Narrative in the Anthropocene 0814215076, 9780814215074

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Anthropocene Narrative Theory
1 Worlds
2 Material
3 Time
4 Space
5 Narration
Coda: Narrative and Climate Science
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

N A R R AT I V E I N T H E A N T H R O P O C E N E

T H E O R Y A N D I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F N A R R AT I V E

James Phelan, Katra Byram, and Faye Halpern, Series Editors

NARR ATIVE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Erin James

T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S C O LUM BU S

Copyright © 2022 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: James, Erin, author. Title: Narrative in the Anthropocene / Erin James. Other titles: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2022] | Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Drawing from a wide set of narratives-novels, collective biographies, indigenous speculative fiction and Afro-futurist fiction, short stories, and graphic novels-James argues that the Anthropocene is changing the very nature of narrative today”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021059161 | ISBN 9780814215074 (cloth) | ISBN 0814215076 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814282076 (ebook) | ISBN 0814282075 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Narration (Rhetoric)—Social aspects. | Climatic changes in literature. | Human ecology in literature. | Nature in literature. | Ecocriticism. Classification: LCC PN212 .J36 2022 | DDC 809/.923—dc23/eng/20220131 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059161 Other Identifiers: | ISBN 9780814258316 (paper) | ISBN 081425831X (paper) Cover design by Andrew Brozyna Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro

For Freddie and the better world he is building

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUC TION Anthropocene Narrative Theory

1

CHAPTER 1

Worlds 26

CHAPTER 2

Material 66

CHAPTER 3

Time 93

CHAPTER 4

Space 118

CHAPTER 5

Narration 145

CODA

Narrative and Climate Science

175

Works Cited

189

Index

201

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote much of this book during a global pandemic—an international crisis that made legible the precarity of our social networks and the interconnectedness of our lives. Of course, I also write in a crisis of anthropogenic climate change that, too, stresses our networks and lays bare the direct effects that our actions have on those with whom we share this world. Academic writing is a lonely exercise that encourages you to be appreciative of your support network at the best of times. My appreciation for those who helped bring this book into being is stronger because I wrote during these tough times. I am grateful to the “Theory and Interpretation of Narrative” series editors, as well as the anonymous reader, for their astute and supportive comments on the initial draft of the book manuscript. The University of Idaho supported my work for this book, both via a summer research grant and a glorious semester of sabbatical. I work at this institution with some of the best people that I know. Special thanks go to my dear friends Teresa Cohn, Jenn Ladino, Tara MacDonald, Jodie Nicotra, and Alexandra Teague, without whose professional and emotional support I would certainly falter. An unexpected yet delightful turn in my career is my interdisciplinary work via the Confluence Lab. Big thanks to all of the lab members who helped Jenn, Teresa, and I get this initiative off the ground and collaborated on our initial projects: Kayla Bordelon, Rob Ely, Ruby Fulton, Kristin Haltinner, Jeff Hicke, Leontina Hormel, Graham Hubbs, Stacy Isenbarger, Leda Kobziar, Melinda Davis, Tom Ptak, Dilshani ix

x  •  Acknow l ed g ments

Sarathchandra, Adam Sowards, and Anastasia Telesetsky. Thanks also to the stellar graduate students who helped me think through the ideas that I explore in this book and read chapter drafts: Mike Bishop, Neil Davidson, Michael Decker, Courtney Lucas, Jack Kredell, Christopher Lamb, Brian Malone, and Mikelyn Rochford. Members of the International Society for the Study of Narrative and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment were vital sounding boards for my articulation of an Anthropocene narrative theory. Special thanks here to Jan Alber, Marco Caracciolo, Nancy Easterlin, Jon Hegglund, and Eric Morel, some of my favorite collaborators and thinkers. I am also grateful for the opportunity to share my ideas with colleagues at the University of Augsburg, Ghent University, Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, the University of Gothenburg, The Ohio State University, RWTTH Aachen University, and the University of Wuppertal. My family is the best. Mom and Dad teach me how to be. Rudy (romping dog) and Poppet (napping cat) teach me how to live with abandon and relax, respectively. Ben and Freddie teach me how to love and adventure. You have my heart, always.

• Earlier versions of certain arguments in this book have previously appeared in print. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to revisit this work here. “Narrative in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology. Erin James and Eric Morel, eds. The Ohio State University Press, 2020. 183–202. “Nonhuman Fictional Characters and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis.” Poetics Today 40.3 (2019): 579–596. “The Value of ‘Old’ Stories: A Response to Marco Caracciolo’s ‘Negotiating Stories in the Anthropocene.’” DIEGESIS 9.2 (2020): 34–44. “What the Plant Says: Plant Narrators and the Ecosocial Imaginary.” The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Patricia Viera, Monica Gagliano, and John Ryan, eds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 253–272.

INTRODUCTION

Anthropocene Narrative Theory

Depending on whom you ask, the story of Anthropocene is one of many narratives. Initially, it was a narrative of industrialization. When Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer first introduced the term in the May 2000 issue of the Global Change Newsletter, they suggested that the new epoch began in the latter part of the eighteenth century. “Although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made,” Crutzen and Stoermer state, “we choose this date because during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become noticeable” (17). In particular, they draw attention to James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784 as driving the growth in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane during the Industrial Revolution, that are now preserved in glacial ice cores. Others have taken Crutzen and Stoermer up on their call for alternative proposals, and with each new start date the Anthropocene takes on a new narrative. For a group of scholars studying palaeobiogeography, the Anthropocene is a story of human-driven mass extinction; their analysis of the geographic distribution of all large mammal species suggests that the epoch begins much earlier than 1784—in fact, 50,000 to 10,000 years ago—and “provides strong support for modern humans as the primary driver of the worldwide megafauna losses during the late Quarternary” (Sandom et al., “Global” 280). For paleoclimatologist William F. Ruddiman, the Anthropocene is a story of farming. He argues that archaeological, cultural, historical, and geologic evidence suggests 1

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that “the Anthropocene actually begins thousands of years ago as a result of the discovery of agriculture and subsequent technological innovations in the practice of farming,” including forest clearance and rice irrigation (Ruddiman 261). Others still offer up a host of alternative stories of the Anthropocene, including the first appearance of the genus Homo over two and a half million years ago, the first cave paintings 40,000 years ago, the beginning of the printing revolution in 1439, and the invention of chlorofluorocarbons in 1920.1 Sometimes, even the same team of scientists cannot settle on one narrative of the Anthropocene. Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin’s survey of anthropogenic signatures in the geological record points to two potential origins of the epoch. In the first version of the Anthropocene, start date 1610, humans begin to make their mark upon the earth via the widespread reforestation that accompanied European colonization of the New World. During what Lewis and Maslin call the “Collision of the Old and New Worlds,” human populations decreased dramatically due to the European-led genocide of indigenous populations in the Americas between 1492 and 1650. Fifty million fewer people farming and harvesting wood for fire led to the regeneration of 50 million hectares of forest, woody savanna, and grassland. This in turn caused a significant carbon uptake by vegetation and soils that resulted in a decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide and produced the little ice age of the seventeenth century (Lewis and Maslin 175). Geologists today can read this carbon sequestration in Antarctic ice cores. But Lewis and Maslin acknowledge that a second, much more recent set of events also registers changes in climate, chemistry, and paleontological signals that geologists can read in stratigraphic records. “The latter part of the twentieth century is unambiguously a time of major anthropogenic global environmental impacts,” they write, the most notable of these impacts being the release of the first atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 (177). For this version of the Anthropocene, dominated by nuclear waste, plastics, and the persistent organic pollutants and inorganic compounds of the “green” agricultural revolution of the 1960s, Lewis and Maslin settle on a start date of 1964, the year that tree rings and glacier ice record peak radiocarbon. Favor one stratigraphic record and the Anthropocene is a story of genocide and imperialism—a narrative of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas that “highlights a long-term and large-scale example of human actions unleashing processes that are difficult to predict or manage” (Lewis and 1. All of these events plus the others that I discuss here appear in the “Anthropocene Timeline” on the Welcome to the Anthropocene website (www.anthropocene.info). The timeline “presents some of the major events associated with the Anthropocene idea.”

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Maslin 177). Favor yet another set of stratigraphic markings and the Anthropocene is a story of “elite-driven technological development that threatens planet-wide destruction” (177). Choosing between the two start dates is “challenging,” Lewis and Maslin acknowledge. Indeed, they note that “the choice of either 1610 or 1964 as the beginning of the Anthropocene would probably affect the perception of human actions on the environment” (177).2 I begin with this quick survey of the different narratives of the Anthropocene to highlight the complicated relationship between the two main concerns of this book: the act of telling and receiving stories and our current epoch, defined and marked by the irrevocable activity of humans on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Lewis and Maslin’s modest note about the effects of the different narratives of the Anthropocene cuts to the heart of the issue. The stories that we tell about our world, our environment, matter. They determine how we perceive the world around us, how we live in it, and how we act upon it. It is no wonder, then, that humanities scholars have homed in on this issue as a key point of entry into conversations about today’s environmental crisis. As literary scholars Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor state in their introduction to Anthropocene Reading (2017), “Each start date redefines the narrative, its eponymous agent—the Anthropos as agriculturalist, conquistador, inventor, industrialist, capitalist, cyborg—and thus the shape and potential outcomes of the story” (3). Change the story, they suggest, and change your understanding of how humans have altered the planet and how we best respond to the problems this collective action has caused. Yet just as geologists and climatologists remain divided on when the Anthropocene begins and with what human activities it originates, humanities scholars, too, remain divided in their thinking about the relationship between narrative and the Anthropocene. Menely and Taylor sum up this debate nicely when they state that the contributors to their edited collection both “examine the Anthropocene as a narrative”—as “a tale without an ending”—and “grapple with the Anthropocene as a historical event, a momentous phrase transition in the Earth system that exceeds narrativization” (5, 10, 5). Accordingly, the Anthropocene is both a narrative and incapable of being narrated, at once a story unfinished and not a story at all. This tension is 2. Lewis and Maslin expand upon this point: “Unlike other geological time unit designations, definitions will probably have effects beyond geology. For example, defining an early start date may, in political terms, ‘normalize’ global environmental change. Meanwhile, agreeing on a later start date related to the Industrial Revolution may, for example, be used to assign historical responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions to particular countries or regions during the industrial era. More broadly, the formal definition of the Anthropocene makes scientists arbiters, to an extent, of the human-environment relationship, itself an act with consequences beyond geology” (171).

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reflected in the opposing stances that many environmental humanities scholars take on narrative. Some, such as the editors of the first issue of the journal Environmental Humanities, are optimistic about the role that new narratives might play in a responsible environmentalism that confronts the damaging attitudes and behaviors that have produced the Anthropocene and thus call for an “unsettling of dominant narratives” and the popularization of “new narratives that are calibrated to the realities of our changing world” (Rose et al. 3). Still others, influenced by deconstructionist philosophy, suggest that narrative is a rhetorical mode deeply unsuited to our current epoch; for these thinkers, narrative is intimately tied to human perspectives and, as such, cannot sufficiently represent the broader timescales and sensitivity to nonhuman lives that they argue our current moment of environmental crisis demands. Hence Clair Colebrook’s statement that the climate change that defines the Anthropocene is “catastrophic for the human imaginary” and “should not require us to return to modes of reading, comprehension and narrative communication but should awaken us from our human-all-too-human narrative slumbers” (10, 25). In this book, I offer up a third approach to narrative and the Anthropocene—one that suggests that our understanding of both is reciprocal. I argue that we not only better know the current state of the world and our relationship to it by engaging with narrative but also better know narrative and how it functions by placing it within the context of the Anthropcoene. My approach corrects two shortcomings: a lack of engagement with narrative theory within the environmental humanities, despite a keen interest in the role that narrative and storytelling might and should play in today’s environmentalism, and relatively scant considerations of the environment in narrative theory, let alone more specific discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change.3 Other scholars have taken initial steps in marrying the environmental humanities and narratology, most notably those that cluster around the concept of “econarratology,” which I define as pairing the environmental humanities’ “interest in the relationship between literature and the physical environment with narratology’s focus on the literary structures and devices by which writers compose narratives” (James, Storyworld Accord xv). In my previous work, I argue that econarratology “studies the storyworlds that readers simulate and transport themselves to when reading narratives, the correlations between such textual, imaginative worlds and the physical, extratextual word, and the potential of reading to foster awareness and understanding for different environmental imaginations and experiences” (xv). In this book, I extend the 3. Important exceptions here are Marco Caracciolo’s Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (2021) and Peter Vermeulen’s Literature and the Anthropecene (2020).

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econarratological project by identifying and categorizing innovative narratological structures that represent the human-created world of the Anthropocene. I also contend with the contradiction inherent in the environmental humanities that the Anthropocene is both produced and mitigated by narratives and, at the same time, incapable of being narrated. I do this by thinking through various ideas and issues that we associate with our new geological epoch—especially those relevant to the processes of narrative production and interpretation, and narrative representations of time, space, and narration— and envisaging their possible narratological correspondents. My primary goal thus is not to analyze individual narratives about the Anthropocene or global climate change by pointing to their strengths and shortcomings, nor to identify the parameters (or lack thereof) of the genre of the “Anthropocene narrative” or “climate change fiction” (“cli-fi”). Instead, I propose an “Anthropocene narrative theory,” or a theory of narrative sensitive to matters commonly associated with the epoch, to explore how narrative and the Anthropocene inform and are influenced by each other. Such an exploration of the connection between narrative and the Anthropocene poses the following questions: how does narrative help us think differently about the Anthropocene? How do narratives provide us with “safe” offline contexts in which to explore the ways that humans make and inhabit worlds in their own image? How does the reading of strata in rocks, tree rings, and ice cores, which are themselves material representations of sequences of events, challenge basic conceptualizations of narrative and narrativity? How do the materials that we associate with the Anthropocene—rocks and ice, but also the fiber cables and LCD screens of digital medias—change the way that we interact with narrative? How do the new, broad conceptions of geologic time and planetary space associated with the Anthropocene diversify models of narrative chronologies and spatializations? How do controversial ideas about the collective agency of humans as a geological agent shed new light on types of narration and narrators? Indeed, how does the Anthropocene help us think differently about narrative? How does it inspire new resources that push against traditional narrative forms? My approach to narrative and the Anthropocene enriches narratological models by incorporating ideas pertinent to this new epoch and developing a more robust vocabulary for analyzing individual narratives in our present moment. It also makes a case for narrative in the Anthropocene—for narrative as the dominant rhetorical mode of this epoch—by tracing the similarities between the two. It thus argues that, contrary to what some suggest, we understand better the current state of the world and our relationship to it by engaging with narrative. We also better understand narrative by placing it in the context of the Anthropocene.

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Anthropocene Narrative? In her seminal work Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002), Val Plumwood draws an explicit link between the current state of the global environment and the stories that we tell about it when she laments a “dominant narrative of reason” that culminates in “global economic regimes that threaten the biosphere” as the primary cause of the environmental crisis (5–6). By linking the contemporary environmental crisis with a specific narrative, Plumwood articulates a theory now vital to the environmental humanities: the crisis is in part a product of a particular story, and a different story will help change the damaging attitudes and behaviors that have brought us to this point. Many environmental humanities scholars working in the wake of Plumwood have doubled down on the optimistic link that she draws between the right kind of narrative and a responsible approach to living in the world that alleviates many of the problematic behaviors that have produced the Anthropocene.4 Foregrounding their ethical commitment to environmental care explicitly, Ursula Heise and Allison Carruth posit that a key question of environmental humanities scholarship is “which concepts of narratives from the environmental inventory will move environmentally oriented thought into the future, and which ones shackle environmentalism to outdated templates?” (3). In The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016), Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz call for new work that “rethink[s] our visions of the world and our ways of inhabiting the Earth together” (12). Noting the 4. See, for example, the introduction to Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities (2015), in which Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan cite as a major theme of the environmental humanities the role that narrative plays in “drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about catastrophic and long-term environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, resource extraction, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification and capitalization of nature” (2). They further suggest that “a critical study of narrative . . . is essential to determining how we interpret and mitigate environmental crisis” (25). Ursula Kluwick concurs in her work on narratives embedded in climate change discourse, noting that public understandings of environmental problems are “intrinsically tied to narrative strategies” (503). See also Meina Pereira Savi’s “The Anthropocene (and) (in) the Humanities: Possibilities for Literary Studies,” in which she discusses the work of scholars and writers such as Donna Haraway, Ursula Le Guin, and Chinua Achebe to argue that the way “the stories we tell produce effects and literature, Achebe and Haraway show, is entangled with change. It may lend support to maintaining the status quo, yes, but it can also lend itself to produce, as Achebe says, the ‘kinetic energy necessary for social transition and change’” (953). Finally, see Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), in which he states: “In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories” (19).

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lack of influence that scientific studies have had in changing public opinions and actions, they argue that narrative is essential to such rethinking: “What historical narratives can we offer of the last quarter of a millennium, able to help us change our world-views and inhabit the Anthropocene more lucidly, respectfully, and equitably?” (13). Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke take a similar stance in a cluster of essays in Environmental Humanities titled “Imagining Anew.” They open the special issue reaffirming their “conviction that the humanities, in their attention to the creation and critique of aesthetic objects, can play a significant role in heightening public environmental awareness,” and suggest that new narratives better attenuated to the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of the Anthropocene can help overcome entrenched social and political resistance to the scientific consensus on climate change (Garrard et al. 149). These scholars all argue that we have told ourselves stories about the environment that permit and encourage destructive behavior and call for the exploration of new, more environmentally responsible ones. For these scholars, the environmental humanities is largely a project of identifying and cataloguing narratives—of figuring out which type of stories can foment bad behaviors among readers and which types can inspire responsible ways of living in the Anthropocene. Heise is explicit that which “stories about nature and humans’ activities in it underwrite environmentally oriented scholarship” is a crucial question of the environmental humanities (Heise “The Environmental Humanities” 29). She is particularly interested in the narrative of the decline of nature that for several centuries has been integral to environmentalist thought and activism. The popular declensionist narrative has run its course, she argues, stating that “this story has become so much of a predictable default template in environmental rhetoric that it sometimes overwrites other scientific and social accounts of natural change, and its political power has become blunted” (29). In the place of declensionist narratives and their related stories—narratives of nostalgia and apocalypse—Heise advocates for alternative, more historically aware story templates, especially speculative fictions and humorous stories. Furthermore, she sees humanities scholars as playing an essential role in the promotion of new narratives. In her version of the environmental humanities, critical analysis of declensionist narratives and the construction of better stories are the top priority. This move to tie a more responsible, earth-centered sensibility to a particular type of narrative is echoed by soil scientist Daniel deB. Richter. In “The Crisis of Environmental Narrative in the Anthropocene,” he argues that “new environmental narratives are needed to counter and enrich that of environmental declension” (Richter 97). He suggests a move toward Georgic narratives, arguing that “if declension

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narratives separate human beings from a natural world we loot, the Georgic has human beings intimately working constructively with the natural world, no matter the future prospects” (98, emphasis in original). In other words, change the stories and change the world. A second group of scholars agrees with the basic premise that the wrong type of narrative has helped to produce the Anthropocene. But they strongly disagree about the potential of the right type of story to help humans course correct. At issue for this group of thinkers is the fundamental ability of narrative to stretch to accommodate the nonhuman perspectives and vast time- and spacescapes that an environmentally responsible story in the Anthropocene must illuminate. They suggest that narrative, with its emphasis on the stories of individual humans, simply cannot well represent geologic time, planetary space, and experiences of nonhuman creatures and matter.5 Colebrook articulates this argument forcefully in Death of the PostHuman (2014) when she advocates for what she calls a “post-Anthropocene point of view” (24). If the Anthropocene was produced by human myopia, she argues, what humans now need is a new way of imagining and interacting with the world that takes seriously nonhuman perspectives. “What we should not do is try to retrieve or repair a proper human vision,” she writes; instead, we should “look positively to the inhuman and other imaging or reading processes” (24, 28). For Colebrook, this means seeking out alternatives to the familiar forms of narratives and their human way of imagining and communicating. Colebrook’s understanding of narrative is much more rigid than that of scholars such as Heise and Plumwood. She argues that global climate change demands alternatives to the forms of conventional, human-focused narratives and knowledges that “were required to think of man as a species emerging within time” in the wake of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (10). She desires a “mode of reading the world, and its anthropogenic scars, that frees itself from folding the earth’s surface around human survival” (23). Frustrated by the inherent human myopia of narrative, she urges us to look elsewhere. We find a second call to look beyond narrative in Timothy Morton’s work. Like Colebrook, Morton is in search of forms of representation that can push humans past the damaging anthropocentrism that produced the Anthropocene; they argue that “global warming is a manifestation of the Anthropocene, the moment at which human history has intersected decisively with geological time,” and that “philosophy is now tasked with bringing human thinking up to speed with this new reality” (“Poisoned” 37). As such, they state that envi 5. For an additional example of this rejection of narrative in the Anthropocene, see James J. Pulizzi’s “Predicting the End of History” (2014).

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ronmentally responsible art in the Anthropocene cannot maintain a status quo. Instead art in this epoch can “only be an uneasy collaboration between humans and nonhumans, not a purely human exploration of access to nonhumans, or the lack thereof ” (Hyperobjects 50). Morton taps into that familiar vein of environmental humanities scholarship here, arguing that a more responsible way of living in the world in the Anthropocene depends upon new representations of that world. But their stance differs from that of Plumwood, Heise, and their peers when they advocate explicitly for art that grapples with that which lies beyond the reach of human imagination. Morton’s vehicle for this project is what they call “hyperobjects,” or “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” such as climate change, nuclear radiation, tectonic plates, the biosphere, and evolution (Hyperobjects 1). They argue that hyperobjects are incompatible with narrative: “Human attunement to hyperobjects in this era is not simply art “about” hyperobjects, but art that evokes hyperobjectivity in its very form” (“Poisoned” 39). Out are art forms such as narrative that rely on a stable world informed by human categories such as “here” and “there,” “then” and “now.” In are those forms that call such conceptualizations of stability into question to stress disjunction and our inability to perceive the complete, stable whole—hence Morton’s preference for Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings and Felix Hess’s sound recordings of air pressure fluctuations over the Atlantic over traditional narrative forms. This urge to move beyond narrative has widespread implications for environmental humanities projects. Unlike Heise and her peers who suggest that the top priority of such scholarship should be the pursuit of the right type of narrative, the work of scholars critical of narrative’s anthropocentrism such as Colebrook and Morton suggests that the environmental humanities should instead focus on probing the limits of the human imagination. Timothy Clark stands solidly among this latter group in his book Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015). Like Colebrook and Morton, Clark states that “there is a case to be made that the psychology of narrative—of what makes for people a credible or compelling story—is itself a problem for representations of the Anthropocene” (178). Because the Anthropocene evades normal representations, he argues, literary critics cannot study the effect of representations on readers in ways that they have done in the past. Indeed, for Clark the entire question of reception is at the heart of the environmental humanities; he states that a key issue of environmental humanities scholarship is how much environmental criticism is “vulnerable to delusions that the sphere of cultural representations has more centrality and power than in fact it has” (21). Even worse, he continues, an exaggerated sense of the imaginary risks perpetuating an illusion that “endorsing certain

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symbolic or . . . imaginary events may be far more crucial or decisive than it really is” (21). Thus, for Clark, environmental humanities scholarship should not assume a direct link between a narrative and its ability to shift the real-life attitudes, values, and behaviors of readers. Instead, he prioritizes the study of the potential effects of narrative in a process that calls into question the widely held assumption of literary critics that the stories that we consume matter. Scholars following this advice will not seek out the right narrative to counter the damaging attitudes and behaviors that have produced the Anthropocene but invest their energies into studying whether narratives can make any difference in shifting the values of readers.6 We find a microcosm of the debate about narrative’s ability to represent the Anthropocene in opposing claims that scholars make about the function of one particular type of narrative—the novel—in today’s world. Unsurprisingly, these opposing claims largely stem from differing understandings of the Anthropocene. For Adam Trexler in Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015), the Anthropocene is a descriptor of geologic process and as such is a useful indicator of the “larger, nonhuman aspects of climate” (4, emphasis in original). His story of the Anthropocene is one in which humans produce emissions that persist beyond them, thereby linking the experiences of individual humans to nonhuman beings and matter across broad timescales and vast spacescapes. By extension, for Trexler an Anthropocene narrative is one that will focus on certain literary qualities: disproportionate scale effects, especially between domestic and planetary scales; complex descriptions of transformations to human economy; and a dominant presence of nonhuman things. Trexler argues that the special characteristics of the novel make it the ideal narrative template by which to flesh out these qualities; the novel is “a privileged form to explore what it means to live in the Anthropocene moment” (27). In particular, he claims that the heteroglossia of the novel makes it particularly suited to representing this epoch: By its nature, the novel assembles heterogeneous characters and things into a narrative sequence: not just “solitary souls” but scientists, consumers, 6. For examples of environmental humanities work that investigates the impacts of climate change fiction upon readers, see the cluster of essays in the special issue of ISLE on “Empirical Ecocriticism”: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s “‘Just as in the Book?’: The Influence of Literature on Readers’ Awareness of Climate Injustice and Perception of Climate Migrants”; W.  P. Malecki, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Malgorzata Dobrowolska’s “Narrating Human and Animal Oppression: Strategic Empathy and Intersectionalism in Alice Walker’s ‘Am I Blue?’”; Pat Brereton and Victoria Gómez’s “Media Students, Climate Change, and YouTube Celebrities: Readings of Dear Future Generations: Sorry Video Clip,” and an introduction by Schneider-Mayerson, Mossner, and Malecki.

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politicians, insurers, drivers, zookeepers, children, punk musicians, and bureaucrats are yoked with cars, factories, big box stores, thermostats, oil wells, butterflies, mountains, and glaciers. This complexity allows the novel to explore diverse human responses to peak oil, alternative energy, carbon sequestration, carbon trading, consumption, and air travel, in ways that are difficult for nonfiction and other art forms to portray. The novel can also think about climate change’s intermingling with cultural narratives, such as nihilism, progress, collective resistance, and international cooperation. Moreover, the climate change novel can explore the aesthetics of wilderness, gastronomy, domesticity, species, urban life, fast cars, and international life. Climate change is, itself, a complex network of things and effects. (14–15)

According to Trexler, the climate change that drives the Anthropocene and the literary mode of the novel share a basic function: they make intimate connections between people and things across diverse times, spaces, and experiences. Both are a mesh of people, their environments, and people’s effects on those environments, meaning that aesthetic form and real-world conditions align. Trexler’s ambitious project, which exists in direct disagreement with the claim that the epoch cannot be narrated, involves identifying and cataloguing a canon of Anthropocene novels. Suitable texts that he identifies range from critically familiar titles, such as Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl (2010), to those that have been largely overlooked by environmental humanities critics, including Richard Cowper’s The Road to Corlay (1976), George Turner’s The Sea in the Summer (1987), and Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids (2009). At the heart of Trexler’s list-making is a diachronic study of the novel that tracks how the literary mode is evolving in the Anthropocene. The guiding questions of his book thus highlight not only the ability of the novel to represent our current epoch, but the formal and structural changes that need to occur in order for it to do so: “How did the climate change novel develop over time? What forms and tropes enabled different aspects of climate change to be articulated? . . . And perhaps more interestingly, how did climate change make new demands on the novel itself, forcing formal and narrative innovation?” (Trexler 10). Trexler’s questions indicate his understanding of the novel as a malleable mode, one that shifts with the social and material conditions in which it is produced. His canon of Anthropocene novels relies upon the idea that the novel has succeeded in making connections between people and the world in the past and will continue to do so as we live in a new world irrevocably marked by human activity. Stephanie LeMenager also sees the novel as a pliable form inherently suited to representing our current epoch in her essay “Climate Change and

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the Struggle for Genre.” Rather than focus on the geology of the Anthropocene—on the golden spike of stratigraphic record or markings of radioactivity—her version of the Anthropocene foregrounds the everyday experience of living in an era dominated by the injustices of capitalism run amok. For her, climate change represents “among other things, an assault on the everyday” (221). She thus recommends “paying attention to what it means to live, day to day, through climate shift and the economic and sociological injuries that underwrite it” to produce a “more gradual and personal account of near catastrophic climate change” (225). LeMenager sees the novel as the rhetorical mode up to this task because of its investment in the everyday, in the “probable, cyclical, and even trivial experience” that represents commonplace Anthropocene experiences such as home-making in a strange place and learning how to die in this epoch dominated by mass extinctions and how to love in an era of climate collapse (221). Furthermore, like Trexler, LeMenager turns to the novel because of how it has handled changes to the everyday in the past, or its successful history of offering “opportunities for trying out and testing material and social relations” (221, 236). While LeMenager’s essay does not have the scope of Trexler’s book and thus is not interested in generating a comprehensive list of Anthropocene novels, she does identify specific narratives that best illustrate these ideas, such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998), Thomas King’s The Back of a Turtle (2014), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), and Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009). Amitav Ghosh’s consideration of climate change novels presents the flip side of these arguments. Indeed, for Ghosh, the very phrase “climate change novel” is oxymoronic, as he sees the novel as inherently unable to represent the sudden and violent new realities of global warming. Ghosh’s version of the Anthropocene differs greatly from Trexler’s and LeMenager’s—while the latter view the epoch as defined by increasingly intimate connections between humans and the nonhuman or the everyday experiences of climate shift, respectively, Ghosh’s understating of the Anthropocene is dominated by turbulence and unpredictability. The climate change events that define the Anthropocene are, for Ghosh, wild, vicious, and extreme. He argues that they pose a major problem for writers of “serious” fiction as the very form of the novel, in its interest in individual human lives, relies upon a certain predictability that conceals the “unheard-of and the improbable” (27). Climate change events are “too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein”; the Anthropocene “defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense” via its “very high degree of improbability” (32–33, 26). Unlike Trexler and LeMenager, Ghosh is not interested in identifying novels that represent the new realities

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of our changing world via their sensitivity to the sociohistorical and material conditions of their production. Instead, his project seeks to explain why no successful climate change novel has yet been published, despite earnest attempts by such esteemed authors as McEwan: I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth. (Ghosh 7)

The fault does not lie with authors, Ghosh suggests, but with the form itself. The climate change novel does not exist because it cannot exist. In this conceptualization of unpredictable epoch and rigid novel, form and world do not align. At issue in the opposing accounts of narrative in the Anthropocene that currently dominate the environmental humanities are differences in opinion about the malleability of narrative, the connection between specific narrative resources and particular ideologies, and the link between reading and real-world action. While one group of scholars celebrates the ability of narrative to shift and evolve over time such that it can respond to changes in realworld sociohistorical and material conditions, a second group sees narrative as inflexible, as having baked into it inescapable assumptions about the superiority of human perspectives and experiences that are fundamentally incompatible with a responsible environmental ethos. While one group of scholars assumes that different narratives can represent different ideologies, a second group sees narrative largely as limited in its ability to always represent the same destructive, anthropocentric assumptions and attitudes. And while one group of scholars argues that the proper narrative will encourage readers to live in the world more responsibly, a second group questions if stories can play any positive role in a response to today’s environmental crisis. It strikes me that conversations about the evolution of narrative, the link between narrative structure and ideology, and the real-world effects of narrative interpretation are vibrant sites of inquiry within contemporary narrative theory. It also strikes me how absent the voices of narrative theorists are in this conversation. One of my central arguments in this book is that the environmental humanities—on both sides of the narrative coin—would benefit from a stronger engagement with the lexicon and insights of narrative theory. Such engagement will not only illuminate the specific ways in which

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narrative has adapted formally to the new times, spaces, and perspectives of the Anthropocene, but also speculate about what additional structures suited to representing the epoch would look like. Such engagement will also shed light on the ways in which readers interact with narrative—on the work that readers must do to comprehend narratives, and the work that narratives do in terms of shifting the real-world attitudes, values, and behaviors of those readers, thus shaping the world in which we read.

Anthropocene Narrative Theory My approach to narrative in the Anthropocene harnesses the insights of narrative theory to shed light on these disagreements and explore more broadly how stories and our current epoch inform and influence each other. My central project in this book is to envision an “Anthropocene narrative theory”—to unpack how a clearer look at narrative can help develop our understanding of the Anthropocene, and how a richer exploration of the Anthropocene can enhance our understanding of how narratives do and can work. Narrative scholars have long been honing a theory of narrative that, as Gerald Prince states, “characterizes and articulates narratively pertinent categories and features in order to account for the ways in which narratives are configured and make sense” (“On a Postcolonial” 379). In particular, my discussion of narrative in the Anthropocene is inspired by Prince’s work in “On a Postcolonial Narratology,” in which he “wear[s] a set of postcolonial lenses to look at narrative” with the goal of sketching out a narratology “sensitive to matters commonly, if not uncontroversially, associated with the postcolonial (e.g., hybridity, migrancy, otherness, fragmentation, diversity, power relations)” (373). Likewise, in this book I consider narrative modalities via an Anthropocene lens to better account for how narratives make sense. I argue that the categories and concepts of current narratological models are insufficient for our epoch—that narrative is changing along with the world in which we tell and receive stories, and that narrative scholars require a new set of conceptual tools to identify, articulate, and track these changes. But unlike Prince’s project, I am also interested in the flip side of the equation. In addition to considering how narrative does and can represent ideas such as the extended durations of geological timelines, the increasing instability of spaces in an age of climate change, and the collective action of (some) humans that has produced the Anthropocene, an Anthropocene narrative theory also questions how narrative can help us better understand our current epoch. It asks: how can studying narrative, especially its world-creating power, provide us with a

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“safe” space in which to explore the processes of world building that have produced the Anthropocene? How can narrative teach us lessons about the ways humans write worlds that we can apply to real-world contexts? How can the Anthropocene refine our very understanding of what narrative is and how it works? Insights from recent work in narrative theory foreground the ability of narrative to shift and change as does the world in which it is produced. In particular, these insights suggest that narratives can deal with precisely the broad scales and nonhuman perspectives that concern scholars such as Colebrook, Morton, and Ghosh. Elana Gomel’s work in Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (2014) speaks to the ability of narrative to accommodate temporal and spatial scales beyond those familiar to human experience. Her interest lies in “textual topologies that defy the Newtonian-Euclidean paradigm of homogenous, uniform, three-dimensional spatiality,” and she roots such representations in narratives dating back to the Victorian era, especially in the work of Charles Dickens (3). Furthermore, she argues that “in many ways, narrative is ahead of science, providing a semantic armature for imagining and representing new forms of space and time” (24). The discussion of nonhuman narrators by Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck suggests that narrative, while an anthropogenic rhetorical mode, is not blinded totally by human myopia. In “The Storied Lives of Nonhuman Narrators,” Bernaerts, Carraciolo, and colleagues argue that such narrators can encourage readers to empathize with fictional autobiographical (nonhuman) storytellers while also reflecting on their own humanness. Likewise, David Herman’s Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (2018) suggests that narrative is an important imaginative tool for perceiving the interconnections between humans in wider biotic communities. This work not only foregrounds the fluid nature of narrative— the way that it can adapt to changing real-world contexts—but also calls into question the claims of narrative rigidity of Colebrook, Morton, and Ghosh. In particular, conversations within narrative theory can help to clarify the functions and identify characteristics of specific types of narrative, including the novel. The discussions of the novel in the Anthropocene by Trexler, LeMenager, and Ghosh are provocative in the links they forge between ideas that scholars affiliate with this epoch and the very forms of one dominant type of narrative. Yet even this work that is so invested in these texts’ formal features fails to contend directly with their structures. Indeed, while the discussion of an “Anthropocene” or “climate change” fiction genre by scholars such as Trexler and LeMenager is no doubt much needed, and while Ghosh’s critiques point to valuable insights about the history of literary realism, none

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of these projects considers in detail the specific structures by which authors produce climate change novels and/or Anthropocene narratives. The very slippage between literary realism, “serious” fiction, and climate change novels in Ghosh’s work suggests a lack of specificity that we can easily remedy with narrative theory’s more precise critical vocabulary and a clearer examination of the structural characteristics of these three types of texts. Furthermore, while Trexler’s and LeMenager’s work foregrounds innovations in the novelistic mode that better allow their preferred texts to represent climate change and the Anthropocene for readers, neither addresses the specific resources that form the basis of these innovations. As such, these formal discussions of narrative in the Anthropocene follow a key environmental humanities trend of ultimately being more concerned with content than form. As Clark states of Trexler’s work, “Trexler is not really describing an innovation in the novel form per se: he is describing a mode of critical reading newly sensitized by the demands of the Anthropocene” (181, my emphasis). I suggest that a deeper probe of the specific forms of novels in this epoch will provide clarity on the ability of narratives to represent the Anthropocene, and thus allow literary critics to speak clearly about the Anthropocene in texts. An Anthropocene narrative theory asks: why the novel? What is it about the specific resources of this mode—its chronologies, spatializations, and styles of narration—that capture the experiences and attitudes of this epoch and thus justify the focus of many literary critics on the novel over other narrative forms, such as cinematic texts and oral storytelling? Why do so many Anthropocene narratives take this form? Indeed, do they? What other types of narrative might scholars study to understand differently our current epoch? Narrative theory can also shed light on the link between certain narrative resources and particular ideologies. Given its structuralist roots, narrative theory has a long history of considering texts in isolation, separate from the contexts of their production. As Brian McHale explains, early practitioners of narratology such as Roland Barthes “underscored that, far from being a school or method of literary criticism—i.e., a way of interpreting novels and other specifically literary narratives—narratology aimed to be a transmedial investigation of stories of all kinds” (572). Furthermore, early or “classical” narratologists such as Gérard Genette, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov viewed particular stories as “individual ‘narrative messages’ supported by a shared semiotic system whose constituents and combinatory practices it was the task of narratological analysis to bring to light” (McHale 571). These scholars were deeply influenced by the structuralist project of Saussurean linguistics, and another way to explain their focus on the general and universal

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rather than the meaning of any individual narrative is to see them as analyzing narrative langue rather than narrative parole. Yet even despite the clear structuralist roots of narratology, developments in narrative theory take seriously the context of a text—especially the context of a narrative’s production and reception. This has opened up narrative theory to various considerations of the interplay between narrative and ideology; as Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck state in their Handbook of Narrative Analysis (2005), “Context always has to do with ideology,” and “the reader and the context—literary as well as ideological—perhaps constitute the most important new ingredients of contemporary narrative theory” (8, 9). We see this embrace of ideology in many facets of modern narrative scholarship, such as the fields of narrative ethics, contextualist narratology, and cognitive narratology.7 The fields of feminist and postcolonial narratology are especially strong examples of contextualist narratology, as they feature scholars analyzing how categories of gender and race are constructed, perpetuated, and subverted by narrative structures, respectively, by placing narrative texts within a specific historical and cultural context. In her groundbreaking essay “Toward a Feminist Narratology,” Susan Lanser states that this approach to narratives “looks in the text for references to social reality and the author’s subjective experience as opposed to the structuralists who considered the text to be an independently functioning system of signs” (135). Similarly, postcolonial narratology explores the connections between narratives and the sociohistorical and material contexts of their production as a means of studying the representation and subjugation of politics of race and ethnicity. Feminist and postcolonial narratology serve as useful models for an Anthropocene narrative theory, as they consider texts in light of the extratextual contexts in which they are produced. They also help narrative scholars appreciate how texts encode certain politics in their representations of gender and race/ethnicity—an approach we can extend to consider the politics that narratives encode in their representations of the material world. Indeed, engaging these debates about the ideological “fit” of narrative resources—about the ways in which certain structures often lend themselves to particular cultural ideas and norms—can only enhance discussions about the ability of narratives to represent the Anthropocene. 7. For examples of work on narrative ethics, see James Phelan’s rhetorical approach to narrative in Living to Tell about It (2005), as well as Adam Zachary Newton’s Narrative Ethics (1997), and Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (1992). For an overview of contextualist narratology, see Ansgar Nünning’s “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies.” For an introduction to cognitive narratology, see Stories and Minds (Bernaerts, de Geest et al., eds.) and Herman’s “Directions in Cognitive Narratology.”

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Finally and relatedly, conversations within narrative theory can help to clarify how narratives stand to influence the real-world attitudes, values, and behaviors of readers. Insights from cognitive narratology by scholars working on Theory of Mind and narrative empathy such as Lisa Zunshine and Suzanne Keen, respectively, are particularly valuable here, as they track precisely the ability (or lack thereof) of imaginative texts to shape real-world experiences that so interest critics such as Clark. Better yet, these studies are often linked to quantitative and qualitative data that uses fMRI machines, eye-tracking technology, and reader surveys to lend empirical credence to their claims. If scholars in the environmental humanities are looking for evidence to support or disturb assertions about the power of narrative to facilitate environmentally responsible living in the Anthropocene, cognitive narratology is an obvious place to start. In the chapters that follow, I flesh out an Anthropocene narrative theory by exploring the ability of particular narrative resources to represent the epoch. I do this by thinking through the narratological counterparts of the most pressing ideas that environmental humanities scholars associate with the Anthropocene, including the overwhelming influence of humans on the physical world, the recognition of nonhuman material agency, the vast evolutionary timescales that an understanding of the Anthropocene demands, the increasing instability of space in this moment, and new and complex notions of collective human action. Each chapter takes up one of these issues and identifies innovative narratological resources suitable to its representation. As this is a first step in an Anthropocene narrative theory, the model that I offer here is far from complete; my focus on these ideas means that I favor some elements of narrative (storyworlds, narrativity, temporality, spatialization, and narration) over others (notably character, focalization, the implied author, and the representation of speech and consciousness). I do not mean to imply that these latter elements are not essential to understanding the relationship between narrative and the Anthropocene, but simply that they lie outside of the purview of this initial account of an Anthropocene narrative theory. Traces of a similar approach to narrative and the Anthropocene exist in already-published work. Although she is critical of this particular novel’s ability to inspire empathy among readers for its human characters, Alexa Weik von Mossner’s analysis of the organization of narrative time in Dale Pendall’s The Great Bay (2010) emphasizes its portrayal of geologic and climatic timescales (“Science Fiction”). And notably, Menely and Taylor observe that several of the contributors to Anthropocene Reading “take up narratological problems” in their discussions of literary forms and the real-world conditions of the Anthropocene (13). They also ponder how “the accelerated transforma-

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tion of literary forms .  .  . [can] be understood to express broader patterns of change in energy production and the organization of biospheric systems” (12). As such they note that essays by critics such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Benjamin Morgan read “forms, signs, fossils, structures, traces, symptoms” and “get close to the text, down to the punctuation” (13). Yet even here, the taking up of narratological problems does not involve a sustained engagement with the lexicon and arguments of the corpus of narrative theory. Instead, the contributors to this book gather around the broader project of “read[ing] the Anthropocene as a literary object and at the same time . . . recogniz[ing] the Anthropocene as a geohistorical event that may unsettle our inherited practices of reading” (5). Indeed, the essays in Anthropocene Reading are remarkably diverse in their methodologies, drawing from a variety of tools, theories, and practices. The result is less a study of narrative in the Anthropocene, or of the challenges this epoch poses to narrative, than it is a consideration of how literary analysis in general might help us interpret the epoch. As Menely and Taylor explain, “This multiplicity of approaches leads us to the conclusion that the strength of our reading practices in literary studies may derive not from methodological rigor but from the acceptance of inconsistency, the belief in complexity, the attention to contradiction, and the labor of translation” (13). My approach in this book differs in precisely its methodological rigor and the consequent depth of its engagement with narrative scholarship, as well as the broad scope by which I explore the relationship between narrative and the Anthropocene. It also differs in its diplopic questioning of not only how narrative theory might help us understand the Anthropocene but also what we stand to learn of narrative by reading it through (and in) our current epoch. My Anthropocene narrative theory begins to solidify connections between narrative and the Anthropocene in Chapter 1, “Worlds,” by viewing both as the products of humans writing worlds. Drawing on work in rhetorical and cognitive narrative theories, I flesh out the connection between the Anthropocene and narratives as records of humans writing and inhabiting worlds by reconceptualizing narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose. As part of this project, I expand common definitions of narrative to produce one suited to our particular moment: somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened in some world.8 This definition combines rhetorical and cognitive approaches to narrative, thus uniting two until-now largely disparate conversations within narrative theory. It also 8. As I explain in the next chapter, my definition is clearly indebted to James Phelan’s definition of narrative as “somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Living 18). It also takes cues from David Herman’s definition of narrative in Basic Elements of Narrative.

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allows scholars of narrative and the Anthropocene to appreciate better the potential real-world effects of narrative engagement. Crucial to my argument is the idea that narratives provide readers with a “safe” offline context in which to practice their world-building skills, or—to state this more aggressively—that narratives afford worldbuilding. As such, I suggest that the study of narratives can help us understand similar processes of world creation in real-life, material realms in the Anthropocene. Indeed, I argue that the world-building power of narratives is one vital connection between narrative and the Anthropocene and that the offline contexts of narrative storyworlds are not as “safe” as we might assume. If narrative interpretation affords worldbuilding, it follows that readers who are especially adept at imaginatively modeling a particular type of world will become increasingly comfortable inhabiting that world. I argue that storyworld models can be a powerful driver of real-world change, in that the mental modeling and emotional inhabitation of a particular type of storyworld can task readers with simulating the environmentally damaging values, attitudes, and behaviors that drive the Anthropocene. Reading, in other words, can foster powerful in-world affiliations. The narratives that we read in this epoch—including those that are highly fictional—are not simply confined to the offline contexts of the imagination; via their affordance of worldbuilding, they stand to radically shape the material contexts in which we read. An understanding of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose helps scholars analyze the resources of narratives that actively deal with the Anthropocene and its effects. It also encourages us to read back, appreciating how older narratives written before the arrival of the Anthropocene as an organizing concept present readers with tools for mentally modeling and imaginatively inhabiting specific worlds that have real-world effects. I conclude this chapter by considering one specific type of narrative world written by humans that originates in the same set of conditions as the Anthropocene: the traditional realist novel. Drawing on Edward Said’s theory of contrapuntal reading and turning to Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), I suggest that the traditional realist novel does not just reflect the social and material changes that produce the Anthropocene but offers a model for human action and behavior in the world that helps to explain its importance as a rhetorical mode in this epoch. I then counter this argument by considering how an author might use these same narrative resources to facilitate readers’ building of a different world via a discussion of Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010). In Chapter 2, I shift from worlds to “Material.” Although narrative theory often does not appear in environmental humanities scholarship, a significant vein of this work does concern itself with narration. Posthumanist

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and new materialist scholars such as Jane Bennett and Karen Barad have long encouraged their readers to consider the experiences and agency of nonhuman forces, beings, and matter. Material ecocritics such as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann take this idea one step further, arguing that all nonhuman material possesses narrative agency and is thus capable of producing its own stories. I disagree with this claim, given the inherently anthropogenic nature of narrative as a rhetorical mode. In the first half of this chapter, I place the idea of matter’s narrative agency within the context of narrative theory, discussing how it overlooks the inherent humanness of a rhetorical mode that involves somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) in some world. Yet I take inspiration from the idea of matter’s narrative agency to explore how the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of narrative itself, especially in terms of what it is and where we find it. I pay particular attention to environmental representations of sequences of events such as those found in geological strata, ice cores, and tree rings to posit an alternative conceptualization of material narrative agency that positions matter not as narrating itself but as possessing a limited degree of narrativity in its material semiotics— what I call material narrativity. I argue that an Anthropocene narrative theory, while acknowledging the anthropogenic basis of narrative, is also sensitive to ways in which fragments of narrativity appear in nonhuman material and can, in turn, inspire human narratives. I discuss this idea in light of actual geological strata, ice cores, and tree rings. I also examine the “Good Oak” chapter of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (1949) as an example of a narrative that uses material semiotics to worldbuild for the purpose of drawing attention to material agency. In addition to exploring the degree to which material in the Anthropocene expresses narrative agency, an Anthropocene narrative theory also queries how the nonhuman matter of this epoch is changing the cognitive processes of narrative comprehension—what I call material-narrative cognition. Drawing on Ian Carr’s argument that digital media is rewiring the brains of readers, N. Katherine Hayles’s work that tracks changes in the reading behaviors of readers increasingly engaged with digital material, and Jussi Parikka’s assertion that today’s media culture is the product of particular material realities, I discuss the effects of the proliferation of digital narratives in the “Great Acceleration” on our engagement with narrative. Chapter 2 thus both considers the ability of nonhuman matter to express narrativity and deeply influence the cognitive work that narrative interpretation demands of authors and readers. To make the latter point, I trace the jump of narrative forms suited to new, digitally inspired cognitive modes from online to offline contexts via

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the recent rise of flash fiction and the macro- and microstructures of Maria Popova’s collective biography Figuring (2019). By definition, the Anthropocene relies upon an imagination of slow and extreme chronologies. Chapter 3, “Time,” takes on these chronologies and considers what they would look like in a narrative. The first half of this chapter discusses the challenge of fitting the extreme durations of evolutionary time into Gérard Genette’s influential classification of event sequencing (order, duration, and frequency). I ultimately argue that the timelines of the stratigraphy that establish the Anthropocene demand a new category of temporality specific to the epoch and propose to fill this narratological gap with the pseudo-singular, or scenes that authors present as singular whereas their historical familiarity ensures that no reader can seriously believe that they occur as disconnected from earlier events in a sequence that occur outside of story time. I suggest that the pseudo-singular roots a singular event in a longer sequence that vastly exceeds that of a narrative’s storyworld, and thus tasks readers with grappling with embodied, experiential timelines of a narrative’s existents and the timelines of historical and/or climatological time that exceed any one given story. To illustrate the pseudo-singular at work, I turn to representations of captivity and slavery in indigenous speculative fiction and Afro-futurist novels such as Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), respectively. An Anthropocene narrative theory also takes up a second debate about long temporal duration essential to the Anthropocene: the obscured timelines of what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” or violence such as that of environmental toxicity and pollution that is “dispersed across time and space” (Slow Violence 2). Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence foregrounds the importance of the lingering effects of events that are difficult, if not impossible, to register in the moment of their occurrence and can thus only be known after the fact via their transformation of objects and/or bodies. An Anthropocene narrative theory recognizes that the events of slow violence that are only legible in their delayed accumulation and protracted effects place direct pressure on what constitutes a narrative “event,” as all current understandings of narrative events assume immediate legibility. To help make recognizable events that only register as such after the fact, I propose a new event type: the effect-event, or narrative events that do not immediately register as meaningful action and thus stand outside of the sequence of instantly legible events that determines a text’s narrativity but become significant in their delayed yet transformative effects upon objects and/or bodies. To illustrate the effect-event in practice, I read representations of environmental racism and pesticide poisoning in Helena Maria Viramon-

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tes’s novel of migrant agricultural workers in California, Under the Feet of Jesus (1996). In Chapter 4, “Space,” I turn my attention to the increasingly protean nature of environments rendered unfamiliar and unrecognizable by the rising temperatures and sea levels that are hallmarks of the Anthropocene. I argue that current models of narrative spatialization are ill-suited for analyzing representations of such changing environments because they embrace anthropocentric assumptions of the inherent stability of space. In the first half of this chapter, I focus specifically on the challenges that water poses to these models. Water is essential to our understanding of the Anthropocene, whether it be via models of rising sea levels or the increasing frequency of extreme and violent water-based events on land, such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and floods, and yet current categories of narrative space do not comfortably accommodate the fluidity of water. To ease this problem, an Anthropocene narrative theory proposes a new category of despatialization that foregrounds spatializing information that is strategically inexact and thus difficult to map. I illustrate the usefulness of unspatialization with a detailed reading of Marina Vitaglione’s short speculative narrative about rising sea levels in Venice, Solastalgia (2017). An Anthropocene narrative theory recognizes that despatialization has broader applications than only those environments that are in danger of being overwhelmed by water. Indeed, I argue that this category of narrative spatialization better equips us to discuss all of the increasingly unstable and changing environments in the Anthropocene, not just aquatic ones. As the title of Vitaglione’s narrative suggests, despatialization is particularly useful for analyzing representations of solastalgia, or what environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht defines as “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’” (“Solastalgia” 45). I closely read Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014) to demonstrate how despatialization can represent terrestrial environments that are changing beyond recognition in the Anthropocene. I also read despatialization in the spacescapes of new “weird” fiction such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) to argue that strategically inexact spatializing cues are an effective tool by which authors can encourage readers to inhabit emotional spaces that defy, or push the limits of, human imagination. My focus in Chapter 5, “Narration,” is historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s controversial notion of species agency and the challenges that it poses to models of narration. In his seminal essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Chakrabarty argues that historians need to develop a new conceptualization of humans as a collective agent acting together and on a grand,

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planetary scale. I use this concept of human collective action to further conversations about omniscience by Jonathan Culler, Paul Dawson, and Richard Russo, arguing that the singularity and externality of conventional omniscient narrators makes them particularly ill-suited to representations of collectivity in our current epoch. I then consider an alternative use of omniscience to tackle attitudes of denial and anthropocentric individualism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), a novel that uses an omniscient narrator to shock readers into real-world awareness of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. An Anthropocene narrative theory must also consider alternatives to conventional omniscient narration better suited to narrative representations of collective agency in the Anthropocene. I first discuss the potentials and pitfalls of we-narration to represent collective human agency, drawing heavily on the work of Natalya Bekhta. I root this discussion in two recent cli-fi novels—Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (2020)—and argue that their representations of the narrating “we” and racial and generational injustices, respectively, offer readers crucially important counternarratives to the “we” who typically narrates the world in the Anthropocene and acknowledge that not all humans are responsible for the epoch in the same way. Via their comparison, I also suggest that the inconstant we-narration of Millet’s novel is an especially useful imaginative tool in this moment, as it tasks readers with imaginatively inhabiting both the individual and group subjectivities that a nuanced understanding of the inequalities and collectivities in the Anthropocene demands. Next I turn to the second-person address to argue that, while we-narratives represent collectives that tell stories, the fictional “you” can illustrate the collective agency of groups that receive stories. I argue that the second-person address can foster a sense of personal responsibility for the creation and well-being of the worlds, environments, and communities in which readers immerse themselves when they read by metaleptically inserting readers into a narrative’s storyworlds and hailing them to join a vast collective of individuals who identify with the story’s “you.” I illustrate the environmentalist potential of the second-person address in representations of “you” in two short stories— Margaret Atwood’s “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” (2009) and Luis Alberto Urrea’s “The Night Drinker” (2019). Finally, an Anthropocene narrative theory explores how climate scientists do (or do not) use narratives in articulations of their work. I do this in a short coda, “Narrative and Climate Change Science,” that pays special attention to studies in communicating science and models of best practice for storytelling in science, including those proposed by science communication specialist

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Michael F. Dahlstorm and marine-biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson. I argue that outdated understandings of what narrative is has led such scholars to limited imaginations of what narrative can do. I propose two updates to these models of best practice—first, that scientists use their own stories of environmental grief and hope to worldbuild for the specific purpose of immersing readers into an alternative to the status quo of environmental crisis in the Anthropocene, and second that scholars more broadly recognize that narratives themselves are valuable data that advances our understanding of the mechanisms by which anthropogenic climate change functions and can be course-corrected. To illuminate the latter point, I discuss my own role as a narrative theorist in interdisciplinary projects that analyze climate change by considering stories as data. By concluding with a discussion of the role of narrative in climate change science, Narrative in the Anthropocene returns to its central premise that we understand better the current state of the planet and our relationship to it by engaging with narrative. It is no secret that a disparity exists between scientific warnings about climate change and existence of legislation and policies that address such warnings, particularly among those populations whose behaviors and lifestyles contribute most to rising temperatures. So, too, have international legislation and policies designed to reduce climate change been dogged by misunderstanding, frustration, and resistance to change. I do not suggest in this book that a golden ticket narrative exists—that by studying narrative in this epoch we can unearth the “perfect” story to shift public opinion and spur action toward a more responsible way of living in the world. But I do suggest that a more solid understanding of how narrative works in this moment—of what narrative resources tend to lend themselves to particular ideologies; of how narrative is changing to accommodate or respond to new material, social, and political realities; and of what work narratives do to readers and the world in which they read—will help us better understand how humans worldbuild for some purpose in the Anthropocene. This stands for the imaginary and virtual storyworlds of narratives and the real-life, material world that humans are fast rewriting in their own image. My narrative of the Anthropocene is thus one in which scholars turn to stories and storytelling not as a panacea, but as a model by which we can think through our assumptions about our relationship to the world and our role in it.

CHAPTER 1

Worlds

I am writing this chapter in the wake of a crucial vote by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). On May 21, 2019, by a margin of 88% in favor, the group voted to treat the Anthropocene as “a formal chrono-­stratigraphic unit” defined by Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP). By the same margin, the AWG also voted in favor of using “stratigraphic signals around the mid-twentieth century of the Common Era” as the “primary guide for the base of the Anthropocene” (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy). In other words, the AWG voted to approve the Anthropocene as an official epoch—the successor to the Holocene—using a specific marking in the geologic strata as evidence of its mid-twentieth-century start date. The AWG argues that the Anthropocene’s beginning would optimally be placed in the mid-twentieth century because of the proliferation of geological proxy signals visible in recently accumulated strata that have resulted from the population growth, industrialization, and globalization of the Great Acceleration. The task of the AWG now is to find a “golden spike,” or “the sharpest and most globally synchronous of these signals” to officially date the epoch, and analysis of potential golden spike locations currently is underway. The group is focusing their search on geological markings produced by the worldwide release of artificial radionuclides during the thermonuclear bomb tests of the early 1950s, as the AWG thinks that these signifiers best illustrate humans making their mark on the world. 26

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As I explain in this book’s introduction, scholars have posited many different start dates for the Anthropocene, from the invention of the steam engine in 1784 as originally proposed by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in their introduction of the term to human-driven mass extinctions during the late Quaternary period and the human discovery of agriculture thousands of years ago. Thus the decision to locate the origins of the Anthropocene in the mid-twentieth-century’s remnants of radiation and atomic bombs is controversial. As archaeologist Matt Edgeworth notes in an interview in Nature, “The stratigraphic evidence overwhelmingly indicates a time-transgressive Anthropocene with multiple beginnings rather than a single moment of origin” (qtd. in Subramanian). Edgeworth claims that because of this multiplicitous evidence, naming the new epoch based on the radionuclide signal alone “impedes rather than facilitates scientific understanding of human involvement in Earth system change.” Yet despite this controversy about the precise timeline of the Anthropocene, consensus among geologists remains that we are in a new epoch in which humans have reshaped (are reshaping) the very structure of our planet to reflect back to us our destructive behavior. The “anthropo” of the “Anthropocene” evokes this clearly: the name of the epoch reflects the fact that humans have imagined a version of the world in which we are superior and reign supreme, and then altered the environment to reflect that vision of human exceptionalism. The search is now on for the one geologic marker that most convincingly represents the damaging effects of this imagination. What interests me about this search is its declaration that the Anthropocene, by definition, is a concept that hinges upon humans writing the world. The scientists of the AWG root their understanding of our current epoch in a specific physical marker, a semiotic sign that records the ability of humans to reshape the material world in which we live. The AWG’s definition of the Anthropocene depends upon the recognition that humans in this epoch literally write the world in our own image and inhabit that changed reality. This fascinates me because I understand narratives, too, as records of humans writing and inhabiting worlds for some purpose. An Anthropocene narrative theory is influenced by cognitive science that suggests that narrative comprehension involves readers mentally modeling and imaginatively transporting themselves to the world of the text; readers must shift from the here and now of their actual world to the alternate world of a story to understand a narrative. This research argues that mentally modeling and imaginatively inhabiting the alternate world of a narrative is an essential component of its interpretation. Differences between the Anthropocene’s golden spike and readers’ transportation to narrative worlds apply, of course. The AWG’s definition of the

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Anthropocene involves physical markers of human activity in the real world, while narrative comprehension demands that narrative interpreters mentally translate symbolic cues into an imagined world to which they then mentally shift. Yet the similarities between the two are rich and productive, as both the Anthropocene and narrative comprehension involve the inhabitations of worlds that begin in the imagination of humans and reflect back to them their own attitudes, values, and behaviors. In this sense, both the epoch and narratives are products of distinctly human forms of cognition that stand to have powerful real-world effects. An Anthropocene narrative theory thus also draws on rhetorical narrative theory to posit that narratives are persuasive tools of communication that have real-world effects, especially via their communication of specific ethical and value systems. As I explain in more detail below, it understands narrative engagement as not only relying upon readers modeling and imaginatively inhabiting specific storyworlds and the ethics they encode but also making easier the modeling and inhabitation of particular versions of the world and their values and behavioral norms outside of the sign-system of the text. A key premise of an Anthropocene narrative theory is the recognition that, if the Anthropocene is the product of humans writing a specific world and then living in it, narratives offer us fertile ground by which to study the processes and purposes of world construction and inhabitation. Narratives, in other words, provide readers with an offline context in which to explore imaginative world-creation—the very same process that has brought about the Anthropocene. It is thus not only that the wrong type of narratives can play a central role in exacerbating the Anthropocene’s environmental crisis and the right type in alleviating it, as many environmental humanities scholars argue. It is also that narratives, at their core, can help us understand how humans write and inhabit worlds, thereby shedding light on the irrevocable human writing of an altered real-life, material world in the Anthropocene. In this chapter, I flesh out the connection between the Anthropocene and narratives as records of humans writing and inhabiting worlds in more detail. I do this by reconceptualizing narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose and expanding (or combining) common definitions of narrative to produce one suited to our particular moment: somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened in some world. This understanding of narrative has three important implications. First, it productively brings together cognitive and rhetorical definitions of the mode, thus uniting two until-now largely disparate conversations within narrative theory. Second, it allows scholars of narrative and the Anthropocene to appreciate better the potential real-world effects of narrative engagement. And third,

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in addition to helping scholars analyze the formal structures of narratives that actively deal with the Anthropocene and its effects, it also encourages us to read back, appreciating how older narratives written before the arrival of the Anthropocene as an organizing concept present readers with tools for mentally modeling and imaginatively inhabiting specific worlds that have real-world effects. In short, it helps us appreciate the way that what is real and what could be real in the Anthropocene merge in the process of narrative worldbuilding.

What Is Narrative? To understand the theoretical implications of my reconceptualization of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose, it helps to tour the history of narrative theory and the various definitions of narrative that scholars propose. Tzvetan Todorov first introduced the term “narratology” in Grammaire du Decameron in 1969. Heavily influenced by the structuralism of Saussurean linguistics, the first-wave or “classical” narratology that emerged in the two decades following sought to develop a scientific, value-free mode of interpreting narratives that calls attention to the larger structure or system of narrative texts. Its primary goal is not the analysis of the strengths or weaknesses of individual narratives but a richer understanding of narrative in general, regardless of the historical period, culture, or geographical context in which a particular text is written. Classical narratological scholars such as Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, F. K. Stanzel, and Algirdas Greimas tend to read narratives in isolation from the contexts of their production and reception, and sought to categorize the major building blocks common to all narratives, such as those pertaining to the organization of time, the style of narration, and type of perspective or point of view. Definitions of narrative that inform classical narratology thus tend to be stripped back and foreground event sequencing as the determining factor of narrativity, or the narrativeness of a narrative. We see this emphasis clearly in Genette’s 1969 definition of narrative as “the representation of a real or fictitious event or series of events” (“Boundaries” 1). We also see this privileging of event sequencing in H. Porter Abbott’s articulation of the “bare minimum” of narrative in the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2021): Simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events. “Event” is the key word here, though some people prefer the word “action.” Without an event or an action, you may have a “description,” an “exposition,”

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an “argument,” a “lyric,” some combination of these or something else altogether, but you won’t have a narrative. (12, emphasis in original)

The later date of Abbott’s text highlights the fact that classical narratology is alive and well within contemporary narrative theory. Classical narratology produced a rich catalogue of terminology and lexicon, and its foundational assertion that narrativity is linked intimately to events and event sequences remains seminal to narrative theory today. Indeed, we can conceive of all subsequent definitions of narrative as layering new elements onto the basic equation of narrativity and event sequencing, such that the definitions read as a palimpsest of intellectual developments within narrative theory. In his 2003 revised edition of A Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince adds rhetorical context to event sequencing in his articulation of narrative as “the representation (as product and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictive EVENTS communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATORS to one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATEES ” (58). For Prince, a basic depiction of an event or sequence of events—much like you might find in your itemized grocery store receipt—is not enough to constitute a narrative. His conceptualization of narrative involves events and two additional elements: a speaking agent who tells a story and a listening agent who receives the story. By emphasizing the vital role of the narrator and narratee in narrative, however implicit these agents may be in a given text, Prince complicates our notions of narrativity. With its scientific tone and confinement to narrative texts alone, outside of the contexts of their production and reception, his definition follows classical narratology’s interest in a general theory of narrative. Yet for Prince, texts without speaking and receiving agents demonstrate a low degree of narrativity, such that it is difficult to classify them as narratives proper. A marked shift begins to occur in the narratological scholarship of the 1990s and 2000s. Due in part to the growing influence of modes of reading that foreground ethics and ideology—especially Marxism, postcolonialism, feminism, and queer studies—and developments in cognitive science, narrative scholars began to turn their attention to the contexts of a narrative’s production and reception. They thus began to pay greater attention to the work of authors and readers, and question the effects of narrative in the real-world outside of the closed sign-system of the text. This second-wave of narratological work, which scholars often refer to as “postclassical” narrative theory, continues to build the palimpsest of definitions of narrative to reflect these developments.

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A key step in this development is the rise of the rhetorical narrative theory of scholars such as James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, and the corresponding articulation of narrative as “somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Phelan, Living 18). We see the remnants of earlier conceptualizations of narrative in Phelan’s definition: present still are Genette’s emphasis on events (“something happened”) and Prince’s interest in a narrative’s rhetorical situation (“somebody telling someone else”). But Phelan’s definition offers us a new appreciation of narratives as tools of persuasion (“for some purpose”). As he explains, his rhetorical approach understands narrative communication as a “multi-layered event” in which “tellers seek to engage and influence their audience’s cognition, emotions, and values” (“Rhetoric/Ethics” 203). It thus places emphasis on the effects of stories and storytelling and draws attention to the relationship between authors, the textual resources those authors draw upon to compose narratives, and readers that interpret those resources in its acknowledgement that “texts are designed by authors in order to affect readers in particular ways” (209). Key to rhetorical narratology’s analysis of the effects of narrative is the specification of a text’s various audiences. Phelan defines the authorial audience as the “hypothetical, ideal audience” for whom an author engineers a text—the audience that “understands . . . perfectly” the author’s choices and meanings (Living 213). The ideal narrative audience, on the other hand, is the “hypothetical, ideal audience for whom the narrator is telling the story” while the narrative audience is the “observer role within the world of the fiction, taken on by the flesh-and-blood reader” (216). As with all postclassical narrative theories, the rhetorical study of narrative retains its footing in classical narratology. Phelan notes that the designs of authors are “conveyed through the words, techniques, structures, forms, and intertexual relations of texts,” and thus rhetorical narratological scholarship continues to develop our understanding of the textual forms and cues common in and unique to narrative. Yet the acknowledgement of authors and readers within rhetorical narrative theory widens the narratological purview to consider flesh-and-blood tellers and receivers who exist outside of the narrative’s closed event sequence, viewing narrative structures as resources that make possible a channel of communication between rhetorical partners. It also encourages discussion of the interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgements that readers make as they decipher the resources that an author chooses to feature in their text, connecting narratives to real-world emotions, ethics, and ideologies. We can productively understand rhetorical narrative theory as part of a larger group of postclassical approaches to narrative that place greater empha-

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sis on authors and readers and supplement classical narratology’s lexicon with sensitivity to the real-world effects of narrative. Indeed, we can see a throughline between rhetorical narrative theory’s interest in the link between particular narrative resources and the ethical judgements of readers and contextualist narrative theory’s questioning of how such resources might encode, produce, or subvert ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. As I explain in the introduction to this book, Susan Lanser’s “Towards a Feminist Narratology” advocates for a narrative theory sensitive to the social realities of the author’s experience, especially in terms of the ideologies of patriarchy. Much like rhetorical narrative theory, Lanser’s approach to narrative texts gazes outside of the narrative sign-system to question how particular textual cues can encode the context of an author and suggests that the cultural categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—which classical narratological modes of reading tend to overlook—are pertinent to the analysis of characters and narrators.1 Likewise, the postcolonial narrative theory initially articulated by Marion Gymnich and Monika Fludernik broadens the classical model to study the connections between narratives and real world ideologies of race and ethnicity.2 It does so by linking analysis of narrative resources to the sociohistorical and cultural contexts of authors to question how narratives can represent, reproduce, and subvert such ideologies. Importantly, this work in contextualist narrative theory also broadens the target of narratological analysis, pushing narrative scholars to consider texts written by women and people of color who were not included in the original corpus of texts upon which scholars built classical narrative theory’s lexicon and conceptual tool kit. In addition to sensitivity to the context of a text’s production, postclassical narrative theory is also guided by a turn toward cognitive science. David Herman’s cognitive definition of narrative in Basic Elements of Narrative (2009) is even more robust than Phelan’s in its identification of four key components of a prototypical narrative. First, he argues that narratives are situated in a specific context or occasion for telling, meaning that they are “geared to particular communicative contexts” (17). Second, he understands narratives as 1. For further examples of feminist narratology, see Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers (Kathy Mezei ed., 1996), Ruth Page’s Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (2006), and Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms (2003). See also Lanser and Warhol’s Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015). 2. See Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996) and Gymnich’s “Linguistics and Narratology: The Relevance of Linguistic Criteria to Postcolonial Narratology.” For more recent examples of narrative theory that examines ideologies of race, see Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan, eds., 2017) and Christopher Gonzalez’s Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/Latina Literature (2017).

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presenting events in a particularized sequence, cuing readers to “construct mental representations of narrated worlds,” or storyworlds. This understanding of event sequencing goes beyond traditional conceptualizations of plot. For Herman, even a “barebones” sequence such as “The cat raced down the hall in pursuit of a mouse that, however, cleverly eluded capture” prompts readers’ construction of a complex mental model: That storyworld includes the cat as agent; the mouse as the (unattained) goal of the cat’s pursuit; a path of motion that unfolds along an axis parallel with the hallway of a house or other building, an axis oriented such that the near end corresponds to the position from which the action is viewed; and a temporal profile that, defining the chase as a singular event rather than a recurrent scenario, situates the cat’s pursuit of the mouse earlier in time than the moment from which the narrative report itself originates. (19, emphasis in original)

Third, Herman claims that the world in which the narrative’s sequence of events takes place is necessarily a world in flux, typically following a trajectory from an initial state of equilibrium to a state of disruption and ultimately a state that introduces a new equilibrium. Finally, he argues that narratives convey to readers the experience of living through that world in flux. For Herman, narrative “roots itself in the lived, felt experience of human or humanlike agents interacting in an ongoing way with their cohorts and surrounding environment” (21). Narrative texts do this via their central concern with “qualia,” or “the sense of ‘what it is like’ for someone or something to have a particular experience.” In sum, Herman argues that narrativity is determined by the basic elements of situatedness, event sequencing, world-making/world dis3 ruption, and what it’s like. Herman’s cognitive definition of narrative—and the connection it makes between narrativity and worldbuilding—anticipates the results of empirical research that examines what happens in readers’ brains when they read. This research suggests that to understand a narrative, readers must mentally model and imaginatively inhabit the world of a text. For example, a 2009 3. The four definitions that I discuss above are by no means mutually exclusive. They interact with one another, highlighting different aspects of narrative texts that are vital to different interests within narrative theory. I do not want to imply that the trajectory that I sketch out above is absolute and determinate. I present the four definitions as building upon each other, which—admittedly—implies a teleological march toward a correct and final definition. Still other definitions of narrative question the fundamental role of the narrator, such as Ann Banfield’s no-narrator theory (see Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, 1982).

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study by Speer et al. that examines the brain activity of readers found that readers “dynamically activate specific visual, motor, and conceptual features of activities while reading about analogous changes in activities in the context of narrative” (“Reading Stories” 995–96). Furthermore, Speer et al. argue that “regions involved in processing goal-directed human activity, navigating spatial environments, and manually manipulating objects in the real world increased in activity at points when these specific aspects of the narrated situation were changing” (995–96). The study’s results indicate that readers’ brains will engage in the same way when they perform an action in real-life and when they read of a character performing that action in a narrative. In other words, the same section of a reader’s brain that controls the navigation of forward movement through space will activate when that reader interprets a passage in a narrative that depicts a cat chasing a mouse down a hallway. Speer et al.’s study suggests that the neurological work that permits readers to comprehend an action or event in a narrative is linked intimately to performing the activity in real life. Just as in real life, the performance of that activity depends heavily upon an awareness of the action’s surrounding context. Narrative scholars inspired by cognitive findings such as those of Speer et al. thus eagerly embrace an understanding of reading as a simulative process that involves contending not only with the lived experiences of characters but also with the physical, material, and environmental contexts in which those experiences take place. Marco Caracciolo argues that “reader’s imaginative engagement with narratives can be said to be experiential,” and that, “like a script, or a musical score, a story is a set of instructions for the enactment of a storyworld” (“Blind” 99). Caracciolo uses the metaphor of a blind person with a cane to illustrate the experiential nature of narratives: “In their imaginative engagement with narratives, readers are like blind people tapping their way around with a cane. Every tap of the cane corresponds to the reader’s being invited to imagine a non-actual object” (82). To understand narratives, he argues, readers must simulate the consciousness and experiences of a fictional character. And as experience cannot be separated from the environment in which one experiences, readers must grapple with a character’s embodied experience of their world. Hence, for Caracciolo, reading “simulates the online, embodied responding that characterizes our basic interaction with the real world” (91). Importantly, the cognitive turn in narrative theory, informed by a more robust definition of narrativity as linked to wordbuilding, experientiality, and qualia, has encouraged narrative scholars to study the potential real-world effects of readers mentally modeling and inhabiting the environments and experiences of characters. A rich vein of this work studies the cognitive impact

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of a character’s emotions on readers. Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction (2006) links narrative theory and Theory of Mind (ToM), a type of quick and informal psychology that cognitive psychologists argue people use to attribute mental states to others. Similar to Herman’s claim that readers must mentally model and inhabit storyworlds to understand narratives, Zunshine argues that ToM makes reading fictional narrative possible—that readers must be able to simulate or imagine the consciousness of fictional characters that they encounter in narratives to comprehend the text. Similarly, Blakey Vermeuele argues that we best understand narrative “as a vehicle by which people test various scenarios”; narrative, she argues, can “toggl[e] our empathy on and off ” by “hooking us up to some mind or another” (Why Do We Care 41, 47, 44). Zunshine admits that this process is not always perfect. Because all readers are unique and informed by particular cultural sociohistorical contexts, all readers stand to interpret differently textual cues relating to a character’s emotional texture and experiences. Yet despite this potential messiness, Zunshine argues that reading fictional narratives flexes important cognitive and emotional muscles that can improve the real-life social contract: “Many of us come to enjoy such simulation and need it as a steady supplement to our daily social interactions. Viewed within this context, even the act of misinterpretation of the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings does not detract from the cognitive satisfaction allowed by reading fiction” (25). For Zunshine, the cognitive process of simulating a fictional character’s feelings is just as important—perhaps even more so—than the accuracy with which readers understand that character’s underlying state of mind. She thus conceives of reading fictional narratives as vital cognitive and emotional training for real-world interactions. Also important here is Suzanne Keen’s development of a theory of narrative empathy. In Empathy and the Novel (2007), Keen queries the empathyaltruism hypothesis, or the long-held assumption of humanities and literary scholars that reading makes readers better people by encouraging them to connect emotionally with characters of different backgrounds and identities. Keen presses on this hypothesis, testing it against empirical evidence that tracks the effects of reading across identities—especially those linked to race, gender, and sexuality—on the real-world values, attitudes, and beliefs of readers. Her ultimate conclusion is that “the case for altruism stemming from novel reading [is] inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated in favor of the beneficial effects of novel reading” (vii). She does admit that narratives can play a strong role in fostering empathic connections between readers and characters, especially as narratives offer readers offline zones in which to try out emotional connections that might be difficult to forge in real life. Yet her research demonstrates that readers most readily empathize with characters in

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their in-group with which it is easiest for them to identify. “Humans empathize naturally,” she writes, “but perhaps we don’t empathize with the right individuals automatically” (11). Despite her warning that literary critics “proceed cautiously” with any work that links reading to altruistic behavior, she develops a robust theory of narrative empathy that accounts for the different types of emotional response a narrative text can foster and examines which resources may be particularly conducive to establishing emotional matches between readers and characters. She continues this project in more recent work, examining the potential of narrative empathy and literary cognitivism to reinvigorate discussions of the effects of postcolonial novels on the emotions of readers.4 As is clear from this history, my conceptualization of narrative as somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened in some world is a pastiche of the definitions that have come before me. In particular, it brings together rhetorical and cognitive understandings of the mode by conceiving of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose. Clearly and most obviously indebted to Phelan’s rhetorical definition of narrative, it places emphasis on the effects of narrative in the realworld outside of the closed sign-system of the text. Yet instead of focusing on communicative channels between authors and readers as Phelan foregrounds in his work, I query how narratives offer readers tools with which to build specific imaginative worlds with specific ethics, values, and behavioral norms that, in turn, have real-world effects on the ways that those readers perceive and live in the real-world. This attention to worlds and worldbuilding draws from the cognitive narratological scholarship of Herman and others. I am not the first scholar to link rhetorical and cognitive narrative theories. Phelan himself is vocal about the potentials of marrying these two understandings of and approaches to narrative that he argues are not as incompatible as many scholars assume.5 He suggests that, rather than emphasizing differences and disagreements as they have tended to do, cognitive and rhetorical narrative scholars can productively gather around shared principles, including their mutual understanding of narrative as a “purposeful communicative exchange between authors and readers” (Somebody 151). In making this point, 4. See “Human Rights Discourse and the Universals of Cognition and Emotion.” For work on narrative empathy that directly ties to the environmental humanities, see Chapter 3 of Alexa Weik von Mossner’s Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (2017) and James, “Nonhuman Fictional Characters and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis.” 5. For examples of scholars who position cognitive and rhetorical narrative theories as incompatible, see Alber’s “Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter” and Caracciolo and Kukkonin’s “Hitting the Wall? The Rhetorical Approach and the Role of Reader Response.”

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Phelan notes that while cognitive scholars tend to shy away from discussing authors, “cognitive theory does assume that there is a mind behind the text and that interpreters attempt to read that mind (often by reading the minds of characters)” (151–52). Herman also brings together cognitive and rhetorical narrative theories in his discussion of narrative worldbuilding. He argues that the Saussurean linguistics and structuralist theories that influenced classical narratologists steered them wrong in that it encourages “the exclusion of the reference in favor of signifier and signified” (“Narrative Theory” 246). But a narrative theory informed by cognitive science sensitive to the worldcreating potential of narrative understands that “narratives cue interpreters to construct discourse models or storyworld models as referential targets.” He continues to argue that interpreters can only identify these targets when they “adop[t] the intentional stance” and “assume that a communicative intention of some kind drives the filtering of the action” through a particular world (246, 256). This does not mean that readers run afoul of the intentional fallacy by rooting their understanding of a given narrative in what they think the author intends for them to know. Instead, Herman positions intentionality in narrative contexts as action and process—it is not “localized in particular minds” but “built into the doing, the activity structure of story-telling and story-interpretation” (256). In other words, we need not construe communicative intentions as “inner, mental objects located in a particular region of space-time”—such as the mind of an author—but “distributed across text producers, text interpreters, textual designs, and the communicative environments in which such designs are produced and interpreted.” In this way, he argues, processes of narrative worldmaking are “inextricably interlinked with inferences about communicative intentions” (246). Phelan’s focus on authors and Herman’s connection of narrative worldbuilding and communicative intentions—both of which are laced into my conceptualization of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose—makes special sense for discussions of climate change fiction. These texts often are written by authors that telegraph a specific purpose; “cli-fi” is a genre that tends to signal loudly an intention to prompt readers to think about and perhaps even reassess their understanding of anthropogenic climate change and their relationship to the world-in-crisis in which authors write and readers read. Yet as I discuss below, a conceptualization of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose also illuminates the communicative intentions of texts that do not signal their environmental bona fides in this way. As Herman suggests, narrative worldbuilding involves the interaction of authors, readers, textual resources, and the worlds in which authors and readers work. An Anthropocene narrative theory thus understands all narratives as containing environ-

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mental insight, as all narratives both are produced and interpreted in specific worlds and communicate specific ethics, values, and behavioral norms related to living in a world. All narratives are thus not only rich representations of alternate worlds to which readers imaginatively transport themselves when they read but also important tools by which we “try on” various worlds and their ethical systems. That process not only has the benefits of a worldbuilding dress rehearsal but also strengthens the worldbuilding practices humans enact in nonnarrative contexts.

Narrative and the World In addition to bringing together rhetorical and cognitive definitions of narrative, my understanding of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose helps scholars of narrative and the Anthropocene appreciate the connection between narrative and the real world in two important ways. One is in the role that the real world plays in readers’ formation of storyworlds, and the second is the role that narratives can play in organizing and driving behaviors in the real world. Cognitive narrative theorists have long been interested in what is left unsaid in a narrative text. As Lars Bernaerts, Dirk de Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck explain in their introduction to Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative (2013), narratives are “gappy” by nature in that they cannot possibly provide readers with all of the textual cues that those readers require to model or simulate fully the emotions, experiences, and surrounding contexts of a narrative’s characters; such a text would be so richly detailed that it would never end, or at least be incomprehensible in the thoroughness of its description. In this way, narrative interpretation relies as much upon readers bridging gaps and filling in holes as it does readers unpacking specific textual cues. A major vein of inquiry in cognitive narrative theory thus is the study of how readers generate knowledge to supplement what a text does not articulate: As narrative theory teaches us, narratives come into being through the interaction between minds and narrative gaps. In brief, there is a profound awareness among theorists of mind as well as theorists of narrative that the construction and interpretation of narratives as coherent wholes paradoxically require gaps, empty spaces, and hidden information. The inquiring into minds and narrative has often taken the shape of pinpointing these gaps and describing how we fill them. (Bernaerts, de Geest et al., Stories and Minds 3)

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Bernaerts, de Geest et al. note that narrative theory has long involved the study of what is absent in a narrative, from Gérard Genette’s structural category of paralipsis (in which a narrator tells less than they know) to Wolfgang Iser’s suggestion that openness and conflict define the literariness of a text. The empirical study of the neurological behavior that narrative comprehension demands of readers upon which cognitive narrative theory draws places even more emphasis on narrative gaps, especially in terms of the presuppositions that inform readers’ simulations of a character’s emotions and experiences. An Anthropocene narrative theory is particularly interested in narrative gaps because of their importance to narrative worldbuilding for some purpose. Narrative gaps are essential to readers’ ability to simulate not only the emotional experiences of characters but also the surrounding context of those textual agents, and in this sense we can understand narrative worldbuilding as demanding a certain amount of filling-in by readers. Herman’s discussion of the barebones event sequence about the cat chasing a mouse down the hall nicely illustrates this necessary supplementation. In modeling the story­ world of this micronarrative, he argues that readers make vital assumptions about the size and color of the cat, the width and length of the hall, the hall’s relationship to a larger structure such as a house, and so on. Admittedly, this sequence of events is about as skeletal as a narrative can get and thus demands a high degree of supplementation from readers. But even the most robust narratives—say, sprawling Victorian novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) or the encyclopedic novels of the late-twentieth-century American canon—demand that readers do a certain amount of gap-filling to model and mentally inhabit their storyworlds. An Anthropocene narrative theory thus is interested in what is left unnarrated in a text, or in those details that authors leave undeveloped. In emphasizing the unnarrated, I take cues from the final beat of Gerald Prince’s definition of the unnarratable, or that which cannot be narrated or is not worth narrating because it “transgresses a law (social, authorial, generic, formal),” “defies the powers of a particular narrator (or those of any narrator),” or “falls below the so-called threshold for narratability 6 (it is not sufficiently unusual or problematic)” (“Disnarrated” 1, my emphasis). Prince states that the unnarratable is often that which is “left unsaid by a narrative because of ignorance, repression, or choice,” thus attuning us to those unnarrated aspects of a narrative’s world that authors deem to be insignificant enough not to merit comment or elaboration. For example, readers can safely assume that the sun regularly rises and sets in the town of Middlemarch or 6. See also Robyn Warhol’s “Neonarrative; or, How to Render the Unnarratable in Realist Fiction and Contemporary Film.”

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that Will Ladislaw has two functioning kidneys despite never being specifically stated as so by the novel; this information is not sufficiently unusual to feature in the narration. To keep a sequence of events progressing, authors must ultimately move on from description to action. Authors thus cannot provide every detail that readers require to model fully a narrative’s world, and a narrative’s interpretation relies upon readers boosting their model with details they pull from extratextual contexts. We find a clear connection between narrative worlds and the real-world in which readers read in this filling-in of storyworld details that lie in the unnarrated. As Herman explains, readers form storyworlds in two directions. Working in a bottom-up fashion, authors provide readers with specific textual cues by which to construct a storyworld model. In his barebones sequences, these cues include “cat,” “hall,” “down,” and so forth; in the opening pages of Middlemarch, they include “Tipton Grange,” “infant school,” “village,” “sittingroom which divided the bedrooms,” and “large drawer of the cabinet” (Eliot 8, 11). Such textual cues can come in many shapes and forms. Some may instruct readers about space—where a bedroom sits within the larger context of a manor house—while others will demand readers adjust their sense of time— how long it takes for a character to walk from the school in which she works to the home in which she daydreams. Still other cues will instruct readers by appealing to their senses to explain what it is like for someone or something to undergo a conscious experience, such as Dorothea’s “uneas[e]” as she sits in the “still” room during her initial dinner meeting with Casaubon (16). But equally as important as these textual cues are the top-down presuppositions that readers will use to fill in the unnarrated. These assumptions can originate in paratextual information, including genre designations and book covers. A copy of Middlemarch that signifies its Victorian origins or the text’s placement in the “Classics” section of the bookstore, for example, provides readers with visual and material cues that suggest that characters in this text will not own iPads but may wear bonnets. But even more importantly for an Anthropocene narrative theory, many assumptions that account for the unnarrated originate in the immediate environment in which readers read. Marie-Laure Ryan’s work explicates this phenomenon in her discussion of the information that readers use to complete what she calls the “fictional recentering” of a narrative’s storyworld (Narrative as Virtual Reality 103–5). Her key claim is that such recentering is defined by the principle of minimal departure, or the idea that readers initially will base a model of a storyworld on the actual world in which they read and only adjust that model when a text cues them to do so. Her principle states that we “reconstrue the central world of a textual universe . . . as conforming as far as possible to our representa-

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tion of AW [the actual world]. We will project upon these worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text” (Possible 51). For Ryan, the real-world context in which readers read is an essential component of their storyworld model. Indeed, her principle suggests that readers approach a narrative with the assumption that the world of the text matches the material context in which they read and only adapt their model when they encounter textual cues that challenge this assumption. We can thus understand all storyworld models as originating in the real world, in that the real world provides the basic assumptions and presuppositions that readers use to account for what authors leave unnarrated. Look into a narrative gap and you will find the real world. Importantly, Ryan’s statement that we model storyworlds as conforming to “our representation” of the actual world and fill in the gaps with “everything we know about reality” emphasizes the subjectivity of storyworld modeling. As readers’ sociocultural and historical contexts determine readers’ understanding of their physical, material, and environmental reality, storyworld models by default will encode the attitudes, values, and behaviors of those contexts. Of course, storyworld gaps also encode the attitudes, values, and behaviors of the contexts of the narrative’s production, as they inform the presuppositions at work in the author’s writing and thus determine what authors deem necessary to articulate in a text and what they do not. As Herman explains, readers “work to interpret narratives by reconstructing the mental representations that have in turn guided their production” (Story Logic 1). Given this, an Anthropocene narrative theory understands storyworld models as a composite of three worlds: the world of the narrative’s content as provided by textual cues, the author’s understanding of reality as encoded in the unnarrated, and the reader’s own representation of the real world that informs their filling in the unnarrated. Storyworlds, in other words, are defined not only by the text itself, but also by the author’s and reader’s subjective cultural and environmental contexts. Storyworld models are thus a complex dance of what is narrated in a narrative and the real-world contexts that allow authors and readers to produce and fill-in what is not, respectively. Conceiving of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose also makes a second connection between the real world and narrative in its illumination of the ways that narratives can drive behaviors in nonnarrative contexts. Appreciating this connection involves grappling with the arguments and developments of second-generation cognitive science. In a 2014 special issue of Style on cognitive literary criticism, Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen explain that second-generation cognitive scholars tend to reject the ideas of first-­generation cognitive science of the mind as limited to information

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processing and functioning like a computer, independent of bodies and sensory modalities. Instead, second-generation scholars adhere to more recent, broader conceptualizations of mental processes as “on a continuum with bioevolutionary phenomena and cultural practices” (“Introduction” 261). Caracciolo and Kukkonen argue that narrative scholars in particular have much to gain from second-­generation cognitive science, including the study of “readers’ immediate embodied engagements with literary texts and how they build on bodily patterns and memories” that originate in the real world, considerations of what they call “situated conceptualizations,” or “the close integration of abstract meanings and embodied cues in reading literature,” and acknowledgements of “how literary texts can reveal the interrelation of embodiment and socio-cultural practices” (264). In doing so, they suggest, narrative scholars stand to reorient the role of readers’ bodies and environments in the processing and interpretation of narrative. The repeated use of the term “embodied” in Caracciolo and Kukkonen’s list of potential second-generation cognitive narratology projects is no accident. The “e-approaches,” as they are colloquially known in cognitive science, emphasize the enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended qualities of the human mind.7 Narrative scholars, Caracciolo and Kukkonen foremost among them, have published widely on the embodied nature of narrative comprehension, most notably in the arguments that reading is shaped by the embodied schemata and lived experiences of readers, and that the minds of fictional characters are themselves embodied.8 But I see great potential for our understanding of the relationship between narrative and nonhuman material in the final “e,” “extended.” It is here that we can press on the role that the real world plays in narrative production and comprehension via an understanding of narrative as a cognitive tool that links the human brain and its external environment. Andy Clark and David Chalmers first articulated their thesis of the “extended mind” in their 1998 article of the same name. In its argument that the environment plays an active role in driving cognitive processes, their work is a notable example of second-generation cognitive science that sees cognition as not confined to the skin and skull but part of a coupled system that links together human organisms and external entities. “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?,” they ask in their article’s first sentence. Their answer is simple: the barrier between human mind and the world is but 7. To this list, Caracciolo and Kukkonen add two additional “e”s: experimental and emotional (“Introduction” 261). 8. See the essays in Style 48.3 (2014), as well as Caracciolo’s The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactive Approach (2014).

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an illusion, as cognition relies on the coupling of the brain and parts of the environment. They thus understand cognition as not restricted to brain-meat but extending out into the body and the world with external features playing an active role in human sense-making. As quick evidence of this extension, Clark and Chalmers ask their readers to imagine a person sitting in front of a computer screen and using a rotate button to determine whether twodimensional geometric shapes will fit into depicted sockets. The scenario, they argue, illustrates an extended mind, as cognition is “distributed across agent and computer instead of internalized within the agent” (7). Clark and Chalmers conclude their essay by stating that “once the hegemony of the skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world”—a declaration that clearly connects human cognition to the world around us (18). Literary scholars have embraced notions of the extended mind to consider what role literature plays in human cognition, or how our thinking often extends to and is reliant upon literary texts. The notion of affordances is central to these arguments. Psychologist James J. Gibson first coined the term in his study of human visual perception in the late 1960s; his statement that “the affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill” highlights his interest in how animals perceive environmental stimuli and thus know and experience the world around them (119, emphasis in original). Gibson explains that for different animals, affordances can be “the medium, substances, surfaces, objects, places, or other animals” of their environment; understanding affordances is thus one way of appreciating the “complementarity of the animal and the environment” (134, 119). The examples that Gibson provides of human affordances include those linked to mobility (“what we call steps afford stepping, up or down, relative to the size of a person’s legs”), weaponry (“a graspable rigid object of moderate size and weight affords throwing”), and communication (“a hand-held tool of enormous importance is one that, when applied to a surface, leaves traces and thus affords trace-making”) (125, emphasis in original). Affordances, in short, describe potentials for action that link organisms to the world around them. Gibson’s discussion of affordances offers us two important ideas for unpacking the relationship between narrative and the Anthropocene. First, affordances are powerful evidence of the extended mind thesis. The actions of stepping and trace-making that Gibson discusses are not only examples of how the human body can move given the right mediums, substances, surfaces, and objects but also illustrations of spatially extended cognitive systems that can power cognitive processes such as navigating and remembering. In

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this sense, we can productively think of affordances as cognitive tools in that they facilitate distinct modes of thinking that are distributed across brains, bodies, and entities in the external environment. Second, Gibson notes that one affordance can lead to another, creating a chain of consequences that can have drastic effects on the world. In a long discussion titled “Man’s [sic] Alteration of the Natural Environment,” he accounts for the ways in which humans have changed the world since the Industrial Revolution; he notes that humans have transformed surfaces by clear-cutting and paving; converted substances into artificial materials such as bronze, iron, concrete, and bread; and modified mediums such as air and water with pollution. “Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment?,” he asks. The answer is simple: “to change what it affords him” (122). In altering the environment to increase what benefits the species and decrease what injures it, Gibson argues, humans have made the environment less habitable for almost all other species. Humans have also clearly demonstrated the linked nature of affordances—that one possibility for action can lead to and produce other possibilities for action. Affordances thus are not only a powerful concept for understanding how human cognition extends into the environment but also a compelling way of recognizing how one action can drive subsequent actions that radically reshape the world. Literary critics have adopted the concept of affordances in their explorations of how literature functions in the world. Affordances recast literature as not simply a thing—texts that we read—but also a vital tool of cognition that shapes our relationship to the world around us. In this light, literature is a powerful cognitive instrument that affords distinct possibilities for thinking and action. Terrance Cave makes this argument in Thinking with Literature (2016), in which he positions literature as a mental tool that helps humans “extend their reach into and control over the environment” (46). He suggests literature is a vital cognitive affordance, or “inherited and cultural cognitive equipment that humans can bring to bear on a particular time and in a particular context” (52). Cave’s interest lies in the potentialities of literature—what actions and possibilities it affords, and how those actions and possibilities stand to organize our reality—and his project places emphasis on literary form. He reimagines the relationship between form and its instantiation “not as a relation between vehicle and content but as an ecological, adaptive, and ultimately innovative interaction” that represents “a ‘new’ way of writing that is also a new way of thinking” (56, 59). He thus argues that concepts such as genre, sonnet, and essay are not only useful categorizing tools, but instruments of thought that each afford distinct possibilities and originate from a specific relationship to our environment.

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Similar to Gibson, Cave’s discussion of affordances appreciates their linked nature, in that, as he states, “affordances can be built on other affordances” (50). But Cave extends the linked nature of affordances to account for how imagined affordances can drive real-world change: Humans create their own adaptive ecologies, imagining potential affordances (or use-values) not available in nature and then improvising the instruments or devices that could supply them. The reversal of the order of affordance is of course critical, and it has become obsessive in modern times: industrial societies invent new needs, and then the means to supply those needs, in an ever-accelerating cycle. . . . (50)

The implication of Cave’s discussion is that literary forms and conventions, by providing new relationships to our environment, can alter that environment by imagining other affordances. For Cave, affordances thus are essential to studying the ways that humans think with literature, or the ways in which literature functions as a vital cognitive tool that has material effects in the real world. Caroline Levin’s Forms (2017) is another example of scholarship that understands literature in terms of affordances to consider its real-world effects. She defines affordances as “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” and, like Cave, argues that this concept encourages us to think anew about literary forms. She writes that affordances “allo[w] us to grasp both the specificity and the generality of forms—both the particular constraints and possibilities that different forms afford, and the fact that those patterns and arrangements carry their affordances with them as they move across space and time” (6). For Levine, all literary forms, like material substances, present us with different possibilities for action; just as “glass affords transparency and brittleness and steel affords strength, smoothness, hardness, and durability,” rhyme “affords connection and circulation” and narrative affords “the connection of events over time” (6). She conceives of the possibilities for action of literary forms in terms of patterns and arrangements, such that each form shapes our understanding of the world around us. Each literary form, in other words, is political in its arrangement of reality. Because the affordances of literary forms remain constant no matter their historical or sociopolitical context—rhyme will always afford repetition, no matter if it appears in Elizabethan England or twenty-first-century Nigeria—Levine argues that “attending to the affordances of form opens up a generalizable understanding of political power” (7, emphasis in original). She thus sees the affordances of literary forms as offering literary critics an innovative method of working

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around the traditional incompatibility of formalism’s dogged interpretation of literary texts alone, isolated from the contexts of their production and reception, and more contemporary historical reading practices that situate those texts firmly within their sociopolitical, historical, cultural, and environmental contexts. Like Gibson, Levine understands affordances as shaping and altering our world, such that literary forms afford the structure of culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge. I agree with Levine and Cave that affordances are a rich resource for understanding what literature can do and the ways in which literary forms offer us distinct possibilities for action. But an Anthropocene narrative theory refines their arguments in light of the specific possibilities that narrative affords. Indeed, I want to make a special case for narrative as an affordance of worldbuilding—a particular aesthetic design that permits particular actions and uses or, to return to my favored language, a communicative mode that involves worldbuilding for some purpose. Levine argues that narrative affords the connection of events over time. But this is a limited way to think about narrative that is based on a classical understanding of narrativity as linked only to event sequencing. When we sophisticate our definition of narrative to include recent developments in rhetorical and cognitive narrative theories, we see that narrative not only affords the connection of events over time, but also the mental modeling of storyworlds to which readers transport themselves as they work to understand a text that can have real-world effects outside of the narrative’s closed sign-system. This perspective illuminates the special properties of narrative and the distinct possibilities that it affords. While all literature affords certain possibilities, it is narrative that affords the building of worlds and their systems of ethics, values, and behaviors. An Anthropocene narrative theory suggests that the study of narrative-asworldbuilding-affordance is especially timely in this epoch in which humans are rewriting the real world because of narrative’s fundamental importance to human cognition. H. Porter Abbott’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative leads with the claim that narrative is fundamental to human self-identity. He notes that infants first demonstrate narrative capability in their third or fourth year, right around the time that they start putting verbs and nouns together. Its appearance, he observes, coincides roughly with the first memories that adults retain of their infancy—a correlation that leads some scholars to see memory as reliant on a capacity for narrative. “In other words,” Abbott writes, “we do not have any mental record of who we are until narrative is present as a kind of armature, giving shape to that record” (3). Social psychologist Jerome Bruner similarly argues that humans “enter into meaning” by making narrative sense of the world around them, and that this meaning-making via

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narrative requires humans to prioritize human goal-directed action, sequential order, sensitivity to what is normal and abnormal, and the perspective of a narrator (77). Bruner asserts that this cognitive inclination toward narrative is a defining characteristic of the species; indeed, he sees the innate disposition to narrative organization as so essential to human cognition that he argues it is a precursor to language acquisition (68). This understanding of the development of human identity suggests that narrative mentation is essential to human cognition. We can easily bolster this theory by considering the cognitive behaviors of our closest genetic relatives. Individual chimpanzees such as Washoe and Nim Chimpsky have learned to communicate with their human handlers via visual images, but no documentation exists of even a rudimentary system of signs naturally occurring in wild chimpanzee communities. Cognitive anthropologist Merlin Donald makes the phylogenetic argument that, while captive apes can learn a significant number of signs and string together two or three signs appropriately, “it is evident that apes do not have anything like the human capacity for syntactically complex, high-speed communication” (134). Studies suggest that while chimpanzees and other apes possess the ability to perceive events and situations, they lack the cognitive capacity for narrative construction and interpretation. It is this capacity for narrative thinking that leads Donald to make a clear distinction between human and ape cognition: “Our genes may be largely identical to those of a chimp or gorilla, but our cognitive architecture is not. . . . Humans are utterly different. Our minds function on several phylogenetically new representational planes, none of which are available to animals” (382). Donald and others argue that the evolution of narrative thinking, which Donald places during the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, brought with it a unique set of cognitive skills that even our closest genetic relatives lack (16). Abbott agrees in his discussion of the evolution of the “storied mind,” developing the work of Bruner and Donald to argue that the emergence of narrative meaning-making allowed early humans to exist in their own constructed realities: Freed from regularity, time could now contract or expand in myriad ways— ways that could even accommodate the regularity of natural rhythms, though without being chained to it. Narrative time is constructed time, organized according to creatural priorities. If hominids found themselves, like all other creatures, thrown into a world governed by the seemingly eternal regularities of days and seasons, they found in narrative a way to impose shapes of their own devising back upon the universe. (“Evolutionary Origins” 250)

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Abbott argues that the evolution of narrative gave early humans a “fundamentally new mode of awareness” that distinguished them from all other creatures. By stringing events into a sequence, he explains, early humans took the first steps “out of the total immersion in the present moment that Donald and others attribute to the consciousness of apes” (250). As Abbott notes, this gave the species an immense evolutionary advantage, in that it permitted them the flexibility to develop survival strategies based on memories and stored information. This new mode of cognition also afforded them a distinct relationship to the world around them, in which they could impose new shapes upon their material contexts. Taken together, this work suggests that narrative thinking is fundamental to the human experience of the world. We can thus understand the capacity for narrative thought as providing humans with a distinctive relationship to ourselves and the world. It also—and this is key to an Anthropocene narrative theory—affords humans a potent process of imaginative worldbuilding. It is not lost on me that our current epoch has been largely produced and driven by damaging attitudes of human superiority. I suggest that by scrutinizing our capacity for narrative mentation and the world-building skills that it affords us we better understand the origins of and mental machinery that produces the Anthropocene. If we want to study the ways in which humans are rewriting the world in the Anthropocene, one great place to start is the cognitive affordance by which humans develop and sharpen their worldbuilding skills.

The Anthropocene in Narrative We can begin to appreciate the benefits of conceptualizing narratives as worldbuilding for some purpose by returning to arguments about Theory of Mind and narrative empathy. As I discuss above, cognitive literary scholars such as Lisa Zunshine and Blakey Vermuele argue that narratives offer us safe spaces in which to try on the emotional states of others. Zunshine and Vermeule thus see narrative reading as an important training ground for the real-life social contract; readers, the theory goes, practice their mind-reading skills and emotional literacy by modeling the experiences of characters in narrative contexts, and thus are better equipped to handle the emotions of the fleshand-blood people whom they encounter in the real world. Other scholars, such as Martha Nussbaum and Steve Pinker, take this idea one step further to suggest that narratives can make us better world citizens—a “nicer species,” in Pinker’s words—by giving readers access to the emotions and experiences of people they would not normally encounter in real life, especially those that

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differ in terms of gender, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, and nationality (48).9 This is the empathy-altruism hypothesis in a nutshell: reading narratives fosters empathic connections between readers and characters in safe contexts, and that practice makes readers more effective empaths and thus better people in real life. But Suzanne Keen offers us an important corrective to this optimistic take on narrative as a training ground for emotional understanding and conflict resolution. Her careful review of empirical evidence suggests that in-group associations are often the determining factor in narrative empathy. Keen argues that readers form empathic connections most easily with characters that resemble them and scholars have yet to provide evidence that any specific set of narrative resources can override in-group affiliations. She is clear about the implications of in-group affiliations for the real-life social contract: “Human beings tend to experience empathy most readily for those who seem like us. . . . We may find ourselves regarding the feelings of those who seem outside the tribe with a range of emotions, but without empathy” (“Theory” 214). Keen is thus deeply suspicious of any claims that narrative reading leads to real-life altruism, stating that “it is one thing to discover that high empathizers report empathic reading experiences, and quite another to show that empathic reading experiences can contribute to changing a reader’s disposition, motivations, and attitudes” (214). Rather than improving the real-life social contract, Keen warns that narrative empathy can be dangerous in that it confirms in-group associations and can foster readers’ emotional and imaginative connection with the bad behavior and prejudicial attitudes of characters who inhabit similar subject positions. As for narrative empathy, I argue, so too for narrative worlds. Narratives are gappy by necessity, as authors cannot possibly provide every detail that readers require to produce a complete model of a storyworld and thus relegate or repress information that is not sufficiently unusual to the unnarrated. Because readers fill in the unnarrated with their knowledge of real-world contexts, narrative reading is by default an exercise in replication: readers will imaginatively recreate and inhabit a world that resembles the world in which they read until they are instructed to do otherwise by the text. In this way, an Anthropocene narrative theory understands narrative comprehension as fos 9. Pinker articulates this theory clearly when he notes that “by allowing you to project yourself into the lives of people of different times and places and races, in a way that wouldn’t spontaneously occur to you, fiction can force you into the perspective of a person unlike yourself, who might otherwise seem subhuman” (48). For additional articulations of this idea, see Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997) and Patrick Colm Hogan’s “The Epilogue of Suffering.”

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tering in-world affiliations. Just as readers tend to form empathic connections to characters that resemble their own identity, they tend to produce storyworlds that resemble their representation of the real world in which they read. Narrative worldbuilding thus can be a positive feedback loop, in that readers will “try on” worlds that largely resemble their own unless a text tasks them with questioning basic assumptions and presuppositions about their relationship to the world. The danger of replication is especially acute if the narratives that circulate and monopolize a canon themselves originate in real-world contexts determined by similar assumptions, attitudes, and values. This insight about narrative’s in-world affiliations has important implications for environmental humanities scholarship, in that it provides cognitive backing to the popular argument that the stories about the environment that we consume have direct effects on the real-world environment. If narrative reading affords worldbuilding, it follows that readers who are especially adept at imaginatively building a particular type of world will become increasingly comfortable inhabiting that world. Furthermore, as Gibson, Cave, and Levine suggest in their discussion of the ability of affordances to shape and alter our environment, certain possibilities for action lead to other possibilities for action. To borrow Cave’s phrasing, we might say that the imagination of a world not available in nature can in turn lead to the improvisation of instruments or devices that can supply that world. Storyworld models can be a powerful driver of the reverse-engineering of affordances, in that the mental modeling and emotional inhabitation of storyworlds can encourage real-world behaviors that will make the imagined real. If we recognize that affordances can be built on other affordances, we must acknowledge the potential implications of practicing worldbuilding skills via engaging with narrative. Model the story and improve your skills at building that particular type of world and imagining the affordances that would make that world possible. Fundamentally change the story and the underlying assumptions and presuppositions upon which it depends and develop your skills for mentally modeling and emotionally inhabiting alternate worlds and their associated affordances. One direction in which an Anthropocene narrative theory can push this insight about narrative reading and in-world affiliations is the study of the world-building processes afforded by narratives that confirm damaging assumptions of human superiority and the role that those processes play in the rewriting of the real world. Environmental humanities scholars can do this by drastically expanding what aspects of a literary text they consider relevant. To date, discussions of narrative in the Anthropocene have largely focused on explicit representations of environmental change. We see this easily in the survey of cli-fi scholarship that I discuss in the introduction to this book.

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Scholars such as Adam Trexler and Stephanie LeMenager tend to focus on the content of contemporary novels in their exploration of representations in climate change in fiction, especially texts by authors writing after the midtwentieth-century date that the Anthropocene Working Group deems as the beginning of the Anthropocene. While the work of both scholars gestures toward the importance of narrative form—Trexler in his questioning of what formal innovations climate change inspires and LeMenager in her arguments about the novelistic mode as best suited to depict the everyday experience of the epoch—both privilege texts that explicitly represent the Anthropocene’s environmental changes in their content, such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Other scholars follow suit. Writer Kim Stanley Robinson privileges realistic representations of climate change in his conceptualization of cli-fi as “near-future science fiction” that “has become in effect the realism of our time” (“Foreword” ix). Adeline Johns-Putra similarly defines cli-fi as “fiction concerned with anthropogenic climate change or global warming as we now understand it” (“Climate Change in Literature” 267). While her explorations of cli-fi helpfully push beyond contemporary novels to also consider poetry and plays, explicit content remains crucial to her categorization of texts as cli-fi. Likewise, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson conceives of cli-fi as texts that not only “bear witness” but also “agitate and inspire apathetic and complicit readers” (“Climate Change Fiction” 309). His articulation of the major themes of the genre—those of denial, caution, and resistance—again ensures a special interest in explicit representations of anthropogenic climate change in a text’s content. Antonia Mehnert is most direct about her focus on clear representation. In Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (2016), she is “interested in works that explicitly engage with anthropogenic climate change”—books in which “meteorological phenomena do not just provide the background setting against which the story unfolds,” but a “climatically changed planet is itself . . . an indispensable part of the narration” (38). For Mehnert, climate change must significantly alter and be “a prevalent issue for characters, plot, and setting” (emphasis in original). Consensus is building that, for a text to represent climate change and thus be worthy of analysis as such, it must do so explicitly in its content.10

10. Econarratological scholarship is one clear exception to this consensus. For examples, see James, The Storyworld Accord and the essays in Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology (2020), especially Eric Morel’s “Readerly Dynamics in Dynamic Climate Times: Cli-Fi and Rhetorical Narrative Theory” and Astrid Bracke’s “Worldmaking Environmental Crisis: Climate Fiction, Econarratology, and Genre.”

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This work is no doubt important, as direct representations of climate change do have the potential to agitate and inspire readers as Schneider-Mayerson suggests. It also follows the insights of rhetorical narrative theory in that it mines the connections between narrative form and authorial message or, to use Phelan’s language, conceives of narrative as not simply a structure but an “action” in which authors use resources “to achieve a purpose in relation to an audience” (“Authors” 2). Yet an Anthropocene narrative theory indicates that texts that do not represent anthropogenic climate change explicitly in their content also can contain valuable information about the Anthropocene, its altered world, the cognitive processes that build that world, and the rhetorical purposes and real-world effects of that building. Conceiving of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose shows us that explicit textual cues are key to readers’ mental modeling and imaginative inhabitation of storyworlds. But equally as vital to these models are the presuppositions functioning in the gaps of a narrative—the ones that fill in crucial information about what kind of world authors write and readers model and inhabit. The unnarrated is a rich vein of assumptions that authors bake into their narratives and readers draw upon to flesh out storyworld models. What is implicit in a narrative— what is not a part of the narration—can tell us a great deal about what structures of reference, value, and attitude are necessary for a narrative to function as such. It can thus be a valuable resource for studying the assumptions of human superiority that have helped to produce the Anthropocene and the textual mechanisms and cognitive processes by which they circulate. Understanding the unnarrated as containing environmentally relevant knowledge not only greatly expands the corpus of texts by which to study our current epoch but also radically redresses the questions that we ask of those texts. Instead of only querying how realistically a narrative represents climate change; how climate change explicitly registers in character, plot, and setting; or how committed an author is to shifting their audience’s attitude toward climate change, an Anthropocene narrative theory asks: What type of world does this text encourage readers to model? What attitudes, values, and behaviors does this world rely upon and assume? What relationship between humans and their environment does the unnarrated in this text suggest? What role do the values, attitudes, and behaviors of the storyworld play in driving the anthropogenic climate change that defines the Anthropocene in the real-world? How does the world of this narrative foreclose, suppress, or deny other, alternate worlds that rely upon other, alternate attitudes, values, and behaviors? Edward Said presents us with a useful model for the type of expanded analysis for which I advocate. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said introduces

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his methodology of contrapuntal reading, which he defines as a simultaneous reading of point and counterpoint. His primary interest is the circulation of imperial ideas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British novels, and the ways in which those ideas at once are shaped by and deny the experiences of colonized peoples. In practice, contrapuntal reading often amounts to reading the experiences and contexts that inform a narrative but that the text refuses to narrate; as Said states, a contrapuntal reading of the British canon involves reading “not univocally” but “with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against with (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (51). Contrapuntal reading thus requires “extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded,” or considering how a text reveals “a structure of reference and attitude, a web of affiliations, connections, decisions, and collaborations” that often manifest as “leaving a set of ghostly notations” (125). Said offers up a rich example of contrapuntal reading in his analysis of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). This text, with its traditional marriage plot, British setting, and explicit concern with morality, appears to have nothing much to do with colonization. Yet Said points out that the novel’s plot and morals are dependent upon an imperial cultural and environmental context that is aggressively suppressed in the novel’s narration. Fanny’s marriage—her very life in Mansfield Park—is funded by Sir Thomas’s plantation in Antigua. Said thus reads the novel’s plot, characters, and British setting as made possible by an unarticulated counterpoint of slavery and exploitation. He argues that this suppressed context, which exists in the unnarrated outside of brief, casual references to Antigua, stands for “a significance ‘out there’ that frames the genuinely important action here” (93, emphasis in original). Yet, he continues, “these signs of ‘abroad’ include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history which has since achieved a status that . . . Austen herself would not, could not, recognize.” To understand the world of Mansfield Park thus is to grapple with not only what is present explicitly in the narration but the context and experiences that that narration denies and represses. A contrapuntal reading illuminates the extent to which many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British novels, and readers’ understanding of these narratives, rely upon the very contexts that authors refuse or neglect to narrate and a familiarity with the imperial attitudes that justify that erasure or omission. Said writes about contrapuntal reading in the early 1990s, before the developments of second-generation cognitive science. But it is easy to frame his methodology in cognitive terms. Contrapuntal reading is heavily invested in narrative gaps, in that it locates meaning in the unnarrated and considers the effects that the unnarrated stands to have on readers. In other words, contra-

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puntal reading makes directly relevant what a text suppresses—the structures of attitude and reference that an author refuses to narrate but yet draws upon in their representation of the world. In the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British novels, these attitudes and references originate in the ideas about home, nation, and cultural superiority of the author’s sociohistorical conditions. Said’s analysis illuminates the fact that English novels that suppress engagement with Indian, African, and Caribbean colonies are nonetheless shaped and determined by the history of colonization, and that the unnarrated of these texts are rich veins of assumptions and presuppositions of British cultural, racial, and geographic superiority. An Anthropocene narrative theory similarly advocates for a mode of analysis that reads the counterpoint to a narrative’s point, or that reads the gaps of a narrative’s world to question the underlying assumptions and presuppositions that inform those gaps. I suggest that we look to the unnarrated for ghostly notations of the damaging assumptions and presuppositions of human superiority that have helped to produce the Anthropocene. In addition to its investment in narrative gaps, contrapuntal reading also highlights the real-world effects of narrative worldbuilding. Said’s work recognizes that the representation of one world in a narrative necessarily precludes another, and that readers stand to develop comfort with the ideas and ideologies upon which a storyworld relies the more they mentally model and emotionally inhabit that world. “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging,” he writes, “is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them” (xiii). He argues that the novel is not only “immensely important for the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences,” but “the aesthetic object” of Britain’s expanding society (xii, emphasis in original). The positive ideas of home and nation in the novels of the British empire thus “do more than validate ‘our’ world”; they also tend to “devaluate other words and, perhaps more significantly from a retrospective point of view, they do not prevent or inhibit or give resistance to horrendously unattractive imperial practices” (81). To phrase this in the rhetorical and cognitive vocabulary with which we have been working, Said suggests that narrative worldbuilding has a purpose: it circulates dominant ideologies of race and nation. Nineteenthand early twentieth-century British novels not only afford the modeling and inhabiting of a specific world—one that relies upon assumptions of British supremacy—but also inhibit the modeling and inhabitation of a world that does not replicate such unattractive attitudes, values, behaviors, and ethics. Likewise, narratives that task readers with modeling and inhabiting a familiar world reliant upon ideas of human superiority that underlie the Anthropocene

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devalue alternate worlds that are not informed by such ideas. We return again here to ideas about reading and in-world affiliations that I articulate above. Said’s analysis of novels of the British empire suggests that readers who practice their skills at modeling that world will be more likely to embrace those ideas in the real world, and I see a similar process and purpose at work in narratives in the Anthropocene. Like Said, I suggest that we study these texts to come to grips with the mechanisms by which these ideas circulate and direct action in real-world contexts. Analyzing narratives that rely upon anthropocentric assumptions as keys to understanding real-world worldbuilding processes and purposes stands to dramatically shift environmental humanities debates about the novel and its significance. Environmental humanities scholars have thus far placed novels at the center of their study of representations of climate change. As I discuss in this book’s introduction, novels are central to Trexler’s survey of Anthropocene fictions, as he sees the novel as a complex literary mode that, “by its nature .  .  . assembles heterogeneous characters and things into a narrative sequence” and thus is well-suited to making sense of climate change, which itself is a “complex network of things and effects” (14). One of Trexler’s main points of inquiry is the ways in which climate change disrupts generic conventions within the novel, such that “literary novels bleed into science fiction; suspense novels have surprising elements of realism; realist depictions of everyday life involuntarily become biting satire” (14). Likewise, LeMenager privileges the novel as befitting representations of what it is like to live in the Anthropocene because of its investment in the everyday and the trivial, and points to the mode’s past success in “trying out and testing material and social relations” as evidence of its malleability (“Climate Change” 236). Amitav Ghosh, on the other hand, regards the climate change novel as an oxymoron, arguing that “serious” fiction absolutely is unsuited to representing today’s altered world. Ghosh sees the realist novel as a mode that conceals the “unheard-of and the improbable,” and thus argues that its basic formulation is antithetical to today’s unpredictable world (27). At debate here are the parameters and history of the novel: what the category of “novel” delineates and the rigidity of that category. Scholars such as Trexler and LeMenager see the novel as capacious and pliable, encompassing realist and speculative texts, while Ghosh’s understanding of the mode is much narrower and more inflexible, restricted only to “serious” realism. Despite loose discussion of the forms of the novel by all three scholars, both stances ultimately put pressure on the novel’s content, the former by arguing that novels can represent climate change and its complexity explicitly, and the latter by stating that novels cannot. But we can also productively study the

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novel and its various subcategories for the ways in which it drives real-world attitudes, values, ethics, and behaviors via the unnarrated. Again, Said’s work provides a useful model. Instead of only focusing on texts that explicitly represent colonization, his primary target of analysis are novels that suppress the horrors of the empire and thus contribute to “an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies, reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions and attitudes about England and the world” (75). The novels that deny or repress colonization “have the coherence of a continuous enterprise,” and thus are primary vehicles of the representation and circulation of assumptions of British superiority. I take a similar stance to Said in posing a fresh set of questions about the novelistic mode and climate change—especially the traditional realist novel which, as Ghosh suggests, tends to pay the least attention to the unstable environmental contexts of the Anthropocene. Rather than querying the possibilities (or not) of the realist novel’s content, an Anthropocene narrative theory asks: what type of worldbuilding does the realist novel as a mode afford readers? What assumptions and presuppositions do authors tend to encode in this mode’s unnarrated? How do possibilities for action that the realist novel affords drive other possibilities for action in the real-world? History of the novel scholarship is a useful context here. In his seminal The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt defines the novel as a literary mode steeped in realism; realism, he argues, is the “defining characteristic which differentiates the work of early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fictions” (463). Furthermore, he suggests that the mode depends upon the presence of two aspects of narrative technique: “characterization and presentation of background” (468). He writes that the novel “is surely distinguished by other genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and the detailed presentation of their environment” (468). He understands writers such as Daniel Defoe as producing narratives that subordinate plot “to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir,” thus defiantly asserting “the primacy of individual experience in the novel” (466). He also sees these writers as breaking from the tradition in tragedy, comedy, and romance to depict place in “general and vague” terms, instead “visualizing the whole of [the] narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment” (473). Watt argues that the realist novel, in sum, “allows a more immediate imitation of individual experience set in its temporal and spatial environment than other literary forms” (477–78). What interests me about Watt’s discussion of the eighteenth-century British realist novel is the implicit assumptions upon which this characterization and presentation of background rely. These narrative forms suggest that

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humans are autonomous individuals and that individual human lives are of primary interest. They also suggest that those interesting human lives are set in stable backgrounds of particularized times and places. To phrase this slightly differently, the realist novel as conceived by Watt affords that readers mentally model and emotionally inhabit a specific type of world—one in which humans and human drama are in the foreground, set apart from a solid and recognizable background in which those characters function. Similar assumptions about the importance of individual human lives and the stability of their environmental contexts, of course, are also foundational to the Anthropocene. This overlap does not surprise me, given the timeline of the epoch and the sociocultural and historical context in which Watt argues the realist novel originates. The Anthropocene is produced in the same set of conditions in which Watt states the realist novel arises: early secularism, scientific enlightenment, empiricism, capitalism, materialism, national consolidation, and the rise of the middle class. After all, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)— Watt’s pick for the first novel—originates in the same social, cultural, historical, and environmental contexts as James Watt’s steam engine. Indeed, these assumptions and their relevance to the Anthropocene help to illuminate realist novels as affording the mental modeling and emotional inhabitation of a particular world steeped in human supremacy. Given the stacking nature of affordances, we might even suggest, similar to Said, that the circulation of these ideas in popular eighteenth-century British novels have a clear purpose in that they facilitate the imagining of affordances that later become real-world realities. The novel thus does not just reflect the social and material contexts that produce the Anthropocene but offers a model for human action, behavior, and ethics in the world that, in turn, helps to produce a world rewritten by human activity. An Anthropocene narrative theory’s understanding of realist novels as affording a particular type of worldbuilding for some purpose suggests that all realist novels—even those that refuse to admit the unpredictable nature of our changing world or the causes of that change, or those that are formally incapable of doing so—contain environmentally relevant knowledge. This environmental insight is not present in the text’s content, but in the implicit unnarrated assumptions that inform its narrative resources. By widening out discussions of climate change and narrative to include the unnarrated and the implicit, we find the means to analyze representations of the values that have produced climate change in texts. We also begin to see the realist novel not as ill-suited to representing climate change because of its reliance on predictability and its concealment of the improbable, but as a rich record of an imagination of a specific way of living in the world that so takes human autonomy, anthropocentrism, and

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environmental stability for granted that it is unwilling or unable to narrate anything but. As the discussions above indicate, many environmental humanities scholars advise that we turn away from the realist novel in our search for responses to anthropogenic climate change. Ghosh recommends this directly in his articulation of the incompatibility that he sees between “serious” fiction and climate change, while scholars such as Trexler and Robinson make a subtler argument about the value of science fiction and speculative novels. Jesse Oak Taylor agrees, drawing attention to the overlaps between the realist novel and the Anthropocene to position their relationship as deep and “troubling” (110). The novel, he argues, is “at once the product of and participant in the social, historical, economic, and ecological forces responsible for bringing the Holocene to an end” (110). He thus advocates for “a more expansive conception of fiction over and against the novel as such, in order to meet the demands of Anthropocene storytelling,” and conceives of the novel as useful primarily in terms of “estrangement”—in “showing us precisely what stories not to tell” (129, emphasis in original). But just as Said turns toward the British novel and its repressions because of the central role it plays in the circulation of imperial ideology, so do I suggest that we study realist novels because of the implicit assumptions of human individualism and stable environmental contexts that their storyworlds rely upon and circulate. These texts are not simply valuable for models of how not to behave but also rich instruments for examining the same cognitive processes by which humans rewrite the real world in the Anthropocene. Such a study, informed by rhetorical narrative theory, also illustrates that the particular resources of the realist novel are not ideologically locked in but text dependent. It is thus not that the realist novel as a mode is incapable of telling the “right” story about the Anthropocene, but that authors of realist novels have tended to use the mode’s specific resources for similar designs. For a productive example of environmental insights that we can pull from the narrative resources of the realist novel—including that which it represses—we can turn, like Said, to Mansfield Park. Scholars have long highlighted the symbolism of place in Austen’s novel, such that in the essay accompanying the 2012 Penguin English Library edition Tony Tanner states that “to grasp the full meaning of the various characters and incidents, it is important to understand the world of the novel and be alert to the significant differences between life in Portsmouth, life in London, and life at Mansfield Park” (476). Tanner argues that the three central locations of the novel represent for readers three different sets of values and experiences. Fanny’s birthplace in Portsmouth is an “unregulated . . . house of confusion” that stands in stark

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contrast to Mansfield, “a house of order, in which there is very little noise and no unnecessary movement” (477, 478). London, the home of the brash and disruptive Crawfords, is a “world of liberty, amusement and fashion, and has no redeeming virtues . . . a world given over to cold deception, manipulation, and exploitation” (479, 480). Embedded in Tanner’s argument, of course, is a reading of the novel’s own values—of the narrative’s delineation of differing attitudes to rural life in nineteenth-century England and its clear preference for rural quiet in the face of, as he states it, “a whole range of new energies and impulses, new ideas and powers, which were changing or about to change England . . . with a violence, a suddenness, and a heedlessness, which would soon make Jane Austen’s world seem as remote as the Elizabethan Age” (476). Indeed, one productive way to interpret Austen’s narrative, following Tanner’s lead, is to read its ultimate valuing of Mansfield Park and Fanny Price over London and the Crawfords as a critique of the very changes that lay the groundwork for the Great Acceleration of the twentieth century. Yet if we press harder on the novel, we see that despite its symbolic rejection of glamorous London modernization and industrialization, it, too, circulates many of the ideologies that are fundamental to the Anthropocene. The text does not do this via its content, but in its narrative forms and gaps. To facilitate a reading of place as symbolic, the narrative must function via one basic assumption: that material and environmental context is stable and significant only in terms of character development. We see this assumption of space as background for human drama in the novel’s first line: About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and a large income. (Austen 3)

In this establishing line, readers must model the physical space of the storyworld via its relationship to characters. Mansfield Park as a house, park, and garden initially holds meaning for readers only in that it signifies a clear step up for Maria Ward—it is her stolid inhabitation of this setting that marks her as titled by the British Crown. So too, later in the novel, does Sotherton Court hold meaning as the primary identifier of the old money of the Rushworth family. As she approaches the estate for a visit, Maria Bertram notes with an “elation of the heart” that the woods through which her barouche passes “belonged to Sotherton” and that “it was now all Mr Rushworth’s property on each side of the road” (81). The woods and gardens of Sotherton do

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not exist in the storyworld in their own terms. Instead, they are signifiers of Rushworth’s fortune and potential as a husband, as well as the stable backdrop that affords his courtship of Miss Bertram. As the carriage drives deeper into the estate and she becomes further enmeshed in the signs of its wealth, her “Rushworth-feelings” increase (81). I am especially interested in Austen’s representation of these two locations because of the paucity of details by which readers must model them. Despite being the text’s central location—its spatial and symbolic heart—Austen never pauses to describe Mansfield Park in any sort of rich detail. The narrator tells readers that Fanny is initially “astonished” by the “grandeur” of the house, such that “the rooms were too large for her to move in with ease” and she “crept about in constant terror of something or other” (15). Readers know that other characters speak of Fanny when she leaves the drawing room for bed each night and that Edmund discovers her crying on the attic stairs, but additional details of the house remain largely unnarrated. Similarly, spatializing details of Mansfield’s grounds mainly exist in the gaps of the novel; readers know that the estate boasts a house and a parsonage, and that Fanny feels forlorn in the shrubbery in addition to the house’s drawing-room and schoolroom, but must mainly rely on presuppositions and assumptions of what a nineteenth-century English baronet’s estate looks like in the realworld to model this setting. The narrator similarly tells readers that Sotherton contains the “ancient manorial residence” of the Rushmores, an unlocked iron gate in its gardens, and “spacious stone steps before the principal entrance” but does not give readers many more details beyond these (81, 82). To model Sotherton Court, as with their interpretation of Mansfield Park, readers must import details to fill in narrative gaps. Austen’s symbolic representation of space—of space as characterization— relies on a key assumption that space is a stable context that affords the functioning of characters. In other words, the symbolic settings of Mansfield Park suggest, via their figurative meanings and lack of spatializing details, that a character’s environment is only notable as a backdrop in which to have their being. We can also read the intense anthropocentrism of this assumption in many other moments of character development in the text. Edmund, feeling sorry for Fanny, decides to trade in one of his three work horses to procure a horse that she can ride. The new mare proves “a treasure,” as with “very little trouble, she became exactly calculated for the purpose” of Fanny’s riding (37). The horse is not a character in its own right but a vehicle by which Austen communicates Edmund’s care for Fanny. Similarly, the “improvements” that Rushmore wants to make to Sotherton highlight the centrality of humans in the text, and thus the necessary inferiority of all other species and matter.

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At Henry Crawford’s and Mrs. Bertram’s encouragement, Rushmore dreams of planting a shrubbery and cutting down an avenue of oak trees. The novel makes clear that these improvements are for the benefit of the human characters; Mrs. Bertram notes that “one likes to get out into a pretty shrubbery in fine weather,” while Rushmore justifies the felling of the oaks by recalling that the cutting down of “two or three fine old trees” that grew too near to the house “opens the prospect amazingly” (55). As with Fanny’s horse, the narrative places emphasis on humans at the cost of other species here. The human characters are central, and the peripheral animals and plants of their world exist for their amusement. I want to be very clear that in discussing the implicit anthropocentrism of Mansfield Park I am highlighting these aspects of the text not to criticize Austen for writing a human-centered novel nor to lament that she did not write a narrative more sensitive to the other species and matter that make possible the lives of Fanny and her peers. I do not blame Austen for writing a storyworld that assumes the stability of space and the centrality of characters. To do so would be unfair and disingenuous and would place a ridiculous burden of prescience upon her and her text. But, to borrow directly Said’s framework, I do want to read the signs of the Anthropocene in the novel that “include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history which has since achieved a status that . . . Austen herself would not, could not, recognize” (Said 93). And, like Said, I turn to what Austen largely leaves out of the text to produce this reading. Said argues that the novel’s marriage plot in England both relies upon and suppresses an alternative narrative of the brutalities of the transatlantic slave trade. Antigua, outside of brief casual references, exists in the text’s unnarrated elements, and thus the story of Fanny and Edmund denies a second story of the horrors of exploitative money-making British plantations in the Caribbean. Likewise, Austen largely hides the world beyond these human characters in the gaps of the narrative. She also does not narrate a context of environmental pollution and change against which the dominant discourse of upper-class British dramas, industrialization, and modernization acts. Like Said’s reading of the centrality of Antigua to the text, I extend my reading of the narrative to “include what was once forcibly excluded,” or, in other words, to pay attention to what Austen refuses to narrate or is incapable of narrating given the narrative’s spatialization and characterization as evidence of the mechanisms by which the structures of reference of the epoch circulate (Said 125). To put this in the terminology of rhetorical narrative theory, I am playing with the difference between Austen’s authorial audience, who would have been comfortable with the attitudes of anthropocentrism and imperialism implicit in the text’s unnarrated aspects, and an actual audience reading in the Anthro-

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pocene who may balk at these assumptions of (white) human superiority and environments that are to be taken for granted. Reading today in a context of climate crisis, I recognize the ideologies of environmental stability and human centrality that an interpretation of this narrative relies upon as illustrating the dominant anthropocentrism of the context of the text’s production—the same anthropocentrism that, in the real-world in which Austen wrote, drove the Anthropocene and continues to do so today. We find a similar structure of anthropocentric references, attitudes, and affiliations in a more recent realist novel, Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), but used in this text to much different effect. Unlike Mansfield Park, McEwan’s novel is explicitly concerned with climate change and the Anthropocene. Indeed, it is easy to read Solar as using the standard characterization and spatialization of the realist novel to criticize the very attitudes, values, ethics, and behaviors that produce the Anthropocene. The novel’s protagonist, the Nobel laureate Michael Beard, is a climate change boogeyman—a comfortably middle-class British scientist who should know better but is too lazy and self-centered to correct his environmentally damaging ways. Worse yet, the capitalist and bureaucratic systems that enmesh Beard bolster his lethargy and ineptitude. Readers follow him as he bumbles through a series of jobs and experiences between the years 2000 and 2009. First he is the aloof and ineffective head of the National Center for Renewable Energy, a new government research establishment on the outskirts of Reading at which, under Beard’s leadership, top-notch scientists waste their time developing “a single eye-catching project that would be comprehensible to the taxpayer and the media” (McEwan 27). That project—the WUDU (Wind turbine for Urban Domestic Use)—begins as a “simple wheeze” that Beard flippantly suggests but quickly turns into a “monster” that “eat[s] up all the attention and resources of the half-built Center.” Beard next travels to the Arctic as part of a research expedition of artists and scientists “concerned” with climate change (53). He is attracted to the trip not because of its potential for climatological innovation but because of the invitation’s promise of a “well-appointed, toastily heated vessel of richly carpeted oak-paneled corridors with tasseled wall lamps” (52). Readers ultimately follow Beard to his flawed yet lucrative alternative energy project in New Mexico—the mechanics of which he earlier steals from a junior scientist with whom he works at the Center after the younger man trips on Beard’s polar bear rug and dies. The novel’s final section finds Beard happily confident in the market value of his scheme. The climate is a “catastrophe,” he assures his partner; “Relax!” (251). McEwan makes the text’s values abundantly clear by representing explicitly Beard as selfish, lazy, and pathetic. “He lacked the will, the material, he

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lacked the spark,” the narrator states: “He had no new ideas” (17). McEwan encourages readers to judge Beard negatively because of this self-centered lethargy; Beard is “not wholly skeptical about climate change,” but “he himself had other things to think about” (17). Indeed, Beard is too self-absorbed to think beyond his own skin. The narrator states that Beard is “unimpressed by wild commentary that suggested that the world was in peril,” and is unable to consider the devastating social consequences of disappearing coastal cities, failed crops, drought, floods, and resource wars. For Beard, this is someone else’s problem; as the narrator notes, Beard “vaguely deplore[s]” anthropogenic climate change but expects governments to “meet and take action.” Beard is much more concerned with his personal problems, most notably his string of failed marriages, than the plight of the planet. This solipsistic emphasis on personal, human drama informs his understanding of the world. As the narrator summarizes, “God may or may not have played the dice, surely. He was nowhere near this clever, or such a show-off. The material world could not be so complicated. But the domestic world could” (24). Importantly, Beard’s solipsism not only drives the novel’s plot but also is the determining factor in the narrative’s form. Solar is narrated by an extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrator with fixed focalization, meaning that while Beard does not narrate the story himself, his is the only consciousness by which readers understand the text’s events. As such, he is both the protagonist of the text and its sensory center. Thus when readers accompany Beard to the Arctic, they spend more time dealing with the interpersonal dramas and dynamics of the shared boot room than the melting glaciers. Even when Beard gets out onto the ice on a snowmobile, his limited capacity to recognize the damaging effects of climate change upon the material world fully determines the narrator’s articulation of his experience. The fog in Beard’s cracked goggles—they freeze “within minutes”—denies readers a clear image of the changing North; he can “make out no more than a grayish blob of the machine in front” as he rides to the glacier (80). Likewise, he can only comprehend the glacier’s terminus in terms of human drama—the narrator notes that the “broken blue wall stretched for fifteen kilometers across the valley” and gives Beard the impression “of a ruined city, grubby and dissolute, with rubble, broken towers, and giant fissures” (81). Perhaps most strikingly, the middle section of the novel begins with a long description of London that represents the city only in terms of Beard’s perspective. As Beard’s plane makes its descent into the city, he watches “his familiar corner of England rotate below him” (123). “Here was a commonplace sight that would have astounded Newton or Dickens,” the narrator states, and yet the only spatializing details of the city that the narrator articulates are linked directly to Beard’s life. McEwan

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spends five pages orienting readers to Beard’s London and Beard’s London only, such that—as in Mansfield Park—the setting only exists to provide the narrative’s audience with key details about Beard’s character. There is the hospital where his mother died, there are the roofs that housed his various marriages, and here is “the very building in the Strand he was supposed to be in now” (125). “Whichever direction his gaze fell,” the narrator states, “this was home, his native corner of the planet” (127). London literally means nothing else in this text. Indeed, it is in this extended description of London in which we most easily see the satire that McEwan embeds in the novel’s narrative structures. Yes, Beard as an individual human is disastrously self-absorbed. But so too is the novel’s form. By consistently limiting the text’s focalization to its protagonist, Solar structurally denies any other perspective and thus any other narrative about climate change. McEwan’s novel formally replicates the very egotistical anthropocentrism that it mocks via its representation of the pathetic and unlovable Beard.11 It leans into the form of the realist novel, such that its hyperbolic representation of stable-space-as-backdrop-for-remarkable-human-drama becomes a feature, not a bug. The text, via its over-thetop depiction of a man who is in a position to make change but does not or cannot care enough to do so, is devastatingly self-aware in its send up of the damaging attitudes, values, ethics, and behaviors that drive the Anthropocene. McEwan identifies the root of the problem in white, masculine, middle-class, heteronormative, Western, able-bodied self-centeredness and insists that readers model the world from this perspective to confront the consequences of Beard’s outrageous anthropocentrism. Everything is about Beard in this novel, such that everything else (all other species, matter, the dying planet, etc.) do not merit mention or exist only as a plot point for our protagonist. In this realist novel—as in Mansfield Park—the material world literally cannot be more complicated than Beard’s domestic dramas. Even polar bears, that clear and clichéd symbol of anthropogenic climate change, only appear in the text as a plot device by which Beard can selfishly advance himself. The novel affords the building of one specific world—one in which the environment exists only as a backdrop for privileged human drama—and thus tasks readers with mentally modeling and imaginatively inhabiting a storyworld that resembles the real-world status quo. Yet a key difference between the two texts is the way in which McEwan self-consciously plays with the dynamics between the narrative audience and an actual audience reading in a context of 11. For more on the form of McEwan’s novel, see Markku Lehtimäki’s “A Comedy of Survival: Narrative Progression and the Rhetoric of Climate Change in Ian McEwan’s Solar.”

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devastating of anthropogenic climate change—same narrative resources, two different effects. While Austen encourages readers to comfortably construct a storyworld reliant upon ideas human centrality in stable environments, McEwan calls attention to the gross abuses of these ideas. He thus uses the very resources of the realist novel to do precisely that which Ghosh claims the mode is incapable. Under Said’s guidance, the postcolonial project is twofold. Via contrapuntal reading, it looks back to reread the mechanisms by which canonical novels formally circulate imperial ideologies in addition to or sometimes in lieu of their content. It also is sensitive to new, innovative work by authors in now-independent nations and their diasporic peers. I advocate for a similar two-beat environmental humanities project that foregrounds the importance of narrative form in the distribution and disruption of this epoch’s anthro­ pogenic status quo. Scholars interested in studying the role that literature plays in the roots of and solutions to the Anthropocene’s climate crisis must be able to look beyond a text’s explicit content to account for the narrative forms that can circulate and propagate environmentally destructive attitudes, values, and behaviors. They also must be able to account for authors’ selfconscious use of these resources to critique this status quo and the innovative textual structures that offer readers alternative models to this humanmade world—even those structures that exist in texts that do not represent explicitly anthropogenic climate change. Thus in addition to studying texts that afford the building of storyworlds that resemble the real, anthropogenically damaged world of the Anthropocene and the ethical implications of these representations, we also need to develop a lexicon for analyzing innovative and experimental narrative structures that task readers with questioning the basic and harmful assumptions that underlie the epoch. We need, in other words, to develop an Anthropocene narrative theory that opens up environmental humanities analysis to a set of texts and narrative forms for which, until now, we have lacked adequate analytical language. Such a project not only helps us deal with the anthropogenic legacies of the realist novel and potential alternative purposes of its resources but also opens up the study of environmentally relevant knowledge to a much wider range of narrative modes and forms, including short stories, flash fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narratives. It is to the second beat of an Anthropocene narrative theory project—to the identification and classification of innovative and disruptive narrative forms and structures—to which I turn in the chapters that follow.

CHAPTER 2

Material

As I prepared to write this chapter, I stumbled upon an interesting headline online—the latest episode of my frequent and directionless bumbling about on the internet. “Red Oak Live Tweets Climate Change,” states the August 13, 2019, edition of The Harvard Gazette (Herpich). The article focuses on the recent communication of a century-old red oak tree in the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, that began tweeting as @awitnesstree on July 17, 2019. It notes that the tree is already known to some readers as the subject of Lynda Mapes’s popular climate-change book, Witness Tree (2017), which makes climate science accessible by chronicling the tree’s experiences over the course of four seasons. In the wake of the Witness Tree’s publication, postdoctoral researcher Tim Rademacher outfitted the oak with sensors that track changes to bark growth, soil moisture, temperature, and sap output, as well as a “PhenoCam” that captures images of the tree’s canopy every thirty minutes. Rademacher states in the article that he was inspired by the “twittering trees” of Treewatch.net, a tree-water and carbon-monitoring network of European trees with sensors that make their hydraulic functioning and growth available in real time to internet users. But Harvard’s tree has one significant leg up on these other tweeting trees: in addition to scientific sensors, this red oak is also equipped with a custom-built computer program that translates sensor information into messages for Facebook and Twitter. Hence, with the help of a human ghostwriter-intern, we have messages such as this, from July 22, 2019: 66

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“My trunk and branches are on the fast track! My trunk has grown 0.255 mm and my branches 0.279 mm so far this month” (@awitnesstree). “We’ve done the work as a team to equip the tree with a voice, which we decided made the most sense in the first person” Rademacher explains (qtd. in Herpich). But he is also careful to note, “We don’t decide what gets posted, the tree does.” The Witness Tree is not the only nonhuman on Twitter. Inanimate objects and nonhuman organisms have been tweeting since the early days of that platform, including @TweetingSeat (a park bench in Scotland’s Dundee Botanical Gardens), @towerbridge (London’s Tower Bridge), and @SUEtheTrex (the Chicago Field Museum’s 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton). There is also my personal favorite: @TheVeryLonely, a stone in a forest that, for three months in 2012, released the same almost-daily tweet, “Today nothing has happened.” The science of the Witness Tree’s computer program is also not rare. Concerned houseplant owners have been able to purchase a “Botanicalls” kit since 2011, which allows your plant to post a tweet when it needs to be watered. (This string of tweets from @pothos illustrates nicely the typical arc of a Botanicalls Twitter account: “You didn’t water me enough”; “URGENT ! Water me!”; “Thank you for watering me!”) But the Witness Tree is unique in its scope and its agenda. In addition to its intense schedule of daily monitoring, the oak’s social media messages can draw on fifty years of data from Harvard’s Forest Fisher Meteorological Station. In effect, this tweeting tree has memory, meaning that its bot can compare today’s data with that of years previous to highlight the drastically changing conditions of its environment. The Witness Tree put this memory to good use on July 21, 2019, when it tweeted: “Yesterday, it was very hot. With a daily average of 27° (80.5°), it was the 24th hottest day I can remember.” With messages like these, the Witness Tree uses a personal touch to directly translate scientific data to a broad audience, encouraging that audience to think differently about the nonhuman organisms and material with which we share this world. As Rademacher explains, the ultimate goal of the Witness Tree project is to “make it [the tree] relatable to a larger audience” and “amplify messages of climate change” (qtd. in Herpich) In an NPR interview, Project Outreach Lead Clarisse Hart is even more explicit about the tree’s ability to teach people about climate change. “Considering the perspective of another organism is such an important thing for all of us to do,” she states; “It’s what’s going to make the world better, ultimately” (All Things Considered). Many environmental humanities scholars agree with Rademacher and Hart that nonhuman perspectives are essential to reenergizing the rhetorical stalemate of climate change discourse and fostering a more responsible environmental ethic. Inspired by the new materialist scholarship of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and

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Donna Haraway, among others, and conscious that an effective response to the human-made mess of the Anthropocene demands increased sensitivity to nonhuman experiences, these scholars have begun to ask the precise question that lies at the heart of the Witness Tree’s tweets: what is it like for nonhumans to experience the world? This work is interested in confronting the assumptions that lie at the heart of the destructive behaviors that produced the Anthropocene. As Bennett states, it rethinks an idea “that runs fast through modern heads: the idea of matter as passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert” (vii). Rather than seeing nonhuman matter and organisms—trees, rocks, a plastic bottlecap, gunpower residue, and so forth—as dull and lifeless, and thus available for human use and exploitation, new materialists reimagine the stuff around us as vibrant and alive, recognizing “the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations” (vii, emphasis in original). The world is reshaped by this scholarship; as Bennett explains, new materialism both “paint[s] a positive ontology of vibrant matter, which stretches received concepts of agency, action, and freedom sometimes to the breaking point,” and “sketch[es] a style of political analysis that can better account for the contributions of nonhuman actants” (x). This view of matter destabilizes familiar binaries of alive/not alive and object/subject, reenergizing our conceptualizations of seemingly inert and inanimate material. As a scholar of narrative and narrative theory, I am intrigued by the role that narrative often plays in the new materialist conversation. Taking up the mantle of Bennett and her peers, material ecocritics such as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann push the notion of material agency one step further to argue for the expressive capacity of nonhuman matter. Iovino and Oppermann suggest that nonhuman material not only is agentic but also capable of narrative agency, able to tell its own story of its animated and unique experiences. “Every being has a story to tell,” they write; for material ecocritics, matter is expressive and “self-representational,” and narratives are no longer solely the property of humans alone (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 9; Oppermann 28). Importantly, Iovino and Oppermann argue that nonhuman matter does not need to be outfitted with a customized computer program to produce these narratives. They suggest that nonhuman material and organisms are busy telling their own stories, whether these narratives are recognized by human minds or not. According to this view of agentic matter, the Witness Tree is exceptional not in the messages that it tweets, but only in the digital platform by which it communicates. An Anthropocene narrative theory, too, is interested in the relationship between nonhuman material agency and narrative. But informed by contem-

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porary narratological scholarship, I come at this relationship from a different angle then Iovino and Oppermann and their material ecocritical peers. Given the deeply anthropogenic nature of narrative and my understanding of narrative of worldbuilding for some purpose, I struggle to recognize the potential for agentic matter to express its own narrative without human intervention. Traditional and more current narrative scholarship poses significant challenges to the idea of nonhuman narrative agency and suggests the idea that all matter is capable of producing a narrative as misguided in its slippage between narrative and other forms of expression and representation. A tree may well be agentic and capable of producing data that illuminates its experience, but on its own it is not capable of producing a narrative, or, to return to the definition of narrative that I offer up in the previous chapter of this book, somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened in some world. It needs a human-designed bot to do that. This is not to suggest that an Anthropocene narrative theory sees no link between theories of material agency and narrative. Indeed, new materialism, material ecocriticism, and narrative theory can productively inform each other, helping to enrich both the environmental humanities and narrative scholarship. But instead of asking how nonhuman matter produces its own narratives without humans and how we best recognize these texts, my focus shifts to querying the role that that matter plays in the production of narratives by authors and the human cognitive processes of their comprehension. An Anthropocene narrative theory asks: how do the materials that we interact with, and the materials that make narratives possible, inform those narratives in surprising and consequential ways? How do some of these nonhuman materials contain within them basic blueprints of narrative, available for human narrativization? How do the materials of narratives act upon us, and how does that action influence the way that we compose and understand narratives? What is the link between the agency of matter and the cognitive processes that make narrative comprehension possible? I flesh out these questions below by discussing the possibilities of material narrativity and introducing the concept of material-narrative cognition.

Material Narrativity To unpack the relationship between narrative and nonhuman material, it helps to examine more thoroughly the material ecocritical idea of matter’s agency. Iovino and Oppermann suggest that there are two productive ways of interpreting this agency. The first studies representations of matter’s agentic

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capacities in literary texts. Noting that such representations “can be found in almost every literary tradition,” they offer up Henry Roth’s depiction of electricity in the poem “Call It Sleep” (1932) and Thomas Hardy’s writing of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878) as prime examples (“Material” 79). Such texts, they suggest, are illustrations of “ecological nonhuman agents projecting themselves as ‘textual forms’ of matter and telling their stories through the material imagination of their human counterparts” (82). Iovino and Oppermann’s second method of studying material agency is more ambitious. They argue that material ecocritics productively study the agency of nonhuman matter by recognizing its expressive potential and state that, like all new materialist scholarship, material ecocriticism is interested in “re-negotiating the boundaries of narrative agency” (“Material” 86). They write that “[m]atter, in all its forms . . . [is] a site of narrativity, a storied matter, embodying its own narratives in the minds of human agents and in the very structure of its own self-constructive forces” (83). In a more recent essay, Oppermann argues that to do this we must understand narrative as “intrinsic to matter, ranging from electrons to cells, all of which are regarded as bearers of meaning within a shared universe of discourse and matter” (“From Ecological” 30). In their elaboration of this second project, Iovino and Oppermann make two points that are directly relevant to an Anthropocene narrative theory. The first is that it is possible—productive even—to read material and material phenomena as a narrative. According to a material ecocritical lens, ecocritics should not restrict our study to literary narratives alone, but read all matter as a narrative, in that “the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narrative stories” (“Introduction” 1). As such, “material ecocriticism traces the tangles and trajectories of natural-cultural interactions by reading them as ‘material narratives’”; material ecocritics read matter “not solely as it appears in texts, but as text itself ” (6). As Iovino and Oppermann argue, “The text, for material ecocriticism, encompasses both human material-discursive constructions and nonhuman things: water, soil, stones, metals, minerals, bacteria, toxins, food, electricity, cells, atoms, all cultural objects and places” (“Material” 83). The second is that matter itself has the potential to tell narratives. Iovino and Oppermann argue that “the emanating point of narrative is no longer the human self, but the human-nonhuman complex of interrelated agencies” and speak of the ability of statues, factory chickens, and plankton to “perfor[m] their narratives” (“Introduction” 9, 6). They suggest that this “narrative performance” is a dynamic process available to all matter (7). “Seen in this light,” they write, “every living creature, from humans to fungi, tells evolutionary stories of coexistence, inter-dependence, adaptation, and hybridization, extinc-

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tions and survival. Whether perceived or interpreted by the human mind or not, these stories shape trajectories that have formative, enactive power” (7). My interest lies in Iovino and Oppermann’s second method of interpreting material agency, as this is where I see narrative theory functioning more as a critique than a complement to material ecocriticism. While narratological lexicon provides material ecocritics with a precise and robust conceptual framework with which to analyze representations of agentic matter in narratives, it also poses significant obstacles to reading material as having narrative agency or performing its own narrative. Iovino and Oppermann never go as far as to suggest that matter can narrate; their language often is gentle in its declarations that it is the “intra-action of human creativity and the narrative agency of matter” that produces narratives and that matter is capable of “material expressions” (“Introduction” 8, 6). Yet as careful as this language is, the conceptualization of material as narrative and the idea of matter’s “narrative agency” or “narrative performance” involves a fundamental slippage between text and narrative, between the ability of an agent to express themselves and the ability of that same agent to tell a narrative. As I discuss in the previous chapter, there are many definitions of narrative that circulate within narrative theory today. These definitions—and certainly the one that I favor—suggest that narratives must contain events sequenced in a timeline and foreground the world in which these events occur and emphasize the essential role of the rhetorical situation of the narrative, or the fundamentally important presence of a narrator and a narratee. It is tough to reconcile these definitions with material ecocriticism’s understanding of matter’s agency. It is difficult, for example, to read a mushroom, electricity, or plankton as a narrative, as those material realities lack the key components of this particular mode of communication: they do not have a narrator and a narratee, they do not sequence events in a particular timeline, and so forth. “Narrative” is a particular mode of communication and cognition with a rich scholarly history, and narrative theory helps us make a clear distinction between narrative and other types of signification, between matter having narrative agency and being bearers of meaning. Human tellers produce narratives, and narrative sets humans apart from the agentic matter that surrounds us in that narrative is fundamental to the evolution of human cognition and meaning-making.1 I do not point to these definitions and histories of menta 1. Hannes Bergthaller makes a similar point in his discussion of the unnarratability of climate change. Warning that “narratives are a rather special case of the use of signs that should not be conflated with signification in general,” he notes that it is “clearly a stretch” to move from recognizing that a deer seems to be able to interpret smoke as a sign of fire to the idea that the smoke “tells a story” of fire (V-4).

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tion to claim that material ecocriticism gets it all wrong. The material ecocritical project raises invaluable questions about the role that agentic matter can and does play in the formation of human-produced narratives. But by pairing material ecocriticism’s focus on the agency of nonhuman material and the specific insights of narrative theory, we can sophisticate our understanding of exactly how—and why—matter and narratives interact. One project of tracking this interaction involves returning to Iovino and Oppermann’s idea that matter is a “site of narrativity” (“Material” 83). While I do not agree that nonhuman material is capable of narrative agency, I do recognize that many types of nonhuman matter do encode within them certain significations. Wendy Wheeler’s project of biosemiotics is a helpful framework here. Wheeler defines this understanding of naturally occurring signification as “a semiotics not only of human verbal and non-verbal communication, but also of the communicating nature of all living organisms as they forge (as they have since the earliest bacterial life) meanings in their environment” (“Postscript” 140). For Wheeler, the project of biosemiotics revises assumptions in Saussurean semiology of the arbitrariness of language and guards against inflammatory arguments that, in her words, “all meanings are made by humans and that human meanings are just a ceaseless circulation of signifiers unanchored from bodies and Earth” (Favareau et al. 28). “The world is not constructed in human articulate language,” she argues, “though it is perfused with signs” (Wheeler, “Figures,” 106, emphasis in original). As such, ecocriticism must be a project of “semiotic widening,” in which literary scholars attune themselves to forms of nonhuman signification (Wheeler, “Postscript” 140). While Wheeler’s work focuses is on the significations of animal communication, more recent scholarship on additional nonhuman agencies expands the arguments of biosemiotics to include nonanimal forms of signification. The emerging field of critical plant studies is illustrative of this trend, especially Michael Marder’s discussion of plant intelligence and agency in PlantThinking (2013) and Peter Wohlleben’s exploration of the “secret language of trees”—their “communication by means of olfactory, visual, and electrical signals” in The Hidden Life of Trees (2016, 12). Yet importantly for our purposes, these forms of nonhuman semiotics are not narratives. Ice cores, tree rings, and geologic strata cannot perform or tell narratives themselves; their significations do not worldbuild for some purpose, nor do they feature somebody telling someone on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened in some world. More specifically, they do not feature narrators and narratees nor other narrative resources such as focalization, representation of the consciousness of characters, metalepsis, metanarration, heteroglossia, and so on. They are also not capable of

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changes in chronology or temporality. The timelines of these materials progress steadily, with no analepsis or prolepsis to complicate the annual recording of events. Yet in their literal inscriptions of a sequence of events, these significations do communicate that something happened. In this sense, they contain a very small degree of what I call material narrativity in that they express temporal duration specific to a nonhuman experience of the world. Ice cores, tree rings, and geologic strata visually represent the passing of long durations of time and, as such, signify one foundational property of narrative while being unable to express others. This singular property of narrative, in turn, is a material affordance that human storytellers can capitalize upon as they compose narratives—a form of signification that affords human storytellers a basic temporal blueprint for a narrative. To phrase this in Herman’s terms of cognition, rhetoric, and narrative purpose, we can return to his statement that the communicative intentions of narratives that engage minimal degrees of material narrativity are “distributed across text producers, text interpreters, textual designs, and the communicative environments in which such designs are produced and interpreted,” placing emphasis on the final node of this nexus and the semiotic agencies we find there (“Narrative Theory” 246, my emphasis). Analysis of the role that material semiotics such as that we find in tree rings, ice cores, and geologic strata play in the formation of narrative is a rich site of inquiry in which narrative theory and material ecocriticism can productively inform each other. In calling attention to limited degrees of narrativity in material semiotics and their affordances for/of narrative, I am proposing a project that is slightly different than that of other material ecocritics. In Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015), Jeffery Jerome Cohen turns to medieval texts to excavate “local knowledge” about lithic materiality (7). In doing so, he charts the ways in which British writing in the Middle Ages represents stone as agentic and alive; he argues that although they are “inherently anthropocentric,” such narratives “unleash ecologies-in-motion that subtly challenge that perspective” and offer alternative understandings of stone that challenge dominant modern conceptualizations of lithic material as inert and inactive (10). Cohen is especially interested in the specific rhetorical devices and narrative tropes that feature in these representations of agentic stone, including “catalogue poems, encyclopedia entries, biographical digression, etymological impulses, lapidaries arranged alphabetically by color to mask their disorder, wonderfilled romance” (6). While Cohen is deeply invested in the agency of lithic material—in the ways in which stone acts as a spur to human narratives—his focus is not the affordance of the stone’s representation of sequences of events for human storytellers but the human imaginations that stone often inspires.

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Similarly, Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen’s “Journey to the Center of the Ice: Narrating Ice Core Drillings in Northern Greenland” considers a 2537.36-meter-long ice core drilled by an international team of glaciologists in the summer of 2010 and the five videos of Secrets of the Ice, produced by the Niels Bohr Institute, that document the excavation. While Hvenegård-Lassen notes that the ice cores themselves are “spatiotemporal envelopes” that signify their own histories, her project is more interested in how the “narrative tropes associated with the intertwined histories of science, explorers, expeditions, empire(s) and travel provide rich representational reservoirs for the videos” (238). In other words, Hvenegård-Lassen’s primary concern is how the Secrets of the Ice videos make the ice core legible for viewers via the rich narrative traditions of Greenland’s colonial history and the familiar plots of polar exploration. Her project is sensitive to the fact that ice cores themselves afford an organizing device for the videos; she notes that the texts take cues from the “new narrative of the Arctic” that the ice core provides—one that is “multilayered, like the stratigraphy of the ice core itself ” (238). But the emphasis remains on the dominance of the anthropocentric narrative of the imperial frontier in the videos, not on the ice core’s affordance of narrative temporality to human storytellers. As in Cohen’s and Hvenegård-Lassen’s analyses, the project that I propose foregrounds the particularities of various types of nonhuman materials. Yet my analysis of the limited degrees of narrativity in nonhuman material places less emphasis on traditions of particular narrative tropes that such material inspires and more emphasis on the narrative blueprints that material significations of temporality afford authors. We find a solid example of the type of text that this project favors in the “Good Oak” chapter of Aldo Leopold’s The Sand County Almanac (1949), which places the materiality of an oak tree at its core and rhetorically spotlights its vegetal blueprint for narrative. Leopold begins his chapter by commenting upon a “spiritual danger in not owning a farm”: the idea that heat comes from a furnace (6). This assumption is dangerous for Leopold because it ignores the very natural material on which humans depend upon for their survival and thus increases the distance between human communities and their environments, the latter of which Leopold is eager to protect. To correct this assumption, Leopold dedicates his chapter to the material of a very “good oak” that warms his shins while a blizzard rages outside one cold February night. The nonfictional chapter reads as a biography of the individual oak tree, revealed to Leopold and a gang of sawyers as they cut through the tree’s eighty rings. Leopold represents the experience of cutting the oak as biting, “stoke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in the concentric annual rings of good oak” (10). The biography at

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first works retrospectively, as the sawyers begin at the outer layer of oak rings and work inward, but eventually also runs the other way once the team hit the heartwood of the tree that marks its birth in 1865. As the sawyers cut, Leopold runs through an annual list of local events that affect the bank of the emigrant road on which the oak stands, from the flooding of a local river in 1913 and the first proclamation of Arbor Day in 1889 to the first stapling of factory-made barbed wire to oak trees in 1874. Throughout the biography, Leopold is eager to stress how his experience as human storyteller differs from the tree’s experience as recorder of events. While the opening and closing paragraphs of the chapter are told retrospectively, Leopold writes the sections that depict the felling of the oak in the present tense and separates them by frequent calls of the chief sawyer to “Rest!” (10). In addition to lending a sense of immediacy to these passages, Leopold’s use of present tense draws attention to the human experience of the oak’s demise; much as he would if he were picking up a written narrative to read, the human woodsman imaginatively relives the events recorded in the tree’s biography each and every time he gazes upon the tree’s rings. Leopold also places emphasis on the distinction between human and oak experience in the content of his narrative, such as when he notes that if the oak heard the stock markets fall in 1929, “its wood gives no sign” (11). Likewise, the oak did not “heed the Legislature’s several protestations for the love of trees,” such as the National Forest and forest-crop law of 1927, nor did it “notice the demise of the state’s last marten in 1925, nor the arrival of the first starling in 1923.” In these frequent acknowledgements of the oak’s lack of experience, Leopold draws attention to the differing ways in which human and tree experience time. Indeed, Leopold’s biography of the oak is odd in that it is equally as focused on what the oak does not register as what it does. Even events that do stand to mark the tree’s wood, such as the introduction of factory-made barbed wire, appear to have no effect. Leopold hopes that “no such artifacts are buried in the oak now under my saw!” but never gives readers any indication that this is the case (15). This emphasis on immediate and past human experiences and a largely unknowable oak experience produces a biographical narrative that is a delicate dance between human storytelling and material signification. Leopold’s biography has a clear rhetorical purpose in that it illuminates a semiotic system of raw materials that lend themselves to narrativizing. The tree’s rings provide the chronological bones of Leopold’s narrative, allowing him to wander out and back along an anthropocentric timeline that traces changes in the local treatment of trees. He makes this relationship between human imagination and vegetal signification explicit when he explains that the movement of

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the saw through the tree’s rings provides a map of a narrative: “The saw works only across the years, which it must deal with one by one, in sequence” (18). Leopold does not attempt to imagine the emotional texture of the tree’s life and in no way narrates from the oak’s perspective. Instead, he allows the oak’s material language to dictate the pace and focus of his very human narration. The oak is not the origin of Leopold’s narrative but instead affords him a specific temporal order, frequency, and duration in its system of signification. Via his collaboration with the tree’s material language, Leopold encourages his readers not only to consider the history that the oak represents but also to acknowledge that history according to the oak’s own timeline and semiotics. He is aware that he cannot imagine exactly what it is like to be the tree, but by letting the signification of the tree’s rings prescribe the rhythm and locality of his narrative he recognizes the agency of oak that warms him. Leopold provides us with one model of a narrative that is sensitive to the temporal affordances of nonhuman material. The generic conventions of nonfiction limit his representation of the good oak; unlike other representations of active oak trees, such as the tweeting Witness Tree or Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Direction of the Road” (1987),2 Leopold’s narrative does not feature an autodiegetic tree narrator that uses human language to tell its story. Yet by framing human events in a way that takes into account vegetal experience and signification, Leopold worldbuilds with the purpose of illuminating the agency and ontology of the tree—he acknowledges that this piece of nonhuman material exists outside of the anthropocentric lens that brings it to light in this particular text. He uses a chronological structure inspired by vegetal experience to provide readers with a new way of imagining plant agency and signification.

Material-Narrative Cognition A second method by which an Anthropocene narrative theory explores the relationship between matter’s agency and narrative is the question of how the materials of narratives act upon us when we read. To better understand this project of material-narrative cognition, it helps to circle back to my discovery of the Witness Tree Twitter account. In The Shallows, blogger and journalist Nicholas Carr discusses this very phenomenon, offering up his own reading habits as evidence of the effects of the web on human brains: “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has

2. For a robust discussion of Le Guin’s short story, see James, “What the Plant Says.”

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been tinkering with my brain, remapping neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” (5). Carr is certain that his mind is not going, just changing, and he notes that he can feel this change most strongly when he is reading. He writes that he used to be able to immerse himself in a book, but now his mind starts to drift after two or three pages. “I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do”; he states, “I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text” (5–6). Carr pins this change upon a decade of searching and surfing the internet. That computers and the internet would prompt a thorough and powerful rewiring of his neural circuitry makes perfect sense to Carr, a journalist trained in the media theories of Marshall McLuhan. Citing McLuhan’s famous quip that “the medium is the message,” Carr calls attention to the potential for media technologies to drastically reshape our lives. He observes that digital texts offer readers a different reading experience then longform print texts: hyperlinks, very short text forms such as the tweet or Facebook post, and the small habitual actions of scrolling and clicking are structures and behaviors that are unique to the digital age. In addition, the sheer amount of material on the internet creates new reading potentials and pitfalls: information is always ready at hand, creating a sense of both fulfilment and mental wanderlust. Carr’s changing habits demonstrate that, when combined, these innovations of digital reading stand to powerfully reshape readers’ interactions with texts on- and offline. As Carr explains, these changes in reading behaviors are made possible by the malleability of the human brain. Neuroscientists once believed that the structure of the adult brain is fixed—that, after an immense period of growth and development in childhood, the human brain becomes defined by nerve paths that are immutable and unchanging. But Carr notes that this rigid understanding of the adult human brain began to change with a series of radical experiments on the brain’s reaction to injuries, most notably Michael Merzenich’s 1968 study of monkeys that showed the animals’ brains developing new neural pathways in response to the damage and healing of their peripheral nerve systems. Merzenich’s groundbreaking experiment provides evidence for the neuroplasticity of primate brains, and Carr notes that additional experiments in the years that followed demonstrate the exceptional plasticity of the brains of not only lab animals but people, too. Carr confirms that neuroscientists are now confident that our neural circuits, including those involved in seeing, learning, perceiving, and remembering, are all subject to change. What interests me about neuroplasticity and the changes in cognition that are sparked by time spent on the internet, beyond my own frustration with

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my wandering mind, is the material origins of these changes. I see the specific material reality of the digital ecosystem as a rich site of convergence for material ecocriticism and narrative theory, as it yokes together concerns about material agency, cognition, and the experience of reading and worldbuilding in the Anthropocene. New media studies scholar Jussi Parikka reminds us in A Geology of Media (2015) that the digital texts that we read, despite their affiliations with ethereal metaphors such as “cloud” and “cyberspace,” are made possible by specific material realities. His study of “media materialism” places emphasis on the physical makeup of modern modes of communication: Instead of radio I prefer to think [of] what components and materials enable such technologies; instead of networking, we need to remember the importance of copper or optical fiber for such forms of communication; instead of a blunt discussion of “the digital,” we need to pick it apart and remember that also mineral durations are essential to it being such a crucial feature that penetrates our academic, social, and economic interests. (4)

Parikka offers up various examples of “premediatic media material” that compose today’s digital media, including the chemical element and metal lithium that is a required component of laptop batteries and platinum-group metals such as palladium and rhodium that are essential for computer hard drives, liquid crystal displays, electronic circuits, and sea water desalination. To this list we can also add cobalt (batteries), indium (displays), neodymium (magnets), and copper and aluminum (submarine cables), among other materials. Parikka’s work helps us realize that the internet—what we so often experience as ephemeral and wireless—is a physical, material entity. When we tell stories and read “online,” we engage with assemblages of specific chemicals, metals, and minerals. I am especially interested in Parikka’s project because of its emphasis on material agency. Taking cues from the new materialist work of Haraway, among others, his work foregrounds the specific materials of today’s media to emphasize the ontologies, histories, and contexts of nonhuman matter. Such an approach, like other new materialist work, offers an alternative perspective to an anthropocentric understanding of matter as inert and nonvibrant. We see the potency of this approach in his chapter on dust, a material that Parikka understands as “a curious case of collective assemblage” that “carries with itself minerals and metals across distances” (84). Beyond this physical assemblage, Parikka also writes of dust as joining the material and the sociopolitical—a constellation of material and human inequality that we see clearly in the toxic, dust-filled lungs of the Chinese factory workers that produce the world’s lap-

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tops, tablets, and phones, or the nervous systems of underpaid laborers in Ghana damaged by the toxic vapors of burning e-waste. Parikka argues that focusing on the materiality of components and waste of today’s media forces us “to think of questions of design as enveloped in a complex ecology and geology of economy, environment, work, and skill” (87). He writes that dust “narrates” a story of matter, media production, and human illness, “but in a way that is paying attention to the nonhuman agency of this narrator” (85). As in the work of Iovino and Oppermann, we see a clear connection between material and narrative in Parikka’s writing of dust as a narrator. But, given the hesitations with narrating material that I hash out above, I want to back off this problematic misunderstanding of the narrative agency of matter and instead pair Parikka’s insights about the material realities of the internet with Carr’s worries about the changes in cognition and reading habits that the internet prompts. I see material such as dust not as a narrator, but as a component of the material reality that makes possible narrative composition, cognition, and comprehension and can determine the specific pathways of that process. I also see this union of the nonhuman material and human cognition of the internet as a ripe meeting place for the environmental humanities and contemporary narrative theory. Indeed, an exploration of digital materials and the cognitive behaviors they prompt productively brings together two linked yet until now separate conversations of material agency: that by environmental humanists such as Oppermann and Iovino and that by narrative scholars. For in addition to material ecocritics and new materialists, recent scholarship in cognitive narratology also emphasizes the agency of materials. But while the former group of scholars tends to foreground the specific ontologies of vibrant nonhuman materials and organisms, the latter tends to consider material agency from the philosophical perspective of extended mind theory. An Anthropocene narrative theory constructively brings these two discussions of material agency together by examining the effects that the materials of the internet have on the cognitive processing of authors and readers. By doing so, it not only sophisticates our understanding of how material agency and narratives are connected but also enriches our knowledge of how the chemicals, minerals, and metals of the internet affect human cognition and mentation and influence the telling and reading of narratives in the Anthropocene. One entry point in thinking through how the materials of the internet not only encode specific histories and nonhuman experiences but also determine our very relationship with narrative, right down to our neural pathways, is recent work in narrative theory inspired by second generation cognitive science. As I explain in this book’s previous chapter, narrative scholars such as

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Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen study the embodied nature of narrative comprehension and often turn to the extended mind thesis of Andy Clark and David Chalmers to make these arguments. Notably for our purposes, the examples in which Clark and Chalmers initially root their theory of the extended mind all involve computer-assisted thinking. In their original essay, Clark and Chalmers provide hypothetical examples of humans thinking with computers as evidence of the “general tendency of human reasoners to lean heavily on environmental supports” (“Extended Mind” 8). In his 2008 foreword to Clark’s Supersizing the Mind, Chalmers uses himself as an example of this tendency. He notes that, despite only purchasing an iPhone one month ago, the device has “already taken over some of the central functions of my brain” (ix). He uses his iPhone to memorize (it stores phone numbers he previously would have learned by rote), desire (it records memos of his favorite recipes when he orders take-out), calculate (it helps him figure out bills and tips), make plans (it stores his calendar), and daydream (he lazily calls up words and images when he can no longer concentrate). “Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain,” he notes. But, he continues, if extended mind theory is correct, “the iPhone is part of my mind already.” Chalmers’s iPhone is a part of his cognitive process, and therefore, he argues that we can consider it a part of his extended mind. It is a small step from conceiving of the human mind as coupled actively with artifacts and external features of its environment to considering the agency of the nonhuman organisms and materials of that environment in cognitive processes. In “Where Brain, Body and World Collide,” first published in 1998 and later reprinted in Carl Knappett’s and Lambros Malafouris’s edited collection Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach (2008), Clark thickens his theory of the mind as “best understood as the activity of an essentially situated brain” by considering the agency of the material world (1, emphasis in original). Clark does not write of nonhuman things as having agency in the same way that Iovino and Oppermann do; his interest does not lie in the ontological particularities of rocks nor the expressive capacities of a river or volcano. But he does argue that, if we best understand the human brain as a controller of environmentally situated activity, it makes sense to “locate the neural contributions as just one (important) element in the complex causal web spanning brains, bodies and world” (11). As one example of this causal web, Clark asks his readers to imagine the process of writing an academic paper. The author cannot take credit for the finished product alone. Instead, the author must acknowledge that the final paper was produced via a cycle of reading, responding, and reorganization in which texts, materials, and notes—all most likely stored as marks on paper or a computer screen—

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support the human brain. The final paper “owes a lot to those repeated loops out into the environment,” Clark writes, with credit belonging to “the agentin-the-world” (12). This web of human author and nonhuman materials is but one example of the brain, body, and world “united in an extended problemsolving web” (15). As its title suggests, Malafouris’s “At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency,” is more explicit in its attention to material agency (emphasis in original). Like Clark, Malafouris’s interest is in the role that nonhuman materials play in the interactive webs of the extended human mind, and he uses the example of a potter throwing a vessel on the wheel—which relies on brain, body, wheel, and clay relating to and interacting with one another—as an example of this agency at work. Also like Clark, Malafouris is eager to get away from the illusion of the autonomous, isolated human mind and argues forcefully that “our human sense of agency, useful as an evolutionary or social strategy as it might be, is to a large extent an illusion” (34). Malafouris conceives of agency as something produced by the interaction of humans and nonhuman materials—a constant dance and “dynamic tension” in which “sometimes it is the thing that becomes the extension of the person,” and at other times “it is the person that becomes the extension of the material agent” (34). Emphatically, he writes that “while agency and intentionality may not be properties of things, they are not properties of humans either: they are the properties of material engagement, that is, of the grey zone where brain, body and culture collide” (22, emphasis in original). Thus for Malafouris, the potter’s clay and the wheel are not passive objects, but cosubstantial components in the creative process. We best understand the vessel as not produced by the potter alone, but created via an act of collaboration between human, machine, and material. To be clear: this work does not conceive of materials as agentic in their own right, and thus stands in tension with the more ambitious and aggressive material ecocritical claims of the narrative agency of nonhuman matter. Malafouris is explicit about this when he writes that the term “material agency” itself is “to some extent a misnomer,” as it ascribes agency to the thing and not the process of engagement (22). Yet this more restrained conceptualization of material agency provides us with a clear path for understanding the role that nonhuman materials play in the process of narrative composition and comprehension—a clarity that is obscured by misleading arguments of the narrative agency of nonhuman matter. It helps us understand that, when authors compose for the internet and readers read digital texts, they do so via a collaboration with their laptops, tablets, and/or phones. The materials of these devices—as well as those of the submarine cables that deliver infor-

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mation “wirelessly”—form a web of agency with the human brain that affects and influences narrative composition and cognitive processing, including the cognitive work upon which authoring and reading relies. Put simply, viewing the minds of authors and readers in the Anthropocene as coupled with the materials of the internet helps us appreciate not only how and why changes in their cognitive patterns and functions occur but also the role that nonhuman materials play in those changes.3 This understanding of authoring-­ and reading-­minds at work in the Anthropocene—of material-narrative cognition—provides us with a rich way of appreciating how the very materials that we place on our desks and hold in our pockets affect and determine our engagement with narratives in this epoch. It is also a provocative meeting place of the environmental humanities and narrative theory that takes seriously ideas of nonhuman material agency and the definition and scholarly tradition of narrative.

Material Reading I suggest two directions by which an Anthropocene narrative theory can study material-narrative cognition, or appreciate the pervasive and powerful effect of the materials of the internet on the minds of today’s authors and readers. The first is the changes that this intra-active web of human brains and nonhuman materials has prompted to the analysis and teaching of literature. N. Katherine Hayles begins her essay “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine” by noting that “people in general, and young people in particular, are doing more screen reading than ever before,” and that “reading skills (as measured by the ability to identify themes, draw inferences, etc.) have been declining in junior high, high school, college, and even graduate schools” in America over the last twenty years (62). Her opening alarm is based on two recent reports from the National Endowment of the Arts that show consistent data, which she 4 summarizes as “people read less print, and they read print less well.” Hayles admits that this evidence suggests a crisis in literacy at the national level—one that is especially dire among teens and young adults. But she is not deterred. She sees literary studies as potentially playing a vital role in responding to 3. For two projects that also pair extended mind theory and narrative, see Nancy Easterlin’s “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind” and Marco Bernini’s “Supersizing Narrative Theory.” 4. The two studies upon which Hayles draws are Reading at Risk (2004), which reports on the results of the National Endowment of the Arts’ own surveys, and To Read or Not to Read (2007), which brings together other large-scale surveys.

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this crisis, if only teachers of literary studies can teach students to read well in print and on screen. For Hayles, this dual focus means a necessary and timely revamp to the traditional methodologies of literary studies that accommodates better the new cognitive patterns of online reading. Literary scholars have long touted the benefits of close reading. Since the rise of New Criticism in the 1950s, professors in English courses have emphasized the benefits of studying the style, form, and specific language of a literary text via meticulous and detailed analysis. Hayles notes that it is the methodology of close reading that has joined together the disparate branches of literary criticism in the latter decades of the twentieth century and early years of the twenty-first. But she sees problems with a total reliance on this methodology in today’s context. As Carr argues, online reading prompts cognitive changes in readers that make close reading difficult to sustain. Furthermore, citing Stephen Best’s and Sharon Marcus’s aggressive critique of the dominance of what they call “symptomatic reading,” or the use of close reading to seek out the ideological subtext of a given text, Hayles writes that close reading has become stale, often producing results “that have begun to seem formulaic, leading to predictable conclusions rather than compelling insights” (64). Her answer to these challenges is the promotion of reading techniques permitted by the coupling of readers’ minds with the internet, which harness the new reading patterns enabled by this extension and its associated cognitive behaviors. In particular, Hayles advocates for two new reading possibilities permitted by the materials of the internet: hyperreading and machine-reading. James Sosnoski first introduced hyperreading in 1999, defining it as “reader-directed, screen-based, computer assisted reading”; examples include search queries, filtering by keyword, skimming, hyperlinking, fragmenting, scanning, and reading across several open windows (qtd. in Hayles 66). Noting that hyperreading stimulates different brain functions than traditional print reading, Hayles outlines the tensions between this reading strategy and the close reading more familiar to literary scholars. Close reading tends to occur in the localized environment of a single text, while hyperreading often occurs in a dispersed, multilocal context. Close reading requires deep attention, while hyperreading tends to require hyperattention. Yet Hayles notes that the two strategies are not as incompatible as they may seem initially and argues for innovative pedagogical practices that allow them to overlap. As an example, she offers up a favorite assignment in which she asks students to study Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) alongside Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), a digital hypertext fiction written using Storyspace software. Hayles instructs her students to not only read closely but also consider the narrative resources

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that Jackson uses to construct her text, thus bridging the digital-print divide and using close reading to illuminate the complexities of dispersed digital forms. These assignments embrace digital tools to carve out a role for the new cognitive patterns prompted by the internet in the analysis of literature. A second path by which an Anthropocene narrative theory can appreciate the powerful effects of the materials of the internet on narrative is in the resources that today’s authors use to compose narratives, both on- and offline. We might explore, for example, the rise of “Twitterature,” or texts that authors release by tweets, 140 characters at a time. Some Twitterature is purely experimental, such as Jennifer Egan’s short story “Black Box” (2012), which began as a series of tweets and was later published in The New Yorker. Some is a marketing stunt; David Mitchell published his short story “The Right Sort” (2014) as a series of 280 tweets in the course of a week, admittedly to drum up publicity for his print novel The Bone Clocks (2014), while Matt Stewart found a print publisher for his debut novel The French Revolution (2010) by amassing an audience of Twitter followers who read a new bite-sized installment of the narrative every fifteen minutes (Crouch, “Great American Twitter Novel”; Rudin, “From Hemingway to Twitterature”). Other pieces of Twitterature are more adventurous, with authors such as Neil Gaiman, Meg Cabot, and Teju Cole using the platform to cowrite narratives with their fans.5 Still other authors use the constricted parameters of the tweet to reinvigorate familiar texts, such as that we find in the Penguin-published Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Retold Through Twitter (2009). Written by college students Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, Twitterature condenses eighty classics, including The Iliad, Hamlet, and Harry Potter (1–7), and distills them to their essence for modern readers. These well-known texts, Aciman and Rensin argue in the book’s introduction, are “in their present form, outdated” (xiii). “Who but college students, hermits, and disciples of the disgraced John Ludd can muddle through them with any hope of understanding?” they ask, promising to remedy this problem by “reinvent[ing] .  .  . our world’s Great Works to suit the ever-evolving brain of modern man [sic]” (xiii). Penguin’s promotional materials are even more blunt about the purpose of the project: “Because as great as 6 the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?” While some of these texts are certainly cheekier than others, what they all have in common is a sensitivity to the reading habits of tech-savvy readers and the material realities of the internet. Short and sweet, and easily digestible on the 5. See Gaiman’s audiobook Hearts, Keys, and Puppetry (2010), Cabot’s audiobook Fashionably Undead (2010), and @tejucole’s “Hafiz” (2014). 6. See https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307055/twitterature-by-alexanderaciman-and-emmett-rensin/9780143117322/.

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small screen of a smart phone, the authors of Twitterature design their texts to suit exactly the cognitive rewiring that the internet prompts. Beyond this internet-specific textual form, we might also explore and think speculatively about narrative resources that, although not particular to digital texts, mimic the organization of the internet for offline readers. Carr observes that the effects of digital reading have spilled into nondigital formats, such as magazines and newspapers that now regularly feature shortened articles and snippets as well as television programming that often features pop-up ads and text crawls. To this list we can add structures of print narratives that offer readers experiences similar to two dominant internet forms: the very short post (such as that we find on Facebook) and the hyperlink. An Anthropocene narrative theory asks: what do these forms look like in print, when they have migrated offline? How do they help us appreciate the relationship between the chemicals, minerals, and metals of the internet and narrative in the Anthropocene even when they exist in a different material context? How can they shape the worldbuilding for some purpose that is inherent to narrative? One obvious place to track the jump of the very short text form from the internet to offline is in flash fiction. This form goes by many names (flash fiction, very short fiction, micro stories), and though scholars debate its exact parameters, most agree that the label applies to fictional works of fewer than a thousand words.7 The condensed word limit of flash fiction places specific pressures on these small narratives, such that they are often distinguished from other literary forms by what they leave out—the very short lengths of flash fiction do not leave much room for hallmarks of longer narratives such as character development and traditional plot structures. Scholars also agree that flash fiction did not arise with the internet. Kristen Figgins draws connections between modern flash fiction and the fables of Aesop, Marie de France, and La Fontaine, while Pamelyn Castro argues that flash is “related to and draws from several genres—short shorts, anecdotes, vignettes, prose poems, short stories, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, journalism, memoir, and more” (Figgins 42–43; Castro 3). Yet despite this lineage, the internet has played an undeniable role in the popularization of flash fiction. Online platforms make flash accessible to authors and readers alike, with websites such as flashfictiononline.com and flashfictionmagazine.com publishing a steady stream of new work. Furthermore, flash is a form perfectly suited to online material realities and the pressures that they place upon readers; flash fiction stories are easily digestible narratives that fit nicely onto the surface of a

7. For definitions of flash fiction, see Cocchiarale’s and Emmert’s “On Flash Fiction.”

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smart phone and can be read in their totality before a mind trained to wander gets distracted. As Michael Cocchiarale and Scott D. Emmert succinctly state, “The shorter the piece is, the easier it is to read on the laptop or phone” (xi). Nicholas Royle similarly argues that flash texts answer “the question of how to write—inventively, thoughtfully, memorably—in the age of the short attention span” (qtd. in Brown, “Flash Fiction” 32). Flash fictions are thus texts of fragmentation in two senses: they are both literal fragments—tiny snippets of what we find in longer narratives—and perfectly suited to human minds conditioned to fragmentation by the internet. As Santino Prinzi argues, “Even though flash fiction and its variants have been around for centuries, flash fiction has found its right time and space within our modern, digital, fragmented lives” (96). Yet despite being particularly suited to the material reality of the internet and cognitive patterns that that environment fosters, flash is just as popular today offline as it is online. Print anthologies of flash fiction, flash fiction criticism, and guides to writing this form have appeared steadily in the past three decades, including but not limited to James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka’s Flash Fiction (1992); Jerome Stern’s Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories (1996); Roberta Allen’s Fast Fiction (1997); Dinty W. Moore’s Sudden Stories (2003); James Thomas and Robert Shapard’s Flash Fiction Forward (2006); Mark Budman and Tom Hazuka’s You Have Time For This (2007); Tara L. Masih’s The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (2009); Robert Shapard, James Thomas, Ray Gonzalez, and Luisa Valenzuela’s Sudden Fiction Latino (2010); Randall Brown’s A Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction (2012); and Michael Cocchiarale and Scott D. Emmert’s Critical Insights: Flash Fiction (2017).8 To this list, we can also add special issues of magazines featuring flash narratives, including Wired (2006), Esquire (2006), and O, The Oprah Magazine (2007). These titles strongly suggest that flash fiction has firmly made the jump from screen to page and that its presence is not limited to websites and apps. Its popularity thus indicates the pervasiveness of internet-inspired authoring and reading habits and textual forms in the Anthropocene. The chemicals, minerals, and metals of the internet not only influence how we write and read online but also have helped condition our brains to favor shorter, more fragmented styles of narrative offline. Along with very short textual forms, we can also consider how the hyperlink can jump from screen to page. A fascinating case study of this type of internet-to-print seepage is the work of Maria Popova and its migration from the website and online newsletter Brain Pickings to the print nonfiction narra

8. For an even more robust list of flash fiction texts, see Pamelyn Castro’s “Flash Fiction.”

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tive Figuring (2019). Brain Pickings began as a weekly email to seven coworkers in 2006, in which Popova distributed links to five things that she found interesting. She eventually established an online home for the newsletter and by 2012 had amassed a loyal audience of 1.2 million readers per month (Sweeney). That same year, the Library of Congress included the site in its permanent web archive. Popova describes the site as a “one-woman labor of love”—“an inquiry into what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life” and a record of her own becoming as a person “drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling” (Brainpickings.org). Brain Pickings remains active today, offering readers a free weekly digest of Popova’s pick of the week’s most interesting and inspiring articles across this wide range of topics. More than 898,000 users also follow Popova on Twitter, where she posts multiple times per day. As indicated in Popova’s description, Brain Pickings is defined by the wide-ranging way that it makes connections across disparate material. Popova describes herself as a “curator of interestingness,” and the array of topics on the site is evidence of the breadth of her reading—we see this easily, for example, in the “best of 2018” list that links readers to the Brain Pickings post that she enjoyed thinking and writing about most, including “The Difficult Art of Giving Space in Love: Rilke on Freedom, Togetherness, and the Secret to a Good Marriage,” “A Brace and Startling Truth: Astrophysicist Janna Lewis Reads Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist Poem that Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan,” “Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers,” and “Bear and Wolf: A Tender Illustrated Fable of Walking Side by Side in Otherness,” among others. A clear curatorial energy drives the macrolevel of Brain Pickings, one that delights in uncovering and expounding unexpected connections between people, subjects, genres, and time periods for readers. Importantly, this connectivity also registers on the site’s microlevel. Popova peppers Brain Pickings posts with embedded artwork and illustrations from books that she discusses, videos of relevant topics and artists, and hyperlinks to other Brain Pickings writing and external websites. These links encourage readers to reach out to ever more information as they take in the individual topics that Popova curates for them. The site’s extensive use of hyperlinks and embedded material has a centrifugal effect, creating an intellectual vortex for its visitors. Readers sit in the eye of the storm while reading Brain Pickings posts, but the linked associations encourage them to venture beyond Popova’s writing to continue the intellectual and philosophical journey. On some levels, Brain Pickings is an unusual presence on the internet, in that Popova eschews the corporate model of paid advertising and instead

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relies wholly on reader donations to keep the site running. Also unlike most other internet sites, Brain Pickings is not primarily driven by the newest or most current ideas. Popova resists the chronological most-recent-is-best hierarchies that organize most internet news venues and instead seeks out and privileges information that she deems to be both of the moment and timeless. Brain Pickings posts also tend to be longer than other internet writing, demanding time and intellectual commitment from readers that they would not invest in a Tweet or a listicle. But on all other levels, Brain Pickings is a clear creature of the internet’s particular ecosystem. It is difficult to imagine its connective tissue existing without the interfaces and databases of the internet, as well as the underwater cables that deliver those connections to Brain Pickings readers. It is also difficult to imagine the philosophy of the site as existing without the internet’s democratic promises of open access and freedom of information, not to mention the expansive, globalized model of the world that access and freedom affords. Deeply hypertexted and boundlessly gesturing out toward more and more knowledge, Brain Pickings is a project influenced by the openness and abundance of the internet and the connections that that accessible amplitude inspires. How audacious, then, is Popova’s latest project: a 500-plus page biography that brings the hyperlinked connectivity of Brain Pickings to the printed page. As with her Brain Pickings writing, the narrative in Figuring makes wideranging connections across time, person, genre, and philosophy, loosely tracking the lives of six historical figures who have contributed to science and the arts. Popova begins with the struggles of seventeenth-century astronomer and writer of the world’s first science fiction novel Johannes Kepler to defend his mother against accusations of witchcraft and ends with a long examination of the relationship of Rachel Carson, founder of the modern environmental movement, and her lover Dorothy Freeman. Along the way, readers follow as Maria Mitchell discovers a comet and establishes her salon in Nantucket, Margaret Fuller struggles with poverty during revolution in Italy and dies in a shipwreck, Harriet Hosmer becomes the first female professional sculptor, and Emily Dickinson navigates a love triangle involving her brother and sister-inlaw. Significant secondary characters include Galilei Galileo, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Carl Sagan, among others. As with much of Popova’s writing, it is difficult to identify one overriding theme of Figuring. Queer love—particularly the love of women for other women—the emancipation of women, the isolation and struggle of the genius ahead of their time, and the influence of one generation upon the next all loom large in the book.

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In its promotional blurb for the book, publisher Penguin totes Figuring’s “tapestry” of themes (“Figuring”). But this conception of the book’s strengths is too flat, too two-dimensional. Rather than seeing the book as weaving together discussions of religion, feminism, the history of science, and the trajectory from Transcendental philosophy to twentieth-century environmentalism, we better read Figuring as Popova’s attempt to hyperlink, on the page, her narrative’s various topics and characters. Following Figuring’s progression from one topic and person to another often feels less like the process of weaving and more like the act of skipping or jumping—Popova doesn’t so much interlace or knit ideas together as carousel readers from one page to another as they uncover not-obviously linked yet relevant material. The path that the narrative charts through chapters twelve, thirteen, and fourteen are a fine example of this literal hyperlink. In chapter twelve, “Between Art and Life,” readers are in Italy with Fuller as she leaves her newborn son Nino with a wet nurse in a small mountain village and returns to Rome to chronicle the revolution. Popova writes that, when Fuller reunites with her son months later, she is devastated to find him emaciated and near death. The wet nurse, despite assuring Fuller of Nino’s good health, had spent Fuller’s allowance on herself and fed Nino wine instead of breast milk. Popova depicts Fuller nurturing her son back to health in the following months and ultimately making the risky decision to return to America via the only ticket she could afford—two months as living cargo on a vessel, among one hundred and fifty tons of marble, silk, and fine paintings. The chapter ends just moments before the ship carrying Fuller and her son runs aground on a sandbar one hundred feet from Fire Island, New York. Noting that “longitude remained a complex mathematical computation” for the ship’s captain, Popova leaves Fuller and Nino on the boat “pack[ing] their trunks and ready[ing] their salutes” as they see the pulsar of a New Jersey lighthouse (Figuring 234). But shipwreck does not happen for hundreds of pages. Popova leaves Fuller here, on the cusp of both her homecoming and her death, and instead turns to related topics. Chapter thirteen, “The Banality of Survival,” makes a hard pivot from Nino’s illness to that of Charles Darwin’s young daughter Annie, with Annie’s death serving as point of access for discussions of nineteenth-century medicine and the trauma of parenting a dying child. This chapter concludes with Darwin penning a letter to his wife, Emma, “with Annie’s body still warm beside him” (245). While writing “the most undeliverable news in the universe,” Darwin looks upon a photograph of Annie. Popova concludes the chapter with the tragic line that he writes to Emma: “I am so thankful for the daguerreotype” (qtd. in Popova 245). Chapter fourteen, “Shadowing the Light of Immortality,” clicks through to the history of

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this object. Popova begins with the sentence, “John Herschel coined the word photography in 1839, the year Margaret Fuller launched her ‘Conversations,’ in his correspondence with Henry Fox Talbot—a onetime aspiring artist turned amateur inventor and polymath” (246). And readers are off, learning about the invention of photography and its affiliated cast of characters. As abrupt as these narrative clicks are, they do not come out of nowhere. Their effect is to create a sense of pause and movement for readers; just as they become invested in Nino’s recuperation and Fuller’s return to America, Popova moves them to a different document that details the psychological and emotional shock of losing a child that Fuller in this narrative temporarily manages to avoid. This, in turn, leads to a treatise on the origins of photography and the nuanced differences between a photograph and a daguerreotype. Popova’s digressions continue beyond these chapters, with Fuller’s death delayed by discussions of Hosmer’s sculptures and Carson’s life and own tragic death. The text never fully loses its way, as it ultimately returns to the sandbar and Fuller’s demise. It also laces microconnections to her story throughout, as we can see in the beginning of chapter fourteen above. But the search for meaning across topics and deep dives into marginalia that Popova uses to organize Brain Pickings—the hyperlinking to new files and documents—also determines the macro-structure of Figuring. Readers may not physically click highlighted words or images as they do on the website, but the experience of jumping around in abundant information remains the same. Worldbuilding has a clear purpose here, in that Popova’s specific choice of narrative resources encourages her audience to mentally model and imaginatively inhabit a storyworld with no horizon in which they can quickly connect everything (all characters, all matter, all history) to everything else. We find similar resources of abundant and quickly intertwined worldbuilding in the microstructure of Figuring. The structures of the internet— and the materials that enable it—afford connection. By inserting a bit of code here or a differently colored word there, authors of internet texts can encourage readers to jump from link to link and skim between dozens of previously unrelated topics and documents. This same energy drives many of Popova’s sentences, most notably in her long and extreme opening line: All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Mon-

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taigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown . . . . (Figuring 3)

This sentence continues for fifteen additional full lines of parataxis, referencing Beethoven’s floorboards, Galileo’s finger, the moons of Jupiter, and “a certain forearm” that Popova loves, among other topics, before concluding with the statement that “it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source” (3). “How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness?,” she asks in Figuring’s second sentence. This is no doubt an overwhelming manner in which to begin a long biography, and it certainly bucks the traditional narrative resources that typically determine such texts. Popova gives readers no indication of who this biography is about, nor does she locate readers in a specific time period or location. Instead, she pummels her audience with an overriding insistence on connecting everything to everything else. This is literary baptism by fire—the textual expression of Popova’s insistence that “sometimes truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making” (4). Popova’s narrative here links fragments in a string of parataxis that evokes the act of surfing, skimming, and greedily consuming information as soon as it is offered up. It also tasks readers with modeling and inhabiting a world that appears to lack limits—one in which they can quickly connect a reference to multiple other people, places, and things. The resources of the internet and the cognitive patterns that they demand are at the heart of this narrative and its storyworld. Readers may come to this hypertext and interlinked world via offline materials, but it retains the online origins, ethos, and worldbuilding of Popova’s earlier writing. Modern flash fiction and Figuring, as different as they are, have one clear thing in common: they are texts inspired by the resources and cognitive patterns that we associate with the internet. In this way, we can read the presence of a particular material reality in their literary forms—much like Leopold capitalizes on the temporal affordance of the raw materials of an actual, reallife oak tree in his “Good Oak” chapter, so do Popova and contemporary flash fiction authors exploit the affordances of the chemicals, minerals, and metals that form the internet. This capitalization of material agency may not be as explicit in the micro- and macrostructures of flash fiction and Figuring as they are in Leopold’s nonfiction, but we can read these texts as similarly illuminating a grey zone where author, narrative resources afforded by specific materials, and readers collide. In this way, I see a valuable material presence baked into the act of authoring and reading these narratives.

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To conclude, let us consider how exploring the new reading strategies and narrative forms that arise from the coupling of human brains with the material of the internet offers us two important counters to arguments against narratives in the Anthropocene. The first argument is one of reading—that readers in this moment, because of their dependence on the internet, are increasingly less competent at comprehending and interpreting longform narratives. As I argue above, the rise of hyperreading demonstrates just how pervasive the materials of the internet are. They also suggest possibilities; instead of fretting about what we lose when we rewire our brains according to the internet, methodologies that rely on coupling our minds with the materials of laptops and computers show what we can do with new neural pathways and the reading tools that afford them. An Anthropocene narrative theory thus offers us an important reminder that reading narratives in the Anthropocene is not a lost cause. Close reading no doubt is still an essential project, and the literacy that enables it is not something that I would ever argue against. But Hayles’s project is a refreshing counter to the pessimism of Carr and the National Endowment of the Arts. The brains of readers may be changing, but we can gain from the insights of new cognitive patterns and the material realities that afford them. The second argument against narrative in the Anthropocene foregrounds the anthropocentrism of the literary mode. A key claim of many environmental humanities scholars is that narrative is an explicitly anthropocentric form of communication and representation, and a responsible response to the human-made mess of the Anthropocene involves embracing other forms of signification better suited to nonhuman ontologies and experiences. Explorations of nonnarrative texts are no doubt a vital aspect of today’s environmentalism. But the materials and texts that I discuss in this chapter encourage me to not give up on narrative just yet. Yes, narrative is anthropogenic in that it is fundamental to human mentation and communication. But innovative narrative forms such as that we find in Leopold’s chapter, recent flash fiction, and Figuring demonstrate the ability of narrative to accommodate the agency of nonhuman things and organisms. These texts retain their anthropogenic nature yet also call attention to the connection between human authors, readers, and the materials of their environments. The Witness Tree, lithium, or cobalt may not be able to narrate on its own, but this does not mean that these very materials are not integral to the process of narrative composition and reception in the Anthropocene.

CHAPTER 3

Time

At its core, the Anthropocene is an idea about time. In their first articulation of the Anthropocene, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer suggested it as an alternative to the Holocene, the “post-glacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years” (17). The major impacts of humans on the earth and atmosphere at all scales, they argued, demands that we recognize a new category of time that foregrounds this anthropogenic activity, distinguishing it from the geologic periods of the past and making its future effects more legible. Temporal sequencing remains fundamental to the Anthropocene Working Group’s (AWG) current definition of the term. Similar to Crutzen and Stoermer, the scientists of the group articulate the Anthropocene as a temporal category, or “the present geological time interval” and a “geological time (chronostraigraphic) unit and potential addition to the Geological Time Scale” (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy). On a foundational level, we can understand the Anthropocene as a solution to questions of temporal order: what follows the Holocene? Of course, as I discuss elsewhere in this book, recognizing the Anthropocene as the latest epoch in a geological sequence has generated lively debates about temporal duration. Crutzen and Stoermer’s initial definition proposes the latter part of the eighteenth century as the Anthropocene’s start date, while others more recently have suggested both earlier and later dates that reshape the time span and scale of this new temporal unit. Even the members of the 93

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AWG, whose current work pinpoints the epoch’s golden spike, or most easily legible geologic signifier, in the artificial radionuclides of mid-twentiethcentury bombings, note that this debate is very much alive. “Although much evidence points towards the mid-20th century as the optimal beginning of any stratigraphically defined Anthropocene interval,” they write, “we emphasize that where to place the lower boundary of the Anthropocene has yet to be finalized” (Zalasiewicz, Waters, Wolfe et al. 213). But they continue to claim that “the most important question with respect to duration” is not when the Anthropocene begins but its place within the continuous and ongoing events of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. The key question is thus: “Has the stratigraphic record been set on an irreversible trajectory?” (214). Their answer— “clearly yes”—suggests that the addition of the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale depends upon recognizing a singularity within the extremely long timelines of geologic strata rather than identifying the exact duration of the epoch (214). As they write elsewhere, in advocating for the boundary of the new epoch, they “do not imply that the time intervals before . . . that boundary become insignificant to studies of the Anthropocene. . . . Understanding the driving processes in any major global transition necessarily involves study of events across any chosen time boundary, irrespective of where it might happen to have been placed” (Zalasiewicz, Waters, Williams et al. 197). To identify an anthropogenic mark in the stratigraphic signal, they argue, you must look back, a long way, to interpret recent events as part of a much larger geologic sequence. You must recognize the significance of an event on multiple timelines, both appreciating the singularity of the Anthropocene unit and understanding it in light of Earth’s deep time, which vastly exceeds that unit. The Anthropocene introduces a second debate about time in the AWG’s discussion of the not-immediately-legible event. In their essay “Making the Case for a Formal Anthropocene Epoch,” members of the AWG respond to various criticisms of the Anthropocene as a unit of geologic time. Foremost among these critiques is what they refer to as the “brevity argument,” or the idea that the epoch, with its mid-twentieth-century start date, has the duration of a human life span and thus simply is too short to be recognized officially as a new unit of geologic time (Zalasiewicz, Waters, Wolfe, et al. 215). The AWG members argue vigorously against this critique. They write that the brevity argument is a “moot point” because, regardless of duration or origin date, the geologic record stands; they declare that “the elapsed and detectable stratigraphic changes associated with the possible base of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century are globally distributed and comparable to, or exceed in scale . . . equivalent signals associated with the advent of the Holocene” (215, 214). They thus argue that the evidence that separates the Anthropocene from

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the Holocene is “already sufficiently distinct,” regardless of the relative thinness of the lithographic record (214, emphasis in original). What interests me about the brevity argument and the AWG’s response is that it necessitates looking forward, to the continuing future relevance of today’s anthropogenic stratigraphic signifiers. “To date,” they write, “70 years for the Anthropocene is a geologically brief duration so far”; on their website, the AWG notes that the environmental changes that define the epoch—including increases in erosion and sediment transport, anthropogenic perturbations of carbon and nitrogen cycles, and the proliferation and dispersion of new materials such as plastic—“will persist for millennia or longer, altering the trajectory of the Earth System, some with permanent effect” (214, emphasis in original). The AWG members make their case for the Anthropocene by imagining what the signifiers that separate previous geological periods from each other would have looked like at the moment of their production: 70 years after the K/Pg bolide impact, it would have been clear to any hypothetical observer then present that the world had undergone a radical biospheric shift relative to its latest Mesozoic state. Although the details, or even the broad brush, of what was to become the new Paleocene Epoch, let alone the Paleogene Period and Cenozoic Era, could not be foreseen at that point, the dramatic—and abrupt—change from what had come before would have already been apparent . . . . (214–15)

In this defense of the Anthropocene unit, the members of the AWG use analogy to make an anticipatory argument about the relevance of present events in the future, or the importance of “geologically brief events” that have “protracted and frequently irreversible consequences” (215). They argue that events that may not be legible immediately as meaningful in the moment of their occurrence—events such as the mass extinction that marks the divide between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Eras or, more recently, the anthropogenic activity that marks the separation of the Holocene and the Anthropocene—become recognizable and especially significant in their enduring ramifications. These discussions about time and the Anthropocene have in turn inspired rich debates within the environmental humanities, especially in terms of the challenges that these extreme timescales pose to narrative time. To put it simply, these debates query how (or even if) narrative, which tends to foreground the experiences of individual existents, can stretch to accommodate the long durations, deep histories, and anticipated distant futures of stratigraphic time. Some scholars sound a cautionary note about the potential disjunctions between modern geologic and climatological science and the temporal pat-

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terns of narrative. Adeline Johns-Putra is illustrative of this group when she points to temporal disjunctions in her introduction to Climate and Literature (2019), stating that “it is now a critical commonplace that scientific questions of climate occur at very different spatial-temporal scales from the individual concerns of the literary” (7). Robert Markley, in his chapter on “Literature, Climate, and Time” in the same collection, similarly notes that “the implications for literature past and present are recasting our conceptions of time and narrative, history and story” (15). He continues: “Climate change has become such an urgent topic [for writers and literary critics] . . . because it forces us to reassess the relationships among three different registers of time: experiential, or embodied time, historical time, and climatological time” (15). Still other scholars are much more optimistic about the ability of narrative to accommodate the extreme durations that inform definitions of the Anthropocene.1 Mary Louise Pratt suggests that the Anthropocene poses productive challenges to narrative structures and templates, in that it is what Mikhail Bakhtin labels a chronotope—what she defines as “a particular configuration of time and space that generates stories through which a society can examine itself ” (G170). She writes that the Anthropocene “creates a chronotope with a multipolar space-time configuration,” and is “a device, an invitation, for Western-identified subjects to resituate themselves in the space-time-matter of the planet” (G170, G171). Ursula Heise argues that narrative has long been answering this invitation. Indeed, she suggests that many science fiction narratives anticipate the Anthropocene’s call for new chronotopes. In her essay “Science Fiction and the Timescales of the Anthropocene,” she discusses how “literary forms accommodate and even sometimes generate ideas about space, time, and agency” (276). Heise surveys science fiction novels that, though written well before the origins of the Anthropocene as a unit of the geologic time scale and not overtly focused on anthropogenic climate change, nevertheless “offer models for what strategies climate narratives in the contemporary could rely on” to represent long time spans (284). In particular, she is interested in the discrepancy between geological time spans and the limited length of the average novel: “A century in three hundred pages or less may be conceivable,” she notes, “but how does one fit 800,000 years into such a format . . . or two billion years?” (284). Her survey suggests five methods of moving readers across

1. For additional examples, see Mossner’s “Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated Transformations in Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay” and Anne-Lise François’s “Ungiving Time: Reading Lyric by the Light of the Anthropocene.” In the latter, François asks: “As a figure for the collapse of slow time info fast, how can the Anthropocene help us consider anew the problem of lyric time as distinct from empirical time?” (243).

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this gap, including time travel, time lapse, species narrative, time collages, and time palimpsests. In this chapter, I think through these debates about the Anthropocene and narrative time in more detail, ultimately positing new narratological categories of narrative time—the pseudo-singular and the effect-event—to expand this conversation and better account for the ways that authors and their texts can manipulate time to worldbuild for some purpose. I root my analysis of the pseudo-singular in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), and the effect-event in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1996).

The Geologic Time Scale and the Pseudo-Singular The addition of the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale demands that we take a long view of time—that we interpret the significance of recent strata as both an indicator of this moment’s exceptionality and the latest addition to a long, ongoing sequence of accumulation. It demands that we recognize both the singularity of anthropogenic lithography and view it as part of the continuous sequence of Earth’s deep time that far exceeds the “Anthropocene” unit. When we map this organization of time on to narrative, we must think through an event that is both singular and part of a larger sequence whose duration is incompatible with narrative representation, or an event that is both a defining aspect of a particular narrative and linked to other extremely long temporal units that resist narrativization. In other words, to task fully readers with interpreting an event along experiential and climatological time, authors must draw upon narrative resources that can represent an event as occurring within a narrative but also as existing in a chain that outpaces the timeline of narrated events. I want to think speculatively about a resource of narrative time that can reach out beyond a single text to evoke other timelines and timescales, or one that can represent the singularity of a given experience while also representing it as significant to a larger, extra-narrative sequence. An author’s use of such a resource would encourage readers to interpret the significance of a single event in light of sequences of extra-narrative events, thus both registering the meaning of an event within a narrative and rooting that event in a sequence that exists outside of the text. An Anthropocene narrative theory is interested in a narrative structure that tasks readers with interpreting the implications of an event within multiple timelines—that of the embodied time of a narrative’s existents and the longer timescales of historical and/or climatological time that outpace the text’s timeframe. It asks:

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what narrative resource can implicate the singular experiences of existents within the extreme durations of deep time that are so difficult to represent in this literary mode? We can begin to appreciate the depth of this representational problem when we attempt to situate the long durations of stratigraphic time within the lexicon of narrative time. Gérard Genette first published Narrative Discourse in 1980 and dedicated three chapters of this book—so foundational to the origins of narratology—to categorizing narrative temporality. The chapters form the three pillars of the classical narratological model of time: order, duration, and frequency. They also introduced essential terms related to each pillar, including analepsis and prolepsis (order); ellipsis, pause, scene, and summary (duration); and singular, repetitive, and iterative (frequency). On the surface, it makes sense to begin the search for our structure within Genette’s discussion of narrative duration. As he explains, this is the category that explores “steadiness in speed” (87, emphasis in original). Genette uses a spatial metaphor to detail his conceptualization of duration: By “speed” we mean the relationship between a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension (so many meters per second, so many seconds per meter): the speed of a narrative will be defined by the relationship between a duration (that of a story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years) and a length (that of a text, measured in lines and pages. (87–88)

Genette’s spatial model tracks the difference between narrative time—number of sentences, paragraphs, pages—and story time, such that it categorizes the relationship between space on the page and the timeline of the world in which characters function. His understanding of duration thus is fundamentally concerned with “accelerations and slowdowns”—with the ratio of “durationof-story” and “length-of-narrative” (88). The subcategories of duration that Genette introduces exist along a continuum of ellipses, or events that occur in story time but take up no narrative time (NT = 0; ST = n), and pauses, or narrative time that does not narrate any events at all (NT = n; ST = 0). In between these poles we find summary, in which events are narrated more quickly than they occur in story time (NT < ST), and scene, in which a text renders faithfully in narration a timeline of events as they occur in story time, as is typical of written dialogue (NT = ST). Given the extreme durations of the geologic time scale—and taking a cue from Heise’s survey of science fiction that represents extreme spans of time via travel, lapse, and so forth—we might first look to Genette’s categories of ellipsis and summary for structures best suited to its representation. These

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are the structures, after all, in which story time exceeds narrative time, thus creating narrative space for events of long durations. As Heise argues, ellipses and summary offer us an effective means of bridging the gap between the limited number of pages in the average novel and the extremely long spans of geological time moving readers quickly from the representation of one experience to another in the future. Yet both categories pose problems for our specific understanding of the Anthropocene as both are singular and part of a longer sequence of events that resist narrativization. Ellipses represent duration via absence; as Genette explains, “The analysis of ellipses comes down to considering the story time elided,” and as such, an ellipsis is a representation of a gap in the narrative timeline (Narrative Discourse, 106). The subcategories that Genette uses to specify the types of ellipsis highlight this interest in absence, in that their definitions rely on their relationship to the elliptical gap. Genette explains that explicit ellipses place parameters around the gap (for example, “some years passed” or “two years later”), while implicit ellipses are “not announced in the text” and readers can only infer its presence “from some chronological lacuna or gap in the narrative continuity” (107, 108). As we see from these subcategories, an ellipsis is capable of shifting readers from one disparate event to another by creating a vacancy in a text or refusing to narrate events that occur in the interim. But it does not demand that readers reach beyond story time to interpret the significance of an event within additional, extranarrative contexts. It does not, in other words, inherently task readers with interpreting the significance of an experience outside of the immediate context of the story to understand an event both in terms of the experiential time of a narrative’s existents and the longer durations of deep time that exceed story time and are so ill-suited to narrativization. An ellipsis thus is a useful tool for representing long durations in which story time exceeds narrative time, but, as the significance of its events remain firmly rooted in story time, it is not as useful for illuminating the even longer sequences of extreme durations that outpace story time. Like ellipsis, summary is a duration in which the events in story time take longer to occur than their narration in a text. Genette explains that summary can cover a wide range of timelines: it is “a form with variable tempo . . . which with great flexibility of pace covers the entire range included between scene and ellipses” (Narrative Discourse 94). Indeed, the key difference between summary and ellipsis lies in their relationship to narrative gaps—while ellipsis leaves the events of story time unnarrated, summary quickly articulates what occurs within a given passage of time. Yet, as Genette notes, “the brevity of summary gives it almost everywhere an obvious quantitative inferiority to descriptive and dramatic chapters,” such that a narrative will often devalue

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or deemphasize events precisely by their articulation via summary (96). Furthermore, Genette argues that summary is a tool of “transition between two scenes, the ‘background’ against which scenes stand out, and thus connective tissue par excellence” (97). In addition to deemphasizing the events that it does narrate, summary also has the tendency to foreground the events that immediately proceed or follow the summarized timeline—events that are given more space in the narration of a text by their representation via pause or scene. Summary, like ellipses, is an effective connective resource despite its connotations of muting and minimizing. Yet also as with ellipses, summary confines itself to the events of story time and does not implicate inherently a narrative event within a much longer extranarrative sequence that occurs outside of story time. It thus similarly is ill-suited to tasking readers with recognizing the significance of an event along multiple timelines, or engaging at the same time with the experiential timeline of a narrative’s existents and the much longer timelines of deep historical and/or climatological time that necessarily exceed the text. It does not satisfy an Anthropocene narrative theory’s search for a temporal structure that can represent the epoch’s singularity and place it in a longer chain that far eclipses the epoch. We run into similar problems of incompatibility when we try to locate the long durations of the Anthropocene within Genette’s categories of temporal order. Genette defines an analepsis as “any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment”—in other words, a flashback to a prior event that interrupts a linear progression of narrative time (40). Genette further specifies that we can categorize an analepsis via its relationship to the storyworld: heterodiegetic analepses “dea[l] with a storyline (and thus diegetic content) different from the content (or contents) of the first narrative,”2 while homodiegetic analepses “deal with the same line of action as the first narrative” (50, 51). He also categorizes an analepsis via its reach, or extent. An external analepsis accesses a past prior to the beginning of the first narrative, while an internal analepsis narrates a past that occurs prior to the current moment but after the start of the first narrative. A mixed analepsis is one “whose reach goes back to a point earlier and whose extent arrives at a point later than the beginning of the first narrative” (49). Because they represent events that occur before the narrative begins, external analepses “never at any moment risk interfering with the first narrative”; internal analepses, on the other hand, “present an obvious risk of

2. “We will henceforth call the temporal level of narrative with respect to which anachrony is defined as such, ‘first narrative’” (Genette, Narrative Discourse 48).

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redundancy or collusion” as their “temporal field is contained within the temporal field of the first narrative” (49, 50). As with Genette’s treatment of duration, this lexicon of isochrony makes for an awkward pairing with the addition of the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale. Yes, an analepsis does connect events in the past to the current moment. An external analepsis even has the benefit of implicating events articulated in the narrative timeline to those occurring prior to the beginning of primary narrative. Yet an analepsis, like ellipses and summary, inherently does not ask readers to consider these events within extranarrative contexts. While an external analepsis may expand narrative time backward, kicking out the scope of the primary narrative, the significance of its event remains rooted firmly in story time. An analepsis is thus a productive representative strategy for implicating one moment in another within a text, but less so for representing the implications of a singular event within a sequence that lies outside of that narrative. Indeed, I argue that Genette’s categories of frequency offer us the most useful narratological framework for grappling with the addition of the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale. As with duration and order, Genette breaks down representations of frequency into subcategories. The singulative, or singular narrative, narrates “n times what happened n times (nN/ nS),”—for example, “Monday I went to bed early, Tuesday I went to bed early, Wednesday I went to bed early” (114–15, emphasis in original). The repetitive or repeating narrative narrates “n times what happened once (nN/1S),” as in “Yesterday I went to bed early, yesterday I went to bed early, yesterday I went to bed early, etc.” (115, emphasis in original). Finally, the iterative narrative narrates “one time (or rather: at one time) what happened n times (1N/ nS)” (116, emphasis in original). As Genette explains, examples of this latter structure include phrasing such as “every day,” or “the whole week,” or “every day of the week I went to bed early” (116). He suggests that iterative narratives are particularly useful for yoking together singular units into a series, such that the phrase “Sundays in the summer of 1890” quickly articulates “a dozen real units” in one narrative sentence and establishes a commonality between them (127). Genette writes that sometimes the parameters of the iterative are shaky, such that readers may suspect the truly repeating nature of a sequence. He classifies these narratives as pseudo-iterative, in which readers encounter events “as iterative, whereas their richness and precision of detail ensure that no reader can seriously believe they occur and reoccur in that manner, several times, without any variation” (121). I am attracted to Genette’s terminology of frequency—and the iterative in particular—because of the ways it establishes relationships between the single

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event and the chain of events. Furthermore, I see the relevance of the pseudoiterative to an Anthropocene narrative theory because of its ability to root a singular event within a larger chain of continuous events. Unlike his categories of duration, the iterative does not elide, pass over, nor diminish events. And unlike that which we see in analepses, iterative narratives foreground the relationship between events in a sequence rather than simply connecting one occurrence to another. Indeed, I understand the iterative as an effective means of quickly knotting otherwise disparate singular events in a narrative into a sequence and for moving quickly from the limited scale of the single occurrence to the larger scale of the repeating event. I thus see it as a fruitful representational resource for quietly long durations that occur within story time. But what about relationships between the singular event and the ongoing sequence that exceed story time? How might we represent durations that spill out beyond the parameters of a narrative, such that they not only outpace narrative time but identify trajectories by evoking timelines prior to (and following from) the duration of story time? For these even more extreme durations, I suggest that we push on Genette’s classifications of frequency to introduce a new concept fundamental to an Anthropocene narrative theory—a companion to the pseudo-iterative that is particularly well suited to placing an event within ongoing and cumulative sequences of events that, importantly, eclipse narrative and story time. This concept is the pseudo-singular, in which readers encounter an event in a narrative as singular, whereas its richness and historical familiarity ensures that no reader can realistically believe it occurs as disconnected from earlier events known from other contexts that exist outside of the text. The pseudo-singular is an effective resource for linking the timeline of one narrative to external contexts in that it encourages readers to expand their understanding of a storyworld by constructing sequences of events that reach beyond the parameters of the text. While the pseudo-iterative calls the authenticity of repetition into question, the pseudo-singular casts doubt upon the disconnected nature of events, such that it implicates an event in a narrative with well-known sequences from real-world history and/or other narratives. I thus see it as a promising representational resource by which authors can task readers with understanding an event within both the familiar terrain of embodied or experiential time, and the more difficult to represent timescales of historical and climatological time. To define it slightly differently, we might say that the pseudo-singular involves a manipulation of the relationship between a narrative’s actual reading audience and authorial audience. To mentally model and emotionally inhabit a storyworld, the actual audience must interpret textual cues that authors provide them. The pseudo-singular presents readers with an invitation to reach

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beyond these explicit textual cues—to extend the parameters of the storyworld to recognize the relevance of other events and contexts that an author leaves strategically unnarrated but that readers must recognize to interpret the text. In doing this, the actual audience supplements a text’s represented events with additional extratextual events, in the process joining the authorial audience that is best suited to comprehending a narrative and fully inhabiting its world. In other words, the pseudo-singular is a narrative resource by which authors rely upon readers expanding the boundaries of a storyworld to place the events narrated by a narrator—seemingly singular in their articulation in the text—within a larger sequence of activity that they know from extranarrative contexts. The pseudo-singular entangles events from a narrative into a larger, extranarrative sequence of similar events that readers know from other contexts, thereby forging chains between one timeline and another, between one narrative’s world and the broader, nonnarrative world. In his discussion of the iterative, Genette does consider those narratives that “put the singulative at the service of the iterative” (139). He writes that a narrative might “evok[e]—in a completely literal and avowed way—a singular event, either as illustration or confirmation of an iterative series” (139). As an example, he annotates a passage from Proust’s Jeunes Filles en fleurs (1918): “Now and then [this is the iterative law] a pretty attention from one or another of them would stir in me vibrations which dissipated for a time my desire for the rest. Thus one day Albertine [this is the singular illustration] .  .  .” (139, annotations and emphasis in original). In this case, Genette writes, “the singulative itself is to some extent integrated into the iterative, compelled to serve and illustrate it, positively . . . by representing its code . . . which is another way of manifesting it” (140, emphasis in original). But what I propose in the pseudo-singular is more aggressive than that which we find in such phrases, in that the singular in Genette’s example confirms an iterative sequence that is contained fully within story time. The pseudo-singular, on the other hand, confirms an iterative sequence that reaches out to events beyond story time, thus widening the borders of a narrative’s storyworld. This representative structure of ongoing frequency integrates a single event into an iterative sequence that outpaces the story time and illustrates or confirms continuity that either predates or proceeds from the parameters of the specific world in which a narrative’s characters function. It thus has the potential to encourage readers to read on multiple timescales—to, using Markley’s words, reassess the relationship among the experiential time of narrative existents to the much longer histories of historical and/or climatological time. For helpful examples of the pseudo-singular, its potentials to expand the parameters of a narrative’s storyworld, and the ways in which it relies upon

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the relationship between a text’s actual and authorial audience, we can turn to representations of racial injustice in recent indigenous speculative fiction and Afro-futurist narratives. Cherie Dimaline’s young adult novel The Marrow Thieves provocatively connects the kidnapping and captivity of First Nations characters in a climate-altered future with the traumatic history of Canada’s residential school system. Dimaline’s text is an example of what we might call the explicit pseudo-singular, in that it directly links events in story time to events from larger, extra-narrative contexts. The narrator of this text is Frenchie, a young Métis boy who lives in a Canada ravaged by decades of water wars with the United States. As Miig, an Anishinaabe elder explains, America was so desperate to resolve its own wide-spread drought that it “reached up and started sipping on our lakes with a great metal straw” (Dimaline 24). At the same time that rivers are relocated, “the Melt” begins in the North, putting most of Northern Canada under water and sinking major coastal cities. Hurricanes and earthquakes wreak havoc in this new landscape, such that Frenchie and his peers “fear for a solid ground to stand on” (46). Yet the most immediate danger in Frenchie’s world is not this environmental nightmare but the “Recruiters,” employees of the Government of Canada’s Department of Oneirology. In Dimaline’s storyworld, nonindigenous Canadians have lost the ability to dream. Miig recalls that, as environmental changes caused death and disease on an unprecedented scale, “the ones that were left were no better off, really. They worked long hours, they stopped reproducing without the help of doctors, and worst of all, they stopped dreaming” (26). To dream again, nonindigenous Canadians must extract the bone marrow of the Anishinaabe, who have retained their ability to dream. The federal government institutes a program of captivity and abuse to facilitate and expedite this process. “That’s when the new residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms,” Miig states. “We go to the schools and they leach our dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slush marrow buried in our bones” (89, 90). Dimaline is explicit about the connection between the new schools and Canada’s historical residential school system. Miig makes clear that the government “turned to history to show them how to best keep us warehoused, how to best position the culling” (89). Yet the text does not flesh out this real-world residential school history. Instead, the real-world context largely appears in Frenchie’s highly condensed summaries of “Story,” a history that Miig tells Frenchie and his peers but which Frenchie does not include in his narration. As Frenchie notes, Miig is explicit about the importance of “Story”: “We needed to remember Story. It was his job to set the memory in perpetu-

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ity. . . . Every week he spoke, because it was imperative that we know. He said it was the only way to make the kind of changes that were necessary to really survive” (25). At one point, Frenchie recalls that Story is sometimes focused on one topic, “like the first residential schools: where they were, what happened there, when they closed” (25). Yet the brevity of this mention, and Frenchie’s use of indirect discourse and extreme summary in this passage, literally places this real-world history as secondary to the ecological ruination of the water wars and the Melt that Miig recalls in detail, over many long paragraphs, via direct discourse. In other words, Dimaline invests more time in filling in the gaps of the development of the storyworld’s environmental reality than the real-world contexts of racial and cultural injustice that remain almost wholly outside of the narrative. She relegates Canada’s residential school history to a “Story” that has no place in Frenchie’s narration. We see her restriction of the historical schools to a referenced yet unnarrated story again when Miig explains why his husband Isaac does not fear nonindigenous people as much as he should: Isaac “didn’t have grandparents who’d told residential school stories like campfire tales to scare you into acting right, stories about men and women who promised themselves to God only and then took whatever they wanted from children, especially at night” (106–7). Here, again, Dimaline brings up yet leaves largely unarticulated the real-life historical context that is necessary for readers’ understanding of a crucial event in the storyworld. Dimaline presents the development of the new Oneirology schools as a singular event in story time but relies upon a broader sequence of historical, extra-narrative events for readers to make sense of this occurrence. She strategically deploys the pseudo-singular in the novel’s demand that readers join her authorial audience by bringing contextual information to bear on their interpretation of the text—that they understand the new schools as an iterative echo of the real-world old schools. She thus demands that readers interpret the schools both within the embodied timescale of the novel’s characters and the deeper timescale of extranarrative historical time to understand the narrative. Dimaline’s use of the pseudo-singular is politically charged in its challenge to readers who cannot join the authorial audience and enact this multiplicity because they do not know this real-world history. By referencing the Canadian federal government’s legacy of racism and abuse but not detailing that context directly, she tasks readers with educating themselves about this terrible history. She also implies that this history is far from over. It has not ended with the Canadian government’s real-life Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the early twenty-first century but continues on in a future in which Frenchie and Miig are still on the run from federally sanctioned genocide.

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We find a second example of the pseudo-singular in River Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts. We might label this text an example of the implicit pseudo-singular as, unlike Dimaline’s novel, Solomon does not explicitly or literally evoke the broader real-world historical contexts upon which their narrative relies, but heavily implies the link between the singular, embodied events of the novel and historical sequences that occur outside of story time. An Unkindness of Ghosts is set on the spaceship HSS Matilda three hundred years after the ship has departed Earth. The architecture of the Matilda hierarchically organizes its inhabitants by race: the lower decks of the ship, cold and sparse, house the darker-skinned fieldworkers, while the ship’s lighterskinned upperdeckers enjoy “opulence for days” (220). Lower deck quarters are cramped and foul, while large upper deck quarters are decorated with “bronze statues of weeping angels” and covered in carpet so clean it makes one want to “undress and lie in the dark blue fibers” (214). They also feature luxurious recreational spaces such as ice rinks. Lower deck workers wear rough, shoddy clothing as they work the ship’s Field Decks growing sugarcane, bananas, cassava, and rice. Upper deck women, on the other hand, enjoy “strolling the more comely of the Field Decks before the morning workers arrive,” clad in shiny white patent leather boots and carrying lace parasols (114). The structures of racism determine life on the ship, such that lower deck laborers are subject to horrific physical and sexual abuse by upper deck inhabitants and their violent guards. Indeed, racism runs so rampant that at one point in the ship’s not-too-distant past, a doctor proposes reanimating the limbs of lower deck workers “for the purposes of manual labor” (20). These people, the doctor argues, “were not made of the heavens,” but “beasts of the field”—“demon forms” from the “Realm of Chaos” (19). While Matilda’s organization is exceptional in its futurity, Solomon clearly bases it upon the slave societies of the Antebellum South. In this sense, it is easy to read An Unkindness of Ghosts as an allegory of Southern American slavery—as a symbolic relocation or reproduction of historical horrors and stratifications in a speculative future. Yet the injustices of the Matilda are not as untethered to the real-world South as this allegorical reading suggests. Artifacts on the ship suggest a connection to the history that predates story time, most notably editions of the old comic Night Empress and its trenchcoat-wearing hero Mariam Santi. Readers learn on the first page of the novel that Mariam Santi carries “a cylindrical device made of metal and wood” (9). The novel’s narrator explains that, when Santi pulls “its tiny lever with her index finger, a silver ball shot out of the tube, wounding her enemy.” Aster, the novel’s protagonist, is disconnected enough from the device’s historical context to stumble over the word “rifle”: “As a child, she’d called them ripples

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for the way they had of changing everything in a story. And because she’d misread the word the first time around, finding the f’s and p’s looked similar to her untrained eyes” (9, emphasis in original). For Aster, Mariam Santi’s rifle is a relic of a long-ago past that exists off-ship, in a different space and time. Similarly, some lowdeckers circle their eyes in charcoal to create what they call “Rakkun eyes” because “they descended from a scavenging people. So they said. So they told themselves. So their stories went” (24, emphasis in original). The misspelling of racoon here functions similarly to Aster’s mishandling of the word “rifle”; the lowdeckers have no knowledge of actual racoons, and so must rely on handed-down stories from contexts that predate the Matilda to fill in their history. Solomon makes explicit that the inhabitants of the Matilda are disconnected culturally, linguistically, and imaginatively from the lives and Earth homes of their ancestors. “This far from the past,” the narrator states, “no one could really know their history” (24). Yet readers do know the histories and contexts that elude the novel’s characters. Readers can easily recognize rifles and racoons and import this knowledge into their interpretation of the narrative, thus joining the authorial audience best suited to interpreting Solomon’s text. Indeed, a rich understanding of this novel’s storyworld demands that they do so. Likewise, most readers will have no trouble recalling the past that the ship’s rigid divisions evokes and using this knowledge to reconstrue their model of the narrative’s storyworld. Unlike Aster and her peers, readers can locate the racial and cultural codes that organize life on the Matilda in broader legacies of injustice and slavery, and must rely on them to mentally model and emotionally inhabit Aster’s world. And the text’s demand that they import other, familiar real-world information such as rifles and racoons eases this process by strengthening the connection between the storyworld and the world in which they read. Solomon manipulates the boundary between the actual and the authorial audience to forge an implicit connection between seemingly singular events of the ship—most obviously Aster’s field labor and abuse—and a historical sequence of slavery that exists outside of story time. In other words, Solomon does not simply represent American slavery as allegory but deploys the pseudo-singular to suggest a chain of events in which readers require an unnarrated historical context to make sense of life on the Matilda. An Unkindness of Ghosts demands that readers interpret the embodied experiences of the novel’s characters in light of the longer, extranarrative timelines of real-world American history. Solomon uses the pseudo-singular to connect one world’s timeline to another, expanding the parameters of the storyworld by connecting singular events in story time to a much longer, extranarrative sequence of violence that stretches from the real-world past into this speculative future.

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Neither Dimaline’s nor Solomon’s use of the pseudo-singular engages in the extremely long durations of the geologic time scale that inform the Anthropocene. Yes, both authors use the epoch’s devastating environmental changes as a backdrop for their storyworld: Dimaline in her representation of a dangerous, climate-altered Canada and Solomon in their suggestion of a future Earth so damaged that it necessitates the exile of humans from the planet. Yet both texts, in their linking of a singular event to a long sequence of historical trauma that expands the borders of their storyworlds, demonstrate how the pseudo-singular might function to task readers with interpreting the significance of an event within a narrative and along much longer timespans that lie outside of the text. These texts illustrate, in other words, how the pseudo-singular can shift readers from experiential time to the longer timescales of historical time and beyond. They also make it easy for us to imagine how a different author might use the pseudo-singular to encourage interpreters to read along even longer timelines—by, for example, rooting the singular experience of existents in a sequence of events preserved in the fossil or stratigraphic record that occurs outside of story time. The pseudo-singular thus stands to be a provocative representational resource linking the temporal scales of narratives—so often focused on the embodied experiences of existents—with the geological scales of climate science that resist narrativization.

Slow Violence and the Effect-Event In addition to connecting experiential time to geologic time, the temporality of the Anthropocene also hinges upon the recognition of the significance of events that are not legible in the moment of their occurrence. This in turn calls into question narratological conceptualizations of “event,” all of which assume that for an event to be relevant to a narrative it must be immediately recognizable as such. We find a useful model for thinking through this new understanding of event in Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence. Nixon defines slow violence as “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Slow Violence 2). As with the AWG’s defense of the Anthropocene’s brevity, Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence foregrounds the importance of the lingering effects of events that are difficult—if not impossible—to register in the moment; he writes that slow violence studies “calamites that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently disperse their devastation while remaining outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media,” and in this way is a useful tool

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for highlighting issues of toxicity, pollution, and environmental racism and injustice. Of course, slow violence is also an essential tool for grappling with the anthropogenic behavior that is driving the Anthropocene. In addition to domestic abuse and post-traumatic stress, Nixon’s list of examples of slow violence explicitly includes “climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” (Slow Violence 2). Unlike normal violence, which he notes is “customarily received as an event or action that is immediate in time” and “erupt[s] into instant sensational visibility,” slow violence is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous,” but “incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). For Nixon, understanding slow violence—and thus confronting the roots and scope of our current epoch’s environmental crisis—involves engaging in experiences of time that are otherwise difficult for humans to access. Nixon notes that a “major problem [of slow violence] is representational,” in that “we need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond” to a host of social and environmental afflictions (3). In particular, slow violence challenges narrative representation because it is open-ended and dispersed across time and space—it fails to be contained within one recognizable timeline and resists clear and observable termination. As Nixon explains, slow violence does not occur in quick, catastrophic events, but accumulates quietly in the background over long periods of time. To phrase this in the language in which we have been dealing in this chapter, we might say that the events of slow violence resist narrativization as they occur outside of the experiential timelines of a narrative’s existents. In appearing off the page or in an unarticulated background, the difficult-tonarrate events of slow violence disturb fundamental definitions of narrative and narrativity, as they do not contain the recognizable events upon which these definitions rely. As they exist outside of experiential time, the events of slow violence only become legible after the fact, in the delayed accumulation of their effects. We can begin to appreciate the depth of this representational problem when we note how intimately narrative theorists tie narrativity to events. The definitions of narrative that I offer up in this book’s first chapter illustrate this intimacy clearly: we see it in Genette’s statement that narrative is “the representation of a real or fictitious event or series of events,” in Prince’s declaration that narrative is “the representation (as product and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictive EVENTS,” in Phelan’s “something happened,” and Herman’s second basic element of narra-

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tive, “event sequencing” (“Boundaries” 1; Dictionary 58; Living 18; Basic 9). We also see this link between narrativity and events in the attempts by narrative theorists to account for what narrative is not. Take, for example, Genette’s categories of narration and description. Narration, he writes, consists of “representations of actions and events,” while description comprises “representations of objects or people” (“Boundaries” 5). Genette writes that these two opposing categories correspond largely to considerations of time and space: Narration is “more active” while description is “more contemplative”; narration “links itself to actions of events” and thus “puts emphasis on the temporal or dramatic aspects of narration,” while description “lingers over objects” and thus “seems to suspend the flow of time and to contribute to the spreading out of narrative in space” (7). In his entry on “Description” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005), Torsten Pflugmacher is even more blunt about this divide. He writes that description “is a text-type which identifies the properties of places, objects, or persons”; description, as classical narratologists traditionally define it, is a “narrative pause interrupting the presentation of the chain of events” (101). Description, in other words, involves the cessation of narrative because it interferes with the representation of a sequence of events. Cognizant of the delayed effects of slow violence and AWG’s interest in the protracted consequences of anthropogenic activity upon geologic strata, an Anthropocene narrative theory fundamentally rewrites this binary. Indeed, we might best understand slow violence and the future orientation of the AWG as knitting together narration and description in that both rely on events that are only recognizable in the description of their accumulated effects upon objects or bodies. Slow violence and the addition of the Anthropocene to the geologic time scale foreground the importance of events that are so slow as to be largely imperceptible to human experience—and thus resistant to direct narrativization—but nevertheless become important signifiers of change and destruction via their transformation of objects and bodies. They demand that an Anthropocene narrative theory create room for events that are difficult to narrate because they exist largely outside of the experiential time of a narrative’s existents yet still move the plot of a narrative forward in their accumulated effects. To trouble fully the binary between narration and description, an Anthropocene narrative theory proposes a new event-type that recognizes unnarrated events via their accumulated effects upon objects and bodies. I label this the effect-event, as it is an event that is only legible in its delayed, transformative effects. I draw upon the work of Emma Kafalenos in generating this label. In discussing events and their effects, she writes: “An effect does not cause a prior event. An effect indicates a significance of a prior event by

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placing it in a sequence, in which the prior event can be interpreted according to its consequences” (“Functions” 471–72). Kafalenos’s primary interest here is in how a narrative’s sjuzhet can establish new relationships of causality, or how the timeline of a narrator’s narration might bring to light an event that occurs earlier in story time by articulating its effects. She argues that the particular arrangement of a sjuzhet “do[es] not alter the principle of causality”; rather, it “guide[s] perceivers to establish the function of the event in question, to interpret it according to its consequences” (472). Kafalenos’s concern with the delayed recognition of an event’s effects by a narrative’s readers helpfully provides us with some language to interpret those events that are not immediately legible to those readers. By looking back to the significance of prior events, she helps us think through possible representations of an event’s future consequences. Yet, as with my discussion of the pseudo-singular, what I propose in the effect-event is even more ambitious than what Kafalenos describes. It also involves us thinking beyond the structuralist frame that Kafalenos favors to consider how authors use textual resources to communicate with and position their audiences and worldbuild for some purpose. While Kafalenos’s interest lies in events that are not immediately recognizable to a narrative’s readers, my concern is with those events that also are not recognizable to a narrative’s narrator but are so to the author. To phrase this differently, Kafalenos’s discussion focuses on the legibility/illegibility of events at the level of story time: a narrator, by narrating the effects of a previously occurring event that is not apparent to readers, uses their knowledge of story time to create a retroactive chain of causality. My understanding of the effect-event focuses on events that are illegible at the level of narration but necessary to narrative comprehension. In an effect-event, the narrator is unable to establish a chain of causality to link effects to an event, as they are incapable of narrating the event in the first place because of the representational challenges that it poses. Yet the author encourages readers to connect on their own the dots between a description of an object or body and the event(s) that produce that object or body, and thus join the authorial audience best suited to interpret the text. In this sense, we can understand the effect-event as similar to the pseudo-singular in that it relies on readers reaching beyond a narrator’s narration to connect effect to earlier event. The effect-event, like the pseudo-singular, tasks interpreters with expanding the borders of a narrative’s storyworld and engaging in a purposeful communicative exchange with the author: to interpret this particular type of event, readers tackle the experiential timeline of story time and the timelines of the broader, extra-narrative contexts that are not narrated but which are necessary to understand the text.

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We find a particularly potent illustration of the effect-event in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus. At its core, Viramontes’s novel is a brutal exposé of the environmental racism and injustice that migrant workers in California fruit fields face. The most shocking event in the novel is undoubtedly the pesticide poisoning of a young boy, Alejo, who sneaks into the fruit fields on his day off to steal peaches. Upon climbing a tree to reach the fruit, Alejo is caught off-guard by the sound of an approaching biplane making an unscheduled fumigation trip. At first, he feels “just a slight moisture until the poison rolled down his face in deep sticky streaks” (76). But soon the pain is unbearable: He panicked when he realized he was choking, clamped his neck with one hand, feeling his Adam’s apple against his palm, but still held onto a branch tightly with the other, afraid he would fall long and hard, like the insects did. . . . A hole ripped in his stomach like a match to paper, spreading into a deeper and bigger black hole that wanted to swallow him completely. He knew he would vomit. His clothes were dampened through, then the sheet of his skin absorbed the chemical and his whole body began to cramp from the shrinking pull of his skin squeezing against his bones. (76–77)

Alejo falls immediately, desperately ill, and his poisoning becomes the touchstone event for the second half of the narrative. The novel’s other characters lack the medical and financial resources to help him and can do little to alleviate the weakness that results from his frequent bouts of diarrhea and vomiting. The aloof, white, middle-class nurse at the local clinic determines that Alejo has dysentery after completing a cursory examination, but Alejo’s peers reject this diagnosis. Instead, they easily recognize that he is but the latest worker to fall victim to “a sickness they called the daño of the fields”—an illness that is “not sunstroke or a flu, but worse” (93). Alejo’s poisoning is so shocking because it occurs so quickly. Its representation is catastrophic and spectacular, and in this sense, it functions as a traditional event within the narrative. We can best understand the poisoning as a devastating happening that alters the trajectory of not only Alejo’s life but also the lives of those around him. It is all the more significant, then, that a second, nonspectacular representation of pesticide poisoning hums in the background of Viramontes’s narrative in her descriptions of various bodies. The novel’s characters are aware that, beyond instant, calamitous poisoning, the accumulated effects of steady pesticide exposure via contaminated water and food threatens their lives and bodies. We see this awareness vividly when two young girls, Estrella and Maxine, take a break from fruit picking by a

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local water source. Estella had “heard through the grapevine about the water,” knowing that the foreman, whose name Big Mac aptly symbolizes his connection to corporate greed, “lied about the pesticides not spilling into the ditch” (32). Estella and Maxine know what pesticides can do to a body; they are sure to rub off the “white coating of insect spray with their shirt sleeves” before they bite into the tomatoes that they pick (37). But the extreme heat of the days and the relentless drudgery of their work makes the contaminated water appear “clear and cool and irresistible” (32). Estrella asks, as she dips her bandana into the water, “You think ’cause of the water our babies are gonna come out with no mouth or something?” The appearance of the bloated body of a drowned dog immediately answers her question. The girls pinch their noses as the carcass floats by them, “its belly swollen and damp dark . . . its legs like spears dipping gently toward the bridge until it passed them” (33). The carcass, ripe with the symbolism of death and corruption, is a stark reminder of the water’s effects upon a body. Other characters also articulate this awareness of the devastating, accumulative effects of pesticide exposure. Estrella’s pregnant mother, Petra, similarly worries about the future of her unborn child, lying in bed at night thinking of the “lima bean in her” and wondering “would the child be born without a mouth, would the poisons of the field harden in its tiny veins?” (124). The connection between the fetus and the crop is explicit here: both are being transformed by the pesticides that surround Petra and which she cannot escape. Unborn child and bean alike are hardened by the toxins of her world. Petra extends her worry to Estrella when a vision of Estrella “cradl[ing] a watermelon like a baby” saddens her (40). Estrella’s future children, like Petra’s, are intimately connected to the poisoned crops upon which they depend. The reality that informs these worries is confirmed by the narrator’s quick summary of the history of Perfecto Flores, Petra’s aging partner. Perfecto wakes early one morning and coughs as he smells saltwater in the air—a telltale sign of recent fumigation. The scent quickly shifts his mind to memories of his first wife, Mercedes, who died of cancer many years earlier. As he recalls these memories, mealybug beetles “dri[p] like crisp curls” on his knee and “fall to the ground . . . their legs jetting and jerking” (79). The sight of the bugs, in turn, makes Perfecto think of his and Mercedes’s first child, who was stillborn, “the color of a plum.” Perfecto himself, now seventy years old, is plagued by dreams of illness, “His veins like irrigation canals clogged with dying insects, twitching on their backs, their little twig legs jerking” (79). Once again, the text’s symbolism makes explicit the exchange that characters like Perfecto and Mercedes must make: cancer and death for “perfect” crops.

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I find a provocative contrast between the novel’s representation of Alejo’s poisoning and this pervasive threat of the slow accumulation of pesticide toxicity. Whereas the narration of the former is vivid and spectacular, Viramontes implicitly evokes the latter via description. Estrella may be aware that Big Mac lies about pesticides spilling into the ditch, but the novel’s narrator does not pause to articulate the gradual drip-drip of her body’s contamination— a sequence of events that occurs so slowly, over such an extended period of time, that it exists largely outside of the character’s and narrator’s powers of observation. Likewise, the narrator does not narrate the slowly accumulating effects of the pesticide’s toxins on the bodies of Petra, Perfecto, Mercedes, and their children. Nor does the narrator explain what happens to the bugs that live near the fields in the aftermath of fumigation, instead simply describing the disastrous effects of pesticide poisoning on their bodies. To make sense of these descriptions, readers must infer a prior sequence of slowly occurring events that exceeds story time via the carcasses of dead animals and the character’s visions of their transformed bodies. Of course, real-life contexts help readers connect these dots. In a 2009 study of worldwide exposure and pesticide use for Reviews on Environmental Health, Michael C.  R. Alavanja notes that over 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides are used worldwide each year—one billion pounds in the United States alone—and twenty-five million agricultural workers worldwide experience “unintentional” pesticide poisoning annually (Alavanja 303). Furthermore, “migrant or seasonal workers in the United States rarely have adequate training in the use of ‘restricted use pesticides,’ ” and as a result “these populations are probably disproportionately affected by the adverse health effects of these pesticides” (305). Despite this risk, Alavanja notes that scientists studying the cancer that results from pesticide poisoning run into similar representational problems to those that I discuss in this chapter: “These populations are difficult to study epidemiologically,” he writes, “because cancer tends to take about 10 to 20 years to develop in an individual exposed to a biologically sufficient dose” (305). The epidemiology of pesticide poisoning is difficult to study or register because it occurs so slowly, outside of the usual timelines of medical research. Alavanja deals with this challenge by recommending new methods of studying the effects of pesticide exposure. Vitamontes’s novel deals with this challenge via the effect-event. In describing the accumulated effects of pesticide exposure on the bodies of people and animals, it makes legible a sequence of events that, because it occurs so slowly and steadily, resists narrativization. The novel thus tasks readers with grappling with two timelines at once—the story time of the text’s existents and the broader, extranarrative timeline of the imperceptible events that transform their bodies.

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Beyond this strong use of the effect-event to illuminate the slow violence of pesticide exposure, I am also attracted to Under the Feet of Jesus because of the connection Vitamontes forges via effect-events between anthropogenic activity in story time and the geologic time that exceeds story time. Prior to his poisoning, Alejo dreams of returning to his family in Texas and studying geology in school. His knowledge of deep time provides him with a spiritual understanding of his place in the world: He loved stones and the history of stones because he believed himself to be a solid mass of boulder thrust out of the earth and not some particle lost in infinite and cosmic space. With a simple touch of a hand and a hungry wonder of his connection to it all, he not only became a part of the earth’s history, but would exist as the boulders did, for eternity. (52)

Alejo’s love of stones is a powerful antidote to his current status as a migrant worker, as the geologic timeline into which he inserts himself stands in direct opposition to the brutal temporariness and impermanence of his position within corporate agriculture. In the immediate aftermath of his poisoning, before he becomes too weak to stand and converse, Alejo tries to share his love of geology with Estrella. As they seek shade from the relentless sun under a Ford pickup truck during a noontime break, Alejo asks Estrella, “You know where oil comes from?” (86). He explains: “Millions of year ago, the dead animals and plants fell to the bottom of the sea. . . . Imagine bones at the bottom of the sea. . . . Bones and rocks and leaves. Falling. Slowly. . . . Makes sense, don’t it, bones becoming tar oil?” (86). In his attempt to demystify the processes of fossilization, Alejo makes an explicit connection between bones and oil. Estrella, more concerned with her immediate circumstances, jokes that oil probably comes “from a leak in the motor” of the truck that shades them. She rebuffs Alejo’s interest in geology as she stares at the Good Year label on the truck’s tire, declaring that she would not mind if they ran out of oil, as then she and her family would lose the ability to move from camp to camp in search of work. Then, she notes, “we’d stay put.” But Estrella’s perspective of oil dramatically changes in the wake of Alejo’s illness. Frustrated by her lack of resources and consequent inability to help him, she is enraged when the clinic nurse demands a fee of $9.17 for Alejo’s superficial medical examination. The significance of bones—and the transformation of his bones into oil—becomes a powerful symbol of racial and social injustice as Alejo’s death looms. Estrella thinks of how “bones made oil and oil made gasoline,” and how “the oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept

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her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six” (147). Estrella begins to understand that Alejo’s body, as well as her body and those of her fellow migrant workers, provide the base material upon which society runs: “It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving along the dotted line on the map. Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that?” (147). Of course, Estrella and Alejo have little access to the life that their bodies powers. Their car lacks air conditioning—indeed, they lack the money to pay for the gasoline that would keep their car moving along the map’s dotted line. This abuse infuriates Estrella, and consequently she feels justified in threatening the nurse with a crowbar to recoup the examination fee. As the narrator explains, “Estrella had it figured out: the nurse owned them as much as they owed her” (147, emphasis in original). We can easily interpret Vitamontes’s representation of bones as a vibrant symbol of the crimes of American capitalism—particularly how the agricultural industry chews up its migrant work force. As Lydia R. Cooper puts it, the image of bones in the novel is one of “the absolute literal oppression of gravity and time and, by extrapolation, the metaphorical yet equally devastating oppression of consumerist American society” (370, emphasis in original). But I want to suggest a second reading of the novel’s representation of bones and the processes of fossilization. In a 2009 forensic toxicology experiment, a group of scientists studied the postmortem and putrefied bone marrow of pesticide-treated rabbits to “reveal the diagnostic value of toxicological analysis of bone marrow in exhumation cases” (Akcan et al. 82). Their results were positive, indicating that bone marrow and putrefied viscera can determine the cause of death through toxicological analysis as “acute pesticide poisoning” (82). This study suggests that pesticides not only transform the bodies of living animals, as we see in the novel to devastating effect, but also linger on in those bodies’ materials after death. Thus, it is not just that Alejo’s and Estrella’s bones fuel the lives of those that oppress them. It is also that these bones will retain within them the scars of pesticide exposure as they settle into the bottom of the sea. The bones, in other words, are a powerful vehicle that moves pesticide exposure from story time to the extranarrative geologic time of the fossilization process. Pesticide settles in bone and remains when bone is much, much later transformed into fossilized fuel. Hence Alejo, on the morning after his poisoning, is alarmed by the tar that he finds under his nails; he feels “like splintered and chipped sea shells embedded in layers of the desert rock, so far away from the ocean” (81). “Something had gone wrong,” he thinks; “The sea had receded without him” (81). In this particularly poignant effect-event, Alejo flashes forward to a future moment not according to the experiential timeline in which he lives, but the geologic timeline of

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which he used to find such comfort. But now, instead of his body transforming into solid rock—a proud part of the earth’s history—it is ground up into sharp, bitter pieces that feel wrongly placed within the earth’s layers. Something had indeed gone wrong, and this injustice registers in both story and geologic time. Vitamontes’s melding of timelines via the effect-event directly calls into question that assumption of much environmental humanities scholarship that narrative cannot accommodate the extreme temporalities of geologic time. It directly challenges the similar assumption that narrative cannot encourage readers to move between the different scales of experiential, historical, and climatological time. It also suggests that my discussions of the pseudosingular and the effect-event in this chapter are not as speculative as they may seem. The effect-event that represents the fossilization of Alejo’s toxic bones joins together multiple timelines, embedding the lived experience of a narrative’s character in the much larger timeline of the earth’s history. Vitamontes thus provides us with a strong example of one resource by which a narrative can, to return to Adeline Johns-Putra’s phrasing, navigate the “very different spatial-temporal scales” of the “individual concerns of the literary” and those upon which “scientific questions of climate occur” (“Introduction”, 7). She also provides us with one clear path for representing the particular temporalities of the Anthropocene in narrative.

CHAPTER 4

Space

While visiting Seattle in the summer of 2016, I stumbled upon on Tamiko Thiel’s augmented reality installation at the city’s Olympic Sculpture Garden, Gardens of the Anthropocene. This immersive and interactive exhibit, which ran from June 25 to October 3 that year, allowed visitors like me to wander around a version of the park in which plants have mutated to survive in the erratic and unpredictable conditions of a changed climate. An instant after downloading an app to my phone, I saw the park transformed. The app superimposed images of the familiar park and its sea view with those of an alternative park’s red algae blooms and bullwhip kelp, the latter of which were not restricted to underwater offshore spaces but now flying drone-like over my head as they fed on storm surge detritus in the open air. I was no longer standing in a stable place, but a bizarre space that was fluid, mercurial, and mutating before my eyes. I recently had a similar experience after downloading After Ice while visiting Manhattan. Designed by New York–based visual artist Justin Brice Guariglia, this augmented reality app received 13 million impressions in the first week after it was released in the days before Earth Day, April 22, 2017, and was conceived by Guariglia after he traveled to Greenland with NASA’s polar ice survey, Operation Ice Bridge. The app delivered on its promise to provide me “a simulation of what happens at ground level, right here, if the sea level rises as predicted by the 2080s.” As with my experience in Olympic Park, I saw the world around me radically altered. I looked at my reflection as 118

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I stood in Times Square and watched water rush into my phone’s screen, ultimately rising above my head and the tops of the buildings behind me. I was alarmed to see animated fish swimming down Seventh Avenue. The assumption at the foundation of Gardens of the Anthropocene and After Ice is that the virtual inhabitation of an unfamiliar future space will lead to action in the current moment. Featuring the tagline “Welcome to the New Normal” and projecting a future for users that is “within the lifetime of children alive today,” After Ice places users in a volatile world that may otherwise be difficult to imagine. In addition to helping users visualize the future of their current space, “right here,” it also encourages them to share images of themselves inhabiting that future space. Users can take a selfie in their augmented environment and post their #AfterIce images on social media to help spread the word about the effects of climate change. Thiel’s exhibit is similarly invested in activism and the mitigation of the worst effects of climate change. Its description by the Seattle Art Museum states, “While these images may seem surreal, they point to a dystopian future where the natural world has been irrevocably impacted by [hu]mankind” (“Past Exhibitions”). The message here is clear: act now to prevent the mutations that you see on your screen. What interests me in particular about these apps is the way that they foster this action by encouraging users to become more comfortable with spaces that are unstable, or inexact in their multiplicity and thus difficult to inhabit. Users of the apps see spaces as both familiar and strange: you look out over the Seattle skyline to a well-known view but are struck by the presence of massive kelp plants overhead; you stand among the hubbub of Times Square and watch as it fills with water. The apps take advantage of the instability and cognitive dissonance that users experience as they try to hold multiple versions of a space in their minds at the same time: one future and strange, and one present and vulnerable. They task users with imaginatively inhabiting a model of space that is purposefully challenging to map and navigate—one that performs mutability and disorder in its refusal to be only one space at once. The emphasis on instability in these apps picks up on the instability inherent to the Anthropocene. As I discuss in this book’s introduction, the Anthropocene is not only a projection of a deeply unstable and rapidly changing world but also itself an unstable narrative with many beginnings and many meanings. Steve Mentz articulates the inherent uncertainty of the epoch when he writes that “the epoch is not one thing but many, even when attached to a precise date” (“Enter” 44). Rather than searching for the meaning or stable context of the Anthropocene, Mentz argues that environmental humanities critics best understand the epoch by searching for meaning in chaos. “We

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need not one Anthropocene but many,” he writes; “Pluralize the Anthropocene!” is his rallying cry to his fellow scholars (45, 44). This pluralization and instability are especially crucial to understandings of the varied and indeterminate spaces of the Anthropocene. Indeed, apps like Gardens of the Anthropocene and After Ice reflect the increasingly unstable representation of space in scientific predictions of the epoch. Take for example the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 special report, “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” The report paints a striking picture of a chaotic and unstable world; in laying out predictions of climate change and their potential impacts and associated risks, the IPCC scientists project a planet with “robust differences” from our own—one marred by species decline and extinction that requires substantial adaptation for human and natural systems, and “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, and urban infrastructure . . . and industrial systems” (9, 17). The report makes clear that the world is changing—that it has changed already—and that policymakers and citizens need to act quickly and widely to mitigate the most disastrous effects of unchecked anthropogenic climate change. Strikingly, the authors of the report do not simply foreground instability in its content but lace it into the very form by which they discuss the future of certain spacescapes. One of the report’s key concerns is spelling out the difference between a world warmed by 1.5°C and one warmed by 2°C, and in toggling back and forth between these two speculative futures its authors task readers with imagining multiple versions of certain spaces. This instability is especially notable in the opening “Summary for Policymakers,” which frequently draws attention to the effects of these two temperatures, including differences in “mean temperature in most land and ocean regions . . . hot extremes in most inhabited regions . . . heavy precipitation in several regions .  .  . and the probability of drought and precipitation in some regions” (9). The report thus not only encourages readers to consider what the future has in store but calls attention to the likely conditions of various spaces depending upon the actions that those readers take today—upon the policies that they support, ratify, and follow. Similar to Gardens of the Anthropocene and After Ice, it foregrounds the instability of the Anthropocene by demanding that readers hold plural versions of space in their head at once in the hopes of strengthening the global response to climate change and fostering awareness and action in the world in which readers live. By inviting users and readers to compare the present and future of a space, Gardens of the Anthropocene, After Ice, and the IPCC report are prompts for narrative—tools for worldbuilding for some purpose. They rely on users and readers imaginatively filling in the story between familiar space and unfamil-

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iar space, sketching out the sequence of events that must occur to produce the world that they see on their phones and thus becoming more cognizant of the changes to the environments in which they read that stand to occur if anthropogenic climate change continues apace. Of course, the vibrant storyworlds of literary narratives also prompt this imaginative, purposeful worldbuilding. Like augmented reality apps, narratives afford the imaginative relocation of readers to alternate spaces, providing them with textual cues by which to model and inhabit a space different from the one in which they read. Better yet, narratives also afford trying on the emotional experiences of characters living in those spatial contexts and thus the specific ethics, values, and behavioral norms of a narrative. Given the increased spatial instability of the Anthropocene, an Anthropocene narrative theory thus highlights unstable spacescapes and seeks to sophisticate analysis and discussions of them. It conceives of chaotic, multiplicitous, and/or protean spatial contexts as key resources by which authors and readers can flex the cognitive muscles that make possible the inhabitation of such real-life spaces and thus prepare themselves for the Anthropocene’s increasing instability. It also makes possible the analysis of experimental texts that do not reproduce and circulate modern, Euclidean, Newtonian notions of space as a stable background upon which human drama unfolds. And yet current understandings of narrative space do not easily lend themselves to this project because of their reliance on stable spatial contexts. Assumptions of ordered and stable space have long been a hallmark of scholarship on narrative spatialization, be it in Ruth Ronen’s theorization of “frames” and “settings” or Gabriel Zoran’s understanding of a text’s topographical level as a static entity. We also see assumptions of stability implicit in David Herman’s six types of narrative spatialization, as the focus of his model is on the textual cues that allow readers to produce clear mental models of the spaces about which they read. As I discuss in more detail below, such understandings of narrative space are useful for analyzing the background context within which a narrative’s characters operate and tracking how readers transport themselves from their reading environments to the virtual spaces of narratives. Yet these understandings of space overlook protean spaces such as those that we find in Gardens of the Anthropocene and After Ice that authors make strategically challenging for readers to map and mentally inhabit. Nor are they helpful for analyzing spaces that themselves are changing and thus inherently unstable. Indeed, scholarship on narrative space illustrates just how difficult it is to discuss unstable and disordered environments in narratives. Lacking the framework by which to do so, narrative scholars have instead tended to focus

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on static, unchanging spaces and spatial references, such as the interior settings of Victorian fiction or maps—both the cognitive maps produced by readers as they read and the narrativization of geographic or geopolitical maps. The lack of framework by which scholars can analyze representations of mercurial and chaotic spaces in narratives is a pressing issue, as it poses immediate problems to our understanding of the Anthropocene. It hampers our ability to recognize and discuss spatializing cues that authors can use to foster readers’ imagination of the mutable and changing spacescapes that define the epoch and that leave scholars less likely to draw attention to the existence and environmental usefulness of such narratives. It also inhibits our analysis of the ways in which space itself in this epoch is not simply a static background within which we move about and have our being but also a changing foreground that acts independently of the human interpersonal conflicts and dramas that drive narratives. To ease this problem, I propose a new category of despatialization that highlights spatializing information in narratives that is strategically inexact and difficult to map. This concept takes inspiration from Herman’s category of “fuzzy temporality,” which similarly emphasizes narrative chronologies that “make it difficult or even impossible [for readers] to assign narrated events a fixed or even fixable position along a timeline in the storyworld” (Story Logic 212). Despatialization focuses attention on spatializing cues that make it challenging for readers to conceive of spaces as fixed and moored; it privileges cues that actively inhibit the generation of mental models of space by readers. But despatialization is even more radical than Herman’s notion of temporal fuzziness, as it represents an understanding of space that is not only unstable in its narration but also in its real-world referents. Despatialization helps environmental humanities and narrative scholars better analyze narratives that task readers with producing mental models of unstable and/or unknowable spaces—models of imagined worlds that better prepare them for the increased instability of the real-world in the Anthropocene. Indeed, despatialization acknowledges the ways in which space has never been simply a static background and that traditional narratological conceptualizations of space and setting are not only inadequate for addressing the increasing instability of space in this epoch but also simultaneously reproduce notions of space-as-static that are instrumental to anthropocentrism and the extractive industries that have brought us to this historic moment. Despatialization helps us recognize narratives that already do this destabilizing work, thus adding to a repertoire of Anthropocene texts and highlighting resources that authors can use to contend with the mercurial nature of the changing world in which they write and today’s readers read. Below, I illustrate the benefits of despa-

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tialization to our understanding of space in the Anthropocene by tracking the unstable, unclear, and conflicting spatializing cues of Marina Vitaglione’s short speculative narrative about rising sea levels in Venice, Solastalgia (2017); Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here (2014); and Jeff VanderMeer’s weird fiction novel Annihilation (2014).

Stable Space vs Despatialization Although approaches to narrative space vary, they share a preference for stable spacescapes that takes its cue from Gérard Genette’s early division of narration and description that I discuss in Chapter 3 of this book. As Genette states, narration is “more active” and “puts emphasis on the temporal or dramatic aspects of narration,” while description is “‘more contemplative’ and “seems to suspend the flow of time and to contribute to the spreading out of narrative in space” (“Boundaries” 7). In other words, plot is dynamic while setting is static. We can easily see the legacy of Genette’s division of action (plot, characters, narration) and space (stable background, pause) in Ruth Ronen’s writing on setting. She begins her essay “Space in Fiction” by stating that space is the “domain of setting and surroundings of events, characters, and objects in literary narrative,” a declaration that makes clear her conceptualization of space as stable backdrop to the dynamic foreground of characters and objects. Her theory hinges on the concepts of frames (“fictional places and locations which provide a topological determination to events and states in the story”) and setting (“the zero point where the actual story-events and story-states are localized . . . the actual immediate surrounding of an object, a character or an event”) (423, emphasis in original). Ronen goes on to introduce new categories by which scholars can classify narrative frames, including by their properties and degrees of immediacy and factuality. But the expectation remains that frames and settings are stable contexts in which actions occur. Space and character are separate, with the former inactive and in the background, and the latter active and in the foreground. Even scholars that try to bridge the divide between narration and description, or setting and action, conceive of space as a stable background for characters and objects. We see this clearly in Gabriel Zoran’s “Toward a Theory of Space in Narrative,” which offers up useful categories for discussing the scope of space in a text, such as places (“houses, cities, streets, fields, mountains, forests, etc.”), zones of action, and fields of vision (“that part of the world perceived as being ‘here’”) (323, 324). Fields of vision helpfully tie space to focalization, and thus link the background (setting) and foreground

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(narrator/character as perceiving agent) in a text. Yet elsewhere in his essay Zoran is explicit about the stability of space. He posits various levels of structuring space in a narrative, including the topographical level, in which space is a “static entity,” and the chronotopic level, which refers to “the structure imposed on space by events and movements” (315). The topographic level is the most explicitly stable and knowable; Zoran notes that “this structure may be conceived as a kind of map” that “provides a sufficiently clear picture of the world” for readers (316). Even the level that appears to be the most fluid, the chronotopic level, is similarly invested in stability. Zoran draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” to conceptualize this level of narrative space, and he defines the term as “an integration of spatial and temporal categories as movement and change” (318). As with Bakhtin’s work, the emphasis here is on the movement and change of characters and objects in space over time, not on the changing nature of space itself. Hence Zoran speaks of the chronotopic spatial structure being defined by objects in motion or at rest, or the particular directions of objects in space. His essay reflects a basic understanding of space as setting or backdrop and ties any considerations of instability to narrative agents, not space itself. Likewise, Monika Fludernik’s and Suzanne Keen’s special issue of Style on “Interior Spaces and Narrative Perspective Before 1850” complicates notions of description by acknowledging that such passages are always tied to the perspective of a perceiving agent. Yet Fludernik and Keen maintain that space is a “backdrop on which reside individual entities” and that in the narratives they study, human characters are “put in relief against the backdrop of settings and objects” (455). Recent narratological scholarship that reconceptualizes space as more than a simple setting that houses narrative agents retains these long-standing assumptions. Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016), cowritten by narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan and geographers Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryhua, is an ambitious interdisciplinary book that offers scholars a rich revision to the idea that space is simply a “backdrop to plot” (1). Instead, Ryan and her coauthors argue that space serves other narrative roles: “It can be a focus of attention, a bearer of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of strategic planning, a principle of organization, and even a supporting medium” (1). The book delivers on its promise to yield “a deeper understanding of human spatial experience,” but that understanding is firmly situated on stable ground, not taking into account the unstable spacescapes that loom on the horizon. Even Ryan’s work on possible worlds theory, which highlights the multiplicity of satellite worlds within narratives, largely conceives of the text’s actual world and alternate possible worlds as stable

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and independent from each other.1 Likewise, Daniel Punday’s writing on the unique spaces of digital narratives helpfully looks to these innovative texts to distinguish new levels of narrative space, notably “a primary storytelling space in which gameplay or reading occurs, and an orienting space through which those primary spaces are encountered” (92). But as with Ryan’s scholarship on alternate possible worlds, these spacescapes remain stable and separate in Punday’s model. David Herman’s six categories of spatializing cues2 in narratives provide the most room for spatial instability, given his interest in the dynamic relationships between spaces and objects. Like Ryan and her cowriters, Herman urges scholars to question their basic assumptions about narrative space: his model explicitly queries “core versus peripheral properties of narrative and the relation between narrative and other text types, especially description” (“Spatial” 520–21 italics in original). And indeed, Herman does note that one of his categories—the relationship between figures (located objects) and grounds (referenced objects)—can produce a certain “fuzziness” in narratives that feature an “uncertain, shifting status of located objects vis-à-vis referenced objects” (526). We can also easily see the potential for fuzziness in Herman’s concept of the deictic shift, in which “narrators prompt their interlocuters to relocate from the here and now of the act of narration to other spacetime coordinates—namely, those defining the perspective from which the events of the story are recounted” (521). Herman conceives of all storytelling as involving a shift in deictic centers whereby readers imaginatively move from the space in which they read to the space of a narrative. In light of this, we might imagine narrative comprehension as involving a certain amount of spatial instability by default as readers physically inhabit one space and mentally and emotionally inhabit another. Yet Herman’s argument that narrative comprehension relies upon readers producing mental models of a storyworld’s spatial context leads him to favor spatializing cues that work to produce a clear map of a narrative’s spaces. For example, he introduces paths as dynamic textual cues that 1. Ryan’s summary of the philosophy of possible worlds (PW) illustrates her emphasis on stability and autonomy: “The foundation of PW theory is the idea that reality—now conceived as the sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds. . . . This universe is structured like a solar system: at the center lies a world commonly known as ‘the actual world,’ and this center is surrounded by worlds that are possible but not actual. These worlds lie at a variable distance from the actual world and resemble it to various degrees” (“From Parallel” 644–45). 2. The full list of Herman’s six categories of narrative spatialization include: 1) the notion of the deictic shift; 2) the distinction between figure and ground; 3) the notions of regions, landmarks, and paths; 4) the distinction between topological (or inherent) and projective (or viewer-relative) locations; 5) the deictic functions of motion verbs; and 6) the distinction between the what and the where systems of spatial cognition (“Spatial” 521).

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“imply motion from one place to another and thus dynamic spatial properties of the sort characteristic of narrative” (526). Yet it is not space itself that is changing here, but characters/objects in space that are moving and dynamic. While Herman’s categories may be useful for understanding how despatialization can occur, overall his model is primarily interested in the mechanics of spatial stability. All of these models of narrative space suggest one thing: narrative scholars currently lack the framework to analyze dynamic and unstable spaces such that we find in texts like Gardens of the Anthropocene, After Ice, and the IPCC report. Such scholars also lack the conceptual tools to recognize space as existing fully in the foreground of a narrative, or to understand space as anything but a stable backdrop for the actions of characters. This poses direct challenges to considerations of Anthropocene spaces, which are chaotic and changing. It also poses challenges to our ability to read narratives that take the changing nature of this epoch’s spaces seriously. In his introduction to I’m With the Bears: Short Stories for a Damaged Planet (2011), Bill McKibben states that narratives that take seriously anthropogenic climate change require “a real departure from most literary work” (3). “Instead of being consumed with the relationship between people,” he writes, such stories must “take on the relationship between people and everything else” (3–4). This shift in interest has clear ramifications for traditional understandings of setting and action: “On a stable planet, nature provided a background against which the human drama took place; on the unstable planet that we’re creating, the background becomes the highest drama” (4, emphasis in original). Although McKibben does not frame these new narratives in the narratological terms of action and setting or narration and description, his claim that a story that takes on our changing planet switches what is normally in the background and what is normally in the foreground of a text demands a fresh understanding of the function of narrative space. It also demands that narrative scholars begin to recognize space itself as unstable and not simply a static context for the action of narrative agents. Despatialization is my answer to these challenges. As I state above, despatialization places emphasis on spatializing cues in narratives that are strategically inexact and thus difficult to map. It is not tied to any one specific type of textual cue—a breadth that I demonstrate via close readings below. Indeed, analyses of despatialization often take advantage of Herman’s categories of narrative spatialization, particularly strategically inexact or purposefully obscure cues related to figures and grounds, regions and landmarks, and deictic shift. But discussions of despatialization focus on textual cues that are purposefully confusing, or those that work to prevent readers from producing

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a clear mental map of a narrative’s spatial context, to highlight the instability of some narrative spaces. Such discussions also draw attention to spaces that, similar to those we find in Gardens of the Anthropocene, After Ice, and the IPCC report, present themselves as unstable in their multiplicity. In this sense, despatialization is a narratological cousin to what Karin Kukkonen calls “multistability,” or “those moments in a narrative when readers are made aware of two mutually exclusive possibilities” (342). Kukkonen’s discussion of multistability largely focuses on the perspective shifts that readers find in the visual images of graphic novels; she presents this narrative trick as analogous to the infamous “duck-rabbit” image, in which viewers can either see a picture of a duck or a picture of a rabbit, but not both at the same time. Despatialization is also related to Jan Alber’s work on the antimimetic spaces of unnatural narratives.3 But while despatialization shares multistability’s interest in pluralism, its understanding of “multi” differs in its emphasis on narrative spaces that are not mutually exclusive but potentially more than one space at once. And while despatialization shares Alber’s interest in strange and unusual spaces— spaces that bump up against the limits of human imagination—it does not conceive of such spaces as antimimetic or unnatural but as illustrative of the very real and “natural” conditions of the Anthropocene. Despatialization thus tasks readers with imaginatively and emotionally inhabiting spaces that, in their instability and chaos, are reflective of today’s (and tomorrow’s) changing environments. Importantly, it also tasks readers with inhabiting worlds in which space is not simply a stable background but itself the unstable foreground of narratives.

Water, Water, Everywhere Water narratives offer one productive opportunity for exploring the usefulness of despatialization. It is striking that much of the instability that the IPCC scientists predict in the Anthropocene stems from water. Their report painstakingly documents how water threatens to drastically alter conditions on the planet, be it in their warnings of rising sea levels or in the dangers of an “increase in the frequency, intensity, and/or amount of heavy precipitation events at the global scale” that have already been caused by human-induced global warming (IPCC 177). Water also promises to create instability by appearing where it has not in recent history—ice in Antarctica and Greenland 3. See Alber’s chapter on “Antimimetic Spaces” in Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. See also his essay “Unnatural Spaces in Narrative Worlds.”

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melts and flows in their projected futures, prompting a multimeter rise in sea level over hundreds to thousands of years, while saltwater intrusion and flooding renders small islands, low-lying coastal areas, and deltas unrecognizable (9). The IPCC scientists even present water itself as unstable. Noting that the ocean has already absorbed about thirty percent of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide currently circulating in our atmosphere, they state that ocean acidification and changes to carbonite chemistry are “unprecedented for at least the last 65 million years” (178). The report, Gardens of the Anthropocene’s algae blooms, and After Ice’s rising sea water all make clear that water, in all of its protean glory, is key to understanding the increasing instability of space in the Anthropocene. Water will both inhabit places that it typically does not in this epoch, making those environments unfamiliar and mercurial, and become strange in its very composition as it absorbs the products of anthropogenic climate change. A quick survey of recent environmental humanities scholarship on water makes clear just how useful the concept of despatialization is to analyses of watery narratives. “Blue” humanities scholarship has surged in the past ten years, with scholars from a range of subjects turning toward cultural imaginations of water as a means of better confronting the Anthropocene and climate change. This turn makes sense in light of the role that water has played and continues to play in the epoch. When Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin point to the decline in carbon dioxide recorded in geologic strata in the year 1610 as one possible start date of the Anthropocene, they implicitly emphasize the importance of water to the epoch; after all, the genocide of indigenous peoples in the New World and resulting regeneration of 50 million hectares of forest, woodland savanna, and grassland was made possible only by the oceanic travels of European colonizers. Beyond this immediate historical context, we also see a connection between water and the Anthropocene in their shared protean nature. As Mentz argues in his call for blue humanities work, attention to water often involves changing the framework by which scholars understand the world. He tracks developments in a host of academic disciplines—including ecological sciences, public policy, international law, and the humanities more generally—in which scholars “seek out the maritime in order to reconsider standard discursive models” (“Toward” 997). “Looking closely at the sea, rather than just the land,” he writes, “challenges established habits of thought.” In their efforts to understand the mercurial and unpredictable nature of the Anthropocene, Mentz and his blue humanities peers find water 4 to be a productive site of inquiry. 4. For additional examples of blue humanities scholarship, see the special forum on “Oceans of History” in American Historicism Review. See especially Kären Wigen’s introduction,

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More recent blue humanities scholarship directly ties water’s instability to spatial confusion. In her writing on the deep sea, Stacy Alaimo notes that because they largely exist beyond state borders, open seas have long been considered “empty space” (234). Furthermore, she suggests that many imaginations of water as spaceless are informed by perceptions of the disorienting deep sea. Such spaces, because of their lack of light and solid blackness, deny viewers “any sense of scale, perspective, or depth. The flat wall of blackness denies us any foundation, direction, or orientation toward a horizon” (241). As such, these “unnervingly violet-black seas . . . renounce mastery, transcendence, and stable, terrestrial frames of reference” (245). Astrida Neimanis’s work on water and human bodies agrees. Drawing on the French feminist celebration of fluidity as an inherently female imagination, Neimanis argues that imaginations of water “torqu[e] many of our accepted cartographies of space . . . and implicate[ ] a specifically watery movement of difference and repetition” (4). Water’s inherent instability and spacelessness has led environmental humanities scholars see the potential of watery artwork and stories for modern environmentalism. Scott Slovic argues that water is particularly useful for thinking across spatial and temporal scales. In his essay on trans-scalar thinking and perceptions of water, he explores the potential of water-related work by artists such as Chris Jordan and musicians such as Antony Hegarty to encourage viewers and listeners to move cognitively “from small to large, from the individual to the collective, and from the present to the future” (11). Mentz is more specific in his focus on oceans, and he connects representations of these bodies of water to a new, modern environmentalism better suited to our changing world. He positions early modern texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and Milton’s “Lycidas” as offering readers powerful antidotes to the illusion of land’s stability: The sea throws cold water on the happy dreams of environmentalism. The hungry ocean destabilizes our fantasies of a sustainable growth and a harmonious relationship between human culture and the natural world. . . . An oceanic perspective speaks to our emerging sense that crisis, not stability, defines the world in which we live now. Supplementing our “green” cultural turn with a “blue cultural studies” that looks at the world through the deathly, inhuman, magical lens of the sea can begin rebuilding narrative and interpretive practices to respond to our uncertain future. (Mentz, At the Bottom xii–xiii) in which she notes that all of the essays in the forum position water as “intrinsically unstable, in multiple senses” (720, italics in original).

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For scholars such as Alaimo, Neiminas, Slovic, and Mentz, water is a necessary shape-shifter. It is an effective imaginative device for grappling with uncertainty, and its opaque and mysterious nature encourages us to confront the catastrophe and disaster so relevant to our modern world. Mentz goes so far as to claim directly that our ability to understand the Anthropocene relies upon shifting our focus from land to water. In advocating for “fewer gardens and more shipwrecks,” he argues that embracing ocean-driven disorder is the best way to engage the instability of the epoch (At the Bottom 98). A major trend within blue humanities work, illustrated by Mentz’s scholarship on early modern texts, is to stress that watery narratives have been with us all along.5 But other scholars argue that the particular textures of today’s environmental crisis demand new narratives to represent better water’s disorder. Elizabeth DeLoughrey is firmly in this camp; in her analysis of water tropes and themes in South Pacific literatures, she calls attention to the instability of watery postcolonial spacescapes in which events from the past linger in the present and future. Furthermore, she turns to science to position water itself as inherently mercurial, noting that “water’s mutability, measured in picoseconds, means that it changes its molecular structure around a trillion times a second” (358). DeLoughrey is confident that engagement with rising sea levels in narrative will lead to new narrative structures: “We might say that the planetary changes in the sea level itself demand and produce different forms of narrative” (358). For an illustration of a recent narrative that offers readers a clear representation of water’s instability in the Anthropocene via despatialization, we can turn to Marina Vitaglione’s near-future narrative about rising sea levels in Venice, Solastalgia. The most striking thing about Vitaglione’s representation of space is her narrative’s rhetorical situation. Solastalgia is narrated by the city of Venice while it is in the process of disappearing into the rising waters of the Adriatic Sea. In this sense, Vitaglione signals despatialization from the onset; in this narrative, Venice is not a stable setting within which characters function, but the active protagonist of its own story. We see a similar fuzziness in the text’s narratee, which is the Adriatic itself. “I do not hold you responsible,” the narrator tells its narratee in the text’s final pages. “We are both victims of those who have not cared for the Earth we stand on, those who for decades willfully ignored the cries for help from nature” (68). As McKibben suggests it might, this narrative that takes seriously anthropogenic climate change reverses the traditional background and foreground of a narrative. In 5. For examples, see Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) and Duckert’s For All Waters (2017).

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this text, the “background” is not only the source of drama but also the source and receiver of narration. The city tells its story in the present tense, such that the text begins with the narrator stating that it “lies between two identical entities”—the clouds above and the sea below—and ends with Venice stating bluntly: “I was once known as the Queen of the Adriatic, but Queen I am no more. I am now merely the Adriatic, for the sea got the better of me” (14, 72). The effect of this narration is twofold. First, the city sinks into the sea with each reading of the story, creating a sense of urgency for readers. In this way Vitaglione’s narrative functions much like the app After Ice, as it forces readers to model the process by which water renders a familiar space unrecognizable. Second and more interesting for our purposes, the sinking of the city into the sea collapses the distinction between narrator and narratee. By the end of this narrative, narrator and narratee are one and the same. The rhetorical situation thus is a resource of despatialization in that it irrevocably intermingles two once-distinct spatial regions—to understand Vitaglione’s text, readers must be able to comprehend Venice both as an independent space and part of the fast-growing Adriatic. Each reading of the text destabilizes the barrier between city and sea, narrator and narratee, muddling the borders of the text’s spatial regions. Solastalgia’s despatialization is heightened by the lack of spatializing cues that Vitaglione provides readers. Clear spatializing cues are more common in the early pages of the narrative before the city is fully underwater, such as when the narrator uses terms identifying general landmarks of urban space, including “piazzas” and “alleys” (24). In this same passage, the narrator provides readers with a clear topological perspective of the city: “I am an island. Rather, an archipelago composed of one hundred and eighteen islands” (24). Yet the majority of the narration focuses on the city as an experience rather than a specific geographical location, and, as such, Vitaglione provides scant spatializing cues by which readers can develop a vivid mental model of Venice’s spatial context. In one passage, the narrator ruminates on the colors that people tend to associate with particular cities. Venice notes that while Paris is green and beige and London is red and grey, it is best suited to “peach, mandarin, olive” (18). Elsewhere, the narrator’s attention turns to noise. The sound of Venice “was pleasant, devoid of loud honks and engines”—filled with the sound of children’s laughter, the music of buskers, and the ring of church bells, among other things (64). But now these sounds are gone: “Sadly, as I am abandoned, it fades away. . . . That sweet brouhaha has given way to the deafening silence of rising waters” (64). These passages make it difficult for readers to produce a mental model of Venice in two ways. First, they focus on notions of color and sound rather than concrete representations of space or of

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characters/agents moving in a specific spatial context. Recent scholarship in cognitive narrative theory suggests that readers’ understanding of a narrative’s space is enhanced by sensory cues, as our experience of space is often embodied.6 But without much detail about the shape and organization of the city itself, Vitaglione unmoors these sensory cues from the specific spatial context of early twenty-first-century Venice. Second, these passages emphasize a space in transition. By narrating what the city is no longer, Vitaglione asks readers to acknowledge that any understanding of space that they glean from these passages is one that does not fully apply to the narrating-Venice, which is in the process of being utterly and irrevocably transformed by the text’s narratee. Indeed, a major theme of Solastalgia is that of an unstable city in the moment transition—of a mercurial spatial context metamorphizing before the eyes of readers. We see this clearly in Vitaglione’s use of white space. The written text of Solastalgia appears in isolated paragraphs, such that each two-page spread never contains more than one paragraph of text. The first paragraph of the narrative appears in the top left corner of the page; each subsequent paragraph appears lower on its page, signifying the narrator’s/city’s descent into the sea/narrate. Vitaglione heightens this feeling of submersion via typographic effects throughout the text, in which some words appear in subscript (and are thus literally submerged) and others take on the wavy shapes of the Adriatic’s waters. Even here, the text’s spatializing cues do not provide readers with a rich understanding of Venice itself, but instead emphasize the narrator’s descent underwater. Vitaglione also makes active use of Venice’s climate to highlight the city’s instability. In one of these passages the narrator notes that wanderers of the city “feel observed here” as they see their reflections in canals and encounter statues returning their gaze (42). Venice suggests that this observation leads to a certain elegance, as “when one’s own reflection emerges again and again, appearance much matters.” Yet this experience of the city fluctuates, as it is wholly dependent on the thick fog that clouds the water and hides the eyes of the statues. The narrator’s statement that “one’s perception of me is at the climate’s mercy” thus reads as a celebration of the city’s temperamental maritime weather and an ironic understatement of the narrator’s current predicament. In a second passage the narrator functions like the fog, obscuring a clear spatializing cue by rendering it symbolic. Venice states that “he who observes me from the sky will liken my natural shape to that of a fish,” naming the particular islands that form the fish’s head and fin, and representing 6. For more the embodied experience of space, see Caracciolo’s “Embodiment at the Crossroads” and The Experientiality of Narrative (2014).

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the city’s “infinite alleys” as the fish’s scales (46). Yet the narrator immediately calls into question this clear spatial image, asking, “How could the sea not be my destiny?” (46). The topological location of Venice-as-fish provides readers with insight into the layout and appearance of the narrator from above. But this insight is brief, as the narrator notes that it is time for it to return to its “natural element.” “Into your depths I shall retire,” it tells the narratee, once again emphasizing its instability and the impossibility of separating fully the urban region from the maritime (46). The narrative’s despatialization is nowhere more immediately striking than in the pictures that accompany Venice’s narration. In keeping with the rhetorical situation of the narrative, Vitaglione intercuts the text with two types of pictures: images of water and images of the city of Venice. Both in their own way challenge the ability of readers to produce a clear mental model of the text’s storyworld. The images of water, which appear with increasing frequency in the text, have no clear perspective or point of reference. Readers look at images of water from above, but without any reference object by which to locate the sea, it is challenging to determine the position of the image-taker. The pictures create the sense that the photographer was on the water when capturing the image, giving readers a sense of being on the sea when they view the photo. The sea spray in the foreground of the images symbolizes the threat of immersion or submersion, as it creates a visual illusion that water is rising out of the book to splash and/or engulf readers. The images disturb normal relationships between figures and ground to produce fuzziness, as they heighten the sense of deictic shift into the sea that Solastalgia’s written narrative fosters. As such, they signal the inherent instability of the sea in the Anthropocene—the ways in which it is closer than we might expect, the ways in which it rises to inundate us. The second set of images are even clearer in Vitaglione’s disruption of traditional spatial categories. Similar to the augmented reality apps with which I open this chapter, these images task readers with mentally wrestling with two regions at the same time. The images themselves—photographs of Venice that Vitaglione took while writing Solastalgia—create a certain fuzziness in their lack of geographic specificity. In only one, the final image of Piazzo San Marco taken from the water, does Vitaglione present readers with an iconic visual cue that locates them firmly within the city of Venice. The rest of the images are nondescript in their commonness and do not specify Venice in this way: the opening image of the blue plastic chairs and white-clothed tables of an outdoor restaurant patio could appear in any number of urban locations within the last fifty years, as could photographs of two red benches underneath a tree, light filtering into a dark room through a window, and an abandoned accor-

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dion and wooden crates on a concrete sidewalk. Yet readers looking closely at the images will notice that these are not simple photos. Before developing her film, Vitaglione exposed the negatives to water from the Adriatic, and the remnants of this process appear in the feathery salt trails and water marks imprinted on the images. What we see thus is a visual record of Vitaglione’s mixing of the city and the sea. While they read of a city-narrator becoming a part of the sea, readers must also take into account images of that city sharing the same visual space as the Adriatic. Vitaglione’s images reinforce the instability of the narrative’s rhetorical situation and spatializing cues in that they, too, make it impossible to tease apart city and sea. Readers must encounter Venice and the Adriatic together and recognize the damaging effects of the latter on the former. Given this spatial confusion, it makes sense that Solastalgia is more invested in the city as an idea rather than a stable context in which characters function. Taking cues from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), which features as an opening epigraph, Vitaglione foregrounds the fleeting nature of Venice as a moored physical space and the enduring nature of Venice as an ethereal dream. “If there existed a spectrum of cities from ‘least suitable’ to ‘most prone’ to dreaming,” the narrator states, “I would certainly fall to the latter. I have sparked reveries, imaginations, illusions, fictions” (56). The narrator is fully aware that it is unstable—that it is in the process of changing so radically as to become unrecognizable—and thus consoles itself with its legacy as a text. Venice is explicit about its hope that “all of the artworks that I am the protagonist of will prolong my existence” and notes that it intends to “live eternally in the world’s finest libraries and museums” (56). Importantly for the narrator, stories are an essential mechanism of this preservation; Venice calls attention to the texts by which people “imagine all of the romances, adventures, wanderings, life decisions, arguments, embraces, laughter, births and deaths that happened here” (56). These metanarrative moments are pessimistic for the narrator. Resigned to the sea, it has lost any hope that it can remain a stable site distinct from the Adriatic. But by calling attention to the power of stories, Vitaglione reminds readers that narratives are a vital way of recognizing and confronting change in the Anthropocene and can be an effective path to action in the real world. Much like After Ice and Gardens in the Anthropocene, Solastalgia prompts readers to consider what it would be like to lose the physical space of Venice as they know it. Vitaglione does this by worldbuilding for a purpose, immersing readers (cognitively, imaginatively) in Venice’s instability and calling attention to the role that stories can and might play in the city’s preservation. As the narrator states, such texts may prolong its existence.

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Unstable Land The IPCC report makes clear that water promises to be a major agent of environmental change in the Anthropocene. The report also makes clear that is it not only aquatic environments that are unstable and protean in this epoch—land environments, too, are changing rapidly around us. An Anthropocene narrative theory thus must not limit its analysis of despatialization to watery storyworlds. It must also ask: how might narratives that foreground the instability of terranean environments prepare readers for dealing with the mercurial nature of all fast-changing spaces in the Anthropocene? By what spatializing cues and structures do/can narratives foreground the chaotic spaces of this epoch? Conveniently, the title of Vitaglione’s narrative provides us with one path by which to answer these questions. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht defines solastalgia as “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment” (Albrecht et al. S95). Albrecht argues that this painful and isolating form of homesickness is one of a host of new “psychoterratic dis-eases,” or mental illnesses that arise from environmental damage and change. Importantly for Albrecht, solastalgia differs from its emotional and affective cousin nostalgia in that it can be future-oriented, and this orientation can often lead to action in the present moment. As Albrecht states, people who suffer from solastalgia “might actively seek to create new things or engage in collective action that provides solace and communion in any given environment”; solastalgia “may seek its alleviation in a future that has to be designed and created” (Albrecht 45). While Vitaglione’s narrative makes direct connections between solastalgia and water, there is nothing in Albrecht’s conceptualization of the condition that ties it directly to water’s instability. The examples of solastalgia that he provides firmly stand on land: his writing focuses on the effects of drought in farmland in rural Australia and the toxic effects of mining and pollution in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales. Albrecht’s work highlights that water is not the only fluid spatial context in the Anthropocene. All environments are mutable and protean in this epoch of radical and irrevocable change. Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here provides us with a clear narrative representation of the despatialization of solastalgia. If Vitaglione’s narrative is striking for the destabalizing way that it conflates regions of space via the slippery relationship between its narrator and narratee, McGuire’s narrative is equally striking for the fuzziness of its allegiance to one spatial landmark. Each panel of Here roots readers in the exact same spot: in each two-page

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spread, readers view the same corner of a room in a New England house. Panels skip through time, such that readers begin in 2014, the year of the text’s initial publication, but then quickly move to views of the room’s corner in 1957, 1942, and 2007, in this order. Readers see the room change color as new residents of the house replace wallpaper and become familiar with the different generations of people who have called this house “home.” The characters are largely interchangeable, with repeating actions and dialogue emphasizing their similarities across generations. As with Solastalgia, Here places space in the foreground and characters in the background. McGuire’s emphasis is on spatial instability and change rather than space as stable backdrop for the emotional experiences of characters. The panels become more complex as readers move deeper into this text. Though they never pivot from their fixed spatial perspective—they never move from the corner of the room—the panels begin to feature insets that illustrate what occurs in an exact spot of the room in a different year. Thus, while the majority of panel 6 represents the room in 1957, a small cut out on the bottom right-hand side of the page shows a black cat walking through this space in 1999. As with Gardens of the Anthropocene, After Ice, the IPCC report, and the water-damaged photographs of Solastalgia, Here presents readers with strategically inexact spatializing cues by demanding that they grapple with two versions of a given space at the same time. Panels can contain up to six insets, tasking readers with mentally modeling six different versions of this spatial landmark at the same time. By remaining fixed on one landmark but moving fluidly and quickly through time and overlaying different timeframes, McGuire insists that readers appreciate how this space has changed and how its various iterations interconnect. Strikingly, Here remains committed to its landmark even when the house does not exist. An image of a dreary woodland in 1623 greets readers when they turn to panel 7. It is clear, given this panel’s insets of a woman in 1957 and the same black cat in 1999, that the woodland will be the future sight of the now-familiar house. McGuire thus demands that readers not only appreciate changes that have occurred in the house over its lifetime but also wrestle with a geological timescale to consider the broader environmental changes that have occurred around this landmark. McGuire continues this demand that readers adopt a geologic perspective by representing this exact spot in space as far back as 3,000,500,000 bce. In the three panels set in this time, the corner of the room is replaced by gaseous clouds that signify a time on Earth before life. The images of the clouds are intercut with two other events that place human timelines within this longer, geologic chronology: an upscale picnicking couple in 1870, enjoying lunch on a grassy knoll that will eventu-

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ally be replaced by the house, and an arrow flying through dense woods in 1402 that connects to other panels depicting indigenous life in this space’s dense forest prior to the arrival of European colonizers. Here’s timeline also extends forward in time, with future panels depicting a catastrophic flood in 2111, sharks swimming through what was the upper corner of the room in 2126, a holographic museum tour of the house-that-once-was in 2213, hazmatsuited radiation testers in 2313, and a postlapsarian nature scene from 22,175. This final image, which McGuire shows over three panels, is particularly striking, as its towering, brightly colored flowers and dinosaur-like creatures recall images from 80,000,000 bce that readers encounter several pages earlier. The effect of this immense timescale is to place the home, so important to the humans who inhabit it, within a broader context of environmental change. Importantly, McGuire positions the humans themselves as a driving force of this change. By intercutting panels to represent change to the room over time, McGuire taps into the central notion of solastalgia that space is fluid and unstable— increasingly so in the Anthropocene—and that people in this epoch stand to become homesick while still at “home.” Readers of Here never leave the text’s home, and yet the narrative forces them to consider the massive environmental changes that need to occur to produce the house in the first place and those that take place after the house’s destruction. Some of these changes are not human-directed, as some of the narrative’s panels represent events outside of the time frame of our species. But McGuire makes explicit the devastating effects of anthropogenic environmental change. The worst human behaviors for the environment and their effects are on full display in Here: the thick forests of precolonial America and their indigenous inhabitants disappear, sea waters rise to flood the house, nuclear fallout renders the spot uninhabitable. These changes also take place on an accelerated timeline; the geologic timescale of the narrative allows readers to watch dinosaurs appear and disappear over millions of years, but also points out that the house, so central to many of the humans in the text, only exists for two hundred years before it is destroyed by the environmental changes produced by those humans. Importantly, readers understand the devastating effects of this human activity not through the rich emotional experiences of characters but through their effects on the house itself. The house, not its inhabitants, is the protagonist of McGuire’s text. In this sense, Here’s despatialization is a powerful illustration of Albrecht’s point that our current moment is one defined by a “recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault” (“Solastalgia” 45). It is also a clear illustration of Albrecht’s suggestion that solastalgia’s future orientation encourages activism, as McGuire worldbuilds to prompts

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readers to consider the connections between their behaviors and related fates of their own homes before it is too late. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation provides us with a second illustration of a narrative that foregrounds the instability of land-based space in the Anthropocene and gives us a clear example of what despatialization can look like in a written narrative that does not contain visual images. This text is part of a recent revitalization of “weird” fiction by writers such as VanderMeer and China Miéville. Drawing from the foundations of H. P. Lovecraft’s novels and short stories, many recent weird narratives tap into the existential dread of the Anthropocene by reveling in things that push up against the limits of human imagination. In an introduction to weird fiction, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer write that these texts “striv[e] for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledg[e] that failure as a sign and symbol of our limitations” (“Weird”). Annihilation is a particularly provocative example of the limitations of science and reason to make sense of an unstable and rapidly changing environment. In this novel, an unnamed biologist and her team of fellow researchers (an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist, who is also the expedition’s leader) attempt to map and study the strange environment of Area X at the request of Southern Reach, a shady governmental organization. The biologist narrates the novel, detailing the failure of her scientific methods to help her understand the unstable region. VanderMeer’s representations of ecological weirdness in Annihilation have attracted the attention of environmental humanities scholars, many of whom read his novel as an illustration of the strange nature of Anthropocene environments.7 And make no doubt—Area X is a strange space. The biologist encounters uncomfortable horrors that betray her scientific training in her exploration of the region, including lichens and plants that have grown into shapes resembling human bodies, a dolphin with human eyes, and a human face that she spies rising out of the dirt (Annihilation 96, 97, 140). The biologist herself becomes strange, contaminated with a “brightness” that causes her and the other expedition members to question whether she is still human or has transformed into something else entirely (125). This strangeness powerfully calls attention to the mutation and deviancy from norms that is characteristic of “nature” in a world radically altered by anthropogenic climate change, as well as the difficulty with which we separate humans from the environment in this epoch. 7. For examples of environmental humanities readings of Annihilation, see Hegglund’s “Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation” and Rodriguez’s “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene.”

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But what interests me in particular about this strangeness is how VanderMeer heightens its effects via the despatialization of Area X. Beyond highlighting the region’s uncanny creatures and contaminating powers, the biologist’s narration is full of contradictory and strategically obscure spatializing cues that make it very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to produce a clear mental model of her spatial context. We see this confusion from the text’s first sentence; in referring to “the tower” that “plunges into the earth,” the biologist begins her story with a nonsensical and contradictory spatial cue (3). The semantic debate about the “tower” becomes a central theme of her narration. Despite noting that “the other three insisted on calling it a tunnel,” the biologist continues to use the inappropriate label, much to the annoyance of her expedition-mates: “I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a tower,” she confesses. “I can’t see it as a tunnel” (12, 18–19, emphasis in original). Beyond signifying fuzziness in its name, the tower/tunnel is also unstable because it is not supposed to be where it is. Upon discovering the structure, the biologist notes: “We did not expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the water-stained, pine-dust smeared documents our predecessors had left behind” (6). In discussing their surprise at the tower’s presence—“This is impossible. . . . And yet here it is”—the biologist and her expedition-mates explicitly reject stable notions of cartographic space. We see a similar rejection of stable cartographic space in the biologist’s experience of the borders of Area X. After entering the region, she sneaks a glance back at the border. “I don’t quite know that I saw,” she states. “It was hazy, indistinct, already far behind us—perhaps a gate, perhaps a trick of the eye. Just a sudden impression of a fizzing block of light, fast fading” (11). The blurred border literally is difficult for the biologist to see, rendering it nearly impossible for readers to map clearly. From the novel’s opening pages, VanderMeer signifies the difficult nature of Area X. This is an environment that, in its strangeness, does not lend itself to clear perception or articulation. Indeed, an overriding theme of the novel is the failure of language to adequately account for Area X. Or, to put this more forcefully, the biologist’s story makes clear that language fails in Area X. (Notably, a fifth member of the expedition, a linguist, has second thoughts and leaves the team before they cross the border.) VanderMeer names none of the central characters, a lack of defining language that the biologist notes is apt for the region as “a name was a dangerous luxury here” (136). Even the text’s title word does not signify what it should in Area X. The psychologist can rely on this command to hypnotize the expedition members outside of the region, but it falls on deaf ears inside the region’s borders. The psychologist’s desperate attempt to regain control of the biologist after the latter’s contamination—“Annihilation! Annihilation!”—has

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no effect (124, emphasis in original). “The word seemed more meaningless the more she repeated it,” the biologist calmly states, “like the cry of a bird with a broken wing” (124). Words similarly fail in the “insane midden” of journals of previous expedition members that the biologist discovers in a lighthouse (106). Combing through the journals to uncover insight from the experiences of those who came before her, the biologist is disappointed that the pages are full of “omissions” and incomplete accounts that make it impossible for her to place herself in their stories. Many of the journals are impenetrable, written in coded shorthand that the biologist cannot decipher. Importantly, she does not pass on to her narratee any meaning that she does glean from these written representations of Area X: many of the events that she reads about in the journals are so “unspeakable” that she refuses to articulate them in her own narration (113). The biologist’s biggest disappointment concerning the journals stems from their failure to place her in the Area X that earlier explorers experience. The journals do not to provide the necessary spatial cues by which the biologist can transport herself imaginatively to their storyworlds; she highlights one journal in particular that “had a distinctly unreal quality to it, as if a fictionalized version of a real event. I tried to imagine what Area X might have looked like so long ago. I couldn’t” (115). Instead of immersing her in the experiences of earlier expeditions to Area X, the journals pile up to produce a “bewildering confusion of typewritten, printed, and handwritten words”—a “clutter” that freezes the biologist in her tracks (113). These texts make clear that one cannot turn to narratives of Area X for clarity. Area X remains unstable and unknowable, for both Annihilation’s narrator and its readers. The failure of language in Area X and the despatialization that this produces is nowhere clearer than in the biologist’s interactions with “the Crawler.” This is the biologist’s name for the creature that lives in the tower/tunnel, the symbolic center of Area X’s obscurity. As with her label for the tower, the name that the biologist gives to this organism is inappropriate and nonsensical. The Crawler does not crawl, and thus the name speaks of the biologist’s inability to comprehend this organism. The Crawler is “inexplicable,” she writes, “beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect” (179). It is both a creature at the bottom of the tower/tunnel and the tower/tunnel itself, a confusion readily apparent in the biologist’s insistence that “the tower breathed” and that its walls “were not made of stone but of living tissue” (41, emphasis in original). The Crawler not only is resistant to clear linguistic cues itself but also further obscures the central landmark of this text, which readers must now see as both a tower/tunnel and “a living creature of some sort . . . an organism” (41, emphasis in original). VanderMeer muddles

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figure and ground in the biologist’s description of the Crawler and its location, such that he purposefully makes it impossible for readers to place the located object (organism) in relation to the reference object (building). Just as with the label “tower” for an underground structure, VanderMeer here offers readers more strategically inexact spatializing cues that disturb any clear mental model of the narrative’s storyworld. The instability of figure and ground continues as the biologist gets closer to the Crawler. As she descends the stairs of the tower/tunnel for the first time, she observes words on the walls of the structure. The words, evocative of Christian scripture and yet largely meaningless,8 are difficult to decipher; the biologist notes that “it was hard to read them—there were several overlapping strands that started and stopped and started up again,” and that she “easily lost track of individual words and phrases” (49). A pattern on the walls that the biologist cannot decipher accompanies this palimpsest of words: “I didn’t even know if I was looking at a language, per se. It could have been a decorative pattern for all I knew” (49). In her obsessive observations of the tower/tunnel, the biologist realizes that it is the Crawler who writes the script, and that the words and patterns are themselves living organisms. The tower/tunnel is thus itself a palimpsest; to use the biologist’s words, the central spatial landmark of the novel is “an organism that might contain a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to write words on the wall” (51). It utterly defeats the biologist’s scientific training and renders her previous observations of non–Area X environments “simplistic, one-dimensional.” VanderMeer smudges the lines between the various organisms unclear, so readers are unsure whether they should imagine a creature producing smaller creatures within a stable inorganic structure, model the tower/tunnel as one organism, or envision some shifting and mutating combination of the two. All of these failures of language in Area X—its inadequacy, its omission, its misuse, its opacity—work to create a distinctly unstable spatial context. To put it simply, Area X is too weird for words. It is too unstable and too bizarre for human understanding. It is also impossible for the narrator to articulate clearly for her narratee. The biologist does not and cannot understand the central landmark of Area X and its inhabitant(s), and thus neither can Annihilation’s readers. Yet the biologist’s narration makes clear that this fuzziness 8. For example, “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the handoff the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that . . . gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen . . . (23, 47, emphasis in original).

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is not a failure of her story, but a fitting account of the uncanny and unstable environment that resists her understanding. The despatialization of Annihilation is a feature, not a bug. We best read it as a product of the protean nature of Area X—a representation of the region that foregrounds its inherent instability and unknowability. As my discussions of Solastalgia and Here suggest, narratives that take on board the despatialization of the Anthropocene often contain within them purposeful cues that encourage readers to consider the increasing instability of the real-world environments within which they read and thus adopt a specific environmental ethic. So, too, does Annihilation. VanderMeer makes particularly effective use of the second-person address at the end of his novel, creating a doubling effect that invites readers to identify with the text’s narratee and thus to draw links between the fictional Area X and the nonfictional environments in which they read. As with the other characters in this narrative, the biologist does not name her narratee, referring to the recipient of her story simply as “you.” The biologist frequently and explicitly speaks to her narratee, noting, for example, that she would “tell you the names of the other three” expedition members “if it mattered,” and stating that “you must understand how I felt then” when she resurfaces from the tower/tunnel (9, 69). In these moments, “you” is key to the biologist’s narrative as a recipient of her story but is not implicated in the strangeness of Area X directly. As the rhetorical situation of the narrative is unclear in the novel’s early stages, in these passages VanderMeer does not direct readers to place the biologist’s narratee within the borders of the contaminated region. VanderMeer later disturbs this comfort in the novel’s conclusion when he locates the narratee firmly inside of Area X. Upon discovering the mountain of abandoned journals, the biologist asks: “Can you really imagine what it is like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now” (106, emphasis in original). The biologist tentatively places the narratee inside Area X in this startling moment, suggesting that “you” have access to the same sights that she does. Importantly, spatialization is unstable even here. The biologist does not articulate what the narratee might see, simply that the narratee might share her experience of dark and confusing space. While the double “perhaps” in this passage suggests a certain distance from the horrors that the biologist encounters, the language here also implies the narratee’s uncomfortable proximity to the region. The biologist makes explicit the implications of this proximity for readers in the novel’s final paragraphs, in which she places her narratee directly within the borders of Area X. In this concluding moment, the narratee is no

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longer “perhaps” sharing the biologist’s space but is situated firmly within the region’s borders: There is nothing much left to tell you, though I haven’t quite told it right. But I am done trying anyway. . . . I have spent four long days perfecting this account you are reading, for all its faults . . . I will bound these materials together . . . and leave them here, atop the pile beneath the trapdoor. . . . I plan to continue on into Area X, to go as far as I can before it’s too late. . . . This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast. (193–94)

The revelation of the novel’s final pages is unsettling: “you” are not simply a passive recipient of the biologist’s narration, but an agent within Area X itself. Indeed, the biologist’s instruction for “you” not to follow her implies that “you” are a member of a future expedition to Area X that has repeated the biologist’s experience of uncovering an abandoned journal of a former expedition member. Importantly, the physical object of the novel becomes a material vehicle that connects the narratee with actual readers in the biologist’s statement that “you” are reading the narrative that she has painstakingly compiled. VanderMeer’s fictional narratee and actual audience mirror each other here, in that both are completing their reading of the biologist’s account of Area X. VanderMeer worldbuilds for a purpose, inviting readers to take on a double subject position in Annihiliation’s climax, manipulating the relationship between narratee and actual audience to create the illusion that readers read a narrative both outside of Area X and within the imagined world of the novel. The effect of this mirroring of fictional narratee and actual reading audience is an uncomfortable spatial inexactness that results from a strategically murky deictic shift. The second-person address creates a slipperiness between the fictional and the real world, inviting readers to analogize the two and thus recognize their own world as being similar enough to the Area X to contain the material relic of the biologist’s narration. Or, even more powerfully, it encourages readers to understand their own environments as Area X—as equally unstable, mutating, and unknowable. VanderMeer prompts readers to ask: where does the biologist’s storyworld end and my world begin? Is Area X confined to this fictional storyworld or has it already spread beyond its borders to claim the real-world environments in which I read? Am I, too, within Area X? This questioning of real-world stability is heightened by the final sentence of the narrative, in which the biologist declares, “I am not return-

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ing home” (195). If “home” is the imaginative anchoring space of the narrative—the ultimate stability—the conclusive rejection of this safe space by the narrator in the novel’s final line casts all space in her narration as unstable, even that outside of Area X’s borders. Much like After Ice and Gardens of the Anthropocene, the novel renders the real-world space in which readers read unstable by superimposing upon it an unfamiliar spacescape. It invites readers to imaginatively inhabit both worlds at once, thus implicating the real world in Area X’s disorienting instability and mutation.

CHAPTER 5

Narration

Perhaps above all other ideas, the importance of human collectives is central to the Anthropocene. We find one sense in which the epoch foregrounds notions of human collectivity in its very name: the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) defines the current epoch as “the present geological time interval, in which many conditions and processes on Earth are profoundly altered by human impact” and “the period of Earth’s history during which humans have a decisive influence on the state, dynamics and future of the Earth System” (Working Group on the “Anthropocene”). Fundamental to this definition is that humans, at-large and together, are changing the state of our planet. The AWG suggests that the human species, acting jointly and in concert, is rewriting the Earth. Indeed, an emphasis on collective human action at the level of the species has been fundamental to conceptualizations of the Anthropocene since the earliest attempts to define the epoch. In Paul J. Crutzen’s and Eugene F. Stoermer’s initial proposal, they suggest the title of “Anthropocene” to “emphasize the central role of [hu]mankind in geology and ecology” and recognize the “major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere and at all, including global, scales” (17). Several years later, members of the AWG published “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” In this essay they explore the development of the Anthropocene, defining the epoch as that in which “humans and our societies 145

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have become a global geophysical force” (Steffen et al. 614). The essay’s writers note that, while “noble savage myths” have perpetuated ideas that preagricultural humans lived in “idyllic harmony” with their environments, recent research suggests an alternate story of the widespread environmental impact of humans on local, regional, and even continental scales. They argue that human use of fire is especially important to these early anthropogenic ecological modifications, as “the mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene” (614). This emphasis on the species remains in the writers’ survey of more modern anthropogenic environmental impacts. While they note that the Anthropocene really begins to take shape with the onset of industrialization, beginning in the 1700s in Europe, they continue to write about humans in global terms, acting together. They argue that industrialization “shattered [the] bottleneck” on the human population and ushered in a new era of interconnected cultures and economies (616). Citing mines and plantations in locations as diverse as Australia, South Africa, and Chile, as well as the “irresistible momentum” of development in North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan that drives the Great Acceleration of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the writers emphasize the impacts of the world economy on the global environment (617). Alongside this sensitivity to the species-level impacts of collective human behavior runs a second notion of human collectivity in this moment: the role that joint, collective political and ecological activism must play in addressing national, cultural, and economic inequalities within human communities and societies.1 An Oxfam media briefing on “Confronting Carbon Inequality” (2020) nicely illustrates this second conceptualization of collective human action and agency that privileges equitable and just group action while warning against the illusion that all humans contribute equally to anthropogenic climate change. The briefing notes that, over the past twenty to thirty years, 1. This emphasis on the necessity of cooperation across and within national and cultural human groups to mitigate the effects of climate change is also present in definitions of the Anthropocene. Crutzen and Stoermer write that “one of the great future tasks of [hu] mankind” will be the development of a “world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human induced stresses” (18, my emphasis). They state that in this project the “global research and engineering community” must lead the project to guide humankind “towards global, sustainable, environmental management” (my emphasis). Similarly, the writers of “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” spread the responsibility of changing the status quo equally across the human species. “Humankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years to come” they write—and thus one of the “greatest research and policy changes ever to confront humanity” is the development of a “universally accepted strategy to ensure the sustainability of Earth’s life support system against human-induced stresses” (Steffen et al. 618).

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the climate crisis “has been fueled and our global carbon budget squandered in the service of increasing the consumption of the already affluent, rather than lifting people out of poverty” (Gore 2). The statistics are striking: the richest 10% of the world’s population has been responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions in this time frame, while the poorest 50% of the global population contributed just 7% of total emissions (2). Furthermore, the world’s richest 1% alone were responsible for 15% of the cumulative carbon emissions—twice as much as the poorest 50% the world’s population (2). The briefing notes that two groups stand to suffer most from this injustice: poor and marginalized people already dealing with the effects of climate change and future generations who will inherit the Earth that some humans are actively building. To correct this imbalance, the Oxfam writers suggest that “once unthinkable changes to the lifestyles of the richest in society can be adapted in the interest of us all,” including public policies that tax luxury carbon and the airline industry, and the expansion of public transportation and digital infrastructures (2). The briefing’s insistence on the development of public policy that benefits us all, in addition to its use of global carbon emission metrics, belies an underlying emphasis on broad human collectives of equality as a necessary response to gross social and ecological injustices of anthropogenic climate change. The Anthropocene, it argues, demands a firm commitment to shared collective activism and change, and a sensitivity to the power of individual actions, whether malevolent or benevolent. Together, these two understandings of human collective action and agency in the Anthropocene have produced one of the most contentious debates within the environmental humanities. In his seminal essay on the epoch, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that because the climate crisis is one of many dimensions, historians must develop literacy beyond the limited timescales within which they normally work—those of individual human civilizations or even shorter socioeconomic and political periods within the duration of these civilizations—to better account for the actions of humans in the deep time of planetary history. Chakrabarty writes that climate change necessitates literacy on both scales because it highlights the dependence of the former on the latter. He argues that climate change makes legible “certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities”; these conditions, such as the temperature range or specific combination of atmospheric chemicals that permit life on Earth, are not connected to human culture, society, or politics but rather “to the history of life on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another” (“Climate of History” 217). He notes

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that, while divisions may exist within and across human societies, climate change is an equalizing force—a “shared catastrophe” that “affects us all”— and points to devastating droughts in Australia and wildfires in California that wipe out poor and wealthy communities without prejudice as evidence that “there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged” (218, 221). Yet he argues that humans struggle to access this new understanding of humanity, as we lack ontological access to what it is like to experience the world as a species. “Who is the we?,” he writes. “We humans never experience ourselves as a species.  .  .  . There could be no phenomenology of us as a species  .  .  . [as] one never experiences being a concept” (221). Nevertheless, by expanding to accommodate a new scale of planetary time, or zooming out to put human societies within the longer durations of geologic time, Chakrabarty suggests that historians can begin to grapple with the scale and significance of anthropogenic activity. They can, in other words, develop an appreciation for humans as a “geological agent distributing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence” (218). In response to Chakrabarty’s essay, other environmental humanities scholars call into question claims about the shared nature of the climate crisis by emphasizing the individual actions of a few privileged humans. Rob Nixon states it bluntly: “My central problem with the dominant mode of Anthropocene storytelling is its failure to articulate the great acceleration to the great divergence” (“Great Acceleration”). To illustrate this divergence, Nixon points to similar statistics that we see in the Oxfam briefing: namely that ninety corporations, primarily oil and coal companies, have produced two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions since 1751. “We” are acting as a species in concept only, Nixon argues, as a small number of affluent humans are more than pulling their weight in terms of anthropogenic environmental violence: “We need to acknowledge that the grand species narrative of the Anthropocene—this geomorphic ‘age of the human’—is gaining credence at a time when in society after society, the idea of the human is breaking apart economically, as the distance between affluence and abandonment is increasing.” Instead of a story of humans as a collective geologic agent, for Nixon the narrative of the Anthropocene must be “a shared story of unshared resources.” Stephanie LeMenager similarly calls into question the “we” that informs Chakrabarty’s notion of the human species as geological agent. In her writing on climate change fiction, she notes that discussions of the emerging genre too often assume all-inclusive collective human agency. In reality, she argues, “‘we’ is the European American subject, comfortable enough in wealth, contemplating not only the loss of self-sovereignty but also the end of a kind of culture that has exceeded its ecological carrying capacity” (231). LeMenager points out

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that the collective activity of some humans has had more impact on the planet than others. Some privileged humans are agents of the climate change that is changing the world, while others are simply witnesses to the ecological and sociopolitical violence that this agency produces. Chakrabarty responds to such criticism by articulating his call for a “double position . . . of both acknowledging the role of (scientific) reason in defining and adapting to climate change . . . but also of maintaining a postcolonial vigilance against ‘universals’ that actually hide particular interests” (“Whose Anthropocene?: A Response” 107). Much like the scientists of the AWG, Chakrabarty asserts that the sheer size of the human population places unsustainable pressure on the Earth and the resources and conditions that support human life. He maintains his original argument that there are no lifeboats for the rich: “Left unmitigated, he writes, climate change affects us all, rich and poor. They are not affected in the same way, but they are all affected” (108). Yet Chakrabarty also stresses that the Anthropocene will “only accentuate the inequalities of the global capitalist order as the impact of climate change—for now and in the immediate future—falls more heavily on poorer nations and on the poor of rich nations” (107, emphasis in original). He thus advocates for recognizing the devastating impact of collective human behavior and acknowledging the divisions within human groups—a duality that makes legible the historical timeframes of capitalism and modernity and the geologic time of human evolution, or the dual subjecthoods of collective agency and individual action (111). He argues that this double position requires a “zooming in and zooming out,” or a “shuttling between different scales, perspectives, and levels of abstraction” (111). He also makes the argument, familiar to environmental humanities scholarship, that new types of stories can help illuminate this double subject position. “I am a deep believer in the role of the arts and imaginative work in this crisis,” he writes, and he goes on to suggest that one source of hope is “human creativity and resilience,” the expression of which will “take multiple narratives and forms” (113). He asks: “Faced with the problem of the ecological over-reach of humans, what kind of stories do we now tell about ourselves, and how?” (112). An Anthropocene narrative theory poses these very questions about narrative form, collective agency, the divisive inequalities of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of group and individual action in the epoch. In this chapter, I explore the pressures that debates about human collectives in the Anthropocene put on narrative and narratological models, both in the sense of species-level geological agency and the collective agency of political and ecological activism in the face of gross environmental and social injustices that resist universalizing assumptions about species-level activity. I am

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particularly interested in narrative resources that facilitate the double subject position of the zooming in and zooming out of which Chakrabarty writes— structures that task readers with imaginatively inhabiting a narrative’s world via the subjecthoods of large collective agents and thoughtful individual actors who call attention to the inherent limitations of human groups and implicitly warn against misguided notions that we are all in this together, equally. I also privilege narrative resources that place readers firmly within storyworlds, thereby weakening the illusion that one can remain above, separate from, or free of the environmental conditions of the world in the Anthropocene. In what follows, I explore narrative resources that can facilitate imaginations of this collectivity and internality; I am especially interested in the potentials of inconstant we-narration and the fictional you. Via discussions of “we” and “you” texts, I consider how these resources challenge and compliment traditional forms of agency in narrative, especially omniscient narration, and can aid the project of worldbuilding for environmental purposes.

Conventional Omniscience: Singularity and Externality To begin our exploration of narrative resources that productively can task readers with imaginatively inhabiting the new collective agencies of the Anthropocene, it helps to turn to more conventional representations of opposing forms of agency. Prime among these resources is traditional omniscient narration. Typically extradiegetic and heterodiegetic (that is, existing one ontological level above the storyworld and not a character in the story), the standard omniscient narrator tells a story of which they are not a part. They also tend to tell that story with complete and sole authority, positioning themselves not only as the telling agent but also as the sole author of the fictional world that they narrate into being. Jonathan Culler uses an analogy of God and the author to define omniscience: “The author creates the world of the novel as God created our world,” he writes, “and just as the world holds no secrets for God, so the novelist knows everything that is to be known about the world of the novel” (23). Omniscient narrators exhibit what Culler refers to as “Total Information Awareness”; in practice, they tend to tell their stories at one level removed from the action of the storyworld, accessing “a vast store of knowledge, in excess of what might be expressed” (22, 23). Omniscience narrators, in other words, are singular and external. They author worlds alone from a position on high, outside of that world. Indeed, while definitions of omniscience are notoriously slippery—Culler argues that the term “conflates and confuses several different factors that

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should be separated if they are to be well understood”—they all tend to highlight the two basic properties of singularity and externality (22). Paul Dawson, in his study of omniscience narration in twenty-first-century fiction, agrees that the term can be ambiguous: “Once we attempt a rigorous definition of omniscient narration and its manifestation in particular works of fiction,” he writes, “once we attempt to theorize the form and its effects, we are presented with a number of difficulties which continue to be debated” (31). Nevertheless, Dawson argues that the “overriding effect which the various formal elements of omniscient narration both enable and are underpinned by is that of a specific rhetorical performance of narrative authority” (54). To create this sense of authority, omniscient narrators must maintain “their status as narrating agents ontologically distinct from the storyworld” (18). In addition, they must pass judgement from that hetereodiegetic position on the “extradiegetic or public world of the reader” (54). An omniscient narrator appears to readers as a “proxy for the author”—a figure of authority who, like flesh-and-blood readers, exists one level above a narrative’s characters and therefore can adjudicate freely those characters and their world. We can understand traditional omniscient narrators, then, as creating a buffer between readers and the world of a narrative’s characters. By passing judgement from a heterodiegetic position and maintaining an ideological barrier between their world and the storyworld they narrate, conventional omniscient narrators produce the illusion of a human figure who stands outside of the world they are actively narrating into being. As William Nelles states, “Since the narrator has invented everything in the world,” they “must know everything there is to know about it” (120). Richard Russo is perhaps clearest about the ethical and ideological implications of the distance between omniscient narrators and the worlds that they narrate in his lecture “In Defense of Omniscience.” Stating that omniscience is “an outside, not an inside view,” and writing that omniscient narrators “speak in a voice that embodies a clearly defined attitude, an authorial pose,” Russo highlights the externality and singularity of this style of narration (10). But for him, omniscience is also “the most arrogant of techniques” (10). Importantly for considerations of narrative and the Anthropocene, this arrogance not only pertains to narration, but also to world-creation: Omniscience not only invents a world; it tells us how that world works and how we should feel about the way it works. . . . Omniscience is permission to speak and to speak with authority we know we really don’t have, about a world that in our century (any century?) is too complex to know. Ultimately, omniscience forces us to pretend we know more than we do. (17)

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Russo’s lecture makes clear that traditional omniscient narrators are not simply haughty in their judgements of a narrative’s characters—their arrogance extends to the entire world of the text. Omniscient narrators create worlds for narratees (and readers) and then tell their audience exactly how to understand that world, all the while maintaining a barrier between the world and themselves and their audience. Environmental humanities scholars have linked the spatiotemporal perspective and attitude that traditional omniscient narrators afford with the very roots of our current epoch. In The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016), Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that the dominant image of the epoch is the “blue marble” representation of Earth from space—an image of the planet that fosters attitudes of ecological separateness and superiority. “Above all,” they write, “the image of the Earth seen from space conveys a radically simplistic interpretation of the world. It gives an intoxicating sense of total overview, global and dominating, rather than a sense of humble belonging” (62). Via a similar subject position, conventional omniscient narrators, too, foster illusions of world control. Much like the “blue marble” image, narratives featuring omniscient narrators task readers with modeling a world in which one can stand outside of that world and maintain complete dominance over it. This ideology of world control is abundantly clear in Russo’s discussion of omniscient narration in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). Russo quotes a lengthy passage from the novel in which the central characters hunt for frogs: During the millennia that frogs and men have lived in the same world, it is probable that men have hunted frogs. And during that time a pattern of hunt and parry has developed. The man with net or bow or lance or gun creeps noiselessly, as he thinks, toward the frog. The pattern requires the frog to sit still, sit very still and wait. The rules of the game require the frog to wait until the final flicker of a second, when the net is descending, when the lance is in the air, when the finger squeezes the trigger, then the frog jumps, plops into the water, swims to the bottom and waits until the man goes away. That is the way it is done, the way it has always been done. Frogs have every right to expect it will always be done that way. Now and then the net is too quick, the lance pierces, the gun flicks and that frog is gone, but it is all fair and in the framework. Frogs don’t resent that. (qtd. in Russo 16)

The arrogance and authority of Steinbeck’s omniscient narrator is on full display here: this is the way it is done—the only way it is done—and it has been done this way for time immemorial, and so on. Men (and only men) hunt

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frogs, and they do it in a controlled, prescribed, and patterned way. There are rules to this game. Note, though, that the rules not only pertain to the men but also to the frogs. The frogs know what to expect and accept their fate without resentment when the pattern proceeds out of their favor. Russo holds up this passage as a clear example of an omniscient narrator not only authoring a world but also telling their audience how to think and feel about that world: “Not content to speak for all Mankind,” Russo writes, Steinbeck’s narrator speaks “for frogs as well” (16). Steinbeck’s narrator is in such control of the world they narrate that they can assert, with authority, what nonhuman creatures think and feel. Steinbeck uses the narrator to build a world in which frogs expect a certain relationship with humans and accept the violent, predatory nature of that relationship with calm, grace, and good will. Russo certainly understands the attraction of omniscient arrogance: he promises his fellow writers that they, too, will come to enjoy the “control over the machine” that they will experience when they write omniscient narrators. He certainly has: he tells his audience that after experimenting with omniscience in two novels-in-progress, he has “begun to understand the attraction of telling people what frogs think” (17). It is in this arrogance of world-creation that I see the connections between traditional omniscient narration such that we find in Steinbeck’s text and the values, attitudes, and behaviors of human exceptionalism and supremacy that drive the Anthropocene. In the first chapter in this book, I argue that the narrative resources that underlie the traditional realist novel—structures that foreground the individual dramas of humans against a backdrop of stable spacescapes—do not simply reflect the social and material contexts that produce the Anthropocene but afford a model for human action and behavior in the world that, in turn, helps to produce a real world rewritten by human activity. So, too, traditional omniscient narration. Omniscient narrators like Steinbeck’s task readers with modeling worlds in which one human who stands outside of that world has complete control over it. These external omniscient narrators (and their audiences) do not feel the effects of the actions they narrate, as they remain one ontological level above a narrative’s characters. They thus afford an attitude of denial for authors and readers in that they foster the illusion that one can simply watch action unfold without experiencing the ramifications of that action. Furthermore, they encourage readers to inhabit an imaginative world that is authored by one single subject, thus denying the collective action of humans in the Anthropocene. Yet this is not to say that all omniscient narrators produce this effect— that omniscient narration is a rhetorical strategy that always and inherently builds this particular type of world and its corresponding anthropocentric

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ethics. For a recent progressive use of omniscient narration, we can turn to Kim Stanley Robinson’s cli-fi novel New York 2140 (2017). The New York City of this fictional world looks different from the real world in which I write in 2021: it has been radically reshaped by a fifty-foot rise in sea level produced by two “pulses” of flooding in the latter half of the twenty-first century. The pulses bring about total change: as the text explains, they are “each a complete psychodrama decade, a meltdown in history, a breakdown in society, a refugee nightmare, an eco-catastrophe, the planet gone collectively nuts” (34). New York City has been thoroughly transformed by the flooding: the bay is much bigger, “Hell Gate more hellish, the Harlem River a wild tidal race and not a shipping canal, the Meadowlands a shallow sea, Brooklyn and Queens and the south Bronx all shallow seas, their prismatically oily waters sloshing poisonously back and forth on the tides” (33). The southern half of Manhattan is “all drowned all of the time, up to the second or third floor of every building that did not collapse into the drink, and all activity has moved north of Forty-Second Street, which is now the “proving ground for the new composite building materials” originally designed for “space elevator cables” but now great for “three-hundred-story superscrapers” (34, 35). This New York City is a “super-Venice,” a world in which characters ride on canals instead of walking on streets and move between island skyscrapers, and the city’s anthropogenically altered natural environment—wet and unforgiving—determines all aspects of life (6). Robinson presents the history of this speculative future through “a citizen”—also known as “that citizen,” “the citizen,” and even “the city smart ass”—an omniscient narrator who regularly interrupts the flow of Robinson’s narrative (32, 77, 495). The chapters that the citizen narrates stand in contrast to those of the text’s two other narrators: an unnamed, extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator that tells the bulk of the story as focalized through a group of central characters that all live in the Met Life Tower, and Franklin, a cocky market trader and fellow tower resident who narrates his own chapters autodiegetically. Unlike the rest of the characters, including Franklin, “the citizen” stands outside of the narrative’s storyworld. And unlike the extradiegetic, hetereodiegetic narrator, whose narration is restricted to the spatiotemporal coordinates of the narrative’s immediate action, the citizen has access to events that occur on a timescale that greatly exceeds that available to the novel’s other narrators and characters. The citizen’s narration pulls the timeline of the novel far backward, moving from the action set in 2140 to the geologic history of Manhattan and the origins of the city. Differences in spatialization also mark the citizen’s chapters from those of the other two narrators; the citizen’s descriptions of Manhattan are not connected to a character’s point of

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view, as readers mainly encounter in the rest of the text (projective locations), but hover above the storyworld and are not linked to any one viewer’s perspective (topological locations). We see this difference in spatialization very clearly, for example, in the citizen’s statement that “the Bight of New York forms an almost ninety-degree angle where the north-southish Jersey Shore meets the east-westish Long Island” (32). Via these differing textures of time and space—hallmarks of the omni-temporality and -spatiality typical of omniscience—Robinson positions the citizen outside of the world that the rest of the characters inhabit and display. The citizen’s sections are also striking because of this narrator’s catty metanarrative commentary and performance of rhetorical prowess that are seminal to omniscience. The citizen regularly appears to speak to readers directly, such as in the reprimands that pepper the long passages of geologic and natural history in their chapters. This narrator is quick to express frustration with the impatience of their narratee, taking on the familiar real-world persona of the tough-talking New Yorker to do so: But pause ever so slightly—those of you anxious to get back to the narrating of the antics of individual human lives can skip to the next chapter, and know that any more expository rants, any more info dumps (on your carpet) from this New Yorker will be printed in red ink to warn you to skip them (not)—pause, broader-minded more intellectually flexible readers, to consider why the First Pulse happened in the first place. (141, emphasis in original)

The citizen remains cantankerous to the end. Telling their narratee to “get over your childlike Rocky Mountain desire for a happy ending, because it doesn’t exist” in the novel’s penultimate chapter, the citizen warns that “down there in Antarctica—or in other realms of being far more dangerous—the next buttress of the buttress could go at any time” (604). These metanarrative interjections make the politics of the citizen’s narration clear: humans (including the narratee) are not paying close enough attention and will suffer the consequences if they do not soon awaken from their myopic longings for happy stories uncomplicated by the environmental realities of a rapidly changing Earth. The citizen is in full control of this story and is telling it to scare the recipients of their narrative out of a stupor. The citizen makes clear that this is a story and storyworld that their audience cannot afford to ignore. Yet despite Robinson’s allegiance to traditional omniscient narration, it is tough to interpret this narrator as communicating the same system of ethics as Steinbeck’s. The citizen has a clear environmental ethic that does not seek to

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replicate the complacent anthropocentrism that they see as driving the climate change that produces the pulses and wreaks havoc upon the city. Robinson’s narrator, unlike Steinbeck’s, has no interest in telling people what frogs think. Indeed, instead of communicating an ethic of anthropocentrism by creating distance between readers and a narrative’s world and foregrounding the singular agency of the author figure, the citizen is a resource for building a fictional world that shocks readers into alternative attitudes, values, and behaviors. Part of this shock comes from the citizen’s cattiness. But perhaps even more so, the shock stems from one crucial difference between the citizen and traditional omniscient narrators—Robinson’s citizen may stand above the world that they narrate and lace their narration with vicious commentary, but it is clear that this narrator is not in full authorial control of the world. The citizen does not create or author into being the historical meltdown and societal breakdown of the pulses—these are the products of “the planet gone collectively nuts,” not the actions of a single malicious agent (34). Even the citizen, who hovers above this world, must deal with the effects of the pulses. There is no life boat. In Robinson’s text, we find an author using a familiar narrative resource to help readers grasp the complexity of the Anthropocene and argue that we are all in this together, no matter our position in or to the world. Much like McEwan’s self-conscious and satirical use of the resources of the traditional realist novel to encourage readers to reassess their relationship to climate change in Solar, here Robinson uses familiar forms of omniscient narration— extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narration, omni-temporality and -spatiality—to jolt readers into an awareness of the environmental dangers of human myopia, apathy, and individualism for which we are all responsible. One resource, multiple effects, and multiple worlds for multiple purposes.

We-Narrators: Collectivity Chang-Rae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea begins by foregrounding clearly the collective at its center: “It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore” (1). This opening statement, articulated by the narrative’s mysterious we-narrator, identifies the collective as an aggregate of immigrants. Subsequent sentences quickly make clear that “we” originally came from “a gravel-colored town of stoop-shouldered buildings on a riverbank in China,” but currently resides—with great pride—in B-Mor, a future, dystopic version of Baltimore, wholly reconfigured by climate change and immigration. “We” explains that B-Mor occupies a working-class middleground in this storyworld: populated solely by the descendants of immigrants

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from New China, B-Mor is neither the gated Charter communities that house the rich nor the “open counties” that are home to the abject poor. Instead, B-Mor is an industrial powerhouse—a haven of happy workers, according to “we,” who produce the food in the city’s trademark “uncontaminated grow beds” that residents of the Charters demand (18). There, in the relative safety of B-Mor’s “runaway-straight blocks,” “indoor gymnasiums and pools,” “subterranean mall busy with shops and game parlors and eateries,” “seasonally perfumed, filtered air,” “honey-haloed lighting,” and “constantly updated mood-enhancing music,” “we” escapes the devastating effects of climate change that have made the open counties “especially unpleasant” (12). Yet the dangers remain ever-present. “Maybe the Charters can easily forget what it’s like out there,” the we-narrator explains, “but we B-Mors and others in similar settlements should be aware of the possibilities” (14). “We” remains one small step from the harsh horrors of the open counties, noting that “simply imagining ourselves existing beyond the gates is enough to induce a swampy tingle in the underarms, a gaining chill in the gut” (13). Lee’s novel quickly leaves B-Mor to follow the adventures of Fan, a pregnant young woman who flees the confines and comforts of the city to search the open counties for the missing father of her unborn child. But the narrating-we remains present throughout the text, a collective chorus recounting the myth of Fan’s departure. The narrating-we in Lee’s novel never disintegrates nor articulates the individuals who compose it. In this sense, On Such a Full Sea is a prime illustration of what Natalya Bekhta defines as a “we-narrative,” or a text in which “collective subjectivity defines the dominant mode of narration” and the consistent use of we-reference “does not reveal any I-speakers nor allow speculations about one” (166, 168). Bekhta distinguishes we-narratives from other types of common texts, such as first-person narratives where individual character narration dominates and “we” refers to an I-narrator and someone else, and multiperson narratives that oscillate between individual and plural narrators. Full-blown or proper we-narrators, by contrast, rely on a “certain holistic supraindividual level,” Bekhta argues; these special narrators are composed of a collection of individuals who, “as a group, necessarily lose their individual properties. This group acts as a distinct, collective character” (177). Furthermore, she states, full-blown we-narrators “possess collective epistemological, perspectival, and other qualities and thus create new rules of (collective) realism” (170, emphasis in original). Given the awareness of collective human agency that informs even the most basic conceptualizations of the Anthropocene, it is easy to recognize the relevance of we-narrators such as that in On Such a Full Sea to the epoch. We-narrators like the storytelling residents of B-Mor task readers with modeling a new subject position: a plural perspective

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that, as Bekhta argues, provides those readers with access to new collective realities and epistemologies. In this way, we can see we-narrators as offering authors and readers an important counterstructure to the singularity of omniscience—one that is more suitable to representations of human collective agency in this epoch. Within the context of the Anthropocene, we-narrators can call attention to the epoch’s sociopolitical and material inequities by pointing to the fact that all collectives necessarily are defined by their difference to other groups. Furthermore, the prominent role that we-narration plays in Lee’s novel provides readers with essential correctives to the idea that the European American subject implied in notions of the species-level “we” is the only collective agent of the Anthropocene, and thus the only group who gets to tell the story of this epoch. In texts such as On Such a Full Sea, the “we” who narrates is not the “we” who has created the dystopian conditions in which the story unfolds. This “we” thus is able to offer a crucially important counternarrative to the “we” who typically narrates the world in the Anthropocene. Of course, they also provide a much-needed alternative to the traditional omniscient “I” who narrates the world with singular, external authority and thus affords authors and readers a model for arrogant anthropogenic worldbuilding. I find Bekhta’s theorization of full-blown we-narrators helpful in her point that they can “exhibit their own beliefs and other mental states,” separate from the individuals that compose them (178). This group, Bekhta asserts, “acts as a distinct, collective character” (177). I am especially drawn to this point because it clarifies a previously held assumption, argued by scholars such as Brian Richardson, that we-narrators represent an unnatural type of narrative agency. Richardson locates we-narrators solely in postmodern narratives and asserts that they are a “different kind of figure from the realistic type of first-person narrator”—one that “refuses to be bound by the epistemological rules of realism” (“Plural Focalization” 152). Bekhta, in contrast, suggests that we-narratives “represent groups that are not unlike those in the ‘real world’ and claiming that such representations are unnatural relies on the assumption that humans can only function in the ‘singular mode’” (172). Bekhta stakes her claim upon recent philosophical and sociological research that studies group knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes that cannot be reduced to individual members of a we-group. To this point, I add the recognition of anthropogenic collective agency in the Anthropocene. Understanding humans as a global geophysical force that has produced (and is actively producing) the Anthropocene, as do the scientists of the AWG and Chakrabarty, and/or understanding equitable and shared action as the only valid response to injustices of anthropogenic climate change, demands that we recognize a level of collective

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agency that supersedes that of individual agency. This understanding must be nuanced, of course; as scholars such as Nixon and LeMenager argue, we must be able to register the vast inequalities within human societies in the Anthropocene while we acknowledge this supraindividual action. By representing both the collective agency of a we-group to narrate a world into being, while also illuminating the core and fundamental difference between this collective and other groups and individuals that exceed it, we-narrators provide readers with exactly this nuance. Yet the Anthropocene also helpfully challenges some of Bekhta’s theorizing. Bekhta is forceful in her assertion that the we-narrative proper maintains its collective narrator throughout. She is firm in labeling we-narratives as only texts in which the “we” is “never identified as ‘I’ and does not call for such identification” (178). As the debate about collective human agency in the Anthropocene suggests, a rich understanding of human action in this epoch must accommodate both the supraindividual level of the human collective agent and the individual actions of humans—some of whom do the most to drive the climate crisis, some of whom are actively working to mitigate it, and some of whom suffer more acutely its effects. I thus want to make a case for the helpful imaginative work that inconstant we-narratives demand of readers. In interpreting these texts, in which a narrator oscillates between the subjecthoods of a narrating-I and a narrating-we that readers cannot separate into distinct characters and that thus illustrates separate realities corresponding to individual and supraindividual subjecthoods, respectively, readers must move between subject positions, developing their comfort with recognizing the relationship between individual and group actions, beliefs, and attitudes, respectively. These texts facilitate the imaginative zooming in and zooming out of which Chakrabarty speaks when he discusses the tensions between collective human agency and intercollective human divisions in the Anthropocene. They afford readers a model by which to inhabit both a collective and singular subject position and move fluidly between them. In advocating for the usefulness of inconstant we-narrators, I join a group of scholars who expand Bekhta’s ideas about we-narration beyond what she classifies as we-narratives proper. Marco Caracciolo discusses “localized” wenarratives in his study of texts featuring nonhuman collectives (“We-Narrative” 94). Like me, Caracciolo is interested in the ways in which narratives and narrative theory can speak to the current debates of the climate crisis, especially notions of collective agency. But his focus is not on collective human agency in this epoch, but the “imagination of more-than-human assemblages through narrative form,” which he argues “calls for a profound rethinking of collective behavior on a planetary scale” (86). He turns to inconstant we-

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narrators such as that in Paul Harding’s Tinkers (2009) to make this point. As Caracciolo states, Harding’s text “is not a we-narrative in the sense that it is consistently narrated by a group of characters” (“We-Narrative” 88). Nevertheless, he writes, “when the we-form does emerge, it meets Bekhta’s criterion for we-narrative—namely that the “we” does not collapse into many individual characters, an aggregation of voices” (88). Thus Caracciolo asserts that even a localized we-narrator can “envisage modalities and possibilities of collectivity beyond the human-scale world,” and so “put pressure on an entrenched ‘we’ that reifies the distinction between human societies and a vast gamut of nonhuman life forms as well as climatological, evolutionary, or geological processes” (94). Similarly, Monika Fludernik examines texts that use imperfect we-narrators to critique group behavior. Her focus is on narratives that represent the single protagonist in relation to the group, such as in Donald Berthelme’s short story, “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” (1987). This text, too, is not a we-narrative “proper” according to Bekhta’s qualifications: “What we have here,” Fludernik writes, is “a story of we-narration in which there is a clear spokesperson” for a group (“Politics of We-Narration” 103). Yet Fludernik argues that this modified structure of the we-narrator allows the text to expose the “political and moral dangers inherent in collective action.” She writes that we-narrators, even imperfect ones such as those we find in Berthelme’s story, can afford readers a “subversive viewpoint on the power exerted by collectives” (108). I agree with Caracciolo and Fludernik that even imperfect or localized we-narrators are useful imaginative tools for understanding the complexities of collectives. Indeed, I push these ideas one step further to advocate for inconstant we-narrators, or imperfect we-narrators that represent the differing experiences of individual and collective agents. Importantly, inconstant we-narrators are not simply localized, nor do they represent an individual as a spokesperson for a larger group. Instead, inconstant we-narrators move between an emotionally rich narrating-I and more unknowable yet coherent we-group that acts together, and thus task readers with moving quickly between a familiar singular subjecthood and a more abstract supraindividual collective with which it is difficult to empathize. As the great divergences and injustices of the Anthropocene illustrate, including the failure to adopt broad collective policies and behaviors to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis for all, the human species struggles to identify mentally and emotionally with a broad human “we.” We thus might understand inconstant we-narrators as important cognitive models for the zooming in and out between scales of individual and plural subjecthood and agency that a response to the climate crisis demands. As Fludernik suggests, such inconstant we-narrators also can helpfully illustrate the potentially damaging power of an unchecked we-group.

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Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (2020) provides us with a provocative example of the imaginative benefits of the inconstant we-narrator. The novel is narrated by Evie, a capable young woman whose family is spending a summer in a rented great house with a group of other families. The novel follows Evie and the other children as they become increasingly independent from their parents—first by choice, as they camp on a nearby beach for a few nights, and then by necessity when the adults prove themselves incapable of handling the flood that destroys the house and radically reshapes the geography of the United States. The novel ends with Evie and her peers eking out a new life for themselves in the full absence of their parents as they adapt to sustainable modes of living better suited to their new reality. It is easy to read A Children’s Bible as a collective Bildungsroman—a representation of the coming of age and maturation of a generation who will live differently and more responsibly than their parents. The presence of the collective “we” supports this interpretation of the text. Although Evie is the novel’s clear narrator, she does not identify herself by name until page sixteen. Indeed, the collective “we” is so present in the novel that often it appears that “we” narrate the text. The novel’s opening paragraphs brightly illustrate this collective agency: Once we lived in a summer country. In the woods there were treehouses, and on the lake were boats. Even the smallest canoe could take us down to the ocean. We’d paddle across the lake, over a marsh, down a stream, and come to the river’s mouth. Where the water met the sky. We’d run along the beach on a salt breeze, leaving our boats on the sand. We found the skull of a dinosaur. Or maybe a porpoise. We found skate eggs and shark-eye shells and sea glass. Before sunset we’d paddle back to the lake, returning for dinner. Loons sent their haunting calls across the water. To wash the sand from our ankles, we jumped off the dock. And screamed. We dove and flipped as the sky turned violet. (1)

The opening lines of Millet’s text clearly foreground the unity of the “we” group: “we” live, paddle, run, find, jump, scream, and dive together. As readers proceed in the narrative, they come to know the individual members of this group: Evie and her inquisitive younger brother Jack, Shel, Sukey, Terry, Low, Rafe, David, Dee, Juicy, and Jen. Yet the text maintains its focus on the group’s unity. The group remains intact at the end of the novel, the children left to live on as a group once the parents disappear. Evie ends the narrative explaining to Jack how they will live on after death, in the “ants . . . trees and plants . . .

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the clouds and the moon . . . the dirt the rocks the water and the wind” (224). “We call that hope, you see,” she says. The kids, the novel suggests, are alright. Indeed, two things unite this group of children: their opposition to their parents and their connection to the world around them. If Evie and her group are adaptable, capable, and responsible, their parents are the exact opposite: inflexible, inept, and carefree. The parents are hopelessly committed to the patterns and lifestyles of late-stage capitalism. When Evie and her group announce that they are going camping on their own, one of the mothers asks if they will handle a lack of tents via “Amazon Prime” (18). (The children opt for tarps they find in the great house’s tool shed.) The one quality that links the parents together is their shared inability to meet the moment. They live a life of denial: “Not science denial exactly,” Evie explains. “They were liberals. It was more a denial of reality. . . . Most of them had a simple attitude: business as usual” (28). In Millet’s narrative, the older generation is desperately unable to grapple with the environmental changes caused by their very reliance on online shopping. The parents’ preferred method of denying reality is to drink themselves into a stupor. Each night, Evie and the children watch as the parents pursue total disengagement with the world around them. Alarmingly, this behavior ramps up as that world becomes more dangerous and threatening. The parents’ response to the violent storm that destroys the great house is to dose themselves with Ecstasy. Sukey explains that, in the midst of the crisis, the parents “gave up completely fixing the holes . . . the water keeps pouring in and they just smile and chew their bottom lip. And stroke each other’s junk” (75). It is thus unsurprising that Evie and her peers consistently imagine the parents as so useless as to be nearly dead. Terry likens them to an “atrophied limb,” and Evie notes that many are “slack-faced, listless—for practical purposes, deceased” (4–5, 22–23, 4). The parents are doomed, and the children know it. “They were a cautionary tale,” Evie coldly states (13). Even the parents, despite their stupor, are aware of this fate. They recognize, on some level, the looming extinction of their kind—that this summer will be their “last hurrah” and that they will next see each other “at someone’s funeral” (13–14). The children feel little compassion for the elder generation. Evie states that the parents’ worst crime, among their many faults, is “the very quality of their being . . . the essence of their personalities” (11). “We blame you for everything,” says Jen; “you were just stupid and lazy,” says Sukey; “you gave up the world,” says David; “you let them turn it all to shit,” says Low; “you’re a liar,” Jack brutally tells his father (193–94, 201, emphasis in original). In contrast, the children are hyperaware of reality and the world around them. While the parents live in denial and paralysis, the children live in full

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recognition of a climate-altered future. Evie imagines the future flying past in “a flash of grim. . . . The clock was ticking,” she states, “and I didn’t like the clock” (13). In response to these changes, Evie and her peers pay more attention to their contexts, not less. We see this awareness most clearly in Jack and Shel, who spend the bulk of the novel rescuing animals endangered by the flood. We also see it in the group’s harmonious connection to each other and the world around them. The children “respected the lake and stream and most of all the ocean”—they respect “the clouds and the earth, from whose sudden burrows and sharp grass a swarm of wasps might arise, an infestation of stinging ants, or suddenly blueberries” and “the treehouse, an elaborate network of well-built structures high up in the forest canopy” that creates a “village in the sky” (12). In still other passages, Evie explicitly recognizes herself as part of something greater—an assemblage of human and nonhuman material that exists together, forever: I sat and gazed at the breakers and sky. That was my preferred activity. I tried to disappear into the stretches of water and air. I pushed my attention higher and higher, through the atmosphere, till I could almost imagine I saw the earth. As the astronauts had when they went to the moon. If you could be nothing, you could also be everything. Once my molecules had dispersed, I would be here forever. Free. Part of the timeless. The sky and the ocean would also be me. Molecules never die, I thought. . . . Molecules exchanging and mingling, on and on. Particles that had once been others and now moved through us. (36–37)

The parents live for the moment, trapped by their dependence on various mechanisms of denial (the excesses of capitalism, alcohol, drugs). Evie and the children, on the other hand, situate themselves within a much longer timeline of planetary life—a timeline that affords them a sense of liberty, comfort, and connectedness in their rapidly changing world. These differing orientations to the world and the crises of the Anthropocene produce two radically different experiences as the groups retreat from the destroyed rented great house to Juicy’s family mansion. Among a crashing stock market, melting polar ice caps, and increased flooding and drought that make defunct global trade routes, the parents immediately attempt to return to their old ways. Evie’s mother avows upon pulling up to the mansion’s gates that she is “going straight to the pool . . . and then the Jacuzzi. . . . The bar better be well stocked” (201–2). The parents’ addiction to late-stage capitalism is complete, leaving them unable to adapt to the more sustainable modes of

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living organized by the children. The parents focus their efforts on protection and security, hiring contractors to build a wall around the mansion and endlessly debating the pros and cons of stockpiling commodities such as gold, ammunition, and antibiotics. The children, alternatively, manage to settle into a more sustainable way of living, transforming the mansion into a largely selfsufficient home base. They repurpose the hot tub building into a hydroponic grow house, remodel the nursery into a mushroom cave, and create an indoor garden in the basement squash court. They plant apple trees in the yard and make plans to generate their own power from a solar array. Roles reverse and the children take charge: they create a schedule for the parents, ordering the adults to contribute to the group’s industry, and do their best to help the adults adapt to the new reality. But the parents remain indignant and complacent, catatonically lost in a haze of nostalgia and depression. Evie again returns to the language of death and extinction to describe the older generation: “They’d functioned passably in a limited domain. Specifically adapted to life in their own small niches” (205). As the children become more and more enmeshed in their environment, they watch their parents slowly and literally “detaching” (221). Eventually, the parents simply disappear: “One morning, when we woke up, they were simply gone.  .  .  . We waited for them to come back, but they never did” (221–22). Millet, via the fates of the two groups, establishes a clear ethics in her narrative: business as usual is not enough. The climate crisis demands major changes and the younger generation will guide the way, and we must align with and adapt alongside this generation to survive in our changing world. Millet also foregrounds this ethics in her characterization. The parents remain flat throughout the text—thinly sketched caricatures who are unnamed and largely undifferentiated from each other. This lack of distinguishing detail makes the parents difficult characters with whom to empathize, as they appear to readers more like an interchangeable, drunken mass than distinct people with full interior lives and clear emotional experiences. The parents only exist at the supraindividual level of the collective, as the narrative denies them any sense of individualization. The narrative presents the children, by contrast, as round and distinct. They have clear personalities and identities: David is technically savvy; Rafe is “out and proud”; Terry “fancie[s] himself a wordsmith”; Dee is “passive-aggressive, neurotic, a germophobe, and borderline paranoid” (12, 7, 19). This is especially true of Evie, who, as the narrator, is the character that Millet draws most richly. Evie is caring and especially protective of her younger brother, Jack. She is patient and congenial. Perhaps most importantly for discussions of collective agency, Evie is very clear in her understanding of her place as an individual in an interconnected, networked world. She is firm

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in her belief that she and the others will be a part of “all of the old beautiful things [that] will still be in the air” long after their individual lives are over” (223). Yet she also is quick to articulate her difference from the networks in which she exists. In the novel’s opening passage, much of which I discuss above, Evie breaks from the “we” over their treatment of deer that amble on the great house’s lawn. While “some of us enjoyed seeing them panic” and “cheer as they fled,” Evie does not (2). “Not me,” she says. “I kept silent. I was sorry for them” (2). Indeed, Evie’s robust interiority is striking given the frequency with which her narration focuses on the cohesion of the group. “We” often act together in the novel—a seamless unit that moves and expresses agency as one. But this collective can be a tough subject position for readers to model mentally and inhabit emotionally; as the novel’s opening lines suggest, “we” often act clearly but lack the emotional specificity that readers find in Evie’s representation of her interior thoughts and experiences. In other words, “we” might live, paddle, run, find, return, and dive together, but Millet provides readers with little sense of what it is like for the supraindividual collective agent to experience these events. This pattern continues right through the text, even in the absence of the parents: in the novel’s final pages, “we kept their names on the schedules for a while, performing the chores assigned to them . . . [and] we waited for them to come back, but they never did” (222). Here, again, Millet places emphasis on the actions of “we” and refuses to narrate any sense of collective emotion or thought. For insight into the emotional texture of the supraindividual “we” collective, readers must turn to Evie’s individual thoughts and feelings—thoughts and feelings that often run counter to the group. Millet’s narrative thus maps out the tensions of collective agency that are so familiar to discussions of the Anthropocene: humans may act as a collective agent in this epoch, but it is exceedingly difficult for us to imagine and inhabit the emotional and mental texture of that subject position. Indeed, doing so can lead to a false sense of equality that is insensitive to inherent divisions within larger collective groups. Millet does not attempt to articulate the thoughts and feelings of “we,” as the mental states and emotions of the supraindividual level of the group is unknowable and unnarratable to Evie. Readers thus cannot form a Theory of Mind for the larger collective because it is inaccessible to this narrator. But Millet does articulate the separate thoughts and feelings of one member of the group, allowing readers a point of access into one account of what it is like to experience the novel’s events. Furthermore, she builds a critique of the unthinking, undifferentiated collective into her novel. She explicitly presents the parents as a warning of what can happen when indi-

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viduals lose their sense of self and fall into a careless and unmindful group mentality. Evie’s narration does not satisfy the criterion that Bekhta lays out for wenarrators, as the narrating-we of A Children’s Bible clearly offers readers an “I + somebody” equation. Nor does it fully match what Susan Lanser calls the singular form, in which “one narrator speaks for a collective,” as Evie only articulates her own feelings, not those of the group (21, my emphasis). Instead, we most productively read Millet’s novel as a self-consciously inconstant wenarrative—one that represents the unified collective actions of a supraindividual group but also warns against the moral and environmental dangers inherent in collective action within the context of a total abandonment of the personal responsibility of the individual. Indeed, I read the inconstancy of Millet’s we-narration as producing two key effects for readers. First, it demystifies the unruly and unknowable “we” subject position by providing them with a clear character with which to identify. This, in turn, fosters an empathic connection to a member of the “we” group, which gives readers a point of access for understanding one experience of the collective. The power of this potential for character identification is especially clear if we compare the wenarration of A Children’s Bible with that of On Such a Full Sea: without a clear, individual emotional anchor, the we-narrator of Lee’s novel remains opaque and thus difficult for readers to emotionally embody. As Adeline Johns-Putra argues, Lee’s collective narrator reads as a “disembodied community spirit” that, ironically, reproduces the ethereal and external texture of omniscience in its lack of emotional depth and clear characterization (“Rest Is Silence” 37). Second, Millet’s inconstant we-narration is a resource for building a world in which a strong environmental ethics of care depends upon a double subject position that at once recognizes the pitfalls of the collective agency of unmindful group actions and maintains an awareness of the necessity of a strong sense of self acting within a caring collective group. Evie’s story illustrates the idea that, to survive, humans in the Anthropocene must be able to acknowledge the supraindividual actions of the group and recognize the importance of inequalities and differences within them.

“You”: Internality and Collectivity In my discussion of A Children’s Bible above, I quote the final line of the novel: explaining the interconnectedness of all things to Jack, Evie tells him that “we call that hope, you see” (224). The “you” here is striking. We might easily interpret it as referring to Jack, to whom Evie notes that she is speaking in this

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moment. But the lack of quotation marks around this line in the text muddies that reading. Millet does not represent this line as direct discourse and thus orthographically renders the “you” ambiguous, opening the door to a previously unacknowledged narratee to whom Evie may have been narrating the entire time. Because Millet does not name, gender, or locate “you,” this fictional character has the potential to hail readers, creating the sense that they are the recipients of Evie’s story. Thus an alternative way of interpreting the novel’s closing “you” is to read it as an inherently and strategically ambiguous signifier that invites flesh-and-blood readers into Evie’s storyworld, or asks them to join her story in a metaleptic way that, until this point, her narration has not made available. I see great relevance of second-person addresses such as Evie’s to an Anthropocene narrative theory. I understand the inherent ambiguity of the metaleptic “you” as being a powerful resource by which authors can build connections between worlds, as its slipperiness encourages readers to step into a narrative’s world and feel some connection to and responsibility for it. In addition, moments such as the end of A Children’s Bible can demand that readers take on a double position, being both the members of the actual audience and the fictional “you” of the text. I thus see the second-person address, along with inconstant we-narration, as a powerful antidote to the externality of omniscient narration. The theorization of “you” by narrative scholars helps us appreciate how the second-person address can perform these functions in a text. In his exploration of the narrative “you,” John Capecci argues that “every use of you .  .  . carries with it the possibility of an address to the reader” (47). “More specifically,” Capecci continues, “every you-utterance carries with it an invitation to the reader: this is an inherent quality of the highly ambiguous English ‘you’” (47, emphasis in original). He argues that the invitation of the secondperson address makes it possible for readers to place themselves in “an imagined receiving situation,” much like the human propensity to react when we hear someone on the street shout, “Hey you!” Capecci notes that a more specified “you” will weaken this invitation, though never fully eliminate it. More recent scholarship on the inherently ambiguous nature of the second-person address builds upon these observations, bolstering the case that “you” can place readers in an unusual situation of inhabiting two different identities at once—one inside a narrative’s world and one outside. As many narrative theorists argue, the second-person address often involves a metaleptic leap in which readers, sometimes briefly and sometimes in a sustained fashion, imagine themselves fully in a narrative’s world. James Phelan notes that the inherently slippery second-person address can shift readers from the

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“observer role” to the “addressee role,” thereby inviting them to identify with the fictional narratee (“Self Help” 351). Monika Fludernik writes that secondperson fiction typically plays with the “multifunctionality of the second-person pronoun . . . and the reader’s attempt at constructing a situation for the discourse” (“Second-Person” 455). She writes, “Whereas the typical storytelling mode allows the reader to sit back and enjoy a narrative of another’s tribulations,” second-person texts can “breach this convention of distance, seemingly involving the reader within the textual world” (457). By doing so, Fludernik writes, the second-person address “break[s] the frame of narration .  .  . and violate[s] the boundaries of narrative levels” (457). Elsewhere, Fludernik writes of the “decidedly involving quality” of the second-person address, which can provoke much greater empathy among readers for secondperson characters than for first- or third-person characters (“Introduction” 286). David Herman is the most technical in his discussion of the destabilizing effects of “you.” He writes that the second-person address can produce an “ontological hesitation” between the physical environment in which readers read and the imagined world of a narrative by “constantly repositioning readers, to a fundamentally indeterminate degree, within the emergent spatiotemporal parameters of one or more alternative worlds” (“Textual You and Double Deixis” 379). Herman thus understands “you” to be “doubly deictic,” capable of at once assigning readers two roles—one internal to the discourse situation of the text and one external. All of this scholarship agrees with one basic point: the second-person address in narrative is an expedient to imaginative transportation. Because it hails readers via the illusion of a direct address, “you” has the capability to usher them into the world of a text and thus break down the boundaries between narrative and nonnarrative, fictional and real. We can thus understand the narrative “you” as a potential antidote to externality of traditional omniscient narration: whereas the omniscient narrator builds and maintains a boundary between narrator/narratee and the world in which a narrative’s characters function, the second-person address can loosen that boundary until it appears to disintegrate altogether. In addition, we can also understand the narrative “you” as being an antidote to the singularity of omniscient narration: when readers engage the doubly deictic “you,” they not only superimpose the identity of the fictional you onto their own, or dissolve their identity into the fictional you, but also join in a wide community of readers who share this double subjecthood, which is limited only by the number of people who pick up and read the text. The narrative “you” is thus a resource of collective internality—one that encourages readers to develop comfort with singular and collective subjecthoods.

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A cluster of recent texts that make particularly strong use of the ideological power of the second-person address are “found text” cli-fi narratives in which “you,” the narratee, stumbles upon and reads the journal of a narrator who is no longer present. I discuss one example of this type of narrative and its potential for the second-person address to transport readers into a sense of collective internality in Chapter 4 of this book. In my analysis of the ending of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, I argue that the novel’s final pages encourage readers to inhabit a double subject position by mirroring the fictional “you” to whom the biologist narrates her story and VanderMeer’s actual audience. I interpret the end of the narrative—via its slippery second-person address—as confronting readers with the illusion that, in this moment, both “you” and they hold in their hands the material artifact of the biologist’s narration. The novel invites readers to analogize the world in which they read as well as the mutated and dangerous environment of Area X. VanderMeer’s readers, like the narratee, find at the end of his novel an implicit call to action: they must decide what to do with the narrator’s ghastly account of their increasingly strange and rapidly changing world. We find two additional examples of found text narratives in recent cli-fi short stories. Strikingly, the bulk of Margaret Atwood’s “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” (2011) is narrated by a collective “we.” In this piece of flash fiction, which measures only two pages, “we” narrate the five ages of their history: in age one “we created gods”; in age two “we created money” that “as if by magic . . . could be changed into other things”; in age three “money became a god” that “ate whole forests, croplands, and the lives of children . . . armies, ships, and cities”; in age four “we created deserts” and “the number zero was holy” (191–93). In age five, we disintegrated, and the last individual on the dead planet leaves a warning for those to come: You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words: Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly. (193)

Atwood pulls a doubly metaleptic trick in her articulation of the final age. In the very moment the narrative hails readers with the inherently unstable second-person address, she also suggests that “you” have traveled to the dead planet from some other, distant world. Of course, Atwood’s actual audience makes this exact journey, albeit only in their imaginations. To comprehend this story, readers must imaginatively move from the environment in which they read to the dry, baked earth that was once inhabited by “we.” They must

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also identify with the broad collective who is hailed by the second-person address—namely, anyone reading and interpreting the narrative. Tellingly, and in line with my discussion of the potential effects of inconstant we-narration above, Atwood does not task readers with mentally modeling and emotionally inhabiting what it is like for the collective to experience the death of their planet. Instead, she places readers in the position of the “you” that will inherit this world, directly warning them not to replicate the actions and ideologies of the largely unthinking and unfeeling collective “we” agent. Luis Alberto Urrea’s “The Night Drinker” features a similar pattern of hailing and warning via its metaleptic second-person address. This story is part of the McSweeney’s 2040 A.D. (2019) collection, for which editors assigned authors from around the world a specific climate event and paired them with collaborators from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Like VanderMeer’s novel and Atwood’s story, Urrea’s story is a found text narrative: an epigraph tells readers that they are about to read the notebooks of historian Joaquin Hernandez III, which were found in the ruins of Mexico City in the year 2045. Hernandez’s notebook sketches out the rise and fall of the city from the late 2020s to its destruction in 2040. He explains that this history is one of great irony; in a world “dying of fever” in which monarch butterflies catch fire in the air and the oceans have come ashore much faster than scientists predicted, “like insidious, living beings, filling the lowlands and drowning the ports,” Mexico City transforms from a place that produces refugees to a city that takes in refugees (49). Its high altitude and relative stability—drugs are decriminalized in 2025, thus gutting the business of Mexico’s brutally violent cartels—make it the destination of choice for those fleeing environmental and social devastation in Brazil, Guadalajara, Haiti, Honduras, and the American West. Hernandez notes that “those of us with a dark sense of humor . . . found it amusing that the parts of the great border wall still above water were used to tie off the boats of floating scavengers and the undocumented” (50). Mexico City also becomes renowned for its technological innovation. Hernandez explains that “in the 2020s, we had managed to clear the air by cutting coal emissions, limiting auto exhaust, and launching the famous government program that set out to plant some million trees in the city and on the outskirts” (51). Project Tlatoc, begun by the government and scientists in 2035, is “perhaps the largest drought amelioration project in history” (52). “We were mending, we believed” (51). Yet all is not well. The explosions of two nearby volcanos rock the city. The city’s inhabitants tolerate the steady, sequenced eruptions of the first, “drink[ing] toasts to him in our bars” and “never believing the worst could happen, for this was mere gringo paranoia” (55). But they cannot ignore the

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explosion of the second volcano—this one “scolded us like a mother gone mad” (55). Hernandez explains that the earth “heaved as the pyroclastic flows of boiling ash asphyxiated and burned whole communities, and lava raised tsunamis of fire and the ground beneath our feet became waves that toppled even the cathedral of the Virgen de Guadalupe” (55). The fallen cathedral foreshadows a sharp shift in the culture of the city, as a charismatic young leader, Hermanito Jorge, brings a new religion to town. Hermanito sees a parallel between the violence of the now-outlawed Mexican drug trade and Aztec human sacrifice rituals, and develops a following of believers who await the return of the old gods. “I am the eruption,” Hermanito tells Hernandez; “I am the horseman” (54). As he predicts, Hermanito does usher in the end of days in the city. The narrative ends in a scene of Lovecraftian horror in which Hernandez witnesses the return of a vengeful old god, Xipe Totec. Hernandez states: “There are no words for this creature. I, a man of words, fail utterly before the alienness of this apparition” (64). In the narrative’s last line, Hernandez writes of the god’s “hot, raw palm, sticky and pestilential,” cupping his cheek before the god’s “two sets of lips descended to kiss my own.” I am particularly interested in Urrea’s story because of its manipulation of the second-person address. Hernandez refers to his reader throughout his narrative, sometimes as “the reader,” but more often than not as simply “you” (58). Indeed, Hernandez is at pains to communicate clearly with his reader— to make his reader take on his perspective. “If you are reading this, you must understand,” he writes, “in light of what I am about to relate, I must assure you that I am a man of letters, a man of reason, a man who rarely even enters a church” (52–53). But “you” is a slippery figure in this narrative. Often, as in the sentence I have just quoted, “you” simply refers to Hernandez’s narratee— a future reader that stands outside of the “we” who live in Mexico City before its fall. In another similar passage, Hernandez instructs “you” on the correct pronunciation of Xipe Totec: “If you who find this chronicle do not know how to say such a name, try saying this: Sheep et Toltec. Leave out the L. But I beseech you, do not say it out loud” (62, emphasis in original). We easily can interpret this passage as an example of what Irene Kacandes calls the “literary performative,” a special type of second-person address in which readers literally perform the actions of which they read. When readers pronounce “Sheep et Toltec” in their heads and not out loud, they mimic exactly the action that Hernandez demands of “you” in this moment. They thus firmly inhabit a double position, being both themselves, members of Urrea’s actual audience, and the fictional “you” of the text that is performing the exact action that Hernandez is narrating. Yet in other moments in the narrative, “you” is much more closely identified with Hernandez himself. We see this especially clearly in the

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novel’s final lines, in which Hernandez quotes Xipe Totec speaking to him in direct discourse: “You must see beyond what you see,” the old god says. “You must see the world as it gives birth. . . . You must break for me, as I am flayed for you. Tell my story” (65). Again, in these lines Urrea immerses readers in a double subject position. Readers in this moment are at once both members of Urrea’s actual audience who are reading Hernandez’s narrative and, via the hailing effects of the second-person address, Hernandez himself. Both figures must “see the world as it gives birth,” as both are witnesses to Xipe Totec’s terrifying return to Earth. The politics of “The Night Drinker” are clear in these final lines: “you”— and Hernandez—must break for the new old gods. Both narrator and narratee must reconfigure their understanding of the world and adjust to the new realities brought about by climate change. Of course, Hernandez fails in this mission. The found quality of this narrative heavily implies that Hernandez is destroyed along with Mexico City. But hope remains for the narratee, if only they heed the narrator’s warning. Urrea is explicit about this; Hernandez, cautioning the narratee about the perils of ignoring the changes that accompany anthropogenic environmental destruction, directly tells “you” to avoid repeating the mistakes that he and his peers make. “If I may offer you one thought about Mexico, it is this,” he writes, “the past is not the past. Even if the pagan spirits do not exist, we summon them into being. And this we did” (56, my emphasis). The advice here is definitive: “you” in the future must not repeat the mistakes of “we” in the past. Urrea builds a world to warn readers to act differently to avoid the horrific and terrifying fate of the story’s characters. In his essay “Future Readers: Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene,” Pieter Vermeulen states that found text narratives are “one of the most popular tropes of the Anthropocene imagination” (867). These narratives, he argues, feature a “future reader who, in an imagined future, reads the remains of contemporary existence” and tend to take two forms: those featuring a historian who “chronicles historical errors that she, unlike us, is able to appreciate,” or those featuring an archaeologist who “will be left to read [hu]mankind’s geological footprint after extinction” (867). Yet Vermeulen draws drastically different conclusions about the potential effects of found text narratives upon readers than I do. While I read narratives such as “Time Capsule” and “The Night Drinker” as worldbuilding to warn readers of the dangers of the status quo, Vermeulen argues that found text narratives such as Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) “do not imply an ethical or political programme for change” (873). Vermeulen writes that, in these texts, there is “no global solution to a planetary problem”; instead,

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“and against their author’s best intentions,” the texts “make narrative available as an occasion for coming to terms with finitude”—especially the finitude of the human species. Vermeulen rejects the standard environmental humanities assumption that narratives can help readers grapple with the new realities of the Anthropocene by immersing them in new imaginative worlds. He argues that found text narratives, rather than affording readers new ways of understanding and living in the world, train readers into a realization that one day humans “will be perceived as nothing more than a geological scar” (879). While I appreciate Vermeulen’s observations about the importance of the found text narrative trope in the Anthropocene, I disagree with his understanding of the potential work of these narratives in the epoch. I see the work of VanderMeer, Atwood, and Urrea as inherently optimistic, as they write into the very backbone of their texts the promise that a human reader will be present in the future to receive the narrator’s narration. Yet perhaps my optimism is guided by the specific rhetorical situation of my chosen primary texts. While VanderMeer, Atwood, and Urrea make use of the slippery and metaleptic second-person address to the actual audience inside their narratives and force those readers to inhabit a double, or collective subject position, those by Brooks and Conway and Oreskes do not. In other words, my interpretation of the rhetorical, political, and ideological purpose of Annihilation, “Time Capsule,” and “The Night Drinker”—of the stark warnings that they force readers to engage—hinges not so much upon the presence of a future reader but the presence of one specific future reader: you. In this sense, my understanding of the environmental potential of the interior collectivity of the second-person address is in line with Fludernik’s argument that the metaleptic strategies of the fictional “you” are not necessarily identifiable only as marks of “postmodern playfulness,” as scholars such as Brian Richardson argue (“Second-Person” 472). “Indeed,” she writes, all of the uses of “you” that she studies in her survey of second-person narratives are “decidedly political or ideological in one way or another” (472). The politics and ideology of Annihilation, “Time Capsule,” and “The Night Drinker”—the purpose of their worldbuilding—are clear to me. “You” are a part of this world of which you read, these narratives cry. “You” are both your flesh-and-blood self and part of the vast collective that is hailed by the fictional other that the narrator is demanding be a part of the solution to the world’s problems. Heed the narrator’s warning and do not participate in its destruction. To conclude, let us return to New York 2140 and complicate our reading of that narrative by considering a moment in which the second-person address fails to be a vehicle of interiority and collectivity. In their narratives, VanderMeer, Atwood, and Urrea largely characterize “you” by the act of read-

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ing, omitting any reference to gender, race, location, name, and so forth. The “found” nature of their narratives produce a mirroring effect for readers, in which the actual audience and the fictional “you” both read the same manuscript. Robinson’s narrative is not a “found” text and thus does not replicate this mirroring. Indeed, we can interpret the omissions of the citizen’s narrative and the racial arrogance of their world creation as putting strong and clear parameters around the collective potentiality of the “you” to which they narrate. The citizen is the primary source of New York City’s history in the text, but the history that this narrator provides is almost wholly white and echoes a familiar real-world narrative of the city beginning with European immigration; as the citizen’s first chapter makes clear, this New York begins when “Henry Hudson sailed by and saw a break in the coast between two hills, right at the deeper part of the bight they were exploring” (32). Indeed, Robinson’s novel does not feature indigenous characters, nor does it ever step outside of the capitalist society that traditionally excludes—or even eradicates—indigenous lives. In my discussion of omniscience above, I argue that conventional omniscient narrators not only create worlds but also tell their audiences exactly how to understand those worlds via their clear ideological and political judgments. So, too, with Robinson’s citizen. By silencing indigenous histories and cultures, the citizen’s narration stands to further increase the barrier that separates some readers from the world of the novel’s characters, as readers sensitive to this erasure must not only deal with the literal barrier separating diegetic levels but also the barrier of bias that whitewashes the history and narratives of America’s financial capital. This inhibits the number of actual audience members who join in a broad collective of people who identify with the fictional “you” when they read the text. Despite the citizen’s progressive environmental ethics, we find in their narration an implicit ideological backbone of separation and denial that runs counter to the very thesis of Robinson’s narrative that we are all in this together.

CODA

Narrative and Climate Science

Throughout this book, I argue that our understanding of narrative and the Anthropocene is reciprocal—that we not only better know the current state of the world and our relationship to it by engaging with narrative but also better know narrative and how it functions by placing it within the context of the Anthropocene. I take a practical approach to the topic in this coda, querying how, when, and why scientists use narrative to communicate climate science. There is a growing recognition among scientists that reporting facts and figures related to our rapidly changing world is not enough to mitigate or slow the pace of those changes. Inspired by the lack of public response to alarming climate data, many scientists are acknowledging that they need to communicate their work differently if it is going to catalyze legislative and collective action. As one team of science communication specialists recently lamented, “In short, even fairly sophisticated knowledge does not result in action” (Kelly et al. 592). One path forward for these scientists is a turn toward narrative. Science communication specialist Michael Dahlstrom makes this argument explicitly: despite the fact that, as he states, “storytelling has a bad reputation within science,” he sees narratives as offering “increased comprehension, interest, and engagement” (13614). Thus, “storytelling in science should not be disregarded” (13618). A recent report from the National Academy of the Sciences summarizing the findings of a colloquium on the “Science of Science Com175

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munication” advocates for a similar embrace of narrative. The authors note that a major theme of the colloquium is that “when phenomena are complex, stories can pull diverse facts together into something that people can understand” (National Academies of Sciences 72). Thus “science communicators can increase their effectiveness through the use of stories” (72). As Emmy Awardwinning journalist Frank Sesno noted at the close of the colloquium, there’s “enormous potential” in putting stories “up against the challenges that we’ve talked about here today” (qtd. in National Academies of Sciences 73). Yet despite this interest in storytelling in science communication—and especially the communication of scientific phenomena as acutely complex as anthropogenic climate change—the turn toward narrative remains incomplete. I probe the current limitations and future potentials of the use of narrative in climate science in the pages that follow, building to a discussion of my own interdisciplinary projects that do not separate narrative and science but rather conceive of narrative as a rhetorical and cognitive tool by which humans worldbuild for some purpose and thus study it as providing evidence of how and why our world is changing.

Narrative in Science Communication I agree with arguments such as Dahlstrom’s that narrative offers scientists an effective means of clear communication that can prompt real-life changes in attitudes, values, and behaviors. But, as a specialist in narrative theory, it strikes me that much of the scholarship that advocates for science communication via narrative does so without engaging actively in a contemporary understanding of narrative and its functions. It is rare for science communication scholarship to conceive of narrative via the humanities or literary studies, let alone the more specifically relevant field of narrative theory.1 Indeed, much 1. One exception here is Kendall Haven, who does engage with narratological scholarship in Story Proof: The Science Behind the Starting Power of Story (2007). Haven notes that he read “eighteen articles . . . from the field of narrative theory” while preparing his manuscript (11). In addition, Haven’s understanding of “story” is deeply steeped in cognitive science; he writes that “results from a dozen prominent cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists have confirmed that human minds do rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering, and planning our lives—as well as the countless experiences and narratives we encounter along the way” (vii, emphasis in original). Yet as this sentence indicates, Haven departs from current narratological scholarship by making a distinction between story and narrative. “Narratives are not all alike,” he states. “Real and important differences exist between different types of narratives. Those narratives that I am calling stories possess specific characteristics that create their unique effectiveness— characteristics that are not shared by other narratives structures (19, emphasis in original). He

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of this work situates the study of narrative within the social sciences, not the humanities or literary studies. We find a typical example of this in Ryan P. Kelly, Sarah R. Cooley, and Terrie Klinger’s article “Narratives Can Motivate Environmental Action” (2013) when they write that the analysis of narrative is a “core tool within the social sciences, particularly for testing ideas about the relationship between individuals and societies” (596). Similarly, Annika Arnold turns to insights from cognitive sociology to “uncover how narratives interpret data and information about climate change” in Climate Change and Storytelling (2018, 129). Despite briefly citing work by narratologists such as Porter Abbott, Marie-Laure Ryan, and others, Arnold firmly positions the study of narrative within social science, arguing that “with the help of cultural theory,” social sciences can “contribute to the understanding of environmental communication by considering that communication processes are not at all specific to one subject but follow inherent rules that need to be uncovered” (3–4). This overlooking of narratological scholarship, vocabulary, and traditions is perhaps why the definitions of narrative that circulate in recent science communication work are limited at best, flat-out outdated at worst. We see a rather basic understanding of narrative in Dahlstrom’s work, in which he defines it as “follow[ing] a particular structure that describes the causeand-effect relationships between events that take place over a particular time period and that impact particular characters” (13614). Because Dahlstrom recognizes that mass media represents the source from which nonexpert audiences get most of their science information, he places special emphasis on the representation of science in the narratives of entertainment and news media, thus implicitly favoring certain types of narrative and their common narrative resources over others. Mary S. Morgan, in her contribution to a cluster of essays on “Narrative and Science” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (2017), repeats this emphasis on event sequencing when she asserts that “scholars of narrative . . . provide definitions of narrative that are determinedly sparse, even reductive, yet all depend fundamentally on a notion of passing time” (86). Likewise, Arnold states that “narrative scholars agree by and large on basic structural elements,” including “beginning—middle—end,” makes clear his frustration with narrative theory’s interest in universality: “Why has it been so hard to pin down the seemingly elusive definition of story? Certainly it has not been for lack of talent or effort. The names from narratology alone read like a who’s who of narrative research—Levi-Strauss, Noam Chompsky, Vladimir Propp, Paul Riceour, Topdovar, Bremend, and Roland Barthes. It’s because they are trying to study and corral the all-inclusive dictionary story, not the effective story that has a specific set of definable common characteristics” (19). Haven defines “story” as “a detailed, character-based narration of a character’s struggles to overcome obstacles and reach an important goal” (79).

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“unfolding events,” “presentation of characters (hero—villain—victim),” “plot,” and “moral/transformation” (62). Like Dahlstrom, Arnold’s understanding of narrative favors certain narrative forms and traditions over others: her definition of narrative foregrounds the sequencing of events, the presence of specific types of characters, and a necessary moral lesson. I see two key trends in the discussions of narrative such as these that tend to dominate science communication scholarship: first, that scholars conceive of narrativity primarily in terms of event sequencing, and second, that they tend to root their understanding of narrative as a whole in certain kinds of stories featuring certain kinds of characters and plot arcs. As the chapters of this book make clear, this understanding of narrative differs quite a bit from the ways in which today’s narrative scholars define and discuss this rhetorical mode. The emphasis on event sequencing does align with the more traditional conceptualizations of narrative that inform early narratological scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s. As I outline in Chapter 1, classical narratological scholars such as Gérard Genette tended to read narratives in isolation from the contexts of their production and reception, and sought to categorize the major building blocks common to all narratives, such as those pertaining to the organization of time, the style of narration, and type of perspective or point of view. Definitions of narrative that inform classical narratology thus tend to be stripped back and foreground event sequencing as the determining factor of narrativity—an emphasis we see clearly in Genette’s 1969 definition of narrative as “the representation of a real or fictitious event or series of events” (“Boundaries” 1). But, as I also track in Chapter 1, a marked shift occurs in the narratological scholarship of the 1990s and 2000s. Due in part to the growing influence of modes of reading that foreground ethics and ideology—especially Marxism, postcolonialism, feminism, and queer studies—and developments in cognitive science, narrative scholars began to turn their attention to the contexts of a narrative’s production and reception. They thus began to pay greater attention to the work of narrative authors and readers, and to question the effects of narrative in the real-world outside of the closed sign–system of the text. This second-wave of postclassical narratological theory builds on a definition of narrative as a representation of a sequence of events to reflect these developments, especially via the rhetorical and cognitive narrative theories that I favor in this book. Indeed, the rhetorical and cognitive perspectives that run throughout contemporary narrative theory—and that deeply influence my understanding of narratives as worldbuilding for some purpose, or somebody telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened in

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some world—offers us a strikingly different conceptualization of narrative and its function than what we see in recent science communication scholarship. First, it greatly expands our notion of what narrative is, positioning day-today storytelling as equally as important as novels or entertainment media. Second, it places emphasis on narratives as vehicles of emotions, experiences, and worlds that not only stand to have profound impacts on how readers understand the sociocultural and environmental contexts in which they live but also play an active role in creating and shaping that world. Yet this perspective is missing from the work of science communication specialists. By linking narrativity primarily to event sequencing, and by favoring some types of narrative at the expense of others, scholars such as Dahlstrom and Arnold limit their imagination of how scientists might effectively wield narrative. We see the product of this limited understanding of narrative in the work of Kelly and his colleagues. Their article argues that “narratives complementing environmental datasets can motivate responsive environmental policy” and discusses local news reporting on the Whiskey Creek shellfish hatchery in Netarts Bay, Oregon, as an example (592). Kelly and his colleagues explain that the hatchery provides 75% of the juvenile oyster spat used in the commercial aquaculture of Pacific oysters along the West Coast of America. Trouble hit the hatchery in 2006; it experienced an 80% mortality rate of its larvae when strong coastal upswelling transported carbon dioxide-rich water from the ocean depths to the surface of the nursery. Kelly et al. argue that the widespread pickup of the hatchery’s story in the popular press “coincided with— and, we argue, contributed to—the adoption of new policy in Washington State, while the spread of other regionally important data on the effects of ocean acidification . . . was comparatively slower” (594). The reason for this difference, they suggest, is the familiar narrative of economic loss that lay in the foundation of the media’s coverage of the hatchery. Kelly and his colleagues state that the Whiskey Creek narrative gained critical traction “because it featured identifiable characters—real people”; accordingly, they argue that “real stories, in which individuals experience some gain or loss of ecosystem services and personal well-being or livelihoods as a result of environmental change . . . help bring scientific and statistical projections to life” (593). Kelly et al. begin their article by citing Dahlstrom and S.  S. Ho’s definition of narrative as “communication that describes specific experiences of characters [i.e., individuals] over time” (qtd. in Kelly et al. 593). They thus continue the trend within science communication scholarship of tying narrativity directly to event sequencing and particular types of characters (“real people”) and overlook the cognitive and rhetorical arguments that foreground the world-building power of narrative and its purposeful communication.

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This narrow definition of what narrative is, in turn, produces a limited understanding of what narrative can do. Kelly et al.’s essay is a strong illustration of the tendency in science communication to turn to narrative as packaging only and not as knowledge in its own right. It uses narrative simply as rhetoric that can describe what has already happened in the world or bring that scientific and mathematical observations of that world “to life,” and not an imaginative tool by which humans actively write the world. By overlooking narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose, Kelly and his colleagues can only imagine narrative as a vehicle for delivering scientific information to a resistant nonexpert audience and not a rhetorical mode that can help readers mentally model and emotionally inhabit alternate worlds and experiences, and thus hone their real-life world-building skills. The work of Randy Olson makes even clearer the product of a narrow understanding of narrative and the tendency to equate narrative with palatable packaging in science communication scholarship. A former biology professor who left the academy to study film and screenwriting, Olson now specializes in training scientists around the world in using narrative to improve the dissemination of their work. In his book Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (2015), he advocates for the importance of storytelling in science communication and sees Hollywood as the answer to science’s problems. He writes: “Lots of humanities scholars can babble on endlessly about their theories of narrative, but most couldn’t spot the basic principles at work in our lives. It’s the people in Hollywood who have cracked the code of narrative over the past century, thanks to the driving force of financial profit” (14). As implied by his interest in Hollywood profits, his primary metric for analyzing the success of a given narrative is financial, such that The Day After Tomorrow ($186 million) is a much better climate change narrative than An Inconvenient Truth ($25 million). He does admit that the fictional movie is “cockamamie and packed with bad science,” but maintains that the discrepancy between the profits of the two films shows how “powerful story structure continues to be a force of successful communication, regardless of content” (180). In line with other understandings of narrative in science communication scholarship, Olson directly links narrativity to event sequencing. He defines narrative, or “story,” as “a series of events that happen along the way in the search for a solution to a problem”; elsewhere he writes that narrative “unifies a bunch of seemingly disparate pieces of information” and that the “central element” in a story is “time” (163–64, 84, 112). In addition, Olson’s privileging of Hollywood storytelling leads him to conceive of effective narrative plots as following the three-act structure dominant in mainstream feature-length Hol-

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lywood films, a formula that he argues is best able to captivate the emotions of an audience. Olson translates this combination of event sequencing and tripartite structure into a practical—and profitable—package of advice for scientists. At the heart of his advice is what he calls the “ABT Narrative Template,” which he teaches scientists to use to produce one-sentence articulations of their work that follow the clearly prescribed formula of “                      AND                     BUT            THEREFORE           .” In a reference card that he provides to participants of his workshops, Olson states that he developed the ABT template in 2012, “though its origin reaches back thousands of years to Aristotle and the beginning of narrative culture” (“ABT”). He explains that the template “embodies the three forces of narrative”: “AGREEMENT—and,” “CONTRADICTION — but,” and “CONSEQUENCE —therefore.” These beats, in turn, model the three core phases of an effective narrative: “SET UP—and,” “PROBLEM—but,” and “SOLUTION/ACTION —therefore.” Olson makes clear that ABT is “good narrative form” as, like a Hollywood blockbuster, it provides readers with the “optimal amount of narrative content.” The handout is unequivocal about the effectiveness of the ABT template; while Olson claims that it is a “new tool for organizing the narrative structure of any amount of content,” it is also “at the core of storytelling, logic, reason, argument and the scientific method.” The ABT structure, he writes, “underpins everything from the most detailed scientific research paper to the silliest joke,” and we can find it in texts as varied as the communications handbook of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and “great speeches, poems, and even nursery rhymes,” including “Little Miss Muffet,” which he cites in full as a helpful example. Despite his celebration of Hollywood movies for their emotional qualities, Olson’s fundamental understanding of narrative is concerned with plot only. Like Dahlstrom’s definition of narrative, the ABT template links narrativity to event sequencing, disregarding other hallmarks of narrative that play a role in the emotional poignancy of blockbuster films, such as spatialization, nonlinear temporalities, types of narrators and focalization, representation of consciousness, the presence of intradiegetic stories, and so on. The writing that he helps scientists produce thus has an incredibly low degree of narrativity, if any at all, and does not stray too far from the basic conventions of science writing. We see a clear example of this in an abstract that Olson offers up as a successful use of the ABT template: “For 8,000 years sea level has been stable AND civilizations have been built right to the edge of the ocean, BUT for the past 150 years sea level has been rising rapidly, THEREFORE it is now time to come up with a new management plan for coastal areas” (Houston 154). This is no doubt an admirably clear articulation of a scientific project. But, if we

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read it with contemporary definitions of narrative in mind, we easily can see that it has weak narrativity—it contains no characters, no vibrant storyworld, no rich sense of what it’s like to experience the devastating effects of rising sea levels. In other words, it is a limited rhetorical and cognitive tool, providing readers with a clear progression of information but minimal cues by which to mentally model and imaginatively inhabit an alternate world for some purpose—in this case, a world that urgently demands new management projects. Unsurprisingly, Olson’s myopic definition of narrative produces a very narrow understanding of the work that narrative can do.

Narrative and Climate Science An appreciation of narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose—a tool that allows narrative interpreters to build and inhabit new imaginative worlds and thus hone their world-building skills in offline contexts—makes clear the limited way that narrative is used in the communication of climate science. One thing that is missing from the narratives promoted by scholars such as Olson is emotional content, or a sense of what it’s like to experience events and contexts. Olson is aware of the power of the emotional texture of narratives and hits on this point in his book briefly when he recalls working with a group of scientist-inventors to promote and foster the importance and role of invention in science research. In his feedback to their proposed conference presentation, he writes: “Enough information. We want the emotion” (Houston 163). He argues that personal, emotional details are “communications gold” that foster a connection between scientist and audience, and tells the scientists that “they [the audience] will be interested in you because you emotionally aroused them. And even if they don’t totally understand the science, they will do their best to listen” (164). This is solid advice, as it highlights the potentially powerful real-world effects of narratives that foreground what it’s like for someone to experience an event and a world in flux. But it’s advice that ultimately falls out of the ABT template and its monolithic focus on threestep event sequencing. We might ask: what would climate science look like if its writers conveyed the worlds, emotions, and experiences of scientists? How could scientists marry narrative and their scientific observations to sound the alarms that their data ring? How might this form of writing help to mitigate the environmental changes that it communicates by purposefully transporting readers into alternate worlds and new emotional experiences? One example of this model in action is the writing of Peter Kalmus, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the past few years, Kalmus

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has published two types of texts: inward-facing traditional scientific studies written in the dry and precise language that industry standards demand, and public-facing articles and books that foreground his climate grief and hope for large-scale societal change. He speaks openly about the importance of the latter mode of communication in the article “To My Fellow Climate Scientists: Be Human, Be Brave, Speak Truth,” in which he urges his colleagues “to communicate that ongoing human-driven changes to the Earth system demand urgent action before things get much worse.” Kalmus acknowledges that this message “contains a value judgement, something you’ll almost never see in a formal scientific talk.” He also admits that he is afraid to speak out, as doing do can result in a “loss of credibility,” “loss of peer respect, harassment from trolls, and playing into the narratives of climate deniers.” But he insists that the problem is too pressing and the stakes too high to maintain a communicative status quo. He writes: “The public and policymakers don’t speak our language, and this is why we need to know when to shed the mantel of scientific authority and speak from the heart.”2 Kalmus provides a robust illustration of speaking from the heart in his book Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution (2017). As he makes clear in the text’s opening lines, the book is part climate science, part personal memoir: “I knew that burning fossil fuels was causing irreversible harm to our planet’s life-support systems,” he states, “and yet I continued to burn” (3). Indeed, the opening chapter doesn’t so much focus on the science or ill-effects of burning fossil fuels as it does Kalmus’s own spiritual and environmental awakening. He writes affectionately of an avocado tree in his backyard that he “began to think of .  .  . as a friend” when he bought his house—the first step along a path in “understanding plants as beings,” and, later, falling “in love with the land” (5). The book oscillates between explaining the science of anthropogenic climate change in an easy, conversational tone and detailing Kalmus’s turn from overwhelming climate grief toward a happier, more fulfilled, and sustainable life. “In our society, this kind of straightforwardness is often dismissed as idealistic, impractical, and out of reach,” he writes. “But my own direct experience says that it is possible to drastically reduce my fossil fuel use, and that it is possible to come out of conflict and negativity. What’s more, the personal rewards for doing both are tremendous: a less stressful, more satisfying life” (9, emphasis in original). Kalmus’s book directly implicates a specific reader in its rhetorical situation. He states that his purpose in sharing his experience is to provide a 2. For more on scientists and climate grief see Susan Clayton’s “Mental Health Risk and Resilience among Climate Scientists.” Also see Joe Duggan’s Is This How You Feel? project: https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com/.

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“concrete and lived example—my actual experience of practical change, not wishful thinking, speculation, or futurism—and to show that deep change is possible, not all that difficult, and surprisingly satisfying” (127–29). He makes clear that his path is not the only path, emphasizing that “your path will surely be different from mine” (129, emphasis in original). Yet he also insists from the book’s opening pages that “those of you who are ready to walk on the straightforward path, the path of love” can learn from his experience and thus “hasten the collective action we desperately need” (9). In keeping with dominant arguments in environmental humanities scholarship, Kalmus argues that such a path relies upon changing the story we tell ourselves about our relationship to the world. He urges his readers to “replace myths of progress and separation and the primacy of selfish wanting” with a new story that actively creates a better world (123). “In this new story,” he writes, “we seek to go more deeply into helping one another, living according to our principles, coming out of our prisons of desire, and becoming truly happy.” The rhetorical purpose of Being the Change is to immerse readers in that new story and its better world as a means of both overcoming environmental apathy and dealing with climate grief. Kalmus writes vividly of the experiences that changed his own values, attitudes, and behaviors in recollections of gardening, meditating, and ultimately “follow[ing] your joy, not your guilt” (129). Nowhere is this more apparent than in his extended recollections of slow travel—both a sixteen-day bike ride from Denver to Chicago and an epic Christmas-time family journey from Los Angeles to Chicago in a car that he converted to run on vegetable oil. The latter journey is especially notable for its characterization: Kalmus precedes his narration of the journey with a long description of how he created the car, named Maeby (“Maeby, she’ll get there. Maybe she won’t” (ft4, 344). “And so, Maeby was born,” he writes at the end of his recollection of her conversion. “I relished the process of creating her” (176). His narration of the journey is one part thrilling and one part harrowing, animated by descriptions of what it is like to be stranded on the side of a freezing highway trying to force the air out of Maeby’s fuel lines that keeps her from starting while your wife and two young children cry inside the car (180). Kalmus laces this narrative with practical tips for making such a journey yourself, including leading a coolant loop under the car, outfitting the engine with extra insulation, and carrying a healthy supply of emergency diesel. It is moments like this in which Kalmus’s book is especially effective in immersing readers into an alternate world in which they, too, mentally model and emotionally experience specific and practical ways to love the planet and each other. Kalmus encourages readers to not only tell a new story of the world but live in the world that their new story affords. He makes explicit that the

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two processes are linked: “I can promise you that no matter how you choose to tell the story,” he writes, “your first step will be to live it” (293). His narrative is not a panacea, of course. He readily admits that his own path toward sustainability and joy is made possible in part by his identity as a busy suburbanite with a wife who also works. His primary audience is thus readers like him, a stance made clear when he clarifies that “if everyone—especially those of us who live in affluent societies—made a conscious effort to move toward low-energy living and to change the collective . . . we could quickly and painlessly cut global emissions in half, and with that momentum, we’d probably go much deeper” (169). We can thus understand Kalmus’s project to be one of bounded strategic empathy, or the type of narrative empathy that Suzanne Keen argues is active in texts that foster empathic connections “within an ingroup, stemming from experiences of mutuality and leading to feeling with familiar others” (“Theory” 215). Yet even with this limitation, Being the Change is a vivid example of the power of an emotionally rich narrative to not only palatably package scientific studies of our changing environment but also be a source of change itself by worldbuilding for a purpose.

Narrative As Climate Science Kalmus’s work is an effective illustration of a scientist using their own emotions to build purposefully an alternate world for readers. A second, more radical way that climate scientists might use narratives in their work is to engage with the narratives of others. This model uproots the traditional hierarchy of science and narrative; instead of using narrative as packaging for facts and figures, such projects understand that climate science must broaden out beyond empirical data if it is to grapple fully with the causes and effects of the climate crisis. These projects realize that narratives do not simply come out of scientific data but are data in and of themselves. By claiming that narratives are data, I do not mean to suggest that we best understand narratives as facts and/or statistics. But I do claim that because narrative is a primary rhetorical and cognitive tool by which humans worldbuild for some purpose, narratives are essential evidence by which we understand how and why our world is changing. These projects thus grow from three foundational assumptions— that public testimony and eye-witness accounts of environmental change are environmentally and scientifically relevant knowledge, that narrative plays an essential role in shaping the environmental and cultural contexts that produce scientific data and thus must also shape scientific inquiry from the ground up, and that narrative is different in quality and texture than the data with which

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scientists and social scientists typically work and thus demands its own narratological methods of analysis. I am currently involved in two projects, both funded by the National Science Foundation, that engage firsthand narratives of the public to study the causes and effects of environmental crises in the Western United States. The first project, “Understanding Conceptions of Space and Time in Tribal Water Quality Governance” (Award ID 1636533), involves a host of collaborators from universities across the United States—two geographers, an environmental philosopher and indigenous scholar, and me as a narrative theorist—to study water quality and governance in two indigenous communities. The project points out that “indigenous experiences of space and time may differ markedly” from, for example, those that inform local, state, and federal governments that determine how waterways are used, or the philosophies of corporations who extract nearby natural resources (Cohn et al. 3). In other words, the project recognizes that “time and space are not culturally or politically neutral,” and questions how different understandings of time and space can produce drastically different perceptions of and relationships to vital water sources (3). For example, the Spokane Tribe in Washington state acknowledges “seven generations as an appropriate time period when planning and designing water quality initiatives focused on sustainability,” while local corporations, aided by lax government regulations, tend to think in much shorter timelines (decades, at best) (3). The Northern Arapaho Tribe conceives of space-time as both a linear and circular movement, which relates to all motion and direction—an ontology that certainly bucks the linear timelines of capitalist American corporations and the municipal, state, and federal governments that oversee them. This project uses various tools to pinpoint and analyze points of cultural and political difference, with the ultimate aim of understanding better how environmental imaginations of water lead to different uses and governance. One of the tools is narrative theory; the research team collected and analyzed narratives from members of the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho and the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe in Nevada and identified the textual cues that organize time and space in the narratives’ storyworlds. We then compared these with narratives that circulate in relevant government and corporate literature, ultimately searching for innovative approaches to water governance and using stories and storytelling as a mechanism for helping institutions better recognize and mitigate conflict in the future. The aim is to study water quality by dealing with the sociocultural and political contexts that determine water use. The second project, titled “Communicating Fire: Integrative Informal STEM Learning Through Participatory Narratives” (Award ID 2006101) is

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a major undertaking of the University of Idaho’s Confluence Lab.3 The lab, which I cofounded in 2018 with Jennifer Ladino (English) and Teresa Cavazos Cohn (Natural Resources and Society), is an interdisciplinary initiative that investigates conceptual and communication barriers that underlie debates about controversial issues especially relevant to rural communities in the state of Idaho and surrounding region, such as public land use, natural resource management, wildfires, and the causes and effects of climate change. The lab’s primary goal is to develop holistic approaches to environmental issues in Idaho and the surrounding region from the ground up by incubating the work of scholars in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences, alongside community members, using interdisciplinary approaches—especially those related to storytelling, emotions, and communication. Informed by the definitions of narrative that I discuss in this book, the lab’s projects position narratives about environmental change as an important data set that scholars must incorporate into the beginning stages of a project idea, rather than using them in the final stage of a project to package information. Narratives are data is a guiding philosophy of our work, and thus narrative theory is a seminal tool in our projects. “Communicating Fire” is a science pedagogy project that turns to firsthand narratives of what it is like to experience wildland fire in rural Idaho to increase participation in informal science learning. It begins by recognizing the deep suspicion toward science and scientists in these communities and understanding that the narratives of what we call “frontliners”—wildland firefighters and people who have been evacuated from their homes because of fires—contain valuable knowledge about wildfires, how they start, how they spread, and how they can be mitigated. It begins with the recognition that observing fires themselves is not enough, and that the stories that people tell about fires play a significant role in the behavior and spread of future fires. It also understands that firsthand narratives about wildfire and the emotions they convey are powerful drivers of public perception, policy, and the composition of wildfire science studies. The project thus poses two questions. First, what mechanisms and structures most effectively integrate lived experience and accurate scientific content in narratives about wildfire? And second, how can informal science educators, such as state park rangers, use these narrative resources both to increase scientific literacy and facilitate participatory story 3. In addition to Jennifer Ladino and Teresa Cavazos Cohn, the Confluence Lab involves a robust group of scholars, including colleagues at the University of Idaho in music, the fine arts, geography, sociology, mathematics, philosophy, history, and law. See the lab’s website to read more about its members and projects: https://www.uidaho.edu/class/english/confluence.

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telling that in turn produces more relevant knowledge about the origins and behaviors of wildfires in rural Idaho? In the first stage of the project, a team of fire ecologists, science communication specialists, and narrative scholars collected stories of what it is like to experience a wildfire from forty frontliners. To facilitate this process, we developed a semi-structured interview guide designed to solicit maximum narrativity from the interviewees’ responses. The narrative scholars analyzed these narratives, identifying the structures by which they represent both fire science and lived experiences of fire, segments that create particularly immersive experiences for listeners, tropes associated with fire stories that have high levels of qualia, and storyworld geographies. The full team then created a curriculum for a workshop on Idaho wildfires for informal science educators to introduce them to leading-edge fire science and narratological research and train them to facilitate participatory storytelling sessions about wildfire with the public. At its heart this project suggests that the use of narrative in informal science education may not only increase scientific literacy among the public but also generate new knowledge about the causes and effects of fire in Idaho, thus leading to a better understanding of how narratives of fire among rural Idahoans may contribute to more effective fire management practices. These projects represent but two examples of an innovative pairing of climate science and narrative. They do not position climate science and narrative as separate, nor do they imply a hierarchy in which we must understand the former before packaging it in the latter. Instead, they put into action the central argument of this book: that narratives are worldbuilding for some purpose and, as such, we better understand the world that humans are creating in the Anthropocene by grappling with the imaginative tool by which we practice and hone our world-building skills. They also begin to tell a new narrative of the Anthropocene—one which begins with all hands on deck.

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INDEX

Abbott, H. Porter, 29, 46, 48, 177

Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), 26–28, 51, 93–94, 96, 110, 145–146

Achebe, Chinua, 6n4

Arnold, Annika, 177–178

Aciman, Alexander, 84

arrogance, 151–153

affordances, 43–46, 48, 50, 57, 73–74, 76, 91

Atwood, Margaret, 51, 169–170, 173

After Ice (Guariglia), 118–120, 126–128, 131, 136

audience: authorial, 31, 61, 102–105, 107, 111; ideal narrative, 31; narrative communication and, 31; omniscience an, 153

agency: authorial, 156; collective, 146–149, 157–159, 161, 164–166; material, 68, 70–71, 78–82, 91, 147–148; narrative, 70–72, 79, 158; new materialism and, 68

Austen, Jane, 20, 53, 58–62 AWG. See Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)

Alaimo, Stacy, 129 Alavanja, Michael C. R., 114

Azaryhua, Maoz, 124

Albrecht, Glenn, 135, 137 Allen, Roberta, 86

Bacigalupi, Paolo, 11

analepsis, 73, 98, 100–102

Back of a Turtle, The (King), 12

Annihilation (VanderMeer), 138–144, 169, 173

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 96, 124

Anthropocene: defined, 145–146; Geologic Time Scale and, 94, 96–108; instability and, 119–120; narrative, 6–15; in narrative, 48–65; origin of term, 1; start of, 1–4, 26–27; time and, 93–96

Banfield, Ann, 33n3 Barad, Karen, 67 Barthes, Roland, 16, 29 Basic Elements of Narrative (Herman), 32

Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Trexler), 10

Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution (Kalmus), 183–185

Anthropocene Reading (Menely and Taylor), 3

Bekhta, Natalya, 157, 159

201

202  •  I nde x

Bennett, Jane, 67–68

Cocchiarale, Michael, 86

Bergthaller, Hannes, 71n1

cognition, material-narrative, 76–82

Bernaerts, Lars, 15, 38

cognitive narrative theory, 38–39

Berthelme, Donald, 160

cognitive science, 32–36, 41–42, 47, 79–80

Best, Stephen, 83

Cohen, Jeffery Jerome, 73

biosemiotics, 72

Cohen, Jerome, 19

“Black Box” (Egan), 84

Cohn, Teresa Cavazos, 187

blue humanities, 128–129

Cole, Teju, 84

Bone Clocks, The (Mitchell), 84

Colebrook, Clair, 4, 8, 15

Bonneuil, Christophe, 6, 152 Brain Pickings, 86–88 Brooks, Max, 172–173 Bruner, Jerome, 46–47 Budman, Mark, 86 Butler, Octavia, 12, 51 Cabot, Meg, 84 “Call It Sleep” (Roth), 70 Calvino, Italo, 134 Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Abbott), 46 Cannery Row (Steinbeck), 152

Collapse of Western Civilization, The (Oreskes and Conway), 172–173 collectivity, 156–174 colonization, 2, 53–54, 56, 128, 137 conflict resolution, 49 “Confronting Carbon Inequality” (Oxfam), 146–147 contrapuntal reading, 52–55 Conway, Erik M., 172–173 Cooley, Sarah R., 177 Cowper, Richard, 11 “Crisis of Environmental Narrative in the Anthropocene, The” (Richter), 7–8

Capecci, John, 167

Critical Insights: Flash Fiction (Cocchiarale and Emmert), 86

Caracciolo, Marco, 15, 34, 41–42, 80, 159–160

Crutzen, Paul J., 1, 27, 93, 145, 146n1

Carr, Nicholas, 76–77, 83, 85

Culler, Jonathan, 150

Carrigan, Anthony, 6n4 Carruth, Allison, 6 Caryatids, The (Sterling), 11 Castro, Pamelyn, 85 Cave, Terrance, 44–46, 50 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 147–150, 158 Chalmers, David, 42–43, 80 chaos, 119–120 Children’s Bible, A (Millet), 161–167 chronotope, 96, 124 Clark, Andy, 42–43, 80–81 Clark, Timothy, 9–10, 18 cli-fi, 5, 24, 37, 50–51, 154, 169 Climate Change and Storytelling (Arnold), 177 Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature (Mehnert), 51

Culture and Imperialism (Said), 52–53 Dahlstrom, Michael, 175, 179–181 Darwin, Charles, 8 Dawson, Paul, 151 Death of the PostHuman (Colebrook), 8 declensionist narrative, 7 Defoe, Daniel, 57 de Geest, Dirk, 38 deictic shift, 125, 125n2, 126, 133, 143 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 6n4, 130 description, narration vs., 110–111, 123 despatialization, 122–128, 130–131, 133, 137–138 Dickens, Charles, 15 Dictionary of Narratology, A (Prince), 30 Didur, Jill, 6n4 Dimaline, Cherie, 104–105

I nde x   •  203

Donald, Merlin, 47–48

fuzzy temporality, 122

duration, narrative, 98, 100–101 Gaiman, Neil, 84 Easterlin, Nancy, 82n3 Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (Clark), 9

Gardens of the Anthropocene (exhibition), 110, 118, 120, 126–128, 136 Garrard, Greg, 7

Edgeworth, Matt, 27

Genette, Gérard, 16, 31, 98–103, 110, 123, 178

effect-event, 108–117

genocide, 2–3

Egan, Jennifer, 84

Geologic Time Scale, 94, 96–108

Eliot, George, 39

Geology of Media, A (Parikka), 78

ellipses, 98–99

Ghosh, Amitav, 12–13, 15–16, 55–56

Emmert, Scott D., 86 emotional understanding, 49 empathy, narrative, 35–36, 48–49 Empathy and the Novel (Keen), 35–36 Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Plumwood), 6 Environmental Humanities (journal), 4, 7 ethnicity, 32, 49

Gibson, James J., 43–44, 50 Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), 26 Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities (DeLoughrey, Didur, and Carrigan), 6n4 Gomel, Elana, 15 Grammaire du Decameron, 29

European colonization, 2

Great Acceleration, 26

evolution, 47

Great Bay, The (Pendall), 18 greenhouse gases, 1–2

farming, 1–2

Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 16, 29

Fast Fiction (Allen), 86

grounds, 125

fictional recentering, 40–41

GSSP. See Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP)

fields of vision, 123–124 Figgins, Kristen, 85 figures, 125 Figuring (Popova), 86–91 flash fiction, 85–86, 91 Flash Fiction (Thomas, Thomas, Hazuka), 86 Flash Fiction Forward (Shapard), 86 Fludernik, Monika, 32, 124, 160, 168 Foote, Kenneth, 124 Forms (Levin), 45–46 François, Anne-Lise, 96n1 Frankenstein (Shelley), 83 French Revolution, The (Stewart), 84 frequency, 101–102

Guariglia, Justin Brice, 118–119 Gymnich, Marion, 32 Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Herman and Vervaeck), 17 Handwerk, Gary, 7 Haraway, Donna, 6n4, 68 Harding, Paul, 160 Hardy, Thomas, 70 Hart, Clarisse, 67 Haven, Kendall, 176n1 Hayles, Katherine, 82–83, 82n3, 83–84 Hazuka, Tom, 86

Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, 6

Hegarty, Antony, 129

“Future Readers: Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene” (Vermeulen), 172–173

Here (McGuire), 135–138

Heise, Ursula, 6–7, 9, 96–99

204  •  I nde x

Herman, David, 15, 19n8, 32–33, 37, 39–41, 109–110, 122, 125–126, 125n2, 168

LeMenager, Stephanie, 11–12, 15–16, 51, 55, 148–149, 159

Herman, Luc, 17, 38

Leopold, Aldo, 74–75

Hernandez III, Joaquin, 170–171

Levin, Caroline, 45–46, 50

heteroglossia, 10, 72

Lewis, Simon L., 2–3, 3n2, 128

Hidden Life of Trees, The (Wohlleben), 72

linguistics, Saussurean, 16

Holocene, 26, 93–95

literary realism, 15–16

Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (Olson), 180

Living to Tell about It (Phelan), 17n7

humanities, blue, 128–129 Hvenegård-Lassen, Kirsten, 74 hyperobjects, 9 ideal narrative audience, 31 I’m With the Bears: Short Stories for a Damaged Planet (McKibben), 126 inconstant we-narration, 150 instability, 119–120, 127–129, 132–133, 135–144 internality, 166–174 Invisible Cities (Calvino), 134 in-world affiliations, 20, 50, 55

Love’s Knowledge (Nussbaum), 17n7 Ludd, John, 84 “Lycidas” (Milton), 129 MaddAddam trilogy, 51 Malafouris, Lambros, 80–81 Mansfield Park (Austen), 20, 53, 58–62 Mapes, Lynda, 66 Marcus, Sharon, 83 Marder, Michael, 72 Marrow Thieves, The (Dimaline), 104–105 Masih, Tara L., 86

Iovino, Serenella, 21, 68–72, 79

Maslin, Mark A., 1–3, 3n2, 128

Jackson, Shelley, 83

materialism: media, 78; new, 68–69

Johns-Putra, Adeline, 51, 95–96, 166

material agency, 68–71, 78–82, 91 material-narrative cognition, 76–82

Jordan, Chris, 129

material narrativity, 69–76

Kafalenos, Emma, 110–111

McEwan, Ian, 11, 13, 20, 62–65, 156

Kalmus, Peter, 182–185 Keen, Suzanne, 18, 35–36, 49, 124 Kelly, Ryan P., 177, 179–180 King, Thomas, 12

material reading, 82–92 McGuire, Richard, 135–138 McHale, Brian, 16 McKibben, Bill, 126, 130–131 McLuhan, Marshall, 77

Klinger, Terrie, 177

media materialism, 78

Kluwick, Ursula, 6n4

Mehnert, Antonia, 51

Knappett, Carl, 80

Menely, Tobias, 3, 18

Kukkonen, Karin, 41–42, 80, 127

Mentz, Steve, 119–120, 128, 130 Merzenich, Michael, 77

Ladino, Jennifer, 187

metalepsis, 72, 167, 169–170, 173

Lanser, Susan, 17, 32

metanarration, 72, 134, 155

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (Scranton), 6n4

Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories (Stern), 86

Lee, Chang-Rae, 156–158

Middlemarch (Eliot), 39–40

Le Guin, Ursula, 6n4

Millet, Lydia, 161–167

I nde x   •  205

Milton, John, 129

neuroplasticity, 77–78

Mitchell, David, 84

New Criticism, 83

Moore, Dinty W., 86

new materialism, 68–69

Morgan, Benjamin, 19

Newton, Adam Zachary, 17n7

Morgan, Mary S., 177

New York 2140 (Robinson), 154–156, 173–174

Morton, Timothy, 8–9, 15

“Night Drinker, The” (Urrea), 170–173 Nixon, Rob, 108–109, 148, 159

Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (Ryan, Foote, and Azaryhua), 124 narration: collectivity and, 156–174; description vs., 110–111, 123; heterodiegetic, 156; inconstant we-, 150; internality and, 166– 174; metanarration, 72, 134, 155; omniscient, 150–156; scene and, 98; stability and, 143–144; summary and, 99–100; we-, 156–166; you, 166–174 narrative, 4–5; affordances and, 43–44; Anthropocene, 6–15; Anthropocene in, 48–65; bare minimum of, 29–30; chronotope and, 96; as climate science, 185–188; climate science and, 175–188; cognitive science and, 32–34, 36; declensionist, 7; defined, 19–20, 19n8, 28–38; ideology and, 16–17; meaning and, 46–47; new materialism and, 68; role of, 6n4, 7; in science communication, 176–182; self-identity and, 46–47; story vs., 176n1; time, 97–98; world and, 38–48; world building and, 14–15, 20 Narrative Discourse (Genette), 98 narrative duration, 98, 100–101 narrative empathy, 35–36, 48–49

nonhumans, 9, 15, 70–73, 81–82 novel, 10–12, 15–16, 55–63 Nünning, Angsar, 17n7 Nussbaum, Martha, 17n7, 48 Olson, Randy, 180–181 omniscient narration, 150–156 “On a Postcolonial Narratology” (Prince), 14 On Such a Full Sea (Lee), 156–158 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 8 Opperman, Serpil, 21, 68–72, 79 order, temporal, 100–101 Oreskes, Naomi, 172–173 Oxfam, 146–147 Parable of the Sower (Butler), 51 Parable of the Talents (Butler), 12 paralipsis, 39 Parikka, Jussi, 78–79 Patchwork Girl (Jackson), 83

Narrative Ethics (Newton), 17n7

patriarchy, 32

narrative gaps, 39, 49, 53–54, 60, 99

pauses, 98

narrative space, 99, 121–127

Pendall, Dale, 18

Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Gomel), 15

Pereira Savi, Meina, 6n4

narrative theory: classical, 29–31; cognitive, 38–39; postclassical, 30–33; rhetorical, 31–32; Theory of Mind and, 35

persuasion, 31 Pflugmacher, Torsten, 110 Phelan, James, 17n7, 19n8, 31, 36–37, 52, 109– 110, 167–168

narrativity, 29–30, 33–35, 46; material, 69–76; site of, 72

Pinker, Steve, 48

narratology, 29, 31

Plumwood, Val, 6, 9

Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (Herman), 15

Popova, Maria, 86–91

Neiminas, Astrid, 129

postcolonialism, 14, 17, 30, 32, 36, 65, 130, 149, 178

Nelles, William, 151

Plant-Thinking (Marder), 72

possible worlds theory, 124–125, 125n1

206  •  I nde x

poverty, 88, 147, 149

self-identity, 46–47

Pratt, Mary Louise, 96

Sesno, Frank, 176

Prince, Gerald, 14, 30, 39

Shakespeare, William, 129

pseudo-singular, 102–108, 111

Shapard, Robert, 86 Shelley, Mary, 83

Quaternary period, 27 Rabinowitz, Peter, 31 Rademacher, Tim, 66–67 reading: in cognitive science, 34; contrapuntal, 52–55; material, 82–92; neural circuitry and, 77 realism, literary, 15–16 Rensin, Emmett, 84 replication, 49–50 Return of the Native, The (Hardy), 70 rhetorical narrative theory, 31–32 Richardson, Brian, 173 Richter, Daniel deB., 7–8 “Right Sort, The” (Mitchell), 84 Rise of the Novel, The (Watt), 56 Road to Corlay, The (Cowper), 11 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 24, 51, 58, 154–156, 173–174 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 57 Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, The (Masih), 86 Roth, Henry, 70 Royle, Nicholas, 86 Ruddiman, William F., 1–2 Russo, Richard, 151–153 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 40–41, 124–125, 125n1, 177 Said, Edward, 52–55, 65

Shock of the Anthropocene, The (Bonneuil and Fressoz), 6, 152 Slovic, Scott, 129 slow violence, 108–117 Solar (McEwan), 11, 20, 62–65, 156 Solastalgia (Vitaglione), 130–134 Solomon, Rivers, 106–107 “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” (Berthelme), 160 space: as characterization, 60–61; deictic shift and, 125; despatialization, 122–128, 130– 131, 133, 137–138; despatialization and, 122–127; fields of vision and, 123–124; figures and, 125; future, 119; grounds and, 125; narrative, 121–122; narrative spatialization and, 124–126, 125n2; possible worlds theory and, 124–125, 125n1; stable, 123–127; water and, 127–134; worldbuilding and, 120–121; zones of action and, 123–124 Stanzel, F. K., 29 Station Eleven (St. John Mandel), 12 Steinbeck, John, 152 Sterling, Bruce, 11 Stern, Jerome, 86 Stewart, Matt, 84 St. John Mandel, Emily, 12 Stoermer, Eugene F., 1, 27, 93, 145, 146n1 Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Cohen), 73 Story Proof: The Science Behind the Starting Power of Story (Haven), 176n1

Sand County Almanac, The (Leopold), 74–75

storyworld: fictional recentering of, 40–41; space and, 121

Saussurean linguistics, 16

subjectivity, 41, 157

scene, 98

Sudden Stories (Moore), 86

Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew, 51–52

summary, 99–100

science communication, 176–182

Supersizing the Mind (Clark), 80

“Science Fiction and the Timescales of the Anthropocene” (Heise), 96

Tanner, Tony, 58–59

Scranton, Roy, 6n4

Taylor, Jesse Oak, 3, 18–19, 58

Sea in the Summer, The (Turner), 11

Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 129

I nde x   •  207

temporal order, 100–101

Vermeulen, Pieter, 172–173

Theory of Mind (ToM), 35, 48–49

Vermuele, Blakely, 48

Thiel, Tamiko, 118

Vervaeck, Bart, 17, 38

Thinking with Literature (Cave), 44

violence, slow, 108–117

Thomas, Denise, 86

Viramontes, Helena María, 112–117

Thomas, James, 86

Vitaglione, Marina, 130–135

time: analepsis and, 100–101; Anthropocene and, 93–96; chronotope and, 96; effectevent and, 108–117; ellipses and, 98–99; frequency and, 101–102; fuzzy temporality and, 122; Geologic Time Scale, 94, 96–108; narrative, 97–98; narrative duration and, 98; pauses and, 98; pseudosingular and, 102–104, 111; slow violence and, 108–117; summary and, 99–100 “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” (Atwood), 169–170, 173 Tinkers (Harding), 160 Todorov, Tzvetan, 16, 29 “Toward a Theory of Space in Narrative” (Zoran), 123–124 Trexler, Adam, 10–12, 15–16, 51, 55, 58 Turner, George, 11 Twitter, 66–67 Twitterature, 84–85

water, 127–134 Watt, Ian, 56–57 Watt, James, 1 Weik von Mossner, Alexa, 18–19 Wheeler, Wendy, 72 Why We Read Fiction (Zunshine), 35 Wilke, Sabine, 7 Wind-Up Girl, The (Bacigalupi), 11 Witness Tree, 66–68 Witness Tree (Mapes), 66 Wohlleben, Peter, 72 worldbuilding, 14–15, 20, 28, 36–37; affordances and, 46; arrogance and, 151–152; as feedback loop, 50; narrative as, 41–42, 52; space and, 120–121 World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Brooks), 172–173

Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes), 112–117 “Ungiving Time: Reading Lyric by the Light of the Anthropocene” (François), 96n1

You Have Time For This (Budman and Hazuka), 86

Unkindness of Ghosts, An (Solomon), 106–107

you-narration, 166–174

unnarratable, 39–40, 52, 71n1 Urrea, Luis Alberto, 170–173

zones of action, 123–124 Zoran, Gabriel, 123–124

VanderMeer, Jeff, 138–144, 169

Zunshine, Lisa, 18, 35, 48

T H E O R Y A N D I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F N A R R AT I V E JAMES PHELAN, K ATRA BYRAM, AND FAYE HALPERN, SERIES EDITORS R O B Y N WA R H O L A N D P E T E R R A B I N O W I T Z , F O U N D I N G E D I T O R S E M E R I T I

Because the series editors believe that the most significant work in narrative studies today contributes both to our knowledge of specific narratives and to our understanding of narrative in general, studies in the series typically offer interpretations of individual narratives and address significant theoretical issues underlying those interpretations. The series does not privilege one critical perspective but is open to work from any strong theoretical position. Narrative in the Anthropocene by Erin James Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics by Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition by Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis by Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel by Alexandra Valint Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology edited by John Pier We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction by Natalya Bekhta Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative by Matthew Clark and James Phelan Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology edited by Erin James and Eric Morel Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges edited by Jan Alber and Brian Richardson A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives by Brian Richardson Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory by Daniel Punday Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction by Elizabeth Alsop Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives edited by Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh Novelization: From Film to Novel by Jan Baetens Reading Conrad by J. Hillis Miller, Edited by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States edited by James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative by James Phelan Media of Serial Narrative edited by Frank Kelleter Suture and Narrative: Deep Intersubjectivity in Fiction and Film by George Butte The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature by Gary Weissman Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy by Kelly A. Marsh

Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice by Brian Richardson Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature by Katra A. Byram Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction by Kai Mikkonen The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Film by Jeremy Hawthorn Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination by Suzanne Keen The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction by Paul Dawson Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form by Katherine Saunders Nash Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable by H. Porter Abbott A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art by Patrick Colm Hogan An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany by Claudia Breger Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga by Laura Green Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future edited by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan The Vitality of Allegory: Figural Narrative in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Gary Johnson Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel edited by Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Essays by Ralph W. Rader edited by James Phelan and David H. Richter The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation by Eric L. Berlatsky Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading edited by Jakob Lothe, Beatrice Sandberg, and Ronald Speirs Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self by Matthew Clark Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy by Kay Young Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose by Karen R. Lawrence Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission by Leona Toker Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives by V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem by Monique R. Morgan

Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity by Patrick Colm Hogan Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, James Phelan The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction by Richard Walsh Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative by James Phelan Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Brian Richardson Narrative Causalities by Emma Kafalenos Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel by Lisa Zunshine I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie by George Butte Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject by Elana Gomel Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure by Deborah A. Martinsen Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms by Robyn R. Warhol Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction by Ellen Peel Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture by Elizabeth Langland Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames edited by Brian Richardson Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject by Debra Malina Invisible Author: Last Essays by Christine Brooke-Rose Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy by Kay Young Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis edited by David Herman Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation by Peter J. Rabinowitz Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge by Daniel W. Lehman The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel by David H. Richter A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology by James Phelan Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm by Jerome Beaty Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Lois Tyson Understanding Narrative edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel by Amy Mandelker Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel by Robyn R. Warhol Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative by James Phelan