KNOWING GENRE, KNOWING NATURE? ECONARRATOLOGY, GENRE AND CLIMATE FICTION Astrid Bracke University of Amsterdam

(I presented this paper at the 2015 ASLE-UKI conference in Cambridge, on September 2nd 2015)

Today, I want to talk about how genres shape representations of nature. I'll explore the narratological mechanics of genre as a significant part of narrating environmental crisis. I will focus on narrative worldmaking as central to genre and to depictions of the Anthropocene. I will discuss this is in relation to two works of climate fiction: Barbara Kingsolver's 2012 novel Flight Behaviour and

Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow, published in 2013.

Although little work has been done on ecocriticism and narratology, there are a few exceptions. Erin James has coined the term "econarratology" in her book The Storyworld Accord. She is also putting together Ecocriticism and

Narrative Theory with Eric Morel, in which a longer version of this paper will appear. [SLIDE 2] Econarratology "embraces the key concerns of each of its parent discourses – it maintains an interest in studying the relationship between literature and the physical environment, but does so with sensitivity to the literary structures and devices that we use to communicate representations of the physical environment to each other via narratives" (23). Similarly, the study of genre isn't wholly alien to ecocriticism. In many ways, genre is central to ecocriticism which in its early stages was concerned explicitly with recuperating the genre of nature writing. And many contemporary ecocritics as well – such as

Richard Kerridge, Ursula Kluwick and earlier, Joseph Meeker – have explored in depth which genres may be most effectual in communicating environmental crisis. Yet ecocritical explorations of how genre works, and how it influences our

1 depictions of nature are rare. In fact, the only example of a reading that comes close to this is Adeline Johns-Putra's discussion of genres as ecological systems in her discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital trilogy. A lot of work, though, remains to be done in both econarratology, ecocriticism and genre, and combinations of the two.

An econarratological approach to genre does two things. Firstly, it leads to a more thorough understanding of a genre and its mechanics. Secondly, it enables a more thorough reading of the text, and consequently a fuller understanding of how narratological elements shape depictions of nature.

My focus today will be on climate fiction – or cli-fi – although the idea of course is that my approach can be applied to a much wider variety of genres.

Climate fiction is an interesting case study because it is quite a popular genre, and it holds a lot of potential in terms of communicating contemporary climate change. At the same time, it taps into an older tradition of ecodystopian and apocalyptic literature.1 Yet cli-fi has been defined primarily in terms of its content and thematics, rather than in terms of its narratological and formal features. The term cli-fi became very popular in the spring of 2013, following an

NPR report on Nathaniel Rich's novel Odds Against Tomorrow. The New Yorker,

The Guardian and other publications picked up on the term. Most of these articles suggest that cli-fi refers to "novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter" (Evancie par. 6).

Husna Haq has distinguished cli-fi from science fiction by arguing that it

1 See Adam Trexler's introduction in Anthropocene Fictions. Frederick Buell provides a discussion of twentieth-century dystopian and apocalyptic fiction in From Apocalypse to Way of Life.

2 "describes a dystopian present, as opposed to a dystopian future, and it isn’t non- fiction or even science fiction: cli-fi is about literary fiction" (par. 9).

Adam Trexler's recent book Anthropocene Fictions is the first extensive study of what we could call climate fiction. Although he prefers the term

"Anthropocene" to "climate change" novels, 2 Trexler's descriptions of

Anthropocene fictions can be extended to include climate fiction: [SLIDE 3] "To date, nearly all Anthropocene fiction addresses the historical tension between the existence of catastrophic global warming and the failed obligation to act.

Under these conditions, fiction offered a medium to explain, predict, implore, and lament" (9). All these definitions focus on shared thematics – environmental chaos, global warming – and barely on narratological features, such as setting, characterization, focalization, register. What narratologists calls "worldmaking" remains unexplored, while is it, as I'll discuss today, central to an econarratological understanding of the genre.

Worldmaking refers to both the ways in which the textual world is created, and in turn, how we are able to make sense of it. In Herman's words, the term encapsulates both [SLIDE 4] "how narrative designs prompt the construction – enable the exploration – of different sorts of storyworlds" and

"how the process of building storyworlds in turn scaffolds a variety of sense- making activities" (Storytelling x). The worldmaking possibilities of narratives tie in with the concept of the storyworld, [SLIDE 5] a "mental model of context and environment within which a narrative's characters function and to which readers transport themselves as they read narratives" (James 253). Storyworlds

2 He prefers the term 'Anthropocene' to climate science because "it may help to move beyond the narrow questions of truth and falsity with regard to climate science" (4).

3 enable readers to travel from the actual world to the textual world, to gain access to it and understand it. Interestingly, genre studies scholars generally understand genre to work in a similar way – although as far as I know, the term worldmaking has not been used in genre studies. Genres do not only help us to understand a text, they also help us make sense of the world by framing our perceptions and experiences. As John Frow has suggested, genres provide

"discursive maps of the world" (1633).

How we travel from our own world into the world of narrative, and how we achieve this act of worldmaking, depends largely on what Marie-Laure Ryan has called the principle of minimal departure. As she argues, [SLIDE 6] "we construe the central world of a textual universe … as conforming as far as possible to our representation of AW [the actual or real world]. We will project upon these worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text" (Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and

Narrative Theory 51). We use our own world and environment as a starting point for our understanding of the narrative's world (Possible Worlds, Artificial

Intelligence and Narrative Theory 51). Stories provide us with a lot of cues that help us understand their world: objects in the narrative will help us establish in what time the story is set – are there iPads or not? – and cues about cultural and social relations help us understand how close this world is to our own. Ryan has grouped these cues into nine different categories which she calls accessibility relations. Accessibility relations are [SLIDE 7] "trans-universe relations" that function as "the airline through which the sender reaches the world at the center of the textual universe" ("Possible Worlds" 558). They provide us with the cues

4 that help us understand the story's world as similar to, or different from, our own world.

Ryan has usefully linked these accessibility relations to genres.

Accessibility relations are key to defining and understanding cli-fi, a genre with which Ryan – writing in the early 1990s – was not concerned. Indeed, I'd argue that the success of climate fiction relies on the difference between the actual world and textual world being as small as possible, yet big enough nonetheless to recognize that the textual world is not wholly the same as the actual world.

Compared to science fiction, then, - which Ryan does include in her typology – cli-fi scores positively on more accessibility relations, most significantly on the one Ryan terms the chronology compatibility of the textual world and the real world. If the textual world is set in the future, accessing it becomes more difficult for readers, as they are not familiar with it. Yet while works of science fiction are arguably set in the future – which allows them the temporal distance to speculate about the future of humanity – a key element of climate fiction is that its setting is so close to the present as to make the future and the present nearly indistinguishable.

Expanding on Ryan's principle of minimal departure, I'd suggest that successful climate fiction – works that really confront us with life in the

Anthropocene – puts the reader through a two-step process taking us from our world into the textual world. Cli-fi depends on first depicting a world that is very close to our actual world, providing cues that give us little reason to suspect that circumstances and developments might be different. Next, however, this familiar world is extended into the unfamiliar, generally without the narrator stepping in to explicitly guide the reader in navigating this new space. What happens is a lot

5 like the myth of the frog who, placed in cold water and slowly boiled, does not jump out as its environment has changed so gradually and imperceptibly.

Cli-fi is at its most successful when the first and second step can be barely told apart. Both Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour and Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow achieve in combining the real world and the textual world in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to tell apart what is real in the actual world, and what is happening in the textual world. The effect of the process is that it reflects something of the epistemological uncertainty that climate crisis is about: unpredictable, full of known and unknown qualities.

[SLIDE 8] The recognizable, actual world in Flight Behaviour depicts

Dellarobia Turnbow, living with her husband and two young children on a struggling farm in rural Tennessee. The narrative provides several clues to emphasize that Flight Behaviour is set in a world very close, or identical, to our actual world: Dellarobia's husband Cub makes a joke about Al Gore (360), references are made to Iraq and terrorism (62), and towards the end of the novel the radio tells us about "[s]omething beyond terrible in Japan, fire and flood"

(591) that likely refers to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Similar cues are provided in Odds Against Tomorrow, in which Mitchell Zukor – a disaster specialist – comes to work for FutureWorld, a company that calculates the risk of everything from disease to terrorism to large-scale environmental collapse. This novel as well is set at a roughly contemporary time: the characters refer to the

9/11 attacks at the beginning of the century as an event in recent human memory and recall that Hurricane Sandy (2012) happened just a few years ago.

Of the two, Kingsolver's novel is the one that is most subtle in expanding the real world known to the reader into a more unknown, yet still familiar,

6 textual world. The arrival of the thousands of monarch butterflies is the clearest cue that something fundamental is changing. Although monarch butterflies are increasingly threatened, the scale that is depicted in Flight Behaviour has not yet occurred in the actual world.

While to some readers Flight Behaviour may seem realistic fiction, the step between the actual world and the textual world is slightly bigger in Odds

Against Tomorrow. Yet it too skilfully blurs the boundaries between the actual and textual in a number of ways. Moreover, the fictional events it depicts are generally close enough to real events and the actual world to be plausible and recognizable. One of these is the Puget Sound earthquake that devastates Seattle in the early pages of the novel. While – still – fictional, the chances of an earthquake happening near Seattle are considerable – experts believe that there is a 10 per cent chance of an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.7 to 9.2 striking the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the Pacific Northwest in the next fifty years.3

Furthermore, the actual disaster that the novel revolves around, Hurricane

Tammy, is eerily recognizable. Hurricane Tammy is a category 2 hurricane and is described in similar ways to Hurricane Sandy, a category 1 hurricane that hit the eastern United States in October 2012.

Odds Against Tomorrow is at its most successful when the reader is unsure whether what they are reading is fact or fiction, and hence whether events like Hurricane Tammy are quite as fictional as we'd like. Two instances illustrate this particularly well – both containing fact and fiction that cannot be told apart unless the reader knows more about them. In order to predict

3 See Kathryn Schulz's articles on "the Big One", and this chart of activity on the Cascadia Subduction Zone: http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Schulz-The-Big- One-Map-41.png

7 disasters as adequately as possible, Mitchell reads up on reports and articles.

One day he receives a report from the World Health Organization titled “Dengue and Hemorrhagic Fever: An Emerging Public Health Threat in the United States,” a file containing new telemetric readings of unusual growth activity in

Yellowstone park, and an article from Nature titled “Recent Contributions of

Glaciers and Ice Caps to Sea Level Rise" (65) in the mail. While the first report does not exist, and the alert level for the Yellowstone volcano is currently

"normal", the article on rising sea levels exists and was published in 2012 in

Nature.4 A similar example is the heatwave that Mitchell mentions in the months before Hurricane Tammy, with temperatures reaching 102F. Over the past years,

New York has experienced several very hot summers, including the one in July

2012 – some months before Hurricane Sandy. While temperatures in New York remained below 100 degrees Fahrenheit,5 the fictional heatwave may well be confused with an actual heatwave. These kinds of combinations, in which the reader can never at first glance determine what is true in the actual world and what only exists in the textual world, destabilize the boundary between the two worlds and challenges our knowledge and sense of certainty. By playing with the principle of minimal departure in this sense, the narrative engages in act of worldmaking in which fiction is nearly undistinguishable from what we know – or think we know – of our present world.

In Flight Behaviour, this confusion between the actual world and the fictional world is more subtle. While this means that events of the scale depicted in Odds Against Tomorrow do not occur, it also makes it more difficult to

4 The Volcano Alert Level can be found on the website of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. Accessed 28 July 2015. 5 See this graph of temperatures in New York in 2012: https://www.climatestations.com/images/stories/new-york/ny2012.gif

8 determine for the reader whether the world in the novel is really so different from the actual world, and whether we are not already experiencing the level of crisis that is fictionalized here. An example is when the scientist in the novel describes of droughts in Australia: "Walls of flames … [t]raversing the land like freight trains, fed by dead trees and desiccated soil. In Victoria hundreds of people burned to death in one month, so many their prime minister called it hell on earth. This has not happened before. There is not an evacuation plan" (385).

Although between 1997 and 2009 Australia indeed faced the worst droughts in recorded history, the apocalyptic scenario sketched here has not (yet) taken place. In another instance, though, the actual world has – eerily – caught up with the fictional world. Explaining to Dellarobia that the maximum of carbon molecules the atmosphere can hold while maintaining normal thermal balance is

350 parts per million, the scientist tells her that in the textual world of the novel, that figure has risen to 390. In July 2015, that number was up to 401.3 – making life stranger than fiction.6

[SLIDE 9] Climate fiction, then, is about more than just depictions of what a world in crisis looks like. Its force – and potential in terms of affecting cultural change – lies in the genre's mechanics, and especially its utilization of worldmaking strategies. Key to these is cli-fi's use of the principle of minimal departure to stretch the reader's actual world to encompass the possibilities the textual world suggests. While worldmaking is perhaps the most logical, and probably most productive, entry point into an econarratological exploration of climate fiction as genre, it is certainly not the only way. As I said earlier, its use of focalization and narrative perspective is another avenue to explore. Of course,

6 http://co2now.org/ Accessed 14 August 2015.

9 the possibilities of an econarratological approach to genre go beyond climate fiction, or indeed genre fiction in general. Environmental crisis is both one of the most pertinent contemporary problems, as well as one of the most dominant narratives of the early twenty-first century. How we tell this story, which narratives and genres we choose, is a vital part of how we respond to it.

[NOTE THAT PAPER + SOURCES ARE ON WEBSITE]

Works cited Bracke, Astrid. "Worldmaking the Anthropocene: Climate fiction, econarratology and genre" forthcoming in James and Morel, eds. CO2Now.org. n.d. Web. 14 August 2015. Evancie, Angela. "So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre?". NPR. 20 April 2013. Web. 14 August 2015. Frow, John. "'Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need': Genre Theory

10 Today." PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1626-1634. Print. Glass, Rodge. "Global Warming: the Rise of 'Cli-Fi'". The Guardian. 31 May 2013. Web. 14 August 2015. Haq, Husna. "Climate Change Inspires a New Literary Science". Christian Science Monitor. 26 April 2013. Web. 14 August 2015. Herman, David. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Print. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord. Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Print. James, Erin and Eric Morel, eds. Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: Essays at a Critical Confluence. Forthcoming. Johns-Putra, Adeline. "Ecocriticism, Genre, and Climate Change: Reading the Utopian Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy". English Studies 91.7 (November 2010): 744-760. Print. Kerridge, Richard. "Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality". The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Ed. Greg Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 361-376. Print. Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behaviour. 2012. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. Print. Kluwick, Ursula. "Talking about Climate Change: The Ecological Crisis and Narrative Form". The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Ed. Greg Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 502-516. Print. Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974. Print. "New York Central Park Daily Maximum/Minimum Temperatures for 2012". Climatestations.com. n.d. Web. 14 August 2015. Pyrhönen, Heta. "Genre". The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 109-124. Print. Rich, Nathaniel. Odds Against Tomorrow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Print. Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure". Poetics 9 (1980): 403-422. Print. ---. "Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction". Poetics Today 12.3 (1991): 553-576. Print. ---. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Print.

11 Schulz, Kathryn. "The Really Big One". The New Yorker. 20 July 2015. Web. 14 August 2015. ---. "How to Stay Safe When the Big One Comes". The New Yorker. 28 July 2015. Web. 14 August 2015. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Print. Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. n.d. Web. 14 August 2015.

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