Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism By
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism by Emily Arvay Bachelor of Arts (Honours), Queen’s University, 2004 Master of Arts, University of Toronto, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English ã Emily Arvay, 2019 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. ii Supervisory Committee Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism by Emily Arvay Bachelor of Arts (Honours), Queen’s University, 2004 Master of Arts, University of Toronto, 2007 Supervisory Committee Dr. Christopher Douglas, Supervisor Department of English Dr. Nicholas Bradley, Department Member Department of English Dr. Helga Thorson, Outside Member Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies iii Abstract This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. iv Keywords: David Mitchell, Will Self, Jeanette Winterson, Jared Diamond, twenty-first- century British fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, climate fiction, ecofiction, Anthropocene fiction, ruined island, ecocriticism, environmental materialism, literary metamodernism. Supervisory Committee Dr. Christopher Douglas, Supervisor Department of English Dr. Nicholas Bradley, Department Member Department of English Dr. Helga Thorson, Outside Member Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies v Table of Contents Supervisory Committee…………………………………………………………..…….ii Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………..iii Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………....v Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………...vii Introduction: Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism….........1 0.1 Ghost of a Climate-Changed Future …………………………………….........1 0.2 A Planetary Archipelago…………………………………………………......15 0.3 Machine. Unexpectedly, I Had Invented a Time-……………………………24 0.4 Fiction as a Medium …………………………………………………………34 0.5 In the Ruins of the Future……………………………………………………38 0.6 Chapter Summaries………………………………………………………......46 Chapter One: Fatalism and Petro-Apocalypse in Self’s The Book of Dave…………...52 1.1 The Recent Past as a Distant Future……………………………………........52 1.2 A Pair of Grotesque Mirrors That Reflect Nothing………………………….56 1.3 Island on the Edge of the World…………………………………………….60 1.4 Gaslighting: Vested Interest and Technological Necessity………………….63 1.5 Millennial Hampstead as Postdiluvial Hiort……………………………........68 1.6 MacLeod, MacRaild, MacKay, and MacKenzie: Ho My Fulmar……….......72 1.7 Ham’s Moto as Hiort’s Fulmar…………………………………………........78 1.8 Ham’s Absent Fathers: Loyah MacLeod and Hack MacRaild…………........80 1.9 Ham’s Abusive Fathers: Guvnor Ferguson and Dryva MacKay…………….84 1.10 Phármakon: Ham’s Poison as Hiort’s Cure…………………………….......88 1.11 Ham’s False Fathers: Geezer MacKenzie and Flyer Buchan…………........91 1.12 A Shrinking World………………………………………………………….95 1.13 Am Parbh: A Turning Point…………………………………………….....100 1.14 Self’s Ham and Mitchell’s Ha-Why………………………………………101 vi Chapter Two: How Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas Dismantles the Future……...…………..103 2.1 Society Islands……………………………………………………………...103 2.2 This Elastic Moment………………………………………………………..107 2.3 The Painstaking Reconstruction of a Lost World………………………......109 2.4 No Smilesome Yarnie……………………………………………………....112 2.5 An Eyrie So Desolate……………………………………………………….115 2.6 The Holy Mist’ry o’ the ‘Civ’lized Days………………………………...…122 2.7 The Hardest of Worlds……………………………………………………...127 2.8 When How Runs Deeper Than What.……………………………………....130 2.9 No Man is an Island, Entire of Itself……………………………………......135 2.10 Gravid with the Ancient Future……………………………………….…..138 2.11 All Boundaries Are Conventions………………………………………….146 2.12 Somewhere and Somewhen…………………………………………….....150 2.13 So the Story Goes………………………………………………………….152 Chapter Three: Ecocide and Originary Return in Winterson’s The Stone Gods……….154 3.1 Everything is Imprinted Forever………………………………………........154 3.2 The Universe in a Nutshell…………………………………………………169 3.3 Shadow of the Valley of Death…………………………………………......177 3.4 A Floating Mirror…………………………………………...……………....181 3.5 Terra Australis Incognita………………………………………………………....189 3.6 A Net to Catch the World………………………………………………......191 3.7 This is One Story. There will be Another………………………………......199 3.8 Loose-Tied Sack of Folly…………………………………………………...200 Conclusion: The Future of British Metamodernist Cli-Fi……………………………....203 4.1 Sooner or Later……………..……………………………………………....203 4.2 This Scepter'd Isle…………………………………………………………..207 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………....217 vii Acknowledgments In the near decade that it has taken me to complete this dissertation, I have been fortunate to have both superb readers as well as supportive family and friends. I would therefore like to extend my thanks to my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Christopher Douglas, whose kindness and patience is rivalled only by his intellect. I would like also to express my gratitude to Dr. Nicholas Bradley and Dr. Helga Thorson for their thoughtful suggestions for how to improve upon this work now and in the near-future. Moreover, I would like to thank Dr. Alison Gibbons in advance for her time and feedback. I have long admired your scholarship and consider myself lucky to have you for an external reader. More broadly, I would like to acknowledge the ongoing support of Dr. Stephen Ross and Dr. Erin Kelly who, on various occasions, offered sage advice. Relatedly, I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. David Oswald and Dr. Tim Personn for their assistance, encouragement, and general good cheer. I would also like to thank my longstanding Write Club companion, Amy Tang, whose dedication often inspired me to work harder. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the small village of people who were instrumental in allowing me to complete this work. I would like to thank Dr. Sarah van Vugt for her keen eye and generosity. I would like to thank Dr. Michael Lukas for keeping me well fed and in good spirits. I would like to thank my children, June and Caspar, for reminding me of wonder and unexpected treasure. I would like to thank my father, Joe Arvay, for instilling in me both a love of islands and a love of books. Last of all, I would like to thank my mother, Marla Buchanan, for all and for everything: this dissertation is dedicated to you Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism “Those who cannot remember their past are condemned to repeat it.”1 “Those who do not understand their history are doomed to repeat it.”2 “Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it, [to] be generous enough to bridge abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away […] Without this kind of imagination, which is actually understanding, we would never be able to take our bearings in the world.”3 0.1 “Ghost of a Climate-Changed Future”4 In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), Scottish journalist