“A world of slow decay” –

Extinction Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

Hannah Klaubert | 10849343

University of Amsterdam

Research Master Cultural Analysis

Dr. Niall Martin | Dr. Tim Yaczo

INTRODUCTION ...... 3

ONE. Thylacine, Extinct ...... 11

TWO. Oryx Beisa, Near Threatened, and Red-Necked Crake, Least Concern ...... 25

THREE. Irrawaddy River Dolphin, Vulnerable, and Royal Bengal Tiger, Endangered ...... 39

CONCLUSION ...... 54

REFERENCES ...... 57

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We live in strange times, a little as if we were suspended between two histories, both of which speak of a world become “global.” One of them is familiar to us. It has the rhythm of news from the front in the great worldwide competition and has economic growth for its arrow of time. It has the clarity of evidence with regard to what it requires and promotes, but it is marked by a remarkable confusion as to its consequences. The other, by contrast, could be called distinct with regard to what is in the process of happening, but it is obscure with regard to what it requires, the response to give to what is in the process of happening.

(Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, 17)

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INTRODUCTION

The 2015 documentary Racing Extinction tackles illegal wildlife trade as one cause of the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction which will, as has become clear by now, wipe a significant percentage of all existing species off planet Earth in foreseeable time.1 Already in its title the documentary points towards a major problem in framing extinction today: the tension between the singular tragedy of the loss of one type of giant manta rays, and a feeling of the absolute urgency of the matter, the scale and speed of the dying unprecedented since humans populated planet Earth. The causes for this extinction event range from habitat loss and - fragmentation, poaching, the spread of invasive species or deadly fungi through globalized trade to the carbonization of the oceans in anthropogenic climate change. The non-human species are disappearing fast; and it feels like we humans aren’t doing much to save them. On the contrary, the rise in extinction rates, currently more than 1000 times above the

“background rate” which accompanies evolutionary change in between peak periods, is almost exclusively ascribed to human activity. (Barnosky et al. 51f) It is closely entangled with Western imperialist movements and the spreading of a system possibly best described as

“Petro-Capitalism”.2 Based on the exploitation of natural resources, this globalized system has had human population more than double since the 1950s, leaving little space and resources to the non-human habitants of this planet. (cf. Heise 10f)

1 For a discussion of the scientific research behind this information, see: Barnosky, Anthony D., et al. “Has the Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction already arrived?” Nature 471.7336 (2011): 51-57. 2 For a more detailed account of the concept of Petro-Capitalism, see Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden (ed.). Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. The concept can be useful in describing our current societal organization as it links our social histories to the exploitation of materials of the Earth which are inextricably interwoven.

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In this thesis, I will be looking at three contemporary Anglophone novels which engage with biodiversity loss and the concept of extinction: a) The Hunter (2000) by

Australian author Julia Leigh, b) the first volume of US-based bestseller author Margaret

Atwood’s dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003), and c) Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry

Tide (2004). All three novels find their own specific ways of narrating how species extinction is negotiated in human culture, drawing on as well as defying stereotypical narrative forms.

As literary critic Ursula Heise has shown, species extinction is often represented along the lines of a classic tragedy, with a “last of a kind” figure in the center. The tragedy of massive biodiversity loss becomes an ersatz stage on which the alienation of the “modern” human from Nature is negotiated. (“Nach der Natur”, Chapter 2, 47f) However, the novels I have chosen also find more differentiated entry-points into the topic, dealing with the above described tension between different temporalities of the current ecological crisis and their ethical implications. I will now first give a first short overview of the theoretical discussions around species loss and extinction in contemporary cultural theory, to then introduce the main concepts and theoretical background I will be working with throughout my analysis.

Lastly, I will give a brief rundown of my chapters before I go on to introduce my first object.

Extinction Theory. My engagement with the topic of species extinction was triggered through a general interest in ecologically engaged philosophy and cultural theory in the last years. With a growing acknowledgement of the material and ecological forces involved in human sense-making and the ontological questions tagging along, cultural theory has come to address the problem of extinction more thoroughly. Two corner marks are Claire Colebrook’s

Essays on Extinction (published in two volumes, Death of the PostHuman and Sex After Life) and Raymond Brassier’s Nihil Unbound – Enlightenment and Extinction. These texts,

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however, use the ongoing mass extinction event as a departing point for their own

(post)human ontological quests – so that the fact of biodiversity loss is only a pathway to thinking about human extinction and the human condition in an age of (ecological) crisis.

Therefore, these theories have proven mostly incompatible with my own research interests.

On the other hand, a number of popular scientific books have investigated the history and workings of the current mass extinction, most famously David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo

– Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (1996) and Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth

Extinction – An Unnatural History (2015). They provide fascinating historical accounts of the rise of extinction as a concept in human thought, the ongoing extinction event and preservation efforts. Finally, at the intersection of these theoretical/philosophical and historical/scientific texts, above mentioned Ursula Heise has brought forward a very extensive study of extinction narratives and genres of biodiversity loss in her 2010 Nach der

Natur – Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (“After Nature – Species Extinction and

Modern Culture”). In this book, she investigates the biological concepts, cultural narratives and rhetoric structures that shape our understanding of biodiversity loss. Her research, with its vast collection of scientific, theoretical, artistic and literary material, forms the background for my own engagement with species extinction and contemporary literature.

The year 2016 actually seems to be a pivotal moment in the critical engagement with biodiversity loss. Not only will a revised and translated version of Heise’s book be published under the title Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species

(University of Chicago Press) this year; other forthcoming publications of 2016 include

Ashley Dawson’s Extinction. A Radical History (OR Books), Myra Hird’s “Proliferation-

Extinction-Anxiety and the Anthropocene Aesthetic” in the Critical Life Studies series of

Columbia University Press, Vanishing America – Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the

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Origins of Conservation by Miles A. Powell (HUP), and Beth Shapiro: How to Clone a

Mammoth – The Science of De-Extinction (PUP). One other event scheduled for this year will stir up discussion in the field of ecocriticism: 2016 also marks the target date for the

“Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy” to decide on behalf of the “International

Commission of Stratigraphy” whether the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, will officially be recognized as the current stratigraphic epoch. If they agree to accept the proposition, which was popularized in the early 2000s by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the

Anthropocene will officially supersede the current official epoch, the Holocene. (Boes and

Marshall 60)

The Anthropocene Narrative. The concept of the Anthropocene has already received a lot of attention in cultural theory and artistic practice during the last decade. (Boes and

Marshall 60) It not only unravels geological thinking through the introduction of a new stratigraphic period, but also intertwines geological and ecological with ontological questions. Whether or not the epoch will be officially recognized by the Stratigraphic

Commission, we have to live with the immense ecological and geological shifts currently under way – and we have to recognize that we humans are their main cause. The

Anthropocene concept puts us humans as a geological force into the centre of the narrative, and at the same time dethrones the human as it defines us as one species among others on a planet which has existed long before and will persist after us. The Anthropocene dismisses human history as the only valid way of temporal structuring. Therefore, it also poses narratological problems. In its narrative framework, human historic narratives compete with the unimaginable timescales of the entirety of geologic history, most often referred to as

“geologic time” or “deep time”. But then, the Anthropocene also stands for an unprecedented

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acceleration of changes to the planet’s human and non-human populations and chemical composition. Those changes have their root in the imperialist movements of the last centuries and the globalized exploitation of natural resources and humans alike. Jason W. Moore has therefore suggested to replace the concept of the Anthropocene with that of the

“Capitalocene”, 3 which inscribes the social histories of exploitation into the geologic period.

Both concepts have been critiqued thoroughly, both produce inclusions and exclusions in the way they seek to represent “humanity” across time and continents. 4 It is not my aim here to check these concepts against one another. What the discussions around the right way to represent ourselves in relation to geologic time scales and ecological disruption most simply shows, though, and what cultural theorists, artists and historians engaging with the

Anthropocene concept have proved sensitive to, is another point: how we narrate the current ecological crisis and our own position and agency in it has massive ethical and political implications. What is at stake here beyond a new geologic epoch is a self-reflexive positioning of humans against, or rather with, their mineral and organic neighbours. I will bear this in mind in my following analysis.

Extinction as Concept. Species loss was first accepted as a scientific fact in the early

19th century. Once it had dawned upon researchers that the fossils they were digging up and collecting en masse in the 18th century must stem from beings that no longer existed during their own lifetime, they started to form theories that disrupted creationist ideas on how

3 For more information on the Capitalocene concept, which has also been adopted by scholars such as Donna Haraway, see: Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso Books, 2015. I also want to note here that of course these geologic time scales are in no way more “natural” or “original” than the human histories. All of these concepts are human ways of structuring time and linearity into a sense-making narrative beyond the human lifespan. 4 For further discussion of this, see Chapter One.

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species were appearing and disappearing from this planet. (Clayton 58) The discovery of the age of the planet opened up geologic time spans reaching far beyond human existence and made path for the idea that species were going extinct as part of a natural selection process.

Charles Darwin popularized the concept of evolution in the mid-19th century, and with it the concept of a natural background extinction rate. 5 Since then, of course, it has become clear that this rate has risen from a common background rate to a massive-scale dying during the last centuries (the beginning of the extinction event is contested and positioned somewhere between 1500 and 1900, which already points towards its close entanglement with colonial movements). (Heise 19f) Today, biologists, activists and policy makers all over the planet are trying to preserve key species through nature reserves, breeding programs and more. But the accelerated extinction rate is gaining pace and has become one of the markers of human impact on the changing the organic structure of this planet – and an official marker of the

Anthropocene.6 Furthermore, the two concepts are very closely related in another way: they entail thinking humans themselves as a species which will disappear from this planet sooner or later, thus making many efforts of preservation look minor in relation to this ‘bigger’ problem. Both the Anthropocene and species extinction are marked by these centrifugal forces which seem to make a clear ethical standpoint hard to delimit. The temporal torsions and narrative challenges of thinking or writing the Anthropocene also mark species extinction

5 Jay Clayton writes about the ‘discovery’ of geologic time and evolutionary theory: “Nineteenth century geologists pushed back the age of the Earth, while astronomers and physicists calculated the death of the sun and the cooling of the planet. But evolution, more than anything else, altered our relation to time. It linked the individual not just to the familial ancestors but to generations back before the dawn of history, to the animal kingdom, and before that, to the protozoa. The future was changed as well. Posterity came to signify not merely lineal descendants, not even sacred eternity, but an impersonal futurity, a time beyond the individual, a time beyond even the species, a time that entailed the possibility of extinction.” (Clayton, 58) For further historical insight into the development of the concept of extinction, I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction – An Unnatural History. 6 Cf. the website of the “Anthropocene Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy” for all the markers that are taken into account: http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/majordivisions/anthropocene/.

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as a concept. In the following extensive analysis, I hope to be able to lay bare the challenges of narrating and representing extinction in its relation to the Anthropocene concept.

Structure. In my first chapter, I will be looking at the novel The Hunter by Australian author Julia Leigh. It narrates the hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger, an animal whose loss has become a symbol for the horrors of colonial conquest in Oceania. The novel is concerned with above mentioned conflicting temporalities of species extinction in entangling the colonial past with the presence of geologic timespans. While the novel shines a light on alternative conceptions of a queer ecological futurity that is based on kinship and care – but therefore also has to confront loss and suffering –, the protagonist of the novel instead settles for an apocalyptic nihilism that leaves his problematic masculinity unquestioned and makes it possible for him to avoid all ethical reflection on extinction, death and loss.

In the second chapter, I will argue that while Leigh alludes to the problematic temporalities of extinction, Magaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake puts the focus on the narrative and linguistic structures in which extinction narratives can operate. The novel, set in a post-apocalyptic future, plays with the genres in which extinction is represented (with the famous Red Lists of Endangered Species leading the way). The post-apocalyptic narrative standpoint of the novel furthermore positions the current species mass extinction as predecessor to inevitable human extinction, and also as the uncanny revenant of earlier extinction events. The subtraction and burning of their remains (in the form of fossil fuels) have made the Sixth Mass Extinction possible in the first place. The novel represents the species loss entangled in networks of exploitation that reach even to the genome of humans and non-humans.

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In the third and last chapter, I will consider The Hungry Tide, which more than the other two novels is concerned with the ethical questions that arise from the Sixth Mass

Extinction event. I will therefore have a closer look at how this novel by Bengali Indian author Amitav Ghosh addresses questions of inter-species justice in a complex ecological and political environment. It addresses the “pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects”

(Nixon 3) that characterize the current ecological crisis. In drawing a parallel between violence against vulnerable communities and non-human habitants of the ecological system of the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide spells out difficult ethical questions that have to be asked in the Sixth Mass Extinction. The tension between questions of representation and species extinction is also examined in the parallel that The Hungry Tide draws between the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of local languages – which, as it turns out, is not only a metaphorical relation.

It is this question of representation which drives my interest in these texts. After all, these novels are not more than fictional accounts of a series of events that in reality is not only tragic from an environmental ethics standpoint, but could also prove fatal to humanity itself. (cf. Heise 20f) What can they potentially reveal to us that goes beyond what we already know about the Sixth Mass Extinction event from scientific research and quantitative data analysis? It is that as humans, we have no other way but relating to our surroundings through stories. As Joanna Zylinska writes in the brilliant Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene:

If we humans have a singular responsibility to give an account of the differentiations of matter, of

which we are part, such practices of account giving establish a constitutive link between ethics and

poetics. Indeed, we encounter ethics precisely via stories and images, i.e., through textual and visual

narratives (…). (105, emphasis mine)

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These stories about species extinction carry conceptions of past and future, ‘us’ and ‘them’, that will inform our ethics and our relations to other humans and non-humans populating the

Earth with us. Therefore, in this thesis I aim to map out these hidden implications of thinking the current mass extinction from a cultural theory point of view, and I will do so in analysing above mentioned three extinction narratives in contemporary Anglophone literature.

One. THYLACINE, EXTINCT

The Tasmanian tiger is a marsupial (with a pouch for the protection of the young on male and female specimen) which can open its jaw up to 120 degrees and has received its biologically wrong common name through the stripes that cover its lower back. The thylacine, or

Thylacinus cynocephalus in Linnean taxonomy, was hunted to extinction for supposedly killing the livestock, children and innocent brides of the European settlers in the 19th century.

A large sum was paid to any person who could bring a thylacine corpse to the town houses.

(Crane 105) Habitat fragmentation, introduction of invasive species and disease did the rest.

The last known thylacine, named Benjamin, died in captivity in 1936, only a few weeks after the species was declared critically endangered. Some video footage of the animal, which seems to have refused to procreate in captivity despite international breeding efforts, and a few taxidermied specimen are all that remain of the Tasmanian tiger today. (Crane 106f)7

Since its disappearance, though, uncountable rumours of sightings in the form of blurry

7 For further information on the extinction process of the thylacine, presumed causes and historic facts, see: David Owen, Tasmanian Tiger: The Tragic Tale of How the World Lost its Most Mysterious Predator (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (London: Hutchinson, 1996), 280f.

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pictures and videos have appeared and claim the “return” of the Tasmanian tiger. The

Australian government has put massive funds into a research project dedicated to re-breeding the thylacine from preserved genetic material – an undertaking that has since been abandoned without any substantial success. (Turner 63) Much of this tiger-craze, also manifested in the branding of uncountable consumer products and souvenirs, has been attributed to the important role that the animal has come to play in discourses around the violence of colonial take-over not only against nature, but also against the native inhabitants of Australia and

Tasmania. (Crane 113f)

In Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter, first published in 1999, a professional hunter who calls himself Martin Davis, or short “M”, rummages the forests of Tasmania in search for the last Tasmanian tiger. Following the rumours that claim the sighting of a tiger up in the woods, he sets out to find the animal, an undertaking which gets him in touch with both the local inhabitants of the remote Tasmanian valley and the hostile natural environment of the

Tasmanian highlands. I will argue in the following chapter that the novel, though short and terse in style, a) plays with the divergent temporalities that collapse in the human imagination of extinction. Through counterposing geologic time frames and prevailing damage from a colonial past, The Hunter makes the centrifugal forces visible that emerge through thinking extinction as both a human-caused process deeply embedded in the social history of the past few centuries and a geologic event with precursors in the history of the planet itself. b)

Furthermore, it explores, in a bold narrative move, how a heteronormative conception of the future (which is prevalent in much environmental ethics) is ultimately not fruitful in framing the current ecological crisis.8 c) Lastly, the novel exposes how facing the pervasive changes

8 This thought is of course routed in a much broader discussion of environmental ethics and the contested nature of the current ecological crisis; a re-evaluation of contemporary environmental ethics has especially been promoted by feminist scholars. See for example: Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis

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in ecology today can easily lead from an ethical environmentalism towards an apocalyptic and ultimately nihilistic vision of the future, a future which creates exclusions and favours a status quo over affective responses to biodiversity loss. In combining these three critical temporalities of species extinction, the novel creates a network of narratives that examine the ethics of extinction.

Human Time, Deep Time. In the novel, the problematic background against which the hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger is positioned, is soon revealed. Right after his arrival on the island, M is confronted with the remains of a once flourishing economy based on the clearing of woodland, a time that he refers to as “(h)ard days, but days of plenty.” (15) After the rather unsuccessful establishment of agriculture this long gone time now manifests in the “vacant concrete plots” (4) of abandoned logging villages. The hostility and frosty silence of the

Tasmanians that M as an outsider is confronted with, underline the impression of a country without perspective or future – a portrayal that Australian author Julia Leigh has strongly been criticized for.9

The entanglement between the colonial history of Tasmania and the extinction of the thylacine is examined more closely when M, during his hunt, stumbles upon a “ring of blackened stone and he imagines they might have been laid by the local aboriginal people, in the years they, the fullbloods, were almost driven to extinction.” (57)10 Confronted with these

of Reason. New York: Routledge, 2002; or more recently: Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. N.p.: Open Humanities Press, 2015. 9 Andrew Peek for example criticizes in the Australian Book Review that the novel simplistically opposes the “hippies and conservationist against backwoodsy yokels.” Cited from Crane, “Tracking the Tassie Tiger”, 111. 10 The first people of Tasmania, which M derogatorily calls the “fullbloods”, were willfully cut off of food supply and starved by the rural colonialists in the first half of the 19th century. Only very few survived these dreadful decades; the people of the Palawa are said to have become completely extinct with the death of a woman called Trugannini in 1876, who has now herself become a mythical ‘Last of a Kind’ figure. Cf. Smith, Nicholas. “The Return of the Living Dead: Unsettlement and the Tasmanian Tiger.” Journal of Australian Studies 36.3 (2012): 269-289, 281f.

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(possibly non-authentic) signs, M’s thoughts travel to a historical episode that could easily have sprung from the author’s imagination, but is historically documented: It was proposed in the 1930s that an island offshore the coast of Tasmania, De Witt island (named after a Dutch crew member of Abel Tasman’s expedition) – a former ‘sanctuary’/de facto concentration camp for Aboriginal people in the 19th century – could be repurposed to become a sanctuary for the last Tasmanian tigers. This plan was never put into practice, though, as the animal went extinct before any of the necessary measures could be taken. (Paddle, 183f) This

‘anecdote’, which M thinks about briefly while wandering into the valley, serves, in and outside the novel, as a clear marker of how closely environmental destruction and Western imperialism were linked, how they were witnessed and thought of together, and how they were met with the same political ‘solutions’.

The rumours of the tiger sighting drive M deep into a remote valley in the Tasmanian forests. With short returns to his expedition base, an ill-kept old farmhouse inhabited by a mourning widow and her equally neglected two children, he spends day after day in the densely vegetated planes of a Tasmanian creek, systematically scanning the woods for footprints and setting traps for the tiger. He enters a space where a different temporality is overwhelmingly present as he marches “towards the valley, down an easy boulder-studded slope, the smooth legacy of an ice-cap spread over sixty-five square kilometres some 20 000 years ago.” (30) He asks: “What must the plateau have been like before? Ragged and jagged, teeming with animals, giant fauna now gone extinct.” (30) As M trails closer towards the tiger, extinction turns from a historical and political tragedy into a geological process, a natural repetition of the last five extinction events11 and the deed of a “two-legged fearsome

11 The last five mass extinction events that scientists have identified and commonly agree upon are: the Ordovician event (around 443m years ago), the Devonian event (around 359m years ago), the Permian event

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little pygmy, the human hunter: a testimony to cunning, to mind over matter.” (31) The acknowledgement of the stratigraphically significant impact of humans on nature is accompanied by the realization that for the animal he is hunting, history is not of any relevance: “The animal does not care for talk, or for history or for what passes for history. If the food is there and she is hungry, then she will eat: provenance is of no concern for she does not know concern.” (48) And that also for him, on his mission, historical reflection won’t give any orientation; “(…) what good,” he asks, “is history when he is not seeking all the tigers, but one tiger: the last one.” (66) The last tiger can only ever be the end of something, it refuses history and thought.

This multi-temporality of deep time and colonial past and present is as interesting as problematic. Kylie Crane has argued that the constant re-awakening of the Tasmanian tiger seems to have a questionable function in Australian and Tasmanian culture: while playing with its image and memory, it also constantly declares the thylacine dead, as belonging to a past that no longer informs the present. (Crane 107) She places the semi-energetic efforts of the wild-life services to find and preserve the last tiger in the novel in this realm, as a fake- preservation of what is no longer allowed to be there, covering over the violence of the past inscribed in the loss of the species with a thin layer of environmental consciousness. (Crane

117) In this sense, the thylacine stories not only reflect upon the “particular histories of modernization” (“Last Dogs” 59) that Ursula Heise sees in contemporary extinction narratives, but overwrites them, smooths their edges along the lines of an unfortunate tragedy.

(251m years ago), the Triassic event (around 200m years ago) and the Cretaceous event (65m years ago). Cf. Barnosky, Anthony D., et al., table 1.

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At the same time, it unveils a temporal torsion which lies at the heart of the

Anthropocene concept: that “zooming out” of human timespans and scales constructs humanity as a monolithic force in geologic time which overwrites the erratic pulses and violent movements that have led to the current ecological crisis. As Andreas Malm and Alf

Hornborg point out, the Anthropocene concept simultaneously de-naturalizes the ecological crisis (“mind over matter”) and re-naturalizes it through thinking about humanity as one species whose innate traits, like the ability to control fire, inevitably have summoned the current crisis. (Malm and Hornborg 65) It thereby plays out inter-species power hierarchies against intra-species injustice – instead of thinking about both, violence amongst humans and violence against the non-human world, as interwoven in complex ways. I believe that The

Hunter, like much other fiction and art with an ecological tenor, can help us to understand the complex political implications of species-thinking and place multiple perspectives and time frames next to one another. It shows: To think the human as a species among others is to place us in conflicting time-frames. In presenting both the colonial history and deep geologic time as interwoven with a narrative that is clearly positioned in the slightly apocalyptic future

(that is now), the novel helps to uncover the strange entanglements and knots of meaning surrounding extinction.

Queer Ecological Futures. In her study of extinction discourses, Ursula Heise observes that there is a trend in the portrayal of the ‘last of a kind’, though often not historically correct, as a female specimen, most often as a grieving wife and mother. (Nach der Natur 52) We encounter the same trope in The Hunter – M’s informants have specified that the tiger he is hunting is a tigress. This becomes a major factor in the way M approaches and imagines his prey. In the meticulous process of his systematic hunt, M’s thoughts start to

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circle around the figure of the tigress. He hushes away his dawning realization of her possible suffering, her animal-being and indifference towards him through the idea that what has made her survive to this date is a strong urge for procreation, the search for a mate. He tells himself and the reader: “And no, she does not spend her days in a sickly fashion, rather she greets each day as a new opportunity to track the scent of a mate. That is what propels her day after day across the plateau: immortality.” (66) Many critics have pointed out the uncomfortably gendered dynamics of M’s hunt, his growing obsession with his prey and the stable masculinity M seems to find in contact with nature. (Cf. Crane 117) This imbrication of wilderness and masculinity, reiterated in the novel again and again, is of course a classic trope of traditional nature writing. Leigh smartly employs this image of the “Natural Man”, as M likes to call himself, and renders it uncomfortable through almost comical repetition.

(Cf. 4, 22, 147, 161) Kylie Crane has stressed that the narrative viewpoint, jumping between the third person and stream of consciousness-like passages in which the reader participates in

M’s thoughts, is entirely focused on M. And as the reader is likely to empathize with the focalizer of the narrative, Leigh’s narrative voice evokes conflicting sympathies. (Crane 116)

She gives the readers no possibility of escaping M’s vision, and forces them to participate in the re-iteration of stereotypes inscribed in the field of nature and gender.

On the one hand, I would argue, this gendered projection is clearly used as a mirror image for M’s own loneliness and incapability to form human relations. He is introduced early on in the text as “anchored neither by wife nor home, nor by a lover nor even a single friend.” (15) And suggestions are made that his only ever girlfriend has had an abortion, which is as close as he has come to having reproduced his own species. During his returns down to the farmhouse, M starts to grow fond of the two feral but imaginative and vivacious children and their mother, a young woman who has lost her husband, a biologist, up in the

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mountains. She tries to console her grief with sleeping pills, but seems to ‘wake up’ when M becomes part of the constellation. The slow formation of friendly or even familial bonds, though, is suddenly interrupted when the young daughter suffers from a terrible accident, leaving her in a far-off hospital with severe burns, the brother in a foster home and the mother in a mental hospital. It is certainly not a coincidence that only after this incidence, after M has lost connection to human society, after losing any sense of time, M will be able to find the last Tasmanian tiger and (spoiler alert!) kill her. In a classic narrative move, protagonist and antagonist, hunter and tiger, are bound together by their fate of being alone forever – and their confrontation ends in tragic resolution. While M will hurry on to the next job, the death of the tiger marks the vanishing of an entire species. In this sense, the novel surely plays along the lines of classic tragedy, a narrative form that Heise identifies as generic to popular extinction narratives.

On the other hand, what Leigh plants into the head of her protagonist and through him into the reader’s is a doubt: that M’s projections, his phantasies of a secret hidden pup that the tiger feeds, a weak and dying mate somewhere in a cave, have nothing to do with the reality of the animal. As the reader will not be able to exit the focalization of the hunter, as the world presented to her seems so entirely formed by M’s ‘problematic masculinity’, fear of failure to complete his mission and failure to reproduce, the world beyond these focal points becomes as opaque as interesting. Even with another lonely mate somewhere, even with an urge for sex and procreation, the animal is bound for extinction as small populations in secluded environments commonly won’t be able to recover. As an animal of the past, the

Tasmanian tiger has no future, hasn’t had one in a long time. So while M imagines an entire secret tribe of tigers hidden in an underground world, an “Atlantis” (117) from which the last thylacine has emerged as a messenger, we have no way of ever knowing how the animal

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relates to its own extinction and childlessness. It might not even care, and it quite certainly doesn’t care in the way we would want it to.

In her 2012 article “Spinster Ecology”, Sarah Ensor seeks to rethink what could be called a queer ecology in relation to (queer) futurity. She argues that current ecological thought (with slogans like “We’re saving the planet for our grandchildren.”) has a strong orientation towards the future with a focus on inheritance and procreation. It therefore reproduces a problematic heteronormative imperative and produces exclusions that stand in the way of a holistic environmental ethics, especially in a moment of ecological crisis where acceptance of loss and grief often seem as necessary as resistance in face of the cataclysmic changes. With Lee Edelman and his famous No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, she therefore argues for a refusal to engage in a (insistently transitive) reproductive futurism.

However, instead of completely getting rid of the future through a negative intransitivity that she assigns to Edelman, Ensor suggests a queer environmentalism that is positively intransitive in that it doesn’t reject the future as such, but constructs it from a queer subjectivity outside the boundaries of reproduction, and outside of our capacity to control it.

“Perhaps the question,” she writes, “is not the future, yes or no, but the future, which and whose, where and when and how.” (Ensor 414) Or as Heather Davis suggests: “In the face of no future for many species, queer theory’s insistence on negativity may provide a useful model for rethinking temporality, social reproduction, and kinship.” (Davis 241) A queer ecological futurity can help uncover the gendered, racialized lines along which much of the environmental crisis operates. Because in effect, both the crisis and many of the half-hearted efforts to face it work with an idea of an apocalyptic future that favours an ideological status quo:

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The extinctions we are currently facing project “no future” asymmetrically. The privileged, white,

heteronormative, reproductive couple that becomes the figure of the political future that Edelman

wishes to foreclose, or at least not to participate in, seems to become more powerful (…) rather than

less. (Davis 242f.)

‘No future’ for the unprivileged, human and non-human, is accepted in order to afford futurity and progress for some; and thinking different, “queer”, possibly non-productive futures, is precluded.12 I would argue that The Hunter, precisely through overdrawing the masculine and heteronormative focalization through M, points towards such a queer ecological future. As M slowly comes closer to the small non-functioning family that he first resists to be a part of, there is indication that coming into intimate contact with nature, in a parallel narrative line, also makes him understand the cruel realities of extinction, the loss and suffering that has happened so far, and that in fulfilling his mission he will take part in it.

The accident, though, stops this internal development, disrupts the emergence of an ending that in some senses could be called happy (though it would surely not save the tiger from extinction); that would at least try to come to terms with loss, that would confront it instead of “sleeping it away”. When the sense of loss becomes too overwhelming, though, as it mostly seems to be when facing extinction, the “figure of apocalypse, then, seems far preferable to a world of slow decay.” (Davis 243)

Nihil Unbound. So what M decides to settle for is a figure of thought that is closely related to much apocalyptic thinking in contemporary philosophy and also some strands of

12 Eben Kirksey has provided a fascinating glimpse into the new worlds and ecological assemblages forming at the edge of environmental catastrophe: Kirksey, Eben. Emergent Ecologies. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

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ecological thought: a type of mereological nihilism.13 On one of his trips back to the valley for new supplies, M finds the house besieged by a group of “hippies” who want to attend a folk music festival in the area and have been invited by the ‘sleeping beauty’ to camp on the property. Sitting by a bonfire, they discuss the book that Jarrah Armstrong, the missing husband and researcher, has published before his disappearance, while presumably researching Tasmanian devils: the book called Bioethics for another Millennium seems to have pleaded for a fluid understanding of ecological systems where processes intertwine without beginning or end. One of the visitors sums it up like this: “Dust to dust, my fine friend, and dust is earth and earth is beautiful, and the rest, the real thing, that goes on too.”

(107) M, who is sitting observantly in the dark behind the group of friends, comes to his own conclusions: “M does not talk. If everything is transformed, then what is extinction?” (107)

Thus, he subsumes the extinction event under the natural occurring transformational processes of Nature (with a capital N, nature as an unruly Darwinian wheel of progress); this makes it possible for him to subtract all ethical reflection and affective bounds from his mission of killing the last thylacine.14

Raymond Brassier, in his book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, has claimed that the very thought of (human) extinction, or in Nietzsche’s words, the

13 Mereological Nihilism is based on the idea that nothing apart from basic building blocks of life exists and these smallest parts have no meaningful relation to one another, even though humans might (mis-)perceive such a relation. Also, Emily Apter provides a dense overview over the nihilistic tendencies in contemporary ecological thought in her essay “Planetary Dysphoria”, Third Text, 27.1 (2013): 131-140. The authors she subsumes under this trend include Eugene Thacker, Ray Brassier, Jean Francois Lyotard, and Robin Mackay. 14 In Darwinian terms, species extinction is indeed no more than a necessary transformation and a sign of failed adaption to changed circumstances. The accelerated loss of biodiversity is the logical consequence of the success of another species, homo sapiens, which in turn will also go extinct at some point in the future. Ironically, the loss of biodiversity might actually make it harder for humans to quickly adapt to changing climate and environmental destruction – which might prove fatal to our own species in the future.

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acknowledgement that after us, after life and death, ‘nothing will have happened’, can actually lead towards a binding of the trauma that comes with this very thought extinction:

Thus, if everything is dead already, this is not only because extinction disables those possibilities which

were taken to be constitutive of life and existence, but also because the will to know is driven by the

traumatic reality of extinction, and strives to become equal to the trauma of the in-itself whose traces it

bears. In becoming equal to it, philosophy achieves a binding of extinction, through which the will to

know is finally rendered commensurate with the in-itself. (238f.)

What Brassier deals with here is, again, the troubling intrinsic tensions of the concept of extinction itself: if other beings can end, and do end undoubtedly, then also humans will end and so will any thought or meaning as it exists today. Extinction, if thought like this, is a concept that “kills itself”, can rob itself of meaning. And while Brassier suggests that the adequation without correspondence (222) that lies in the recognition of this internal tension can serve as a starting point for a contemporary philosophy (which to deliver he seems to fall short of), Heather Davis warns that transferring nihilistic/apocalyptic ideas (that she also sees to some extend in Lee Edelman’s refusal of future) into a biological or ecological context is ethically unproductive or even dangerous. She claims that ultimately the “(…) nihilistic, apocalyptic, or masculinist techno-fantasies of the future will only lead us to the continued reproduction of the social order.” (Davis 246) Again, though paying lip service to an environmental consciousness through evocation of the totality of the current crisis, the question remains how this kind of absolute catastrophism can actually become politically active. More than anything, it seems to lead dangerously close towards the same conclusions that M draws from the pseudo-spiritual meandering at the bonfire: that thinking ‘no future’ in the sense of a future without meaning, without thought, with only matter remaining, can ultimately stabilize actions that work towards the catastrophe.

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One question I have left unanswered so far is the following: Why on earth is M even out there, killing an animal that is already bound for extinction, risking his health and life to kill a specimen that has de facto ended a long time ago? M is paid by a US-American corporation to extract DNA from the tiger. Apparently a group of researchers has found that the DNA of the tiger could be used to develop dangerous biological weapons “capable of winning a thousand wars.” (40) How much of this heroic expectation has sprung from M’s wishful thinking is left unclear, but surely after having killed the tiger, he neatly extracts tissue samples and reproductive organs of the animal and burns the body in order not to leave any traces behind. Even though in the whole of the narrative of the novel this only plays a minor role, it opens up a whole new field of questions that are also closely related to the framing of extinction. From a biological perspective, Julien Delord argues, traditional definitions of extinction as either the death of the last of a species or the end of the reproductive processes in a species no longer hold true. (Delord 665) Instead, he says, in expectation of accelerated technological progress, we can actually declare many species that have already disappeared “potentially non-extinct” as there will soon be possibility to clone and revive any species quite easily. (665) Despite the very apparent flaws in this argumentation and strategy (which DNA is preserved, which species are considered worth of a cloning process, if the animal has been lost through shifts in the ecological system or habitat loss, then where is the cloned animal going to live freely?), his argumentation points towards important questions: if we think about extinction from a materialist point of view, and in an age where the modification of DNA has become a normal practice, then can we even speak of and frame extinction in a Darwinian sense? Or, to borrow an expression from

Jay Clayton and Stephanie Turner, what is extinction in Genome Time? In the following chapter, I will have a closer look at these questions through the analysis of another

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contemporary extinction narrative that has gained prominence among long-established science fiction fans as well as newcomers to the genre: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.

Conclusion. It is the strength of this brief novel The Hunter, I believe, that it unravels and throws back together conflicting conceptions of past and future that the extinction concept entails. It alludes to the conflicting time-frames of geologic time and problematic human histories, in narrating how from passing over from one time-frame to another also challenges our perception of the currently ongoing mass-extinction. At the same time, it intertwines the ecological sensibilities with questions of gender. The protagonist structures his ethical orientation strongly along the lines of a heteronormative imperative of futurity through procreation. Once this orientating system is disrupted through an accident, though, he has no way of incorporating the experience of loss into an alternative future. Instead, he leaves any ethical considerations behind, packs up his bag and ruthlessly sets out to complete his mission. He accepts the extinction of the thylacine as inevitable. What is weirdly absent from the novel and therefore also from my analysis, I want to mention here before moving on. It is the animal itself, the Tasmanian tiger. It is a sad reality of this extinction event that the most common way animals participate in it is as cut-open carcasses or reproductive

DNA-containers in some zoo’s breeding programme, as a record on a Red List, or as a haunting spectre of the past like the thylacine. The sixth mass extinction is very much a human business.15

15 Behind this stands of course a whole debate of human-animal relations and the nature of the animal as addressed in the emergent discipline of Animal Studies, nudged by Jacques Derrida and others and now prominently advocated by Cary Wolfe, Donna Haraway, etc. Geologist Kathryn Yusoff has put forward a very fascinating discussion of the relation between representation of the animal and biodiversity loss; she writes that non-human beings of biodiversity cannot be represented, that they will always be “the invisible multitudes that exist and then do not exist somewhere out the corner of our eyes.” (586) Nonetheless, she argues, already the act of representation will configure a recognition of existence, and therefore a relation (often one of violence) – and

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Two. ORYX BEISA, NEAR THREATENED, AND RED-NECKED

CRAKE, LEAST CONCERN

The IUCN Red List of Endangered Species holds an entry for the species Homo Sapiens, common name “human”. In the current version of 2015, it registers the status of this species as of “Least Concern” and the population trend as “increasing”.16 In the 2015 summary document, the list furthermore included 1,734,830 other species (vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, fungi and protists), of which 23,250 were registered as “threatened”. Careful estimates assume that 26 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians fall under this category.17

Of course, such seemingly complete lists have to be taken with a grain of salt as their range is necessarily restricted. Each inventory of biodiversity is created through a huge number of decisions that produce inclusions and exclusions. (Heise, Nach der Natur 86f)18 Kathryn

Yusoff furthermore points towards the fact that a big part of the species that are disappearing in the current extinction event, especially on a micro-biological level, aren’t known to humans and will therefore never be represented on any lists, despite their claim and aim for completeness. (Yusoff, “Aesthetics of Loss” 582) Nonetheless, as Ursula Heise stresses, these red lists have come to be the most prominent contemporary genre in which the

thus a responsibility: “By bringing these creatures into existence through representation we acquire responsibility for and to their spectral beings, yet they are not present in this encounter as themselves, as full sovereign beings, but as a kind of haunting configured around a profoundly human sensibility.” (586) 16 Cf. entry Homo Sapiens under: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/136584/0. 17 See Pdf “Table 1 – Numbers of threatened species by major groups of organisms (1996–2015)” on the Summary Statistics webpage of the IUCN: http://www.iucnredlist.org/about/summary-statistics#Tables_1_2. 18 In Nach der Natur, Heise points out that there are two basic types of species inventories: one aims to produce a complete picture of biodiversity on this planet, the other is more focused on registering the current status of certain species to then promote their preservation. (86) The first one is hard to achieve as today the number of newly discovered species is actually still higher than the current extinction rates; furthermore, there is constant discussion about the correct taxonomy of species and sub-species already in the inventory. (87) The second type has to be based on the first kind of inventory, but needs to be removed from the above mentioned discussions in order to serve as the basis for political decision making. (88) In this light of this political task, the inclusion of the Homo Sapiens into the Red List is a political decision, to remind us that we are one species among more than 6000 mammals know today. (cf. 113)

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extinction of animals is negotiated, (Heise, “Nach der Natur” 100) striving for a completeness that she compares to the classic epos. (89)

In Magaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake the stepchild of such a “Red List” plays an important role. In the following analysis, I want to take a closer look at this highly acclaimed and frequently analysed novel. It positions the human in a dystopian future and the sixth mass extinction in the past. One could argue quite easily that it simply serves as a parody – and one with a wagging finger – reminding us of the catastrophes to come if we don’t change our behaviours. I would insist, though, that Oryx and Crake actually raises questions around the topic of extinction that go beyond a traditional moralizing ethics of biodiversity and preservation. a) Firstly, the text is concerned with the linguistic structures of extinction, the forms, genres and ways in which we narrate, report and capture extinction. Through the play with these words, it again poses questions of representation and loss.19 In doing so, the text points towards the close relationship between animal extinction and human extinction; the concept of extinction is inextricably interwoven with species thinking and points out to humans the spot reserved for them in their own human-made taxonomies. b) Secondly,

Atwood plays, as Calina Ciobanu puts it, with the assertion that “the clock on the

Anthropocene is effectively running out” (Ciobanu, 153), but that the end of the

Anthropocene “is hardly the end of the world.” It alludes to questions that I have also posed

19 Again, I’d like to point to Kathryn Yussof’s analysis of the problematic relationship between representation, preservation and biodiversity loss in “Aesthetics of Loss.” She writes: “One of the most visible ways in which the loss of biodiversity is brought to our attention is through the various aesthetic practices of conservation groups. (…)” (579) These practices immediately point towards their own insufficiency, thus laying open “the great multitude of life that eludes, or fails to collude, collaborate or cohabitate with our technologies of presence.” (580) In Oryx and Crake, the database taxonomies have become containers of loss, markers that represent what has long disappeared. Crake even takes this depletion of representation one step further when he uses the names of the extinct animals to give all his co-workers and friends names from Extinctathon – like the title-giving Oryx Beisa and Red-Necked Crake, his own nickname and the nickname of his lover. It might also not be a coincidence that “Oryx” is also the name of a recognized conservation journal, Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation. (Cf. http://www.oryxthejournal.org/)

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at the end of the last chapter: how can we even frame extinction from a materialist point of view? As announced earlier, I would thus like to unroll here a set of questions that connect the novel’s dystopian future with contemporary preservation efforts and policies: the problematic nature of extinction in Genome Time. c) Lastly, the novel also positions the sixth mass extinction in a broader causality of capitalist exploitation of planet earth. It plays with the idea that the fossil remains of humans themselves will not only display the material, but also the social histories of humanity. It is in digging up the remains of another extinction event that the humans have come to destroy the ecosystems of the earth so thoroughly.

Extinctathon. In Oryx and Crake, the IUCN list sadly has come to contain only one classificatory marker: EX or “extinct.” In the not-so-far but deeply dystopian future of the novel, most animals today assessed as critically endangered or even of “least concern” have shuffled off this mortal coil. The titular Oryx Beisa, an antelope which in 2016 has recovered from being hunted to the brink of extinction through extensive breeding programs, and the

Red-necked crake, a waterbird today still very common in the South Pacific area,20 have disappeared from the earth. They survive only as a winning currency in a nerdy online game called Extinctathon. As I have mentioned above, Oryx and Crake is set in a dystopian future.

The novel switches between two time frames: it starts off in a post-apocalyptic setting where the main character, Jimmy, struggles to survive in a landscape that has been completely depopulated from humans. As a classic ‘last of a kind’ figure, he wanders the deserted coastlands. The only living beings he encounters are the Crakers – amicable but rather dull post-human creatures – and the off-spring of genetically modified animals that have made an

20 For detailed information, again see http://www.iucnredlist.org/.

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escape from the abandoned laboratories and meat-production facilities. The second narrative timeframe consists of Jimmy’s flashbacks. They bring the reader back into his childhood in a completely segregated and hyper-capitalist society. He narrates his blossoming friendship with the nerdy Crake, and his friend’s development into an ultra-rational misanthrope.

The “interactive biofreak masterlore game” (92) Extinctathon is one of the many ways through which Crake and Jimmy distract themselves from their dreary teenage lives. In the face of the other distractions that Jimmy and Crake engage in – stretching from child pornography to live beheadings – Extincathon seems a relatively innocent pastime. It greets the player with the following words: “EXTINCTATHON, Monitored by MaddAddam. Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. Do you want to play?” (92)

What then follows is a classic Who am I? game set up, where players can compete against each other by guessing a certain extinct species with as few questions as possible: “Then you’d narrow it down, Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species, then the habitat and when last seen, and what had snuffed it. (Pollution, habitat destruction, credulous morons who thought eating its horn would give them a boner)” (92) The players can earn points through speed and precision, and the only help they have is the above mentioned complete list of extinct animals, “a couple of hundred pages of fine print” that catalogue, in Jimmy’s words, all the “obscure bugs, weeds and frogs nobody had ever heard of.” (92)21 Being used to more drastic stimulations, Jimmy becomes bored with this repetitive game quite quickly. We only find out later that Crake has kept on playing throughout his youth and that he has managed to become a “Grandmaster”. This opens up a whole new perspective on the game: it secretly

21 This catalogue also seems to reference another science fiction classic in which an animal list plays an important role: in Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and less prominently in the movie adaption, Blade Runner, people carry around a catalogue in which all animals, their population status and current market value are meticulously recorded – as hardly any real animals are left on the earth and collectors search for them frantically.

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functions as a communication and organization tool for a group of radical environmentalists who use it to organize sabotage acts against the destructive forces that endanger both humans and the environment. This hidden function of the Extinctathon game can be read as a caustic comment on the current archiving and taxonomy rage; it relies on the assumption that there is a connection between knowledge of each species and the will to protect them: that whoever is patient and interested enough to learn by heart all extinct animals and plants will also have the will to engage in drastic action to save them. Even though the inventories play a main role in the understanding of bio-diversity on this planet, they cannot always guarantee political action and preservation. (Cf. Heise, 86) Furthermore, the name of the game, Extinctathon, with its allusion to the marathon, also ironically points towards something else: that it is a seemingly endless, exhausting race against time. It is fast and draining, but also uncomfortably long (and Jimmy would say incredibly boring) – “racing extinction” at its best.

While Jimmy goes on to attend a mediocre art school and starts an unpromising career in advertising – the only area where his gift for words can be translated into money –, Crake is accepted into a prestigious natural science university. On graduation, he starts a career in a biotech corporation. During this time, he keeps on playing Extinctathon and it has profound effects on the way he is thinking. Being faced with the endless stream of extinct animals is a constant reminder that humans indeed are only one species among others, and that the way they are exploiting the planet is completely unsustainable: “Homo sapiens doesn’t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He’s one of the few species that doesn’t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources.” (139) He shares his thoughts with the clueless Jimmy: “All it takes, said Crake, is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link

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in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.” (261) Crake, just like the IUCN, has added the Homo Sapiens to the Red List of possibly extinct species on this planet.

We learn only very late in the novel that what has brought Jimmy into the unfortunate situation of seemingly being the last surviving human on earth is a deadly virus developed by his friend Crake – a virus that Jimmy and his lover Oryx cluelessly helped to spread all over the world, thereby sealing the fate of humanity. The Extinctathon game not only theoretically, but also practically, has helped Crake realize his misanthropic ideas. As mentioned above, once Crake has become a “Grandmaster” of the game, he discovers that the game is actually used as a communication tool and platform of exchange by a group of loosely connected radical environmentalists. Through the game, these activists share ideas, tips and news on eco-terrorist attacks they implement all over the world, reaching from tar- eating microbes and viruses to the release of bio-engineered animals into the wild. Crake has become fascinated by their approach:

I thought at first they were just another crazy Animal Liberation org. But there’s more to it than that. I

think they’re after the machinery. They’re after the whole system, they want to shut it down. So far

they haven’t done any people numbers, but it’s obvious they could. (254)

‘Doing people numbers’ is a very euphemistic description of what Crake has in mind. Once he has come to the conclusion that human extinction is the best solution to the ecological crisis and overpopulation of the earth, he invites the Grandmasters from the Extinctathon into his compound. As a genius researcher, he has unlimited resources, and he incorporates the unsuspecting Extinctathon-Grandmasters into his project to efface humans from the earth through creation of a pill that promises endless sexual pleasure. The pill is greeted with

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enthusiasm, the deadly virus does its deed, and Jimmy witnesses the weeklong systematic genocide from a sealed-off laboratory space:

(…) the end of a species was taking place before his very eyes. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order,

Family, Genus, Species. How many legs does it have? Homo sapiens sapiens, joining the polar bear,

the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowing owl, the long long list. Oh, big points, Grandmaster. (401)

As in this quote, throughout the novel Atwood plays with the linguistic structures that characterize red lists and the biological approach to the topic of extinction. In Jimmy’s flashbacks, the rhetoric of the Exinctathon game (“Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family,

Genus, Species”) continues to structure his idea of the apocalypse that has come upon him.

Just like Crake, ultimately he can’t help but see the dying humans as the last species on the red list of animals, the last to cross the line in an endless Extinctathon that ironically the humans themselves have started.

Extinction in Genome Time. The concept of Genome time was first introduced by Jay

Clayton in his research on narrative and Darwinism “Genome time: Post-Darwinism then and now”). It is the attempt to capture what the deep immersion of humans into micro-biology, genetics and bio-engineering might actually mean for our conception of past and future. In many senses, it is the biological counter-part to geologic “deep time”. Clayton writes:

On the one hand, your genetic code is unique, a personal inheritance from your parents that defines key

aspects of your identity and influences your singular destiny. (…) On the other hand, the genome has a

synchronic dimension. It is a four-letter langue that runs through and beyond the individual, reaching back

to the first primordial cell and forward to whatever future humanity may encounter. (Clayton, 59)

Thus, “(g)enome time fuses the personal timescale of everyday life with the immense impersonal timescales of the species” and, I would add here, with living structures in general as contemporary genetics find more and more DNA sequences that are shared between innumerable

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species and across geologic time spans. In genome time, the “past and future appear inscribed as theoretical possibilities within the virtual space of the code.” (Clayton, 59) The current possibilities of thinking evolutionary histories, and specifically extinction narratives, under genome time has in many ways revised or even forestalled the absolute endpoints of extinction.

(Turner, 59) Just like Julien Delord, whom I have mentioned in my first chapter, Clayton and

Turner observe a reconsideration of extinction itself in a time where we have come to understand the nucleotides of DNA as the building blocks of life. (Turner, 59)

Because the effect of genome time is to erase traditional boundaries, the expressive forms most useful in

this regard will be those that challenge boundaries between the human and the non-human, between the

“nature” of the DNA molecule and the “nurture” of our engagement with it, between the temporal and the

spatial, and between cultures of science and the activities of the rest of the world. (Turner, 76)

Echoing Judeo-Christian salvation narratives (cf. the trope of the zoo as Noah’s Ark in speaking about recent institutionalized efforts like the San Diego frozen zoo22), new methods in bio- engineering have in many ways shifted extinction narratives into a holding pattern where, while de facto the species are still becoming extinct at an extremely high rate, a future of some sort is now guaranteed. (Turner, 61)

The economic circulations of Oryx and Crake mostly are made of the products of heavy genetic engineering. After climate change and population growth have wrecked the

Earth, food, clothes and pharmaceuticals come directly from the laboratories. Through a complete deconstruction of the Nature/Culture divide (also introduced in the constant quest

22 The Frozen Zoo initiative advertises their work in the following words: “The Frozen Zoo® constitutes a crucial resource for facilitating advances in genetic and reproductive technologies for population sustainability. In a new collaboration with The Scripps Research Institute, our Reproductive Physiology and Genetics teams are using the resources of the Frozen Zoo® to study the potential for emerging stem cell technologies to rescue the northern white rhino from the brink of extinction. Our vision for the future is to develop an international network of cryobanks under the umbrella of a Global Wildlife Biobank that is dedicated to sharing resources and expertise and growing a worldwide legacy of irreplaceable reproductive and genetic material that can be used in support of species conservation.” Cf. webpage: http://institute.sandiegozoo.org/resources/frozen- zoo%C2%AE#.

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for “real” or “original” alias non-engineered products), Atwood introduces Genome Time into her narrative – and the misanthrope Crake as its most devoted fan. He takes this thought to an extreme: he is willing to end the existence of an entire species, the humans, and his own life, in order to replace them with genetically engineered post-humans who, he believes, only represent the best parts of human and non-human genome. They smell of insect repellent, ruminate leaves for the little energy they need, and feel no sexual desire. There is a future guaranteed after the apocalypse in Oryx and Crake – but humans and many animals and plants only partake in it as nucleotide sequences, and modelled after the megalomaniac and self-centred Crake. Again, I would like to echo here a quote that I have brought in earlier in relation to questionable conceptions of an environmental future: the question also in relation to Genome Time is not only “the future, yes or no”, but also “the future, which and whose, where and when and how.” (Ensor 414) What Atwood sets out to show here is thus that down to the genome, living beings are interwoven with the inclusions and exclusions of capitalist structures and negotiations of power. The future promised in Genome time might be a future of some sorts, but who will be creating it and who will be excluded is to be decided along the lines of privilege, race and gender and in the case of animals and plants often (though of course not exclusively) along the lines of cuteness, size, class (with mammals much more likely to be targets of preservation efforts than fish, not to speak of insects) or human standards of beauty. Just like religious salvation narratives, extinction narratives in Genome time don’t promise a happy ending for everyone.

Extinction as Revenant. Many critics have drawn upon the fact that Atwood herself rejects the label “science fiction” for her writing. What she uses instead is the concept of “speculative fiction”, fiction that speculates about the future, but with a clear coalescence towards the present.

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(Cf. Atwood In Other Worlds) Her dystopian worlds allow for an “imaginative leap into the future, following current socio-cultural, political or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions.” (Snyders, 470) The stance of the novel is that of the apocalypse after the eco-apocalypse. When Jimmy and Crake are young, the mass extinction has already happened, animals familiar to us today have disappeared. Atwood adds another layer to the drama in thinking, just like Crake, the events to their coercive conclusion, that is: the eventual extinction of humans and their disappearance from the earth. Nonetheless, the world of Oryx and

Crake is also deeply structured by our contemporary petro-capitalism, which relies on the exploitation of both humans and natural resources. This brings me now to another way in which I see extinction represented in the novel: extinction as revenant.

In her essay on “Geologic Life”, Yusoff points towards the fact that, with its massive digging up of the mineral remains of the Carboniferous period, the current ecological shifts framed under the term Anthropocene are actually based on the reanimation of another extinction event, the “trajectory of one extinction feeding another”. (784) She writes:

Fossil fuels are a material condition that subtends contemporary geopolitical life. Massive biodiversity

loss in its most simple expression is the battle over geography that has ensued in securing the material

conditions for the reproduction of life in its contemporary geologic forms (…) – in unearthing one

fossil layer we create another contemporary fossil stratum that has our name on it. (784)

It is in unearthing and burning the remains of another extinction event in the form of coal, gas and oil that the human subjectivity in its modern form has come into being. The game

Extinctathon in Oryx and Crake plays with this idea of the extinction as a revenant: much like Chekhov’s gun, once the fact of extinction is on the table, it becomes very hard to ignore.

The idea of species life and (human) extinction saturate the language and thinking of the main characters, especially Crake’s. Like the sixth mass extinction is a revenant, a spectre of

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another extinction event that has produced the coal and fuels in the stratum that we are digging up in contemporary petro-capitalism, Crake’s genocide becomes the echo of the sixth mass extinction, both materially (in using the same distribution paths of globalized trade that are one main reason for the ongoing sixth mass extinction) and through language and structure of thought.

Furthermore, the book is saturated with allusions to the extinction events of the past.

For example, as Jimmy wanders the coast as the last survivor, he lets his thoughts flow and

“From nowhere, a word appears: Mesozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can’t reach the word. He can’t attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space.” (43)

The Mesozoic is the geologic period that followed the Carboniferous, alias the period whose remains we now dig up as fossil fuels. It ended with the most famous extinction event of all – the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Cf. Barnosky et al.) Furthermore, Jimmy describes the idyllic white beaches that he wanders along as “ground-up corals and broken bones.” (6) And more: briefly after the genocide, the kids of the Crakers jump around Jimmy with the remains of human ravage on earth in their hands, asking Jimmy, whom they call Snowman: “Oh

Snowman, what have we found?” (7) Although they don’t have to dig the plunder up (they find toasters, cans, guns and more at the beach), what they hold in their hands are not-yet fossilized fossils, “human fossils to come” (Yusoff). With the “endless crumbling that must be going on everywhere” (50) after all humans have died – their decaying bodies actually laying around wherever they took their last breath, Jimmy is witnessing the first steps towards the “re-mineralization” of human existence on earth.

In thinking through the eco-apocalypse to a drastic end and tying together the ends of current political developments, Atwood seems to follow Yusoff’s call that we must become

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“attuned to fossils” in order to be able to fully think the Anthropocene. (784) This is not only to understand humans as a geological force, as is already inscribed in the concept of the

Anthropocene, but to be able to understand both our geologic and our social histories as inscribed into the stratum of the Earth. Thus seeing the traces as “geologic witness and mimetic memory device for both Earth and social histories” and thereby “naturalising the geologic subject of late capitalism.” (784) Echoing Heather Davis’ and Sarah Ensor’s concern about the inclusions and exclusions inscribed in contemporary ecological thinking,

Yussof reminds us that “a focus on the ‘ends of man’ might be a distraction from the task of thinking about who or what might survive the subjectification of late capitalism.” (Yusoff

“Geologic Life” 787) Atwood’s speculative leap into our future dares to tentatively answer this question. First, it doesn’t look good for animals and plants, but ultimately not for humans either.

Conclusion. The question remains how the future-oriented extinction narrative I am working with here can ultimately become politically active. Gerry Caravan argues that the imagination of an eco-apocalypse plays a specific role in contemporary efforts towards social change:

(…) the radical disruption of history offered by eco-apocalypse is, in fact, a dialectical reassertion of

both the possibility and the necessity of such change (…). Apocalypse reminds us that the logic of

consumer capitalism is not, in fact, timeless and eternal; there was a time before it and there will be a

time after it. History does, indeed, go on. (Canavan, 139)

And following Turner one step further: “The apocalyptic mode of expression is thus in essence utopian, an ‘imperative to imagine radical alternatives,’ as Fredric Jameson has described it. Such thought experiments have the power both to delude and to inspire.”

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(Turner, 58) Both delusion and inspiration come together in the concept of extinction, as it always entails the suffering and loss and the thought of what comes after. Extinction is,

Turner argues, echoing Raymond Brassier’s argument about extinction as a concept that erases itself, the unimaginable endpoint of a drama around the threatened and endangered.

But while Brassier wants to use the impossibility of thinking extinction as a starting point for his nihilistic philosophical endeavour, Turner also states (with narrative theorist James

Berger) that extinction resists representation because we are not capable of imagining an ending without also including what happens after it. (Turner, 58) Thus, even though thinking the mass extinction is always thinking the end of humans, in geologic time it is always also the end of a dying and the beginning of something new.

The new in Oryx and Crake comes in the form of a genetically engineered life-form that Crake has created. The role that Crake has foreseen for Jimmy is to take care of the

Crakers, this group of peaceful, modest post-human creatures that Crake has modified to live off leaves and speak and think without metonymical reference. They are the ultimate embodiment of what Crake has analysed as problematic in humans – and they bore Jimmy, whose two main gifts are a love for rare old words and his humour, almost to death. This points towards another narrative strand in the novel that I haven’t addressed so far: Atwood draws a clear parallel between the mass extinction in ecological terms and the impoverishment of language and loss of words in a world that values numbers and (genetic) code more highly than subtleties of language. The opposition between “word people”

(Jimmy) and “numbers people” (Crake) seems deliberately overdrawn. I choose to believe that Jimmy’s quoting of classic English texts and frantic collection of rare words of the 20th century are satirized in the awareness that English is a language that doesn’t face extinction today. That on the contrary, in a globalized world, more and more small languages are

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superseded – inside and outside of academia. This metonymical relationship between the extinction of languages and biological extinction will come to play a role in the last chapter of this thesis.

At the end of this section, I would also like to point towards the tension between the almost uncomfortable joy of engaging in Atwood’s apocalyptic imaginations and the gap that opens between those drastic narratives and the slow violence against both the biosphere and humans actually happening in the Anthropocene. As Yusoff and Davis point out, it can be difficult to translate our philosophical explorations into the biological sphere (Davis 242,

Yusoff “Aesthetics of Loss” 781), especially in a moment of major environmental crisis caused by humans themselves – and in which also humans are amongst those who suffer from the consequences. I believe that, as the concept of extinction ceaselessly drifts towards the end of humans, the question of inter-species justice in a very unjust world often remains unanswered. A short glance at the Homo Sapiens entry on the IUCN site though might reveal how closely the ecological crisis and both human and non-human injustice are related. It states: “There are currently no major threats to humans, although some subpopulations may be experiencing localized declines as a result of disease, drought, war, natural disasters, and other factors.”23 These “subpopulations” are communities most vulnerable to the consequences of environmental destruction and climate change which manifest as droughts, floods, raising sea levels and other threats to life and livelihood. In my third and last chapter,

I therefore want to introduce one last novel that is concerned with the topics of extinction and preservation. Other than my first two objects, though, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh is not so much playing with the intricacies of thinking species extinction. Rather, the novel is

23 Cf. “The IUCN List of Threatened Species”, Homo Sapiens (http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/136584/0). To stress the unintentional comic effect of this entry, I want to quote further: “A small group of humans has been introduced to space, where they inhabit the International Space Station.”

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concerned with the entanglements of human/non-human justice in the sixth mass extinction event.

Three. IRRAWADDY RIVER DOLPHIN, VULNERABLE, AND

ROYAL BENGAL TIGER, ENDANGERED

In this last chapter, I will now turn to a novel that has been praised extensively for its self-reflexive ecological investment. The Hungry Tide by established Bengali Indian author

Amitav Ghosh was first published in 2004. It develops a network of storylines in the Indian

Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest at the mouth of the Ganges River. The ever-changing islands of this inhospitable landscape become not only the background for human tragedy, but as a complex multi-actor eco-system help to develop a discourse around justice, ecology and politics in a barely “post”-colonial society. The novel addresses human/non-human relations on various levels. While one of the main characters of the novel, a young US-

American of Indian descent named Piya, comes to the Sundarbans to research the endangered

Irrawaddy River Dolphin,24 the habitants of the Sundarbans themselves live in fear of being attacked by a Bengal Tiger. This tiger again is the target of intervention from Indian and

Western governments since the impressive animal has become one of the most emblematic images of endangered species.25 It is in the name of preservation of this tiger that a massive

24 Due to lack for precise data, the IUNC has categorized this dolphin species as vulnerable, but it is assumed that the population has been reduced drastically during the last decades, possibly bringing the species to the brink of extinction. Cf. http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15419/0. 25 The pairing/opposition of these two animals already points towards different, overlapping discourses of the ecological: each seems to be totemic of a different kind of conception of the natural. While the dolphin is constructed as a well-meaning, hyper-sensible companion species, the “Royal” Bengal tiger is absorbed into the

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act of state violence against inhabitants of an island in the Sundarbans is conducted. And all inhabitants of the archipelago, human and non-human, mangroves and dolphins, are forced to oblige the erratic rhythm of the tides and floods that change the salinity of the rivers and leave the landscape changed after every cycle.

More than the other two novels I’ve been looking at so far, The Hungry Tide is concerned with the ethical questions that arise from the Anthropocene extinction event and its deep entanglement with social and political histories of Modernity. Less than the philosophical problem of extinction itself, the novel addresses the banal violence (Yusoff, echoing Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”) against humans and non-humans arising in the sixth mass extinction, and the questions of care, loss and grief related to it. Nonetheless, it also resists the temptation to represent the current ecological crisis in a one-sided moral narrative. In this chapter, I therefore a) want to look at the ways in which the novel discusses interspecies justice and the violence involved in dominant conservation discourses. To then come back to the question of temporalities and narrative structure, I will b) argue with Rob

Nixon that the “pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (Nixon 3) that characterizes the current ecological crisis is not only violence against non-human nature, but the effect of “conjoined ecological and human disposabilities” (4) routed in decade- or even century-long histories of exploitation. This slow violence poses representational dilemmas as the violence is decoupled from its original cause through time; a problem that I see addressed in the novel’s careful investigation of the ecological shifts in the Sundarban ecosystem. c)

Finally, the tension between questions of representation and species extinction is also

territorialized hierarchical imaginary of wildlife ‘preservation’. The opposition between the two seems to be organising two different genres of interspecies-narrative: one collaborative, the other violent and imperial, that are addressed in the novel.

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examined in the parallel that The Hungry Tide draws between the loss of biodiversity and the extinction of local languages and diverse modes of expression and storytelling.

I want to note that the novel holds an ambiguous position in the field of questions I am opening up here; while very nuanced in its discussion of inter-species justice, it still sits quite comfortably in a canon of world literature dominated by the English language and

Western tradition.26 I will argue, though, that the novel reflects on the ecological implications of its own position within the global discourse of world literature. Through a very resourceful play with inter-textual references, narrative structure, and translations the novel incorporates its claim for ecological sensibilities into the literary form and comments on the conditions of world literature in a globalized world.

Interspecies Justice. The novel The Hungry Tide is widely read, praised (and critiqued) as an exemplary fictional account of post-colonial ecocriticism. This lies not only in the nuanced portrayal of the Sundarbans with its human and non-human actants, but also in its faithfulness to an environmental justice ecocriticism that considers how “environmental destruction, pollution, and the oppression of specific classes and races go hand in hand.”

(Morton 10) Its main narrative twist lies in laying bare how even the seemingly innocent wish for wildlife protection can work hand in hand with a “bad globalization” (Spivak) ignorant of the various discursive layers entangled in a seemingly untouched space of Nature. The text exposes how animal rights and preservation efforts can carry a dangerous moment of

26 For some more critical voices on the novel’s use of Western form, language and frameworks, cf. Sawar, Das S. “Home and Homelessness in The Hungry Tide: A Discourse Unmade” Indian Literature, Vol. 50, No. 5 (235), pp. 179-185 on the problematic construction of “home” in the periphery for the metropolitan characters; also: Jaising, Shakti. “Fixity amid Flux: Aesthetics and Environmentalism in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 46.4 (2015): 63-88.

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universalization because they are situated in a field of power; they are formed by an intersection of class, race, gender, species and also language, under the shield of a multi- layered political situation. They should not be globalized or universalized carelessly. Gayatri

Spivak notes:

Globalization is a means, not an end. Even good globalization requires uniformity and must

therefore destroy linguistic and cultural specificity. This damages human life and makes

globalization unsustainable in terms of people. (“Close Reading” 5)

Globalization even of something as fundamentally well-intentioned as animal or human rights can, in its commitment to a movement of uniformity, turn against the very plurality it is trying to preserve. (“Close Reading” 6) And as we will see below, the questions of linguistic and cultural specificity and biodiversity and ecological preservation are more closely related than visible at first sight.

As mentioned above, the novel evolves around two main narrative strands that are each linked to an animal: first, the story of Piya who has come to the Sundarbans to research the endangered Irrawaddy River Dolphin. The second narrative stems from a notebook that translator Kanai has received from his uncle Nirmal. In this script, Nirmal recounts the violent eviction of a refugee camp in the mangrove forests of Marichjhapi island in 1979. The island had been chosen as a new home by a large number of settlers fleeing the political unrest following the independence movements of India and subsequent partition of Bengal.

The official justification for the eviction (which is a historical event and has de facto cost the life of several hundred people) is that the “squatted” island was part of a preservation area meant to give a habitat to the endangered Bengal Tiger. Thus, the violence against the refugees of Marichjhapi is rooted both in the violent colonial history itself and in the

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conservational practices introduced in the early decades of the 20th century when awareness of the loss of species started to slowly spread.

Kusum, a woman who witnesses the brutality with which the evicted refugees of

Marichjhapi are treated, bewilderedly asks, shortly before she is killed in a police raid:

Who are these people (…) who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they

know what is being done in their name? Where do they live, these people? (…) As I thought of this, it

seemed to me that the whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that

we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil.

(261f.)

The rights of the settlers of Marichjhapi can be breached so violently because of the powerful myth of untouched Nature, the dream of an ecology without inter-species contact (“a place of animals”), and a nature that can be thoroughly studied and understood, but that is detached from human society. Nilima, leader of a local hospital, cites another example of this parallelism between violence against humans and preservation efforts when she recounts how the colonial forces were digging deep wells into the ground of the river bed so as to give the tigers access to more freshwater. She complains: “Just imagine that. (…) They were providing water for tigers! In a place where nobody thinks twice about human beings going thirsty!” (241) The idea of preservation is built on the assumption that the tigers were there first, and that this gives them rights over the people – but people have lived with the tiger for hundreds of years. It is through industrial pollution, through modern weaponry, through globalized trade in magical drugs and poaching that this animal has come to a state of almost- extinction. (cf. IUCN) Animal rights in these terms are a Western import product, a blind passenger on the wave of colonialism and capitalist expansion – but so are the causes that have made it necessary to protect the animals in the first place. Kanai, himself an upper

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middleclass Indian, points towards the entanglement between class relations, colonial history, and animal rights when he tells Piya:

(I)t was people like you (…) who made a push to protect wildlife here, without regard for the human

cost. And I’m complicit because people like me – Indians of my class, that is – have chosen to hide

these costs, basically in order to curry favour with their Western patrons. It’s not hard to ignore the

people who are dying – after all, they are the poorest of the poor. (301)

Yet, this is not to say that the protection of endangered species could and should not become a priority in understanding its importance for the balance of an ecological system or in accepting humans responsibility against their non-human companion species.27 Piya alludes to the dangers of uniformity; not only does she defend the right of the animals to be protected from extinction. She argues against Kanai:

Just suppose we crossed the imaginary line that prevents us from deciding no other species matters

except ourselves. What’ll be left then? Aren’t we alone enough in the universe? And do you think it’ll

stop at that? Once we decide we can kill off other species, it’ll be people next – just the kind of people

you’re thinking of, people who’re poor and unnoticed. (301)

Effectively Piya is here describing the need for a critical environmental ethics, an ethics whose importance lies in the preservation of difference and the awareness of singularity of situation, of class and power relations, gender constructions, of place and local history and legends. In the global ecological crisis, thinking human justice without non-human justice has become problematic. Or as Kathryn Yusoff argues:

(…) it becomes our responsibility to recognise how violence is structured into our historic ties of

relating [to both human and non-human actants!] and to pay attention to the vibrations of these ties into

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the future (as structural and spatial violence), and into the im/possibility for open-ended lives that criss-

cross the planet. (“Aesthetics of Loss” 587)

She argues that we need to acknowledge that our relations to the human and non-human world are framed not only by care and love, but also by experience of grief, loss and violence. Then, we can render visible what is at stake in the current extinction event: a

“collective organisation of life, its commons and its potential to be otherwise.” (587) This is the argument that Piya also seems to be making in the novel; throughout the plot, the actors necessarily have to relate both to the lived experience of the other people they meet and the forces and vulnerabilities of the environment they live in.

Extinction and Slow Violence. In his monograph Slow Violence and the

Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues that one of the biggest problems of the current ecological crisis is again one that is temporal: it is grounded in a violence of delayed effects where the original causes are both timely and spatially removed from their aftermath.

The accelerated species loss, for instance, is indeed cataclysmic, but the actual casualties are postponed and spread over generations. (3) Ecological catastrophes like oil spills, radioactive contamination or intoxication of rivers are “calamities that patiently dispense their devastation” in human and non-human environments over decades and centuries. (6) This deceleration poses a problem to human perception of environmental violence. The unequal attention that we are willing to give to the spectacular times of catastrophe and the unspectacular times of its aftermath thus works to multiply the violence experienced by those humans and non-humans that already find themselves in a vulnerable situation. The slow violence of environmental destruction works mostly unnoticed, mis- or under-represented, as it escapes the speed of the accelerated politics of Modernity. (12) Therefore, slow violence

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poses a specific representational challenge: that of bridging the displacements happening in the course of slow violence through apprehension of relationalities, through “making apprehensive” (14) what slips from our sight because it escapes our temporal perceptions.

Nixon refers to Marie Louise Pratt’s studies of the ‘imperial eye’ to stress the close relationship between the power to represent and the ethics that one can call for, thus also referring back to the close relationship between imperialist histories and futures and environmental slow violence. The challenge remains how to “devise arresting stories, images and adequate symbols” (2) that can represent the workings of slow violence. Environmentally engaged literature and its analysis, I want to argue with Nixon, can aim for a representation that challenges the centrifugal forces involved in slow violence, a violence that is, we can say with Yusoff, shared among human and non-human beings alike.

The Hungry Tide is very careful in narrating the signs of disruption of the ecological systems of the Sundarbans and the slow but unsettling changes that are happening. First of all, the narrative structure itself, which switches between the build-up to the Marichjhapi massacre and Piya’s quest for the preservation of the dolphins, but also refers to the colonial and natural history of the landscape in many instances, draws lines between the violence against human and non-human actants, post-colonial struggles of the last decades and environmental destruction/ preservation. The events are placed in a historic narrative that shows the Sundarbans not as wild and original nature, but as a space criss-crossed with social and natural histories that only unfold their workings decades later. The scenes of writing, reading, translation and transmission become ‘ecological’ themselves.28

28 This ‘ecologization’ of the novel extends to its simple division into two chapters, ‘ebb’ and ‘flood’ – and its climatic scene in a massive storm; the narrative movement is directly aligned with the natural environment of the Sundarbans. However, this simple plot structure is contrasted by the sophistication of the novel’s reflections on language as a medium of transmission that enables the resurfacing of historic injustices in the present.

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Secondly, there is an underlying awareness throughout the novel that the ecological system of the Sundarbans will be experiencing massive disruption in the near future. When asked why she is even so concerned about the fate of the river dolphins, Piya stresses that

“something is very very wrong” when sea mammals disappear from their original habitats as they serve as early markers for collapse of an ecosystem. She claims that there must be a

“drastic change in the habitat” and “some kind of dramatic deterioration” that is not yet visible to human perception. (266) Furthermore, the local fishermen know and fear, it is explained to Kanai, that the new nylon nets used to catch crabs will empty the rivers of fish in a decade as the eggs of the fish get caught in the nets with the crabs. (134) Piya points out the crucial role that the crabs play in the ecosystem of the mangrove forests; an overfishing of crabs will therefore have unprecedented consequences for the forests and their inhabitants.

But the nets will not be forbidden as “there’s a lot of money in prawns and the traders have paid off the politicians.” (134) The local fishermen, struggling for survival, comply to the forces as they need to earn their daily bread, but it is them and their families who will pay the price, as Kanai stresses, some time in the future. The main problem that Nixon sees in this dispersion of action and reaction is that also the agency and responsibility are scattered along the same temporal and spatial lines, which makes it hard to impossible to hold any specific actors accountable for the slow violence against humans, and, as Piya learns throughout the novel, the slow violence against animals and their ecosystems alike.

Extinction of Languages. One other outstanding element of the novel that surprisingly hasn’t been taken up much in its reception is the parallel that it draws between the loss of biodiversity and changes in local ecosystems and the loss of a diversity of languages and stories in the Sundarbans. In her paper “Close Reading”, Gayatri Spivak argues that one of

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the most crucial agents for the preservation of difference and nuance in ethical discussion is the preservation and teaching of small or oppressed languages, fighting the hegemonic status of the colonial Western canon. The Hungry Tide continuously stresses the importance of language and stories as a way of understanding and relating to our environment in all its complexity and temporal entanglements (even though, I want to stress again, the novel itself was written and first published in English). At the end of the novel, Piya will come back to the Sundarbans months after her first failed attempt to research the river dolphins and set up a preservation program in order to avoid their extinction. She decides that the only way she can help understand and preserve these animals is through close collaboration with the local population, and through learning Bengali. It remains unclear whether her endeavour is successful; but she has clearly reached a different understanding of the ecological system she wants to study, as a space of political negotiations, with a history and future closely related to the well-being of human and non-human inhabitants alike. Rajender Kaur describes the outcome of her learning process as an “enlightened environmentalism that is sensitive to the material and cultural interests of the local” and “pays respect to the intimate local knowledge of the fishermen in accomplishing her cetological project.” (Kaur 128)

Furthermore, the Sundarbans themselves are set up as an environment deeply shaped not only by its natural history (which Piya provides a detailed account of), but also by the human histories, dramas and political aberrations of the past. First of all, the tide land itself is framed as an environment that shifts between stableness and deterritorialization, between abundance, scarcity, and weather extremes, all framed by the rhythm of the tide and ebb that shape the inhabitants’ (both human and non-human) behaviours and movements. At one point

Piya describes the complex eco-system as follows:

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The waters of the river and sea did not intermingle evenly in this part of the delta; rather, they

interpenetrated each other, creating hundreds of different ecological niches, with streams of fresh water

running along the floors of some channels, creating variations of salinity and turbidity. These micro-

environments were like balloons suspended in the water, and they had their own patterns of flow. They

changed position constantly, some floating into midstream and wafting back towards the shore, at times

being carried well out to sea and others, retreating deep inland. (125)

Once a new island is formed by the flows, it can be covered and stabilized by a dense mangrove forest “within a few short years” (7) – until the next big storm or Tsunami again reshapes the archipelago completely.

Other descriptions carefully investigate how the ecological system, even though untameable for its inhabitants, is also always already shaped in every encounter by human presence, colonial movements and globalized networks.29 And not to forget, the novel draws on another archive of stories: the whole text and especially the figure of Nirmal are hugely influenced by works from the Western literary canon. Nirmal continuously quotes German symbolist poet Rainer Maria Rilke.30 The symbolist poetry as well as other intertextual links

29 It is Nirmal, the schoolmaster with a fascination for historic anecdotes and historic materialism, who also points out that “no place was so remote as to escape the flood of history.” (77) The novel carefully narrates the complex history of the Sundarbans which have been populated and abandoned many times in the past centuries. Through the figures of Marxist Nirmal and his pragmatic wife Nilima (who leads a local hospital), we get a comprehensive insight into the makings of the society and its connection to the natural environment, since the Sundarbans have been an experimental laboratory for both utopian Marxist and radical ecological projects. Furthermore, Nirmal and young cetologist Piya gradually uncover how the natural history of the Sundarbans, its scientific opening and classification, have been shaped by colonial power interests and clashes with the local communities (229f). The materiality of the environment, everything that the characters touch, feel and see, as soon as they relate to it is incorporated into a network of global relations, of political and historical formations, and thus into stories. At the same time, the circular rhythms of the tide and flood and the geological horizon of deep time are also deeply interwoven with the lives of the inhabitants, providing various contrasting time frames in which the story is situated. 30 The tensions in this figure of Nirmal, the Marxist well-versed in the Western literary canon, can be read as a comment on world literature as such. Rilke, the poet of German symbolism, is most famous for the poem “Der Panther”, about an animal’s suffering behind bars in captivity. Rilke’s concern with the sublime (in general, but also in this animal) and Nirmal’s boundless adoration for the poet (he puts a Rilke quote after every diary entry) stand in stark contrast with the political-ecological investments of The Hungry Tide, and also with Nirmal’s own radical Marxist convictions. It seems that the novel here comments on its own status as world literature; while aware of its status in an elitist canon and as written in the language of the colonizer, The Hungry Tide clearly also holds on to an ethical and political standpoint.

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(like the cetological framework echoing Moby Dick) propose additional ways in which the environment can be artistically explored through language, and it opens up a century-long tradition of nature-writing, travel and world literature.

The text also constantly refers to the languages that the characters are capable of speaking: Piya is presented very early on as a speaker of solely one language, English, whereas Kanai speaks six languages, and many of the locals speak various languages as well

(although not usually English). (3f) The constant negotiation of possible and impossible communications becomes not only visible in the wordless love-story of Piya and Fokir, a local fisherman, but also in her reflections on the echo-communication of the river dolphins, for whom “to see was also to speak to others of your kind, where simply to exist was to communicate.” (159) It is Nirmal again, the thwarted poet, who draws a relation between the landscape of the tide land and the multiplicity of languages flourishing in the area:

(…) I have seen confirmed many times that the mudbanks of the tide country are shaped not only by

the rivers of salt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who

knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang

suspended in the flow. (247)

Using almost the same words as Piya when she describes the ecological niches of the river

(“micro-environments” with their own “patterns of flow”, see quote above), Nirmal depicts how also the coming and going of languages ultimately shapes the Sundarbans; they migrate from one place to another with the flows of the river, thereby shaping faith, stories and politics, and ultimately how humans relate to their environments.

The connection that the novel draws between linguistic and ecological diversity and the violence against non-human systems and underprivileged humans is less metaphorical than one might believe. In a research paper that assessed various data sets and

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studies done in the field of linguistic and biological diversity (Gorenflo et al. 2012), the authors come to the conclusion that there is indeed a close relation between the two. They write:

Global biodiversity in the early 20th century is experiencing an extinction crisis, with annual loss of

plant and animal species estimated to be at least 1000 times higher than historic background rates.

Linguistic diversity is experiencing a similar crisis. (8032)

Studies comparing both conditions have given rise to the notion of bio-cultural diversity, “the tendency for biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity to co-occur.” (8032) What is important in understanding representations of bio-diversity loss or extinction is that this bio- cultural relationality also works in the reverse direction:

Although different processes may have given rise to the diversification of languages, cultures, and

species in different areas, similar forces currently appear to be driving biological extinctions and

cultural/linguistic homogenizations. Broad changes in the form of habitat loss because of large-scale

human impacts from an industrialized global economy also represent potential risks to languages and

their associated cultures (…) (8037, emphasis mine)

Thus, the mass extinction event is very closely tied to the extinction of languages as the same global forces of international trade penetrate the natural and social environments that were characterized by rich bio-cultural diversity. With the destruction of those systems, specific ways of relating to the damaged eco-systems of the earth will cease to exist as well. What the novel The Hungry Tide stresses in this entanglement of nature and language, narrative and ecology, is exactly the fact that ultimately both the human and non-human communities are endangered by the same forces of what Spivak calls “bad globalization”. This conjuncture reiterates the representational dilemma of the slow but racing extinction on a whole new level: the biodiversity loss is hard to appropriately represent, as its slow violence is constantly temporally displaced. Furthermore, it shifts between the apocalyptic nihilism of species

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thinking and a lamenting elegy for a specific last of a kind. But alongside these considerations, with the loss of local languages, histories and narratives, the possibilities of representation of violence against bio-diversity equally decline.

Conclusion. When Piya is asked by Kanai to tell him more about the decline of the dolphin population in the Ganges and the disruptions that can be expected in the near future for this ecological system, she only sighs and answers: “Let’s not go down that route or we’ll end up in tears.” (266) This sentence seems crucial to me in understanding one last representational dilemma of the sixth mass extinction, one that Yusoff exposes in her paper

“Aesthetics of Loss”. She asks about the “material, representational, biopolitical and affective economies” of loss that are involved in the current extinction event. (578, emphasis mine)

The loss of a species can evoke feelings of loss and grief, which are uncomfortable and sometimes hopeless affects; they lay at the imbrication of “affectual registers of biodiversity loss and the ineffectual attempts to stem it” (578) As the concept of slow violence by Nixon seems to imply, this affective dimension of the extinction event is furthermore hard to grasp as the causes of death and destruction lay either far removed in the past or beyond the agency of a single group or actor. What The Hungry Tide is able to show, though, is that these affective registers of biodiversity are closely linked to personal experience, histories, language, and, indeed, love, for a human, a species or a community and their specific ways of being in the world. While Kanai makes fun of Piya for her investment in the preservation of the “little floating pigs” (304) he sees in the river dolphins, he can admire her persistence in achieving her preservation goals. With his fascination for language and translation processes, he is the emblematic metropolitan reader and consumer of world literature; and he is also the figure whose imagination is slowly seduced and captured by a vision of critical

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environmentalism – which might be proposing a new kind of world literature that doesn’t shy away from clear environmental commitment. Piya, on the other hand, falls madly in love with the local fisherman Fokir whom she believes to have a deep understanding of the local ecologies. She is devastated to find out that Fokir is happy to comply in the killing of a tiger who made its way into a village. It is only late in the novel that she understands that she, likewise, has been seduced – by the romanticized vision of a person who lives in harmony with nature. Fokir lives with and of the Sundarbans, however, he also has to fight for his life and livelihood as the mangrove forests don’t shed favours.

As Timothy Morton argues in Ecology without Nature, the very idea of “Nature” as constructed through Western epistemologies “is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics and society.” (Morton 1) The dangerous universalising moment in thinking untouched Nature (with a capital N), talking “by a way of unexamined environmentalism, referring to a ‘natural’ space rather than a differentiated political space,” can, as Gayatri Spivak writes, “work in the interest of (bad) globalization in the mode of the abstract as such.” (“Death” 72). This also resonates with a current critical renegotiation of anthropocentric post-colonial discourse in Western academia; scholars of post-colonial environmentalism hope that

ecocritical perspectives on postcolonial writing can draw attention to any unjustified anthropocentric

bias, while postcolonial criticism, for its part, challenges universalizing claims of environmentalism

that tend to neglect the specific historical, material and political contexts of environmental concerns.

(Steinwand 195)

Thus, both strands of thought can fruitfully be criticized, but also revised and extended, through combining them in one reading. As The Hungry Tide sits in the tension field of those two discourses and discusses, but also challenges notions of nature and justice from both

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perspectives, it seems an ideal object for such an endeavour. The Hungry Tide discusses interspecies justice and the violence involved in Western conservation discourses without taking sides for vulnerable humans or non-humans. It carefully investigates the slow workings of violence routed in social and natural history of the Sundarbans, the “conjoined ecological and human disposabilities” (Nixon 4) that work together in the ongoing mass extinction and ecological crisis. At the same time, it reflects upon the representational dilemmas of extinction in collating the loss of bio-diversity and cultural diversity. If we loose our diverse ways of relating to the world and to the non-humans around us, will it then still be possible to understand, value and preserve them?

CONCLUSION

In this thesis, I have set out to look at the topic of biodiversity loss and species extinction in contemporary Anglophone literature. My analysis relies on the assumption that, whether or not the Stratigraphic Commission decides to officially acknowledge the Anthropocene as our current geologic epoch, and no matter whether we frame it under the name Anthropocene or

Capitalocene, the current ecological crisis has shifted our own position in relation to planet

Earth. In the Anthropocene, we are acting upon the natural world, but we are also being acted upon on an existential as well as ontological level. (Boes and Marshall 61) It positions us humans as a geologic force, but also stresses our vulnerability to the material forces of our surroundings – which are currently changing at an accelerated speed. I argued that the topic of massive biodiversity loss relates to this new “human condition” in a special way, as it

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reminds us humans of our own “species being” and the possibility (or even inevitability) of our own extinction. But at the same time, species extinction calls for an ethics of care and a reconsideration of how we humans want to (and also have to!) position ourselves in relation to the non-human world around us. Species extinction places us in geologic timespans beyond our own imagination; and it currently projects a future that is marked by exclusion and injustice for many (human and non-human alike). It is relevant how we speak about species extinction, whether we lament a “last of a kind” figure through which we re-enact our own (supposed) alienation from the non-human world, or whether we are able to reflect upon the complex narratives of extinction and their ethical implications. For my analysis. I have therefore chosen three very different novels that deal, in one way or another, with the current biodiversity crisis.

The first text, The Hunter by Julia Leigh, at first sight seems a classic “last of a kind” narrative, in which a lonely hunter goes up into the mountains to kill the last Tasmanian tiger.

I have set out to show, however, that the novel very skillfully plays with the tension that emerges between human and geologic histories in the encounter with the tiger. Although confronted with these centrifugal temporalities and tempted to develop a (queer) sense of kinship with the animal – which is doomed to die as the last of her kind, the protagonist M is unable to give into his affects. Instead, he settles for an apocalyptic and nihilistic sense of future from which an environmental ethics can be defied and in which the masculinity of the

“Natural Man” remains intact. Through precision in focalization, narrative voice and with subtle irony, this short novel stages and ironizes the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger, an animal that has become highly symbolic in the Oceanian region for the violence of colonial conquest.

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In the post-apocalyptic scenario of Oryx and Crake, the Red Lists that today serve as the basis for preservation efforts recur in the form of a game named Extinctathon. Through this game, I have argued in the second chapter, the novel focuses on the linguistic structures that accompany species extinction. Furthermore, the different narrative frames of the novel

(one after the Sixth Mass Extinction, one after the human extinction) make visible how one extinction is the revenant of another, how they are materially and symbolically intertwined.

Lastly, the novel plays with the idea that through genetic engineering the process of extinction can come to a hold and that at least on a DNA level, a future for some will be guaranteed. With the figure of the megalomanic Crake, who is seemingly willing to accept this proposition for the seeming sake of planet Earth and commit a genocide, Margaret

Atwood has found a brilliant way of laying bare whose ideas and dreams and genes might survive an extinction event in a hypercapitalist society.

More realist and nuanced in his portrayal of the entanglements of globalized capitalism and species extinction is the last novel I have been looking at. The Hungry Tide by

Amitav Ghosh manages to draw a compelling tableau of inter-species relations and justice in a complex (post-)colonial setting. The main characters gradually come to understand the slow workings of environmental violence against the human and non-human habitants of the

Sundarban mangrove forests. Through several interwoven narratives and self-reflexive play with intertextuality, translation and form, the text reflects upon the representational challenges which the current ecological crisis poses: not only is the slow violence of biodiversity loss generally hard to represent, and more so in the face of anthropogenic environmental catastrophe; moreover, the same forces of economic globalization that produce the mass extinction event in the first place also threaten the local languages and cultural

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specificities – which are necessary for a differentiated understanding of complex local ecologies.

In conclusion, I would like to go back to Joanna Zylinska’s Mininmal Ethics for the

Anthropocene and one last point that I hope to have made in between the lines throughout my argumentation: the link between aesthetic representation of species extinction and ethical considerations in the Anthropocene. In my introduction, I have argued with Zylinska that in the face of environmental catastrophe, the arts, and in the case of this analysis literature, can fulfil a poietic function in the classic Greek sense; they bring forth concepts, values and realities and can fashion our ethical response to the object of their imaginative representations. (105) Considering the cataclysmic changes to our surroundings, we need

“(…) alternative creative interventions that allow us to reimagine life, death and extinction beyond the narrow fatalism and also beyond what we might term the ‘rescuism’ of the dominant Anthropocene story” (106) of human mastery over the Earth. To “invent well” is to develop empathy with other life forms, “being sentient with and about them”, (119) and it is also to be able to theorize and critically reflect upon our own position in the world. However,

Zylinska argues, it is “precisely the moment of reflection on that capacity and the forms of affect it generates that is a condition for any such living encounter being ethical.” (119) There are, I hope to have shown, such alternative creative interventions out there, and they challenge and enrich our theoretical and ethical responses to the ongoing Sixth Mass

Extinction.

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