Abstract
Beginning with analyses of work by Ben Marcus, Blake Butler, and Barbara Kingsolver, this chapter discusses the way fiction can respond to dramatic shifts in humanity’s place in the world. It contrasts the explicitly American, capitalist perspective on climate change and mass extinction in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream with the Indigenous perspectives of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, then turns to the fantastic worlds of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and Adam Roberts’s Bête. All four authors suggest the importance of seeing precarity and vulnerability as essential to all creaturely life, and challenge ideas of linear narratives. By examining the way language is shared between creatures and positioning mass suffering and death as a form of relation, they suggest new directions for narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
Amitav Ghosh (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 124.
- 2.
Ghosh, Great, p. 66.
- 3.
Roy Scranton (2015) Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights), p. 19.
- 4.
As Mary Louise Pratt writes: ‘the question of how to live the Anthropocene is inseparable from the question of how to write it. Indeed, writing becomes the way of posing the question of how to live.’ Mary Louise Pratt (2017) ‘Concept and Chronotope’, in Anna Tsing et al. (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), pp. G169-G174, p. G170.
- 5.
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35, 197–222, p. 207.
- 6.
Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (2015) ‘Art and Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment and the Sixth Extinction’, in Davis and Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press), pp. 3–29, p. 13.
- 7.
The term was coined in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene F. Stormer, and popularised in the twenty-first century by Paul J. Crutzen. See Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill (2007) ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature’, Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 36.8, 614–621.
- 8.
Astrid Bracke (2018) Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel (London: Bloomsbury), p. 16.
- 9.
Italo Calvino (2009) Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Penguin), p. 124. Original emphasis.
- 10.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 26. Niklas Luhmann takes a very different view, in which the construction of modern knowledge is predicated on distinctions that can only generate further distinctions, such that any transcendent unity or knowledge of the world is ultimately impossible. Niklas Luhmann (2002) Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. William Rasch, trans. Joseph O’Neil et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 74.
- 11.
Aaron Rosenberg (2018) ‘Romancing the Anthropocene: H.G. Wells and the Genre of the Future’, Novel 51.1, 79–100, p. 82.
- 12.
See Frank Kermode (2000) The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- 13.
Ben Marcus (2012) The Flame Alphabet (New York: Knopf), p. 11. This is a repeated theme of Marcus’s writing: in an earlier text, for instance, a character declares ‘I will not succumb to the easy distractions of language poison’. Ben Marcus (2002) Notable American Women (New York: Vintage), p. 3.
- 14.
Blake Butler (2009) Scorch Atlas (Chicago: Featherproof), p. 76.
- 15.
Barbara Kingsolver (2012) Flight Behaviour (London: Faber), p. 17.
- 16.
This dynamic, where a secondary POC character changes the perspective of a white protagonist, appears in many of Kingsolver’s novels, although it is handled somewhat more delicately here. For a fuller discussion of the relation between domestic and environmental politics in the novel, see Kristin J. Jacobson (2018) ‘Radical Homemaking in Contemporary American Environmental Fiction’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 6.1. https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/doi/10.16995/c21.31/. Accessed 21 June, 2018.
- 17.
As Timothy Clark argues, the happy ending of Flight Behaviour arguably lessens the immediacy of Kingsolver’s argument. Given that both human and nonhuman characters achieve resolution, the reader’s temptation is to see the butterflies as symbolic of human experience, and ‘[i]n so complex a context as the Anthropocene, narrative closure of the kind achieved in Kingsolver’s novel will always risk being evasive’. Timothy Clark (2015) Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury), p. 178.
- 18.
Vincent Normand (2015) ‘In the Planetarium: The Modern Museum on the Anthropocenic Stage’, in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press), pp. 63–78, p. 65; Peter Sloterdijk (2015) ‘The Anthropocene: A Process-State at the Edge of Geohistory’, trans. Anna-Sophie Springer, in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press), pp. 327–340, p. 330. See also Bracke, Climate Crisis, pp. 23–37.
- 19.
Stacy Alaimo (2016) Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 1.
- 20.
Christina Crosby (2016) A Body Undone: Living on after Great Pain (New York: New York University Press), p. 185. Crosby’s particular interest is in the degree to which progressive narratives are often unable to depict pain and suffering, as discussed in the introduction.
- 21.
See Diletta De Cristofaro and Daniel Cordle (2018) ‘Introduction: The Literature of the Anthropocene’, C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 6.1. https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/doi/10.16995/c21.73/. Accessed 20 June, 2018.
- 22.
Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison (2017) Anthrozoology: Embracing Co-Existence in the Anthropocene (Cham: Springer), p. 124.
- 23.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), p. 282.
- 24.
Lydia Millet (2009) How the Dead Dream (London: Vintage), p. 13. Perhaps the oddest representation of such a relation between finance and animality is in Michael Cisco’s gargantuan experimental novel Animal Money, where the protagonists attempt to develop a secret economy based on a living, animal currency: ‘What is life? It is not increments, not units, not math. Life is qualities in action, verbs, as well as nouns. Animal money would have to be qualitative [… it] would mean handing someone an experience.’ Michael Cisco (2015) Animal Money (Portland and Astoria: Lazy Fascist), pp. 20–21. Millet’s novel, however, focuses on money as more conventionally quantitative; capitalism is here, as in Mark Fisher’s analysis ‘a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact’. Mark Fisher (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester and Washington: Zero), p. 6.
- 25.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press), p. 8.
- 26.
John Berger (2009) Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin), p. 13.
- 27.
Catherine Russell (1999) Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham and London: Duke University Press), p. 120. As she points out, the motto of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago was ‘To See is to Know’, highlighting ‘the coextensive discourses of science, visuality, imprisonment, and imperialism’ that govern the exhibition of both nonhuman animals and Indigenous populations (p. 123).
- 28.
Berger, Why Look, p. 30.
- 29.
T.’s description of zoos as a kind of ‘ark’ (197) reappears in Bill Broun’s Night of the Animals, a dystopian novel set in 2052 where the protagonist attempts to liberate all of the animals in the London Zoo: ‘So few nonhuman animal species existed in the deforested, bulldozed, and poisoned planet, the London Zoo had truly become a kind of “ark” for all interconnected life – an ark, and a death row prison.’ Bill Broun (2016) Night of the Animals (New York: Ecco), p. 5.
- 30.
Elena Passarello (2017) Animals Strike Curious Poses (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 208.
- 31.
Donna J. Haraway (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press), p. 49.
- 32.
Povinelli, Geontologies, p. 115.
- 33.
T.C. Boyle (2004) A Friend of the Earth (London: Bloomsbury), p. 44. See also Christian Kiefer’s The Animals (2015) which, like Boyle’s novel, depicts an individual’s struggle to maintain a private zoo, in this case not holding endangered species but wild animals with whom the protagonist has a close emotional bond. The novel is distinguished by its focus on individual death, beginning ‘[w]hat you have come for is death’; most notably, the third section of the novel switches to a closely-focalised third-person description of a bear’s reaction to its death, challenging ideas of a particular human relation to death. Christian Kiefer (2015) The Animals (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 13.
- 34.
Claire Colebrook (2014) Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press), p. 28. Original emphasis.
- 35.
Eugene Thacker (2010) After Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. xv.
- 36.
Lydia Millet (2011) Ghost Lights (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 218.
- 37.
Lydia Millet (2013) Magnificence (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 18.
- 38.
Carolyn Steedman (2001) Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 166.
- 39.
Alexis Wright (2016) The Swan Book (London: Constable), p. 6.
- 40.
Wright’s approach echoes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s description of Indigenous theoretical understandings: ‘they are woven into doing, they are layered in meaning, they can be communicated through story, action, and embodied presence’. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), p. 56. Simpson specifically highlights duality and layering as forms of holism rather than opposition.
- 41.
Linda Daley translates Olivion Ethyl(ene) as ‘forgotten carbon’, but it is as likely a reference to her Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Linda Daley (2016) ‘Alexis Wright’s Fiction as World Making’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 10.1, 8–23, p. 18.
- 42.
As Jessica White argues, the ‘wonder of Wright’s novel lies in her application of Indigenous Australians’ dispossession from their country to a global context, so that readers can understand what pollution will do to one’s mind, environment and home’. Jessica White (2014) ‘Fluid Worlds: Reflecting Climate Change in The Swan Book and The Sunlit Zone’, Southerly 74.1, 142–163, p. 148. While White stresses the novel’s appeal to European readers, however, Wright is careful to avoid such a binary distinction.
- 43.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2015) ‘Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worlding in the Anthropocene’, in DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (eds), Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 352–372, p. 354.
- 44.
As the Métis scholar Zoe Todd argues, the ‘current framing of the Anthropocene blunts the distinctions between the people, nations, and collectives who drive the fossil-fuel economy and those who do not’. Zoe Todd (2015) ‘Indigenizing the Anthropocene’, in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (eds), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press), pp. 241–254, p. 244. Likewise Françoise Vergés persuasively claims that ‘climate change is not about human hubris, but the result of the long history of colonialism and its Promethean thinking’. Françoise Vergés (2017) ‘Racial Capitalocene’, in Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism (London and New York: Verso), pp. 72–82, p. 80.
- 45.
Meera Atkinson (2017) The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (New York and London: Bloomsbury), p. 171. Atkinson links individual, collective, and cross-species trauma in her persuasive account of the novel as a ‘prime example of the poetics of transgenerational trauma as postmodern allegory’ (150).
- 46.
Maneesha Deckha suggests that ‘holding out non-Western cultures as resources to reimagine human-animal relations is to acknowledge that the dominant and dualistic negative framing that animals receive in Western narratives of human-animal relations is not universal’. Maneesha Deckha (2017) ‘Is Multiculturalism Good for Animals?’, in Luís Cordeiro-Rodgrigues and Les Mitchell (eds), Animals, Race, and Multiculturalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 61–93, p. 71. Wright, however, goes further to challenge the dualism between Western and non-Western perspectives as well.
- 47.
The black swan is particularly marked as a sign of difference between European and Aboriginal Australian cultures, according to Bruce Pascoe: ‘The early European reaction to Australia was to mock the kangaroo and emu, to ridicule the black swan and platypus, to laugh at the wombat, to regret that the kangaroo was not a horse, that the cod was not a trout, the thylacine not a fox. But the weird fauna held some strange influence over the Australian psyche and soon the kangaroo and emu were blazoned defiantly on the coat of arms, the black swan seen as emphatic difference.’ Bruce Pascoe (2007) Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press), pp. 181–182.
- 48.
Haraway, Staying, pp. 117–118.
- 49.
Arnaud Barras (2015) ‘The Law of Storytelling: The Hermeneutics of Relationality in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 15.3: 1–12, p. 3.
- 50.
Deborah Rose Bird (2017) ‘Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed’, in Anna Tsing et al. (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), pp. G51-G63, p. G53.
- 51.
Jason W. Moore (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London and New York: Verso), p. 4. Original emphasis.
- 52.
Moore, Capitalism, p. 35. Original emphasis.
- 53.
See Clark, 19–20.
- 54.
Jeff VanderMeer (2014) Authority (London: Fourth Estate), p. 35.
- 55.
Jeff VanderMeer (2015) ‘From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey’, The Atlantic (28 January). https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/from-annihilation-to-acceptance-a-writers-surreal-journey/384884/. Accessed 23 November, 2017.
- 56.
Jeff VanderMeer (2014) Annihilation (London: Fourth Estate), p. 6.
- 57.
Brian Rotman (2008) Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press), p. 6.
- 58.
The biologist phrases this in terms of a remembered song lyric, ‘all this useless knowledge’. The phrase, however, comes from Elvis Costello’s ‘All This Useless Beauty’, and the unnoted replacement indicates not only the biologist’s unreliability, but also the porousness of the novel.
- 59.
J. Halberstam and Ira Livingston (1995) ‘Introduction: Posthuman Bodies’, in Halberstam and Livingston (eds), Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), pp. 1–19, p. 3.
- 60.
Eugene Thacker (2015) Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester and Washington: Zero), p. 11.
- 61.
Thacker, Tentacles, p. 121.
- 62.
Jeff VanderMeer (2014) Acceptance (London: Fourth Estate), p. 43.
- 63.
Rosi Braidotti (2017) ‘Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism’, in Richard Grusin (ed), Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 21–48, p. 32.
- 64.
Moomintroll’s exploration of a barren, unfamiliar land in Moominland Midwinter, where he feels the ‘world belongs to somebody else whom I don’t know’ and meets many peculiar hybrid creatures, who themselves challenge the division between the real and imagined, is both structurally and thematically far closer to VanderMeer’s trilogy than might be expected. Tove Jansson (1971) Moominland Midwinter (London: Penguin), p. 18.
- 65.
Jacques Derrida (2008) The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 96.
- 66.
Adam Roberts (2014) Bête (London: Gollancz, 2014), p. 114. Original emphasis.
- 67.
Given that most companion species in the UK, if not necessarily all livestock, are mandated to have a microchip already, most pets are already cyborgs in this sense.
- 68.
Giorgio Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 71.
- 69.
Agamben, Homo, p. 98.
- 70.
Jacques Derrida (2009) The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 178.
- 71.
Penhaligon claims to remember people who remembered a free National Health Service, while a coffee at Starbucks costs 11 euros, marking the period as any time between now and 60 years hence, depending on the reader’s political perspective.
- 72.
Donna Haraway (2008) When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 78–9.
- 73.
Given the allusions to D.H. Lawrence throughout the novel, this development might echo The Plumed Serpent, where ‘Lawrence questions the possibility of intersubjectivity, of overcoming the boundaries of identity. […] Even eating the “flesh of my flesh” […] cannot bridge the impassable gap between two persons.’ Carrie Rohman (2009) Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 59. Yet as Rohman notes, Lawrence’s deep engagement with ‘the species problem’ suggests his scepticism about species hierarchies (100). As such, Roberts may simply be finding a solution to the problems with which Lawrence was wrestling.
- 74.
Jacques Derrida (2011) The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 113.
- 75.
Claire Jean Kim (2015) Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 21.
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Baker, T.C. (2019). The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories. In: Writing Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03880-9_5
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