Literature and the Anthropocene

Pieter Vermeulen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351005401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Anthropocene has fundamentally changed the way we think about our relation to nonhuman life and to the planet. This book is the first to critically survey how the Anthropocene is enriching the study of literature and inspiring contemporary poetry and fiction. Engaging with topics such as genre, life, extinction, memory, infrastructure, energy, and the future, the book makes a compelling case for literature's unique contribution to contemporary environmental thought. It pays attention to literature's imaginative and narrative resources, and also to its appeal to the emotions and its relation to the material world. As the Anthropocene enjoins us to read the signals the planet is sending and to ponder the traces we leave on the Earth, it is also, this book argues, a literary problem.

Literature and the Anthropocene maps key debates and introduces the often difficult vocabulary for capturing the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in an insightful way. Alternating between accessible discussions of prominent theories and concise readings of major works of Anthropocene literature, the book serves as an indispensable guide to this exciting new subfield for academics and students of literature and the environmental humanities.

Part 1

Anthropocene Agencies

1 Forms, Lives, Forms of Life

Ecopoetics and Form at the End of Nature

One important implication of the Anthropocene is that nature, as a reality that is divorced from human culture, no longer exists. Humans’ far-reaching impact on the planet means that no part of the environment is untouched by human action, and that the world is now a thoroughly contaminated and compromised place. It would be wrong to see this is a sudden change: one of the lessons of the Anthropocene is that human and nonhuman realities have always been entangled. For many premodern communities, the idea that nature and culture were not intimately interlinked would not have made sense. The opposition between natural and cultural realms was always a cultural construct, and part of a process in which literature played a crucial role. Inherited ideas about nature were partly shaped by literary forms: the genre of the pastoral constructed the countryside as a repose from urban environments; in elegies, the cyclical rhythms of nature compensated for human losses and deaths; westerns, for their part, delivered the environment as a wilderness to be conquered and subdued. In the face of the Anthropocene, literature is revising these traditional forms and even developing radically new ones. In this chapter, I explore how formal innovation aligns contemporary literature with the aims of the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities.

One of the most remarkable works of Anthropocene poetry, Evelyn Reilly’s 2009 collection Styrofoam, opens with the lines “Answer: Styrofoam deathlessness / Question: How long does it take?” (9). What outlasts human impermanence here is not the soothing rhythms of natural regeneration but the “deathlessness” of thermoplastics. Synthetic polymers like polystyrene (of which Styrofoam is a brand name) are gradually replacing animal and plant life in the world’s oceans, especially the Atlantic and the North Pacific, and they are there to stay: nonbiodegradable, they reach beyond biological into geological time and will remain part of the landscape that nature poets of the (far) future will have to reckon with. In Reilly’s poem, “Styrofoam deathlessness” is a nonnegotiable fact—it is the answer that precedes whatever questions we want to direct at it. The second page of the poem restates this fact: “Answer: It is a misconception that materials / biodegrade in a meaningful timeframe // Answer: Thought to be composters landfills / are actually vast mummifiers // of waste // and waste’s companions // lo stunning all-color // heap-like & manifold.of // foam” (10). These two answers are neither preceded nor (as on the first page) followed by a question. In a sense, adding a question to what is an unalterable fact would be a way to pretend that such a reality somehow answers to human concerns. The poem’s elision of the question underlines that such human considerations are beside the point, and that Anthropocene poetry needs new ways to reflect a denatured world. The distorted order and punctuation of Reilly’s poem (“heap-like & manifold.of”) similarly points to the need to find a new syntax and new forms for an altered reality.

Plastic in many ways condenses the paradoxes of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, the alternative label of the “Plasticene” has already been coined (Reed 2015). Cheap to produce and available for many uses, plastic became the key substrate for consumer capitalism as it developed after the Second World War. Heather Davis (2015) explains that plastic embodied “the promise of sealed, perfected, clean, smooth abundance” (349). Plastic’s shiny surfaces fostered the fantasy that we could disconnect from the recalcitrant, amorphous, and inconvenient demands of the natural environment and seal ourselves off in a self-contained bubble (354). Yet plastic has refused to serve as a clean barrier that shields us from contingency, as its own proliferating material reality has come to destroy ocean and animal life and expose our human bodies as permeable and penetrable. In Reilly’s collection, plastic infiltrates human bodies: “Enter: 8,9,13,14,17-ethynyl-13-methyl- / 7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16-octahydro-cyclopenta-diol // (aka environmental sources of hormonal activity / (side effects include tenderness, dizziness / and aberrations of the vision” (9). The brackets never close, nor do the brackets within the brackets, as if to underscore that the human body, the female sex hormone estrogen (encoded in the chemical formula), and thermoplastics (which infamously release estrogenic chemicals) are inseparably enmeshed in an open circuit. If “tenderness” and “vision” are traditional attributes of poetic language, in this new constellation they are merely the side effects of plastic-induced hormonal disturbances. Anthropocene environments are not just sublime spectacles to be contemplated (there is a strange beauty to floating Styrofoam islands), they also course through human bodies. Human corporeality is, in theorist Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) words, always a “trans-corporeality,” in which “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world … ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin—perhaps even closer” (2).

Styrofoam draws inspiration from a long tradition of nature writing, even if it sees traditional forms as deeply implicated in the destruction of the environment. Reilly’s opening poem references Samuel Coleridge’s famous “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a tortured reflection on a sailor’s gratuitous killing of an albatross and a keystone of British romantic poetry. Coleridge’s “For all averred, I had killed the bird” becomes “(for all averred, we had killed the bird [enter albatross / stand in of choice” (11). Responsibility, in Reilly’s poem, is shared by a collective “we,” and the albatross is eerily interchangeable with other targets of human overreach—not least the seabirds choking on plastics that have become powerful emblems of the Anthropocene. Coleridge’s “Rime” dissects how the fallout of that transgression comes to haunt the sailor for the rest of his life; it shows how human life in overextending itself also ends up targeting itself. Reilly’s collection also amply references Wordsworth, another central figure in the consolidation of the romantic celebration of nature, and Herman Melville, whose Moby-Dick precociously intimated the dangers of planetary profiteering (exemplified by the whaling industry), while it also perpetuated romantic associations between nature and transcendence. As Lynn Keller (2015) has noted, Styrofoam shows how the romantic habit of finding consolation in a sacralized nature, by denying the entanglement of human and nonhuman entities, is complicit in the degradation of nature to which the collection testifies (854–56).

“(for all averred, we had killed the bird [enter albatross”: Reilly mobilizes italicization and (square) brackets to navigate a sea of information, a surfeit of seemingly nonbiodegradable signs. The environment in which contemporary poetry operates also contains digital flotsam: “Monica T / Soft and satisfying for infant teething if you first freeze. / posted 10/11/2007 at thriftyfun.com / … All this.information / anddeformation // & barely able to see sea” (11). The Internet is not only a platform that stimulates the consumption and production of ever more thermoplastics that stubbornly refuse to disappear, it also generates an “infowhelm” in which poetry threatens to drown. The intrusion of so many discourses—from chemistry over cultural history to the everyday banality of customer reviews—in the body of the poem is crucial for Styrofoam: it is not only a collection about environments after the end of nature, but also about the viability of poetry in saturated information ecologies.

In Styrofoam, the consolations of pastoral make way for formal innovations that signal a crisis that is environmental as well as literary. Reilly’s work is often considered as a work of ecopoetics, a kind of writing that directly addresses environmental crisis and that emerged in the 1990s and was later consolidated around poet and critic Jonathan Skinner’s experimental journal ecopoetics. For Juliana Spahr (2011), another poet affiliated with this development, ecopoetics differs from traditional nature poetry that, as she writes, “even when it got the birds and the plants and the animals right it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat” (69). In ecopoetics, environmental crisis is also a crisis of representation, as the customary formats that organized the divisions between the human and the nonhuman are unable to accommodate both bird and bulldozer. Ecopoetical form, in contrast, reflects what Margaret Ronda (2014) calls “incommensurabilities and violent estrangements” (105). In the case of Styrofoam, the inevitable inadequacies and distortions of representation are reflected in the unstable lay-out, the erratic punctuation, the quasi-misprints, and the agglutination of words (“All this.information / anddeformation”). The collection resembles nothing so much as the effect of copy-and-pasting an image-based PDF as plain, editable text. The collection’s most remarkable stylistic features are then so many glitches afflicting this attempted conversion.

There are two ways to assess Styrofoam’s formal innovations: as evidence of a breakdown of obsolete forms, or as an attempt to design new forms for a new reality. Most existing literary criticism on the Anthropocene tends to underline formal failure, and to promote works whose “material and formal qualities … come to displace and overwhelm” established forms of expression and representation (Clark 2015, 183). It emphasizes “disjunctiveness, a being-overwhelmed by contexts in which the human perceiver is deeply implicated but cannot hope to command or sometimes even to comprehend” (184). This emphasis on formal inadequacy in the face of crushing realities recalls the structure of the romantic sublime: as I already explored in the introduction, this model stages a collapse of the human capacity to represent an overpowering reality (mountains, waterfalls, canyons) but still snatches some consolation from its higher-order insight in this mismatch between mind and matter. It is certainly possible to describe Reilly’s glitchy collage in those terms. At the same time, we also saw her poetry dismiss such a recuperative sublime in its critical update of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Melville.

It may be more productive to consider Styrofoam as an ultimately successful effort to devise new forms rather than as a campaign to break obsolete ones. The collection’s capacious collage of human and nonhuman forces, of different commercial, scientific, and cultural discourses, but also of images, charts, drawings, and diagrams is a formal achievement: it presents a formal equivalent of the sprawling, weirdly unexciting, but increasingly unavoidable presence of thermoplastics in the planetary ecosystem. Old forms (such as the romantic sublime) are not displaced or discarded: they are recycled as part of this new formal construction. The text’s sparse and irregular lay-out of scratches and dots on a white surface even resembles the typical texture of Styrofoam. This is not the naïve evocation of a text-external reality typical of traditional poetry, but a form of mimesis that locates itself in the Anthropocene infowhelm and mobilizes the affordances of poetry to convey, in different ways, the contours and the feel of a previously unsung but increasingly inescapable environmental reality. Styrofoam’s structural, visual, typographic, and stylistic choices all point to an attempt to make rather than break form.

The notion of form can help us understand how literature can contribute to the interdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene under the label of the environmental humanities (a field I map in the third section of this chapter). The Anthropocene is marked by an intense reorganization of the relations between different (cultural, political, social) forms of life and (biological) life forms—an unstable distinction to which I return below. A medium like literature that is defined by its restless grappling with form can help us gain traction on this mutating reality. Of course, form is a notoriously slippery notion. Literary criticism can be relied on to rediscover the importance of form every few decades. Since the 1990s, the discipline has launched several “new formalisms” (Levinson 2007), which has not resulted in a shared understanding of the term (Kramnick and Nersessian 2017). Yet this lack of a strict definition also makes form a versatile and flexible term for articulating complex realities. In her book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Caroline Levine (2015) emphasizes that the notion of form not only points to artistic and literary arrangements, but also to social ones. For her, “form always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering; patterning, or shaping”; form, for Levine, means “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference” (3). Forms “can organize both social and literary objects” (13), and a sustained focus on form makes it possible to trace the ways literature engages social life through the collisions, overlaps, and intersections of forms.

Anthropocene literature does not stop at social life. As it also engages biological, geological, and cosmic dimensions, it traffics in things that are precisely not configurations, that are not ordered, but rather intractable, resistant, diffuse, or even intangible. Tracing encounters with such things requires a more capacious account of the relations between form and life. In a felicitous phrase, Styrofoam calls the Anthropocene “our infinite plasticity prosperity plenitude” (Reilly 2009, 43), suggesting that in the Plasticene, the notion of life itself has become plastic. Following the work of Catherine Malabou, Arne De Boever (2016) explains that plasticity does not mean that life is infinitely malleable and fungible, but that it is able to “receive, give, and explode form” (24). But Anthropocene form does not stop at life: following Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2016) work on “geontopower,” we can see that it is not only life that is at stake, but, “as the previously stable ordering divisions of Life and Nonlife shake,” we also need to be mindful of the differences between bios and geos, between living and nonliving things (5). Some things are precisely not malleable, not plastic. One of these things is, surprisingly, plastic itself. Heather Davis (2015) remarks that plastic may be “the hardest material there is,” as “it refuses its environment, creating a sealant or barrier that remains impermeable to what surrounds it” (351–52). Even when plastic breaks apart, “[t]he molecules themselves remain intact, holding onto their identity” (352). A sufficiently capacious account of form, in other words, also needs to factor in a resistance to formal patterns and arrangements.

In the next section, I situate the relation between life and form in the development of the field of ecocriticism, the literary subfield in which that relation has been discussed since the early 1990s. As I show, ecocriticism traditionally celebrated literary writing for its capacity for literary mimesis, before it took inspiration from a strain of critical theory it initially resisted to move on to a more sober appreciation of the constructedness of nature. Only more recently has ecocriticism shifted from the extremes of mimesis and construction to a consideration of the multifarious interactions, not only between literature and science, but also between the natural and the social world. In the section after that, I draw on the distinction between forms of life and life forms to show how contemporary ecocriticism, this time increasingly operating under the banner of the environmental humanities, negotiates literature’s engagements with different differences: with different histories, values, ethnicities, and classes, but also with natural and geological forces, and with kinds of life and nonlife. Giving these different elements their due involves remaining attentive to their specificity and not collapsing them into all too vast categories such as “the other” or “the nonhuman.”

To illustrate the importance of differentiating differences, the last section of the chapter turns to the field of critical ocean studies with a discussion of J.M. Ledgard’s novel Submergence and his curious Terra Firma Triptych: When Robots Fly. These works exemplify the interactions between biological and social forms and demonstrate the complementary needs for scientific literacy and cultural knowledge. Both works are thematically complex, draw on different forms of disciplinary expertise, and deploy multiple genres and formats. They illustrate how the Anthropocene challenges the limits of ecocriticism and brings the ecological study of literature into the remit of what Ursula Heise (2014) has called “the transdisciplinary matrix” of the environmental humanities. Ecocriticism’s contiguity to disciplines such as environmental history, environmental anthropology, cultural geography, critical animal studies, and political ecology (all of which increasingly operate under the umbrella of the environmental humanities) becomes a vital asset when confronting the Anthropocene.

What Was Ecocriticism?

One curious fact about the history of academic ecocriticism is that it took so long to catch up with non-academic environmental writing. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 condemnation of pesticide overuse, is commonly considered the beginning of modern environmentalism (Garrard 2004, 1), and the two-page “Fable for Tomorrow” that opens Carson’s text already prefigures Anthropocene discourses in uncanny detail. There is a (decidedly suburban) pastoral (the book begins: “There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings”), a sudden apocalyptic interruption (“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change”), echoes of radioactive fallout (as “a white granular power” falls “like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and the streams”), and finally the realization that responsibility cannot be outsourced to “witchcraft” or “enemy action”: “The people had done it themselves” (Carson 2002, 1–3). Carson’s opening fable is marked by an astute use of formats such as pastoral and biblical apocalypse and by the multidirectional interactions between technology, nature, and human life. This shows that the Anthropocene is only one chapter in a longer history of ecological awareness, making it all the more remarkable that such awareness initially found few echoes in the academic study of literature.

In the years between Silent Spring and the emergence of ecocriticism in the early 1990s, and definitely since the 1970s, literary criticism in the Anglophone world was dominated by a philosophically informed consideration of the ways texts construct realities and identities. Representation and narrative were studied as processes that shape the world; because such processes were indelibly warped by power, the capacity of literary texts to reliably refer to a text-external reality met with skepticism at best. The use of biological metaphors (as when the state is imagined as a body politic, or feminine beauty as a flower) was seen as a sinister form of “naturalization”: invoking the stability of nature was seen as a ploy to pass off mutable social arrangements as self-evident and common sense. Until the 1950s, the romantic notion of literary works as organic and internally harmonious totalities had dominated literary criticism. The living harmonies of literature were categorically separated from what were seen as the reductive and soulless operations of science and theory. The critical movements that followed (especially poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxist criticism, and the new historicism) reacted to this overly pious approach to literary objects and drew on theoretical and non-literary knowledge to dismantle rather than celebrate literary texts. In this transition, the natural world stayed out of the picture. To the extent that literary criticism engaged political issues (and it did so increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s), it attended to the recognition of ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities rather than to questions of environmental justice.

Only more recently has literary criticism begun to see that the constructedness of nature and nature’s irreducible materiality are not mutually exclusive ideas, and neither are the value of nature and the importance of cultural difference. The development of ecocriticism is customarily figured as a series of (as many as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Naming, Telling, Writing—The Anthropocene
• PART 1: Anthropocene Agencies
• PART 2: Anthropocene Temporalities
• Glossary
• References
• Index