Abstract
This chapter starts by exploring the challenges facing environmental criticism in the twenty-first century, for the external crisis captured by the phrase “the end of nature” (McKibben 1989) has been mirrored by the internal crisis in the field of ecocriticism itself. The paradigm shifts known as the transnational and transnatural turns have necessarily affected ecocritical practices, as has the more recent material turn. This chapter tries to illustrate these changes with two contemporary Japanese American writers, Ruth Ozeki and Karen Tei Yamashita, whose novels explore the consequences of globalization and engage in a profound reformulation of nature. While Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being examines the limits of a materialist approach in its exploration of time-space compression, Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest uses the old trope of the machine in the garden to problematize the nature of nature.
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- 1.
In I Hotel, one of her most ambitious novels, Karen Tei Yamashita asks the resonant question: “Asian America (where’s that?)” (2010, 230). See the website of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW), for an ongoing discussion of nature of Asian American literature: http://aaww.org/curation/page-turners-asian-american-literature-in-the-21st-century
- 2.
In much the same vein, Stan Yogi coincided in the difficulty of finding a label for Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, at the same time that he claimed that the novel constituted a landmark in the Japanese American literary tradition, signaling as it did “a movement away from the treatment of specifically Japanese American characters toward a stunning blend of genres and characters” (1997, 148).
- 3.
Since the 1990s a rising number of studies have focused on the shifting nature of Asian American literature. Lisa Lowe’s “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity” (1991; cf. Immigrant Acts 1996) and Sau-ling Wong’s “Denationalization Reconsidered” (1995) were the first articles to seriously tackle the tensions between the old monolithic-nationalist and the new transnational-diasporic paradigms in Asian American studies. The late 1990s saw a proliferation of books dealing with the topic, among them King-kok Cheung’s An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (1997), David Leiwei Li’s Imagining the Nation (1998), Sheng-Mei Ma’s Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998), and David Palumbo-Liu’s Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (1999). These publications have been complemented by critical work appearing in the twenty-first century (Chuh and Shimakawa 2001; Nguyen 2002; Davis and Ludwig 2002; Simal and Marino 2004; Sohn et al. 2010; Simal 2013; or Parikh and Kim 2015).
- 4.
- 5.
She elaborates on this vision of the “pervasively domesticated” nature in Imagining Extinction (2016), where she calls for “a new kind of environmentalism” that accounts for the reality of tamed, “post-wild” nature (12, 208).
- 6.
As Dana Phillips convincingly claims, it was precisely the ecological crisis that triggered the emergence of ecocriticism itself: “Without environmental crisis … there might be no ‘environmental imagination.’ At best, there would be only a very attenuated one. Nor might there be ecologists struggling to understand and repair the mechanisms of a damaged natural world. … There is considerable irony in the fact that in order to begin to understand nature, we had first to alter it for the worse” (1999, 598).
- 7.
Not only the “nature of nature” but also its apparent uniqueness has been problematized in recent criticism. In the polemical War of the Worlds (2002), Bruno Latour maintains that the emergence of a postmodern “multinaturalism” (Viveiros de Castro) has already replaced the “mononaturalism” that had provided the bedrock for modernist confidence (20–21).
- 8.
My understanding of the term “global” coincides with Robert Marzec’s definition: “the complex of contemporary transnational forces of capital and culture governed by an endeavor to homogenize and reduce difference and distance, an evolving network first laid down in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries with the development of the Dutch, French, and specifically British Empires” (2007, 25). For an overview of the different positions vis-à-vis globalization, see Scholte (2005), Jay (2010), Goyal (2017), and Simal (2018).
- 9.
As we saw in Chap. 4, bioregionalism is far from dead, and some of the earlier ecocritics are rather skeptical about the effectiveness of global rather than local engagements with the natural environment (Berry 1989; Murphy 2009). Contrary to the positions held in earlier analyses of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Wallace 2000; Heise 2004; Simal 2010), John Gamber has recently argued that Yamashita’s novel traces Kazumasa’s quest for a real home, which he ultimately finds not in Brazilian cities nor in the globalized Matacão, but in the “local” and rural location where he finally settles (2018, 43).
- 10.
- 11.
One example of this material turn in ecocriticism would be Nancy Tuana’s viscous porosity (2008) or Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality (2010), two concepts discussed in earlier chapters), because of their emphasis on the interaction between the human bodies and the surrounding matter. Gamber’s theorizations of positive pollutions (2012, 7–8, 122) are also relevant here.
- 12.
- 13.
Among such literary topoi, many inherited from earlier gothic and pastoral traditions, Buell mentions the enlistment of “totalizing images of a world without refuge from toxic penetration,” “images of community disruption” and “pastoral betrayal,” or the reenactment of unequal David-Goliath battles (1998, 648–655). In Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins (2012), Gamber takes a different stance: while the critic is very much aware that the concept of toxicity has to be handled with care (6–7), he argues that it can be positively wielded in order to “represent a multitude of transgressive mixings that might be historically coded as negative, but which are demonstrated to be anything but” (7).
- 14.
In the prelude we saw a clear example of toxic riskscapes in Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), with its unnatural, nuclear plants. In addition, novels like DeLillo’s White Noise and Updike’s Rabbit at Rest underscored the fact that pollution had inexorably changed our experience of the planet itself “as primal home”: this is “a generation poised on the precipice of an epistemic rupture”—between knowing the earth as “the landforms, flora and fauna which are the home in which life is set and knowing the earth as toxic riskscape” (Deitering 1992, 200).
- 15.
Contrary to what might seem at first sight, Gamber claims, Tropic of Orange is as much about ecological concerns as Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, even though the former’s “urban setting might preclude some readers from considering it an environmentalist text” (2012, 154). For an ecocritical analysis of Tropic of Orange, see Gamber (2012, 120–154).
- 16.
Although it can hardly be considered “nature writing” in the traditional sense, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest has also been read as such, specifically as an allegory of the natural cycle of the rainforest (Ishihara 1997).
- 17.
The narrating ball can be literally and figuratively linked to the Matacão, but it can also be construed as a replica of the larger ball that is our planet. For an insightful analysis of the ball as narrator and of Yamashita’s narrative strategies, see Rody (2000). In “Local Rock and Global Plastic,” Heise also addresses the consequences of the choice of a nonhuman narrator (2004, 147–149). For a reading of the ball’s ambiguous import, see Simal (2009, 215–217). Finally, for an interpretation of the ball as “the memory of modernity” and beyond, see Wess (2005, 112–113).
- 18.
For a discussion of “Waste Theory,” see “‘The waste of the empire’: Neocolonialism and Environmental Justice in Merlinda Bobis’s ‘The Long Siesta as a Language Primer’” (Simal Forthcoming).
- 19.
According to the ecological theory put forward by Ellis and Ramankutty, we should favor the term “anthropogenic biomes” or anthromes, instead of just “biomes,” in order to “describe the terrestrial biosphere in its contemporary, human-altered form, using global ecosystem units defined by global patterns of sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, offering a new way forward for ecological research and education” (2008).
- 20.
Interestingly, the zoo has been interpreted as an excellent illustration of “how our desire for the real can give rise to the hyperreal, to a culture in which imitations are the dominant form of reality” (Phillips 2003, 21). In zoo-like Chicolándia Yamashita takes this trope even further, as she makes this site doubly artificial by introducing plastic animals.
- 21.
For the author, Yamashita’s novel manages to “synthesize the kind of Marxist critique of postmodernism offered by Jameson with the kind of interrogation of the nature/culture binary offered by Latour” (2000, 146).
- 22.
Retrospectively, we understand that the description of Chico Paco’s improvised altar is a proleptic version of such an explanation. When trying to fulfill his pilgrim promise and erect an altar, the boy “had gathered an enormous amount of iron refuse, nails, aluminum cans, plastic wrappings and plastic containers from a garbage dumb. He had filled a large base with all this trash, which he, in turn, melted down into a solid mass with a welding torch. The combination of these materials, in fact, simulated the physical structure of the Matacão itself, creating a magnetic attraction that proved irresistible” (97).
- 23.
In Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, for instance, there is an explicit reference to “the sweat of human labor” mixing with the forest (145). See Chap. 4 for a discussion of the interactions between human labor and the environment in Shawn Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston.
- 24.
The example used by Phillips a few pages later hints at the nostalgia for the lost, original “essence” of nature as much as for the actual deterioration of our planet: “The fiberglass fish look more like live fish than stuffed fish ever did. Of course, such trophies memorialize much more than a great day afield: they are monuments to a disappearing natural world” (1994, 209).
- 25.
- 26.
To substantiate his theory of the “betrayed Eden” (Buell 1998, 647), Leo Marx includes analyses of canonical American texts from the perspective of this “interrupted idyll” and the clash of tropes that it entails.
- 27.
The “Rain Forest parking lot” has also modified the customs and attire of some Amazonian Indians, who sport “reflective materials in the masks, headpieces and necklaces” thanks to the old mirrors from the car and plane cemetery (100).
- 28.
With “the advent of the global,” identities have been so thoroughly altered that, as Koshy cautions us, it now becomes “imperative that the transformed meaning of the ethnic [and national] subject in transnationality be reexamined” (2005, 111, 117). Such a reexamination, however, lies well beyond the scope of this book.
- 29.
In his recent “Dancing with Goblins in Plastic Jungles,” Gamber claims that rather than dismantling “the binary of the real and the fake, or the natural and the artificial,” Yamashita’s novel “relies heavily on very traditional, and specifically Romantic and Transcendentalist notions of Nature” (2018, 40). In fact, Gamber argues, Yamashita’s strategy is to “underline” rather than undermine clear-cut divisions “between the natural and the artificial,” privileging the former (2018, 49–50).
- 30.
- 31.
Coincidentally, Gamber’s new study, which focuses on the significance of birds in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, also sees echoes of Carson’s work in Yamashita’s novel and discusses them at some length (2018, 50–51).
- 32.
- 33.
For different interpretations of the type of pastoralism encoded in Yamashita’s novel, see Heise (2004), Simal (2009, 2010), and Gamber (2018). In contrast to the usual reading of the final chapter as an example of “agrarian optimism” (Gamber 2018, 44) or pastoral “bliss” (Heise 2004, 138), I still maintain that the last chapter of the novel can be more fruitfully read as an example of complex (post)pastoralism or comic apocalypse (Simal 2009, 2010).
- 34.
For an analysis of gender issues in Ozeki’s novels, see Monica Chiu’s “Postnational Globalization and (En)Gendered Meat Production in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats” (2001), Shameem Black’s “Fertile Cosmofeminism: Ruth L. Ozeki and Transnational Reproduction” (2004), and Youngsuk Chae’s “‘Guns Race, Meat, and Manifest Destiny’: Environmental Neocolonialism and Ecofeminism in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats” (2015). In her essay on My Year of Meats and All Over Creation, Black prefers to describe Ozeki’s novels as “cosmofeminist,” instead of using the ecofeminist label, arguing that the female subject position erodes the very physicality of borders and thus “stand[s] at the forefront of transnational forms of life” (2004, 226).
- 35.
Meat symbolism and the patriarchal oppressive system are indeed linked. For Chiu, “circulating [cultural] capital becomes a euphemism for prostitution between TNCs (pimps) and the women who become vehicles of sale, promoting masculine American beef to female Japanese consumers” (2001, 106).
- 36.
Another link between the two women, relevant not only in the plot but also in the very “literary texture” of the novel, is their common love of Sei Shonagōn’s The Pillow Book.
- 37.
Jane’s suggestions for the TV program become more and more radical so as “to counter the underlying sexist and racist (or exaggeratedly conservative) content that Joichi promotes” (Chiu 2001, 100). For Chiu, however, Ozeki’s novel is not ultimately successful, for the same “American Dream” ideology stays in place even after the ingredient of multiethnic (and other types of) diversity is introduced: “beef is coupled with American Dream families, subsequently undercut by ‘real’ immigrant families whose stories—advocating a ‘pull-themselves-up-by-their-bootstraps’ mentality—and their pig-cum-pork suppers become re-imagined fodder for overseas consumption. Essentially, nothing has been revised in order to promote a more thoughtful understanding of a diverse (and often embattled) America!” (2001, 107).
- 38.
Those dangerous, even criminal practices include what the narrator calls the “illegal hormone ring” (358), the “pharmaceutical farming methods that taint beef and sicken humans,” and the very “suffering of animals in abattoirs” (Chiu 2001, 101). In order to unveil such illegal practices, Ozeki resorts to some of the traditional conventions of detective fiction, with some differences; for instance, the monthly/menstrual chapters have clear female resonances not often encountered in classic detective fiction.
- 39.
Andrew Wallis (2013) hailed Ozeki’s first novel, My Year of Meats, as an accomplished example of global eco-consciousness. Ozeki herself notes that “the notion of interdependence” was pervasive and even “literal” in the first two books: “you are what you eat—the connections between the way our food is produced and who we become. And the global reach of our food networks is a playing-out of that interdependence” (Ty 2013, 162). For an analysis of the implications of the globalization of food, see Ecker (2000) and Torreiro (2016).
- 40.
In the novel, this is confirmed by the increase in cancer cases after the consumption of genetically modified potatoes. For a specific study of Ozeki’s narrative handling of GMOs, see Wallace’s “Discomfort Food: Analogy, Biotechnology, and Risk in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation” (2011).
- 41.
This strategy is not without its critics. For Heise, in trying to draw parallels between biological and cultural diversity, the novelist inadvertently conflates two realms that not always follow the same logic (2008a, 399–400).
- 42.
- 43.
The range of matters directly or indirectly examined in the book was rather overwhelming as some reviewers pointed out. Liz Jensen, for instance, in her review for The Guardian, described Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being as a “novel about everything from the Japanese tsunami and Silicon Valley to Zen and the meaning of life,” a narrative which “sucks the reader in like a great Pacific gyre” and thus threatens to drown us if we are not careful (2013). Not only Jensen but other reviewers like Moseley highlighted that such impressive variety of topics might overwhelm the average reader.
- 44.
A summary of the following analysis was presented at the SAAS conference held in Cáceres (Spain), in April 2017.
- 45.
Behind the intended homophony of Nao’s “now,” the narrative hides an imprecise past that reaches Ruth’s present in unpredictable ways. The author’s namesake, Ruth, seems to function as the writer’s alter ego, in an intriguing fictive-autobiographical maneuver that has been cogently analyzed by Rocio Davis in a recent article (2015).
- 46.
For his latest eco-artistic project, the “NeoEocene site,” Oliver has opted for taking “the long view” and prepares for the new scenario that global warming will bring about. He gets hold of a plot of land where he wants “to create a climate-change forest” full of “groves of ancient natives … species that had been indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago” (60). However, conservationist policies prevent him from carrying out the NeoEocene project, because such species are not considered native to Western Canada. This triggers a fascinating discussion about how we decide what can be considered exotic, invasive species. Oliver wonders that, “given the rapid onset of climate change, we need to radically redefine the term native and expand it to include formerly, and even prehistorically, native species” (120). See Heise (2016, 212) for an ecocritical analysis of “‘rewilding’ projects.”
- 47.
“When I start writing, I start with a sense of exploration rather than an agenda. It’s not like I have a secret plot to educate people about the evils of genetic modification or anything like that; it’s more that I have a concern or a worry myself. So the book is an excuse to do the exploration” (Ty 2013, 161; emphasis added).
- 48.
See Wallace (2016, 131–4) for an in-depth discussion of plastic materiality.
- 49.
A brief clarification is in order. Both Harvey’s project in The Condition of Postmodernity and the earlier work it is indebted to, Jameson’s exploration of postmodernism as “the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism,” apparently echo the Marxist base-superstructure dichotomy, for the material conditions of postmodernity seem to dictate a certain type of cultural superstructure known as postmodernism, which in turn might then be seen as a reflection of “a shift in the way capitalism is working these days” (1990, 112; 283). However, like many intellectuals of the late twentieth century, Harvey is wary of such a simplified approach to culture and, accordingly, calls attention to that risk: “it is just as surely dangerous to presuppose that postmodernism is solely mimetic rather than an aesthetic intervention in politics, economy, and social life in its own right. … Changes in the way we imagine, think, plan, and rationalize are bound to have material consequences” (114–115).
- 50.
By 1990, when his book was first published, Harvey believed that the new organization of capitalism had meant the effective compression of both time and space: “a strong case can be made that the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us. The time taken to traverse space … and the way we commonly represent that fact to ourselves … are useful indicators. … As space appears to shrink to a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies … and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is …, so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds” (240, emphasis added).
- 51.
As Song explains, texts dealing with globalization and the changes it has brought to time-space coordinates tend to “jump from location to location, ceaselessly occupy one perspective and then another, switch between the first-person singular to a free indirect speech that bounds from character to character without respect for nationality or language, and jumble past events with present occurrences” (2011, 555). This is the case of Ozeki’s novel.
- 52.
Nao uses Google and popular webpages like Amazon and watches her own virtual funeral in the Internet.
- 53.
An earlier version of this section was presented at the 2016 EASLCE conference, held in Brussels.
- 54.
In fact, Harvey had already pointed at such parallelism when he had resorted to the image of the “spaceship earth” in order to capture both “economic and ecological interdependencies” (240). Even the ICTs can be viewed as indirectly fostering an ecological consciousness. In contrast to Ozeki’s novel, whose depiction of ICTs is not entirely positive, in Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, we encounter a redeeming aspect of these technologies. In his analysis of Yamashita’s novel, Gamber describes how Gabriel, one of the main characters, comes to understand the role that ICTs play in developing awareness both of “global communities” and of our interdependent, global environment: in the end, Gabriel “does come to realize that he is connected to everything else, as the digital technology behind the internet facilitates an ecological awareness” (2012, 153).
- 55.
See Starr (2016, 112–113) for a different interpretation, according to which Nao moves away from Buddhism.
- 56.
The quotation opening Part 3 is important in order to understand how Ozeki tries to link scientific theories with Buddhist principles. The differences between both translations are notable, and Ozeki’s version clearly emphasizes the ambiguity of the phrase “time being” as a being in time, whereas other translations keep the literal meaning of “for the time being” as temporary, impermanent.
- 57.
This interpretation can be buttressed by the fact that Ruth Ozeki, the conspicuous alter ego of Ruth the character, is herself an ordained Buddhist priest.
- 58.
For a full description of the thought experiment, see Melody Kramer’s “The Physics Behind Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox” (2013).
- 59.
What is more, the same can be applied to the observer. This interpretation, however, is parodied in the novel when Ruth watches Pesto observing his asshole: “It didn’t seem like this observation caused him to split into multiple cats with multiple assholes” (Ozeki 398).
- 60.
In a recent interview, Ozeki intimates that her inclusion of quantum mechanics emerged out of her philosophical disquisition about reality, especially the reality of characters and human beings: “Are these people real, or are they not real? What is reality? And here is where the quantum universes come in” (Ty 2013, 162). The literary interest in such existential matters is far from new in literature: it is explicitly articulated through similar “author”-character confrontations in twentieth-century classics such as Miguel de Unamuno’s novel Niebla (Fog) and Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of An Author, published in 1914 and 1920, respectively.
- 61.
Buddhist non-duality is invoked on a few other occasions, as when old Jiko describes the surfers and the waves as time beings, and thus not fundamentally separate (194; cf. 204). See Starr (2016, 102) for a negative appraisal of Buddhist non-dualism.
- 62.
Ozeki concurs that “there is definitely an optimistic sensibility at the end of the book,” since, “by the act of writing that final letter, Ruth is calling Nao into being in the same way that Nao called Ruth into being at the beginning of the book” (Ty 2013, 169).
- 63.
For Rigby, “materialist ecological thought […] could be considerably enriched by entering into dialogue with older forms of nonreductive materialism” such as Buddhism (2014, 284). In their later publications, both Rigby and Gaard explore the extent to which matter is endowed with spirit, how spirituality matters. Gaard specifically discusses the ways in which Buddhism intersects with material ecocriticism. However, Buddhism is not the only religious tradition that can contribute to ecological thought and foster the care of the environment. Among indigenous traditions, ecocritics like Plumwood and Rigby point at Aboriginal spirituality as a viable way to “re-enchant” matter (see Chap. 4 for a discussion of the complex relationships of environmentalism and Native Americans). Notwithstanding the fact that Christian beliefs have been invoked to justify the exploitation of nature for centuries, there is an important Franciscan undercurrent in Christianism that has always fostered respect and love of nature and which, as Bill McKibben has recently noted (2015), has reemerged with Pope Francis and his Laudato Si (2015).
- 64.
The old and new worldviews evoked by oil lamps and LEDs are also embodied by Ruth and Oliver, as they lie in bed, side by side. Of these two characters, it is Ruth whose outlook on life more clearly changes in the course of the narrative. As she becomes more engrossed in Nao’s diary and learns more about Zen Buddhism, Ruth starts to question her postmodern skepticism and becomes more open to immaterial matters.
- 65.
In reaction to the linguistic turn in theory, the proponents of material ecocriticism have urged us to question abstract concepts and focus on “the concreteness of existential experience” instead (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 452). If constructivist theories saw “everything as textuality, as networks of signifying systems of all kinds,” SueEllen Campbell urges ecocritics to look elsewhere for guidance, to learn from the ecological science, which “insists that we pay attention not to the way things have meaning for us, but to the way the rest of the world—the nonhuman part—exists apart from us and our languages” (1996, 133).
- 66.
Original (Latour 1991): “le trou de l’ozone est trop social et trop narré pour être vraiement naturel.”
- 67.
For Jameson, the central “antinomy of the postmodern” resides precisely in this attempt to juggle the “antifoundationalist ball,” so to speak, with “the passionate ecological revival of a sense of Nature” at the same time (1994, 46–47, quoted in Wallace 2000, 138). For a study of the ways such an antinomy is overcome, see Wallace (2000); for a Burkean inflection to Wallace’s discussion, see Wess (2005).
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Simal-González, B. (2020). Facing the End of Nature: Karen Tei Yamashita and Ruth Ozeki. In: Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35618-7_6
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