Fifth lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/

1. Lecture 5: Traces of the Vanished World
English 192
Summer 2013
12 August 2013
“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence
to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it
on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has
yet a reality, known or not."
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road

2. Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)
● Lived in Los Angeles for
most of his life.
● Works have been
frequently adapted for
cinema and TV.
● Published several early
stories in Weird Tales.
● Probably most famous
for The Martian
Chronicles (1950) and
Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
A publicity photo of Bradbury in 1959

3. “The house was an altar with ten thousand
attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in
choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the
ritual of the religion continued senselessly,
uselessly.” (477)
“The entire west face of the house was black,
save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint
of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a
photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still
farther over, their images burned on wood in
one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into
the air, higher up, the image of a thrown ball,
and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a
ball which never came down.” (477)

4. Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1920)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

5. The future: like the present, but
automated
“Two thirty-five.
“Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing
cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips.
Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-
salad sandwiches. Music played.” (478)
“Four-thirty. […] Hidden films clocked through well-
oiled sprockets, and the walls lived.” (478)
“Six, seven, eight o’clock. […] In the metal stand
opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up
warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft
grey ash on it, smoking, waiting.” (479)

6. A few words before we get to Lippit
● I expect that many of you found the selections from
Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) to be difficult reading.
● However, dense theory is not inappropriate in a senior-level
English class, and I believe that encountering difficult texts
that push beyond your current thresholds of understanding
is a positive educational experience.
● I do not expect that you will be intimately familiar with,
e.g., the differences between the various Japanese
Invisible Man cinematic adaptations.
● I’d like to say a few words about the theoretical
tradition in which Lippit is working before we get to his
text.

7. The (Saussurean) Linguistic Sign
● The following discussion is based
on the theoretical approach of
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913).
● Language (and other systems of
meaning) consist of signs:
elements of meaning consisting of
symbols that point toward
something in “the real world.”
● Signifier: the thing that does the
pointing (a word, for instance)
● Signified: the thing that is pointed to
(the thing in the real world)

8. The Arbitrary Nature of the Sign
● One of Saussure’s most influential principles:
signs are arbitrary.
● The relationship between the signifier and the
signified is not “natural”: it is determined by culture
(has a history, and does not come somehow from
inherent properties of the thing itself)
English: tree
Finnish: puu
French: arbre
German: Baum
Italian: albero
Latin: lignum
Russian: дерево
Spanish: árbol
Etc ...

9. For Saussure, meaning is based on
difference between signs
“bat” “cat” “Matt”

10. ● Much of linguistic theory in the latter part of the
twentieth century has been a critique of (what is taken
to be) Saussure’s belief that signs point to things “in the
real world.”

11. So what is deconstruction?
“Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the
hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western
thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical,
speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture,
form/meaning. To deconstruct an opposition is to show that it
is not natural and inevitable but a construction, produced by
discourses that rely on it, and to show that it is a construction
in a work of deconstruction that seeks to dismantle it and
reinscribe it – that is, not destroy it but give it a different
structure and functioning. But as a mode of reading,
deconstruction is, in Barbara Johnson’s phrase, a ‘teasing out
of warring forces of signification within the text’, an
investigation of the tension between modes of signification.”
— Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction, 2nd edition, p. 140.

12. “Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is
non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative
value in relation to the male first principle. But equally
man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly
shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in
antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore
caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which
he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence.
Woman is not just an other in the sense of something
beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him
as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an
essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore
needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained
to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-
thing. […]
On Gender

13. “[…] Not only is his own being parasitically dependent
upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and
subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion
is necessary is because she may not be quite so
other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of
something in man himself which he needs to repress,
expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely
alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps
what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien
also intimate – so that man needs to police the
absolute frontier between the two realms as
vigilantly as he does because it may always be
transgressed, has always been transgressed already,
and is much less absolute than it appears.”
— Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
(second edition, p. 115; ch. 4)

14. So, what binary oppositions does
Lippit break down?
● In today’s selection, Lippit works with …
● Inside—outside
● Visual—a/visual
● Visible—invisible
● Theological—technological
● Living—dead
● Subject—world
● And other oppositions, as well.

15. Radiation
● … developed as a visual-
epistemological technique, in the
form of X rays, that collapses
inside and outside (Lippit 4-5).
● … causes damage and
destruction while allowing for
sight.
● … and, therefore, is a
deconstructionist technique in
and of itself.
● These characteristics are present
even more strongly in nuclear
radiation. Wilhelm Röntgen, “Hand mit
Ringen” (1895)

16. To put it another way ...
… the possibility of atomic destruction after the end of
World War II results in a radical epistemological shift in
human consciousness:
“A spectacle in excess of the capacity of any individual to
recognize it as a spectacle, or even to see it. De Kooning’s
angelic, wrathful light of atoms suspends for a moment, but
also forever, the economies of visibility and visuality—melting
in ecstasy the eyes of those who say, blending all colors into
one, and making everyone angels. A phantom temporality that
passes in an instant, in a flash, that leaves behind a historicity
scarred and haunted […] by an image, an image of time, torn
from its place in history. A timeless image of timelessness. It
inscribes an end of visuality, an aporia, a point after which
visuality is seared by the forces of an insurmountable
avisuality.” (82)

17. Atomic radiation, for Lippit
● … cannot be directly figured in postwar Japanese
cinema, due to both (external) U.S. censorship and
(internal) cultural prohibitions (83).
“The sense of total destruction unleashed by atomic
war initiated a fort/da effect: the closer one moved
toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the more those
topologies receded. At the hypocenter of destruction, a
fundamental density left the event invisible.” (92)
● … renders the human body inside-out (90-91).
● Lippit elsewhere calls this process exscription (e.g., on
page 3); contrast the way in which Hōichi’s body is
inscribed with Buddhist prayers (1-2).

18. Media Credits
● The photo of Ray Bradbury (slide 2) is in the public domain because it
was published pre-1977 without a copyright notice. Original source:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Ray_Bradbury_
1959.JPG
● Saussure's diagram incorporating a picture of a tree and derivatives
thereof (slides 7 through 10) are from Wikimedia Commons. Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tree.gif
● The photo of Matt Damon (slide 9) is also in the public domain and
also from Wikimedia Commons. Source:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Damon_croppe
d.jpg
● Wilhelm Röntgen's “Hand mit Ringen” (slide 15) is out of copyright
because it was first published before 1923. Source:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_medical_X-
ray_by_Wilhelm_R%C3%B6ntgen_of_his_wife_Anna_Bertha_Ludwig
%27s_hand_-_18951222.jpg