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What is it like to be a rat? Early

cold war glimpses of the post-
human
a
Benjamin Kohlmann
a
University of Freiburg
Published online: 04 Dec 2013.

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To cite this article: Benjamin Kohlmann (2014) What is it like to be a rat? Early
cold war glimpses of the post-human, Textual Practice, 28:4, 655-675, DOI:
10.1080/0950236X.2013.858066

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 Textual Practice, 2014
Vol. 28, No. 4, 655 –675, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013.858066

Benjamin Kohlmann
What is it like to be a rat? Early cold war glimpses of the
post-human
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This article explores the interaction and mutual reinforcement of two sets
of cultural concerns in early cold war literature and science: the antici-
pation of humankind’s nuclear (self-) annihilation and the emergence
of new forms of ecological awareness. The interrogation of anthropo-
centrism that was enabled by cold war post-apocalyptic fiction, I
argue, helped to shape an artistic and critical concern with non-human
life in the absence of the human. Considering a range of cultural
materials (including 1950s science-fictions and John Calhoun’s rodent
experiments in the early 1960s), the article contends that the cultural
engagement with non-human forms of cognition and agency created
an imaginative wedge that made it possible to think what scientists
have recently called the ‘anthropocene’ and what might become its after-
math. I choose the term ‘post-human’ to describe this confluence of the
vision of a world from which human presence has been violently
removed and the attention (anticipating more recent forms of ‘posthu-
manism’) that was brought to non-human forms of animal and vegetative
life.

Keywords
Cold war; science fiction; posthumanism; ecocriticism; Thomas Pynchon

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been
corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2013).
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 Textual Practice

This article examines a cultural fascination with the post-human whose zenith
can be located roughly in the frenetic first phase of the cold war between 1945
(the nuclear strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and 1962 (the year of the
Cuban Missile Crisis). This early artistic concern with the post-human
focuses on an extreme, though by no means merely fantastic, consequence
of hot nuclear war: the complete annihilation of the human species. In the dis-
aster narratives of the cold war period examined here, the attempt to imagine a
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world that is no longer subject to human procedures of sense-making gives rise

to a scepticism towards anthropocentric accounts of the world and to an inter-
est in alternative, non-human epistemologies. When these texts attempt to
picture a post-human earth, they turn towards animal consciousness as a
way of mediating between the vanished human world and the incomprehen-
sibility of a completely lifeless planet. I trace this particular configuration of
the apocalyptic imaginary in a variety of materials comprising science
fiction texts from the 1950s, some passages from Thomas Pynchon’s debut
novel V. (1963) and John B. Calhoun’s celebrated rodent behaviour exper-
iments (conducted at Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s and 1960s).
While these narratives pertain to different cultural spheres, they employ
similar rhetorical registers and are animated by similar interests. I have
opted for the hyphenated version of the term ‘post-human’ to describe the cul-
tural work performed by these narratives. The spelling is intended to signal the
convergence and mutual reinforcement of two sets of concerns: on the one
hand, the vision of a temporal process ending in a terminal (‘post-human’)
nuclear catastrophe and on the other, an investigation of alternative
(‘posthuman’) modes of being.1
In what follows, I suggest that the interrogation of human cognitive
habits and teleological temporalities in post-apocalyptic narratives of the
early cold war period helped to shape a critical concern with non-human
life in the absence of the human. This increased attention towards non-
human forms of cognition and agency created an imaginative wedge that
made it possible to think what scientists have recently called the ‘anthropo-
cene’ – the relatively brief period in earth history characterised by humanity’s
existence – and what might become its aftermath. My account is necessarily
abbreviated and selective, but it indicates that the same historical factors which
fostered nuclear anxiety also opened the door towards new kinds of ecological
awareness. The act of envisioning planetary futures without humanity made it
possible to imagine a post-humanity even in the here and now.2

1. Post-atomic animals in early cold war science fiction

Because the elimination of homo sapiens from the face of the earth would
entail the disappearance of human consciousness, a fruitful way to think

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

about the transition from the ‘human’ to the ‘post-human’ is in phenom-

enological terms. The works investigated in this article are troubled by the
radical difference between the world as an object of human perception and
consciousness and a world in which things exist without being perceived by
humans. They try to bridge the gap between subject- and object-centred
accounts of the world by gesturing towards the distinct states of conscious-
ness embodied by non-human life forms, especially animals. Using a set of
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terms discussed by Giorgio Agamben (who in his turn invokes a series of

lectures by Martin Heidegger), it is possible to say that from a phenomen-
ological perspective the main difference between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ resides
in the way in which each sees and interacts with its environment: ‘the
animal cannot truly act (handeln) or comport itself (sich verhalten) in
relation to the environment: it can only behave (sich benehmen)’.3 Heideg-
ger’s lectures from 1929 to 1930 had likewise argued on the basis of a fun-
damental division between human ‘action’ and animal ‘behaviour’. The
lectures (published posthumously as Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics)
point out that the animal, being ‘poor in world (weltarm)’, functions as a
third term besides the inanimate ‘stone’ which is ‘worldless (weltlos)’ and
‘man’ who is ‘world-forming (weltbildend)’.4 However, Heidegger insists
that this theorisation of animal ‘behaviour’ does not imply any value jud-
gement regarding the ‘higher’ intellectual faculties of homo sapiens. Rather,
it is specifically designed to eschew the pitfalls of facile anthropomorphism.
Heidegger’s insight, shared by Agamben, that animals are subject to a ‘cap-
tivation’ (Benommenheit) by their environment ‘which can never open itself
to a world’ leaves room for the idea that animals possess distinct states of
consciousness, but it also suggests that these states of consciousness are fun-
damentally different from, and ultimately inaccessible to, humans.5
The critical vocabulary of Heidegger’s lectures occupies a middle
ground between the Cartesian demotion of animals to a subhuman
realm of cognitive being and more optimistic recent accounts by some
posthumanist scholars who posit that fiction’s ‘power to allow the
animal to speak enables a powerful fantasy of communication with an
alien other that might [also] be realized in our material world’.6 Heideg-
ger’s position resonates with both of these views, but it is also clearly dis-
tinct from them. While it acknowledges that animal consciousness (like
human consciousness) is qualitatively different from the sheer materiality
of the stone, it also asserts that humans can never fully enter into the per-
ceptual and cognitive world of animals. Heidegger’s terminology can help
to describe the critique of liberal-humanist subjectivity performed by
certain cold war texts: on the one hand, animals enable the narrative pro-
jection of a form of consciousness and on the other, they elude subsump-
tion under dominant novelistic protocols which privilege the rendering of
human ‘actions’ over animal ‘behaviour’. Because of this intermediary

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status, the ‘captivated’ (benommen) mode of being of animals can operate as

a narrative hinge between the subject-centred world of humans and a post-
human earth consisting of inert matter. However, the texts singled out for
discussion here also speak to Heidegger’s root differentiation between an
empathetic ‘feeling-into’ (Einfühlung) and a carefully graded sympathy, a
‘going along with’ (Mitgehen) that maintains a distance between human
and animal. They show that the figure of the post-human always relies
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on an imperfect ‘projection’ of the human ‘self’ (what Heidegger calls

Sich-versetzen) rather than a seamless immersion in the animal other.7
I want to begin my exploration of the post-human in early cold war
culture by considering a number of science fiction texts, Nevil Shute’s
On the Beach (1957), Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz
(1959), and Ray Bradbury’s story ‘There will come soft rains’ (1950).
These works were among the most commercially successful representatives
of their genre in the 1950s and 1960s, and they suggest the pervasiveness of
the post-human in other early cold war fictions. Humankind’s encounters
with its (alien, robotic, and animal) other are of course central to the genre
of science fiction, and one critic has even proposed that the question ‘What
is human?’ can be recognised as the genre’s unifying ‘great theme’.8 In the
texts examined here, the experience of alterity that is constitutive of much
science fiction is foregrounded in radical fashion. By envisioning a world
without humans these texts offer reflections about the possibility of a
post-anthropomorphic subjectivity.
In Shute’s iconic cold war novel On the Beach, the idea that life on
earth will continue beyond the demise of humanity is introduced by one
of the novel’s protagonists: ‘John Osborne laughed. “It’s not the end of
the world at all”, he said. “It’s the end of us. The world will go on just
the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right
without us”’.9 On the Beach is set in 1963, one year after World War III
has climaxed in a nuclear holocaust. Air currents are distributing nuclear
fallout across the globe. Certain parts of the southern hemisphere, includ-
ing New Zealand, Australia, and South America, are still habitable but they
will also be contaminated in the near future. The American nuclear-
powered submarine USS Scorpion carries some of the last survivors of
the catastrophe as it travels along the devastated coastline of Australia in
search of human life. Shute’s novel envisions the imminent extinction of
the human species, inquiring what will come after its end, but it still
does so from the point of view of its human protagonists. On the Beach’s
discussion of the post-human is therefore best described as transitional:
while the novel’s focus remains on a group of humans, it offers a clear indi-
cation of the problematic that underlies narrative representations of the
post-human and of the ways in which authors sought to come to terms
with this artistic challenge. The discussion about the ‘end of us’ is

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

resumed towards the end of the novel when the submarine crew begin to
realise that they, too, will soon succumb to the deadly effects of radiation
fallout. ‘Of course, that’s not the end of life upon the earth’ remarks the
scientist Osborne, ‘You mustn’t think that’.

‘There’ll be life here in Melbourne long after we’ve gone.’

They stared at him. ‘What life?’ Peter asked.
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He grinned broadly. ‘The rabbit. That’s the most resistant animal we

know about.’
The General pushed himself upright in his chair, his face suffused
with anger. ‘You mean to say the rabbit’s going to live longer than
we do?’
‘That’s right. About a year longer. It’s got about twice the resistance
that we’ve got. There’ll be rabbits running about Australia and eating
all the feed next year.’
‘You’re telling me the bloody rabbit’s going to put it across us, after
all? They’ll be alive and kicking when we’re all dead?’
John Osborne nodded. ‘Dogs will outlive us. Mice will last a lot
longer, but not so long as rabbits. So far as we can see, the rabbit
has them all licked – he’ll be the last.’ (p. 216)

By insisting that a world without humans will not look different from the
way it looks now (the only change being that ‘we shan’t be in it’), the novel
imagines the passage from a human towards a post-human world as a
gradual process that involves the incremental substraction of consciousness,
from humans to dogs to rabbits. The slow erosion of subjectivity predicted
by Osborne is profoundly anticlimactic, resisting the idea that the passage
from human to post-human will involve a catastrophic rupture of some
kind. The human-induced ecological catastrophe also upends the anthro-
pocentric narrative that presents the human subjugation of animals and the
physical world as an almost natural process and the General’s hurt species-
pride signals that the realisation that deep time will continue its course well
beyond the extinction of homo sapiens is capable of upsetting humanist
assumptions about progress and agency.
While On the Beach envisages the imminent demise of homo sapiens, it
invests relatively few narrative resources into describing such a future. This
reluctance to project a post-human scenario by artistic means illustrates the
difficulty of articulating a post-historical moment within the traditional
parameters of novel writing, especially given the form’s long-standing
concern with the representation of human consciousness. ‘The right

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vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse’, Jonathan

Schell noted in The Fate of the Earth (1982), ‘but from that vantage point,
of course, there is nothing to report’.10 Schell’s comment encapsulates the
key dilemma which cold war novelists were facing in imagining the post-
human: on the one hand, problems of narrative form compounded epis-
temological and phenomenological questions regarding the knowability
of a post-human world and on the other, the historical circumstances of
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the early cold war rendered the need to describe such a world increasingly
pressing.
In a series of brilliant discussions, David Trotter has demonstrated the
value of Heidegger’s early distinction between Erde and Welt for contempor-
ary literary and cultural analysis.11 Trotter builds on Being and Time (1927),
a text which considers animals only glancingly, and The Origin of the Work of
Art (1935–1936) to reinstate the narrative significance of inanimate
‘matter’ (Erde, which exists apart from a perceiving and structuring con-
sciousness) as distinct from subject-oriented ‘things’ (Welt). A post-
nuclear, post-human planet would seem to belong squarely into Heidegger’s
category of unformed Erde. But Trotter’s discussion also points out (as do
Heidegger’s ontological analysis and Shute’s novel) that Erde constitutively
eludes human attempts to impose meaning on it or to represent it. It is at this
point that Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lectures become significant. The analysis
of animals as weltarm (as opposed to the consummate Weltlosigkeit of the
stone) makes it possible to see the rodents, dogs, and rabbits of cold war
fiction as intermediaries between the realm of human life and the sphere
of inanimate matter. According to Heidegger, the question ‘Can we trans-
pose ourselves [uns versetzen] into an animal?’ can be rephrased as asking

whether or not we can succeed in going along [mitgehen] with the

animal in the way in which it sees and hears, the way in which it
seizes its prey or evades it predators, the way in which it builds its
nest and so forth.12

Because animals possess states of consciousness, ‘transposing oneself into

an animal is in principle a possibility for man’, whereas ‘[w]ith respect
to the stone, the question . . . is impossible in principle’.13 The minds of
animals, Heidegger points out, are sufficiently distinct from our own to
preclude premature identification; at the same time, they offer a substitute
for more fully elaborated depictions of human psychology. The works dis-
cussed in this article suggest the productiveness of the tension between Welt
and Erde as they open the search for narrative situations which are capable
of conveying the disappearance of human subjectivity and inwardness.
Like Shute’s novel, Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is set on a post-
apocalyptic earth, but the book turns more radically to the consciousness

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

of animals in order to imagine a world that is no longer perceived by

humans. Only one-third through A Canticle for Leibowitz, the book’s pro-
tagonist, Brother Francis, is killed. Rather than concluding the first part of
his novel by showing Francis’s dead body in the desert, however, the view
shifts towards the carcass of an animal nearby:

There was a dead hog beyond the Valley of the Misborn. The buz-
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zards observed it gaily and glided down for a feast. Later, in a far
mountain pass, a cougar licked her chops and left her kill. The buz-
zards seemed thankful for the chance to finish their meal.
The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young: a
dead snake, and bits of a feral dog.
The younger generation waxed strong, soared high and far on black
wings, waiting for the fruitful Earth to yield up her bountiful carrion.
Sometimes dinner was only a toad. Once it was a messenger from
New Rome.
The flight carried them over the Midwestern plains. They were
delighted with the bounty of good things which the nomads left
lying on the land during their ride over toward the south.
The buzzards laid their eggs in season and lovingly fed their young.
Earth had nourished them bountifully for centuries. She would
nourish them for centuries more . . . 14

The bulk of Miller’s novel relates the attempts by survivors to restore

human civilisation to its former grandeur (‘New Rome’ refers to the Catho-
lic Church’s new centre in North America). Yet despite the narrator’s sym-
pathy with Renaissance humanism, the above passage also tries to imagine
a world in which nature’s cyclical renewals are no longer disturbed through
human agency. In doing so, A Canticle for Leibowitz exposes the intractable
subject-centredness of the novel genre – the ‘introspective habit’ which, in
Ian Watt’s influential account, has led to the form’s privileged concern
with individual psychology.15 For example, the omniscient narrator
assumes the aloof aerial perspective of the buzzards and the narrative
voice variously resorts to anthropomorphism (the buzzards look on
‘gaily’, ‘seemed thankful’, and ‘lovingly fed their young’). Miller’s anthro-
pomorphising adjectives and adverbs work to attenuate the fundamental
strangeness of animal consciousness, but this gravitation towards human
psychology is startlingly at odds with his artistically more innovative
attempt to suspend the linear movement of the narrative through the con-
spicuous repetition of key sentences (‘The buzzards laid their eggs in season
and lovingly fed their young’).

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Miller’s emphasis on the endless iteration of reproductive cycles and

the slow movement of environmental time is remarkably successful at
challenging grand narratives of human-made progress and at tripping
up the linear progression of novelistic plots. Because the buzzards
‘behave’ (sich benehmen) rather than ‘act’ (handeln) they are of no
immediate consequence to the forward movement of the narrative. The
effort to unsettle human-centred accounts of a post-apocalyptic Planet
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Earth by infiltrating non-teleological temporalities into the narrative

specifically resists the romanticisation of the apocalypse as an opportunity
for civilisational renewal that runs through many ‘last-survivor’ tales of
the 1950s and 1960s. While later chapters of Miller’s novel do in fact
project a re-establishment of human civilisation in a reformed and
more benign register, the ending of the book’s first part affords a brief
glimpse of a world that has terminally eluded human control. Miller’s
passage produces a double effect: the buzzards offer an opportunity for
empathetic identification, but they are also unamenable to full anthropo-
morphisation and narrative naturalisation by the author or the reader.
This divided impulse mirrors Heidegger’s reluctance to specify the con-
ditions which needed to be met for the act of ‘transposing oneself into
an animal’ to be successful. The Benommenheit invoked by Miller reflects
the semantic ambiguity of Heidegger’s German term: it refers both to the
‘captivation’ of instinctual animal behaviour by the environment and to
the sudden ‘disorientation’ which the artistic rendering of non-human
states of being is capable of producing in the reader. In Miller’s narrative,
the disorientation associated with non-human forms of cognition pro-
vides an affective link between the world of humans and the incompre-
hensibility of utter lifelessness.
One of the most notable attempts at evoking a post-human world in
1950s science fiction is Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘There Will Come Soft
Rains’ (1950). Set in 2026, the narrative centres on a house whose inhabi-
tants have been wiped out by a nuclear explosion. While the inhabitants
have disappeared, with only their shadows left on the wall by the atomic
blast, their breakfast continues to be automatically prepared, the garage
door opens and closes mechanically each morning, and the children’s
TV programme runs for an hour in the afternoon. The story presents
the fully automated home as the ghostly relic of an instrumental rationality
that blindly continues to perform the domestic functions for which it was
designed. The only sentient beings which populate the house are animals:

A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.

The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once
huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores,

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred

angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at the
inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but that the wall panels
flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The
offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was
raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the
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cellar it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which

sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.16

The passage from Bradbury’s story movingly captures what Susan Sontag,
in an influential essay from 1966, called ‘the very real trauma of the Bomb’:
that nuclear weapons ‘do not simply kill the person’ but ‘obliterate him’
without a trace.17 But ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ also illustrates how
writers were seeking to push their writing beyond the final frontier of com-
plete annihilation. The passage quoted above, like the excerpt from Shute’s
On the Beach, is governed by an implicit hierarchy of different kinds of
consciousness. The domesticated dog that is situated at the heart of the nar-
rative provides the main object for readerly empathy. Less prominent is the
mass of ‘angry mice’ which rush forth from the cracks in the wall and
restore the house to its pristine tidiness. The rodents seem most at home
in this post-atomic future, yet in their anonymity and inexpressiveness
they also represent the diminishment, and ultimately the obliteration, of
personal identity. Bradbury’s mice are mechanical, but their appearance
in a ‘mass’ bears out Eugene Thacker’s comments about the ambiguous
status of animal ‘swarms’: swarms ‘are never just individuals, and never
just groups [ . . . ] the locale of agency is never clear-cut’.18 The change
from active into passive voice in the last sentence (‘it was dropped’) ident-
ifies this ambiguity as a cessation of human-like agency and as a shift into
the non-self-reflexive mode of conditioned ‘behaviour’.19 As in Philip
K. Dick’s 1965 novel Dr Bloodmoney, the swarm of rodents symbolises
the last stage in the transition to a post-human world.
The animals in Shute’s, Miller’s, and Bradbury’s texts are easily over-
looked precisely because they are so inconspicuous. Unlike the post-atomic
‘gifted’ animals discussed by Fredric Jameson, they do not fall into the cat-
egory of mutant creatures that dominate an influential subset of early cold
war science fiction.20 In a 1984 article for the New York Times Book Review,
Pynchon lampooned the ‘people who were writing science fiction in the
1950’s’, including SF’s obsession with supersized, city-wrecking insects.
These authors, Pynchon inveighed, had failed ‘to come up with any coun-
tercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to
begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war’.21 Shute’s,

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Miller’s, Bradbury’s, and Pynchon’s own fictions in fact suggest that ‘Bad
and Big’ was not the way to go at all: the post-human future would not be
populated by Godzilla-like monsters, such as the spectacular giant ants in
the film Them! (1954) and the mutant locusts in Beginning of the End
(1957), but by more ordinary rats, rabbits, and dogs.
There is a real sense in which all of the narratives discussed so far fail at
the task which they have set for themselves. After all, the function of the
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omniscient narrator in them is to provide at the level of discourse a

unified centre of consciousness that is lacking at the diegetic level of the
story itself. These works are accordingly best described as sophisticated
reflections on the question how a post-human world might be imagined
and what narrative obstacles need to be overcome, rather than actual depic-
tions of such a world. But they can also be taken to indicate that the ima-
gining of non-human consciousness need not be dismissed simply as a
liberal-humanist conceit, what N. Katherine Hayles has called ‘the grafting
of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self’.22 Instead of pre-
tending to offer an accurate picture of non- and post-human modes of
experience, they convey the gradual diminishment of human consciousness
by way of the intellectual and affective confusion (Benommenheit) that Hei-
degger associated with the process of sympathetic Mitgehen (as opposed to
empathetic Einfühlung). They achieve this complex effect by positing
layered hierarchies of consciousness, from humans to domesticated
animals to the loss of individuality in rodent and avian swarms. In other
words, they do not rely on a binary opposition between humans and
animals for the construal of human subjectivity, but on a gradation of cog-
nitive states that recalls the gradualist differentiation between weltbildend
and weltarm in Heidegger’s lectures.

2. Overpopulation, nuclear apocalypticism, and the post-human

According to Hayles’s influential account in How We Became Posthuman,

the birth of posthumanity can be dated around the time of the Macy Con-
ferences on cybernetics soon after World War II. Critics have long recog-
nised the ‘posthuman’ as a central concern in Pynchon’s work and Hayles’s
critical narrative offers a fruitful historical context in which his novels and
short stories can be read. The central theme of V., as Edward Mendelson
has observed, is the progressive hybridisation of ‘the vital’ by ‘the inani-
mate’.23 This ‘inanimate’, Mendelson argues, typically figures in the
form of technological or prosthetic modifications of the human: from
Esther’s nose job in a New York beauty clinic and the Bad Priest’s physical
disassembly by a group of children to the human-like crash dummies
SHOCK and SHROUD. Significantly, critics have tended to overlook

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

that the novel also briefly imagines the posthuman in a non-technological,

non-cybernetic sense as it shifts attention towards a post-apocalyptic world
and, concomitantly, towards non-human forms of cognition and experi-
ence. The fifth chapter, located in the sewers underneath New York
City, has sat uneasily with critical readings which insist that the ‘Stenci-
lised’ sections of V. depict a progressive ‘mechanisation’ of the human.
In what follows, I want to further test my central observation – that the
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early cold war fascination with the post-human fed into an occupation
with non-human forms of cognition and experience – by bringing it to
bear on this section of Pynchon’s text. The sewer chapter of V. revolves
around two characters, Benny Profane and Father Fairing, whose humanity
is eviscerated as they go native among an underground population of rats
and alligators. Even though threats of nuclear holocaust do not show up at
the level of narrative representation, complete (atomic) annihilation forms
a potent subtext of these passages. The parts from V. which I will discuss
can be seen to contemplate a central corollary of all-out nuclear warfare: in
them the rats (and, to a lesser degree, alligators) which infest the New York
underground come to embody the zoocentric vision of a post-human
world.
In the fifth chapter of V., Benny Profane joins a gang of alligator exter-
minators operating in the sewers underneath New York. On one of his
hunts, Profane inadvertently enters the former underground ‘parish’ of
Father Fairing, a Jesuit priest, who ‘[d]uring the Depression of the 30’s,
in an hour of apocalyptic well-being, . . . had decided that the rats were
going to take over New York’.24 Father Fairing, whose name recalls that
of Miller’s Catholic monk Brother Francis, anticipated a world in which
overpopulation has led to the (self-) extinction of considerable portions
of the human species:

He foresaw nothing but a city of starved corpses, covering the side-

walks and the grass of the parks, lying belly up in the fountains,
hanging wrynecked from the streetlamps. The city – maybe
America, his horizons didn’t extend that far – would belong to the
rats before the year was out. This being the case, Father Fairing
thought it best for the rats to be given a head start – which meant
conversion to the Roman Church. (p. 118)

Fairing joins the rat population because he (like Osborne in Shute’s On the
Beach) believes that the extinction of humanity is imminent, and his
mission underground begins with the attempt to rearticulate the liberal-
humanist subject in the rats by converting them and thereby ‘saving’
their souls. As readers are soon told, however, Fairing makes every concei-
vable effort to immerse himself in the rat population and he even carries on

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an affair with a female rat called Veronica who is described as a ‘voluptu-

ous’ belle in Fairing’s diary (p. 121). In the sewer chapter, Pynchon deflects
a scenario of religious indoctrination and species conflict by focusing atten-
tion on the erotic relationship between Veronica and the priest. The novel’s
anticipation of a ‘post-human’ planet thus overlaps with the ‘posthuman’,
as the attempt to dominate a non-human species gives rise to an ambiguous
process of symbiotic cohabitation and (Pynchon hints) miscegenation. The
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text elides the scenario of a terminal catastrophe that will annihilate the
human species with a hybridisation of the ‘human’ itself.
V. is teeming with ‘gaudy dream[s] of annihilation’ (p. 210):
‘Humanity’, one character observes early on, ‘is something to destroy’
(p. 81). In the fifth chapter Profane is trailing an alligator on his own, con-
trary to the Alligator Patrol’s rule to hunt in pairs. Pynchon presents
Profane as a lone hunter, as though intending to cast him in the role of
science fiction’s iconic ‘last man’:

He moved away from the manhole, carrying the gun safetied under
one arm, the flashlight in the other hand. It was the first time he’d
hunted solo. He wasn’t scared. . . . Nearly as he could figure, he
was on the East Side, uptown somewhere. He was out of his territory
– God, had he chased this alligator all the way crosstown? He
rounded the bend, the light from the pink sky was lost: now there
moved only a sluggish ellipse with him and the alligator at foci,
and a slender axis of light linking them. (p. 117)

The scene is poised between two possible futures: if Profane does not kill
the alligator, he embraces Fairing’s fate by joining the non-human under-
ground population; if he shoots it, he will have temporarily reasserted the
dominance of his own species in a Darwinian struggle for living space. The
encounter of Profane, gun in hand, with the reptile offers a precise inver-
sion of the erotic connection between rodent and priest, but it also reiter-
ates and to some degree heightens the intimacy that characterised Fairing/
Veronica’s relationship. Pynchon puts the violence that is about to be
unleashed on hold and, with ‘a slender axis of light linking’ hunter and
hunted, hints at a silent understanding between Profane and the alligator.
At the same time, Pynchon manages to foreground questions regarding the
knowability of non-human experience; in particular, V. interrogates the
idea that the brief encounter between human and animal can produce a
genuinely non-hierarchical concord between the two species.
Sherryl Vint has recently argued that science fiction can ‘defy [the]
separation’ between humans and animals ‘because its generic premises
enable us to imagine the animal quite literally looking at and addressing
us from a non-anthropocentric perspective’.25 Vint’s argument is

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

representative of some recent interventions within the academic subfield of

animal studies which assert confidently that a complete break with huma-
nist discourse is possible.26 With a view to Pynchon’s novel (as well as
Shute’s, Miller’s, and Bradbury’s narratives) it would be more accurate
to say that, even though these texts sporadically invest animals with huma-
nist subjectivity, they also confront their readers with the fundamental
strangeness of non-human experience. The rats’ and alligators’ status as
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non-human ‘aliens’ is thrown into relief by Pynchon’s reluctance to

anthropomorphise them by giving them a voice. In an observation that
is also pertinent to the rendering of animals in Bradbury’s, Miller’s, and
Shute’s texts, Jacques Derrida noted that the recognition of animals as
fellow-beings consists ‘not [in] “giving speech back” to [them]’ but ‘of
acceding to a thinking that thinks the absence of the name and of the
word [ . . . ] as something other than a privation’.27 Following Derrida’s
account, it is the very inconspicuousness of animals in certain literary
works, the fact that they seem merely incidental to the texts which they
inhabit, that becomes a token of their ontological difference. Pynchon’s
text, like the other works discussed here, can thus be seen to point back
to the underlying problem of ‘transposing oneself into an animal’. ‘Think-
ing with animals’, as the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Gregg
Mitman have recently observed, ‘can take the form of an intense yearning
to transcend the confines of self and species, to understand from the inside,
or even to become an animal’. Daston and Mitman’s argument delineates
the possibilities and limits of inter-species projection that are also discussed
by Heidegger: ‘[S]ubmersion of self in the genuinely other is fervently
attempted’, they note, but is ‘never achieved. It is a virtuoso but
doomed act of complete empathy’.28 In a related vein Pynchon stages
boundary crossings between species, but resists seeing such encounters as
unproblematic moments of communion between human and animal
other.
The fifth chapter of V. draws heavily on the rodent iconography
popularised by science fiction novels of the 1950s, and like some of
these earlier texts the novel contemplates the possibility of a world in
which homo sapiens will have become extinct. But Pynchon’s work also
looks back to a set of famous behavioural experiments which the American
ecologist John B. Calhoun had been conducting as a member of the
Rodent Ecology Project at Johns Hopkins University from the mid-
1950s onward and which played a significant part in shaping cultural
debates about post- and non-human subjectivity. By the mid-1960s,
Calhoun’s research into animal psychology had achieved considerable
notoriety; an article presenting his key findings was published in Scientific
American in early 1962, the year before V. was published. Calhoun’s exper-
iments were straightforward: he kept a number of rats in pens that were

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partitioned into V-shaped segments and, whilst providing an abundance of

food, allowed the population to grow. Calhoun observed that at some
point population growth stagnated and the social behaviour of the rats
changed dramatically: female rats killed their children; males became
aggressive towards young and female rats; and a sizable group of animals
became exclusively homosexual. Calhoun dubbed these collective
changes ‘behavioural sink’.29 The experiments of the Rodent Ecology
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Project could be seen as proof that the thermodynamic (and quintessen-

tially Pynchonesque) principle of entropy was also at work in social life:
during the first week of the tests the behaviour of Calhoun’s rats seemed
increasingly ‘erratic’ until eventually behavioural sink ‘emerged like a
vortex’.30
Calhoun had presented his first scientific discoveries in the early 1950s,
but by the end of the decade he was drawing increasingly sensationalist ana-
logies between behavioural sink among rodents and humans. Concluding
his 1962 Scientific American article, he declared: ‘In time, refinement of
experimental procedures and of the interpretation of these studies may
advance our understanding to the point where they may contribute to the
making of value judgments about analogous problems confronting the
human species’.31 And a decade later he affirmed that ‘there is no logical
reason why a comparable sequence of events [in human society] should
not also lead to species extinction’.32 His research received much attention,
both publicly and professionally, and Calhoun rocketed to international
fame and a Nobel Prize nomination. ‘The transition from lab notes to Scien-
tific American to the pages of newspapers and novels’, Jon Adams and
Edmund Ramsden note, required ‘relatively little translation’ in the cultural
contexts of the early cold war.33 The popular appeal of the rodent exper-
iments derived in part from their explanatory power vis-à-vis current histori-
cal events and the endangered state of human life on earth. Calhoun’s tests
made it possible to read the cold war as an early stage in the self-annihilation
of the human species: overpopulation, they suggested, would lead to scarcer
resources and conflict over territory and hence a heightened risk of nuclear
war. Significantly his experiments also elided the distinction between human
‘action’ and animal ‘behaviour’. They indicated in particular that the human
ability to ‘act’ freely could in its turn become ‘captivated’ (benommen) by
environmental factors. Humans, his analogies suggested, were fighting for
living space, and it was only a question of time until this struggle would
turn from cold conflict to hot.
Calhoun was not the first scientist to suggest that the procedures of
behaviourist research could be applied to human societies, yet his exper-
iments on species extinction gathered to themselves a particular cultural
momentum during the 1950s and 1960s. The sensationalist language
which Calhoun used to popularise his research lent itself particularly

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

well to co-optation by writers in the burgeoning genre of ecocatastrophe

fiction, and it kept in motion a busy traffic of metaphors and concerns
between natural science, science fiction, and avant-garde art.34 While
science fiction authors and more highbrow writers like Pynchon tapped
into the work of scientists like Calhoun, the researchers at the Rodent
Ecology Project were in their turn developing experimental procedures
that recalled the apocalyptic scenarios of some science fiction. Pynchon’s
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debut novel, with its references to ‘starved corpses’ and bodies ‘hanging
wrynecked from the streetlamps’, notably toys with Calhoun’s central
idea that under certain conditions of overcrowding humans were subject
to the same auto-destructive conditioning as rats. It is important to recog-
nise that Calhoun’s behaviourist tests predate most of the early experimen-
tal work in cognitive ethology, a field that was only beginning to take shape
in the 1960s. Instead of investigating animal cognition and agency and
asking how the cognitive faculties of animals might resemble those of
humans, Calhoun’s experiments implied that under certain environmental
conditions human action (what Heidegger called Handeln) approximated
– ‘sank’ to the level of – rodent behaviour (Benehmen). Because Calhoun
aimed to reveal shared patterns of behaviour (rather than cognition)
between rodents and humans, his research goes some way towards explain-
ing the specific figuration of the post-human in Pynchon’s novel and in the
science fiction texts I have discussed. Like Calhoun’s experiments, these lit-
erary works articulate the post-human moment not through the direct rep-
resentation of animal minds, but in terms of a dereliction of human
autonomy – a gradual transition from ‘world-forming’ action to ‘poor-
in-world’ behaviour.
V. develops Calhoun’s scientific experiments in species extinction into
artistic experiments with the post-human. Pynchon’s interest in the possi-
bility of a post-human future is most fully expressed in the sewer chapter,
but the novel also contains other permutations of the topos of the depopu-
lated (or, more precisely, de-humanised) landscape. I will offer two brief
examples of such landscapes which illustrate that the vision of a planet
without humans could produce an embryonic ecological recognition of
non-human and post-human temporalities. In the course of one of his
third person ‘impersonations’ in chapter three, for example, Stencil imagi-
nes civilisation being consumed by the desert.

The desert moves in. It happens, nothing else. . . .

Soon, nothing. Soon only the desert. The two goats must choke on
sand, nuzzling down to find the white clover . . . The man, he, runs
one night out to where the wall was, begins to lift and toss imaginary
rocks about, curses Allah, then begs forgiveness from the Prophet,

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then urinates on the desert, hoping to insult what cannot be insulted.

They find him in the morning a mile from the house, skin blued, shi-
vering in a sleep which is almost death, tears turned to frost on the
sand.
And now the house begins to fill with desert, like the lower half of an
hourglass which will never be inverted again. (pp. 82 –83)
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The passage offers a startling visualisation of the vulnerability of humanity

in the face of an ecological catastrophe. It poignantly describes the stopping
of human time (‘an hourglass which will never be inverted again’) and the
shift towards unreflective, instinctive modes of animal behaviour (‘two
goats [ . . . ] nuzzling down’), but it also reveals the presence of an infinitely
slower environmental time that underpins and transcends human experi-
ence. Critics of cold war literature have long addressed the prospect of
humanity’s complete annihilation under the sign of the ‘nuclear
sublime’. The notion of a ‘nuclear sublime’ indexes the ability of nuclear
anxiety to unsettle anthropocentric narratives about the world, but the
sheer incomprehensibility of this apocalyptic ‘absolute referent’ has con-
cealed the ways in which early cold war texts were beginning to project
an earth without humans.35 The excerpt from V.’s third chapter suggests
that deserts can be privileged sites for such artistic explorations because
they make it possible to correlate the sidelining of human concerns with
the panoramic view of a vast environmental space. The ending of V. pre-
sents another conspicuous view of a landscape from which human presence
has been violently removed. The ship that carries Herbert Stencil’s father
Sidney has sunk off the Maltese coast:

Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere

in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and
lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet,
whirling and cracking . . . , and slam it down again into a piece of
the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena – white-
caps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch
thereafter part of the brute sun’s spectrum – showed nothing at all
of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day. (p. 492)

The passage relates an episode which, properly speaking, is impossible to

relate because everybody who witnessed the shipwreck died in it. The
passage instantiates Stencil’s attempts to create an ending for his narrative
about his father, but it also dislodges his own narrative voice from its pos-
ition of authority by introducing the paradoxical temporality of the cata-
strophic event. Like the supersonic rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow whose

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

scream can be heard only after it has fallen, the foundered xebec epitomises
the paradox of representing a world that exists without a human conscious-
ness to perceive it. In their attempt to glimpse the post-human, the two
passages which I have just quoted associate particular settings, the vast
expanses of the desert and the sea, with temporalities that precede and
disrupt prevailing anthropocentric accounts of time. Like Shute, Miller,
and Bradbury, Pynchon employs the rhetorical effects of anticlimax (‘It
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happens, nothing else’) and monotony (‘any of a million flatnesses . . .

showing nothing at all’) in order to denaturalise humanist concepts of pro-
gressive, teleological time.
When they are compared to these passages, the underground rat
scenes of the fifth chapter still retain a special significance. Going under-
ground, as V. reminds readers elsewhere, is a response to the threat of
annihilation that awaits humans at street level: ‘During the raids’, Fausto
Maijstral recalls the bombardment of Malta during World War II, ‘every-
thing civilian and with a soul was underground’ (p. 323). The novel makes
clear that the imperative to hide underground will be even more pressing if
World War III breaks out: ‘Hiroshima’, the name of the electronic tech-
nician on board the USS Scaffold (the ship on which Profane first
travels to Malta), unambiguously points to the dangers of nuclear war.
Critics have also noted that the writing of V. may have been prompted
by Pynchon’s own experiences as a sailor on board a US Navy vessel in
the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis of 1956. The Suez Crisis, a
brief face-off between the world’s major nuclear powers, had brought the
world closer to an all-out thermonuclear war than ever before and Pynch-
on’s half-humorous remarks on the dangers of life above ground – both in
the ‘Confessions of Fausto Maijstral’ and the sewer chapter – reflect the
fear of a planet engulfed in atomic destruction. On this interpretation,
Pynchon asks readers to see the world of the sewers, in which priests dis-
appear and Profane battles alligators and rats, as an anticipation of the
earth as it will appear after the apocalypse.
The idea that rats will take the place of humans is played out, with a
more clearly Heideggerian twist, in a further scene of the book’s Malta
chapter. Stencil discovers that Father Fairing, the New York priest who
put his faith in the imminent apocalypse, is connected to the Maltese
Bad Priest who ‘had been known to gather about him a small knot of chil-
dren in the street and give them sermons’: ‘The girls he advised to become
nuns, avoid the sensual extremes – pleasure of intercourse, pain of child-
birth. The boys he told to find strength in – and be like – the rock of their
island’ (p. 340). Malta’s ‘rock’ symbolises a radically non- and post-human
world – what Heidegger called the Weltlosigkeit of the stone. But the
passage does not simply predict the displacement of the human by the
insentient and inanimate. If the events in V. were ordered according to a

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strict chronological sequence, the Malta episode (set in the 1940s) would
precede Profane’s journey underground (in the 1950s). By arranging the
narrative in reverse chronological order, however, Pynchon portrays the
Bad Priest of the 1940s as a kind of Pied Piper figure who tries to lure
the Maltese children away from their parents and into the rat-world under-
ground. The priest’s attempts remain unsuccessful, yet Pynchon’s narrative
offers a brief glimpse of a scenario in which the chain of human reproduc-
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tion is interrupted and in which the children come to resemble rats before
they are transformed into Maltese rock. The Malta chapter in V. offers the
most abstract formulation of the cultural preoccupation with the post-
human that I have described. Yet even in Pynchon’s novel, the shift
from human to inanimate and from subject-centred Welt to object-
centred Erde proceeds by way of a narrative detour that briefly invokes
the transitional character of animal Benommenheit.
In V., as in the other works discussed in this article, the looming pro-
spect of a post-human future makes it possible to think beyond naturalised
concepts of the human. These texts indicate that early cold war writers were
thinking about nuclear destruction in ways that contained the seeds of an
environmental awareness, even if they did not convert this nascent under-
standing into an explicit political agenda. By seizing on the idea of a
posthuman planet Bradbury’s, Miller’s, Pynchon’s, and Shute’s texts con-
tributed to the momentum built by texts that were more explicitly concerned
with animal consciousness, such as Andre Norton’s The Beast Master (1959)
and Lord of Thunder (1960), as well as by the growing genre of ecocatas-
trophe fiction. When they are read in conjunction with these often more
polemical books, the works discussed here indicate a much larger cultural
trend which became a precondition of the environmental thought of later
decades. Their tentative opening out towards the perceptual and experiential
world of other species helped to prepare the cultural context in which more
recent ecocritical conceptualisations of the posthuman and of interspecies
relations could set to work.

University of Freiburg

Notes

1 The OED traces the primary meaning of the term ‘posthuman’ (‘1. Chiefly
Science Fiction. Of or relating to a hypothetical species that might evolve
from human beings, as by means of genetic or bionic augmentation’) to
early twentieth-century scientific discourse. The first documented use of the
word’s secondary meaning (‘2. Designating or relating to art, music, etc. in
which humanity or human concerns are regarded as peripheral or absent’)

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

occurs in 1944. My readings of several textual specimens suggest that both

meanings coalesced in complex ways in the literature of the early post-war
years.
2 As I argue with a view to Calhoun’s experiments, cold war narratives of the
post-human fed into other forms of posthumanist discourse – environment-
alism and cognitive ethology most prominent among them – which were
beginning to emerge in the 1960s. In dating this transitional phase around
the early and mid-1960s, my article is in agreement with recent studies
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which point to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and
the first photograph taken of earth from outer space in 1968 as key events
in the formation of the ecology movement. See e.g. Ursula Heise, Sense of
Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 22 – 28.
3 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal [2002], translated by Kevin
Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 52.
4 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude [1929 –30], translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 185.
5 Agamben, The Open, p. 52.
6 Sherryl Vint, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), p. 22. My article takes its
title from a particularly well-known contribution to the philosophical debate
about animal consciousness, Thomas Nagel’s 1979 essay ‘What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?’, whose conclusions broadly resemble those reached by Heidegger.
The works examined in my article reflect Nagel’s central contention that we
should not ‘dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have
experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own’, even if we
assume that these experiences are inaccessible to us as humans (in Thomas
Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
p. 170).
7 For Heidegger’s German terminology, see Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik:
Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2010), pp. 297–298.
8 Keith N. Hull, ‘What is human? Ursula LeGuin and science fiction’s great
theme’, Modern Fiction Studies, 32.1 (1986), pp. 65 –74.
9 Nevil Shute, On the Beach [1957] (London: Pan Books, 1967), p. 79.
10 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (London: Picador, 1982), p. 26.
11 See Trotter’s essay ‘The New Historicism and the Psychopathology of Every-
day Modern Life’ in William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (ed.), Filth: Dirt,
Disgust and Modern Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), pp. 30 – 48. For an application of these ideas, see Trotter’s Cooking
with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
12 Heidegger, Concepts, pp. 203 – 204.
13 Ibid., p. 207.
14 Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz [1959] (London: Corgi Books,
1971), pp. 97 – 98.

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15 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding
[1957] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 75.
16 Malcom Bradbury, ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ [1950], in Martian Chron-
icles (New York: Doubelday, 1958), p. 207.
17 Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ in Against Interpretation
(New York: Dell, 1969), p. 221.
18 Eugene Thacker, ‘Networks, Swarms, Multitudes’, ctheory.net ,http://www.
ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id¼423., accessed April 12, 2012.
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19 Heidegger had likewise used a passive participle (benommen) to describe the

mode of being of animals.
20 Fredric Jameson, ‘After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr Bloodmoney’
[1975], in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 349– 362. In Jameson’s
reading, the enlarged insects of Golden Age science fiction act as symbols
for the utopian/dystopian potential of the novel’s own historical present.
In the works discussed in this article, however, the ‘world-forming’ (weltbil-
dende) functions of utopian consciousness are disabled in favour of a post-
historical, post-human moment; here, the progression of anthropocentric
time is suspended in favour of the cyclical temporality of animal and vege-
tative life.
21 Thomas Pynchon, ‘Is it O.K. To Be a Luddite’, The New York Times Book
Review, 28 (October 1984), p. 41.
22 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cyber-
netics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), pp. 286– 287. The development of such innovative narrative strategies
has also recently been discussed under the label of ‘unnatural narratology’. See
e.g. Jan Alber, ‘Unnatural Narratology: The Systematic Study of Anti-Mime-
ticism’, Literature Compass, 10.5 (2013), pp. 449–460.
23 Edward Mendelson, ‘The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49’ in
Edward Mendelson (ed.), Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1978), p. 112.
24 Thomas Pynchon, V. [1963] (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 117. All subsequent
references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text.
25 Vint, Animal Alterity, p. 6.
26 Margot Norris, an influential early advocate of this critical position, argues that
artists such as D.H. Lawrence or Max Ernst succeeded in ‘creat[ing] as the
animal’ (in Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1985), p. 1).
27 Jacques Derrida, ‘The animal that therefore i am (more to follow)’, translated
by David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002), p. 416.
28 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, ‘Introdution: The How and Why of
Thinking with Animals’ in Daston/Mitman (ed.), Thinking with Animals:
New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), p. 7.
29 John B. Calhoun, ‘Population density and social pathology’, Scientific Ameri-
can, 206.2 (1962), pp. 139 –148.

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 Benjamin Kohlmann What is it like to be a rat?

30 Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden, ‘Escaping the laboratory: the rodent exper-
iments of John B. Calhoun and their cultural influence’, London School of Econ-
omics, ,www2.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/pdf/FACTSPDF/2308Ramadams.
pdf., accessed January 30, 2012, p. 22.
31 Calhoun, ‘Population Density’, p. 148. Calhoun had first made the obser-
vation that ‘[t]here are striking similarities between the culture of man and
that of some of the other vertebrates’ in 1952 (in ‘The social aspects of popu-
lation dynamics’, Journal of Mammology, 33.2 (1952), p. 143).
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32 John B. Calhoun, ‘Death squared: the explosive growth and demise of a mouse
population’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 66 (1973), p. 86.
33 Adams/Ramsden, ‘Escaping the Laboratory’, p. 7.
34 On the exchanges between literature and behavioural science in the early cold
war period, see the journal special issue The Human Sciences and Cold War
America (¼ Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, 47.3 (2011), pp. 224 –321).
For overviews of early theories of global overcrowding and their significance
for the rise of ecocatastrophe fiction in the 1950s, see Heise, Sense of Place,
pp. 68– 90, and Brian Stableford, ‘Science Fiction and Ecology’ in David
Seed (ed.), A Companion to Science Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005),
pp. 137 – 139. Heise and Stableford do not mention Calhoun, even though
his predictions resonate widely in 1950s and early 1960s fiction. Anthony Bur-
gess’s The Wanting Seed (1962), for example, describes an Orwellian state that
issues directives to combat the threat of overpopulation. One of these directives
reads ‘It’s sapiens to be homo’, an allusion to Calhoun’s observations about
rodent homosexuality.
35 The phrase ‘nuclear sublime’ was coined by Frances Ferguson in an influential
special issue of Diacritics in 1986 (see her essay ‘The nuclear sublime’, Diacri-
tics, 14.2 (1984), pp. 4 –10). Ferguson’s article drew on Jacques Derrida’s essay
on the ‘absolute referent’ of nuclear destruction, printed in the same issue (‘No
apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’, trans-
lated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics, 14.2 (1983), pp. 20 –
31). The notion of the nuclear sublime, a form of proleptically experienced
trauma that involves the impossible imperative ‘to think the unthinkable
and to exist in one’s nonexistence’ (Ferguson, ‘Nuclear sublime’, p. 7), has
cast a long shadow on subsequent scholarship (see Peter Schwenger, ‘Circling
ground zero’, PMLA, 106.2 (1991), pp. 251 – 261; and Schwenger’s ‘Writing
the unthinkable’, Critical Inquiry, 13.1 (1985), pp. 33 –48; for a recent state-
ment of this position, see Daniel Grausam, ‘The crying of lot 49, circa 1642; or,
Pynchon and the writing of world war three’, Clio 37.3 (2008), pp. 219– 238).
Karl Kroeber was the first to observe that cold war literary criticism’s preoccu-
pation with the instability of representation and meaning threatened to eclipse
ecological and environmentalist concerns (see especially his book Ecological
Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 37 –52).

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