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University of Florida

‘You have a story to tell’: Overcoming the hyperobjectivity of change through literature

Kaylyn Ling Undergraduate English Honors Thesis Dr. Terry Harpold Dr. Stephanie Smith Spring 2020

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... 3

INTRODUCTION ...... 4

PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY ...... 8

INCONSISTENCIES OF NARRATIVE ...... 26

A COUNTRY’S CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES ...... 41

CONCLUSION ...... 50

WORKS CITED ...... 51

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ABSTRACT

The relationship between humans and the environment has been deeply studied, provoked, and explored across literature, but no literary has addressed representation of this relationship as significantly as climate fiction. Climate fiction is loosely defined as a field of literature dealing with anthropogenic and its effects, both speculative and proven. This genre has radically influenced the way we tell stories about the human–natural world connection. The environmentally minded diegetic stories embedded into climate fiction are as complex as itself; these stories are delivered in different ways, from oral narration to amateur documentaries, in turn affecting the way knowledge is shared, stored, and understood, and they precipitate ecological lessons of massive consequence.

This paper will use Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Aaron Thier’s Mr. Eternity (2016), and ’s (2018) to investigate the function of narration in climate fiction. Narration develops literary ideations of sustainability and responsibility in the late Anthropocene. These three contemporary novels, characterized by their fractured structure and heteroglossic textures, showcase extremely nuanced representations of storytelling. The characters in these novels overcome the representational challenges of climate change by transgressing temporal and spatial limits. The context, multiplicities, and uncertainties of each story gives shape to abstract ecological thought. This investigation will address human exceptionalism, memory, ontology, and the agency of nature within the literary imagination.

KEYWORDS: climate fiction, climate change, storytelling, temporal, memory, representation

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INTRODUCTION

It is impossible to pinpoint where or when anthropogenic climate change begins or will

end in human history. Humankind has maintained a contentious relationship with the

environment for centuries, and the complexity of the ’s ecological issues has expanded far

beyond an easily defined temporal or spatial scope. Even when attempting to mark a concise

climate crisis timeline beginning with the invention of the steam engine, or the industrialization

of agriculture, the phenomenon is too generalized and graphically dispersed to admit of a precise

date. In other words, from its notional inception, climate change resists simplification. Climate crisis does not adhere to a monolithic definition, which poses many representational challenges.

Explaining, depicting, and understanding such a geophysically, politically, and culturally massive phenomenon has never been done before, but writers1 are leading the way in conquering

these representational challenges. Writers are taking to novels and short fiction, newspapers, and

blogs alike to craft literary pictures of the climate crisis. They humanize what philosopher

Timothy Morton has termed a “hyperobject”—something so “massively distributed in space and

time relative to humans” (1) that it cannot be easily understood or represented. The literature of

interdisciplinary writers is shaping incomprehensible tales of ecological turmoil into empathetic

narratives of humanity, expanding the ways in which we envision our relationship with the

environment.

Climate fiction is the principal literary genre currently leading the visualization of climate

crisis. Works in the genre speculate how climate change as a hyperobject fits into narrative

representations of the past, present, and . They “make environmental crisis thinkable” by

1 Rob Nixon in Slow Violence prefers the term “writer-activist,” referring to someone who is a watchdog for environmental injustice; liaison between institutional and populist action; and leader of humanizing ecological issues (5). 4

“combin[ing] extrapolative and cognitive mapping of technoscientific innovation with

sociopolitical and ethical critique” (Garforth 240). By reaching into several disciplines at once, climate fiction is able to produce a holistic approximation of climate crisis. Fictional projections of ecological disaster and human survival are typical of the genre. Often, diegetic narratives of climate fiction are also extraordinarily layered. They feature stories within stories tightly interwoven with one another; their connectedness reflects the “viscous” nature of climate change

(Morton 37). Climate change “sticks” (Morton 36) to the individuals and institutions that it touches. Because this viscous hyperobject has become so entangled with all worldly aspects, climate change must be met by new ways of storytelling capable of overcoming the temporal and spatial limits of more conventional representations.

This paper will use Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Richard Powers’s The

Overstory (2018), and Aaron Thier’s Mr. Eternity (2016) to explore representational complexities of narrative in climate fiction. These three contemporary novels feature vastly elaborate, fractured narratives employing an exhaustive span of characters and settings. Even minor characters are nuanced in purpose, attitude, and influence. As a result, the protagonist becomes loosely defined as these books prove that everyone has their own stakes in the portrayed climate crisis. Character analyses of the idiosyncratic Oblivia Ethylene from The Swan

Book and the larger-than-life Daniel Defoe in Mr. Eternity are studied in conjunction with the minor characters that intersect their lives. All aspects of Oblivia and Defoe’s lives are deeply and complexly entangled with climate crisis, demonstrated through the uniquity of their experiences and the language used to develop them. The Overstory, on the other hand, provides a useful framework to examine the sociopolitical ramifications of climate activism, especially in current- day America. All three books are written in the last decade, making them contemporary pieces of

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climate criticism, but none so readily engage with the real-world contemporary as Powers’s novel.

When analyzed in juxtaposition with one another, these narratives craft an ecological rhetoric that resonates with prescience of the climate crisis to come. Climate fiction has its finger on the pulse of the contemporary ecological movement, and the characters, events, and themes reflect accordingly. Moreover, the construction of each novel mirrors the immensity of

ecological crisis. Mr. Eternity and The Overstory are heteroglossic,2 switching point of view

through a series of ostensibly well-defined character voices, while The Swan Book is told by an

omniscient narrator. The difference between voices allows subjectivity within an individual

experience, while simultaneously building an objective and intersectional picture of a collective

experience. The language in the selected texts, especially in Wright’s story of aboriginal realism,

is deeply evocative, nuanced, and mature both in language and theme. Elliptical prose traces the same themes of love, ecological responsibility, sociopolitical activism, trauma, and connectivity across the three books. The broadness of their scope cannot be understated. Each novel defies being canonized into a “self-contained, knowable, and easily delineated body of literary works”

(such as ‘Australian literature’) but instead reinvents itself as “an undecidable and shimmering

arrangement of bodies, countries, and stories” (Barras, “The Law” 3). Mr. Eternity reaches as far

back as sixteenth-century South America while The Swan Book probes deeply the future of post-

climate change Australia, as each author contends with the consequences of environmental

action (or inaction).

2 The simultaneous use of many voices, dialects, or languages, which introduces social or ideological complexity, as explored in The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981. 6

While these books accomplish much in their establishment of narrative scope and depth, they still face gargantuan, and sometimes irreconcilable, challenges of representation. Each novel’s fragmented style and structure breeds ambiguity. Climate fiction, like climate change itself, is in a constant battle with uncertainty—while scientific data, predictive models, and progressive policy reflect a real planetary emergency, attempts of depicting something as large and slow as climate change raises more questions than answers. Rob Nixon describes environmental crisis as a phenomenon of “slow violence,” a massive, generalized violence that often fails to be recognized, diagnosed, and treated, especially in underprivileged populations, because its effects, while widespread, are produced gradually (6). The visibility of environmental violence presents numerous obstacles to the literary imagination. Wright, Powers, and Thier are forced to manipulate language in innovative ways to articulate the events and consequences of environmental slow violence. These authors’ methods, challenges, and successes of storytelling will be addressed in this essay. Issues of memory and ontology are particularly fundamental to this argument. As this investigation explores gaps of narrative across the three novels, more and more connections seem to appear counterintuitively, illustrating the aforementioned viscosity of climate change. The hyperobjectivity of environmental crisis, expressed across its fragmentation, ambiguity, and superhuman scope, paradoxically finds a solid ground for understanding in these texts, in that they have effectively used narrative form to represent the evolving relationship between humankind and contemporary climate crisis.

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PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

In order to understand the state of their environment in the present moment, characters in

works of climate fiction must first be reconciled with their world’s environmental past. All three

books begin in medias res of a climate crisis. They do not describe the origin of anthropogenic climate change and none of the novels see an end for it; they illustrate intermediary, ongoing conditions. Characters’ memories provide context for contemporary ecological issues confronted in the literature. Context, in turn, supports the representation of climate change and dismantles some of its temporal size.

Notably, the characteristics of remembrance influence how the past is understood.

Characters in these novels access different banks of memory—categorized here as personal,

collective, and biological—to articulate an ecological history. Some characters demonstrate the

ability to engage different memories simultaneously. This helps them piece together a historical

narrative of the human–natural world relationship with diversified perspectives. While these

banks frame the past, and occasionally the present or future, memory is also fraught with the

representational difficulties typical of climate crisis. Recollection is often unreliable for

characters in The Swan Book, Mr. Eternity, and The Overstory. Lapses in memory and

contradictory affect complicate the narratives. For example, while some narratives look fondly

upon the past as a time of technological success, others resent the past for its environmental

irresponsibility. The uncertainty of the past in turn emphasizes the uncertainty of the future—

there are “endemic and even irreducible uncertainties” (Garforth 250) in climate studies and

climate fiction alike. These uncertainties, however, leave room for a bleak kind of optimism. The

job of climate fiction as a forager into the unknown relies on room for doubt; while the existence

of climate crisis cannot be denied, its trajectory of developments is much less certain. Even the

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most comprehensive data-fed predictive models are fundamentally uncertain in some respects,

given the scope and complexity of the phenomena involved. The distant environmental future

can only be felt by “blurring generic boundaries between speculation and realism” (Garforth

254), which is what Wright, Powers, and Thier all attempt to do, beginning with context

established by remembering the past.

Oblivia Ethylene, protagonist of The Swan Book, shapes her understanding of the

environment through both personal and collective memory. There are gaps in Oblivia’s personal recollection that are filled in by Bella Donna and Oblivia’s connections to the indigenous community. Oblivia’s name, short for Oblivion, is etymologically related to the Latin verb obliviscor3 meaning to forget. Her name places an emphasis on her role as “a liminal figure

caught up in an oscillating pattern between remembering and forgetting” (Barras, “An

Australian-made hell” 197). Oblivia berates her own “fictitious, ridiculous name” for making her

a forgetful person (Wright 248). The liminality of her character describes her struggle with

“social in-betweenness”: Oblivia is simultaneously remembering and contending with first-hand trauma, inherited knowledge from Aboriginal Law, and the non-indigenous stories of Bella

Donna, the white European climate refugee who raises Oblivia (205). Oblivia’s first-hand trauma

is a sexual assault revealed early on in the novel. Her family and community willingly forget

Oblivia because they fault her for the sexual assault. Both the trauma and communal disowning

are sources of her forgetfulness.

Oblivia is rendered mute and “joined with the undoable” (Wright 72) when it is revealed

that she was the victim of a gang rape. The personal trauma has trapped the young Aboriginal in

what Morton, paraphrasing Wordsworth, calls a “spot of time”: she is affected by “a traumatic

3 Related to oblivious, obliviate. 9

rupture in the continuity of [her] being, a wound around which [her] psyche secrete[s] memories,

, thoughts” (Morton 51). Her speechlessness emphasizes how badly she has been

affected by this spot of time. Personal memory is vulnerable, limited in scope, and subject to

multiple kinds of distortions and disruptions. The trauma is “undoable,” but its aftermath is

mitigatable through the consultation of collective memory.

Oblivia’s trauma is not only felt by her, but also by the indigenous community and the

nation, which have been traumatized by centuries of invasion and dispossession. The swamp people make unjustified associations between Oblivia’s sexual assault and the intrusion of the

Army. Rumors claim that “the girl caused all of this Army business” (Wright 44), coding individual trauma with communal ramifications. Bella Donna is the only one who explains to

Oblivia that the rape was not her fault, but instead the fault of “an outrageous history” (72),

referring to systematic sexism and crimes against indigenous women in Australia, and to the

European depredation of the continent more generally. Oblivia spends time “pulling her head

apart trying to remember what had happened to her, or perhaps whatever it was, it just happened

to some other girl that everyone was talking about and maybe it was not her either, or herself

neither, but all girls” (72)—here, she cannot comprehend personal incident, but instead sees the

event as shared pain and consequence. This entanglement of personal experience and collective

responsibility reflects an ecological conundrum. Isolated traumas in a greater environmental

timeline never leave only individual wounds. Instead, they are causes and effects of larger

communal problems expressed individually. Bella Donna helps Oblivia see it this way.

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Bella Donna’s stories fill many of Oblivia’s gaps in memory. The old woman tells the

young girl about the past and the world outside of the swamp.4 The majority of Oblivia’s

“memory [is] created by what the old woman [chooses] to tell her” (Wright 77-78); Bella

Donna’s stories of swans, in particular, have a strong effect on the young girl’s psyche. Bella

Donna mostly tells stories about white swans. She asks the Harbor Master, “I wonder why you

never see a white swan landing on the swamp?” (35), not taking interest in the abundance of

black swans that are native to the area. The white swan represents a colonizer, as Bella Donna

herself does, and the black swan “embodies an ancient creative being who is native to Australia,

but it is also Oblivia’s friend and her guide” (Barras, “Law of Storytelling” 4). The black swans

seen in the story thus represent indigenous Australians displaced by climate change. Oblivia

immediately knows upon encountering a black swan that “the swan had been banished from

wherever it should be singing its stories” (Wright 13). The swan is not native to northern

Australia but takes shelter in the swamp after being pushed out of its natural habitat, presumably

by anthropogenic environmental change. Oblivia engages with the swans, both black and white,

as she struggles within a liminal space between indigenous and foreign cultures. Even though

Bella Donna is not an Aboriginal, she helps open Oblivia up toward pathways of cultural

remembrance. The stories allow Oblivia to overcome her trauma and “reclaim her identity” as

she rediscovers an indigenous home (Barras, “Law of Storytelling” 7). Additionally, Bella

Donna has a fundamentally different temporal understanding of things compared to the young

girl, having come to Australia at the “beginning of dust time” (14), or the beginning of a great

that has devastated Aboriginal lands and populations. Bella Donna is able to recall life

before dust time, providing context to The Swan Book and its diegetic narratives. Her stories of

the European and Asian continents are rich with adventure and discovery, which charms Oblivia.

4 Also known as “Swan Lake.” 11

In addition to Bella Donna, there is another generational voice influencing and completing Oblivia’s memory. The elders of the swamp have another fundamentally different understanding of time. They are able to visualize issues and events on a long-term scale: “These were people old enough to still remember things about the rest of the world, whereas most of the younger generations with a gutful of their own wars to fight were not interested in thinking any further afield of their own wars to fight” (Wright 15). This suggests a lack of collective responsibility for the state of the changed world in the young people. Thanks to Bella Donna, and to a certain extent, the elders of the swamp, Oblivia is able to access larger bodies of collective memory and begins to understand long-term phenomena. This is shown through Oblivia’s ability to communicate with spirits and ghosts throughout Australia. These supernatural manifestations are representative of Oblivia interfacing with ancient, communal histories. Oblivia’s relationship to the animals and ghosts of the landscape represent her role as “inscriber of the stories of

Country but also as an extension or agent of Country itself” (Gleeson-White 32), where Country is the Aboriginal word to describe a landscape that interconnects human and nonhuman relations.

Oblivia’s connection to Country is exemplified by her unusual relationship with the swamp’s eucalyptus tree. She is “related to the tree through Law” (Wright 83). Law is the order of

Australia’s ancient spiritual ancestors. The eucalyptus tree is a “a sacred tree where all the stories of the swamp were stored,” and it is the “oldest living relative for looking after the memories”

(69). The coding of the tree as a “relative” suggests biological ties. Oblivia’s connection to the tree is an intersection between collective memory and biological memory, as well as bonds between Country and Law. The tree is destroyed by the Army of Australia “on the premise that this nexus of dangerous beliefs had to be broken, to close the gap between Aboriginal people and

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white people” (69). The destruction of the tree is clearly an attack on the indigenous cultural

knowledge embedded within the landscape.

Warren Finch, Oblivia’s upper-class Aboriginal fiancé, recognizes the connection

between Oblivia’s trauma and the collective grievances of the tribe, but fails to identify proper

forms of trauma resolution. Instead of helping Oblivia cope with her history, or mending the

relationship between her and the community, Warren looks to the severance of bonds. Whereas

the foreign Bella Donna encourages Oblivia to find solace in swan stories, Warren forces Oblivia

to confront the past and then obliterate it. In a song he composes for her, Warren sings, “But I

got to tell you to come out… You have a story to tell” (Wright 87). Here, Warren desires to coax an unspeakable narrative out of Oblivia, despite her muteness and deep-seated emotional injury.

Warren’s insistence on Oblivia ‘coming out’ also refers to his displacement of the girl. He is the one to take her from Swan Lake to Melbourne, where he pursues an ambitious campaign to become Australia’s first Aboriginal president. Warren believes he can rectify Oblivia’s trauma by reinventing her as an individual. The trip to Melbourne “chips off bits and pieces of

[Oblivia’s] memory of home until all is gone” (Barras, “An Australian-made hell” 206), serving

Warren’s mission of erasure. “Swan girl, I know your name is Ethyl,” he tells her, “I don’t know who gave you that other name. But from now on it’s going to be Ethyl, short they tell me for

Ethylene Oblivion” (164). Warren has inverted Oblivia Ethyl(ene) into Ethylene Oblivion, which has significant ecological symbolism. Ethylene is a hydrocarbon found naturally in the world and in fossil fuels. Anthropogenically produced ethylene is associated with negative environmental impacts such as pollution and habitat degradation. If Oblivion represents Oblivia’s trauma and past, Ethylene represents the part of her life affected by climate disaster. Warren has placed

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Ethylene before Oblivion, prioritizing the accessories of capitalist-oriented ecological (in)action over Oblivia herself.

There is a vast difference between the way different social classes regard the past. In The

Swan Book, some characters choose to remember the past with resentment, while others reflect on the life of their predecessors with feelings of adherence, if not fondness. People descended from places of social privilege in particular, such as “the red-haired people” of Warren’s family

(Wright 196), tend to romanticize days of unregulated human activity. Warren’s family

“remember[s] a time when you could leave the lights burning all night without anyone batting an eyelid” (193), referring to times of industry and reckless resource usage. Their wistfulness for

“the good old days” (193) is sharply juxtaposed by the disdain for the errors and injustices of the past on the part of the less privileged. Oblivia is convinced that the good old days never existed because she has never known carefree, luxurious times.

When Oblivia encounters a room full of uncanny Christmas miniatures in Warren’s house, Oblivia decides that these scenes “[do] not exist” for her (196). The scenes, even in miniature, reflect a social disparity. They feature happy white people and animals in the midst of

Christmas festivities. There are piles of snow, presents at the feet of Christmas trees, and holiday feasts. These “perfect images of nostalgia” (196) are shallow representations of the past because they render ongoing social or environmental crisis invisible. Oblivia notes that “there was no miniature black girl such as herself in any of these depictions of humanity” and “no swamp world of people quarreling over food” (198). Oblivia sees no place for herself in this diorama representation of official memory,5 so she concludes that “there [is] no link between her and

Warren Finch’s world” (198). This establishment of separate worlds is salient. It draws a line in

5 ‘Official’ refers to a societal norm. Official memory is an officiated, or standardized collective memory. 14

the sand between the haves and have-nots in the novel, particularly when it comes to the aftermath of environmental disaster. Oblivia’s world is the world of “disposable people” while

Warren’s is the world of those advantaged by “ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation” (Nixon 4)—including even Warren, who represents a new sort of Aboriginal who has chosen to adhere to and participate in the ruling political class. The Aboriginals in The Swan

Book, like the many impoverished populations of what Nixon associates with the global South, suffer from “the discriminatory distribution of environmental visibility” (Nixon 65).

Communities are given more attention depending on “mechanisms of globalization, environmental racism, and class discrimination” (65). The suffering of the swamp people is left unseen, unspoken, and therefore nonexistent in the memory of the privileged. Oblivia ultimately accuses the Christmas scenes of being “incomplete” and “wrong” (Wright 198), taking more faith in her personal memory than these accounts of an idyllic past.

This episode is soon followed by a more disturbing event that further illuminates the gap between official and personal memory, as well as the severity of discriminatory environmental visibility. Warren orders the destruction of Swan Lake as a wedding gift for Oblivia. He reveals, with pride, that the army bombed the area and it had become “the place that does not exist anymore” (207). This ontological erasure of Swan Lake completely takes her aback. She is filled with anxiety and questions; she even has a brief troubling vision of Bella Donna saying she will have to search for her blown-up bones. Oblivia’s swamp can be described as a vernacular landscape. It is “integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of community” without being politicized or capitalized (Nixon 17) by ‘official’ societies. The vernacular represents the indigenous while the official represents the colonizer. By destroying the swamp, Warren Finch overwrites the place and it becomes an “official landscape” (17). Official landscapes typically

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“discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning

and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate

deceased” (17). Official landscapes offer a monolithic narrative of an environment that works to benefit the official entity—in this case, the official entity is Warren and the Australian

government—and disallow alternative stories. “Stories disrupt the possibilities for homogeneity”

(Pascoe 2), while the standardization of a narrative limits ontological possibility, squandering

smaller (often indigenous) multiplicities. The vision of Bella Donna searching for her bones is

disturbing because it illustrates how destruction of vernacular landscapes will disturb even the

most sacred elements of a cultural narrative. This scene also places Bella Donna, a white woman,

as one of Oblivia’s strongest connections to Aboriginal understanding while Warren, an

Aboriginal man, stands to destroy those connections. Both Bella Donna and Warren exhibit traits

of the colonizer as they influence Oblivia, but Warren is the one who engages in self-serving

erasure of indigenous connection.

Completely blindsided by the loss of Swan Lake, Oblivia cannot reconcile with the loss

of her home so she “start[s] to disbelieve herself,” wondering if her “memory was unreliable”

(210). She is briefly tempted to buy into the constructed fiction of Warren’s family. Instead of

immediately rejecting the idyllic past proposed by official memory, as she did in the Christmas

miniature scene, Oblivia reckons with the opportunity for a seemingly perfect life—she would

live with the people and things that come “from storybooks” and dreams (210). Warren’s

promises of comfort, love, and protection are reiterated to her and others in the Finch sphere of

influence. She has the chance to replace the grit of her past with an official, palatable history, and

adopt a conventionally perfect life. In illustration of this displacement, directly following the

wedding, Warren’s “phone rang like an alarm bell interrupting her thoughts, to dominate the

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past, to insist the future be heard” (206), contributing to the encroachment of past erasure. Before losing to the “double challenge of invisibility and amnesia” that characterizes many cases of environmental invisibility (Nixon 65), Oblivia realizes that “even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered” and the “truth was always forgotten” (Wright 210). She realizes that keeping her past—“the truth”—alive is a priority. Even if she has to tell her truth in different ways, telling memories as if they were invented stories, she must continue doing so to resist the complete erasure of her people.

This overwriting of indigenous space is foreshadowed in the novel’s prologue when

Oblivia claims to have a virus living in her brain that plagues her with a “nostalgia for foreign things” (3). The foreign things alluded to here are the objects of Bella Donna’s stories. The invasive nature of the old woman’s stories is foreshadowed by her name. Bella Donna translates to ‘beautiful lady’ in Italian, but it is also the name of the Atropa belladonna plant, or poisonous nightshade (Barras, “Law of Storytelling” 4). The belladonna plant is not native to Australia, just as Bella Donna is not native. The poison of the non-native nightshade plant has manifested itself as Oblivia’s virus. Oblivia’s infected mind also reflects a ravaged indigenous landscape.6 The virus is the colonial presence that has taken to “vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains” (Wright 1). Oblivia’s “remarkable” brain is the section of land characterized by ghosts and ancestral ties, but it has been made desolate by the virus of colonization. The virus expects the land to be pure and empty, engaging with colonial narratives of ‘untrammeled’7 land which ignore indigenous presence and sovereignty, but the virus fails to see that its presence itself fills the landscape. The virus is encoded with “colonialism’s myths of white ownership and

6 Also known as the Aboriginal Country. 7 Language of the U.S. government used to define wilderness in The Wilderness Act of 1964: A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 17

superiority” (Sheridan 209). Oblivia says that the virus “could sing its homesick head off to the

universe of viruses living in the polluted microscopic cities of the backwater swamp etched in

[her] brain” (3), but ultimately her virus is inconsolable. Oblivia travels in her imagination to

lure the virus away from her swamp, so she can reclaim the land of her ancestors, but the virus

does not leave. Oblivia never finds her homeland; instead, she ends her as accepting her

destiny as “custodian of the black swans” (Sheridan 199).

Environmental injustice is also an important theme of Mr. Eternity. Class gaps are felt more acutely in the future sections of Thier’s nonchronological novel. Jam, a young man without family or education, has “dream[s] of riches” (Thier 9) that illustrate significant class stratification in the of year 2200. He dreams of “the rich men in Boston which had motored boats and drank clear water out of plastic bottles a fresh bottle every day” (9). Motored boats, along with air conditioning and refrigeration, are described by Jam as “old very expensive technology” (9). These facilities are powered by solar panels or carbon-taxed electricity. Jam recognizes the link between old technology and climate change8 despite being uneducated. This

shows that everyone understands and is affected by the ecological crisis at hand, regardless of

social class. Jam also identifies the luxuries of rich men as “the cause of all our ills” (9)—“our” here reflecting solidarity with the disaffected working class. The rich remain unfazed by their environmentally unsustainable practices or the cost of carbon taxes, and the poor must suffer the consequences. Here, Jam is engaging with a collective memory. He has not personally experienced the ostentatious luxuries of the rich, even after planetary climate crisis, but he assumes and imagines their lifestyle. He is also engaging with the collective memory of the middle class. The rich in Mr. Eternity seem to have the same carefree attitude as Warren Finch’s

8 Jam identifies the phenomenon as “climate warming” (Thier 9), a conglomeration of climate change and global warming. 18

family; they, too, long for the past when the consequences for their wasteful lifestyles were

nearly invisible and could be ignored.

Mr. Eternity opens in 2016 Key West, Florida. Two young men are working on a

documentary about a fascinating man named, improbably, Daniel Defoe. “The ancient mariner”

(1), as they call him, claims to be hundreds of years old. This epithet is an allusion to Samuel

Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”9 (1834). The Coleridge poem tells

the story of a mariner who has to suffer the consequences after he capriciously kills an albatross,

a totem of good fortune for sea voyagers. The work engages religious imagery to make a

out of the bird and a sinner out of the mariner. Reading this in context with Mr. Eternity, it is

likely that a moral argument is being made: Daniel Defoe is forever dealing with the

consequences of humanity’s crimes against the environment. He is the one who outlives his

earthly companions throughout the years, much like Coleridge’s mariner in his voyage, and lives

to tell the tale to others.

The documentary filmmakers, Azar and the narrator, are fascinated by Defoe and wish to tell his stories, whether they believe in them or not. Azar entertains the idea that Defoe may

“remember what [he] wants to remember” and only has “elective memories” (86). Here, Azar is exposing the vulnerability of personal memory. Events influence one another and certain details blur together over time. The 2016 narrator returns to this discussion again when admitting that he has “false memories” that feel like “memories of someone else’s life” (93). These elective

memories, Azar and the narrator believe, reflect the subjectivity of experience. Elective

memories are similarly an issue in The Swan Book. Oblivia points out that “People tell stories all

the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or

9 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834 19

that” (Wright 74). The room for bias, subjectivity, and tampering with the real bases of narrative

exploits the vulnerability of memory, but this seeming risk actually serves environmental

narratives well. Uncertainty leaves room for generative ecological possibility. As previously

discussed, the standardization of narrative and establishment of an ‘absolute’ erases the

possibility of alternative perspectives. This means that less favorable narratives can be censured

out of existence. Warren Finch, for example, effectively turns Oblivia into an object of elective

memories. He replaces her with a “permanent television wife” personality (230) to serve his own

purposes. Oblivia feels this “theft of her identity” very personally, and like Mr. Eternity’s 2016 narrator, begins to see her interactions with her husband as “a different life” (229). She and her marriage exist, but it has been manipulated into a production of falsehoods. The same thing can occur with accounts of environmental crisis and survival. Facts bleed into fiction due to misremembered details, unconscious bias, or outright manipulation (denialism). This is one of the reasons why representing climate crisis is difficult in a time when much is at stake for those who would embrace the reality of change and the imperative for corrective action, and equally for those who deny change and resist human change: depictions are forever being editorialized by conscious and unconscious efforts into more palatable ‘official’ narratives, which often include, somewhat paradoxically, stories that recognize the reality of crisis.

Both The Swan Book and Mr. Eternity address the role of societal gatekeepers in the instauration of official memory. Environmental catastrophe that affects the poor “are readily dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing them as accidental, random, and unforeseeable acts of God” (Nixon 65-66). Gatekeepers are antagonists in these narratives of climate change. They suppress important narratives and place environmental disaster into ontological jeopardy. In reaction to these diegetic gatekeepers, Oblivia rejects the reality put

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forth by Warren’s family and Jam decides to incorporate his own nation and his own national

narrative instead of submitting to the corrupt regimes of existing governments and status quo

national narratives. This way, characters actively refute the acts and challenge the authority of

gatekeepers.

Biological memory is another memory bank deployed in climate fiction. The Overstory

constructs narratives of ancestry that link people to trees. The “vegetal intelligence” (Caracciolo

18) of trees is reflected in instinctual human behavior. Pat Westerford,10 one of the main

characters in The Overstory’s nine-member starring cast, is a tree scientist. She releases a book

entitled The Secret Forest. Her book opens with the following passage: “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes” (Powers 132).

Westerford testifies that humans and trees are distant relatives, and that remote biological

memories are accessible between the two worlds of plant and animal agency. She claims that the

genetic makeup of trees and humans, though now extremely different, have some foundational

similarities. Basic life functions are reflected between both human and nonhuman entities.

Westerford’s hypothesis is a key point in Powers’s novel because it establishes “stories about

biota that portray the natural world not as a spectacular backdrop for human dramas, but as a

being with agency and with which human life is inextricably bound” (Gleeson-White 31).

Interpersonal communication, for example, exists both in human and tree behaviors, according to

both the fictional Westerford’s research and real-life studies.11 “The biochemical behavior of

10 Likely based on the work of scientist Suzanne Simard. 11 Published in a work by Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohlleben. 21

individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community,”

Westerford writes (Powers 126), summarizing years of work that shakes the scientific

community. 12 She suggests trees are interconnected through a series of innate biological processes. This interconnectedness she describes aligns with the Aboriginal philosophy of

Country, which maintains intimate relationalities between humans, nonhumans, the landscape, and everything in-between.

Characters in Powers’s novel show a similar kind of relationality. They cross paths, communicate, disagree, and form intentional communities with one another. Each character experiences “a dramatic encounter with a tree that instills into them the insight that their existence, in individual as well as in collective terms, is fundamentally dependent on plants”

(Caracciolo 17). This dependency helps decentralize individualistic humanity from these kinds of environmental stories, and instead tilts the ratio of responsibility toward nonhuman agents. For each character, life-changing encounters with plants differ radically. They are, in turn, inspiring, horrifying, lifesaving, shocking, or traumatic. All of the disjointed narratives in The Overstory eventually come together to create a larger network, or ‘overstory,’ of human relationships. This deep interconnectedness is set up by the function of biological memory, which lays foundations for common ancestry and human to nonhuman connection.

While biological memory is best studied across the human/nonhuman binary of The

Overstory, the most interesting example of memory is in the case of Mimi Ma, whose story presents a fascinating conflation of time and memory. Mimi Ma is the daughter of Sih Hsuin Ma, an engineer who immigrates to the United States from China. Sih Hsuin comes to America with

12 Viewing trees as social beings is a contested issue in modern science. Resource transfer and chemical signaling between trees suggest trees have community and family, but many scientists have pushed back against describing these behaviors as trees being ‘social.’ 22

family heirlooms, a new identity,13 an unfamiliar language, and a loving fascination with the

outdoors. After settling in Illinois, Sih Hsuin plants a mulberry tree in the backyard of his

suburban home. For an immigrant who “never speaks Chinese, not even in Chinatown” (Powers

33), this mulberry tree,14 along with three jade rings and a scroll, represent Sih Hsuin’s only

connection to his heritage and past. When this tree finally reaches the end of its life, plagued by

pests and disease, Sih Hsuin deteriorates as well. Mimi has a troubling conversation over the

phone with her parents. Her father is morose, and her mother is suffering from onsets of

dementia. “My time coming,” he tells Mimi (46). This ominous statement echoes his words from

a camping trip many years ago, after suffering a close encounter with a bear: “Not my time yet.

Not my story” (38). Sih Hsuin seems to read his own story of mortality in the fate of his

mulberry tree. Sih Hsuin eventually takes his own life in the shade of “the diseased mulberry,”

leaving behind “fruit stained…with the blood of a suicide for love” (42). Mimi and her two

siblings, Alicia and Carmen, return home to navigate the aftermath of their father’s death. Mimi

is disturbed by her own reaction, which impossibly feels like nostalgia—“How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?” (42).

This pseudo-nostalgia introduces Mimi’s unusual relationship with time. Her thinking often shifts out of the present moment and occupies a future space without outliving the normal pace of human life. When her father shows her the scroll of arhats for the first time, Mimi has a bizarre experience of time simultaneity. Her present nine-year-old self momentarily exists beside a teenage Mimi and a grown Mimi. Mimi sees time as nonlinear, in analogy to the rings of a tree:

“Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself

13 Winston Ma. 14 The mulberry tree is a silk farm with no silkworms that represents the Fusang tree, a mythological tree growing in a mysterious land to the east. The growing mulberry is “older than the separation of yin and yang” (Powers 30). 23

at the core and the present floating outward among the outermost rim” (Powers 35). Mimi is able to access her future selves in this metaphysical moment. Her father, too, had demonstrated some supernatural-adjacent ability to know “his story” before it happened (38). Mimi’s reaction to her father’s suicide suggests that she shares the same talent.

The jade rings reaffirm a narrative of abnormal temporality in the Ma family. The three jade rings Sih Hsuin inherits from his father are carved with trees that represent the past, present, and future. The Ma sisters split the rings up between each other, and Mimi ends up “holding the thin trunk of things to come” (45). When looking at a picture of her grandparents, even more evidence of an inherited relationship with time is seen: “It’s like the couple already know, as the lens opens, at this precise moment years before the violent crime” (399). The possibility of a Ma family clairvoyance does not, surprisingly, present a temporal paradox. As scholar Marie-Laure

Ryan explains, tampering with time is not necessarily problematic as long as, overall, time continues to flow forward (151). In The Overstory, here is no inclination toward affected causality. The Ma clairvoyants never attempt to influence their future, which would introduce an

“imaginatively and narratively unsustainable” story (Ryan 150). However, Mimi’s connection to the future does make her more receptive to the world around her. After her father’s death, Mimi grapples with “anticipation and loss” that affects her daily life (Powers 190) and eventually turns to environmental activism. After participating in a protest and getting arrested, Mimi feels “for the first time since her father’s death, like she’s given the day everything it wanted,” fulfilling a spiritual-temporal lack she has been struggling with (245).

The most effective forms of memory are biological and collective because they reach across generations, that is, across the collective experiences of individuals. Coding features of the landscape with memories makes them last longer: embedding eucalyptus trees with orders of

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indigenous elders or propagating the double consciousness of a South American city are ways of sustaining knowledge throughout generations. Memories with physicality retain a better temporal ground, which is why the overhaul of vernacular landscapes into official landscapes is so detrimental to the livelihood of non-institutionalized memory. There are always revisionists that take advantage of vulnerability in memory, evidenced by Warren Finch’s treatment of Oblivia and the swamp people. While personal memory is the most vulnerable because it is jeopardized by the limited self-determination of subjectivity, there are still representational issues confronting other memory banks. It is best to engage with multiple forms of memory at once because doing so better establishes context for the present and future.

Neelay, one of The Overstory’s main characters, claims in the last arc of the novel, “Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory” (Powers 482). Permanent memory institutions help us understand the hyperobjectivity of climate change, grasped across its historical presentation. Memories inform but do not limit possibilities of the upcoming. Buddhist philosophy, as described by Morton, defines aikido (nowness) as “an exaggeration of the lack of a true now” (93). Instead of a true now, the present is a fluid blend of past and future, which is why remembering is not only an act of framing the past but shaping the future. “The past is an object of knowledge and memory, while the future is a realm of probabilities which can only be apprehended through speculation” (Ryan 145). Speculating the complex, deeply contingent nature of the future is one of the most important literary-cultural functions of climate fiction, and it would be impossible to do so without providing a contextual past for the narratives of today and tomorrow.

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INCONSISTENCIES IN NARRATIVE

The stories told across these three novels are fraught with spatial and temporal transgressions. Fragmentation of narrative, compression of time, and ontological impossibility are just a few of the issues that shape these stories. These narrational inconsistencies complicate the novels’ portrayal of climate change, but do not undermine its reality both within and without the storyworlds. In fact, the establishment of uncertainty and multiplicity agrees with climate change as a hyperobject. While the polyvocalities and complexities of each book make storytelling a tricky art, they effectively reflect the intricacy and uncertainty of climate crisis.

Climate change, after all, is not simple. While characters in The Swan Book, The Overstory, and

Mr. Eternity confront doubt, interruption, and misinformation, climate disaster inevitably looms

on the horizon. It is uncertain when, where, or how climate disaster will come about, but it is

coming nonetheless. That absolute hovers in the background of all of the seeming contingency of

the novels’ narrative logic.

Daniel Defoe in Mr. Eternity makes an interesting case study of narrational

inconsistency. He claims to have lived through the rise and fall of multiple civilizations, to have

made countless friends and enemies, and to have seen extraordinary things. He impossibly

appears just as old in 1560 as he does in 2500. He transcends the traditional limits of a human

lifetime.15 His immortality is never explained; it is simply accepted or written off with half-truth

justifications. When facing near death in a shipwreck, Defoe addresses his mortality in the

context of faith. He tells Jam, who was distraught after seeing the boat go down and his

crewmates drown: “don’t worry young man God will not kill me he preserves me from death I

15 Average male human life expectancy in the early 21st century is 76 years. Daniel Defoe lives through at least 700 years. 26

am useful to him as a plaything” (Thier 34). This deference to religion emphasizes Defoe’s

humanity. His religious affiliation16 briefly resurfaces while he is en route to Anaquitos. The

Spanish men on the boat decide to hold masses every day of the week, but Defoe doesn’t seem to

identify with any of the audiences. “What about a mass for Jews cursed with immortality?” he

says offhandedly (135), evoking the archetype of the Wandering Jew. The Wandering Jew is a

character from religious and medieval literature describing a Jewish man cursed with eternal life

as atonement for a sin. Daniel Defoe is a satire of the Wandering Jew. He is retributing for

humankind’s sins against the environment by walking the world to no end, but Defoe has no

sense of real consequence, and he treats mortality very flippantly. Defoe also, unconvincingly,

attributes his longevity to probiotics and medicine. When speaking to the documentary

filmmakers in 2016, Defoe says he simply “reaped the benefits of modern medicine” (47). His

nonchalant approach to immortality is absurd and often comedic. This absurdist approach to

explaining the largest question of the book—the basis of Daniel Defoe’s eternal life—introduces

doubt. Doubt, as previously discussed, leaves room for narrative possibility. The lack of solid

evidence explicitly supporting or refuting Daniel Defoe’s narrative of immortality allows him to

exist. Also, by being an immortal world traveler and transgressing traditional human conceptions

of space and time, Defoe becomes a hyperobject in and of himself.

Other characters in Mr. Eternity demonstrate a healthy amount of skepticism when talking to Defoe. Xiako, a Pirahao girl from 1560, notes that Defoe “can’t tell his story without

speaking heresies” (Thier 6). He constantly contradicts what his contemporaries believe and

what he has said himself. His stories often stitch together radically different experiences in

haphazard fashion; space and time are shuffled around until Defoe’s great adventures are only

16 Defoe identifies as a converso, or a Jew who renounced Judaism in favor of Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition. 27

approximates of something that may have been true. In a conversation with Princess Jasmine17, a woman he meets in 2500, Defoe talks about space travel. “Once I knew a space captain named

Robinson Caruso,” he says, “He discovered how to build cities [on Mars]. I’ll admit I don’t remember how this grand scheme finally unraveled…. I did walk on the moon once. There were trees with pink feathers instead of leaves. Am I thinking of somewhere else?” (Thier 115).

Defoe seems to be mixing literary allusions into this story. The space captain’s namesake pays homage to the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by English writer Daniel Defoe. It is one of multiple Crusoe reference made throughout the novel. The Robinson Crusoe link is clearly playing with the multiplicity of Daniel Defoe. The author of Robinson Crusoe was known for using various pennames, transgressing the typical limits of identity and authorship. Thier’s Defoe similarly lives many lifetimes. While the writer Defoe extends his legacy through pennames, lives a larger-than-life existence during the sheer amount of time he has on hand. Also, Robinson

Crusoe “literally is the story of white male Western colonialism” (Mertens 158). Daniel Defoe is a main character, but he is never an autodiegetic narrator, and he is often critiqued by the other characters throughout the novel. This “decenters the Western protagonist” in favor of allowing other marginalized people to tell their own stories (Mertens 157). The trees with pink feathers in this literary allusion are more oblique. They are likely a reference to the truffula trees of The

Lorax by Dr. Seuss,18 a well-known children’s book famous for its address of careless consumerism and environmental decline.

Despite the blurring between fact and fiction, Defoe hangs on to certain objects that seem to anchor him to reality. The first and foremost item he takes across the years is Anna Gloria.

17 Full name Jasmine St. Roulette. 18 Theodor Geisel. 28

Defoe is in love with Anna Gloria, a woman he claims to also be immortal. He tracks her

whereabouts through the years and seems to be in constant pursuit of this mysterious woman.

Her existence is never confirmed, but she is made real and immortal through Defoe’s accounts of

her. Interestingly enough, characters also play with the idea that Anna Gloria is what keeps

Defoe alive. Lena, a girl from Key West in 2016, suggests, “It’s unrequited love that keeps him

alive. He meets her in different ages of the world. Fate drives them apart. You know how the

story goes. She’s literally the woman of his dreams” (Thier 165). The 2016 narrator notes that

Anna Gloria is real “because she existed for him,” and that at best, “history was an effort of

imagination, mostly fictive, mostly allegorical, like a story of unrecanted love” (116).

Storytelling Anna Gloria into reality, and into history, makes her real. She becomes a marker of

“socio-ecological change” throughout the book, as the barriers between Defoe and Anna Gloria change (Pascoe 4). For instance, Defoe tells Jam “I saw [Anna Gloria] in Miami… but she will be elsewhere now for Miami were drowned” (Thier 179). The stories of Anna Gloria are opportunities for environmental speculation and reflection. Anna Gloria is also, much like Defoe himself, a hyperobject. While it is true that more efforts to depict a hyperobject produces more questions than answers, it also realizes the hyperobject. Anna Gloria is allowed to fill an ontological space not without representational difficulties, but the extensibility of that space allows for novelty and discovery.

At the end of his 2500 adventure, Daniel Defoe seems ready to give up the search for

Anna Gloria. He worries that she has given up on him. The narrator of this time period, Princess

Jasmine, daughter of the president of the Democratic Federation of Mississippi States, decides to

tell Daniel Defoe a story about himself. In this revised story, she is Anna Gloria, “the object of

his eternal search” (Thier 252). After listening to endless stories of this woman, the princess is

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able to adopt this woman’s persona and become Anna Gloria. Daniel Defoe laughs at the irony of the situation: “You let me tell all my stories, and for this whole time you knew the ending!”

(252). This role reversal of storyteller and listener is significant. Princess Jasmine is first introduced as a wealthy yet powerless character. She is locked in loveless arranged relationships, suffering the pains of “a place and time where men horded up all the power” (Thier 15). When she seizes agency to tell her own story, embracing feminist philosophies she and her friend

Edward Halloween have astutely studied, and reinvents herself in the spirit of Anna Gloria, she has demonstrated how empowering telling and listening to stories can be. Listening to environmental narratives “is crucial for how we frame and address climate change,” just as it was crucial in Princess Jasmine’s arc of identity formation (Pascoe 2).

Daniel also carries the memory of his treasure through the centuries. He constantly reminds his traveling companions and himself to collect his hidden wealth, which serves as a time capsule throughout the centuries. This treasure is a physical anchor to the world. While normal humans are unable to live through a time scale comparable to Defoe, nonhuman objects such as treasure can. This nonhuman object tangibly transgresses human temporality because it exists on the earth for centuries. Recognizing items that can outlive humans helps provide perspective for larger timescales, such as deep time. Deep time refers to a timescale that reaches through “evolutionary and geological” events (Pahl et al. 377). Understanding larger temporalities further decentralizes humanity from narratives of life, giving room for nonhuman agents such as trees, water, nonhuman animals, and the landscape.

When discussing Daniel Defoe as a temporal transgressor, it is impossible not to address the doctor Quaco. Quaco, a slave physician, shows up at multiple points in the novel and seems to also be immortal. While his immortality, like Defoe’s, is never explained, it appears that he

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has independently happened on eternal life. Both Defoe and Quaco make spatial and temporal gaps arbitrary. They traverse the world, crossing paths again and again in different centuries and places, making the world seem like their small playground. When meeting the documentary filmmakers, Quaco remarks that young people “never stop coming” (Thier 123). This off-hand comment suggests that he has met many of Defoe’s companions before and been involved in an innumerable amount of Defoe’s schemes. For the documentary filmmakers, the immortal Quaco is a novelty, but for Quaco, these two young men are rather forgettable people in his long life.

This interesting relativism exists only because of the vast difference in temporal understanding.

Daniel Defoe tells his stories through oral narration. He spins verbal tales of love, murder, heroism, and villainy to anyone who will listen. Oral narration, as his medium of choice, is a common technique in multiple climate fiction novels. It passes information from person to person(s) quite easily, but oral tradition is fraught with issues of consistency and verifiability.

The same story can be recited differently every time. This demonstrates the “fluid and open- ended” nature of storytelling (Pascoe 3). Defoe tells Princess Jasmine that he once found Anna

Gloria “enslaved on a caffeine plantation in the island of Brazil” (251). Readers know, in a bout of dramatic irony, that this claim is completely false. The encounter with a slave woman occurred in the Bahamas and, as Defoe himself admits in 2200, “I thought it were her in the

Bahamas… but it were just some lady” (Thier 69). The fragility of this medium of storytelling illustrates the challenge of relating environmental stories only by mouth. While oral narration is an efficient method of dissemination, it is not effective in piecing together a cohesive narrative.

As the 2016 narrator is quick to note, “What’s magical about the ancient mariner are his lies”

(231). Lies allow room for uncertainty, which in turn builds a space for possibility. Daniel

Defoe’s lies leave space for uncertainty in humanity and in environmental crisis. Despite his

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years of life experience, Defoe still manages to be surprised; he is far from a clairvoyant, as it

was revealed when Princess Jasmine declared herself to be Anna Gloria. As such, the fragility

and flexibility of oral narration fits well with the dynamic nature of climate crisis.

In Mr. Eternity’s 1560 timeline, the narrator—a orphan Pirahao girl named Xiako—is

another oral narrator. She struggles with language. Language as a facet of communication is

highly complex; one of the foundational aspects of Mr. Eternity’s writing is the fixation on

language and dialect. Every character has unique speech patterns. Jam’s chapters, for instance,

feature run-on sentences with scarce punctuation. Words are occasionally misspelled on purpose.

Jam’s way of speaking indicates his lack of education and lower-class status. These aspects of character voice develop the time period and individual. Xiako constantly struggles with language because she cannot reconcile Pirahao and Spanish. Pirahao19 is her indigenous language, but most of the people she interacts with—Spanish conquistadors—cannot understand her language.

“When I’m asleep my name is Xiako and I speak Pirahao and nothing exists that can’t be seen,” she says, “But when I’m awake I speak Spanish and God watches us from his heaven and my name is Maria” (Thier 4). As she is forcibly assimilated into Spanish culture as a sex worker, she begins to resent the Pirahao and sees them through the eyes of conquistadors: “I want the

Christians to destroy Anaquitos… I want the Pirahao to die and I want them to know they are dying because of me” (4). She feels “infected with the Western way of looking at the world”

(Mertens 169), not unlike the experience of Oblivia and her virus-induced nostalgia for foreign

things.

Xiako tells Spaniards false and hateful stories about her hometown of Anaquitos that “are

true in Spanish, in which everything is true, but they are not true in Pirahao” (5), demonstrating

19 The Pirahao presumably represent the Pirahã, an indigenous people native to Brazil. 32

the fickle nature of truth in oral narration. The city is called Anaquitos in Pirahao, but it is known to Europeans as El Dorado. When the city is talked about in Spanish, it is a place of dreams brought to life. In Pirahao, however, the place becomes coded with more significant ancestral and spiritual connotations. During a conversation with Xiako, Daniel Defoe observes: “There are two cities. There is the city of our most glorious aspirations and at the same time there is the city where the whores paint their teeth black” (28). The duality of Anaquitos/El Dorado suggests a double consciousness paradox, where indigenous and colonial preconceptions are at odds with each other. Double consciousness, as described by W.E.B. Du Bois in his influential book The

Souls of Black People, is the existence of “two warring ideals in one dark body” (Martinez 170).

Du Bois’s description of an “experience of dogged survival in the face of overwhelming and systemic repression” suggests that a black person is forced to always view “one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (169). In other words, African Americans are asked to find a peaceful balance of identity between with being black and being American. Xiako struggles with a similar coexistence of “oppositional cultures” (Martinez 160) as she oscillates between Pirahao and

Spanish culture. The Anaquitos/El Dorado conundrum is an example of “two warring ideals” fighting for the same ideological space.

In the context of Nixon’s distinction between official and vernacular landscapes,

Anaquitos also represents a vernacular landscape full of indigenous life and culture, while El

Dorado is an official landscape tailored to benefit narratives of greedy conquistadors. The overtaking of the vernacular by the official is colonialism on a physical and cultural level. When

Xiako brings her Spanish company to Anaquitos, she thinks: “The city will not be destroyed and it will be destroyed and it has already been destroyed, and I have no home in the world” (Thier

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203). She recognizes that the Spanish intend on “reduc[ing the city] to civility by introducing private property, wages, horses, industry, the use of money, and Spanish goods” (Thier 170), leaving no room for an indigenous presence. Official landscapes “leav[e] communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable” (Nixon 19). As a result,

Xiako experiences a sense of displacement known to many climate refugees. Although she lives in an era before the effects of anthropogenic climate change are clearly felt, she is no stranger to the “environmentally induced stress” (Mertens 169) of displacement, identity loss, and homelessness.

Xiako’s claim that “nothing exists that can’t be seen” in Pirahao opens up an interesting question of ontology. Xiako doesn’t understand or acknowledge certain things if she does not have the language to speak it into existence. The ocean, for example, wasn’t a concept that she understood until she learned the Spanish word for it. She applies this philosophy to abstract things such as Anna Gloria. She tells Daniel Defoe, “You have to find the world in which she exists. The language in which her name can be spoken” (205). Having words to describe the invisible brings something into reality for Xiako. Language is her way of accessing hyperobjects, just as it can be applied to the understanding of environmental crisis. Writers are constantly searching for vocabularies to describe difficult concepts or monumental events. Transgressing linguistic boundaries “giv[es] environmental literary studies adequate international dimension” that develops “a transnational ethics of place” (Nixon 243). This transnational aspect is important because climate discussion does not only need to overcome temporal challenges, but it needs to embrace a multinational geographic spread.

Finding alternative methods of telling stories—or alternative methods of delivery— allows storytellers to overcome representational challenges. Delivery is defined as “how a speech

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is embodied, how it is spoken, how it comes to exist for others” (Nixon 148). Delivering

information about climate crisis, or concepts of the environment as a hyperobject, requires

nuance in its embodiment. Characters in Mr. Eternity attempt to document Daniel Defoe’s

existence in other forms of media that carry different levels of legitimacy than Defoe’s own word

of mouth. Defoe is scouted as a subject of a documentary film in 2016 after

publishes a travel article about him. The filmmakers have no experience filmmaking but meet

Defoe in Key West regardless. In Key West, Azar and the narrator come across a blurry, pre-

Civil War photograph in the John Baxter Maritime Museum20 that “unmistakably” features

Defoe and Quaco (Thier 131). The NYT article, documentary-in-the-making, and the photograph are alternative media of delivery used to chronicle Defoe’s extraordinary life. The filmmakers are quick to write the photo off as a fake, but they are still befuddled by it. “Who has perpetrated this fiction?” Azar asks, suggesting Daniel Defoe might be complicit in some greater conspiracy

(160). The legitimacy of these alternative methods of delivery has raised stakes in the question of

Daniel Defoe. Azar actively contends with the possibility of Defoe being hundreds of years old; instead of drawing an agreeable conclusion between the circumstantial evidence of Defoe’s longevity, Azar chooses to develop doubt.

Defoe is massively spread across space and time, ontologically present and existent, but paradoxically, he cannot exist in any local sense. Climate change is “nonlocal and atemporal”

(Morton 47), just as is Daniel Defoe’s legacy. Hyperobjects “confound the social and psychic instruments we use to measure them” (47). The circumstantial evidence that corroborates Daniel

Defoe’s centuries of existence—the photograph, his stories, his treasure, and his immortal

20 The museum’s namesake, John Baxter, may be a reference to the Australian writer John Baxter who is known in literature and film for biographies. He has written a number of documentaries, perhaps reflecting the work of Azar and the narrator. 35

companions Quaco and Anna Gloria—demonstrate the persistence of a degree of uncertainty.

When asked how he deals with seeing “the world swallow up so much time” (Thier 193), Daniel

Defoe describes his experience of time as a constant acceleration. While the sixteenth century

“lasted forever,” he found the nineteenth century to be “a cup of cutgrass tea” and afterwards

akin to “wind under the door” (193). This compression of time demonstrates how relative time

can be. A year feels like a second to Defoe, demonstrating “relational temporality” (Pascoe 6). In

many indigenous cultures, time is not measured by standardized clocks or calendars. Instead,

“time is revealed through the birds, trees and winds” (6). Temporality grows out of a human–

natural world relationship instead of chronological definitions imposed by “colonization and

missionization” (6). Defoe is more sensitive to political, social, and religious temporality than to

ecological temporality, but the people he meets throughout life illustrate an ecological timeline

regardless. The 2016 narrator, for example, is ultra-aware of impending environmental crisis and suffers pre-traumatic stress disorder as a result of it. He claims to be “addicted to bad news” and often thinks about “the sorrow of environmental devastation” (Thier 49); while the narrator is valid in his ecological worry, he makes the mistake of thinking that “the self is futureless or the future worthless” (Mertens 161). The narrator has used the menace of a climate emergency not affecting his current place or time so as to paralyze himself in a perpetual state of anxiety. Daniel

Defoe operates in complete contrast to this. Defoe has experiences vastly spread across space and time, and directly interfaced with events of ecological crisis, yet he retains agency. He realizes himself despite the obstacles of nonlocality.

The Overstory also triumphs over its share of narrational challenges. Powers’s The

Overstory is the only novel of the three discussed in which the present tense21 is the principal

21 More correctly, the historical present, or the narration of past events in present tense. 36

mode of narration. This verb tense places readers in the moment, addressing the most important

part of stories, which is “how they begin to mesh with the present time or narration” (Morton

50). The use of the present tense establishes a sense of simultaneity. The novel does not take the

same nonchronological approach as Mr. Eternity, but a key facet of this Powers novel is its

“comprehensiveness” (Herforth et al. 43). It “trace[s] all social, political, personal, cultural and

aesthetic aspects of [climate change] in a non-reductive way” (43). The Overstory takes place in the microcosm of 1990s American environmentalism, taking an “inwardly focused” (Nixon 252) approach to climate change, but the dynamic and overlapping nature of the microcosm raises its environmental stakes.

The Hoel family in The Overstory has a photographic tradition for recording and compressing the passage of time. Nicholas Hoel, one of the main characters of the novel, inherits what his father identified as a “pointless photographic ritual” of taking pictures of the family chestnut tree (Powers 15). As fathers and grandfathers are left to “fad[e] into blurry, black-and- white, overexposed memories” (14), Nicholas develops a slightly different sense of time. He flips through the pictures left by his grandfather and father as a child, watching as “three-quarters of a century runs by in the time it takes to say grace” (18). The “multi-generation photo project” condenses the slow, invisible growth of the chestnut into a five-second movie. The growth is an astounding vision of “a Corinthian column of wood swell[ing] under his thumb, rousing itself and shaking free” (18). Nicholas’s grandfather described the feeling of flipping the photos aptly:

“Makes you think different about things, don’t it?” (19). This manipulation of time is an important technique for environmental narratives. Large events can be condensed into microscopic moments, which helps develop a macro-level perspective. Here, we have evidence of tree time being translated into human time by way of technology. Technology is often “geared

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to immediate signals and short-term actions” (Pahl 382) that are much more comprehensible to

humans than drawn-out and large-scale temporal events, speaking to the advantages of finding

alternate delivery methods.

Neelay, another main character of The Overstory, describes this temporal relativism by relating it to a story. He remembers a story featuring aliens who come to Earth; the aliens’ temporality is accelerated in comparison to humans: they “zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans” (Powers 487). Similarly, when

Adam is sentenced to 140 years in prison, he finds the sentence lenient. He views it in tree time; he approximates 140 years to the lifespan of a black willow and a wild cherry. Thinking of this sentence in human time, considering a roughly 80-year lifespan for an American citizen, 140 years is a death sentence, but Adam is at the most unfazed. Climate change is defined by this relativism. For most of the last several centuries, accelerating climate change has happened so slowly that its effects have been, overall, difficult to perceive in the measures of a single human life. Climate disaster, like many other hyperobjects, “loom[s] into human time like the lengthening shadow of a tree across the garden lawn in the bright sunshine” (Morton 122).

Human time phases against deep time, or even tree time, because they are carried out on dramatically different scales. Using items such as the Hoel photo book helps manipulate time into something more accessible. Seeing time pass differently allows characters to think about life differently, allowing for more original thought and better comprehension of dauntingly sized hyperobjects.

Neelay’s world of Mastery also changes one’s notion of time and space. The computer- generated environments of his game are nearly infinite. The game he designs allows players to build themselves and civilizations from ground zero. It is described as highly addictive, and

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Neelay admits it is “chronophagic,” or time-eating (Powers 227). This idea of eaten time connects directly with the novel’s other examples of time compression. The “forever growing” video game is characterized by near-endless possibility (226). It is limited by the absence of perma-death or significant consequences; only good possibilities exist, erasing the uncertainty of a bad turnout. It is development without consequence—in particular, without ecological crisis—

and therefore an unparalleled treat for humans. The idea that one can replace their real life,

which is characterized as slow-moving and full of consequence and limit, is so attractive to

Mastery players that it becomes dangerous. With the advancement of the Internet, Mastery

becomes a massively multiplayer online (MMO) service that sees “a million more lonely boys

emigrate to the new and improved Neverland” (276). This allusion to Neverland from J.M.

Barrie’s Peter Pan paints Mastery as a juvenile . It is a “Neverland” of frozen time that

shows itself to be unsustainable. When Neelay sees the shortcomings of Mastery, he proposes a

change in the gameplay model. In order to solve a “Midas problem” (377), where arbitrary

objectives are simply about expansion, wealth accumulation, and reinvention, Neelay suggests

implementing finite resources, realistic environmental simulations, and real consequences.

“Imagine: a game with the goal of growing the world, instead of yourself,” he suggests to his

team (413). His employees, young and successful programmers and businesspeople,

unanimously disagree. They believe in the unadulterated world of Mastery because it sustains the ecological fiction of human exceptionalism and growth without consequence. In the video game, humanity is placed above all. The digital world makes a god out of a normal person, placing them impossibly above the constraints of time, space, and finite resources, and thus distorts values of actual life. Neelay observes that Mastery’s “land of animated wishes will expand without limits,” but “people will be hungry and alone” (308) at a fundamental level.

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There is no “Goldilocks position” (Morton 27) in which all the effects of climate change

can be perfectly viewed and understood but recognizing the consequences of the present moment allows characters to take meaningful action. By recognizing the future’s uncertainty, characters can come to understand the urgency and existence of climate change. This repositioning of perspective trumps a “psychic and ideological” distance that complicates the representation of hyperobjects (27). Narrational inconsistences present and overcome these complications. Climate change as a hyperobject is constantly developing and moving across “blurred boundaries” as it interacts with and transforms the rest of the world (42). Objectivity seems impossible as characters reflect on stories of the past with the retrospect of the present or make prospections about the future that exists in absolute uncertainty. A hyperobject “passes through a thousand sieves” when thought about, “emerging as translated information at the other end of the mesh”

(77). The diegetic narratives in these climate fiction novels are those sieves. Though they may be fraught with narrational challenges of delivery, language, and ontology, they do cohere into meaningful environmental philosophies, histories, and criticisms.

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A COUNTRY’S CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

The aforementioned representational challenges are significant but they are not insurmountable. These three novels effectively showcase narratives that reimagine past, present, and future implications of climate change, offering “a complex, multifaceted, and robust mapping of what might happen” (Garforth 255). The Swan Book, Mr. Eternity, and The

Overstory are all heavy with lessons of environmental ethics. Their complexification of the contemporary environmental consciousness allows different voices and visions to enter modern discourse. Discourse then leads to action—the characters in these novels grapple with intersectional causes and consequences as they take diversified approaches to transforming misconceptions of anthropogenic climate crisis as a monolithic event.

In Richard Powers’s The Overstory, five characters are given tree names: Watchman,

Maidenhair, Mulberry, Doug-fir, and Maple. These five are introduced in separate stories, but their paths converge as they set out on of environmental justice. The title of The Overstory does not reflect the overstory of any one forest; instead, it illustrates the many links between the book’s nine main characters: a network or forest of people. Even when characters never explicitly interact with each other, there are discreet links between them. The lives of these characters “have long been connected, deep underground” and their “kinship will work like an unfolding book” (Powers 132). The five environmental activists,22 in particular, are the ones that engage most directly with environmental action in the story. Although the other principal characters of the novel are also joined into narratives of environmental justice, these five make for the most appropriate case study in the motivations and consequences of environmental narratives.

22 Also identified in the book as environmental terrorists. 41

Nick (Watchman) and Olivia (Maidenhair) begin their careers as activists by tree-sitting in Mimas, a gargantuan redwood, as it is threatened by loggers. Mimas “could be Yggdrasil, the

World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above” (Powers 260). The

World Tree is invoked by different names in various cultural cosmologies, but the name

Yggdrasil calls special attention to Norse mythology. Yggdrasil is known as a connecting hub between the Nine Worlds, as well as a center of sacred government. The general evocation of

The World Tree calls to mind a tree that connects the heavens, earth, and the underworld, and is also associated with eternal life. Here, the language relating Mimas to these tree mythologies turns the tree into a metonymy of interconnectivity. The Overstory seeks to illustrate “the complexity of the worldwide arboreal system as a ‘wood wide web’ in both its temporal and spatial dimensions” that is “beyond the total grasp of… human endeavor” through the magnanimity of Mimas (Herforth 43). The redwood represents a greater network of plant life that tethers temporal, spatial, political, and sacred concepts together into a cohesive universe.

The redwood quite literally becomes the entire world for Nick and Olivia as they spend months camping in Mimas’s crown. Olivia begins ‘hearing’ the voice of Mimas, demonstrating that “the characters [in the novel] are not merely thinking about trees, but [they are thinking] with them”

(Herforth 49). Solidarity between human and tree is significant in The Overstory. The activists in

Powers’s novel do not see environmental advocacy as a commodified exchange between trees and people that must benefit one party while costing the other gravely. There are no cut-and-dry winners or losers in the fight for a healthier planet. In the mind of the activist, both parties must sacrifice for mutual benefit. While tree-sitting, Nick and Olivia sympathize with the loggers who are simply “doing what they’ve been asked to do” (Powers 289) to feed their families and keep their jobs. Similarly, the loggers claim to respect the trees and have sympathy for the activist

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cause. The structuring of ecological activism as a cost-benefit gray area makes it a complete antithesis to capitalist economics. Whereas capitalism encourages one-sided profit in its free- market enterprise, the goals of The Overstory activists suggest compromise. By taking the side of people and trees—as opposed to people or trees—they enforce a narrative of finding symbiotic relationships in an interconnected world.

The tree-sitting episode does not end until a helicopter forces Nick, Olivia, and Adam

(Maple)—a psychologist who has come to study Nick and Olivia—out of Mimas, leaving the redwood to be logged. Nick and Olivia mourn the loss. Nick loses “the largest, strongest, widest, oldest, sanest living thing” he has ever seen (262); here, his language displaces humankind as an apex species. Powers is completely overturning narratives of human exceptionalism. He

“decentralize[s] intentionality and guide[s] readers to consider enlarging the concepts of agency and creativity to include trees and forests” (Masiero 136). Powers gives agency to Mimas, which makes the loss of the tree all the more poignant. Powers effectively creates “grievable nature… and an understanding of trees as creatures with which, as humans, we are more intricately connected than we commonly consider” (Hess 190). Nick and Olivia equate the wellbeing of the tree with the wellbeing of people, while acknowledging that trees, for all of their greatness, are not able to advocate for themselves amidst this late Anthropocene. Olivia has the following epiphany after leaving college to search for a new course of life: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (Powers 165). The “most wondrous products” being trees, of course, and the call for help going out to humankind.

Together, the five environmental activists take it upon themselves to do what they can “to stop the [human] race from killing itself” (345). They take on acts of resistance in efforts to garner national attention. They seek to “plan[t] a seed, the kind that needs fire to open” (346)

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with attacks for environmental justice. Together, the five decide to set fire to a parcel of public land being sold to public speculators. This arson is a turning point in the novel. They work the arson “like a single creature,” simulating interconnectedness, “wrestling five-gallon fuel containers into place and daisy-chaining them with wicks of towel and sheet doused in propellant” (347) until something goes wrong. Adam suddenly feels a change of heart and is struck by hopelessness. He believes the “bedrock of human existence” (348) is inevitably doomed. Their actions seem futile in the moment to him and he briefly panics with the thought that he can do nothing to stop a future where “Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered” (348). The use of the word “bedrock” suggests a reaching deep into geologic time, surpassing the time scale of individual human lives or even the life of the human species. This pessimistic view of the future refutes its state of absolute uncertainty. Adam is paralyzed by thinking of the future and its ill-boding what-ifs instead of the present moment, experiencing similar doomsday anxieties as the 2016 narrator in Mr. Eternity. At the same moment as this crisis of faith, Nick is struck by a concussion wave from an explosion set off too early. The fire starts prematurely and Olivia is gravely injured. Adam is sent to get help, but he never does so because he believes she is doomed and is unwilling to risk persecution, again acting in the interest of the future rather than the present.

As Olivia slowly dies in Mimi’s arms, Adam calls the sight a “Pietà,” referring to a frequent motif in Christian art of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus (Powers 351).

In this moment, Mimi is the Virgin Mary, burdened with great sorrow and a supernatural compassion, while Olivia is the messiah. Olivia’s death has already been foreshadowed by her momentary death by electrocution early on in the novel. Here, her second and permanent death is

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felt in reverberations by the other characters who mourn her as another casualty in the quest to

build a relationship between nature and humankind.

In her dying words, Olivia asks Nick, “This will never end—what we have. Right?”

(352). It is unclear what she is referring to. She is possibly referring to a romantic relationship, but she could also be speaking about their ongoing quest for environmental justice. The ending of the book seems to confirm the latter as Nick ponders his next environmental project. “This.

What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end,” he hears “a voice” say

(Powers 502). Nick’s last work of art in the book is a giant sculpture of the word “STILL” readable from space. The idea of “STILL,” as in still existing, still learning, and still telling stories reinforces the idea of post-human longevity. The consequences of environmental justice in the novel seem “ineffective and short-sighted” because “they do not yield results in proportion to the sacrifices” (Hess 202). Characters are met with ‘bad endings’ of death, incarceration, and loneliness that could suggest “activism does not win the day” (202). However, upon closer examination, it is clear that these consequences are trivial in scale. The Overstory is all about rescaling perspective. Although not each character is met with the satisfaction of some great ecological victory, they are fulfilled by the participation in a larger movement. This movement goes on, perhaps will never end, and exists in the space of still going.

This perpetual pursuit of ecological justice connects to a larger motif of climate fiction: the cyclical nature of environmental crisis. Oblivia in The Swan Book notes that her story “might be the same story about some important person carrying a swan centuries ago, and it might be the same story in centuries to come when someone will carry a swan back to this ground where its story once lived” (Wright 301). This temporal displacement underscores the ongoing nature of climate change. As previously observed, these three novels begin in medias res. Wright

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consciously avoids placing her story in a distinct time or place because dating it might write off its concerns as a problems of an isolated historical moment, rather than those of an ongoing crisis. Oblivia’s issues aren’t only issues of a distant dystopian future, but they are problems rooted in a deep time past that continue into the present. Thus, Wright brings “new scales of time and space” to a story about climate (Gleeson-White 33). In Mr. Eternity, Daniel Defoe is interested in the rate at how things evolve. Jam notes, “It were a amazing thought how everything changes but then I also thought how Old Dan said it changes back again. Even more amazing it all goes in circles” (Thier 209). The circle of ecological activism only grows in stakes as time goes on. The 2016 narrator asks Quaco about the end of the world. Quaco tells him that

“[The world] does end. Over and over again”23 (Thier 126), painting an impermanence of human civilization yet generational repetition of the same environmental mistakes.

The predictability of crisis begs a question of proactivity and reactivity: if humankind keeps making the same environmental missteps, how do we change the paradigm? The Overstory and Mr. Eternity address issues of proactivity versus reactivity, which speak to this issue.

Toward the end of both novels, characters bring up the preventability of ecological crisis. In The

Overstory, Douglas writes a memoir of his years as an activist. In it, he addresses “the nearby, related topic of What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind” (Powers 386). This issue, impossibly large to be resolved in the space of his writing, suggests the failure to prevent the preventable.

Douglas feels regret for his ancestors, and even his contemporary peers, as he ponders the times humankind failed the environment. Jam in Mr. Eternity expresses a similar thought. “How did the world get so fucked I said why didn’t they stop it people are smart why didn’t they think of something,” he asks Daniel Defoe as they survey the ruins of flooded St. Augustine (Thier 241).

23 Quaco makes reference to the fall of Anaquitos and Achem. 46

Both characters are keen to place the blame on people, underlining the anthropogenic aspect of

climate change. Douglas and Jam agree that humankind should have taken a more proactive

stance to ecological action. They also recognize the ability of humankind to change things.

Breaking the cycle is possible: the future is absolutely uncertain, so while modifying a paradigm

of environmental thought would be challenging, it is a feat still within reach.

Part of changing the contemporary paradigm is also diversifying it. Mr. Eternity does an

impressive job of countering “Western modernity with a plurality of voices, with multiplicity and

difference” (Mertens 171). Environmental arguments are present in the white Western male

voice in Daniel Defoe, but they are also present in a filmmaker with pre-traumatic stress disorder, a former slave, an indigenous Pirahao girl, a destitute orphan, and a powerless princess.

Mr. Eternity “foregrounds elements of capitalist society such as racism, sexism, and colonialism”

(Mertens 170), which is vitally important in constructing a diverse climate narrative.

“Synthesizing local experiences of climate change” and allowing marginalized populations to articulate “human-environment relations in their own terms”’ (Pascoe 2) is one of the great values of intersectional climate fiction. Localization through diversification leads to better understandings of massive issues, allowing even the most nebulous hyperobjects to be realized.

Nixon points out that postcolonial scholars and critics often fault “mainstream environmentalism” for being full of “whiter-than-white, hippy-dippy-tree-hugging-dopehead deep ecologist[s] from an over privileged background” (253), but ambitiously casted novels such as Mr. Eternity counter that narrative. Modern environmentalist thought can be broadened to include those in the global South, or any people othered in ecological narratives by race, class, location, ethnicity, and gender. The Swan Book achieves this by highlighting indigenous voices and landscapes. Oblivia’s trauma also opens roads to discuss “intersectional environmentalism”

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(Nixon 133). Intersectional environmentalism in The Swan Book combines indigenous women’s

rights with an ecological argument. Bella Donna tells stories of the girls who were “left to die in

the bush” (Wright 182), much like Oblivia, who was left traumatized and all but forgotten in a

eucalyptus tree. Following the incident, the story of Oblivia’s sexual assault is described as

“polluting” by the community (83). This metaphor relating sexual violence to pollution in the

landscape is a perfect example of an intersectional environmentalist narrative.

While The Overstory doesn’t achieve the same intersectional effect with its human

diversity—most of the characters are relatively privileged middle-class Americans—it does give

agency to nonhuman operatives (viz., trees) and becomes inclusive of “diverse forms of

intelligence” (Hess 196). In the opening passage, there is a woman sitting under a pine tree.

Powers writes, “The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear”

(Powers 4). The tree speaks in “words before words” (3), or in a language that has existed long before humans invented conventional vocabulary, syntax, and so on. The voice of the tree is set in roman font while the narrative voice is in italics. This places emphasis on the tree voice as the norm, decentralizing the human. The pine tells the woman that humanity “never sees us whole”

(3), using “us” to describe trees around the world. Powers is, through the voice of the pine, and through the whole of the novel, trying “to give linguistic shape to what is out there but is still— essentially—invisible, what we may call the nonhuman” (Masiero 136). Characters in the book who engage with trees, such as Olivia, translate nonhuman experiences of struggle, victory, temporality, and community into human discourse.

Intersectionality goes hand-in-hand with deep interconnectedness. Each picture of a past, present, or future environmental issue is a “metonymy” (Morton 77) of a whole that suggests something large and sensitive to other moving parts. Although each climate event or

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consequence fails to capture the entirety of a hyperobject, they work well in concert to represent the larger entity. In explaining interconnectedness as a “paradox of perspectives” (Thier 248),

Daniel Defoe in Mr. Eternity shares a story of a barnacle goose:

“There used to be a creature called the barnacle goose, which reproduced in two different

ways. First, it could be produced from a scum that developed on fir timber tossing in the

waves. The baby bird hung from the timber until it was coated with feathers, at which

time it flew away. But it could also be produced when the droppings of a mature goose

fell into the water from a high cliff. The droppings became barnacles, and the new geese

hatched out of these barnacles in the spring and burst through the waves. Now, consider

this effect: If you have climate warming, the water becomes corrosive, as everyone

knows. This melts the barnacles before they can turn into geese, and it melts the feathers

on the baby birds that grow on driftwood. You might not see the connection between the

warm water and the destruction of geese, but this anecdote shows how everything was

connected. That is what I mean by rivets. All the rivets melt, but only when the final rivet

melts does the spaceship fall out of the sky.” (Thier 248)

Daniel Defoe’s claim that “everything [is] connected” in nature lies at the heart of these stories. If Country, as defined by the indigenous Aboriginal imaginary, means a landscape of deep and extensive interconnectedness, then each of these works builds its own version of

Country. The narrative method of each book is fraught with spatial and temporal challenges, but their storytelling adapts to confront these highly complex issues. As climate fiction develops, it is becoming increasingly clear that while one consequence, or melting rivet, may not seem like the most influential event, it adopts significance in the framework of a sensitive and irreducible ecosystem.

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CONCLUSION

“We need to find (as Rachel Carson did some fifty years ago) new ways to tell the slow-

moving stories about the long dying… We’re all downwinders now, some sooner than

others” (Nixon 232).

Undoubtedly, there are numerous representational challenges in climate studies. Climate fiction is beginning to fight these diversified issues, alongside nonfiction writers, scientists, activists,

and sustainably motivated industrialists. As detailed in the first half of this paper, in order to tell

stories about climate change, you must first have context, which is established through memory.

Pictures of the past inform the present and future—sometimes affecting all time frames at once,

as seen in the case of Mimi Ma. Spatial and temporal transgressions, which come through the

form of narrational inconsistencies, necessarily complicate stories by introducing uncertainty and

room for differences in expression and reception. Multiplicity, through diverse representation

and complex prose, broadens the scope of modern environmentalism, opening up new ways to

understand and depict climate crisis. The effectiveness of decentralizing standardized Western

perspectives of the environment is best seen in the indigenous voices of The Swan Book,

diversified narrators in Mr. Eternity, and empowered natural agents in The Overstory. All three

of these novels share stories of ecology that overcome typical representational challenges of

environmental discourse. Telling stories about climate change is important because it makes the

invisible visible and articulates the unsayable. Undoubtedly, climate fiction will continue to break boundaries when it comes to depicting, understanding, contextualizing, speculating, and responding to climate events on the horizon.

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