Belletto Steven - American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment

American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War

American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War

A CRITICAL REASSESSMENT

EDITED BY STEVEN BELLETTO AND DANIEL GRAUSAM

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS

IOWA CITY

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

Copyright 2012 by the University of Iowa Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American literature and culture in an age of cold war: a critical reassessment / edited by Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60938-113-4 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-60938-113-0 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-60938-144-8 (e-book)

1. American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Cold War in literature. I. Belletto, Steven. II. Grausam, Daniel, 1975

PS228.C58A44 2012

810.93582825dc23 2012006953

CONTENTS

Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam

William J. Maxwell

Catherine Gunther Kodat

Daniel Belgrad

Andrew Hoberek

Karen Steigman

Christine Hong

Leerom Medovoi

Alan Nadel

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our contributors for their generosity and labor, and for their patience as we were completing this volume. Charlotte Wright and the entire staff at the University of Iowa Press have been wonderful. Special thanks go to Joe Parsons, both for his initial interest and for his ongoing support and wise counsel.

INTRODUCTION

CULTURE AND COLD CONFLICT

STEVEN BELLETTO AND DANIEL GRAUSAM

What Is Cold War Culture?

When in June of 2010 news broke concerning a longterm undercover Russian spy operation in the United States, the media had their summer blockbuster. Nearly every news story or radio broadcast featured some variation of not since the Cold War, mused about whether the conflict had ever really ended, and commented on the oddity of this espionage ring. The television critic for the New York Times, for one, noted the aesthetic shape of the quaint, Cold Warstyle spy operation, and joked that there would soon be a Real Russian Spies of New Jersey reality show. The story soon emerged: nearly a dozen Russian agents had been under deep cover in the United States, tasked with integrating themselves into American society. Some did so by becoming average members of the American middle class, and in some cases so complete was their transformation that their identity started to seem the end, rather than the means, of their mission.

It was all textbook Cold War thriller, if indeed a bit quaint-seeming: hadnt we seen this all before? The Rosenbergs. Klaus Fuchs. Aldrich Ames. Werent spies supposed to be from a bygone era? And yet there was the espionage ring in all its pulp glorythe Newsweek headline announced that it was Part John le Carr, Part Austin Powers. It was as if the Russian spies were taking their cues from film, rather than the other way around: as the employer of one of the accused noted, the story seemed straight from a movie.

Directed by Phillip Noyce, who brought Tom Clancys Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games to the silver screen in the 1990s, Salt seemed almost too fitting in the summer of 2010. Part seat-of-the-pants thriller, part feminized reworking of Bond ingenuity, part kitsch (there is a secret Russian castle where child agents train in isolation), the film paralleled the real spy ring: on the one hand it was deadly serious, on the other it was too campy to be believable. The frightening possibility of losing control of the American nuclear arsenal coexisted with scenes of children lining up to kiss the ring of their grizzled Soviet spymaster.

The point of a tour through Salt is not, of course, to suggest that we should take our historiographic cues from Hollywood, or that we should necessarily seek to extend the Cold Wars descriptive reach past 1989 or 1991 (although there may be good reasons to do so). For the neighbor, the mundane fact of the well-kept hydrangeas invalidates the fantastically romantic possibility that spies live on the block; for the cultural critic, this screams of the cinematic Cold War, in which the humble hydrangea played a key role as a Communist cover. In a famous early scene of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), arguably the classic film of American Cold War culture, U.S. troops being brainwashed in Manchuria are tricked into believing that they are in New Jersey listening to a Ladies Club presentation on the growing of hydrangeas. Once again, the quotidian crashes against the improbable, and there seems a profound confusion of realmsjust where does history end, and imaginative aesthetic production begin? Anna Chapman, for instance, could populate the pages of a Don DeLillo novel: since her return to Russia she has hosted a television program called Secrets of the World and has sported lingerie and a gun on the cover of the Russian version of Maxim. It isnt that, Bond-like, sex is in the service of espionage, but rather that secret agency qualifies you, if you are especially attractive, to sell your sexuality. In this case, the provocative agent was now qualified to wear the luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur on the cover of the premier soft-core mens magazine.

The Russian spy ring and Salt appeared after we had begun work on this collection, but they confirmed our sense that the time was right for critical reassessment of Cold War culture. We believe that the confusion surrounding the spy ring was due in part to the fact that the full cultural impact of the Cold War remains unprocessed, and that some of the operative paradigms for understanding the culture of the Cold War were contributing to, rather than alleviating, such confusion. It was time to foreground the wide variety of ways in which we might understand the Cold Wars shaping power. Collecting the work of some of the very best cultural critics writing about the period, what follows reveals the multiple ways in which American cultural production from the late 1940s to the present might be understood in relation to the Cold War. While they have benefitted from much of the pioneering work done on American Cold War culture, the following chapters offer a critical engagement with reigning paradigms and a series of suggestive revisionist claims.

Cold War Literary and Cultural Studies

Ann Douglas claimed in 1998 that literary critics do not make the Cold War central to their work on post-1945 American literature, even though two key concepts they employpostmodernism and postcolonialismare inexplicable outside the context it [the Cold War] supplies.

In fact, work was well under way before Douglass essay appeared. The three books which marked a cultural turn in Cold War studies were, perhaps fittingly, clustered around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are Elaine Tyler Mays social history Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), and two works of literary and cultural criticism, Thomas Schaubs