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They use words to resist this imposition of nothingness, telling a story of loss that will not fade away. Dr Hachiya, and Canetti, bring specific individual lives back from the brink of total erasure that the bombing sought to impose. What was rendered a blank suddenly bereft of human lives and their significance is redeemed by this doctor’s actions and by his journal. Today the Hiroshima Peace Memorial is a comparable attempt to mark an absence by paradoxically filling it with meaning. Hachiya does this prayerfully, Canetti writes, in order to provide a balm of respectful words. But if Hiroshima and related fears aren’t explored for that reason, profound human anxieties remained unvoiced and repressed.Īfter all, narrative instructs us in who we are as ethical beings (citizens, in other words) and being ethical in these precarious times must involve acute self-reflection as to what we are capable of doing to each other.Īs a means of communicating such profound reflection, Canetti tells us that Dr Hachiya honours the memory of the dead by pilgrimaging to the places where they lived and died, one death at a time. It testifies to something unspeakable within us. The fact that the bombing was perpetrated by humans, not nature, makes it somehow all the more inadmissible. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan. But as Canetti remarks, nature played no part in Hiroshima. In Dr Hachiya’s Diary of Hiroshima, memorialised in Elias Canetti’s essay collection The Conscience of Words & Earwitness (1971), the Japanese physician thinks of Pompeii. Eyewitnesses testify that it was as if everything had ceased to exist. This sense of unparalleled calamity is registered most movingly among the Hiroshima survivors themselves. But with Hiroshima, she argued, this cannot be done, since “the continuity of life was, for the first time, put into question”. In The New Yorker, November 1946, American novelist and political activist Mary McCarthy accused journalists of referring to Hiroshima “in terms of measurable destruction”.
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They insist on the need to reflect on the horrors of warfare and put pressure on the way we choose to either talk or keep silent about the darkness of humanity.īut having the words to describe the event itself doesn’t always ensure an appropriate narrative. He argues that the way we speak about and imagine nuclear weapons, and energy, is drawn from literature, emotions and medieval symbolism.įaulkner and Vonnegut show us the importance of thinking about and communicating the unthinkable. But in his book Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (1988), Spencer Weart demonstrates how the most enduring description of the atomic cloud as a “mushroom cloud” comes from mythology. The Enola Gay is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named for Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, who selected the aircraft while it was still on the assembly line. A major challenge facing writers who want to take on the Bomb is that conventional description fails.