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Final Prompt

Lively Matter: Or the Importance of Being a “Copepod”

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There are myriad words, images, concepts, and sounds that will remain stored within my nuclear-coffer, for this has been both a very disquieting and very electrifying class. Yet, if I had to choose one single concept out of this radioactive pool of abstractions, I would choose Jane Bennett’s “vibrant-matter”, as it encompasses not only the theories of ecology, but also mirrors the aesthetic strokes of the wonderful novels we have read (i.e. Bronsky’s Baba Dunja, Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, and Christa Wolf’s Accident). Bennett takes the idea of a holistic universe and embraces it beyond science-fiction, making natural structures—both dead and alive, animate and inanimate—become the explicit intermingled organism that we have failed to observe during our walks to the park. Her thoughts on ecology make us think of a world that (in Donna Haraway’s terms) appears to be of arachnid nature; of endless and interconnected ramifications. This cannot but remind me of Darwin’s scientific thought, for his view was not severed from the realm of images and aesthetic ponderings, on the contrary, it was utterly linked to them. He truly understood what it meant to inhabit a unified and symbiotic universe:

“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications” (Darwin 171).

Darwin’s theory is a precedent of Bennett’s conceptual view, for it presents every organism as constituted of the same stuff, hopped on an ongoing wheel of thriving and decay: the dead and broken branches occupy the same space as the fresh and vigorous buds. This is what the novels we read helped to illuminate; through their neon-allure we got to experience a world that has been plunged into a postmodern nuclear design, in which the conventions that encircled the dead and the living, the normal and the abnormal, have finally been subverted. Bronsky’s Baba Dunja, for example, is constantly reminding the reader that the realm of the dead not only pervades the realm of the living, but determines it. The future invades the past just as the past invades the future, making human timelines go berserk: “Our dead are among us, often they don’t even know they’re dead and that their bodies are rotting in the ground” (Bronsky 13). The past (the corpses, the compost) continues to drag its invisible presence towards the future[1], thus mirroring the effects of the nuclear age—a gruesome scenario that obliges us to pay attention to change and to all its wired complexities.

Interestingly, when we pay attention to this continuous motion, and to the coexistence of dead and lively matter, we-readers experience something similar to what Mark Fisher calls the “cognitive weird” (48): i.e., when “the weird” is not “directly seen or experienced”, but when “it is a cognitive effect” produced by depriving reality of certainty. What lingers is an affect that is difficult to pinpoint or differentiate[2]; a mood, one might say, that springs from seeing (although not clearly) the circular web of interdependent structures in nature. This is not unlike what Baba Dunja thinks about while sitting in her radioactive garden: “the village has a history that is intertwined with my history, like two strands of hair in the same braid” (54). Amusingly, her knowledge regarding the omnipresence of historical events and their inextricable relationship with the precious-individual-self, achieves to alienate people—indeed, humans tend to shy away from the idea that their bodies are neither fixed nor immune to being permeated by ghosts and radiation (i.e., death): “We scare people. They seem to believe that the death zone stops at the borders [they] draw on maps” (Bronsky 43).

Consequently, nuclear-age could be thought of as an x-ray of nature’s uncertain flux—through its effects we are able to connect (once again) with the moving materiality of our surroundings. As Darwin states, it would be “rash to assert that characters now increased to their utmost limit, could not, after remaining fixed for many centuries, again vary under new conditions of life” (62). Somewhat ironically, the H-bomb and the malfunction of nuclear-plants have created new conditions of life which cannot go unnoticed, for it is that very obliviousness that has given rise to their empire. Both Darwin in the nineteenth century and Bennett et al. in the twentieth century, have turned their eyes outward, i.e., beyond the tiny kingdom of the human, making visible the invisible. They have contributed to the understanding of ecology through and outside of science.

Fun fact: Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the German zoologist, marveled at Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, keen on capturing nature’s complex organisms, worked on aesthetic depictions of their form. He, in a way, accomplished through colorful drawings what Bronsky and Tawada accomplished through literature, i.e., to create a “cognitive weird” by unweaving the cloth of beings, nonbeings, and processes that breath under a seemingly shallow reality. The drawing above shows a body of creatures called “copepods”; these are small crustaceans that inhabit both fresh and salt water and are indispensable for the maintenance of global ecology and the carbon cycle—they resemble the earth’s flora as they reduce humans’ carbon emissions while floating in their oceanic habitat. Haeckel’s illustration gives agency to the specks that are interlaced with human life, thus broadening our view of the environment and situating us along the lines of Bennett’s lively matter.

We can certainly feel disturbed by all these overwhelming connections, as well as by the changing of scales and the warping of time; however, this is precisely what I enjoyed most from our classes, for I believe that this “knowledgeable-weird-affect” has the potential to stir our imagination and ward us from a growing hubris. On an age of nuclear energy and coffee chains, the strange and the eerie can help us disrupt our classically disjoint perceptions of nature.

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Notes

[1]Nixon’s “slow violence” is a term that will inevitably come to mind every time this “invisible presence” appears.
[2]As when Baba Dunja says, “I know exactly what is happening to me, but the word of it escapes me” (Bronsky 121).

Works Cited

__Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.
__Bronsky, Alina. Baba Dunja. Europa Editions, 2015.
__Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Modern Library, 2009.
__Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2016.

Images
__Both by Ernst Haeckel.

Prompt 9

Reconnecting with Mother: A Musical Attempt to Restore Peace during the Nuclear Age.

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“Turn your back on mother nature:
—Everybody wants to rule the world” (Tears for Fears)

Perhaps because I was born in the 90s and lived most of my life in Chile, I grew-up somewhat oblivious to the veiled but seemingly inescapable nuclear-doom that took over the 80s collective imaginary. In fact, every summer vacation, while I traveled with my family to the beach, we sang along Righeira’s Vamos a la Playa (We Go to the Beach)—it seemed like the perfect anthem for our touristy goal of lying under sun and skipping the salty waves: vamos a la playa oh, oh, oh, oh.

Sadly and ironically, I was unaware that the upbeat disco song by the Italian duo Righeira was about the after-effects of the atomic-bomb; their lyrics sounded hallucinogenic and surreal and therefore fun to vocalize: “let’s go to the beach/the bomb exploded/radiation gives you a tan with a tint of blue/the radioactive air ruffles your hair/the sea is finally clean/no more stinky fishes, only fluorescent water” (vamos a la playa, la bomba estalló/las radiaciones tuestan y matizan de azul/el viento radioactivo despeina los cabellos/al fin el mar es limpio/no más peces hediondos, sino agua fluorescentes). Moreover, and until yesterday, I ignored that back in the 80s the song occupied the third place on the West German charts (Klimke and Stapane120), and that it was one among the many pop-songs that addressed both the fear and the absurdity of a very possible nuclear war. How eerie it is to think now that the songs that cheered our beach-trips were also the political and aesthetic representations of a stance against nuclear-annihilation.

Although this musical scenario appears to be both ludicrous and grotesque, I believe it vividly represents the zeitgeist of the 80s, for the “artists cosmos” of that time —with all its surreal rhetoric— sought to counterbalance the “new American nuclear weapons” that had the power to “trigger nuclear doom, threatening to destroy the planet” (Klimke and Stapane 123). As the artists from 1982’s Peace Festival in Germany put it: their music festivals were a strong opposing force precisely because they combined “criticism and joy”, “opposition and fun”. One may be prone to sneer at their colorful idealism, however, if it were not for the strategic use of music and ironic criticism, the world of today might be nothing but space-dust.

I believe it was this restless spirit that Germany’s Green Party decided to embrace, thus moving away from conventional politics and exploiting, in a very strategic and organized way, the non-rational aspects that music and art had to offer. The artists from the Grüne Raupe declared: “we have to appeal to more than just bare [rational] understanding […] activism arises not only through insight into necessities but also through an inner emotion that is often triggered by sung and structured lyrics, by music and dance” (Klimke and Stapane 131). In fact, back in the 1960s The Beatles had already stood on that ground, for they mocked American nationalism and muddled the underlying binarism of good (U.S.) versus evil (U.S.S.R.) by singing from the perspective of someone that is glad to be back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.R! As the letters “u” and “s” morphed into the unexpected assemblage of “u-s-s-r”, the feeling of “being home” became foreign, obliging the listener to engage with a different affective setup. The Californian melody that accompanied the lyrics helped to accomplish the perceptive trick of blurring the lines between the “u-s” (pun intended) and the “other”, consequently denouncing the absurdity of such conflict/affair between nations.

In this sense, the Green Party and its playful engagement with the musical scene of the 80s reminds us of the “spontaneous anti-aesthetic” (Klimke and Stapane 132) that has the power to lift people from a state of stupefaction and defeat, and, through a language that is essentially performative, stir people’s imaginations—ultimately giving rise to a collective space that fosters alternative forms of futurity, in which “dying young” and “living forever”[1] have become the central axis of an uncertain and barren present. This was also the main goal of the Grüne Raupe’s artists: i.e. “to have uncompromising courage to tell the truth and to seek utopia; to be a politics with imagination” (129). It seems that the only effective weapons for fighting the silent and stable violence that wobbles under the nuclear-nonsense are the electric and surreal sounds that speak of/from fear and rage[2]. The medium is the message!

From Germany’s music-scene we have the examples of Nena’s 99 Luftballons and Alphaville’s Forever Young—both artists sing in a cheerful manner about the childish and obstinate games that have the power to obliterate our sense of ecological-wisdom[3] and ecological-safety. We can also find earlier examples from the English music-scene: Kate Bush’s 1980s hit Breathing depicts the invisible toxicity that permeates a mother’s womb and feeds radioactive particles to the fetus; in a world in which after the blast chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung, all living things seem to become tombs within the womb, or to perish before growth. Indeed, this reminds us of a home (a mother/a planet) that suddenly develops into a pool of toxic waste, thus devouring its own offspring in an attempt to defend herself from a fictitious enemy (an “other”, a “u-s-s-r”).


-Kate Bush dressed as a fetus inside a (plastic) womb-

The year before Kate Bush’s Breathing, Pink Floyd released the song Mother (1979), which also portrays the anxiety and the sense of loss that springs from war, deception, and threat. Its most striking image, I believe, comes from the lyrics that speak of a mother that promises protection, yet, as she attempts to keep her promise, she also implants the seed of fear and destruction in her son:

Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mama’s gonna make all your nightmares come true.
Mama’s gonna put all her fears into you.
Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mama’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
Ooh baby, ooh baby, ooh baby,
Of course mama’s gonna help build the wall.

This cannot but remind us of the sense of protection that an age of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy tries to sell us, and in which nations (such as America in the 80s) become abusive mothers, building walls and making all our nightmares come true. However, there is only one thing that this monstrous-mother might let you do: she might let you sing. When the senseless threat of a nuclear war has permeated every corner of our homes, pleas can only take the shape of music, of melodic tunes that escape the conventional-rational arguments of a politicized universe. And, it is precisely this tangential mode of representation that challenged the state of affairs imposed by a slow but omnipresent form of violence during the 80s —momentarily breaking the ruling Kūki[4] of the time. In Lefevre’s terms, one could argue that during the Cold War the live-in space built by musicians was the antidote to the conceived-space built by an omnipresent and hegemonic nuclear empire (Manabe 16). By being boisterous, grotesque, and bold, music sought to create both a second chance and a second space where fetuses could be safely nourished through a non-contaminated umbilical cord.

In a New York Times’ article (2016), a writer argues that in recent years Nena’s 99 Luftballons has taken on a second life within karaoke-bars, where it has become a song mostly sung by women: “there’s something about the sense of doom in that song that female karaoke singers seem to respond to”—I wonder how much of this has to do with a sense of restoration, or with a sense of western relief regarding the almost complete loss of that which we call “home”/“mother”.

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[1]Lyrics from Alphaville’s Forever Young.
[2]It is interesting to pause on the 80s aesthetic, for the musicians’ hairdos and garments make them look like the survivors of a nuclear bombing, i.e. all disheveled and covered by a combination of dark and neon colors.
[3]This was one of the Green Party’s ideological pillars.
[4]This is the Japanese concept for “atmosphere”: “a system of social, psychological, and political pressures requiring compliance with group norms” (Manabe 112).
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Works Cited:

__Klimke, Martin and Laura Stapane. “From Artists from Peace to the Green Caterpillar”. Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fears, and the Cold War of the 1980s, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
__Manabe, Noriko. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Oxford University Press, 2015.
__Edwards, Gavin. Missed the ’80s? Nena, and ‘99 Luftballons,’ Alights Live in America. New York Times, Oct. 2, 2016.

Music Mentioned in the Blog-Post:

__Everybody Wants to Rules the World by Tears for Fears.
__Vamos a la Playa by Righeira.
__Back in the U.S.S.R. by The Beatles.
__Breathing by Kate Bush.
__Mother by Pink Floyd.
__99 Luftballons by Nena.
__Forever Young by Alphaville.

Images:
__1st image taken from Pink Floyd’s movie The Wall.
__2nd image taken from Kate Bush’s music-video Breathing.

Prompt 5

The Emissary: An Aesthetic Leap Towards Queer Ecology

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I believe that The Emissary is a tale about nature, moreover, about the ways in which humans map the intricate and everchanging narratives of nature —especially when those changes are the perilous consequences of “scientific progress”. The universe built by Yoko Tawada conjures up a psychological ecosystem weaved through biological structures, i.e. the way her characters (human and non-human) inhabit and comprehend both their inner and outer world is deeply determined by an altered-state-of-nature, possibly unchained by a nuclear disaster. Fauna and Flora are depicted under a strange but aesthetically enchanting light; they seem to thrive and grow in absurd and unpredictable patterns, creating new forms of life which, in turn, need new forms of comprehensive cataloguing for humans to digest them —both literally and metaphorically. Thus, new and strange ecological ponderings take place in this fictional universe, such as “are oversized dandelions chrysanthemums?”, as well as new political movements, such as “The [oversized] Dandelion support association”.

This new mutated neon-ecology[1] also carries with it a new mutated ecology of the mind which, unknowingly, strives to deconstruct, blend, and organize old and novel epistemologies, for how can we word-the-world when familiarity has vanish from daily experiences? Gregory Bateson, in his book Mind and Nature (1979), describes sixteen presuppositions that aim to guide both our understanding of science and of everyday life, and, interestingly, the second presupposition is called “the map is not the territory, or the name is not the thing named”, which mainly suggests that “when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain” (30), or, in other words, that “in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported” (31).

In this sense, our understanding and interaction with reality is never instant or direct, on the contrary, it’s always mediated by maps and names that determine our ways of knowing and, therefore, are subject to constant change. Now, in a very fascinating manner, Yoko Tawada’s novel does precisely this: it abruptly shifts the maps that govern both our abstract and concrete methods for navigating reality. A fictional urgency, one might say, that comes from an environment that has been violently transformed by technology and progress —defiled by a foolish desire for a fast-paced narrative and for easily-obtainable stuff. Yoshiro’s grandson, Tomo, is the best reflection of this modern form of “progress”: “Any machine that made big things happen with just the push of a button or two he loved, while he showed no interest in building blocks, Legos, or swings, either, which generally he gave up on after two or three bends of the knee” (76)[2]. Hence, The Emissary presents a postapocalyptic neon-world which seems to be the product of a thoughtless and greedy “push of a button”.

However, what has been transfigured through Yoko’s fictional lens? I would argue that almost all that guides our naturalized narratives of progress, linearity, and binarity, i.e.:

– Language
– Time
– Space
– Sex/Gender

All of these categories become fluid and uncertain after The Emissary’s unnamed (nuclear?) disaster. In the very beginning of the book, Yoshiro thinks that time didn’t “spread gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten?” (6). Well, yes. The passing of time is a disorderly pile; however, it looked organized due to the fictional maps we created in order to feel safe-and-warm. After the disaster the neatly organized maps break: old people become energetic and immortal while the children get feeble and sick; men go through menopause and sometimes their reproductive organs swing from male to female; language slowly vanishes as it loses its foreign and oldest words; technology is set aside and thus tranquility and slowness become ubiquitous; and, in terms of space, Japan turns into a flat-land isolated from the globe.

Contamination, at last, pervades every form of familiar life where not even the permanence of species remains untouched —Mumei, for example, is basically a human-bird that deeply desires to be an octopus. Yet, the most fascinating detail of the novel (I believe) lies in the topsy-turvy understanding of lineage and family, for there are no more mom-dad-offspring assemblages/hierarchies. Yoko’s world deconstructs this tidy map, granting to the timeless great-grandfathers the power to skip generations (i.e. time) and become the spinsters of a new neon-ecology. In her essay Spinster Ecology, Sarah Ensor writes that “the spinster, not saving the planet for her own children, engages in a more impersonal mode of stewardship —one whose investment is neither linear nor directly object-based but instead, as Sedgwick suggests, somehow more ‘varied, contingent, recalcitrant [and] reforming’” (416).

And, indeed, the relationship that we see portrayed in the novel by Yoshiro and Mumei is determined by queerness (a queerness that travels through air, worms, and psychic states), and thus openly questions the epistemologies and cultural constructs of the present. It offers, at last, an alternative form of understanding futurity, where Tokyo can be revitalized, as Donna Haraway would say, by “making kin, not babies” (103). Even Yoshiro’s wife has stopped being a mother to a single child; she has become a sort of spinster-octopus with many arms that tend many children: “My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop. My descendants are the independent children in my institution” (88). Thereby, all the characters in Yoko’s novel reach a point of utter fluidity, challenging the norms that a fictional-Japan tries to impose with a desperate aim of normalization —an effort to make invisible the aftereffects of a (nuclear)disaster.

Finally, and because nature mutates and rebels in such a grandiose way (mostly by feminizing itself), The Emissary creates a tangential (i.e. a spinster) epistemology that gets weaved through a new form of narrative, or, as Bateson would argue, through new names and new maps. When Mumei says “the map is my portrait” (70), or when he thinks “if you cut the globe in a different way, when you open it up, you’ll get a different map of the world” (24), he seems to be acknowledging the purpose of the novel, which is to create through strange words, neologisms, and literary arrangements, a different map of the earth, where the future and its unfolding is understood non-linearly, that is, more like a disorderly (but interconnected) pile of stuff. As John Treat states about the “most creatively ambitious hibakusha writers”, Yoko Tawada also insists in filling the “unspeakable spaces with new words or even new language… We read, in other words, at the edge of our epistemological, aesthetic, and even emotional borders, always ready for the unfamiliar as well as the familiar” (30).

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[1] I somehow picture every-thing to be of neon-colors when it comes to a postnuclear disaster universe.
[2] This lack of thoughtfulness and pleasurable curiosity are traits that are also present in novels such as Christa Wolf’s Accident.
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Works Cited:

__Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. E. P. Dutton, 1979.
__Ensor, Sarah. “Spinster Ecology”. Duke University Press, 2012.
__Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
__Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
__Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions Paperbook, 2018.

Illustration by Edward Gorey.

Prompt 3

Doing the Garden—Digging the Weeds

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Reading this week’s texts was indeed hard. Writing about them seems like an even harder (if not ludicrous) task. For, as John Treat states, what prerogative do we-(foreign)-readers have in talking about such outlandish events? In the midst of irresolution —as to when and where to start writing, or if to write at all— I figured that perhaps the strange and pervasive after-effects that Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories left in my brain’s very tight and tidy web-of-ruminations, provide a productive example of the ways in which literature (fiction or otherwise) can shift how we-readers interact with unfamiliar realities, ushering us into what we might have formerly thought of as unfathomable.

For a hypochondriac such as myself, City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers defied my expectations in a very peculiar way. They certainly presented gruesome and highly disturbing imageries of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s human and non-human landscapes after the atomic-bombs were dropped; however, whilst reading, the kind of imaginative leaps that I experienced were different from those induced by non-nuclear narratives. The latter usually touch the image-based and intellectual wirings of the brain, while the former touched a kernel that triggered a lasting and physical discomfort that had to do with an irrational sense of contamination. The gap between reader and writer, between 1945 and 2019, between Japan and America, was suddenly bridged by a piece of literary fancy that weaved itself not through language, but through bodily uproar, ultimately causing the reader to develop an eerie awareness of her own organic bits, i.e. red corpuscles, hair follicles, thyroid glands.

I would call this experience a defamiliarizing one, for it not only causes dread from gore, but it twists the sense of the real and the imaginary by blurring and problematizing the line that severs the human from the non-human, and the natural from the unnatural. Freud, in the very beginning of his essay Das Unheimliche (1919), states that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1), but which has suddenly lost its recognizable and comforting quality, such as when “something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (14). Following this line of thought, we could say that nuclear-bomb literature recreates a scenario that obliges the reader to transgress its own network of certainties, thus breaking the spell of normality, custom, habit, and language —language! our rational organizer par excellence, as both Christa Wolf and John Treat recognize.

It is interesting to notice that language and other rational (technological) forms of organizing reality are the very tools that help efface humans’ reliable patterns of existence —technology carries within itself an unsolvable paradox, for it breeds both familiarity and unfamiliarity; it embodies, in the midst of disaster, what Freud called das unheimliche. There are two very striking images that help create this dreaded feeling in Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories. The first is when Ōta’s protagonist sees her mother in the cemetery: “the fence had been blown away, so I could see the whole cemetery. Mother was coming and going between cemetery and house” (184). The second is when Hayashi’s Wakako sees people drinking water from the river: “there was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs” (36). In both scenes there is an estrangement from reality caused by a disruption of predictable patterns; progress itself (science) has obliterated the distinctive traits of a controlled/civilized environment: the dead are no longer segregated from the living by a fence, they are now thrust upon each other in a space of ambiguity where the human body (and other bodies as well, such as plants and insects) is no longer sacred, but a defiled conjunction of matter. The scene of the giant centipede, on the other hand, shows a novel and uncanny form of harmony that prevents the eye from distinguishing one organism (i.e. the river) from the other (i.e. humans), thus creating an image of mutated animation in which, again, the sense of humanity as separated from the realm of the non-human or inorganic is violently reversed.

This, I believe, resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of Thing and Object, for every scattered piece of soil and every human cell alters its literal and figurative meaning under the synesthetic light of the atomic-bomb, signaling the moment in which the “Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (2). Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s scenery post-nuclear-reaction is one in which ordinary things —breakfast, stairs, trees, eyes, noses, words, roots, graves— look back at their human “protagonists”, embodying a form of life that can only be achieved through death and decay, not unlike what Wakako projects when she returns to her parents: “You’re beautiful, Waka-san. Like a wax doll… If this beauty was something she had brought home from N City, didn’t it signify death?” (29). There is an almost untraceable presence, as Freud would say, that ought to be absent: death is the unwanted and intrusive guest in the (seemingly) living body of a child.

These are not tales in which the beautiful/bright/strong/fascinating protagonists thrive and conquer the depths of cruelty; on the contrary, they are the theaters-of-truth in which (due to a link missing between common understanding and facts) nothing can be forecast[1]. This, I believe, is what profoundly shakes the reader’s imagination, for we simply cannot “bear being the victims of chance” (Wolf 79). As a result of this, our own bodies begin to look and feel different under the radioactive light of uncertainty, projecting that vulnerable glow we thought only existed in the nonhuman.

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[1] As Treat states: “It is the conspicuous lack of conventional malice and vengeance that, in part, distinguishes the start of the nuclear age. It is an age not enjoined by emotions of epics, the stuff of storytelling from the beginning of our literacy, but rather one effectively voided of them” (17).

Image: From Japanese Manga Hadashi no Gen (1973 – 1974).