James and the giant, looming specter of nuclear annihilation

On September 11, 2001, millions of Americans came of age in an instant. These shrines to our own material excess, these modern constructions of our engineering prowess and wealth, our skyscrapers were subject to the same laws of physics which brought Jenga bricks tumbling down. The illusion of security was shattered, our perceptions of air travel and metropolises irrevocably altered. What is it about these modern Towers of Babel that so lend themselves to this sort of reverence, bordering on worship? We Americans are obsessed with our apparent command of this planet, with the godlike characteristics attributed to the movers and shakers of our society, and especially with the lengths to which we can stretch our metallic phallic monuments into the sky. When one of these idols is destroyed, when the beloved celebrity politician is assassinated or a passenger airliner demolishes a longstanding testament to our financial immensity like the World Trade Center, our collective worldview is momentarily shattered, giving rise to countless conspiracy theories in attempts to reconcile our previously-held notions about the nature of reality with these new developments.

Because of our attachment to structures like our skyscrapers, who within the realm of our American psyche are much larger and more significant than empirical observation would suggest, we tend to stress over even a suggested threat to them. For example, the fever pitch of paranoia during the Cold War era was the result not of a singular cataclysmic societal tragedy but of a perceived threat, a possible scenario in which everything American society held dear would be destroyed instantaneously. And, interestingly, this is the political and cultural climate the characters of James and the Giant Peach find themselves in. As they descend upon New York City in their fanciful, flavorful flying machine, the first attempted identification of the mysterious object was that it was “an enormous bomb sent over by another country to blow the whole city to smithereens.”¹ Although taking place over a span of some fourteen pages, this event is the most important and lasting message in the entire story. In his novel, Dahl attempts to trivialize the threat for his prepubescent readership, sending a positive and relieving message to a youth populace doubtless terrorized by the ubiquitous paranoia and sheer terror running rampant in the contemporary media and culture.

And was it ever rampant: itʼs difficult to reflect on the popular fiction of the mid twentieth century without considering all of it through the lens of Cold War symbolism, accidental or intentional. Science fiction dominated the box office, first telling of monstrous something-foot somethings with intentions to wreak havoc on the American homestead and eventually depicting life in a post-apocalyptic landscape following the inevitable conflict. Tales of alien invasion, although having their roots in the previous century before atomic weapons were even imagined, became hugely popular during these intermediate decades. As explained by Philip Nel in his article “Metaphors and Paranoia: Two Approaches to Contemporary American Fiction,” these popular trends are indicative of the fact that “paranoia ha[d] become a central metaphor of American fiction and culture during … the Cold War period.”² Dahlʼs work falls snuggly into this pop science fiction tradition, what with its magically-enhanced insect characters and stretching of the laws of physics. The greater portion of the novel is unremarkable in the context of scaremongering or war paranoia, following commonly-established tropes of the progress narrative and childrenʼs adventure stories. It isnʼt until the titular fruit begins its descent on our most American of cities that things begin to become interesting.

And all the way across the vast stretch of America, in all the fifty states from Alaska to Florida, from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, the alarm was sounded and the word went out that the biggest bomb in the history of the world was hovering over New York City, and that at any moment it might go off.¹

This passage is perhaps among the most peculiar in the entirety of Dahlʼs decidedly peculiar body of work. Here, in a novel henceforth taking place exclusively in England and over a significant of the Atlantic Ocean, the author seems to suddenly address American readers specifically, contextualizing the gravity of this fictional spectacle in American terms for American readers. He expresses the unbelievable speed with which this message of panic spread across the entire United States, at which point the entire event becomes somewhat ridiculous.

How insane of these silly adults, it would seem, to enter a state of “something like pandemonium”¹ over a floating piece of fruit! “A few women screamed. Others knelt on the sidewalk and began praying aloud … And for the next thirty seconds the whole City held its breath, waiting for the end to come.”¹ Of course, the object hovering so suspiciously above them and its occupants, to be discovered later, posed no threat at all, and yet these ridiculous New Yorkers panicked and told one another, “Good-by, everybody, good-by!” in anticipation of their certain and violent deaths. Perhaps Dahl was merely trying to ensure the calmness of Americaʼs youth should doomsday ever actually arrive by having them honestly believe that the falling missiles were mutated fruits populated by friendly insect friends. More likely, however, was that he attempted to dissuade the children from buying into unnecessary and premature panic, maintaining their better judgements until more and better information becomes available. At which point they could decide their course of action, perhaps discovering that “paranoia may be, in fact, an intelligent response.”²

Regardless, these passages in Roald Dahlʼs novel serve only to show the irrationality and fear exhibited by a majority of Americans during this time from another perspective, putting the events, boundless speculations, and threats of the Cold War era in a new context for his child readers. With the understanding that not everything is always necessarily as bad as it at first may seem, and with a respect for gaining better understanding and information before jumping to conclusions, Dahl may very well have been attempting to create a new generation of analytical reasoners to deal with an increasingly frightening and paranoid world. However, even Roald Dahlʼs valiant effort to effect a more reasonable society could not overcome the cyclical nature of cultures and histories. Judging by the fact that the attacks on September 11 led to a degree of paranoia and terror rivaling that achieved during even the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that they led inexplicably to two inescapable desert conflict quagmires, something tells me that the children reading James and the Giant Peach during the Sixties may have grown up to be exactly like their parents. So it goes.