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Threshold Thinking: Environmental Limits and Literary World-Making

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Threshold Thinking: Environmental Limits and Literary World-Making Threshold Thinking: Environmental Limits and Literary World-Making Austin Travis Hetrick Fort Wayne, Indiana B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010 M.A., University of Virginia, 2015 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Virginia July, 2018 II Table of Contents Abstract III Acknowledgments IV 1. Introduction 1 A Brief History of Environmental Limits 10 Threshold Thinking and Literary World-Making 26 In the Field 31 Outline of the Dissertation 36 2. Chapter 1: Less is More: Human Needs in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf 39 3. Chapter 2: Global Environmentalism, Difference, and Shortage in Two Apartheid Fictions 80 4. Chapter 3: Feeling Small: Affect and Environmental Limits in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance 122 5. Coda: Over the Edge (and Back Again) 156 Works Cited 161 III Abstract As Earth’s finitude and fragility became increasingly clear in the twentieth century, literary authors centered their work on environmental thresholds, verges and brinks that augured dramatic transformation. Tracing this distinct form of environmental imagination through a selection of modern and contemporary Anglophone literature, “Threshold Thinking: Environmental Limits and Literary World-Making” establishes that the problem of environmental boundaries must be understood not merely as technical or scientific, but also as a narrative, rhetorical, and affective phenomenon, one which can be usefully approached by the humanities. While scientists and theorists have long warned of impending biophysical limits like inadequate farmland, rapidly filling atmospheric sinks, and depleted oil reserves, this project connects those empirical accounts with their cultural and aesthetic formulations, and shows how the era’s literature and science share imaginative, narrative, and rhetorical DNA. Through readings of work by George Orwell, M.F.K. Fisher, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and Rohinton Mistry, “Threshold Thinking” argues that the environmental imagination of limits functions not as a closure, but rather as an impetus and opening for literary world-making. IV Acknowledgments This project owes much to the teachers and scholars who shaped it, and especially to Steve Cushman, Mary Kuhn, and Debjani Ganguly. I am a better reader, writer, and thinker thanks to their guidance. At the University of Virginia, I’ve also learned much from the insight and expertise of Victoria Olwell, Victor Luftig, Deborah Lawrence, Clare Kinney, Rita Felski, Jon Cannon, Michael Levenson, Michael Livermore, Jennifer Wicke, and Jahan Ramazani. For the passionate and luminous classrooms that led me on this path, I’m grateful to Richard Begam, Cyrena Pondrom, Theresa Kelley, Steve Clough, and Julie Page. Like all dissertations, this work represents hours of solitary labor. Yet I will also remember the last years as brimming with the friends that I have made in Charlottesville, and I could not have finished this project without them. Thank you to Tom Butcher and Jesse Bordwin for the board game comradery, to my symposium partner, the indomitable Jap Nanak-Makkar, and to Stephanie Bernhard, whose passion for our shared subject inspires me. Thanks also to Eva Latterner, Lee Surma, Jack Levenson, George Derk, Annie Galvin, Sarah Berkowitz, Anastatia Curley, Zach Stone, Megan Gadient, and Kelly Fleming. For their endless patience with my prose, and their steady friendship, I am forever grateful to Sarah Smith and Aaron Colton. This research also belongs to two intellectual communities in Charlottesville. First, to the Environmental Humanities Colloquium, and the many invited scholars (Dale Jamieson, Jason Moore, Serenella Iovino, among others) who broadened my vocabulary, modeled great research, and challenged my thinking. Second, to the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures—my home on Grounds—and to Debjani, Anne Gilliam, Joseph Wei, and Julie Gronlund, who have been some of my closest friends and colleagues as I completed this work. Rubbing elbows at the IHGC has molded my writing in so many ways: Sarah Nuttall, one of our guests, was so kind as to read and comment on a version of my second chapter. For financial support, thank you to the University of Virginia, and especially the Department of English, the Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities, the IHGC, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Institute for World Literature funded a productive and generative month of work and study where I met Stefan Helgesson, who provided important commentary on an article draft. That article is now forthcoming in PMLA as “Hunger in the Garden: Shortage and Environmental Aesthetics in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist.” My thanks to the readers and the editorial board there for their patience and generosity. Finally, thank you to my family. My (many) parents—Cheri, Laura, Dave, Bruce, Pam, and Bob—made me a reader, curious, and committed. My brother, Zach keeps me on my toes (thanks for the free shoes), and I’m looking forward to traveling the world with Erin soon. Deb and Beth inspired me to be an advocate for others, in my work and out of it. Steve, Beth, and Connor showed me how to relax, and welcomed me to their family. My grandparents, and especially Dave and Bonnie, have kept me grounded: when I’m in my mid-eighties, I aspire to your to kindness and sense of humor. Katelyn and Sam—I can’t wait to see what’s next. Thank you for getting me this far. 1 Introduction All debate about ecoscarcity, natural limits, overpopulation, and sustainability is a debate about the preservation of a particular social order rather than a debate about the preservation of nature per se. (148) - David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996) The failure to recognise the limits arising from other living beings and systems is the product of a monological and deeply human-centred view of humans and of nature. (26) - Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture (2005) Mehring and Ishvar are living on the edge. These childless, middle-aged men exist in sharp geographic and socio-economic contrast—one is a rich landowner and industrialist in apartheid South Africa, the other an impoverished tailor scratching out a living in India’s still tenuous independence—but differences of race, class, and setting belie their common environmental precarity. The possibility of postcolonial economic development and a prosperous future, glimpsed by both, has been realized instead as the threat of environmental ruin, as a world that cannot sustain itself. Mehring’s amateurish grasp of conservation principles allows him to enunciate fears about global overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and species extinction: environmental limits1 that he sees fast approaching. Wealthy and powerful, protected by the 1 In this project, I use “limit,” “boundary,” and “threshold” interchangeably, though a brief note on etymology and definition may be useful here. The English word “limit” traces its origins first to Anglo-Norman and Middle French, and then to the classical Latin līmit- or limes (“Limit”). Its initial connotations are primarily cartographic, suggesting a “boundary of a plot of land,” the frontier, or a “national boundary.” As early as the fifth century Latin, however, limit had also become a figurative term, suggesting mathematical boundaries. The Oxford English Dictionary includes two definitions of interest, both appearing in the 15th century. First, limit can be “any of the fixed points between which the possible or permitted extent, amount, duration, range of action, or variation of anything is confined; a bound which may not be passed, or beyond which something ceases to be possible or allowed.” A second definition is as “a boundary, frontier; an object serving to define a boundary, a landmark.” Notable in both definitions as in its usage history is the expansiveness and fluidity of this term, its (paradoxical) capacity to encompass new figurative meanings far from its cartographic origins. Important too, is the way in which the word gestures towards visions of closure and severance that defy the imagination: to cross a limit is to cross into the unknown, the unpermitted, and possibly into nowhere at all. Of course, for this dissertation, the word “limit” is merely the tip of the iceberg. While it would eventually be 2 systematic oppression of the apartheid regime, he identifies the signs of coming collapse in the lives and communities of others, those people of color at increased risk now, and in the future. North and East, across the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea, Ishvar is one of them. With his nephew, Omprakash, this unemployed tailor from a tiny village struggles to survive in crowded, polluted Bombay. For him, environmental problems are both immediate (the crowds he fights as he looks for work, his slum’s tightly-controlled water supply) and mediated by the administration of Indira Gandhi, appearing in the form of policies meant to curb overpopulation and “beautify” the city. For both men, the unintended damages of global capitalism have brought city and country to the brink of environmental disaster: they encounter thresholds of pollution, consumption, and population that manifest in the spaces they inhabit, the political regimes that rule them, their moods, their fears, and even their dreams. Appearing in two Anglophone novels set in the 1970s—Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) and Rohinton
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