Apart to the end
Baer, Barbara L.
WOMEN & MEN - DIFFERENT VISIONS OF NUCLEAR WAR Apart to the end? BARBARA L. BAER Men are men, they have reason and weapons. Jakov Lind Landscape in Concrete Counting. They have counted the...
...Commonweal: 170...
...Once poisoned, there was no return...
...The world of the future is so completely in pieces that everything is contained in each piece, each memory, each expression, each artifact...
...Rather, there has been an invisible trickling of death — radiation, plagues, starvation, social chaos — after an unspecified conflict...
...The Primal Twins of technology, its use and misuse, are entwined...
...Lessing and Wilhelm, writing about the future of children after a nuclear war, are speaking of the present as well...
...The Dispossessed has the mark of a woman more concerned with the right uses of science and technology than with progress itself...
...Our own generation of children is being numbed and harmed and made violent in various ways by the double speak of future/non-future offered them in our current stand-off with doom...
...Miller's monks copy texts), the women novelists have their characters concerned first of all with re-establishing a relationship with nature, even if at a subsistence level...
...He does not live in that dark world of the unconscious, asleep to his own urges, the way Pyn-chon's scientists do...
...Women see the holocaust primarily in terms of its survivors...
...We hope to live on through them...
...If there's a big bang, and civilization goes bust," Russell Hoban has said about the language in Riddley Walker, "then we'd have a corrupted vernacular with bits of scientific jargon floating around in it like meat in a stew...
...However, in their ficiton, men and women perceive themselves as responsible for different aspects of the situation and reveal how differently they think...
...Men share the fear of nuclear war and feel disgust towards its makers...
...131 132 133 They count the dead to be 42 million...
...Men have had a relationship with weapons over the centuries that women have not...
...They count the bombs...
...IN URSULA LE GUIN's The Dispossessed, one of Earth's weary survivors details the planet's destruction in order that we, the present Earthlings, might be warned of our own folly: "We controlled neither appetite nor violence...
...Shevik is a most unusual scientist, conscious of the ends, the consequences, of his work...
...They have counted the targets...
...Even when a male author's aim is to evoke the horror of war, the history and technology of its weaponry still fascinate him, often occupying a central point in his narrative...
...Edward Teller has often spoken of the H-bomb as his ' 'baby,'' almost promising nothing bad could come from it...
...and Who...
...History has devoured its own tail...
...Twenty-five hundred years after the war, nothing grows...
...Malamud's man rehashes history and retrieves objects...
...In the novels of Lessing, Wilhelm, and Le Guin, the end of the world has not come with one big bang...
...In its grainy, crude, no-holds-barred language, Gravity's Rainbow strips bare a certain kind of male insanity, showing it for what it is...
...Thus, novels of a post-apocalyptic future by women are about what is happening to our children now — as well as what will happen to them if we have war...
...There's only one female in the novel, a shaman woman...
...George Leonard, interviewing military officers connected with nuclear weapons, recorded one man's late-night remark: "Sometimes I just want to get it all over with, one way or the other...
...Another branch of womens' writing on the post-holocaust theme, which I distinguish from the novels I have mentioned, is feminist science fiction...
...Millennia later, someone from another planet asks why such destruction occurred...
...Towards the end of the book, Pynchon suggests the possibility of sublimating the love of rockets and missiles in good Pioneers and Voyagers, rockets men can feel powerful sending into space without the power of destruction in them...
...Mutants are ritually murdered...
...Male writers view technology and weapons in a way women do not...
...The end is more like a fatal pollution than an Apocalypse...
...What is it about human nature that is so destructive...
...Shevik combines the "maleness" of abstract, linear thinking with the "femaleness" of emotional foresight, tending more to the latter...
...Men and women will probably continue to write 22 March 1985: 169 differently about them...
...we did not adapt...
...We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died...
...IN THE THREE novels by women, no one poses unanswerable questions...
...These words come from the feminine side, asking us to love nature, to revere it, to quit meddling...
...Their suffering is unbearable to us...
...The more primitive V-rockets prefigure the larger, computer-guided missiles carrying nuclear warheads...
...In the three other novels by men — A Canticlefor Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Riddley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban, God's Grace (1982) by Bernard Malamud — the war which brought about the end of civilization was brief but totally effective...
...It takes place in Germany in the ruins of World War U. However, the seeds for the next war have been planted by the last one...
...Le Guin is telling us that a hi-tech paradise, where we can push buttons for our comfort and ease, has its own traps: other buttons can be pushed also...
...These questions lead to further questions about good and evil, God and the Devil, free will and predestination...
...We project ourselves in them...
...The girl in turn pities and tries to mother bands of wild children who come out of the sewers at night to scavenge and steal, children without ties to anything...
...Saying, LET GO...
...The presence of children is a form of hope...
...Society consists of small bands of people speaking a demotic tongue who scavenge by day and retreat to huddle behind fences at night, as afraid of what they may see as of being seen...
...Only a few authors of post-holocaust fiction explore the issue from both sides: from beginnings to endings, causes to effects...
...It is hard to imagine a worse collective fate for our race, short of total extinction, than the one Russell Hoban conjures up...
...They have not identified with them, and do not appear even curious about them...
...Of 224 targets they count, 71 were cities...
...What he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets each time exploding in the sky...
...In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Earth (or Terra, as Earth js called), has been devastated by wars and pollution...
...The only woman in the novel is a two-headed mutant who may also be a saint in disguise...
...There are descriptions of devastated cities, landscapes charred and covered by dust or ice, but no rockets or rocket launchers, bomb casings or even secret bunkers, all of which figure in the post-holocaust novels by men...
...22 March 1985:167 More than anything, Gravity's Rainbow is about weapons and why men have been making them since history began...
...He's barely out of childhood, which he grieves for, as he grieves for a forgiving Mother Earth he did not know, and for all children everywhere who haven't known anything but blackened, poisoned land...
...It is a visionary, almost seamless work that takes place in the far future, millennia after the holocaust, when things have so thoroughly broken down that all life seems like a hologram in which the picture is unfocused, but where every bit of that picture is spread over every other bit...
...In Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor, war and its aftermath have sent refugees streaming through the city on their way to the country...
...In God's Grace, Bernard Malamud reduces the world's post-nuclear population to one last man who speaks for all humankind to a band of apes...
...In Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, a community of monks preserves remnants of civilization from the mutants and brigands roaming the land in a second Dark Age, a radioactive, post-holocaust world...
...Earth is described as a body with a blistered, burned skin, as if it were the characters' own skin...
...He writes no future-romance...
...Perhaps women's identification with Earth means that a woman writer cannot put the world to death in a few hours of war...
...In the end, Riddley gives himself up to a power greater than himself — not precisely God because both the concept and the word "God" have been lost — but to some power nonetheless...
...But there is no satisfaction to killing them, because it does not answer the questions, Why...
...Women must form their own societies free of men, healing themselves and the earth through the use of psychic powers long denied them...
...Here the work of the imagination, the novel, is important because in fiction the demon of many human psyches concentrates itself in a composite character whose background we seem to know intimately: a Teller-like character, such as Pynchon creates, is more believable than Teller himself...
...Most of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in the dark, in smoke or mists, which veil the thoughts of men from themselves...
...Like the shaman woman in Riddley Walker, she has strange powers — perhaps the only kind of woman men can imagine surviving...
...What can we do now that this thing has happened...
...There is a second question Commonweal: 168 related to Why?: Who...
...I have chosen a balanced sampling of post-holocaust fiction from the past twenty years, three novels by women and four by men...
...The panelists did not go so far as to say that fear of world destruction was hysterical or womanish, but there was no woman on hand to dispute the importance of the statistics of nuclear war — statistics that Jonathan Schell has Barbara L. BAER is a writer living in rural California where she divides her time between taking care of her family and editing the newsletter of Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament...
...Pynchon's male characters identify with their rockets as if they were part of their own bodies...
...NEVERTHELESS, our faith in human reason, in survival, and in the meaning of our existence, tends to make us think such wishes are aberrations...
...The three novels by women — The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) by Doris Lessing...
...In Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, the third or fourth generation of survivors of war and radiation poisoning are groups of parentless children...
...Women, on the other hand, tend to ignore weapons and even leave out descriptions of war itself...
...If they die, so in a sense do we...
...From her window, she watches the mob go by, among them many children...
...These children are also lost...
...They are children without individuality, without thoughts of their own...
...If Jesus had, why didn't he tell Him about it?'' God doesn't answer these questioners, and no one comes forth to respond to Riddley's plea...
...The narrator is an old woman who has decided to stick it out in the city...
...I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer saying, LOSE IT...
...Names of warring nations have been forgotten or mythologized...
...Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) by Kate Wilhelm...
...THOMAS PYNCHON'S Gravity's Rainbow (1973) does not seem to be about nuclear holocaust...
...The reappearance of a capacity to think of beauty and hope seems to be an evolutionary step forward from the depths of the post-holocaust quagmire...
...The female representative of Earth answers simply, ' 'My world, my Earth is a ruin...
...Words must keep coming from the heart and the imagination, for when they stop all that will be left is the computer's Counting...
...The existence of beauty strikes like a bolt of lightning or a spontaneous mutation...
...How can we live and make life as bearable as possible for the survivors, the children...
...Riddley Walker has not told us to quit thinking or speaking...
...We on Earth must deal with technology, with our weapons, or face our ruin...
...Absence of feeling and of individuality are as much a loss of humanity as are savagery and murder...
...Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban is the most completely realized and aesthetically successful work to date of post-holocaust fiction...
...are we helpless...
...They lead everywhere and nowhere...
...There is, simply, a fundamental difference in focus...
...Because He hadn't lived it...
...Food has to be gotten, warmth provided for, the eye accustomed to pain...
...In the men's novels, scapegoats are sought and ritually murdered, long after the war...
...They are also our posterity...
...Are we doomed to do it again and again and again...
...It makes us see how durable the human spirit is even when body and land are blighted...
...Who was responsible...
...The only power is no power...
...Does the absence of children betray an absence of hope in the survival of the race...
...The book has engaged an unusual group of readers...
...Why are men tied to the wheel of self-destruction...
...And again and again and again...
...A planet spoiled by the human species...
...Children, in fiction as in life, are the truly innocent...
...The men who have survived in Riddley Walker, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and God's Grace, are obsessed with knowing why they have come to this end...
...The abbot of the monastery continually asks, Why...
...Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing...
...Computer whizzes and technology men are said to be Pynchon's hard-core audience...
...In God's Grace, the female sex and children are represented by a female chimpanzee and her mutant offspring who is killed...
...Survivors have time to make efforts to save their loved ones, to adapt to conditions for a while longer, to give children a chance for a little more life...
...She does not try to save anyone until an orphaned girl is brought to her, forcing her to re-engage herself with others...
...Their absence reveals despair...
...Whatever the reason, women novelists, unburdened by the need to question Why?, are freer to ask the concrete question, What...
...Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER...
...Americans and Russians are already scrambling for their secrets embedded in the fragments...
...They feel the power of eruption, the lift-off and penetration of space, the explosion that reaches toward the heart of matter, as if they were taking flight with the machines — as one character literally does, strapped to a rocket...
...One reason for the different perspective may be the exclusion of women from power when it comes to making the weapons, and deciding on their deployment and use...
...Pynchon describes what we may have suspected all along: a landscape of rockets/missiles resembles nothing so much as male organs lined up ready to be launched...
...Perhaps since women did not devise the weapons in the first place, they do not feel responsible for them, experience less need for soul-searching and blaming...
...Women writers cut through ideas to summon feeling for the survivors, especially children...
...The entire population is up against a collective blankness of mind, like a victim of brain damage who dimly remembers a former self but cannot bring it to light...
...Ruins of cities are still radioactive...
...But in the novels by men about the nuclear holocaust, children — like women — don't figure much...
...Susan Griffin Woman and Nature WOMEN WRITING about the prospect of nuclear war and its aftermath, its possibilities for survivors, do so differently from men...
...They imagine 42 million to be dead . . . (Counting...
...called insane and their makers madmen, "on whose thinking almost no bounds are set and the slaughter of whole populations and the extinction of man are too thinkable...
...And yet as her hero, Le Guin has chosen a male theoretical physicist and mathematician named Shevik...
...She has counted on this life continuing...
...If we were to come to this dreadful end, why did the All-knowing God create us...
...We failed as a species, as a social species...
...In A Canticle for Leibowitz, we see children only at the end, being led onto a spaceship to escape the second nuclear war...
...Riddley discovers Gothic sculpture in an underground crypt...
...Perhaps Gravity's Rainbow reflects part of themselves, their deeper motives, the links to their erotic fantasies, and thus has served a salutary purpose...
...The boy, Riddley Walker, narrating his quest across a ruined landscape twenty-five centuries after the war, asks, "Why wil he all ways kill the babby if he can...
...Are men perhaps more isolated in the imaginary post-holocaust world than women, who find or make a family...
...Perhaps the more accustomed role of victim has given women a better insight into the peril of the nuclear holocaust, a more realistic view of it...
...Riddley has turned twelve the day the novel begins...
...Each day she has counted, each day she has done what she must, done what she must to go on...
...In the writings of Suzy McKee Charnas, Sally Gearhart, Joanna Russ, and others, men are described as unregenerate and unregeneratable, even in the postwar dust...
...Even in non-specialist discussions, such as the one which followed television's "The Day After," women were excluded...
...One only guesses at it by the extent of its effects...
...I say this not to condemn the male writer but to show how he takes part of a masculine point of view...
...Abstract questions are not asked by women writers and their characters...
...Language, like machinery, is strewn about...
...He, too, is obsessed with the question, Why...
...Why does human life mean so little to Him...
...In the heart of this grim story, there is a revelation...
...If Riddley Walker offers a dose of aversion therapy to playing around with ideas of limited war, even with the notion of the beauty of science itself, the novel is not only a warning...
...What they have seen and identified with is the consequences of the weapons' use: the destruction of Earth...
...But every now and then a writer will turn up who repairs the split vision and engages the warriors and victims in dialogue...
...For the most part, the men on that panel talked about numbers and strategies, dismissing fears of the consequences of the weapons' use — which "The Day After" had underplayed — as an emotional response, having little to do with the serious problems at hand...
...Earth, the poisoned planet, was ruined by the misuse of technology...
...Women haven't seen the weapons themselves as an important part of the ruined world...
...As long as nuclear weapons exist, writers will imagine their use and aftermath...
...Gravity's Rainbow ends in the 1970s with an unidentified warning siren screaming over the Los Angeles freeways, spreading, "further than any mortal could ever move . . . could move in time...
...The questioners, all men, torment themselves like a Tantalus, almost within reach of water but unable to drink...
...128 129 130 They count 263 bombs and 1,446 megatons...
...The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin — contain no weaponry and very little machinery...
...the boy continually questions, as if by asking an intellectual question often enough, he will get an intellectual answer...
...Riddley Walker is the closest, but he's already twelve and a man in his tribal world...
...to help him deny what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race's death...
...It may be no revelation that men, and not only military men, identify with and love their weapons, and perhaps even nourish a half-wish to see them go off...
...She has counted on continuing...
...And while men write about the effects of war, they intellectualize them in a way women do not...
...burned into the oblivion of the centuries...
...Buttons were pressed, blasts recorded, and Earth was destroyed so swiftly the survivors are still "walking wounded" centuries, even millennia, later...
...If explanation of civilization's end is sought, a character gives a succinct, specific answer...
...Each year, new novels, stories, essays, poems, and anthologies on the subject of nuclear holocaust appear...
...Here, radical expression of anti-maleness appears...
...However painful the destruction of children, of childhood itself, the women writers take this difficult matter as their theme, trying to give us images of what children in the post-holocaust world might be like...
...Does the fact that men see themselves freer to speculate, to invent language and forms unencumbered by the nagging problems of children and the demands they make, also make them more pessimistic...
...While the survivors in male novels are concerned with retrieving documents and materiel after the war (Hoban's men dig up machinery...
...Two such novels already exist, one by a woman, the other by a man...
...These words are not those of men who follow an instinct to build weapons of destruction, who need to prove their power is greater than nature's...
...I trust the reader finds no contradiction in my quoting Jonathan Schell to represent the woman's point of view...
...In these works there is little hope of reconciliation...
...We destroyed ourselves...
...They are clones, clusters of beings made in a test tube to ensure survival of an infertile race...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
