Drew Milne

Nuclear theory degree zero, with two cheers for Derrida

T his is written on the verge. We have been set up by the holy grail of science, by the offer of a solution to diminishing resources, a solution to global war – the American Manhattan Project writ large as a full-stop on modernity (Fox). But it wasn’t a full-stop, and it wasn’t the solution to diminishing resources. It is the deadly promise of total death – fast and slow and slower. It threatens to be all encompassing. We make our journeys towards awareness of the nuclear in so many different ways, but we arrive at the same dead ends. Hiroshima and Nagasaki fallout on one side, while the other side melts down into Chernobyl and Fukushima. As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests: “Nuclear catastrophe – all differences military or civilian kept in mind – remains the one potentially irremediable catastrophe, whose effects spread through generations, through the layers of the earth” (3). Recognition of the anthropocene threatens to mulch nuclear catastrophe amid other layers of anthropogenic damage, notably plastics. As the ecology of floods, tsunamis and earthquakes around Fukushima also reveals, the nuclear is caught up in the risks of global warming: “natural catastrophes are no longer separable from their technological, economic, and political implications or repercussions” (4). We are caught in a symbiotic intertwining in which “nature” can no longer be imagined as a backdrop, but has become a dark ecology prefigured by the nuclear, and suffused with it. Scientists talk of the nuclear industry reaching from the cradle to the grave: the mining to the enriching to its (half-)life in a reactor to weapons-grade plutonium. It is not a straightforward journey – there are diversions and different routes – but semantically and biochemically, militarily and politically, they link, and in terms of ultimate outcomes, they break up the links of DNA, and the materials that constitute the world. Nuclear representation is torn between the global society of the nuclear spectacle and the micro-threads of lived experience, between the heroic if morally poisoned scientists and the damaged Plutonium knights of the nuclear

POETRY AFTER HIROSHIMA

Abstract This essay explores the faultlines, poetic pressures and social structures of feeling determining poetry “after” Hiroshima. Nuclear bombs, accidents and waste pose theoretical and poetic challenges. The argument outlines a model of nuclear implicature that reworks Gricean conversational implicature. Nuclear implicature helps to describe ways in which poems “represent” nuclear problems implicitly rather than explicitly. Metonymic, metaphorical, and grammatical modes of implication are juxtaposed with recognition of social attitudes complicit with nuclear problems. Mushroom and lichen metaphors are analysed and distinguished. There are brief accounts of The Chernobyl Herbarium, The Nuclear Culture Source Book and poems by Aidan Semmens, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg and Gerry Loose. The argument attempts to keep open the fragile agency of writing in poems that confront nuclear power. Poetry after Hiroshima is also contrasted with Adorno’s provocative questions about poetry after Auschwitz, amid Cold War arguments that have distorted recognition of the reality of nuclear production. The essay concludes by considering the emergence of poetry within E.P. Thompson’s theoretical account of “Exterminism,” sketching ways in which poetics and theory might inform both the nuclear imagination and the difficulties of nuclear song.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

Politics and Modernist Poetics

Anyone teaching Anglo-American modernist poetry becomes familiar with resistances to the elitist, authoritarian, or reactionary politics of prominent modernists. As Michael North puts it, ‘The politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound have long been an embarrassment and a scandal’ (North, 1991: 1). The difficulties are confirmed rather than dissipated by a wider exploration into the poetics of T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence or David Jones. T. E. Hulme’s pseudonymous ‘A Tory Philosophy’ sets the tone for much of what came after: ‘I believe in original sin … Ican’t stand romanticism, and … Iamacertain kind of Tory’ (Hulme, 1998: 157;cf. Levenson, 1984). T. S. Eliot’s more famous 1928 declaration of his general point of view as ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’ confirms the curiously unstable compound of interests (Eliot, 1928: 7). Inquisitive students might seek out the work of more left-wing poets like Joseph MacLeod or Charles Madge (Milne, 2001). Contrasts can be made with the socialist and communist poetics of Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Mayakovsky, or Hugh MacDiarmid. Even if modernists share a sense of socio-political crisis, for which the antiquated terms of the ‘left-right’ political spectrum lack historical relevance, the pillars of Anglo-American modernist poetics nevertheless share attitudes that fall outside the positions now acceptable within the politics of contemporary capitalism.