Through the Weather Glass (& What Icarus Found There) Lucy Burnett Ph.D. Thesis 2013 Through the Weather Glass (& What Icarus Found There) Lucy Burnett School of Humanities, Languages & Social Sciences University of Salford, Salford, UK Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, April 2013 Carry a paper and pen at all times in case of inspiration. As we all know, climate change can hit at any time at any place. It probably comes most often when least expected, when waiting in the checkout line or sitting in a traffic jam. The immediate feeling of the instinctual emotion felt at the very moment will be forgotten, or at least, begin to cloud in memory. i Contents Acknowledgements & Declaration iii Abstract iv Critical Introduction 1 An introductory overview 2 Instrumental expectations on writers 6 The dominant frame of climate change 8 Problems with the dominant frame of climate change 11 Representational illusions and the literary genre of climate change 15 Popular science literature 19 Climate change fiction 22 Climate change poetry 26 Through the Weather Glass – a post-climate change poetics 33 The theoretical context 34 The interrogative mode 37 The imaginative mode 41 The epistemological mode 46 Conclusion 51 Works cited 53 Creative Project 59 Daedalus’s Climate Prologue 60 Part 1: The Fall 63 Part 2: The Climate Labyrinth 75 Part 3: Crafting Wings 101 Part 4: The Flight 159 Part 5: The Fallen 189 Part 6: The Athenian Climate Change Summit 229 Part 7: Ikaria 251 Part 8: Epilogue 259 Bibliography 267 ii Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to my parents, John and Margaret Burnett, with thanks for everything, and to my supervisor Scott Thurston for going far beyond the call of duty along the way. I would also like to thank Sinead Murphy for supporting me throughout, my former tutor and publisher Jon Glover for the belief he has always showed in my writing, and Heather Hewitt for doing such a wonderful job of proof reading. Declaration This thesis is my own work and has not been submitted for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. The following poems were previously published in Leaf Graffiti (Carcanet Press, 2013): ‘Awake, and tingling near the air,’ ‘Changes at peripheries of vision,’ ‘So here I am, then,’ ‘Icarus is depressed by the thought,’ ‘A month already so much sky,’ ‘Beyond the road,’ ‘The average spelling of the weather,’ and ‘Icarus.’ ‘I never saw it as a form of fleeing,’ ‘A place of circus,’ ‘A loss of river limbs,’ and ‘Icarus’ were published in Shadowtrain. Thanks to the publishers. The image on p.188, Pinarello Queen of the Desert, is an artwork by Lisa Fingleton. iii Abstract This Creative Writing thesis argues for the need to rethink our understanding of climate change and focuses on the response of creative writers to this phenomenon, whilst also offering its own creative contribution. The critical component aims at articulating a post-climate change poetics. It reviews the mainstream literature in popular science writing, fiction and poetry from the point of view of a political frame-analysis of climate change, to demonstrate how a certain understanding of climate change maps onto conventions of literary genre. The thesis takes the view that many mainstream literary attempts to negotiate climate change are compromised by the teleological way in which they conceive of the phenomenon. As an alternative position, it draws on the work of climatologist Mike Hulme and physicist and cultural theorist Karen Barad to encourage participation in climate change as a condition for negotiating its meaning. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is proposed as a model for literary production informed by this poetics and as a model for the author’s own creative practice. The creative component of this thesis is an intra-generic text presenting the fictionalised narrative of a cycle expedition the author made from Salford to the Greek island of Ikaria in the summer of 2010. This substantial work aims to interrogate, imagine, and enquire into the epistemology of a post-climate change world. iv Through the Weather Glass (& What Icarus Found There) Critical Introduction 1 An introductory overview As recently as 2005, two literary environmental commentators on either side of the Atlantic bemoaned the lack of cultural response to climate change. In an article for the environmental magazine Grist, American Bill McKibben presented what he called the ‘climate paradox’: If the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since civilisation emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly enough, though we know about it, we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddam operas? (McKibben 2005: online) McKibben compares the limited response to climate change with the ‘staggering output’, and ‘real political effect’ of art about AIDs over the previous two decades. Later that year British nature writer and journalist Robert Macfarlane issued a similar rallying cry to writers in an article in The Guardian. His rhetoric echoes McKibben’s: ‘Where is the literature of climate change? Where is the creative response to what Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, has famously described as ‘the most severe problem faced by the world’?’ (Macfarlane 2005: online) Macfarlane compares the lack of climate change literature with the abundance of work produced in response to ‘the other great eschatological crisis of the past half century – the nuclear threat.’ Since these commentators wrote, a flurry of climate change novels, poems and poetry anthologies have been published. This has been sufficient for two critics who recently completed a comprehensive review of climate change fiction to describe it as an ‘explosion’ (Trexler & Putra 2010: 186). However, if it has been an explosion, it has been a controlled one, for the extent of the literary response remains vastly out of proportion to what climate change appears to demand, and a minority literary interest. In an article for New Formations, US critic Adrian Ivakhiv notes how artistic responses to climate change easily get ‘lost in the din’ of wider popular culture (Ivakhiv 2008: 98). This is borne out more specifically within the literary field. During his paper for a one day symposium on Culture and Climate Change at Bath Spa University in July 2010, Adam Trexler estimated that at least one hundred and thirty climate change novels have been published, with more ‘ecocrisis novels’ being published ‘literally by the day’ (Trexler 2010: 1). This might be a significant increase, but remains a minute proportion of fiction publishing, and a paltry response to the apparent scale of the issue. Macfarlane and McKibben dedicate the remainder of their articles to outlining the role they believe literature could play when it comes to climate change. What I remain less convinced by 2 is their rationale for what is it about climate change that proves so problematic for writers, or what might account for the ‘cultural absence’ they lament. Almost a decade later, these questions still need asking. The nature of climate change itself provides a partial answer. Climate change is not conducive to narrative since it happens incrementally over long time scales. Furthermore it resists representation since it is intangible to the senses and inaccessible to direct scientific measurement, and by operating over vast geographical scales it proves difficult to capture in literary form. Such formal challenges have been noted by a number of critics over recent years (Trexler & Johns-Putra 2011; Calderazzo 2011). However, approaching these questions as a writer myself, a formal challenge is no reason to avoid exploring climate change, but rather an opportunity to experiment. In my own experience far more problematic than any of the above was my perception that instrumental expectations and moral obligations were being exerted upon me by the climate change agenda. It is these expectations and obligations – facets of how we come to understand and respond to climate change, rather than climate change itself – that I have come to firmly believe are the underlying reason for writers’ apparent reticence before climate change. One year into my doctoral research these pressures had blocked my own writing into a corner, as captured in the question I asked the Culture and Climate Change symposium at Bath Spa: how can I write a playful, improvised poetry which explores serious, politically involved issues such as climate change, without trivialising them? This question on the one hand demonstrates my commitment to exploring climate change in my writing. Climate change, as one of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary culture, demands a literary response. Over recent years climate change has been one of the most prominent of contemporary narratives, and poses questions of the entire meaning of the human project on Earth. Literature surely has unique, and important, means of exploring such challenges. However during my own early creative experiments, the obligation to ‘play my part’ in the ‘fight against climate change’ soon began to place instrumental expectations on my writing. Meanwhile the catastrophic potential consequences of climate change weighted these expectations with moral imperative, since the stakes of not contributing to the ‘effort’ are no less than humanity’s future existence on Earth. Yet I felt highly uncomfortable with both of the above. In order to establish my relevance to the politics of climate change, or to be seen to take climate change seriously, I felt obliged to subvert my aesthetics to persuasive, didactic ends in order to contribute to ‘solving’ climate change before it is too late.