Rewriting the Unthinkable: Atomic Bodies and the Nuclear Sublime in Lindsey A. Freeman’s Creative Memoir This Atom Bomb in Me (2019)

Traditional theories of the natural sublime still suggest a fraught and distant experience of overpowering natural landscapes and thus seem incompatible with the Anthropocene aesthetic and imaginative crises, which compel us to question the nature/culture divide. The nuclear or atomic sublime, for its part, has built on the natural sublime’s “terrible beauty” to aestheticize phenomena which leave the human subject in a state of “petrified awe” (Shukin 2020) and devoid of any sense of responsibility (Ferguson 1984; Wilson 1989; Hales 1991). This presentation will turn to the genre of the creative memoir or “eco-memoir” (Lynch 2020) as a resourceful site for thinking about the material sublime and new materialist alternatives to the nuclear sublime. More specifically, by means of a rhetorical and narratological analysis of atomic culture in Lindsey A. Freeman’s The Atom Bomb in Me (2019), this paper will evaluate the affordances and limits of using the nuclear sublime to figure the “invisible” and yet global and still-pervasive issue or “hyperobject” (Morton 2010; 2013) of nuclear danger. This presentation will also explore how Freeman’s interests in new materialist trends and concepts such as “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010) and “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010), which view humans and nonhumans as constantly “intermeshed” (Alaimo 2010, 2), in the “lower” sense of touch, and in other aesthetic categories such as the gothic and the weird (Fisher 2016), help her imaginatively rewrite our understanding of the emotional and affective dimensions of the nuclear sublime and sensorium. Overall, through its study of one of the ramifications of the current environmental crisis (atomic power) in Freeman’s memoir, this paper will redefine the nuclear sublime as a beguiling and dangerous strategy to represent the intricacies of our relationship with humans, nonhumans and technology in the Anthropocene.