HSC English Extension 1
After the Bomb - Hiroshima
Hersey’s Hiroshima signalled
an intensification of challenges to modernist assumptions of progress. The
attrition of the Great War, the mechanised and bureaucratised slaughter of a
generation, brought teleological assumptions increasingly into question.
Modernism’s affirmation of historical positivism, of a metanarrative of
technological innovation and human ennoblement, was always qualified and tentative.
As the twentieth century brought manmade calamity after calamity modernists redoubled
their scepticism. In 1939 the renewal of global conflict was even more
mechanised, more ideological and more explicitly eugenicist, culminating in the
annihilation of civilian populations and the industrial, methodical
extermination of a people.
The closing chapters of the Second World War sent a shockwave through
modernist thought that would eventually result in deconstruction and
postmodernity, beginning with a renewed questioning of critical assumptions. When
the Frankfurt School cultural theorist Theodor Adorno returned to Europe after
the war he contemplated the agony of Europe and concluded that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Adorno was thus moved not simply by horror but because, intellectually, the
death camps brought the project of civilization into question. What might the
canon represent, what values remained if human reason and human genius could
devise such inhumanity? How could Auschwitz have happened on the verge of the
same Teutoburg Forest that had
inspired Goethe? What culture could produce poetry and Zyclon B? Paradoxically,
scepticism of the canon came to pervade texts we might consider central to the
Cold War canon. In John Hersey’s Hiroshima,
we are told that “in the first moment of the atomic age, a
human being was crushed by books.” The culture of the Cold War would be
increasingly suspicious of itself: metatextual, self-reflexive and
deconstructivist.
Adorno may have felt
that poetry was inappropriate to the aftermath of war, but he was nevertheless
inspired to publish volumes of criticism. With the loss of faith in science as
an absolute good came a further, philosophical dilemma. Human history was demonstrably
not a grand narrative of eternal progress. Indeed, Adorno maintained that:
Universal
history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have
happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say
that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to
be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous,
chaotically splintered moments and phases of history — the unity of the control
of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner
nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there
is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total
menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of
discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head.
If he transfigured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of
the self-realizing absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this
day—with occasional breathing spells — would teleologically be the absolute of
suffering.
If we focus on the single affirmation, that “no universal history leads
from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot
to the megaton bomb”, then we can see the philosophical rupture caused by the
detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We can also see the significance of
Hersey’s textual transmission of this dilemma in his extended essay, Hiroshima.
Hersey’s article was avidly received by readers whose demand for
information was equalled by moral uncertainty. Michael Yavenditti observes that “Hiroshima was popular, not
because Hersey advanced theories about the will to survive, but because he did
what no one had accomplished before: he recreated the entire experience of
atomic bombing from the victims' point of view.” Hersey’s article was significant in that it showed Americans the
Japanese perspective, but also because it was among the first ‘Japanese’
versions of events to reach Japan. Japanese responses did circulate despite the
efforts of the occupying force’s censor. Tamiki Hara published his personal
recollection of Hiroshima in ‘Summer Flowers’. Yoko Ota published ‘City of
Corpses’ following a visit from the censor in 1948. Hersey’s work appeared in
Japanese in 1949, at which time it had already enlivened public debate in the
United States.
Hersey was well suited to communicate the events of war to his audience,
disciplined as he was in the craft of the war correspondent. David Sander’s
describes the discipline under which Hersey worked during the war, flying from
theatre to theatre for Time-Life:
Hersey
and his colleagues were often subject to Henry Luce’s personal journalism,
which may have reached an extreme with Whittaker Chambers’ editing of foreign
reports from Hersey and others in 1944-45, but it was often expressed directly
from Luce to a writer.
Even after Hersey earned his byline, he was still bound by the
strictures of the war correspondent. Of these strictures another war
correspondent, John Steinbeck, tells us that the “Noncombatant Commandos of the
Stork Club, of Time Magazine and The New Yorker” were rarely the subject
of direct censure but were, as part of the war effort, their own censor. The
exact rules were difficult to define, according to Steinbeck:
We really tried to observe the censorship rules,
even knowing that a lot of them were nonsense, but it was very hard to know
what the rules were. They had a way of changing with the commanding officer.
Just when you thought you knew what you could send, the command changed and you
couldn’t send that at all.
When Hersey was commissioned by the New
Yorker to write an investigative piece on the atomic bombing of Japan, he
was in many ways emancipated from these restrictions: the erstwhile enemy need
not be demonised; authority need not be omniscient; the message need not be
unambiguous. Hiroshima, however, was
still written with the economy of style, with a mastery of textual form that
Hersey had honed as a war correspondent.
Hersey’s skill as a war correspondent was used instead to humanise the
‘faceless Asian horde’, to present the decision of high command as arbitrary
and cruel; yet Hersey managed to retain a sense of detachment. Yavenditti characterises Hersey’s
work as a masterpiece of understated realism, the “contrast between the apparently objective simplicity of his prose
and the enormity of the phenomenon he described made Hiroshima all the more graphic and frightening for most readers.”
Both the objectivity and simplicity are demonstrably more “apparent” than
actual. Hersey’s choice of subjects, for instance, presented the American
audience with sympathetic characters: doctors, priests, mothers. Hersey had
found his interviewees through missionary contacts, so the sample is more
accidental than intentional. Still, the sample was as opportune as much as it
was opportunistic. The structure of Hiroshima
was also intended to elicit an empathetic response: the mundane details of six
lives are interrupted by an eruption, clinically described, followed by a
surreal sequence of flight and survival and a period of feverish recovery and
sickly regrowth of weeds and keloid.
