worker Vadim Apollinarievich Kitousov, and at the same time in the first person” (10). This reidentified author/narrator then begins telling the story of Ironburg, all the while lapsing in and out of first person into a variety of different characters’ perspectives. Aksyonov intentionally destabilizes the degree to which his narrator, primarily associated with Kitousov, can be seen as truly “omniscient.” After all Kitousov is an ordinary human character within the narrative. This technique immediately begins the process of undermining monological narrative authority, a prerequisite of the industrial novel, indeed of most official Soviet literature.

Critics have tended to see Memozov’s narrative intrusion, a process that ultimately results in the destruction of Ironburg entirely, as either a reflection of tight Soviet control over literary work or an exemplary rejection of such tight control. Proponents of the former view, such as Konstantin Kustanovich, generally cite Memozov’s supposed defeat at the end of the novel¹⁸ as Aksyonov’s positive statement about the power of art (in this case, Kitousov’s novel about Ironburg) to survive repression. This perspective is logically unsatisfactory because it ignores the parodic/satiric dimension of the novel and trustingly accepts Kitousov’s version of reality as that which Aksyonov values. If, as I do, one reads the novel as a quasi-dystopian metafictional satire, Memozov’s apparent defeat does not so much discredit his avant-gardism as point out the durability of simplified ideologies (cognitive schemata) that are constantly reinforced and reinscribed.

Taking issue explicitly with Kustanovich’s argument, Kessler points out the fallacy in privileging Kitousov’s perspective: “The mere existence of a real and dangerously avant-garde opponent—in the eyes of Kitousov—has upset the narrator’s intention of maintaining distance and pursuing a quiet narrative. This is an intention that therefore does not seem avant-garde: conventional, ordinary, quiet—a typical production novel. It is therefore not correct that, as Kustanovich sees it, the position of the narrator (‘author’) contains a positive, affirmative valuation for the reader” (377).¹⁹ Kessler’s primary proof for this assertion lies in the fact that the negative depiction of Memozov stems from Kitousov, a narrator whose language is marked not only by frequent and often logically inappropriate recourse to “the language of the official Soviet propaganda as used in the media and in many industrial novels” (Kolesnikoff 199)²⁰ but also by academic-style footnotes and scientific formulas. Kessler points out that the garbled and seemingly arbitrary inclusion of these elements is merely form without content, since the formulas are incapable of conveying Page 160 →any information: “Footnotes and formulas constitute the novel together with the narrated events as parody, because both paratextual elements are normally characteristic of other genres and, moreover, are included in Zolotaia nasha zhelezka in a nonsensical fashion. As far as the formulas are concerned, despite their typographical appearance as potentially stemming from mathematics or physics, they are intrinsically nonsensical” (358). Any faith the reader may have in Kitousov’s narration is thus shaken by these superficial attempts to make the novel appear consistent with “the rules” of the genre.

Even though the classic Soviet industrial novel was becoming obsolete by the early 1970s, Aksyonov’s parody of its linguistic, logical, and ideological methodology in Our Golden Ironburg is so thorough that it becomes a satire of the fundamental values that originally shaped that genre. These values continued to define the Soviet Union up to and even to some extent through Gorbachev’s reforms in the mid- to late 1980s, making Aksyonov’s satire historically relevant to not only the earlier period when the industrial novel dominated Soviet literature²¹ but also his own authorial present. As Clark points out, the neo-Stalinist tendencies of the Brezhnev era were an attempt to “rebuild a sense of pride in the Soviet past and present” and as such reaffirmed a number of “attitudes toward governance that were meant to have been discredited in the Khrushchev era” (237–38). The substantial fluctuation in the official estimation of Stalin in the two decades following his death helped undermine further trust in the pronouncements of the leadership, especially given the limited but nevertheless repugnant details about the “excesses” of his reign that were revealed during the Thaw. Aksyonov’s parody of a predominantly Stalinist genre, then, also parodies Brezhnev’s policies,²² arguing that, like Kitousov’s narrative, the Soviet Union of the later cold war period is governed through the use of inconsistent, dubious, or even wholly nonsensical logic. Implicit in such a position is the knowledge that this kind of logic has already led the country down a dour, bloody path before and has the potential to do so again.

Although both Khrushchev and Kennedy tempered their public attitudes toward nuclear weapons after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the reality of the arms race remained a highly volatile one that actually worsened despite a flurry of high-profile treaty signings in the ten years after Cuba: “In both the United States and the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons research, construction and deployment went forward rapidly after 1963. Taking advantage of the [1963] test ban treaty’s gaping loophole, both sides developed sophisticated techniques of underground testing. The United States conducted more tests in the five years after 1963 than in the five years before, some involving weapons fifty times the size of the Hiroshima bomb” (Boyer, Fallout 113).

In short, even though the rhetoric of militarism had been scaled back somewhat in favor of “peaceful coexistence,” preparation for and even execution of military conflict was still proceeding apace, a dissonance between Page 161 →word and deed that was a common feature of cold war politics in general (and thus a locus of subversive satirical potential). The increasing number of conflicts between superpower proxies in Southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, and elsewhere during détente allowed this particular “dissimulation of violence” to develop still further. The majority of these smaller “hot” wars were nominally predicated on the same Communism-versus-capitalism ideological dichotomy that defined the cold war, which the superpowers were allegedly now trying to resolve. The speciousness of this position vis-à-vis militarism was patently obvious to many writers whose faith in the system, American and/or Soviet, was already shaken. They collectively criticize the mindset that psychologist Erich Fromm catalogued in his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, which posited that wars are “caused not by dammed-up aggression, but by instrumental aggression of the military and political elites” (quoted in Jones 198). Consequently their satires convey cynicism toward the military-industrial-scientific complexes of authority by identifying the absurdity and duplicity of the language and logic that they used to justify the cold war (and many of its “hot” adjuncts).

Deterrence theory, “bad” science, and militarism, however, are not the only self-justifying behaviors that cold war satirists decry as injurious masks for political and economic self-interest. The final group of cold war satires that I will examine below exemplify Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction in that they are “willing to draw upon any signifying practices [they] can find operative in a society. [They want] to challenge those discourses and yet to use them, even to milk them for all they are worth” (137). Whether having their characters perform before comic pantheons of celebrity/importance or trapping them within linguistic environments that are overstuffed to the point of nonsensicality, such works expose how all forms of masked fictionality are symptomatic of considerably more pervasive and dire cultural pathologies.

Robert Coover’s Public Burning is perhaps the most exhaustive subversion of American cold war cultural attitudes. Coover not only accuses the U.S. political and social elite of violent and self-serving distortions of logic and language, he also implies that such behavior is omnipresent throughout the nation’s history. Because of Coover’s willingness to identify his satirical targets unambiguously, The Public Burning supersedes even Giles Goat-Boy as an unrestrained satire of cold war American culture. Barth’s allegorical transformation of the cold war world into a university campus in Giles Goat-Boy allows him to satirize many of the institutional and rhetorical follies of both academic and political life, but his approach ultimately stops short of unambiguously indicting specific historical figures or institutions.²³ Coover retrospectively denounces the anti-Communist rhetoric of American politics Page 162 →during one of the cold war’s earlier flashpoints, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953, in order to satirize it in his own time, the mid-1970s. As Maltby notes, though, Coover’s intentions are more expansive than simple satire of particular moments in American history: “The adversarial power of the book surely need not depend on a developed political analysis of recent American history. Rather, that power resides primarily in the novel’s forceful deconstruction and de-mystification of the ruling historical narratives of cold war America” (100). This “deconstruction and de-mystification” is achieved by demonstrating the corrupting influence of the cold war’s binary logic on an exceedingly eager recipient: Richard Milhous Nixon. By linking Nixon with the other “incarnations” of the voraciously nationalistic Uncle Sam, Coover sets up a critique that indicts the principles on which the nation was founded, or, more accurately, he satirizes the historical variance between these principles and the actual practice of the nation’s power elites.

Although it was not published until 1977, the bulk of The Public Burning was composed while Nixon was still in the Oval Office, which encourages the association between Nixon’s thoughts and actions as vice president (and as the narrator of most of the novel) in 1953 and those of Nixon as president in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As vice president Nixon is largely an outsider to the political intrigues that result in the Rosenbergs’ executions; consequently his narration remains reportorial for most of the first half of novel. As the novel progresses and Nixon becomes more directly involved with Uncle Sam—Coover’s larger-than-life satirical personification of American values and the ideological counterpart of the Phantom, whose name contains overtones of both menace and nonexistence—his role changes from that of observer to active participant and somewhat inept orchestrator of the events going on around him.

For most of the early chapters, Nixon is little more than a bit player in Eisenhower’s government. He works diligently in his office and takes part in cabinet meetings, but Eisenhower is clearly in charge, as is made abundantly clear by a scene in which Ike and Nixon play golf. As they walk the course, Uncle Sam materializes physically (“he slipped out of his duffer’s disguise” [83]), temporarily supplanting the personality of Eisenhower, into whom he has incarnated himself. As befits his relative omnipotence, Uncle Sam immediately hits a hole in one and asks Nixon’s opinion on the Rosenberg case. Nixon’s fumbling answer (“Well . . . well, I believe they’re, uh, probably guilty” [85]) demonstrates his lack of understanding of the case’s political exigencies. Uncle Sam incredulously responds, “Well, hell yes they’re guilty!”; but Nixon says that he “resented what seemed like some kind of entrapment” and replies that, from what he’s seen of the case transcripts, “the case has not been proven” (85).²⁴ Uncle Sam immediately attempts to make the reality of the situation clear by explaining that the legal proof against the Rosenbergs is subsidiary to the advantageous fiction their conviction will perpetuate: Page 163 →“Hell, all courtroom testimony about the past is ipso facto and teetotaciously a baldface lie, ain’t that so? Moonshine! Chicanery! The ole gum game! Like history itself—all more or less bunk, as Henry Ford liked to say, as saintly and wise a pup as this nation’s seen since the Gold Rush—the fatal slantindicular futility of Fact! Appearances, my boy, appearances! Practical politics consists in ignorin’ facts! Opinion ultimately governs the world!” (86).²⁵ Uncle Sam essentially asserts the same connection between persuasive public relations and effective governance upon which Hirshberg bases his patriotic schema. The premise that the Rosenbergs’ trial is primarily a spectacle to improve American morale in the face of worldwide gains by the forces of the Phantom²⁶ remains in place throughout the rest of the book.

Retaining his lawyerly mindset, Nixon continues to misapprehend Uncle Sam. He simultaneously struggles with his golf game, a metaphorical association that underscores Nixon’s ongoing difficulties in conforming to the values of the American ruling class despite his familiarity with their rhetoric.²⁷ Nixon’s working-class, rural, Quaker upbringing in California did not involve learning how to play golf—an activity associated even more in the 1950s than today with the economic, social, and racial elites—making his lack of skill in the face of Uncle Sam / Eisenhower’s prodigious five-iron shots even more of a contrast. As Nixon flails his way around the course, Uncle Sam explains the true nature of the “crime” of which the Rosenbergs are guilty in distinctly biblical, specifically Judaic terms: “They have walked in the spirit of perversity . . . violators of the Covenant, defilers of the sanctuary.” Nixon finally takes the bait and finishes Uncle Sam’s thought with a stock phrase of anti-Communist rhetoric: “Sons of Darkness!” (88). Coupled with Uncle Sam’s identification of the “good guys [who] achieve peace and prosperity” as “Sons of Light” two pages later, Coover establishes a biblical/political dichotomy at the center of his cold war milieu and uses it to denounce fraudulent rhetoric that harnesses the power of religious language—but rarely its underlying ethics—to further political goals.

Coover does not limit himself to wholesale inventions of language to accomplish his satirical objectives in this regard. The novel contains three “Intermezzos” that incorporate actual quotes from the documentary record of the time and recasts them into recognizably literary forms. The first of these interstitial sections is laid out on the page as a lengthy poem (presumably an epic, given the grandeur of its title, “The War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness: The Vision of Dwight David Eisenhower”) taken entirely from “Public Papers of the Presidents, January 20–June 19, 1953” (149). The latter two “Intermezzos” are even more elaborate recontextualizations of historical primary sources, one being a “Dramatic Dialogue by Ethel Rosenberg and Dwight Eisenhower” (247) and the other a “Last-Act Sing Sing Opera by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” (381). This technique underscores Coover’s belief in the inauthenticity, to use Iser’s terminology, of the entire Page 164 →proceeding against the Rosenbergs (and by extension American political rhetoric in general), while also making his satire even more damning, especially in the first “Intermezzo,” since he uses Eisenhower’s own words against him.

In The Boundaries of Genre, Morson writes that “a parody can be verbally identical to its original if the parodist uses contextual, rather than textual, change to indicate the fact and grounds of double-voicing” (112). Coover uses precisely this technique to parody and satirize the histrionic tenor of Eisenhower’s appeals to the binary logic of cold war patriotism. As Maltby writes of the first narrative interruption, “The title, with its Manichaean image of two fundamentally conflicting principles, gives an indication of what is to come: a sequence of the reified dualisms which limit popular political thinking in America” (101). Maltby goes on to quote three of the dozens of instances in this “poem” in which Eisenhower casts the ideological conflict between the United States and Soviet Union as an apocalyptic battle between armies representing polar moral opposites. The fact that these are limiting rather than enlightening comparisons is the relevant issue for Coover. Eisenhower’s “lexicon of totemic words . . . and bogey words” (Maltby 102) simultaneously draws upon and reinforces the various parts of Hirshberg’s patriotic schema. This rhetorical approach distracts the American public’s attention from such counterschematic information as the Rosenbergs’ presumed innocence or the demonstrably antidemocratic behavior of South Korean leader Syngman Rhee, the putative defender of American values in the conflict with Communist North Korea. Uncle Sam’s influence over the discourse of the Eisenhower administration is complete (as demonstrated by Uncle Sam’s use of several key phrases prior to their appearance in Eisenhower’s speeches) and calculated specifically as a strategic maneuver against the forces of the Phantom.

Having spent two days (and more than half the novel) scrutinizing the dubious details of the case against the Rosenbergs, Nixon still questions the validity of Uncle Sam’s contention that their deaths are a necessary national inoculation against the Phantom’s expanding influence. His research calls into question the objectivity of institutions such as Time magazine (personified as “the National Poet Laureate” [319 and passim]), the New York Times, and the FBI in perpetuating the political mythology of the cold war. The novel thus indicts print journalism as simply another tool through which governmental rhetoric is transmitted to the people. The relatively omniscient narrator with whom Nixon’s voice alternates writes: “Before The New York Times, if you wished to destroy a man, you inscribed his name on a pot and smashed it. Or stuck a clay image with a pin. Now you attach his name to a sin and print it. Such an act is beyond mere insult or information, it is a magical disturbance of History. It is a holy act and an act of defilement at the same time. It may bring peace and prosperity, it may result in madness and disaster. Is Alger Hiss a Communist? Is Joe McCarthy a Fascist? Is Justice Douglas a Traitor? Is Richard Nixon a Farting Quacker who dreams of selling his pajamas Page 165 →at Coney Island? What matters is: where are such questions being asked?” (194–95). The arcane power of characterization may have been passed from shamanic priests to newspaper editors, but its efficacy in reinforcing dogmatic beliefs remains seemingly undiminished.

Time, on the other hand, is presented as a different kind of anthropomorphized entity, an artist who “frankly acknowledged [the] above-the-board package of prejudices [that were] essential to his genius” (325). Among these “prejudices” are an unquestioning probusiness bias and a “great poetic affinity for War” (323), both of which lead him to disseminate information with a “spin” beneficial to the government’s aims: “This is what his art is all about, this is what it means, as his mother says, to be ‘called to be the servant of truth.’ It is not enough to present facts—something has to happen in time and space, observed through the imagination and the heart, something accessible and illuminating to that reader he writes for, the Gentleman from Indiana. Raw data is paralyzing, a nightmare, and there’s too much of it and man’s mind is quickly engulfed by it. Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination, of giving them shape and visibility, keeping them personal” (320). Having recast journalism into the language of artistic (and thus fictional) creation, Time goes on to defend himself against charges of unwarranted subjectivity: “Some would say that such deep personal involvement, such metaphoric compressions and reliance on inner vision and imaginary ‘sources’ must make objectivity impossible and TIME [sic] would agree with them, but he would find simply illiterate anyone who concluded from this that he was not serving Truth. More: he would argue that objectivity is an impossible illusion, a ‘fantastic claim’ . . . , and as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible” (320). Were Time actually an artist, of course, this final claim would resonate closely with the objectives attributed to the postmodernist authors who were subverting the literary “master narratives” esteemed so highly by modernism. The problem, of course, is that Time is not an artist and the ideas contained in its articles are not acknowledged as fictive constructions, being presented instead as trustworthy journalistic “facts.” The Times and Time are both shown to have the ability to bring ideologically convenient “truths” into practical (that is, exploitable) existence simply by uttering them publicly.

Coover implies that J. Edgar Hoover has been granted similar power in order to find a scapegoat to justify Nixon’s 1949 claim to have evidence of a massive Soviet atomic spy ring.²⁸ Nixon describes the workings of the FBI under Hoover: “Hoover was in many ways a complete loony, arbitrary in his power and pampered like a Caesar, and if he dreamed up a spy ring one day, then by God it existed. Doubt was out. It was an agent’s job to increase the Bureau’s ‘statistical accomplishments’ and ‘personally ramrod field investigations of “major cases” to successful conclusions,’ and never to question the Page 166 →remote wisdom of the Director” (371). Even as he ponders the ramifications of challenging Hoover’s version of the truth concerning the Rosenbergs, Nixon understands the potential danger of exposing the agency’s fictitious history-manufacturing power: “If we went after the FBI and the Justice Department, what then? Could the American people take it? The incorruptibility of U.S. agencies and institutions—above all, the FBI—was an article of faith in this country: could the people brook an attack on that faith?” (371). Of course Nixon’s question is (fictionally) posed more than ten years before Kennedy’s assassination spawned a host of conspiracy theories about the “incorruptibility of U.S. agencies and institutions.” His phrasing, though, echoes Hirshberg’s discussion of the detrimental consequences of overwhelming counter-indicative information to the patriotic cognitive schema (that is, “faith in this country”).

Coover’s grotesque retelling of the Rosenbergs’ trial also contains parallels with Aleshkovsky’s novel The Hand. Much as Bashov reveals the KGB’s extensive resources for fabricating whatever damning materials might be needed to convict a defendant, Nixon relates the importance of potentially manufactured evidence in the case against the Rosenbergs: “Nor did he [Manny Bloch, the Rosenbergs’ defense lawyer] challenge any of the physical exhibits, a lot of which were very dubious and should have been exposed to public scrutiny—hell, the FBI has a special section which does nothing but produce fake documents, they have to do this, it’s a routine part of police work, the kind of thing I might have enjoyed doing if they’d given me that job I asked for when I left Duke—and much of the stuff that Saypol offered up looked like it might well have come from that factory” (123). Coover implies that this “factory” was not even necessary, since Hoover is allowed to testify that he has a wealth of corroborating evidence against the Rosenbergs that cannot be declassified for use in the trial because of the ongoing investigation. Hoover’s false witnessing thus does not even need to be verbalized, merely insinuated, to be effective. The government, the media, and the agencies of law enforcement are all implicated in the creation of social fictions whose artificiality cannot be acknowledged, since to do so would undermine their capacity to maintain ideological unity and its attendant political power.

After the Rosenbergs’ final appeal for clemency is denied, Nixon comes to believe that he can personally intervene to save Ethel Rosenberg from execution at the last minute, and he goes to Sing Sing prison with this intention. As he does throughout the novel, Coover intentionally conflates politics and sexuality. Nixon fumblingly attempts to seduce Ethel and is subsequently surprised by her vigorous response, failing to recognize that her reaction to his advances seems disingenuously warm. He becomes so engrossed in their mutual groping that he is forced to retreat hurriedly into the execution chamber when the jailers arrive to lead Ethel off to carry out her death sentence. As Sing Sing and Times Square phantasmagorically merge into the same Page 167 →locality, Nixon finds himself backing onstage, bare bottomed in front of an audience that includes Uncle Sam, Nixon’s immediate family, and a compendium of luminaries from American politics and entertainment (which Coover implies are nearly indistinguishable). To compound Nixon’s embarrassment, Ethel has lipsticked the phrase “I AM A SCAMP” on his exposed posterior. In addition to commenting on Nixon’s current mischief, this phrase also hearkens back to Ethel’s participation in a labor dispute earlier in her life. Nixon recalls this episode prior to his ill-fated trip to Ossining, demonstrating his political sympathies in the process: “She was pretty goddamn tough, all right. Once, when she was only nineteen years old, she led 150 fellow women workers in a strike that closed down National Shipping. This was during the Depression and the company was fighting for its life, so naturally they hired a new staff and tried to keep operating. But Ethel led the girls in an illegal riot that terrorized the non-union girls and shut the plant down again, in spite of the protective efforts of the whole New York City police force. When a delivery truck tried to crash the picket line, Ethel and the girls hauled the driver from his cab, stripped him bare and lipsticked his butt with I AM A SCAB. My own butt tingled with the thought of it” (304). Nixon’s prescient tingling is, of course, borne out later after he tries to break the ideological picket line represented by the Rosenbergs’ refusal to confess to the espionage charges of which they have been convicted.

Caught literally and figuratively with his pants down in a moment of fraternization with the ideological enemy, Nixon wraps a piece of bunting (which turns out to be a circa-1789 American flag) around his naked waist. He then resorts to a speech in which he regains the shocked crowd’s confidence by appealing to the simple binary logic of their rabid anti-Communism: “‘I tell you, we are on the brink,’ I screamed—I had to scream: the uproar in the Square was deafening, and on top of it radios were blaring away, bands playing, generators humming, and police helicopters were rattling overhead, taking pictures and dropping booze parcels. ‘Look at Korea!’ I cried. ‘Look at China! Eastern Europe! Our own State Department! Even the Supreme Court! We’re exposed on all sides by this insidious evil! this sinister conspiracy! this deadly infection! Let me assure you, the Phantom isn’t changing! He isn’t sleeping! He is, as always, plotting, screaming, working, fighting! Scheming, I should say!’” (474). Nixon cannot properly “recall that lecture that Uncle Sam had given [him] about the wall-eyed harbinger who thirsted for Christian blood” because he is “too overwrought and afraid [he] would fuck it up,” so instead he falls back on standard anti-Communist rhetorical flourishes (which he calls “a touch of the old Dick Nixon”): “We owe a solemn duty, not only to our own people but to free peoples everywhere on both sides of the Iron Curtain, to roll back the Red Tide which to date has swept everything before it! We cannot allow another Munich!” (474). In this brief excerpt, Nixon invokes almost all the elements that constitute Hirshberg’s American cold war schema, including Page 168 →the various positive associations contained in the American patriotic schema (freedom, democracy, good, self, United States) and the transference of diametrical opponent status from the Nazis to the Soviets (achieved through the reference to the Allies’ appeasement of Hitler at Munich).

Coover’s presentation makes it clear that Nixon is only parroting the words of Uncle Sam in an effort again literally and figuratively to cover his ass by wrapping it in the flag. His trysting with Ethel is clearly “counter-schematic information” in terms of his reputation as a confirmed anti-Communist, and this speech (like his famous “Checkers” speech that helped him extricate himself from scandal during the 1952 election campaign) is an attempt to salvage his career by redirecting attention away from his own transgressions. His mistake in repeating the formula (saying “screaming” instead of “scheming”), though, points out Nixon’s lack of real comprehension of the words that he is shouting at the frenzied crowd. In this regard Coover’s technique again resembles that of Aleshkovsky. In The Hand Bashov retells a story in which Stalin, in a moment of revolutionary zeal, attempts to appeal to the spirit of Karl Marx: “‘I see, I see,’ Stalin said quietly. ‘Constipation. . . . Lambs. . . . My gut. . . . The shish kebab of world revolution. . . . This is a call to Louis Bonaparte’s 18th Humidor” (108).²⁹ This nonsensical melange of words and misquotes that issues from Stalin’s mouth points out, as Booker and Juraga note, the fact that the “new Soviet man . . . far from being superior to his predecessors, was utterly devoid of any moral character because of his lack of connection to any meaningful cultural or moral tradition . . . [as demonstrated by his] almost complete ignoran[ce] of history” (105–6). Coover and Aleshkovsky not only accuse Nixon and Stalin, respectively, of using oversimplified and faulty binary logic, but also of being largely incapable of understanding it themselves.

Nixon calls for the crowd to join him in his vulnerable state to demonstrate their patriotism, again using the rhetoric of ideological warfare to persuade:

Now, my friends, I am going to suggest a course of conduct—and I am going to ask you to help! This is a war and we are all in it together! So I would suggest that under the circumstances, everybody here tonight should come before the American people and bare himself as I have done! . . . I want to make my position perfectly clear! We have nothing to hide! And we have a lot to be proud of! We say that no one of the 167 million Americans is a little man! The only question is whether we face up to our world responsibilities, whether we have the faith, the patriotism, the willingness to lead in his [sic] critical period! I say it is time for a new sense of dedication in this country! I ask for your support in helping to develop the national spirit, the faith that we need in order to meet our responsibilities in the world! It is a great goal! And to achieve it, I am asking everyone Page 169 →tonight to step forward—right now!—and drop his pants for America! (482)

The crowd responds enthusiastically to his entreaties, removing their pants and shouting a series of slogans consistent with the constituent parts of the patriotic schema (several of which contain, as Nixon’s original plea did, unrecognized double entendres):

“IT’S A SHOWDOWN!” they cried.

“PANTS DOWN FOR GOD AND COUNTRY!”

“PANTS DOWN FOR JESUS CHRIST!”

“WHOOPEE!”

“FOR THE COMMON MAN!”

“DEEDS NOT WORDS!”

“PANTS DOWN FOR DICK!”

Everyone in his audience, from Billy Graham and Joseph Kennedy to Nixon’s father and the women of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, begins removing their clothing, leading Nixon to remark, “I knew that, whatever the cost, I’d won the day, the victory was mine!” (483).

But Nixon becomes hubristic in the wake of his success and overreaches. Uncle Sam tries to regain the spotlight and resume the festivities by forcing Nixon from the stage, dismissing him with a flippant gesture that only incites Nixon to greater rhetorical excess: “‘Wait a minute!’ I hollered through the freshly unleashed crash of derisive laughter. ‘Wait just a goddamn minute!’ The laughter subsided for a moment, and there was a moment of grinning silence, waiting to be filled. Even though I was still dangling by the scruff of my neck, I plunged right into it: ‘MY pants are down! YOUR pants are down! EVERYBODY’s pants in AMERICA are down! Everybody’s—EXCEPT HIS!’ This stunned the Square. A deadly hush fell over everybody. That, I thought, is what you call putting a cap on it” (484). Nixon’s rash demand that Uncle Sam expose himself—thereby literally unclothing the American “emperor” and revealing what lies beneath the American myths in which he is figuratively dressed—causes Uncle Sam to ask the crowd, now chanting for his pants to come down, “What mad project of national sooey-cide is this?” As Uncle Sam’s pants hit the floor, Nixon relates, “There was a blinding flash of light, a simultaneous crack of ear-splitting thunder, and then—BLACKOUT!!” (485).

The subsequent chapter, narrated by the more omniscient voice that has alternated with Nixon’s throughout the novel, recounts the crowd’s hysteria as they attempt to function in the darkness. The early pages of this chapter are filled with terrified and often illogical exclamations such as “IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD!” and “WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER BROKEN THE SOUND BARRIER!” and “THE PHANTOM’S KILLT UNCLE SAM!” (486–87). An encyclopedic compendium of American social anxieties, historical and fictional, is unleashed Page 170 →in the absence of light (that is, the absence of virtue, Uncle Sam, God, and the other positive aspects of the American patriotic schema):

In the ever deepening nighttime of the people, the shapes of their fear are drawn from ever deepening wells, roiling visions of the imminent imbalance of terror commingling now with shades of half-forgotten nightmares from all their childhoods: V-2S and gas ovens and kamikazes, the hurricane that tore through Overlord, the holocaust at the Cocoanut Grove, gremlins and goose-steppers, malaria, unfaithful wives, starvation at Guadalcanal, U-boat wolfpacks and Jap Snipers and warplanes over Pearl Harbor, vampires and striking workers, hoboes, infantile paralysis, bread lines, bank failures, mortgage foreclosures and dust storms, King Kong and Scarface Al, Wobblies, werewolves, anarchists, Bolsheviks and bootleggers, Filipino guerrillas and Mexican bandidos, the Tweed Ring, earth tremors, the Cross of Gold! (488)

This litany of American terrors goes on for another dozen lines, demonstrating the way in which the fear of the dark (that is, Communism) feeds on and reinforces an almost inexhaustible list of past bogeymen. As the narrator says, “Down they [the crowd] spiral into irrational panic, as upward swirl the spooks of terrors past!” (488).³⁰ The scene is reminiscent of Yossarian’s Dantean trip through Rome near the end of Catch-22 in that it presents a distinctly hellish vision of reality that has been corruptively influenced by American ideology.

As the darkness continues, the frightened crowd realizes that they “have passed through their conventional terrors and discovered that which they fear most: each other!” (490). The easy moral distinctions made available by the binaries that support the patriotic schema disappear along with Uncle Sam and the people begin to intermingle simply out of their forced proximity: “And inevitably, in all this hysterical jangling around, flesh is finding flesh, mouths mouths, heat heat, and the juices, as Satchel Paige would say, is flowin’. The people are no less beset with confusion and panic, horrendous anguish and pain, like to the throes of travail, but they are also suddenly as hot as firecrackers—or maybe it’s not so suddenly, maybe it’s just the culmination of that strange randy unease they’ve been feeling all day. . . . Now . . . the people seek, with distraught hearts and agitated loins—a final connection, a kind of ultimate ingathering, a tribal implosion, that will either release them from this infinite darkness and doleful sorrow or obliterate them once and for all and end their misery” (492). As all manner of sexual mores begin to break down, the crowd seems to be breaking free of its reliance on prescriptive ideas and is actively seeking new sexual experiences, not only with each other but also with “any animal, vegetable, artifact, or other surface irregularity” (492). As was the case with Nixon’s attempted seduction of Ethel Page 171 →Rosenberg, sexual behavior outside the established bounds of propriety becomes associated with political subversion.

When Uncle Sam returns to the scene, though, he interrupts the crowd “in the mind-shattering throes of what might have been some ultimate orgasmic fusion” and restores “their old isolate and terrified selves” by relighting the scene with a “spark from the sacred flame” (493) from Yucca Flat, Nevada.³¹ The narrator’s description of the returned Uncle Sam not only associates him with Superman, another fictitious character with strong nationalistic associations for an American audience, but also reverts to the artificial language of the patriotic schema: “When [the crowd] open their eyes again, it is to see their Star-Spangled Superhero standing stark and solemn above them on the Death House stage, cradling freedom’s holy light in his outstretched hands and gazing down upon them with glittering eyes sunk in deeply shadowed sockets” (493). Freely and willfully conflating Christian religious imagery, comic-book fantasy, political rhetoric, and hyperalliterative (and thus plainly contrived) language, Uncle Sam’s restoration of order is as much a verbal act as physical, since it reintroduces what Maltby calls the “discourse of America” (103), this time unmistakably buttressed by the power of the bomb.

Once the square is again lit and under Uncle Sam’s indisputable control, he turns the proceedings over to Betty Crocker and the preexecution spectacle proceeds. Julius’s electrocution goes off without a hitch, although the merriment of the earlier scenes has abated somewhat, especially among those who have to face the actual repercussions of their patriotic fervor: “[Julius’s death] is duly cheered . . . less enthusiastically up front, where the disquieting presence of Death can still be felt like a sticky malodorous fog, more warmly as it spreads out toward the periphery, traveling like a happy rumor, merging finally into a drunken exultant uproar out at the far edges, where everyone is having a terrific time without exactly knowing why” (511). When Ethel’s initial electrocution fails to kill her, the crowd’s unease momentarily becomes widespread. Uncle Sam rectifies the situation by exhorting the executioner to try again, upon which “virtually the entire VIP section . . . scrambl[es] up over the side of the stage, fighting for position as though their very future depended on it, racing for the switch” (517). It is not clear who actually throws the switch, and the narrator suggests both Nixon and John F. Kennedy as potential “victors” in this race. In doing so he presages the hotly contested 1960 presidential election (in which Kennedy and Nixon would each attempt to seize the anti-Communist high ground) and implicates both parties—and thus the whole scope of establishment politics—in the Rosenbergs’ deaths.

All that remains is Nixon’s own anointment as the next incarnation of Uncle Sam. This is accomplished through a heavily sexualized scene that likely Page 172 →contributed to the book’s lengthy delay in being published. Uncle Sam comes to Nixon in his bedroom and makes his intentions clear in yet another parody of American patriotic iconography:

“Come here, boy,” he said, smiling frostily and jabbing his recruitment finger at me with one hand, unbuttoning his striped pantaloons with the other: “I want YOU!”

“But—!”

“Speech me no speeches, my friend! I had a bellyfulla baloney—what I got a burnin’ yearnin’ for now is a little humble toil, heavenward duty, and onmittygated cornholin’ whoopee! So jes’ drap your drawers and bend over, boy—you been ee-LECK-ted!” (530)

Uncle Sam, having essentially turned Nixon’s previous “PANTS DOWN FOR DICK!” rhetoric back on its author, proceeds to sodomize Nixon savagely while telling him that uncritical acceptance of Uncle Sam’s personality (that is, American ideology) is necessary if Nixon truly wishes to be president: “You want to make it with me . . . you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-’n’-claw tamer of the heathen wilderness, lusty and in everything a screamin’ meddler, novus ball-bustin’ ordo seculorum, that’s me, boy” (531–32). Uncle Sam’s graphic commentary in flagrante delicto makes one final connection between sexual power and political power in the cold war: “They’s a political axiom that wherever a vacuum exists, it will be filled by the nearest or strongest power! Well, you’re lookin’ at it, mister: an example and fit instrument, big as they come in this world and gittin’ bigger by the minute!” (532). After Uncle Sam has finished with him, Nixon reflects that he now understands the true origins of “Hoover’s glazed stare, Roosevelt’s anguished tics, Ike’s silly smile” (533). Gradually overcoming his feelings of having been violated, Nixon finally admits his love for Uncle Sam, thus signaling the end of his questioning of Uncle Sam’s reasoning. Hume asserts that the “parallel to George Orwell’s Winston Smith realizing that he loves Big Brother is unmistakable” (181), which not only lays bare the grim satirical implications of this final scene but accurately places The Public Burning among satires that examine the enormous, even dystopian potential for abuse within intentional distortions of language.

The Public Burning looks backward to a fictionalized version of the 1950s—and even further back via the character of Uncle Sam³²—for the origins of the societal corruption that Coover believes to be running rampant in Nixon’s America. As such the novel serves as a metaphorical examination of the deformed American body politic that Uncle Sam represents. In a similar vein, Don DeLillo diagnosed the cultural malignancies caused by the cold war well in advance of its end. Beginning in 1972, when he deliberately confused the languages of nuclear warfare and football in End Zone, DeLillo’s fiction has been marked by mediations upon the lasting ramifications of the cold Page 173 →war on both the collective conscience of the United States and the individual psyches of its citizens. This process reaches its peak in 1985’s White Noise, in which DeLillo offers a portrait of the numbing and dehumanizing effects of the constant fear of death that was inherent in the cold war mindset. As Joseph Dewey compellingly argues in his In a Dark Time, DeLillo accomplishes this by exposing the panoply of ineffectual linguistic strategies that American culture offered up as both palliative and justification for unsettling concepts such as the “balance of terror” deterrence theory.³³

For more than thirty years, historian/psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has examined the after effects of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His Death in Life (1969) was the first extensive study of the atomic bombs’ psychological ramifications on their Japanese survivors. Directly relevant to consideration of DeLillo’s fiction is Lifton’s 1995 work (coauthored with Greg Mitchell) Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, which puts forth the argument that governmental disinformation and/or misinformation coupled with collective societal aversion to face up to the intricate and often unpleasant historical consequences of the bomb’s use led to “a collective form of psychic numbing” among the American populace. Lifton and Mitchell contend that the concerted official effort to “justify the use of the bomb on ethical grounds, to hide its grotesque effects on people, and to deny the weapon’s revolutionary significance . . . represented an inability to confront the full truth of Hiroshima, an insufficient recognition in our policies and our attitudes that nothing was the same after Hiroshima—that human survival was now at issue” (xiv). This national inability to confront the reality of life in the nuclear age is for Lifton and Mitchell reminiscent of the reaction of patients to a potentially traumatic medical condition: “We construct what Edith Wyschogrod calls a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Hiroshima—a barrier designed to prevent the spread of a threatening disease, the ‘illness’ that we block off in his case being what we did in Hiroshima. That cordon sanitaire was transmitted, as official policy, throughout American society. One was supposed to be numbed to Hiroshima” (338). Extending their medical analogy to post-Hiroshima society, Lifton and Mitchell argue that this numbing is only a superficial and fleeting balm against the complex assortment of anxieties that the bomb unleashed in its aftermath. The net result of this “psychic numbing” is that the cold war became, in essence, a five-decade period of denial, a stage that must be transcended before recovery from trauma can occur.

Jack Gladney, the protagonist of White Noise, participates in the process of maintaining the kinds of illusions that perpetuate the problem of psychic numbing. His colleagues at the College-on-the-Hill are all complicit in fostering an academic environment that disproportionately values trivia such as Elvis Presley and supermarket culture. The subjects they study are almost wholly commodified, whether or not such a context is warranted. Even Page 174 →Gladney’s study of Adolf Hitler is significantly removed from its grim and violent historical context and refashioned largely as admiring respect for Hitler’s power over death.³⁴ Gladney’s relatively amoral recontextualization of Hitler resembles the general American cultural shift that resulted in the demonization of a new enemy (the Soviet Union) during the cold war to take the place of the old enemy (Nazi Germany) from World War II. The social and political reputation of the Western portion of Germany had largely been rehabilitated by 1985—thanks not only to its repudiation of its Nazi past but also to its general willingness to oppose the Soviets as part of the NATO alliance. Gladney’s Hitler Studies program extends this revisionist attitude in an attempt to distill virtue from one of history’s greatest tyrants and murderers. In his scholarly work, Gladney abrogates the purely negative cognitive associations that stem from Hitler’s now-obsolete wartime classification as a national enemy, although whether he does so consciously or not is debatable.³⁵

Nevertheless Gladney is financially and academically secure thanks to his unusual intellectual specialty, even going so far as to claim that “death was strictly a professional matter” (74) at College-on-the-Hill. In this regard, the college is a microcosm of the United States in general, since the lion’s share of the national budget during the early 1980s (when the novel was written) was devoted to defense spending, a fact that had been justified to the nation throughout the cold war as necessary for combating “the Evil Empire.” Such bellicose rhetoric and the stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction that accompanied it professionalized, politicized, and even familiarized the prospect of death on an enormous scale in the United States. This created an atmosphere in which the continued existence of the “American way of life” was allegedly threatened at all times with extinction and safeguarded by an identical reciprocal threat. Lifton and Mitchell contend that such a constant state of vigilance is likely to desensitize one eventually to the real dangers of destruction, since remaining in a state of alert anxiety for long periods eventually leads to neurosis without some form of sedative coping mechanism (such as a cordon sanitaire). Dewey, like Lifton and Mitchell, argues that such a situation has its roots in unpleasant ground: “The manipulators of language—from Hitler to Stalin to the scientists obtaining data from the rubble of Hiroshima—have made death generic” (206).

The lunchtime discussion among several of the school’s faculty members early in the novel demonstrates that nearly everyone at the College-on-the-Hill is engaged in some field of study that concurrently analyzes and contributes to the “white noise,” that is, the “static [and] interference that jams the information trying to get through” (Dewey 206). Gladney’s colleague Alfonse Stompanato is introduced in a context that suggests at least the potential for informational excess: “He knew four languages, had a photographic memory, did complex mathematics in his head” (DeLillo, White Noise 65). Stompanato laments the “incessant bombardment of information” to which Page 175 →Americans are subjected and claims that the only relief available is “an occasional catastrophe.” He goes on to enumerate a list of “good” and “untapped” resources for such catastrophes, noting that options are limited by the fact that “for most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.” Murray Siskind, another of Gladney’s colleagues, explains that this binary phenomenon is the result of what he calls a collective “brain fade”: “They’ve forgotten how to listen and look as children. They’ve forgotten how to collect data. In the psychic sense a forest fire on TV is on a lower plane than a ten-second commercial for Automatic Dishwasher All. The commercial has deeper waves, deeper emanations. But we have reversed the relative significance of these things. This is why people’s eyes, ears, brains and nervous systems have grown weary. It’s a simple case of misuse” (65–66). The fact that the faculty participates almost subliminally in this “misuse” while apparently recognizing the deleterious consequences of “brain fade” speaks both to the pervasiveness of the condition and to the powerful potential for ideological control contained in the simple home/television dichotomy that Stompanato describes.

The brain fade / psychic numbing in the cold war United States is the calculated result of policies that have covert economic and/or political motivations, unrelated or even contrary to the overt moral and/or ethical language in which they are couched. American society of the early 1980s took refuge in the benefits of materialism and anti-Communism that had been “sold” to them as righteous. The fact that this pitch came from a government and a media who profited financially and politically from the propagation of these same values, makes them inherently suspect.³⁶ DeLillo’s satirical depiction of Blacksmith and the College-on-the-Hill (whose name parodically deflates John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century identification of America as a “city upon a hill”) suggests that he believes this sense of comfort to have been overly credulous and, as a result, superficial and injurious.

The disturbing absurdity of instances in which the realms of the fictional and the real overlap provides DeLillo with much of his satirical power in this regard. Gladney’s daughters begin exhibiting the physical symptoms of exposure to a toxic chemical cloud issuing from an industrial accident after merely hearing about it on the radio for example. Although psychosomatic illness and/or hypochondria are neither uncommon nor necessarily the product of disinformation, the ease with which the girls seem to succumb to the broadcast version of reality (which, as Gladney’s oldest son Heinrich points out, is riddled with glaring inconsistencies) suggests the degree to which they have been conditioned to be receptive to propaganda. The governmental officials in charge of evacuating Blacksmith, moreover, repeatedly compare the results of their actual evacuation with a simulation of a comparable disaster. One of these officials even complains to Gladney, who has by this point been exposed to the toxic chemical, that the actual event is frustrating them because it does Page 176 →not correspond closely enough with the model to provide illuminating data. Philip E. Simmons notes the ways in which the reality of the cloud is immediately appropriated and altered by the dual linguistic controls of government and the media: “Rather than unequivocally assert the existence of a material reality beyond the realm of the image, the ‘airborne toxic event’ is quickly absorbed by the image-making apparatus of the media and forced to conform to the bureaucratic imperatives of the official and quasi-official agencies that respond to the catastrophe. On the other side, we see that ‘information’ itself can be a material cause of ‘real’ events. What has happened is not that the referent for mass-media images has disappeared but that the binary opposition between the real and imaginary has itself broken down” (60). DeLillo’s narrative makes it clear that such a breakdown has happened, yet few if any of the characters recognize it, thereby ensuring—as in Derrida’s assessment of the cold war as a self-sustaining fable—that those who control the “imaginary” also control the “real.”

For all its utility in perpetuating social, political, and economic objectives, this sort of linguistic control can only serve as a temporary panacea against the specter of violence and death that it is intended to obscure. Despite his nonchalant demeanor and seeming contentedness, Gladney is afflicted by a sort of morbid fascination shared by his own family and seemingly everyone else in Blacksmith. His wife Babette takes a suspect drug called Dylar designed to suppress fear of death (a pharmaceutical supplement to the linguistic numbing process); Heinrich obsessively tracks the progress of the “airborne toxic event” that threatens the city and also corresponds with an imprisoned killer; Gladney’s elder daughter Denise constantly chides her parents (especially Babette) for their litany of unhealthy behaviors; and the whole family, but especially the younger daughter Steffie, is “totally absorbed by documentary clips of calamity and death” that they watch on television while eating dinner. They become engrossed in these programs, and Gladney adds that “every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (64). The family’s insatiable desire for the spectacle of death and suffering is presented as a conditioned response to the total saturation of semantically empty forms of discourse implied by the novel’s title. Nearly all forms of language in the book—from the endless repetitions of brand names that crop up in the text to the pop culture topics that dominate the curriculum at the College-on-the-Hill, and from the radio broadcasts that fail to provide either accurate or substantive information about the “airborne toxic event” to Siskind’s attempt to “explain . . . any number of massacres, wars, and executions” through a dubious theory that claims “violence is a form of rebirth” (277)—are either unsuccessful at providing relief from the death-fear that tacitly dominates society or appallingly serve to amplify it.

The fact that the Gladneys desire “something bigger, grander, more sweeping” as a spectacle of death also ties in with the progressively increasing Page 177 →violence of the twentieth century’s major conflicts. The history of the century is one that offers ample satisfaction for the kind of exponentially expanding appetite for death that the Gladneys exhibit. The simultaneously cyclical and escalating nature of the world’s capacity to destroy itself is evinced by Heinrich’s conversation with his father as they watch the progress of the toxic cloud together from their attic window:

“It doesn’t cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before.”

“What does it cause?”

“Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu.”

“Déjà vu?”

“It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That’s not all. They’re not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore.”

“What are they calling it?”

He looked at me carefully.

“The airborne toxic event.” (112)

The sense of déjà vu that Heinrich mentions associates the danger of the cloud with prior, similar events even as its novelty makes it inherently more engrossing for the Gladneys. The redesignation of the “black billowing cloud” as “the airborne toxic event” also reflects, as Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor point out in Nukespeak, the tendency of official rhetoric of the nuclear age to sugarcoat or to completely obscure potentially unpleasant aspects of its reality (compare “Sunshine units”). The cloud, therefore, not only represents an intensification of violence in keeping with the times but also reveals the official practice of intentionally masking such intensification. The family’s fascination with carefully commodified death must not be allowed to lapse into criticism of that “commodity,” and this positive relationship is ensured (or at least fortified) by disingenuous use of language on the part of the powers that control Blacksmith and its environs.

Dewey sees Gladney’s physical exposure to the toxic cloud as a positive development since it finally cuts through the “white noise” and removes death from its “fabulous” linguistic context by reconnecting him to “something universal” beyond the “finite, deceptive nature of human systems”: “DeLillo offers a tough lesson, a tough avenue to hope. He performs, perhaps unknowingly, the healing most particular to traditional apocalyptic literature. He reminds a people, anchored in time, of a scale far beyond the measure of minutes, days, years (which so profoundly frightens Gladney). He reconnects that people with the elemental, in which endings are simply a phase of living itself” (Dewey 223).

As the novel closes, Gladney and a large crowd including his family silently watch a beautiful sunset, one whose beauty is ironically attributable to light refraction caused by the toxic cloud, from an overpass. Dewey interprets Page 178 →this moment as representing “a measure of human connection with something greater, a recognition of something vaster” because all of the distractions caused by the myriad fictions that provide spurious order for the cold war world have been removed. It is too late for Gladney to change the fact of his exposure to Nyodene, the book’s analogue to nuclear fallout, and Dewey is correct in suggesting that there is a sense of “reconnecting with a living cosmos” (222–23) in Gladney’s Ecclesiastes-like observation that the “sunsets linger and so do we” (White Noise 308).

A pall is cast over this supposed revelation by Gladney’s continued withdrawal—“I am taking no calls”—and fear—“I am afraid of the imaging block. . . . Afraid of what it knows about me” (309), both of which suggest that his cordon sanitaire has not yet been dismantled. Moreover there is a foreboding sense at the end of the book that the postcloud respite, symbolically described in the commodified lingo of the novel as “the supermarket shelves hav[ing] been rearranged” (309),³⁷ will be not only fleeting but also ultimately impotent in terms of affecting real deliverance. Gladney and all the rest “slowly begin to disperse . . . restored to [their] separate and defensible selves” after their communal silence at the overpass, yet the processes and the language of the culture that has dominated them also reassert themselves in the book’s final paragraph: “In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. . . . And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything that we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead” (310). The novel ends with the beginnings of yet another of its signature copia of banality and a suggestion that such illusory miracles, cures, and remedies have become a “need” on par with food and love that will overwhelm any other process of coming “through the confusion” engendered by the cloud and its aftereffects. In this manner DeLillo is less apocalyptic in the manner of John the Revelator (or Dewey) and more in the manner of Walter Miller Jr. and A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which the repetition of willful self-destruction is seemingly inexorable, even with the knowledge of past apocalypse.

If there is a message of hope at the end of the novel, however, it is (as in the film version of On the Beach or in Fail-Safe) that the reader still has the chance to act in an attempt to avoid a similar fate. Interpreted this way White Noise acts in concert with the rest of DeLillo’s body of fiction as a cautionary prescription, a call to reject all aspects of the artificial and obfuscating Page 179 →culture of the cold war thrust upon people by those who stand to gain from the “brain fade.” In This Mad “Instead” (2000), Arthur M. Saltzman summarizes DeLillo’s project of contesting various forms of American cultural logic: “DeLillo is peculiarly conscious among contemporary American writers of predicating his fictions in environments hostile to the individual’s capacity to use words that have not been irrevocably sworn to prior manipulations, whose forms include official communiqués and press releases (Libra), conventional bigotry (End Zone), commercialism (Americana), pedantry and jargon (Ratner’s Star). To combat wholesale manipulation of language into ‘lullabies processed by intricate systems’ [End Zone 54], DeLillo proposes a creed of resistance. . . . In White Noise it is seen in the spell that seems to render the post-toxic-event sky incandescent. . . . What is certain is that people linger, exchange, participate—instead of pressing heedlessly, habitually onward, they are moved to interpret and dwell upon the defamiliarized heavens” (46). DeLillo argues that only by adopting this more skeptical and judicious creed—and, perhaps more important, maintaining it in the face of the enormous pressures to backslide into the “lullabies processed by intricate systems” like Coover’s Nixon does—will his angst-ridden characters (and by extension his readers) also rid themselves of the accompanying fear of death.

Much in the way that Coover and DeLillo invent fictionalized simulations of American history—that is, seemingly recognizable historical narratives that constantly and conspicuously announce their own fictionalized nature—as vehicles for their cultural satire, several Russian satires of the cold war create counterhistories whose structure and/or narrative call attention to their own fictionality. Like Aksyonov’s Our Golden Ironburg, both Aleshkovsky’s Kangaroo and Sokolov’s Astrophobia (1984; Palisandriia) are first-person narratives whose content and structure destabilize official Soviet versions of reality. Mark Lipovetsky’s assertion that Astrophobia “model[s] an idyllic simulacrum of Soviet history” (175) applies equally well to Our Golden Ironburg and Kangaroo. Lipovetsky’s comment underscores both the intentionally idealized tone and the patent artificiality of Astrophobia’s narrative. When presented in a parodic context, such characteristics become easy targets for a satirical reductio ad absurdum due to their egregious logical flaws. All three novels widely subvert Soviet culture by creating historical milieus that achieve two interrelated goals: first, they parody genres that express the unremittingly optimistic Soviet view of history resulting from strict adherence to historical determinism; second, they satirize the very processes by which the elaborately veiled social fictions that are required to maintain such a view are created.

In her “Sokolov’s Palisandriya: the Art of History” (2000), Karen L. Ryan claims such an approach is innate to postmodern Russian satire: “Russian Page 180 →post-modern texts evince a particularly acute insistence on the need to rethink history; this tendency is, perhaps, not surprising, considering Soviet culture’s tradition of manipulating and distorting history. Thus Russian postmodernism’s questioning of historical myths and the possibility of a final ‘knowable’ truth dovetails with satire’s scepticism about the viability of an officially sanctioned truth” (216). The reemergence of neo-Stalinist rhetoric under Brezhnev, a clear stimulus for the parodic sots-art movement with which Ryan and others have associated Astrophobia, created an ideological environment ripe for (if not necessarily accepting of) satirical questioning of the largely uncritical official rehabilitation of the Soviet past.

As discussed previously³⁸ Aleshkovsky’s The Hand similarly couches satire intended for its author’s present within an altered but still distinctly Stalinist chronotope. Edward J. Brown’s assessment of The Hand provides a useful framework for discussing Aleshkovsky’s later novel Kangaroo. Of the former, Brown writes, “The novel offers a fascinating fictional hypothesis to explain certain events in Soviet history that are not yet fully understood, and though Aleshkovsky’s hypothesis may seem a fantastic invention, it makes about as much sense as any that have yet been offered” (314). Overshadowed within Brown’s otherwise perceptive reading of The Hand is the point that Aleshkovsky’s “fantastic invention” differs qualitatively from the others “that have yet been offered” insomuch as it provides readers with constant reminders of its status as both “fantasy” and “invention.” Bashov repeatedly reveals the artifice behind his work as an officer in the KGB to his prisoner/listener, just as Aleshkovsky openly displays his novelistic techniques to reiterate his book’s status as a satirical work of art and not an objective counterhistory. In doing so he demonstrates one of the essential qualities of historiographic metafiction: “The reader is forced to acknowledge not only the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past, but also both the value and the limitation of the inescapably discursive form of that knowledge” (Hutcheon 127). Aleshkovsky deflates the claims to veracity made by other versions of history, especially the dominant Soviet ones, by contending that they are at least as fictive as his own outlandish scenarios.

This subversive process is even more pronounced in Kangaroo, the entire plot of which revolves around the experiences of a petty criminal named Fan Fanych³⁹ within the legal system of the Soviet Union. Fan Fanych’s apolitical and largely innocuous career as a criminal intersects on numerous occasions with the highest echelons of power. He becomes a less naive and much less fortunate Soviet version of Forrest Gump, unintentionally altering the course of Soviet and even world history at a number of critical junctures. Aleshkovsky uses Fan Fanych’s presence, for example, in the same Berlin beer hall as Hitler in 1929 (where he unintentionally provokes Hitler into burning down the Reichstag) and at the Yalta Conference in February of 1945 Page 181 →to create a ridiculous alternative historical narrative whose purpose is ultimately parodic and satirical in regard to accepted Soviet versions of history.

At the start of the novel, Fan Fanych addresses (as he does throughout) his unseen friend Kolya, describing his arrest in the late 1920s by a Cheka lieutenant named Kidalla in connection with the apparent contract killing of an NEP-era businessman. A series of bizarre circumstances led both to Fan Fanych’s exoneration (he is guilty of accepting the blood money, but never actually committed the murder) and the end of private enterprise in the Soviet Union.⁴⁰ Fan Fanych also incurs a debt to Kidalla, who allows him to go free but also says that he “is saving [Fan Fanych] for a very important case” (17).

Fan Fanych explains to Kolya that he spent years afterward waiting for this “very important case” to arrive. He runs through a litany of occasions during the 1930s and 1940s that he thought could have put an end to his waiting, among which are some of the most infamous episodes of the Stalin era (the murder of Kirov, the terrors of 1937–38, and Hitler’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union) as well as occasions (basic necessities being unavailable, crop failures, failure to meet production quotas during the so-called Stakhanovite year of 1936) for which the Soviet propaganda mechanism would have been compelled to provide expedient explanations. Fan Fanych’s disgraceful compendium reveals how the legal system was often used to concoct an ideologically consistent cover for developments that ran contrary to the national ideology, much as Nixon in The Public Burning comes to realize that the Rosenbergs’ execution (if not their initial conviction) is intended to repair Americans’ sense of patriotism in the wake of seeming Communist gains.

When Fan Fanych is summoned to appear before Kidalla, now a prosecutor for the KGB, Fan Fanych explains that “finally—[his] historical necessity arrived”: “There’s a job for you. In three months our section will celebrate the anniversary of the First Case. The Very First Case. Case Number One. By that day we can’t have a single very important case left unsolved. Not one. You can’t wriggle out of this, so don’t fuck around. Any questions?” (20). Fan Fanych immediately asks Kidalla how many important unresolved cases remain and whether he will be charged with all of them in an effort to clear the docket in one stroke. Kidalla’s response provides the fictionalized context for the remainder of the novel’s plot: “We make them all up anyway, so there’s an unlimited quantity of unsolved cases. . . . You have about ten to choose from” (21).⁴¹ Kidalla, moreover, explains that because Fan Fanych is “an artist [who] can make these proceedings a brilliant dramatic performance” he is indispensable to the KGB. He also preempts Fan Fanych’s potential objection to the concept of “historical necessity” saying that it is a “state, party, philosophical, and military secret” (21).

Dismayed by the seemingly monolithic forces thus arrayed against him, Fan Fanych begins going through his options. He notes that all the cases Page 182 →carry a fairly standard punishment from the era of the purges: “twenty-five years in stir, plus five of disenfranchisement, five of internal exile, five of exclusion from responsible jobs, and a denunciation at Lenin Stadium” (21).⁴² As he recounts the various cases he rejected before getting to his eventual choice, Fan Fanych explains how a computer was used to generate cases for the KGB: “They fed it various data about me, the all-conquering teachings of Marx-Lenin-Stalin, the Soviet era, the Iron Curtain, Socialist Realism, the struggle for peace, cosmopolitanism, the subversive activities of the CIA and the FBI, the number of workdays on collective farms, Tito the hireling of imperialism, and it brought up the very important case that yours truly got involved in” (22). The clichéd overtones—“the struggle for peace,” “cosmopolitanism,” “the hireling of imperialism”—and absurd disjunctions among this input data helps explain the strange nature of the computer’s output. The cases Fan Fanych declines include the typical kinds of charges that were used in the purges and in the show trials of the 1930s (including plots to assassinate Stalin or other politburo members, which are not coincidentally precisely the kinds of fabrications depicted in The Hand) but also feature a bizarre melange of “offenses” whose supposed criminality is utterly dependent on the politically motivated legal reasoning of the Soviets: “I took a closer look at a scheme for printing bank notes with portraits of Peter the Great on the hundreds, Bobrov the soccer player on the fifties, and Ilya Ehrenburg on the thirties, but I changed my mind. As for swiping one of the Mongolian prime minister’s kidneys when he’s under the knife, forget it. Trying to stage The Brothers Karamazov in the Central Theater of the Red Army—no way. Wrecking, poisoning rivers and seltzer water in areas where tank troops were stationed, sabotage, praising the theory of relativity, agitation and propaganda, infiltrating literary journals with far-reaching aims like Novy Mir, destroying plans and timetables, years of sabotage activity in the U.S.S.R. Meteorological Center, spying for seventy-seven countries, including Antarctica” (23). The implausible and outlandish case he ultimately chooses—“[The] case of the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789 and January 5, 1905” (23)⁴³—is perhaps the most unusual of all these. However, it also seems, due to its strange temporal boundaries, to be removed from the Soviet political context (for which Fan Fanych has no use) and accordingly appeals to him the most.

The first thing he reads in the case file is the supposed testimony, apparently completely computer generated, of a “Doctor of Philology” improbably named Perdebabaev-Valois.⁴⁴ This document is composed almost entirely of fragments of Soviet clichés, obscene phrases, zoological details, and vaguely legalistic phraseology, none of which coheres enough to be articulate as legal testimony or anything else. Kidalla acknowledges that the statement is hopelessly corrupted and promises to interrogate its inventor. When Fan Fanych asks him why the KGB is using a computer, “when any of your Sholokhovs Page 183 →could turn out this thing without your having to change a word?” (23),⁴⁵ Kidalla claims that using the computer is both necessary to keep up with the technology of the enemy and a more equitable means of justice: “We can jump straight from the enemy’s sometimes unconscious criminal intent to the right punishment, bypassing the actual crime altogether, with its blood, horrors, cynicism, information leaks, pain, tears of the relatives of those who’ve suffered, and damage to our military might. We’ve totally eliminated investigation’s indifference to the evolution of a crime, and we’ve thrown the notorious assumption of innocence on the garbage heap of history along with the productions of that White Guardist whore Akhmatova and that faggot Zoshchenko” (26).⁴⁶ Kidalla’s description of the supposed improvements in the legal system point out its complete distortion in the service of ideology, as questions of guilt and innocence have been refined entirely out of existence. Aleshkovsky puts the KGB’s historical modus operandi of convicting suspects on fabricated charges into an absurdly embellished context with Fan Fanych’s case, thereby satirizing the system that would condone, encourage, and develop such a practice.

Once Kidalla explains the kangaroo case’s provenance, Fan Fanych is told to assist in the preparation of his fate: “Start getting into your role as kangaroo murderer and rapist. Make up a scenario of the case along the lines of Stanislavsky’s Method, and think up some versions and variations. Be happy, scumbag: you’ve immortalized yourself, you’ll go down in The Secret History of the Cheka along with me. And it shall be written someday! They shall write about our labors! They’ll tell how we helped to change the world, not explain it!” (29). Kidalla’s exclamation makes it clear that he sees control, not justice, as the Cheka’s mission. With the fantastic outlines of Fan Fanych’s world established, the remainder of the novel details the process of writing the “script” for the trial at which Fan Fanych will be convicted of the rape and murder of the kangaroo, conducting the trial, and executing Fan Fanych’s sentence, all of which continue Aleshkovsky’s blending of fiction and history.

Fan Fanych is imprisoned in a “Deluxe” cell furnished with luxuries confiscated from past “enemies of the people,” where he is observed by Beria and Kidalla as he composes his script (with the dubious assistance of a zoologist specializing in kangaroos). When Fan Fanych attempts to undermine the scripting process, he is drugged and unwillingly subjected to an experiment involving an attempt to condition him into believing that he is a kangaroo.⁴⁷ He momentarily succumbs and teeters on the edge of both madness and submission, but eventually overcomes his captors’ efforts, at which point he is returned to his normal cell.

When Fan Fanych is brought forth to be tried for a crime deemed so heinous that the prosecutor claims that all parts of Article 58 pertain to it, he steps into a Soviet version of the all-American throng assembled in Times Square for the Rosenbergs’ executions in The Public Burning: “In the front Page 184 →rows were representatives from all the Soviet republics, in national dress: turbans, kerchiefs, Caucasian sheepskin hats, felt cloaks, side-buttoned Russian blouses, high boots, Central Asian skullcaps, caftans, and a lot of daggers. Behind them were workers straight off the assembly lines, wiping their hands on their overalls. Peasants with sickles. Intellectuals with note pads. Writers. Generals. Soldiers. Violinists. A lot of famous movie stars. A ballerina. Film directors. Surkov. Fadeev. Khrennikov [three renowned ‘official’ Soviet authors]. Behind them were representatives of the fraternal Communist parties and daughter Chekas” (76).⁴⁸ The main piece of evidence against him is an elaborate cinematic recreation of his alleged crime (apparently based on the “screenplay” he produced in his cell), footage recalling both the falsified film testimony used against Conceptiev in The Hand and the home movies shown to the crowd as Ethel Rosenberg is led to the electric chair in The Public Burning. The prosecutor introduces the film by discussing the “creative” process behind this “radically new cinematic genre” in a manner filled with Soviet-style clichés:

The author of the screenplay is the accused himself, C.U.N. Tarkington. Obviously the investigators, who for a short time had to act as screenwriters, and the screenwriters, who became investigators, made some corrections in the accused’s criminal concept. Not everything went smoothly, and not everything conformed to the aesthetic norms of Socialist Realism, the artistic movement of the century. But the collective overcame all the problems and is submitting the fruit of its effort to the people’s judgment today. For the time being, its creators will all remain anonymous. They will all receive the Stalin Prize, first class. Long live the greatest friend of the most important art of all, long live the brilliant successor to the work of Marx and Chaplin, Engels and de Sica, Lenin and all-the-Pudovkins—the great Stalin. Death to Hollywood! (83)⁴⁹

The prosecutor’s blatant attempt to equate Chaplin (a fellow traveler at best), Italian neorealist director Vittorio de Sica (a non-Soviet Communist), and director Vsevolod Pudovkin (one of the giants of early Soviet film, along with Sergei Eisenstein) reverberates with his overall rhetorical strategy of reserving exclusively for the Soviets film’s capacity for social change. The apparently intentional eradication of the distinction between investigators and screenwriters (that is, those who attempt to discern reality and those who create fictions) in concocting the evidence against Fan Fanych shows how this rhetoric manifests itself in practice.

Fan Fanych’s trial supports Uncle Sam’s declaration in The Public Burning that “all courtroom testimony about the past is ipso facto and teetotaciously a baldface lie” and that it is “like history itself—all more or less bunk” (86). The prosecutor tells the audience that they are “witnessing the trial of Page 185 →the future” and cites the fact that “Soviet jurists have cooperated amicably with engineers, scientific scholars, the accused, and his guard” as the secret to its glorious success. As a result of this “greatest moment in legal history, when life and Socialist Realist art converge” (102–3), Fan Fanych is sentenced to be shot, having literally and figuratively received a show trial that called on the best officially sanctioned artistic, scientific, technological, and juridical skills the country has to offer (that is, “any signifying practices . . . operative in a society” [Hutcheon 137]). Aleshkovsky’s satire makes it clear that he finds all of these areas of Soviet life to be thoroughly diminished or even completely invalidated by their obedient participation in the wholesale fictionalization of reality.

Fan Fanych is not shot, however, but subjected to a series of bizarre punishments. First he is unwittingly forced to participate in another scientific experiment; this time his captors attempt to convince him that he has been sent into space and is traveling near the speed of light to test whether the human biological clock can be made to conform to Communist ideology. Next he is sent to a prison camp where he is billeted with a collection of unreconstructed Bolsheviks (including one who either is or believes himself to be the nineteenth-century Russian socialist philosopher and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky) who were imprisoned during the purges of 1937. They still fervently believe the rhetoric of the revolution—even going so far as to justify their own imprisonment—and their dutiful enthusiasm makes them easy prey for Fan Fanych’s fantastically exaggerated lies about the victories of Communism during their incarceration.⁵⁰ While in the camps he recalls his chance encounters with Hitler and Goehring in Berlin in 1929 and his unnoticed presence at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Both instances present him with opportunities for telling Kolya (and the reader) an alternative account of actual events, which, given the novel’s complete and seemingly intentional lack of historical verisimilitude to this point, must be considered the product of an individual trapped within a society that as a whole can no longer (nor seems to care to) discriminate between fiction and reality.

Booker and Juraga are right in pointing out that “Kangaroo critiques the [Stalinist] system from without, through its focus on Fan Fanych, a marginal figure who is very much outside official circles of power” (115), but his narrative is nevertheless clearly tainted by association with this system. Unlike Kitousov in Our Golden Ironburg, Fan Fanych has complete ideological control of his story, in large part because he is telling it in retrospect, at a time when most of the major players are no longer around to exert their influence. Like Aleshkovsky himself, Fan Fanych is released from his prison sentence upon Stalin’s death in 1953. Unable to find any trace of Kidalla after being freed, he returns to his apartment and begins life anew, apparently taking the time to relate his picaresque adventures to Kolya, his erstwhile partner in crime, during a prodigious drinking bout. No outside force steps in at any point Page 186 →in the novel either to contradict or to corroborate the wild tales he tells, thus making them as narratively monologic (literally and in the Bakhtinian sense) as the Soviet perspective that his recollections undermine.⁵¹ Aleshkovsky’s novel, though, is dialogic in that it presents its reality as a parodic-satirical amplification of Soviet history. Fan Fanych’s story is itself also dialogic in that it presents both the rigid ideological orthodoxy of characters such as Kidalla, Beria, and Chernyshevsky and Fan Fanych’s resistance to the system. However, the manner in which his narrative is a closed and self-affirming system mirrors the rhetorical position of the Soviets, a point designed to keep readers’ sympathy for Aleshkovsky’s roguish hero from being mistaken for blind trust in his story.

The inherent inadequacies of any subjective attempt to arrange the details of existence into an authoritative narrative are a central concern of Sokolov’s Astrophobia, perhaps the quintessential work of Russian historiographic metafiction. Composed in the early 1980s and first published in 1984 (nearly a decade after Sokolov’s emigration from the Soviet Union), Astrophobia is one of the most comprehensive satires of Soviet society. Like Our Golden Ironburg and Kangaroo, Sokolov’s novel couches its social criticism within extreme formal avant-gardism, demanding not only a high degree of diligence in its readers but also extensive familiarity with minutiae of Russian history and literature. In her article “Sasha Sokolov and His Literary Context,” Olga Matich calls it “a postmodern encyclopedia of contemporary Russian life in its various discourses” (315). Booker and Juraga add the qualification that “almost everything in this brilliant text is addressed in one way or another to previous texts and especially to the ways those texts address the events of Soviet history” (145). They go on to write that the privileged (and impossible) position within Soviet history that Sokolov gives to Palisander Dahlberg, his protagonist and narrator, allows “his story to shed light on aspects of Soviet history that might otherwise have remained hidden.” The object of this disclosure is not to “recover the real truth of the Soviet past” but to create “an outrageous parody of such efforts that ultimately suggests the impossibility of knowing the truth of history” (147–48).⁵² Sokolov’s narrative thus undermines both unrelentingly positive pro-Soviet and unrelentingly negative anti-Soviet accounts of history by self-consciously pointing out the fictionalizing impulse behind both such ideologically charged historical perspectives.

The chief difference between Sokolov and his fictional narrator is that Sokolov never allows the line between fiction and history to be blurred. As a novel, Astrophobia repeatedly calls attention to its own fictional (and parodic) nature by overt allusions to other texts or by similarly exposed literary devices. Sokolov makes no effort to characterize his novel as a plausible counterhistory of the Soviet Union; in fact, as with Aleshkovsky’s Kangaroo, the outrageous episodes and unmistakable anachronisms in this novel undermine any such claim a priori. As an autobiography, supposedly completed in Page 187 →A.D. 2044 and compiled by an unnamed biographer more than seven hundred years later, Palisander’s narrative does not make the same kind of admission, claiming instead that its odd construction does not affect its potential to be a precise record of events. Iser’s claim that “concealment of fictionality endows an explanation with an appearance of reality” (3) sheds light on the important distinction between Sokolov and Palisander as authors. Sokolov’s criticism is directed at those, whether pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet, who mask their fictionalized texts as objectively true accounts of reality.

As a number of critics have pointed out, and Sokolov himself has vigorously asserted, the actual plot details of this novel are largely inconsequential to understanding the novel’s themes since they do not cohere in accordance with the rationalist aims of conventional Soviet fiction. D. Barton Johnson provides a succinct summary⁵³ of Palisander’s outlandish life story that illustrates its chaotic nature:

Palisandr, an orphan, is heir apparent to the leadership of the mysterious secret Order of Watchmen [Keleinaia organizatsiia chasovshchikov], a hereditary group that rules Russia. Palisandr is a universally adored lad of vast and diverse sexual capacities whose welfare is supervised by a Guardian Council consisting of Stalin, Beria, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov. The leadership is rumored to be subject to the authority of certain forces abroad, possibly the Masons. In his memoirs, Palisandr recounts his many bizarre, often comic, adventures and misadventures, including childhood sexual escapades with elderly kin and Kremlin wives and widows, a boyish prank that results in Stalin’s death, internal exile as a steward of the Government Massage Parlor (located in Novodevichii Convent), an attempt on Brezhnev’s life, a pseudo-espionage adventure in western Europe to free Russia from secret Masonic control, and exile abroad from forces that fear his accession to power in Russia. In the west, Palisandr, who proves to be an enthusiastic hermaphrodite, becomes a wandering bisexual courtesan—intimate with the great and near-great, a wealthy writer of scabrous best-sellers, and the owner of the graves of all Russians who have died in exile and emigration. Upon his triumphant return to assume his rightful position, he is accompanied by the coffins of the exiled Russian dead. (“Twilight Cosmos” 639–40)

Elsewhere Johnson sums up both Palisander’s self-characterization and Sokolov’s external characterization of him even more compactly, noting that although he is “a passive figure who sees himself as History’s amanuensis, he is in fact a self-deluded graphomaniac” (“Galoshes” 167). Because of this discrepancy, the manner in which the plot is narrated becomes a much more important vehicle for Sokolov to convey his overriding satirical points. Palisander claims to be a faithful recorder of history, rather than openly acknowledging Page 188 →his active participation in shaping both historical events and historical narratives. Likewise, Soviet Communism posited itself as the egalitarian end to which history was inevitably proceeding via conflict between Communism and capitalism—in other words, not a created ideology, but a predestined stage of human development. By the time Sokolov wrote the novel, this benevolent ideological self-image had been discredited by (among other things) Stalinism, the cold war, and the zastoi under Brezhnev. Sokolov’s literary parody of Palisander’s persona and narrative thus also carries within it a satirical critique of the Soviet system that encouraged the various literary and nonliterary styles and genres parodied in the novel.

One of the most common Soviet methods of fictionalizing history involved the aggrandizement of relatively ordinary deeds to heroic status, a practice exemplified by the Stakhanovite movement that began in the 1930s. Such exaggerations often occurred in a military context, whether in terms of actual armed conflict or, as was more common in the cold war, in terms of ideological warfare against a domestic or foreign class enemy. As Clark and others have noted, a common trope in Socialist Realist literature is the often grandiloquent use of epic formulae to aggrandize the deeds of rather ordinary individuals in times of grievous struggle. Soviet rhetoric is filled with examples of this overly epic tone, from ideological “shock workers” or “shock troops” (udarnie voiska) to “heroes of socialist labor” (geroi sotsialisticheskogo truda), model workers who demonstrated exceptional efficiency. As Alexander Zholkovsky points out, the original Russian title of Sokolov’s book begins the parodic critique of this mode of discourse, simply by appending a Homeric suffix to the protagonist’s name (381).⁵⁴

The introductory note, supposedly written by Palisander’s posthumous biographer, helps frame the ensuing narrative in a hyperbolic context reminiscent of the excessive and toadying praise heaped upon the intellect of Soviet leaders:⁵⁵ “Palisander Dahlberg traversed a glorious road, Napoleonic in scope, from simple Kremlin orphan and steward of the Government Massage Parlor to head of state and commander of the powers that were. The seven centuries dividing us from the memoirist’s demise have diminished neither the historical significance of his immense stature nor the ideological and artistic merits of his seminal works. Indeed, they stand today as permanent spiritual treasures of the so-called Age of Transition. None of his books is any less precious to us, but this one is infinitely more precious than the rest. Wholly succumbing to the fever of confession, Dahlberg races from first line to last; his pen never stops for mere convention” (Astrophobia viii). After the first paragraph, though, it becomes clear that Palisander’s narrative relies heavily on elements of “mere convention” taken from a host of different genres and reconstituted, not as the “meticulously reconstructed fragments” (vii) that the biographer attributes to him, but as a self-serving hodgepodge of dubious details.

Page 189 →As Palisander narrates the fictional suicide of Beria, identified not only as the head of the KGB but as Palisander’s great uncle, the disharmony between his cocksure narrative tone and the available facts becomes more pronounced: “All at once literally the following happened. Uncle Lavrenty, maligned by minions, hanged himself in despair from the Kremlin’s Salvation Tower clock. And though all the chroniclers view the loss in the light of the fatal and unbridgeable gap it left behind, they disagree as to the particulars. Some claim he used the minute hand, others insist on the hour. The guard at hand, however, not only refrains from all claims but omits such details as his own name, first, sur, et caetera. And yet the confidential investigatory report prepared by a specially appointed governmental commission makes it clear that the attempts of one and all dissectors in the laboratory of history to split this particular hair are thoroughly laughable: the time was sixteen minutes to nine” (1). Palisander’s haughty dismissal of historians’ efforts to study Beria’s suicide—a situation made ironic by the real-life circumstances of his death, given that he was executed in December of 1953 for supposedly plotting to overthrow the state after Stalin’s death—is problematic on several levels. First, Palisander notes that the extant explanations (that is, the work of “all the chroniclers”) differ on the facts but nevertheless agree on their ideological interpretation, which suggests that the latter overrides the former. Second, Palisander fails to realize that the supposedly substantiating detail he cites—itself taken from an internal, and thus potentially distorted, investigation—is no more historically enlightening than the “hairs” he claims are being split by the historians. Finally it certainly does not (and cannot, given the missing details) provide the “literal” (bukval’nyi) account that his opening sentence implies. As he does throughout the novel, Palisander tries to overcome a lack of definitive information by using a self-assured tone to establish the authority of his dubious version of events.

The fantastic tale Palisander spins in recounting Beria’s last hours is so replete with parodies—intentional on Sokolov’s part, unintentional on Palisander’s—of Soviet hagiography (“The General-General’s [Beria’s] kindness knew no bounds, and his troops loved him as best they could” [3]) that it actively resists interpretation as anything other than a subjective reconstruction with an ulterior motive. Palisander appears to be aware of his story’s credibility problems and frequently interrupts the narrative in an effort to convince readers that these shortcomings in no way affect its authenticity. Immediately after waxing rhapsodic over the alleged uprightness of “Horse Marine officer Yakov Nezabudka,”⁵⁶ the same guard singled out for censure only a few lines earlier for having failed to include his own name in his report of Beria’s suicide, Palisander directly addresses his reader to defend his narrative against potential charges of misrepresentation: “But, you may ask, have we not slipped into matters mythopoeic, are we not juggling the facts, do we not make an idol unto ourselves of this—how shall I put it—unknown Page 190 →seahorseman? Not in the least. Ensign Nezabudka is, in a sense, more real than the celestial beings we have become. We are cut off from reality; he is manifest, day-to-day, down-to-earth” (2–3).

Palisander’s language here is an unwitting parody of the common Soviet practice of glorifying a common soldier, peasant, or worker as the exemplary Soviet man. His words make explicit the substantive separation of the Soviet ruling classes from the populace, in spite of rhetorical efforts to mask them. Propagandistic biographical accounts of Soviet leaders—such as those that called attention to Stalin’s alleged populism—attempted to obscure this separation by claiming that the leaders were simply and benevolently first among equals, all of whom embodied the same Communist ideals. Palisander downplays or even attempts to negate the effect of his use of qualifying phrases like “in a sense” (esli khotite, or, literally, “if you wish”), claiming that this largely fictive reality is entirely legitimate. Ensign Nezabudka seems to exist, as Palisander consults official documents containing his vital statistics, but the version that Palisander inserts into his story is almost entirely a carefully wrought and, yes, mythopoeic (mifotvorcheskii) narrative construct.

From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, Bolshevik heroes of fictionalized ocherki⁵⁷ such as Dmitrii Furmanov’s Chapaev (1923), Feodor Gladkov’s Tsement (1925; Cement), or Aleksandr Fadeyev’s Razgrom (1927; The Rout) embodied values that would later be exaggerated even further in the “positive hero” (polozhitel’nyi geroi) of Socialist Realism. In his The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (1958), Rufus W. Mathewson notes that this genealogy can be traced back even further to Russian socialist writers of the 1860s such as Chernyshevsky, who proposed a model of a “new man” in his novel Chto delat’? (1863; What Is to Be Done?). The “positive hero” of sotsrealizm is a fictionalized cousin to the “hero of socialist labor” in that he “should be a paragon, a builder of a new life, a person capable of leadership, a man without any doubts, that is, a model Communist” (Kasack 389). Palisander presents himself (and selected others) largely along these lines, but his overwhelming control over the narration of his autobiography (repeatedly pointed out to the reader in chatty asides) emphasizes his unreliability and reveals the double-voiced parody at work in the book.

Palisander’s attempts at identifying with Nezabudka (and thereby providing further verification for his narrative) expose the false humility behind his words: “[Nezabudka’s] year, month, and even day of birth corresponded to the year, month and day of birth of yours truly. ‘Coevals!’ I thought in amazement, ‘but what different fates.’ I hope this heartrending coincidence helps you accept the fact that Nezabudka did exist, in flesh and blood, height, age, and sex, that he was—let us not mince our words, bromidic as they may be—human. Though of course a first-class careerist” (3).⁵⁸ Despite his earlier protestation, Palisander is very much “juggl[ing] the facts” and “minc[ing] his words” here as throughout his narrative. The “heartrending coincidence” Page 191 →is largely irrelevant, since it does not establish Nezabudka’s identity any more firmly, and Palisander’s closing jibe of “careerist” (sluzhbist, a favorite Soviet slur) is an empty and unsupported claim that retroactively attempts to validate his remark about their “different fates.” He “varnishes reality” to his own advantage and his comments about the nature of conventional history shed light on why he feels compelled to tinker with his narrative in such a manner: “Assuming that one discounts a certain apocalyptic ring to its otherwise apoplectic intonations, the first thing one notices is the perhaps not entirely fortuitous fact that it is filled, glutted, with scrupulously dated but unknown and unknowable events. Taken separately, they perplex; taken together, they dismay. In the end, one has no idea what to think. . . . Insofar as one must come to a decision, form some sort of minimally informed ranks, one bites the bullet and formulates a credo” (19).

Palisander claims, furthermore, that “there have always been people and nations that publicly harbor positive or negative feelings toward one another; and not far off there have been people writing about such interrelations. . . . No wonder we begin to yawn and nod and whatever we happen to be holding, despite the esteem in which we hold it, falls from our hands, our academic mortarboard slips down over our eyes, and we doze off yet again” (19).⁵⁹ The ubiquity of history has led to perplexity and boredom, and Palisander intends for his history-with-credo to rectify this by making history both comprehensible and interesting again.

By itself, this approach would not present a problem, except that Palisander maintains, as the Soviets did both before and during the cold war, that basing a historical perspective on a particular ideology does not alter its epistemological nature. Also, Palisander’s solution for the complaint that consideration of historical facts can “dismay” changes the goal of history from rational analysis to emotional inspiration. When such a tainted history is used to reendorse the ideology that informed it in the first place, the logic becomes circular, and thus invalid and untenable. Much like the deliberate intermingling of reality and fable that Derrida finds central to the nuclear arms race, Palisander’s method of composing history eradicates the possibility of distinguishing between doxa and épistémè and similarly generates a self-sustaining fiction. Sokolov’s parodic presentation equates Palisander’s logic with Soviet rhetoric in general, claiming that both invariably value form over substance, credo over fact, utility over veracity.

The conclusion of the section on Beria’s suicide finally exposes the credo at work behind the scenes in Palisander’s retelling:

[Beria’s] final thought was of his great-nephew, whom, the peripeteias in their relationship notwithstanding, he loved dearly like a father.

“Dare, Palisander!” He shouted in the direction of the Convent of the New Virgin and at the top of his mental lungs. “Dare!” he shouted, Page 192 →balancing on the threshold of nothingness. And with a child-like clasp of the hands he crossed over. (8)

Palisander ennobles Beria as a tragic suicide who was driven to kill himself out of despair at his colleagues’ lack of social conscience. All but the most rigidly conformist Soviet reader can recognize this as an outright fabrication, but the sheer discontinuity between Beria’s execution at the end of a notorious tenure as head of the KGB and this anecdote of an altruistic martyrdom begins to cast doubt on Palisander’s subsequent arrangements. This doubt is heightened by the nonsensicality of some of Palisander’s phrases, such as the odd adverb umoglasno, translated as “at the top of his mental lungs” but literally meaning something along the more paradoxical lines of “publicly, within his mind.” Finally the maudlin sentimentality of Beria’s exhortation to Palisander would strike Soviet readers as a clear borrowing from Socialist Realism, in which the example and sacrifice of the “positive hero” provide both emotional uplift and encouragement to continue working toward the “radiant future.” Palisander’s formal adaptation of the impoverished rhetoric of Socialist Realism, a genre whose status even within official Soviet literature had been devalued by the time Sokolov wrote Astrophobia, finalizes his demise as a reliable narrator and frames the rest of the novel as metahistory/metafiction. The reader has been made blatantly aware of Palisander’s tendency to alter information to correspond to his credo and is much more likely to notice its manifestations in the remainder of the novel, thus allowing Sokolov to concoct an encyclopedic series of parodic and satirical episodes that cover an expansive, albeit thoroughly implausible, Soviet history.

The self-apparent although strenuously denied artifice of Palisander’s congenial characterizations of Beria, Stalin, Brezhnev, himself, and others reveals the parodic-satiric intention of Sokolov’s novel. The often grotesquely sentimentalized portraits that Palisander paints of such unquestionably distasteful figures as Stalin and Beria are, as Booker and Juraga point out, “quite consistent with the representations . . . in socialist realist works of the time” (150). Such supposedly objective representations appear not only in Socialist Realist fiction, but also in ostensibly nonfictional (auto)biographies, as Palisander’s narrative claims to be. Matich’s discussion of the subversive function of the anecdote helps explain how fiction and nonfiction intersect in Soviet-era satire: “Related to the satire in content and form, the anecdote performs an analogous function in Soviet culture. Voinovich’s Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin . . . is patterned on the anecdote, except that what is anecdote in Soviet reality is life in the satirical novel. The result is a reversal of the life/art relationship, according to which art becomes more real than life because Soviet life is so fantastic” (“Is There” 186). Voinovich himself echoed this statement concerning the “reversal of the life/art relationship” in a 1990 interview, stating that “it’s not that the book Page 193 →[Moscow 2042, in this case] reflects reality, but that reality is beginning to reflect fiction” (quoted in Ryan-Hayes 215).

While Matich’s analysis does not explicitly share Morson’s view that parody achieves satire by recontextualizing a nonparodic original in an absurd setting, her interpretation of Voinovich’s novel, an exemplar of Soviet-era satire, clearly is conversant with it. Her definition of the “anecdote” being transformed into parody by the simple fact of its describing an absurd or “fantastic” society, is essentially the same as Morson’s Bakhtin-derived notion of “double-voiced” parody, since both imply a superficial straightforward reading and a satirical subtext. Thus Palisander’s story is not only a mock epic and a mock autobiography but also, specifically, a travesty of Soviet epic and biographical forms that are already themselves perverted by the distorting influence of Soviet ideology. In Astrophobia Sokolov simultaneously subverts the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and the false heroic rhetoric behind it by “repeating the original in a significantly inappropriate social or literary setting” (Morson 112).

The works discussed in this chapter exemplify most thoroughly the humanistic subversion of the cold war’s cultural logic through satire. Few if any aspects of the fictionalized societies they depict remain untouched by distortions than can be justified—by those who benefit from them, at least—to some perceived necessity within the grand-scale ideological struggle of the cold war. The wholesale revelation of such distortions is intended to remind the reader that the costs of the cold war cannot be measured simply in the dollars and rubles expended on military budgets, but also in terms of any authentic understanding of the world and one’s own place in it. Whether propping up a myth of American exceptionalism (as in The Public Burning) or recasting Beria’s participation in mass murder as heroism (as in Astrophobia), such deceits serve only to perpetuate the power structures responsible for the grotesque, dangerous, and dehumanized worlds of these novels. None of these authors offers a definitive view of reality to replace the ones they critique in their works, but all of them accomplish Pynchon’s goal of putting “more humanistic concerns” before their readers, both by showing them the perils of not addressing these concerns and by exposing unacknowledged fabrications that they believe to be damagingly permeating American and Russian culture during the cold war. Neither of these techniques offers a guarantee of escape from the snares of cold war cultural logic—after all, as Pynchon noted, we “average poor bastards are completely outclassed”—but they are a first step without which meaningful resistance and reform are impossible.