Сухенко Інна Миколаївна, кандидат філологічних наук, доцент Дніпровського національного університету імені Олеся Гончара «On «Factual» in Fictionalizing Nuclear Events: Chornobyl Case»

 

Сухенко І. М.

к.філол.н., доцент

Дніпровський національний

університет імені Олеся Гончара

 

ON FICTIONALIZING NUCLEAR EVENTS: CHORNOBYL CASE

 

Within the factors of shaping the global nuclear discourse the Chornobyl nuclear power plant (April 25, 1986) was a real impulse to reconsider the narration of nuclear events by separating nuclear energy-related issues and nuclear weapons agenda. The literary perspective on narrating the Chornobyl disaster in Anglophone fictional writings (in our case - U.S. nuclear fiction of the post-Chornobyl Age) allowed seeing the features of shifting a nuclear event from a global scale (represented by the nuclear counteraction and nuclear weapon race of the superpower states) to the local level (represented by the local nuclear disasters, referring to nuclear tests, uranium mining, nuclear power plant accidents, nuclear waste management etc), which demonstrates the tendency towards literary implication of «domestic nuclear peril» [3, C. 726].  

The comparative narrative analysis, with a special emphasis on the relations between nuclear events (Chornobyl disaster, in our case) and their narrative representations in the aspect of researching narrative strategies towards textual coherence and structure within the transforming political, social and cultural contexts, is focused on researching the literary representation of the Chornobyl nuclear explosion, which cover the premises, stages and aftermath of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant explosion, depicted in U.S. nuclear fiction, such as F. Pohl’s Chernobyl (1987), A. White’s Radiant Girl (2008) and J. Reich’s Bombshell (2013). With the aim of highlighting the fictional consideration of the true nuclear event, all the authors purposefully emphasize the fictional nature of their interpreting the Chornobyl disaster in their novels, which confirms their attempt to represent their subjective perspective on the nuclear event and its aftermath. But the real nature of the fictionalized event evidently tends the usage of the factual component which is represented by the same spacio-temporal information (true locations, dates, names, organizations etc), the encyclopedic data and knowledge about the historical settings of the event. The inclusion of these data into the fictional storytelling shapes the perspective on nuclear fiction as a pool of archives data in our nuclear history.

The ways of narrating the Chornobyl NPP explosion within the nuclear agenda in these novels are studied though the ‘narrativization of experience’ [5, P. 89], which allows to transform personal narratives, regarded as ‘the most internally consistent interpretation of presently understood past, experienced present, and anticipated future’ [2, P. 206] , into propaganda narrative, related to the mediated U.S. nuclear strategy within the various social and political context. Such approach confirms that these fictional works on the Chernobyl accident vary with the different levels of using memoirs, represented in the forms of eye-witnesses’ memoirs, reconsidered eye-witnesses’ memoirs and intergenerational trauma memory of the events. [4, P. 43].

The reference to narrating the Chornobyl disaster through memoirs allows to distinguish the «factual» components in fictionalizing the nuclear event: Pohl’s perspective on the Chornobyl NPP explosion tends to be of non-fictional storytelling which a strong factual component in order to transfer the information for his Anglophone readers about the recently happening nuclear event, while White’s perspective is based on reconsideration eye-witnesses’ memoirs after visiting the Chornobyl NPP and the Chornobyl Exclusion, while for Reich’s protagonists the Chornobyl disaster is the reconsidered intergenerational trauma memory, which interprets the depicted events. Thus, the various level of memoirs’ component is one of the ways for the writers to include the perspective of their present feelings and thoughts about the past, with an attempt to digest the present day situation concerning the political, social and ecological dimensions of such a traumatic experience. Using such memoirs or documented eye-witnesses’ evidences defines the «factual» component of fictional storytelling on nuclear events and tends to be regarded as a claim of  authenticity for further interpreting the nuclear past. And such approach to inserting the fictional storytelling within the factual setting, represented by the true spacio-temporal circumstances and based on the memoirs’ component, which creates the emotional acceptance of the nuclear event, tends to blur the distinguishing line between the fictional and non-fictional interpreting of the real nuclear event

 In his recent book «Chernobyl: the History of a Disaster» (2018) Serhii Plokhy emphasizes the inevitable role of eyewitnesses’ evidence for revealing the truth about a nuclear event: «The further we move in time from the disaster, the more it seems like a myth — and the more difficult it becomes to grasp its real-life roots and consequences» [6, P. 6]. The nuclear fictional on Chornobyl is a contribution into commemorating the nuclear events. The «factual» component together with the writers’ reconsideration of eye-witnesses’ memoirs is the background for fictional depicting the protagonists’ emoting nuclear energy as a cultural concept and societal value, which all together functions not only as a step towards setting a full picture of the event happening in the past towards shaping nuclear knowledge about the nuclear history accident, but also as a contributor to shaping the public opinion about the current nuclear agenda and energy policy of humanity.

 

Лiтература

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3.     Hecker S. Nuclear Promise or Nuclear Peril? // MRS Bulletin October. 2010. Volume 35(10). P. 726-732.

4.     Lindsay S. Rereading Chernobyl: Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Literature. PhD thesis, University of Stirling, 2017. 259 p.

5.     Mishler E. G. Models of Narrative Analysis: A Typology // Journal of Narrative and Life History. 1995. № 5(2). P. 87-123.

6.     Plokhy S. Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. Basic Books. 432 p.