Enchanting Irruptions Wonder, Noir, and the Environmental Imaginary
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Ryan Palmer Enchanting Irruptions Wonder, Noir, and the Environmental Imaginary Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Geijersalen: Eng/6-1023, Thunbergsvägen 3P, Uppsala, Saturday, 27 January 2018 at 10:00 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner: Professor Michael Lundblad (University of Oslo). Abstract Palmer, R. 2017. Enchanting Irruptions. Wonder, Noir, and the Environmental Imaginary. 170 pp. Uppsala: Department of English, Uppsala University. This thesis investigates narratives of re-enchantment and disenchantment in three contemporary U.S. novels, Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Drawing on key concepts from ecocritcism and affect theory, I argue that these novels interrogate narratives and affects associated with questions central to the Anthropocene: climate-related dilemmas, questions of environmental justice, and animal ethics. Situating these texts in relation to environmental discourses, I show how affects of wonder and re-enchantment are produced within them through the insertion of anti- mimetic narrative objects into otherwise representationally realistic fictional worlds. These incursions, and the affective shifts they produce, challenge and interrupt in the novels narratives of ecological dread and disenchantment, which I link to the techniques and affects of noir. In each chapter of this study, I show how the dialogical interplay between disenchantment and re-enchantment disrupts preconceptions and assumptions about aspects of ecological crisis, and engenders or reinforces political commitments to environmentally related issues. Chapter One focuses on interspecies politics and animal rights in Mermaids in Paradise, environmental justice is central to the analysis of Tropic of Orange in Chapter Two, and the political dynamics of countercultural environmentalism inform my reading of Inherent Vice in Chapter Three. Throughout, I explore the potential of re-enchantment to suggest an alternative to disenchanted and apocalyptic narratives concerning the environment, and to articulate a productive politics for contemporary ecofiction. Keywords: Ecocriticism, ecofiction, re-enchantment, wonder, disenchantment, noir, environmental ethics, climate change, affect, environmental justice, Thomas Pynchon, Lydia Millet, Karen Tei Yamashita Ryan Palmer, Department of English, Box 527, Uppsala University, SE-75120 Uppsala, Sweden. © Ryan Palmer 2017 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-334648 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-334648) For Marie Kay Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................... 9 Chapter One “Goodbye to perfect legs”: Wonder and Instrumentalism in Mermaids in Paradise ........................... 43 Chapter Two Citrus Noir: Environmental Justice in Tropic of Orange ............................................. 75 Chapter Three “A Way to Lose More Slowly”: Climate Change and Counterculture in Inherent Vice. ........................... 111 Conclusion ................................................................................................... 149 Works Cited ................................................................................................. 157 Index ............................................................................................................ 167 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I extend my gratitude to my supervisors David Watson and Danuta Fjellestad. David’s expertise in theoretical issues combined with Danuta’s formidable attention to detail have been invaluable for this project. Their tireless and incisive reading shaped the thesis at every stage of its de- velopment. I am also indebted to them for the time and energy they have put into organizing conferences, symposia, workshops, and events as well as grants and other administrative matters. Thanks are also due to Nicholas Sergeant for his valuable input during the editing process. Many thanks to Uppsala University’s English Department, the Work-in Progress seminar participants, and the Doctoral Association. I’d like to spe- cifically thank Michael Boyden, Dag Blanck, Stephen Donovan, Ashleigh Harris, Christer Larsson, Roberto del Valle Alcalá, Sindija Franzetti, Tasnim Qutait, Ola Jönsson, Kristen Rau, Leonard Driscoll, Michael Jones, Peter Waites, Sally Anderson Boström, and Elisabeth Lutteman. The feedback and advice from my mock-defense opponent Daniel Grausam is very much ap- preciated. I am grateful for the assistance provided by Åke Ericsson, Lóa Kristjánsdóttir, and Ruth Hvidberg during my time in the department. I have been the grateful recipient of funds from the Erik Tengstrand sti- pend, and the Carl Gustaf and Carl Cervin stipend. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the STINT-funded project “Fictions of Threat: Security, Speculation, and Surviving the Now,” which provided me with opportunities to present research and meet with international scholars. Special thanks are due to Michael Titlestad and Merle Williams at the Uni- versity of Witwatersrand, as well as Maria Lauret, John Masterson, and Doug Haynes at the University of Sussex. Thanks also to the participants of these events, particularly Marc Botha, Mark Byron, Arthur Rose, Lara Buxbaum, Simon van Schalkwyk, Karl van Wyck, Natalie Paoli, Manosa Nthunya, and Robyn Pierce. Finally, I thank my friends and family. Without the support of Catherine and Rachel Palmer these years of study would not have been possible. I ex- tend my gratitude also to Michaela Malmberg for her support and patience during the process, Alex Szorkovsky for his indefatigable ear and generous hospitality, Cesar Valdez for helping me to keep things in perspective, and Emelie Jonsson for her advice and unflinching critique. Introduction This thesis aims to make sense of the recurrent tropes of disenchantment and re-enchantment in contemporary ecofiction, particularly in relation to noir sensibilities which the three primary novels draw on. More specifically, its goal is to examine the tensions produced between noir-inflected disenchant- ment and opposed gestures of re-enchantment and wonder in Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. These novels are linked by various com- monalities in their depiction of the impacts of a nebulous and apocalyptic, anthropogenic climate change. I argue that these novels further make use of a common dialogic between disenchantment and re-enchantment as part of a representational structure in which affective engagement is deployed as a means of mobilizing environmentalist politics and ethics.1 My claim is that there is an affinity between disenchantment and the environmental imaginary which is developed through discourses such as that of climate change.2 In their depiction of disaster narratives, the novels bear out this affinity while also resisting it by identifying the potential of other affects such as wonder and re-enchantment. I explore the ways in which the novels challenge disen- chantment on the basis of the threat it poses to an affect-based political and ethical engagement and I present some of the ways in which re-enchantment is proposed as an antidote to environmentalist inertia. While exploring the tension between dis- and re-enchantment that structures the novels, I analyze the particular manner in which each frames its environmental narrative in the context of the historical, political, and economic forces that lend it its present form. Given that the novels are fictional representations of questions central to the Anthropocene, I approach them as part of a much larger environmental imaginary expressed in contemporary fiction. The rapid increase in the number and scope of publications which can be broadly categorized as ecofiction, as well as growing critical attention to 1 The term dialogic is used to indicate that instances of disenchantment and re-enchantment form an interrelationship in which one contextualises and re-contextualises the other. Mo- ments of re-enchantment in the novels are to be read in terms of their relation to disenchant- ment, and vice versa. 2 As well as referring to the way environment in its broadest sense is imagined, framed, and processed in fictional works, the term environmental imaginary is used in the geographical sense to denote the ways in which the natural environment and events associated with it shape discourses on it. However, the latter usage will remain secondary, given that the primary discussion revolves around representation rather than the physical systems themselves. 9 such writing, comes in the wake of the environmental movements of the 1960s. Though these movements have a far longer history than this, their modern manifestation in North America was spurred on by a combination of material and theoretical forces. Environmental catastrophes such as the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, the Love Canal disaster in 1978, and the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear plant meltdown rendered the sometimes abstract issues of pollution, population pressure, and ecosystem degradation increas- ingly comprehensible and immediate to the non-specialist public. These kinds of disasters showed that anthropogenic risk to both people and ecosys- tems now exists on a scale previously only applicable to natural disasters. Meanwhile, the widespread impact of these disasters lent weight