Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age

by Alan Nadel

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history.
Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to Playboy Magazine , from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as Catch–22 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence .
An important work of cultural criticism, Containment Culture links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation’s cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Alan Nadel is the Bryan Chair of American literature and culture at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches literature and film. He is the editor of May All Your Fences Have Gates (Iowa, 1993) and the author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (Iowa, 1991), Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age, Flatlining on the Field of Dreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America, and Television in Black and White America: Race and National Identity.

Reviews

[Abbey S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brain is chugging along like a distressed laptop fan.

Nadel's "dilemma of the historian" is a Concept Of All Time. It's completely reframed how I view my own work, the cultural texts of the period, how I negotiate the intersection of American foreign policy and it's (non?) reciprocal relationship with cultural production, all that jazz. I'll be revisiting the first few chapters ad infinitum, and I'm really glad to have read those portions so many months ago for the chance to invoke Nadel's work in my own writing.

Further, his notes about Holden Caulfield's Christ figure symbology offering the only way out of the McCarthyism double-bind of speech, an inopportune, impossible appeal to a universal theological truth, is up there with my favorite Salinger analyses ever . And Nadel even circles the Glass family drain when he explicates Holden's own dilemma of silence/acquiescence: "Against that failure weighs the possible alternative, silence in the extreme, suicide" (85). Not sure if Nadel ever ventured deeper into Salinger land but, much like myself, I think he'd have a delightful time tracing Salinger's own nuclearity. Seymour haunts my narrative constantly (pun intended).

BIG HOWEVER INCOMING, THOUGH. I suppose I misread the Catcher in the Rye chapter because, in his later Catch-22 analysis, Nadel reiterates time and time again how Salinger deliberately appeals to and believes in Holden's theological universality. Don't piss me off. Nadel claims almost 100 pages later that, against Heller's breakdown of causal narrativity, Salinger/Holden was characterizing such a breakdown as "a personal failure to conform to objective norms" (168). Either I completely missed the part where Nadel justified where/why he thinks that Salinger constructs an objectivity for Holden to reach for, or he's blowing smoke. Nadel completely forgoes the position of the SUBJECT in Catcher , who resorts to the false theological truth, sure, but Salinger makes it clear that such a truth IS false. I'm probably screaming into the void right now, but it's not every day that I encounter exciting Holden Caulfield discourse, even if this was published over 30 years ago.

Aggravating Holden Caulfield analyses aren't enough to genuinely irritate me, though, especially since Nadel's work with Catch-22 was otherwise incredible. What really grinds my gears is the prose. I disagree with just about every single rhetorical choice Nadel made in this book. About half of my marginal notes are complaining about his writing style. Please don't use metaphor in lieu of a direct explanation. Please stop writing in Latin when you have no reason to other than to flex. Please stop burying the lead in your paragraphs. Please switch out your concluding sentences for your topic sentences. Please stop saying "to put it another way," only to put it infinitely WORSE than you did the first time.

Lastly, I'm perplexed by his obsession with the gendered component of Kenan's containment policy, and how that dual nature intersects with Sedgwick. For one thing, I don't think he did that initial connection between the dual nature of the closet and the dual nature of containment enough due diligence because I'm still fuzzy. Secondly, every time he invoked the man/woman/courtship/Other of it all, it felt so forced. Kenan's more popular characterization of containment, the idea of communism as contagion, would have worked better with room to borrow from Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet. That also would have made a strong inroad into communism/contagion/containment politics engaging with 1980s-90s AIDS crisis, which Nadel didn't touch. Instead, he stacked rhetorical analysis atop rhetorical analysis and left his readers to make the necessary connections on an uncomfortable subliminal level.

I don't know. I've read the "Long Telegram" myself, and I think some of Nadel's selections from that text are odd.

This review is way longer than I meant it to be, and I could keep complaining. TLDR: the historian's dilemma is so fascinating that, despite everything, I'm glad to have read this book. I identify with Nadel's subtextual anxiety over marrying literary theory with the (paradoxical) necessity of historians. At the end of the day, though, we have to admit the intangibility of the former and the necessary fiction of the latter - and that's okay!

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nadel argues that the culture of postwar America can be read in terms of the Cold War notion of “containment.” He analyzes a number of texts in this respect. These include films (The Ten Commandments, Rear Window, The Lady and the Tramp, Pillow Talk, What’s Up Tiger Lily, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), novels (The Catcher in the Rye, Hiroshima, Catch-22, Meridian) and historical events (the Bay of Pigs incident, the Free Speech movement at Berkeley).

Acquired Jun 17, 2003
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nadel writes, with a confident and easy manner, very stylish academic prose. Which is rare these days. This book explores Cold War culture and the ways it attempts and fails to contain, well, everything: sexuality, commerce, national politics, foreign policy, domesticity, etc. The many and diverse textual examples he reigns in adhere incrementally into a full argument very much invested in post-structuralist and postmodernist investigation. Some of my favorite textual readings here are the most surprising: Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" as indicative of the closeted stated of female sexuality; a reading of the Bay of Pigs and the CIA against Catch-22; Catcher in the Rye. This work is a touchstone for cultural studies in the Cold War period.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nadel's book may be a little dated, but it makes a lot of points that hold up 13 years later. His main idea revolves around the constant negotiation of containment in American culture. As always, our hero (culture) fights against political maneuvering and suspect premises, eventually showing their falseness. In particular, I liked the chapters on Catch-22, Lady and the Tramp,and Democracy.

[Lauren Levitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not always in the most transparent style. However, I enjoyed some of the chapters, especially the one on Playboy and Lady and the Tramp.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

He does some very interesting things with popular mass media