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.