Atomic idioms: Authority, identity, and language in novels by Mailer, O'Connor, Purdy, and Agee

This study investigates the American literary response to the post-atomic, post-Holocaust environment. The common feature of the four novels discussed here—Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore (1951), Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away (1960), James Purdy's The Nephew (1960), and James Agee's A Death in the Family (published posthumously in 1957)—is a void created by the absence or distortion of their putative heroes, reflecting a shared concern about notions of individual, artistic and heroic identity. An introductory discussion of John Hersey's “Hiroshima” and Hannah Arendt's “Eichmann in Jerusalem” anchors this concern to the questions of moral and individual authority engendered by the modern atrocities.;Acknowledging the problem of whether any literary act is sufficient to the task of representing the horror of the postwar world, this study sees the pervasive critical discomfort with the postwar novel as itself evidence of the difficulty of approaching imaginatively and intellectually the subject of human extinction. A brief reception history reveals that discussions of the post-atomic, post-Holocaust context are as conspicuously absent from the criticism on these novelists, as the heroes are from their novels. None of these novelists takes either the Holocaust or the bomb as his or her explicit subject, but each writes in a mode I call the “atomic idiom” marshaling images and verbal constructs which reflect the profound influence of the theme of atomic violence, and modern violence in general, on postwar literary consciousness. Paradoxically, the anxiety stirred by the contemporary climate was a creative force, generating works which illuminate the issues of moral, religious and cultural authority that dominated the postwar years. For O'Connor and Purdy, the image of the bomb was a redemptive one, signaling elements of sublimity in an age otherwise defined by repression and scientific-rational thought.