Contemporary Australian Novels and Crises of Ecologies by David S
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Contemporary Australian Novels and Crises of Ecologies by David S Harris Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University June 2017 For Vera & Ray “One is always the index of a multiplicity: an event, a singularity, a life…” (Gilles Deleuze) Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 2 Chapter 1 – Crises of Ecologies .............................................................. 13 Chapter 2 – Literary Hopes and Delusions .............................................. 50 Chapter 3 – Other Trajectories ................................................................ 73 Chapter 4 - Tim Winton’s Eyrie .............................................................. 118 Chapter 5 – Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book ......................................... 187 Chapter 6 – Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster ....................................... 262 Conclusion ............................................................................................. 330 References ............................................................................................ 343 Abstract This thesis is concerned with what contemporary Australian novels can do amid Crises of Ecologies. Crises of Ecologies involve the entanglements of climate change, mass extinction, planetary degradation and capitalism with crises of agency and of subjectivity: Indigenous and non-indigenous; human and non-and-more-than-human. To conceptualise literary practices for Crises of Ecologies, I draw upon Deleuzo-Guattarian and New Materialist ontologies, epistemologies and ethics, their comportments towards ecology, sense, and Crises of Ecologies, and the literary practices towards which they already gesture. I focus upon three intensive literary practices: writing the posthuman, writing affect and becomings, and minor literature. I argue that these practices carry potentials to cultivate our sensuous attunements to our critical states of affairs (our ecological sense) and to enhance our capacities to relate, resist and renew amid them (our powers of acting, or living). I explore these literary practices and their capacities for transformation via three contemporary Australian novels: Tim Winton’s Eyrie (2013), Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), and Janette Turner Hospital’s Oyster (1996). 1 Introduction There is no return to nature, but only a political problem of the collective soul, the connections of which a society is capable, the flows it supports, invents, leaves alone, or does away with. (Deleuze, 1997, p. 52) This thesis is concerned with contemporary Australian novels’ work amid Crises of Ecologies. Drawing upon Deleuzo-Guattarian and New Materialist thought to conceptualise what literature can do, I pursue intensive1 trajectories for “the socio-political functions of literature and its reception” (Clark, 2015, p. 190). I do not propose that literature will solve our collective “wicked” problems (Morton, 2016, pp. 36-37), nor offer ways out. Rather, I conceptualise intensive literary practices that carry potentials to cultivate sensuous attunements to our critical states of affairs (our ecological sense) and enhance capacities to relate, resist and renew amid them (our powers of acting, or living (Deleuze, 1988b)). I offer studies of three contemporary Australian novels that inform and enrich these initial conceptualisations and affirm their potentials. This introduction expands on this work and the thesis structure, and addresses matters of scope. 1 For Deleuze (1994, p. 222), intensity shapes relations and transformations; the intensive field is the home of sense, experience and the source of thought. 2 In Chapter 1, I observe that we are entangled in Crises of Ecologies: global warming; mass extinction; planetary degradation; crises of agency and subjectivity; and, in Australia, though not only here, long-running annihilations of Indigenous peoples and country. Capitalism and colonialism, and we too, are agents of these crises. Some of us fear there are no ways out: no unproblematic technological-scientific, commercial, or government solutions; no cures; only chronic continuance for humans and non-and-more-than-humans.2 I map these Crises via a survey of thirty-two Australian novels published since the 1980s. This knotted-together contextualisation-cum-literary critique serves also to temper reservations expressed publicly about the degree of engagement by contemporary Australian novelists with these Crises, but it does not answer questions as to the efficacy of that engagement. In Chapter 2, I consider efficacy: the contemporary academy’s hopes for literature’s affirmative work amid Crises of Ecologies, and challenges to these hopes. Current critical thought on the work of literature in this context is as vibrantly unresolved as the Crises with which it engages. It is possible, though, to discern shared hopes that literature can critique and re-constitute our conceptions, perceptions, representations and imaginaries: of the Human, of Life/ecology, of Being(s), and of relations. There are also common expectations that literature can reorient ethics and enhance our capacities to adapt to, mitigate, reverse, or avoid, the impacts of Crises of 2 I use ‘non-and-more-than-human’ to indicate that non-human Life (organic and otherwise) is not lesser than the human and should not be viewed anthropocentrically, and to help differentiate this idea from uses of the Deleuzian (1983) concept of the nonhuman (impersonal desire, forces and flows). 3 Ecologies. However, there are also acknowledgements of the perceptual and representational complexities associated with ecological writing and literary efficacy amid these entangled, disruptive, and deranging Crises (Clark, 2012, 2015; Morton, 2007b, 2010b, 2013a, 2016). As one response to these issues, I explore the potentials of intensive literary practices. In Chapter 3, I conceptualise literary practices that carry potentials to cultivate ecological sense and enhance our powers of living. To do this, I embrace what I will refer to as Deleuzo-Guattarian New Materialist3 comportments towards ecology, sense, and Crises of Ecologies, and the literary practices towards which they gesture. I begin by thinking ecology (or Life) and sense differently. We can conceptualise and perceive Life as processual, relational, and immanent. Life involves dynamic, varying productions and syntheses of lives—individuations (Deleuze, 2004, p. 86) –via intensive relations between bodies,4 not the transcendentally pre-determined relations and productions of prior beings (presumed to include identities, organisms, subjects, signs). While we might commonly consider Life as stratified and patterned, it is also capable of de-stratification, lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3),5 and new connections: indeed, for Deleuze, “creativity comes first, then routinization” (Protevi, 2012, p. 250). Humans are not separate from Life (or 3 I do not claim New Materialist thought for Deleuze. This terminology is shorthand for the fruitful transversal relations/resonances between Deleuzian, Guattarian and New Materialist thought. 4 These are not only human bodies but all corporeal and incorporeal phenomena entering into and arising from relations. 5 Lines of flight are trajectories taken, entailing changes in nature and capacities, the forming of new connections, and entries into new dimensions of existence with new potentials. 4 Nature). Life is not anthropocentric. Rather, Life’s always collective productions occur across entangled physical, biological, psychical, and social registers, and (re)constitute worlds populated by “beings of totally different scales and kingdoms” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 238). Embracing this onto-epistemology opens us up to new Life practices amid “a field of new connections, creative and novel becomings that will give one new patterns and triggers of behaviour” (Protevi, 2012, p. 258). Ecology involves questions of what bodies can do and become amid forces working to limit the answers. In this thesis, I also adopt relational and processual conceptualisations of sense, as our trans-faculty attunements to the universal and irreducibly intricate relational field (Poxon & Stivale, 2014, p. 73) in which Life’s productions arise. Sense is not bound to judgement or orthodoxy (common or good sense (Deleuze, 1994, p. 33)), nor to a thing’s referential function (Williams, 2008). Sense has to do with what passes between relating bodies, how their powers of living vary, and their perceptions of those encounters and variations (Deleuze, 1997, p. 25). A process ontology that focuses upon affects—bodies’ capacities to have intensive effects upon each other, and their experience of those effects (Deleuze, 1988b)—is not circumscribed by reason. Sense becomes thinking-feeling (Massumi, 2015, p. xi): “thinking is not a natural exercise but always a second power of thought, born under the constraint of experience as a material power, a force” (Semetsky, 2005, p. 90). Thinking expands to enfold all faculties, challenging their limits (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 137 - 146), and allowing for their transformations. New sensations are experienced that cannot be reliably 5 articulated or categorised but are real nonetheless. Sense, then, has to do with an awareness of the particularity of encounters rather