Lecture 6: “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires”*

English 165EWWinter 2013

28 January 2013

“[A]round 1910 a certain space was shattered, […] [the] space of common sense, of knowledge [savoir], of social practice, of political power […] enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought.”

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

*Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” (1678), ll. 10-11

“The atomic bomb thrust the United States into a totally new age, one full of promise and peril. Atomic energy dramatically altered the way the government operated, the military fought, the economy functioned, and ordinary people felt. Reacting to this new reality, people responded with new ways of living. They searched for ways to understand and live in the Atomic Age and in so doing created a new culture.” (Hunner 33)

“The Cold War conception of nuclear reality represented an attempt to think about the unthinkable, to conceptualize an unintelligible event and rationalize a world that seemed to be irrational, by reducing the apparently unimaginable experience of nuclear war to a set of routines.” (45)

“Faced for the first time with an atomic explosion, some witnesses had to culturally code switch to understand the event. When Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian director of the laboratory at Los Alamos, experienced the first atomic detonation at Trinity in July 1945, he thought Hindu scripture from the Baghavad-Gita: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” (34)

“As early as August 12. 1945, journalist Edward R. Murrow said on his radio program, ‘Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.’” (38)

Practicality and “realism”“One might collect a small party and keep it alive somehow for an uncertain length of time—but who was to be taken and who left? No objectively right course presented itself however I tried to look at it.” (Wyndham 49; ch. 4)

Bill: “Our likes and dislikes as decisive factors have pretty well disappeared.” (85; ch. 6)

Bill: “And an obstinate refusal to face facts isn’t going to bring anything back, or help us at all. I think we’ll have to try to see ourselves not as the robbers of all this but more as—well, the unwilling heirs to it.” (66; ch. 5)

Dr. Vorless: “The laws we knew have been abolished by circumstances. It now falls to us to make laws suitable to the conditions.” (101; ch. 7)

Social (re-)organization

Michael Beadley: “Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become.” (95; ch. 7)

The Tynsham clergyman: “Let us all beseech Him that we may survive the trials and tribulations that lie ahead in order that in His time and with His aid we may succeed in playing our part in the rebuilding of a better world to His greater glory.” (140; ch. 10)

Coker: “I’ve watched one lot fall to bits, and I can see this one’s going to do the same—more slowly and, maybe, more nastily. It’s queer, isn’t it? Decent intentions seem to be the most dangerous things around just now.” (149; ch. 11)

Ivan: “We aren’t out to reconstruct—we want to build something new and better.” (215; ch. 16)

The re-production of knowledge

Coker: “in spite of all that’s happened this thing hasn’t got home to these people yet. They don’t want to turn to—that’d be making it too final.” (150; ch. 11)

Coker: “Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back until we can—if we can—make good all that we wear out.” (165; ch. 12)

“[F]arming […] is not the kind of thing that is easily learned from books. For one thing, it has never occurred to any writer on the subject that any potential farmer could be starting from absolute zero.” (191; ch. 15)

The (social) production of space

“in an environment reverting to savagery it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to behave at all, before long.” (127; ch. 9)

“Before I went into the Russell Square garden I looked it over carefully. I had already begun to become suspicious of open spaces.” (129; ch. 9)

Miss Durant: “This is a clean, decent community with standards—Christian standards—and we intend to uphold them. We have no place here for people of loose views.” (141; ch. 10)

“There were signposts which pointed to ‘Exeter & The West,’ and other places, as if they still pursued their habitual lives.” (159; ch. 12)

“As a rule they showed little wish to join up with other parties and were inclined rather to lay hands on what they could, building themselves into refuges as comfortably as possible while they waited for the arrival or the Americans.” (163; ch. 12)

Josella: “the world’s gone, and we’re left.” (188; ch. 14)

Ivan: “They [triffids] make a dark border round any inhabited place.” (212; ch. 16)

Torrance: “But the state of society which gave sanction to his [Dennis’s] ownership no longer exists. Titles to property have therefore ceased to be valid.” (220; ch. 17)

Balance and precarity

“It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations that ‘it can’t happen here’ – that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms.” (70; ch. 5)

Alf: “Cor, blimy, oo’d ever’ve thought it could ’appen like this!” (109; ch. 8)

Elspeth Cary: “I’ve been in places where they [triffids] are out of hand. Quite nasty. But in England—well, it’s hard to imagine that here.” (92; ch. 6)

Michael Beadley: “From August 6, 1945, the margin of survival has narrowed appallingly.” (95; ch. 7)

“Growing things seemed, indeed, to press out everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding lodgments even in the seats of the abandoned cars. On all sides they were encroaching to repossess themselves of the arid spaces that man had created.” (192; ch. 15)

Bill: “I don’t think we can blame anyone too much for the triffids. The extracts they give were very valuable in the circumstances, Nobody can ever see what a major discovery is going to lead to—whether it is a new kind of engine or a triffid—and we coped with them all right in normal conditions. We benefited quite a lot from them, as long as the conditions were to their disadvantage.”

Josella: “Well, it wasn’t our fault the conditions changed. It was—just one of those things. Like earthquakes or hurricanes—what an insurance company would call an act of God.” (204; ch. 15)

The Triffids

“I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world. One could not even blame nature for them. Somehow they had been bred—just as we had bred for ourselves beautiful flowers or grotesque parodies of dogs. … I began to loathe them them now on account of more than their carrion-eating habits—for they, more than anything else, seemed able to profit and flourish on our disaster. …” (160; ch. 12)

Dennis: “I tell you, there’s more to them than we think. How did they know? They started to break loose the moment there was no one to stop them.” (196; ch. 15)

What’s a life worth?

Bill: “I got around to feeling that if the treatment [for the triffid sting] had not been successful I’d rather end the whole thing than go on that way.” (8; ch. 1)

“‘It’s going to be a very queer sort of world—what’s left of it. I don’t think we’re going to like it a lot,’ she [Josella] said reflectively.

“It seemed to me an odd view to take—rather as if one should protest that one did not like the idea of dying or being born.” (93; ch. 6)

Coker: “God almighty, aren’t you people human?” (83; ch. 6)

“She did not reply for some seconds. Then she said unsteadily:

“‘Life is very precious—even like this.’ Her control almost cracked.” (124; ch. 9)

“Let it [Parliament] shower its crumbling pinnacles onto the terrace as it would—there would be no more indignant members complaining of the risk to their valuable lives.” (128; ch. 9)

Josella: “If I were a child now, […] I think I should want a reason for what happened. Unless I was given it—that is, if I were allowed to think that I had been born into a world which had been quite pointlessly destroyed—I should find living quite pointless too.” (203; ch. 15)