Redeeming Hitler? Steve Erickson’s Tours of the Black Clock (1989)

Abstract

The three preceding chapters have traced the development of Hitler Fiction from the early 1970s into the new millennium, from the Vietnam era to the post-9/11 period. Over the last thirty years, I have argued, American culture has transformed the figure of Hitler into the epitome of evil; the Hitler trope has been turned from a means of left-wing critique into a rhetorical device to affirm right-wing accounts of American exceptionalism and to reconstruct the progressive narrative; and the dominant cultural function of Hitler Fiction has changed accordingly from self-critique to projection and then to othering. Since the mid-1990s, though, texts such as Robert Pielke’s Hitler the Cat Goes West (1995) have reappropriated the trope for their left-wing critique of American society. Unlike its far more numerous realist counterparts, Pielke’s postmodernist novel rejects essentialist notions of good and evil, and even casts (a) Hitler as its hero. However, the text does not as extensively and selfconsciously explore how the trope works and what meanings the figure of Hitler transports for American culture at the end of the twentieth century, as early-1970s texts did for their time. During the last two decades only texts that frequently mention but never represent Hitler, most notably Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and William Gass’s The Tunnel (1995), have tackled these questions in any detail. Among the 1980s and 1990s texts that feature Hitler as a character, there is only one that constantly and carefully negotiates these issues, Steve Erickson’s novel Tours of the Black Clock (1989).