BYPRODUCT TEMPORALITIES: NUCLEAR WASTE IN DON DELILLO'S UNDERWORLD AND VLADIMIR SOROKIN'S BLUE LARD

This paper examines two novels from either side of the bipolar Cold War - Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Lard (Goluboe salo, 1999) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) - and their approaches to narrative temporality and nuclear waste. Building upon interdisciplinary theories of nuclear fallout, climate change, the Anthropocene epoch, and narrative time, I argue that both novels struggle to dramatically expand their temporal structures to accommodate larger-than-human timescales, extending into the future as well as the past. The eponymous substance of Sorokin's novel, often connected and compared to nuclear byproduct, transgresses the boundaries of time, moving from the future to the past and back again. DeLillo's novel, by contrast, depicts a world that is at once saturated with wastes and deeply invested in concealing them from view. As with Blue Lard, the structure of the novel attempts to resolve this tension between "the two streams of history, weapons and waste". In my comparison of the two novels, I theorize a "byproduct temporality", which pulls the texts away from individual lifetimes or historical periods and toward toxic objects that transgress and problematize perceptual human time. Finally, both novels dramatize how societies try and inevitably fail to bury hazardous materials and, within the structures of the novels, unbury the nuclear detritus of our collective past.