THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 81-86
© 2001 National Communication Association 

Nuclear Criticism

Bryan C. Taylor

John Canaday, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. xv + 310 pages.  $22.95 (paper). 

As a research topic, nuclear weapons have confronted communication scholars with a compelling paradox. In their potential Cold War state, nuclear weapons have served as the ultimate materialistic rebuke (a brilliant, devouring  blast) to culture (children at play, commuters in traffic, all that is fragile and mundane stopped in a final moment). This condition is, further, a product of the highly technical, rational, and elitist realms of scientific theory and defense policy. Scholars seeking access to these sanctums have traditionally faced numerous challenges: defensive and exclusive cultures; complex, highly-coded professional jargon; mind-bending paradoxes; and profound ethical dilemmas associated with depicting a culture willing to destroy the world to save itself. Under these pressures, communication scholars have aligned their work with the conventional subjectivities of Cold War culture: patriotic-pragmatic endorsement of existing arrangements; moral and passionate opposition (with extremely limited effect); and a vast middle ground of resignation and ambivalence characterized by side-long glances at the apparatus, occasional flashes of dread and longing, and a great deal taken on faith (if not consent).  

And yet, nuclear weapons have also offered scholars a combination of underbelly, ontological joke, and grudging invitation: they are nothing (meaningful) but discourse. This statement requires some brief unpacking. It is of course a gloss of the post-structuralist position on representation, but this position is agitated and confounded in the nuclear case. Jacques Derrida's infamous 1984 manifesto for nuclear criticism opened the door: because the nuclear referent (in the form of strategic war) would irrevocably destroy the materiality of culture, it can only be represented in discourse as signs. Nuclear weapons are, in other words, “all talk” in the hope of “no action” (at least not the apocalyptic variety, not yet)—although of course the talk is itself strategic action designed to influence outcomes. Nuclear signs form a political and poetic resource to be configured in threats, projections, and simulations. Whatever form it takes, nuclear discourse is thus deeply neurotic: it obsessively confronts on several intersecting levels (physical, moral, strategic) the limits of credibility and coherence. As a material force, discourse potentially hastens and defers the missile's arc. As John Canaday argues in The Nuclear Muse, this condition demands both intellectual and moral attention. Even in analyzing the accounts of early nuclear scientists, he notes:

. . . [W]e are gaining access not to [some original] physical experience but to more texts. . . . [T]hese texts, and even the scientific practices to which they refer, are themselves full of the very literary qualities we [often] mistrust. A prejudice against literary representations is, therefore, not only counterproductive but dangerous. Since we cannot escape our dependence on these representations . . . by continuing to privilege literal representation over figurative, we are deluding ourselves. Instead, it would be more helpful to acknowledge and attempt to analyze the particular ways in which literary practices, within science as without, facilitate and complicate our efforts to understand and represent nuclear weapons. (224)

With luck, resolve, and skill, then, criticism might intervene in and transform the logics that underwrite the nuclear apparatus. This is, however, a tall order, because it returns the critic to the dilemmas of access, skill, and voice. But these dilemmas are not monolithic: different sites of nuclear discourse present different opportunities and challenges.

One solution is to historicize the nuclear-discursive condition, and it is here that poet, playwright, and literary critic Canaday offers a useful model. The Nuclear Muse explores the histories of quantum physics and the Manhattan Project (specifically, the Los Alamos Laboratory) to show how the authority and credibility of speakers in these sites were heavily dependent on literary discourse. Before the weapons could become physical “facts,” they were first conceptualized as “fictions” through literary genres and devices. Canaday's inventory of influences includes vernacular, metaphor, scripture, novels, poetry, myth, legend, letters, plays, manifestos, and petitions. By the time he is done, the bomb has lost its grim and chilling silence. That silence is replaced by a haunted, restless murmur. It is not, in other words, merely playful to say that the Bomb might talk us to death—an image clarified in Derrida's conflation of the terms “missile” and “missive.” Nuclear weapons are—as a uniquely potent inscription of discourse—“letter bombs.”

Canday's argument concerning the discursive constitution of scientific knowledge  probes conditions that generated profound anxiety for early nuclear rhetors. Try as they might to repress the intertextual contingency of their claims (for example, as mere “play”), they were increasingly driven to self-conscious discourse. As Canaday reveals, nuclear weapons both emerged from and generated a series of theoretical and professional conditions that constituted crises of legitimation and representation in scientific life. Discourse offered only partial and ambiguous solutions to these crises, and its use potentially undermined the objectivist paradigms that had traditionally warranted scientific authority. The early nuclear scientists thus became sadder but wiser about language, discovering that “in the long run a stable, literal representation of the world cannot exist without a slippery, metaphorical immersion in it” (74). In this process, the conditions for nuclear weapons fused recursively with their signs -- even before the Cold War policies of deterrence conflated the symbolic modes of gesture and act: “The atomic bomb . . . may be read as an instance of the power of scientific discourse to organize human observations of the natural world, to construct abstract symbolic representations of those observations, and to reapply such representations in the manipulation of the natural phenomena they describe.” (174) This claim is significant in that it establishes how nuclear weapons have, historically, always already been saturated in discourse.

Canaday performs this argument in a series of case studies and close readings. Chapters 1-3 engage events prior to the Manhattan Project: physicists' use of figurative language in their development of the new science of quantum theory, rhetorical attempts by Niels Bohr to resolve dilemmas in the relationship between classical and quantum physics; and a revisionist 1932 staging of Goethe's Faust by a group of physicists in Copenhagen as an allegory for their intellectual predicaments and cultural conflicts. Canaday's central themes here include scientists' ambivalent usage of metaphor as a necessary heuristic for conceptualization, whose flexible connotations are later “circumscribed” in favor of static literalism; the necessity of adopting a reflective stance on the contingency of language (that is, that the simultaneous use of contradictory metaphors was a logical necessity, not a failure) to cope with the paradoxes created by quantum theory (for example, the infamous simultaneity of matter as both wave and particle); and the primordial need— experienced perhaps most desperately by these devotees of rationalism—to formulate and resolve their anxieties using the narrative resources provided by myth.

Canaday turns next to four case studies associated with the wartime development at Los Alamos of the nuclear weapons delivered on Japan. Chapter 4 explores literary devices displayed in a Primer (a term Canaday deconstructs as a pun conflating the textual and physical initiation of a “chain reaction”) used to socialize the Laboratory's new, high-strung, and diverse arrivals. This document, Canaday argues, was filled as much with strategic projection and diplomatic conciliation to professional egos as valid documentation, and succeeded in marginalizing ethical interests in favor of instrumental technique before the work even began.  Chapter 5 examines the colonialist metaphors of exploration and discovery used by Los Alamos residents to make sense of their isolated, arduous, and grafted existence amid ancient New Mexican pueblo culture. A companion chapter considers how Los Alamos scientists used these same metaphors to contain their anxiety surrounding the process and product of their work. Specifically, Canaday argues, the scientists used these metaphors to depict natural phenomena in ways that also functioned as commentary on their evolving and ambiguous professional status as weaponeers. Chapter 7 focuses on the religious rhetoric used by Los Alamos scientists to express their ambivalence surrounding their commitments to the project (for example, in adopting the self-serving caste metaphor of a monastic nuclear “priesthood”). Here, Canaday performs close readings that defamiliarize cliché'd expressions descended from this period, such as Robert Oppenheimer's borrowings from the Bhagavad Ghita and John Donne's poetry, to show how the scientists positioned their own agency and accountability for nuclear death in relation to the supernatural. Chapter 8 examines the formative influence exerted during the immediate postwar period by the celebrated Los Alamites (for example, their use of biblical allusion) in the initial manufacture of popular nuclear understanding. A final chapter brings Canaday's argument full circle by examining two fantasy novels (one by the former Manhattan Project scientist, Leo Szilard) that draw upon and transform the very literary devices used by these scientists.

Canaday's volume thus offers a resource that should be most appealing to critics of scientific and nuclear rhetoric. He is to be commended for his impressive archival research and accessible depiction of extremely complex scientific theory. His arguments confirm the salience of issues relevant to these critics: the dilemmas faced by nuclear scientists in balancing their celebrity and professional authority, and in honoring both their own individual authorship and the professional community. Canaday establishes that, even as they often disdain the realms of culture and discourse, scientists are continually seizing on available symbolic resources to work out issues of affect and spirituality inhibited by their own professional ideologies. In this process, they strike a Faustian bargain: they seek language to control the uncontrollable, but inevitably discover language is itself uncontrollable, and subjects its users to a rhizomatic dispersal of meaning, which can only be repaired (temporarily) by the use of more language. This condition can of course generate both acceptance and denial. Canaday cautions, however, that scientists who do not understand the rhetorical contingency of their knowledge are inevitably dominated by it (and use it to dominate others). Of particular interest here is his claim that metaphors used to popularize nuclear science both invite public understanding of technical matters, but frustrate legitimate democratic participation in policymaking by maintaining pernicious barriers of abstraction and expertise.

On that note, one wishes that Canaday had pushed even farther to integrate his literary-critical claims with the evolving social histories of nuclear institutions. Nuclear critics have been performing fine-grained readings of discourse for almost two decades: the process by which these claims may be applied as political intervention are as yet unclear (and feminist and post-colonial critics may find Canaday's restrained judgments about the sexism and racism of early nuclear discourse to be unnecessarily conservative). Anthropologist Joe Masco, for example, has recently analyzed the “symbolic economy of plutonium” linking the diverse subcultures of post-Cold War New Mexico, and depicted the political movement among Pueblo peoples seeking to regain lands seized by the Manhattan Project, and to protect their health from its lingering toxic and radioactive contamination.  In this process, these speakers struggle against the legacies (invisibility, economic subordination, etc.) of the exploration and discovery metaphors analyzed by Canaday. This need for applied criticism is more urgent (and not less) in the contemporary political climate in which nuclear institutions are displaying counter-intuitive success in marketing their goods and services to a resurgent U.S. national-security apparatus. As is often the case in nuclear-cultural studies, Canaday's move to historicize the Bomb is a double-edged sword: it illuminates the condition of nuclear intertextuality, but avoids engaging the complex transformation of associated political and strategic conditions at the close of the 20^th century. The Nuclear Muse serves as a valuable resource for critics wishing to pursue that particular project, or related studies of scientific rhetoric. 

Bryan C. Taylor is associate professor of Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder.