Sky and Smoke: Literary Atmospherics in Cary and Ibuse

A contrastive analysis of literary atmospherics in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (1944) and Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain (Kuroi Ame) (1962) presents sharply differing accounts as characters in these novels look skyward, careening between representations of a world of artistic possibility and threats of contamination. This dramatic shift, alternately fulfilling and fearful, provides a greatly altered scope for aesthetics in relation to the modernist Anthropocene. In The Horse’s Mouth, the delivery of a moral aesthetic relies mainly upon Cary’s “art-organized experience” (Case 1959, 119), the painterly representation of the skies above London which, canvas-like, serves artistic freedom and independence as a background for the human story. In Black Rain, by contrast, the horrific sculpting of the Japanese lifeworld by unseen atmospheric agents renders the putative perfectibility of art obscene. New atomic-era diseases (genbakubyō), like the communities they at once disfigure and enunciate (hibakusha), make a mockery of the painterly sky, and radically re-impose as radioactive the world-forming climate (fūdo) Ibuse’s contemporary, Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsurō, theorized. Such atmospheric bivalency—humanist in Cary and denaturing in Ibuse—is constitutive of a shared epistemological horizon within the modernist Anthropocene that differentiates, even as it connects, London and Hiroshima, Gulley Jimson’s antics and the voiceless collective of Hiroshima’s irradiated dead. I conclude with some provisional assertions about how our contemporary understanding of this shared horizon is also changing, as the stress of the Anthropocene requires the heuristics of world-consciousness to accelerate beyond the logic of juxtaposition (Here/Not-Here) and toward convergence (Everywhere Here). While the accelerating convergence of the modernist Anthropocene may create more opportunities for the singularity of imaginative experience, it also threatens the epistemological basis of alterity proper, the means by which any locality, experience, or individual action may be recognized as different from others....