Geologic Narration in German Fiction Since 1945 a DISSERTATION

Telling Deep Time: Geologic Narration in German Fiction since 1945 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Kiley M Kost IN PARTIAL FULFULLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Charlotte Melin April 2019 © Kiley M Kost 2019 Acknowledgements This dissertation was made possible through the support and guidance from many important people, for whom I am incredibly grateful. Above all, my advisor Professor Charlotte Melin has played an essential role from well before this project began (let’s call it the deep past). From encouraging me to apply for graduate school, creating engaging seminars that helped me deepen my understanding of literature, providing copious amounts (copious!) of very useful feedback on my work, advising me in applications for conference and fellowships, encouraging breaks for walks and chocolate to always pushing me “through the muck” to just write, I could not have done this without her. I am also grateful to the members of my dissertation committee. Matthias Rothe’s support during graduate school has meant a tremendous amount to me. Rüdiger Singer helped me broaden my focus and make connections with different historical eras. Daniel Philippon played a large role in shaping my project and paving a path for me to believe in my work. He was also instrumental in supporting my applications to a number of fellowships and grants. I am deeply grateful for the time I spent at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich with the support of a Fulbright research grant in 2017-2018. At the Carson Center, I met scholars whose work influenced my own and found a welcoming community that made me feel at home in Munich. I would like to thank Christof Mauch, Katie Ritson, Chris Cokinos and the participants of the 2017 Oberseminar for their academic guidance. My warm and productive stay at the Carson Center was due in large part to fantastic people including my first office mate and writing pal Gustaf Johansson, gustatory genius Sasha Gora, and fellow ecocritics Eveline de i Smalen and Eline Tabak. The Queen of Corn herself, Annka Liepold, was my emotional home in Munich and I’m grateful for her anytime bike rides, weekend hiking trips and love of vermouth. In Summer 2018 I participated in the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute at the University of Minnesota and am grateful for the feedback of its participants and conveners. I am also appreciative of all the feedback I’ve received during presentations and seminars at conferences of the German Studies Association, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Austrian Studies Association. My research and travel was often funded by a number of grants connected to the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota and I am grateful for the department’s assistance. To all of my fellow graduate students, I say thank you for your engagement, criticism and support along the way. To my dear friends Karsten Olson, Moritz Meutzner and Rachel Meutzner, I say thanks for all your encouragement, friendship and late-night conversations on the carriage house balcony. I owe my deepest thanks to my family and my parents for encouraging me every step of the way. A special thanks goes to my mother, Beth Kost, who read every single paper I wrote during graduate school and claimed they were good (she also claims to enjoy the proofreading!). Thank you for everything. And though she is no longer with us, thank you to my grandmother Joyce Holt who has always been an inspriation. Finally, thank you to Matt Jones who has made this whole process exponentially more enjoyable. You’re the best. ii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Into the Deep………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2 Narrating a Valley in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän …...……………13 Chapter 3 The Incredulous Geologist: Language, Narration and Doubt in Peter Handke’s Langsame Heimkehr…………………………………………………………………………………77 Chapter 4 Stratigraphy and Sight: Grounded perspective in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung…..138 Chapter 5 Geologic Narration and Glaciers……………………………………………………….187 Bibliography...………………………………………………………………………….207 iii Chapter 1: Into the Deep How can literature help us understand the vast temporal dimensions of the geologic past and the place of humans within such an expansive temporality? In Telling Deep Time: Geologic Narration and German Fiction after 1945, I examine works of German-language fiction that bring the deep past to life in narrative dimensions to answer the question of how meaningful stories can be told that span both human history and natural history of the deep past, navigating the enormous temporal differences that separate them. The central works for this investigation are Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene, 1979), Peter Handke’s Langsame Heimkehr (Slow Homecoming, 1979), and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (Visitation, 2008). All three authors treat the nonhuman environment as a dynamic entity whose ability to make meaning comes into existence through narrative. I claim that the combination of human stories and the deep past demands distinct narrative strategies, three of which I examine in this dissertation. The main questions that guide my project concern how stories of the deep past are told in works of fiction. I am interested in who or what narrates stories that take place well before human existence and how such nonhuman stories are made compelling to the reader. Because the temporal scale of the deep past is vastly greater than that of recent human history, I also question whether stories told on a geologic time scale risk masking human violence and suffering and consider what narrative techniques allow for authors to tell both human and nonhuman stories. Additionally, with a focus on nonhuman agents in the past, I am interested in which ways nonhuman agents produce meaning in a narrative, 1 how this meaning is interpreted and by whom. My focus on nonhuman agents in fiction leads to the main theoretical question that frames my research: how are theories of material ecocriticism that are concerned with nonhuman agents compatible with narratology and how does their combination add to interpretations and analyses of fiction texts? In order to investigate these questions, I also consider what role scientific understanding plays in fiction works about the deep past. Do stories about geologic history require certain scientific knowledge? And if so, how accurate must depictions of specific landscapes or geologic processes be? How do authors incorporate scientific knowledge into works of fiction? The contemporary theoretical debates I am exploring have been largely tied to parallel conversations about the Anthropocene. In the beginning stages of this project, I imagined my research in terms of the Anthropocene, the proposed geologic era for the current moment in which humans have altered the planet on a such a scale that it is akin to previous shifts in geologic history. The term Anthropocene offers us a way to talk about the extensive damage humans have caused to the nonhuman environment that reaches beyond climate change and global warming to also include ocean acidification, species extinction and biodiversity loss. On the one hand, the term Anthropocene is a convenient catchall that highlights the current state of environmental degradation. On the other hand, however, many scholars and activists have rightly criticized the term for its inability to address the large inequalities of these environmental effects—that is, that the anthropos of the Anthropocene is not all humans as the word suggests. Rather, those who are most threatened by the effects of climate change contributed much less to it, while those responsible for high emissions and pollution are the ones who can afford to ignore 2 the consequences in the short term. In the course of my research process, however, it became clear that the concept of the Anthropocene was only a stepping stone to imagine the temporal dimensions that interest me. For it is precisely the temporal that makes the changes occurring in the Anthropocene so alarming—changes, which, in the absence of human influence, would take hundreds of thousands of years to occur through natural processes. I am curious about how fiction expands the temporal dimension to include the deep past and in order to consider this question, it is important to break down a number of theoretical positions and key terms from material ecocriticism and narratology. Background and Theory Theories of material ecocriticism that explore the agentic capacity of matter and its intra-action with other matter and humans to create meaning provide a robust framework for analyzing narratives of deep time in the three novels I discuss. Scholars working in material ecocriticism, particularly Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, describe the world as a complex entanglement of people, things, and discourse that all intertwine to create meaning. Their framing sheds light on the complex processes that make up the world, and the meaning produced by each instance of entanglement. Seen through the lens of material ecocriticism, matter is relevant and nonhuman nature emerges as a dynamic entity, existing and changing both independent of, and, through intra-action with humans.1 Scholars of material ecocriticism frame the world as “a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman 1 There has been a similar interest in the material

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