Unvarnishing Reality

Derek C. Maus

Description

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

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

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Themes
• Subjects
• Vladímir Voinóvich
• Yuz Aleshkovsky
• Sasha Sokolov
• Aleksandr Zinovyev
• Vladimir Voinovich
• Vasily Aksyonov
• Balance of terror
• Brinkmanship
• Orwellian
• Walker Percy
• Soviet Union
• Politics
• Robert Coover
• John Barth
• Fazil Iskander
• United States
• Don DeLillo
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Thomas Pynchon
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172263
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Unvarnishing Reality
UNVARNISHING REALITY
Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire
DEREK C. MAUS
2011 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Maus, Derek C.
Unvarnishing reality : subversive Russian and American cold war satire / Derek C. Maus.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-985-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. American fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Russian fiction-20th century-History and criticism. 3. Satire, American- History and criticism. 4. Satire, Russian-History and criticism. 5. Cold War in literature. 6. Politics and literature-History-20th century. 7. Cold War-Influence. I. Title.
PS374.S2M38 2011
817 .5409358282-dc22
2011001616
ISBN 978-1-61117-226-3 (ebook)
CONTENTS

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

I only ever cared about the man. . . . I never gave a fig for the ideologies. . . . I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn t notice. . . . And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They re the whores and angels of our striving selves.
John le Carr , The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, relations between the United States and Russia have progressed through several stages. From the initial flurry of optimism about (and monetary investment in) Russia s future as a new democracy and global trading partner, through fears of a return to Communism (or worse, the hypernationalism exemplified by Vladimir Zhirinovsky during the mid- to late 1990s) and an initially warm but increasingly strained friendship between Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, American attitudes toward its former enemy have vacillated considerably since George H. W. Bush s proclamation of a New World Order in January 1991. To be sure, things have changed, and all-out nuclear apocalypse has been largely forestalled-if only to be replaced by a host of alternate, less totalized, but no less immediate (at least in the popular imagination) threats, ranging from so-called rogue nations to stateless terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida. I believe this tendency is a dual effect of governments peopled largely with individuals who cut their teeth during the cold war and an incomplete, perhaps intentionally hobbled, effort to understand the ways in which the cold war was conducted.
As a result the philosophical and political landscape of the post-cold war world is dominated by volatility, from the economic catastrophes threatened by the 1997 Asian economic crisis and again by the international banking meltdown of 2008-9, to regional conflicts with global significance (such as NATO s 1999 military intervention in the Balkans, the resurgence of the Palestinian intifada, and the long-standing Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan), and finally to the growing influence of various forms of religious fundamentalism reacting against the generally secularist and rationalist tendencies of the past century. Despite one of its greatest periods of sustained economic growth through the 1990s, the United States also witnessed bitter political infighting at the national level and localized outbreaks of violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine shootings that seemingly alluded to disturbances in the ostensibly healthy national psyche. As the boom years subsided, these disturbances were exacerbated, first in the bitterly contested presidential election of 2000 and later in the national and cultural response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, especially the decision to go to war against Iraq in March 2003. Russia has likewise proceeded erratically in its efforts to move away from the unpleasant past of the cold war, including its continuing problems with rebellion in Chechnya, its lingering tendency toward authoritarianism in suppressing internal dissent, and its mixed results in retaining a preeminent role in global politics and economics.
Although only a small and relatively reactionary minority in either the United States or Russia advocates a return to the superpower rivalry of the cold war, the tumultuous situation of the early twenty-first century hints at a lingering social unease about the two nations recent past. Given the nuclear tension of varying intensity that existed from 1949, when the Soviets successfully exploded their first atomic bomb, until 1991, when the cold war effectively ended along with the Soviet Union, one obvious source of this cultural trauma is not difficult to identify. 1 Any diagnosis of contemporary cultural maladies must consider the shortcomings of the exalted (and exaggerated) rhetorical edifice of the New World Order the cold war s victors erected atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall and innumerable toppled statues of Lenin. If the initial American cultural response to the end of the cold war was understandably celebratory (if perhaps overly self-congratulatory), it also lacked substantive inquiry into the potentially deleterious after-effects of nearly fifty years of extreme anxiety. Likewise the furious dash to de-Sovietize Russia under the iconic prodemocracy figure of Boris Yeltsin in the early and mid-1990s tempered widespread efforts to delve deeply into the past. 2 As statesman George Kennan, whose 1946 Long Telegram to Harry Truman from Moscow indirectly helped define the cold war in its earliest days, argued in a New York Times op-ed piece on October 28, 1992, the end of the cold war is a fit occasion for satisfaction but also for sober re-examination of the part we took in its origin and long continuation. It is not a fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone (A21).
My response to Kennan s call for such sober re-examination specifically involves reexamining a group of socially conscious writers of satirical fiction who began, well before 1992, to question the various forces that contributed to the origin and long continuation of the cold war. Although the literature of the cold war period has been studied extensively, in terms of not only its literary lineage but also its historical context, precious few critics have compared works by both Russian and American writers of satirical fiction that endeavor to condemn and in due course subvert the established power structure. Such a comparison yields a complex of thematic and structural similarities that transcends specific national/cultural origins. The cold war was a conflict that inextricably linked the governments and citizens of both countries, even as they ostensibly separated themselves from one another with ideological barriers. Similarly the literature that resisted and/or rejected the premises that guided this conflict is not confined by national borders, even though many of its creators and its physical manifestations-that is, printed texts-were. Together these works represent a thoroughgoing humanistic refutation of the cold war and its operative doctrines, an alternative to the exclusionary binary logic of the time. My goal in this book is first to reveal the existence and the scope of such nonaligned critiques and then to evaluate their philosophical merits. In my view such a process is an important step in addressing the cultural damage of living for so long under the nuclear Sword of Damocles, as John F. Kennedy called it in his September 25, 1961, address to the United Nations.
Although triumphalist discourses, especially those associated with neo-conservatism, are perhaps the most robust forces affecting the retrospective cultural attitudes toward the cold war in the United States, they are not the only ones whose insistent nationalism threatens to oversimplify and thereby distort the legacy of the cold war by marginalizing anyone who refused to take sides in the conflict, to say nothing of those who cast their lot with the losing side. A substantial number of condemnations have originated from within the intellectual Left as well. Of especial interest to me are the denunciations of literary authors who question(ed) fundamental notions of American self-image. Such allegations generally imply that raising such doubts during perilous times such as the cold war is at worst treasonous, at best woefully misguided.
In his Achieving Our Country (1998), for example, Richard Rorty singles out Richard Condon s Manchurian Candidate (1959), Thomas Pynchon s Vineland (1990), Leslie Marmon Silko s Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Neal Stephenson s Snow Crash (1992) as novels not of social protest but rather of rueful acquiescence in the end of American hopes (3). Rorty s interpretation is predicated on the belief that pride in American national identity is a necessary precondition for ethical national policies: Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it ca