Intervention
Boldface Dates

The Great Fire of London in 1666. The Great War. The Blitz. The Second World War. The 20th century itself. Love. The characters and narrator of Hazzard’s The Great Fire (2003) attribute the title variously throughout the novel. They read “the great fire” as many fires, real and metaphorical. But for this novel set primarily on the outskirts of Hiroshima in 1947, the nearest fire is the atomic bomb. Both historically and geographically, the closest great fire is Hiroshima.

August 6, 1945 witnessed an immeasurably consequential disaster (another August calamity to add to Gregory’s collection). But somehow that date doesn’t resound as loudly or ominously as “August 1914” or “September 11, 2001” or—given today’s date and thank you, Auden—“September 1, 1939.” I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts on why “August 6, 1945” doesn’t quite reverberate. (Or maybe in your field or where you live, it does.)

Why do you think it is that when one speaks metonymically about the bomb, one switches from time to space, or from chronology to geography, and says, “Hiroshima?” (Or one opts for the thing itself, “the atomic bomb,” as I just did.) In the U.S. context, the reasons are many and varied, ranging from high school history curricula to cold war political imperatives to mid-century rhetorical strategies for selling nuclear and national power to the populace. In the early aftermath of Hiroshima, “Hiroshima” sounded, perhaps especially to American ears, like a neat close parenthesis to “Pearl Harbor.” Does that compression to place-name still implicitly argue a justification?

However you think it has come to pass that place trumps date for the historical catastrophe of August 6, 1945, Hazzard tunes The Great Fire into Anglo-American literary idiom of the late 1940s. She tunes in, that is, to the moment when habits of mind around “the bomb” and “Hiroshima” were formed. Aldred Leith comes to Japan partly to document the early aftermath of the atomic bomb. He has proven himself as a sound researcher in China. Now English military intelligence puts him to work in Hiroshima. They try to put him to work, anyway. In his investigations, Leith keeps running up against U.S. Bomb Survey control over what information gets out and, equally consequential, over the language in which that information is couched. Having created the bomb, the U.S. directs the PR around the weapon.

The straightforward, sweeping love story of Hazzard’s novel thus quietly counters the early rhetorical armature of the “Atomic Age.” As Natalia notes in her helpful comment, an unknown network of strangers helps Aldred Leith find Helen Driscoll again, and find her for good. In this reading, I mean “for good” as in “forever” and as in “versus evil.” That is, I mean it naively: I have to believe that Helen and Leith live happily ever after. At the same time, their earnest, romantic directness is cast as good, pure (read: chaste, according to an outdated code of moral, chivalrous conduct). Why else keep reiterating Leith’s reservations about Helen’s young age? He’s a stand-up guy, a postwar Mr. Knightley. Why else, except to cement the goodness of this love, reiterate how dreadful Helen’s disapproving parents are?

Helen and Leith’s forthright fictional tale relies on a kind of scaled-down anti-Manhattan Project. Their love activates a wildly different vision of the clandestine network from the military-scientific one that produced the atomic bomb—and against which scientists like Norbert Wiener were warning decades ago. Scientists, politicians, historians, art historians, environmental ethicists, philosophers, literary scholars, demographers: everyone still struggles with how to think the atomic bomb. How do you quantify the effects of the atomic bomb without folding it into neat, dull stats? (Even that tally remains inconclusive.) How do you describe its impact without flattening its ecological repercussions? (Ditto.) How do you narrate the scope of this great human-made fire—or, by extension in our own time, argue for nuclear non-proliferation—without reducing it to anecdote? Hazzard, for her part, writes a love story. How do you teach, write about, or think Hiroshima?

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