Thesis Ecopoetic metafiction: the interaction of organism and environment in postcolonial literatures BARRAS, Arnaud Abstract This doctoral thesis is a study of the interaction of organism and environment as represented in three postcolonial novels published between 1994 and 2006 and written by authors from Canada, India and Australia: Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria. I argue that these novels have emerged from the literary junction of the movements of postmodernism, postcolonialism and environmentalism, and that the formal features of these narratives have been influenced by this junction to the point that they can be said to form a new genre, which I call "postcolonial ecopoetic metafiction." Reference BARRAS, Arnaud. Ecopoetic metafiction: the interaction of organism and environment in postcolonial literatures. Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2017, no. L. 889 DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:96382 URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-963824 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:96382 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 Ecopoetic Metafiction The Interaction of Organism and Environment in Postcolonial Literatures Arnaud Barras Directeur de these: Dr. Martin Leer Thèse de doctorat Présidente du jury: Prof. Deborah Madsen Département de langue et littérature anglaises Université de Genève 09/03/2017 Contents Contents iii Acknowledgements iv Foreword v Introduction: Organism/Environment in Postcolonial Literature 1 1. Environmentalism and Empire: Untangling Environmental Attitudes 15 1.1 Extractivism 21 1.2 Protectivism 23 1.3 Relativism 26 1.4 Environmental Attitudes in Environmental Fiction 53 2. Econarratology and Postcolonial Ecopoetic Metafiction 72 2.1 Postcolonial Environmental Fiction and Ecopoetic Metafiction 74 2.2 Grounding Reading, Text and Interpretation 86 2.3 Interactional Patterns 94 2.4 Interactional Epistemes 104 2.5 Interactional Chronotopes 111 2.6 Towards a Hermeneutics of Interaction 116 3. History, Fiction and Dialogism in A Discovery of Strangers 120 3.1 Canadian Historiographic Metafiction 122 3.2 Rudy Wiebe and the Search For a Voice: The Figure of the Storymaker 125 3.3 Historiographic Metafiction as Dialogism 132 3.4 Plunging into Alterity through Poetics 140 3.5 “Guns Screamed: ‘Listen: I’M HERE!’”: The European Cartographic Interactional Episteme 155 3.6 “Frame and Woven Centre”: The Tetsot’ine Storied Interactional Episteme 169 3.7 Hood and Greenstockings: Unclothing Discovery 194 3.8 Weaving two Interpretations into one Storyworld 199 4. The Sundarbans as History, Ecology and Chronotope in The Hungry Tide 201 4.1 Ghosh and the Subaltern 201 4.2 Translating Ecopoiesis: Sundarbans, Tide Country and Rilke 204 4.3 The Tide Country’s Ecological, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity 211 4.4 The Protagonists’ Interactional Epistemes 218 4.5 “Life is Lived in Transformation”: The Confluence of Interactional Patterns and Epistemes 237 4.6 Reading The Hungry Tide, Reading the Tide Country 267 5. Ecopoetics and the Law of Country in Carpentaria 269 5.1 Australian Aboriginal Literatures 269 5.2 Aboriginal Epistemologies and Ontologies: Country, Law, Dreaming, Story 271 5.3 Mapping Carpentaria: The Ecopoetics of the Law 275 5.4 Shimmering with the Dreaming: The Affective Resonance of Country 281 5.5 The Allegory of Postcolonial Politics 290 5.6 Environmental Justice: Bala, or The Will to Find Hope 303 5.7 Towards a Literary Mode of the Law 321 Conclusion 325 Bibliography 330 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my wife Leslie, who has been by my side since the beginning of the PhD. She has supported me with her love and tender understanding despite my bouts of research-and-writing-induced crankiness. I love you. Thank you Martin for being such a kind supervisor, for being the point of origin of this work, for helping me organize my thoughts, for being around when I needed to talk, for asking me to tone down my jargon, for encouraging me to go beyond the borders of my epistemic territory and to explore the ecopoetic processes that make up language, stories, knowledge, body and environment. Thank you Martin for becoming a friend. I would also like to thank my PhD fairy godmother Anna, whose first-hand knowledge of the joy, pain, frustration and excitement associated with the writing of a thesis helped me go through tough times with a friend by my side. There are so many others that I would like to thank: Oran, Nick and Carla for our wonderful talks in the vulnerable space of our research group GeMEME; my friends, and particularly Giam, Joel, Julien, Lucas and Romain my best pals for listening to my rants; Sam, Bryn, Deborah and all my other colleagues for sharing with me and teaching me so much during these 6 years; my Canberran colleagues and friends Scott and Megan and the others for helping me go through my fits of antipodean loneliness. Finally, thank you Mom and Dad for teaching me the value of respect, hard work, humility, for guiding me on the path of life and for building for me the environment that would make me the human and scholar I am. iv Foreword I wish to share what strikes me as a paradox: the subject of this doctoral thesis was initiated by what now constitutes its ultimate chapters. It is indeed the peculiar ecopoetics of A Discovery of Strangers, The Hungry Tide and Carpentaria that got me started. It is the way these literary storyworlds (including fictional organisms, environments and their interactions) are constructed, formed, and produced in reading that triggered in me the need to do research. Engaging with these three novels was not only a pleasure, it stimulated me intellectually in a way I had never been, causing me to reflect on the act of meaning-making at the core of reading. The complexity and self-reflexivity of these novels pushed me to understand the interpretation of literary works as a cultural, cognitive and ecological process. I needed to make sense of this intellectual transformation of mine. I needed to explicate, to detail, and to analyze the cognitive operations and phenomena that, as I understood it, underlay my skilled practice of reading, and the historical and ecological circumstances that made it possible. I needed to ground my work as reader and scholar into the world. I began to envision the very act of reading as an interaction between organism and environment, namely between a reading organism and a textual environment. It will come to you as no surprise, then, that each of the three novels that I study in the second part of this thesis are not only profound reflections on the relationships between organism and environment, but are also (and perhaps even more importantly) reflections on the relationships between reader and text. It is illusory to think that the thesis you hold in your hands can ever be finished. This dissertation is the frozen surface of an ever-flowing river; it is a segment in my line of thought. The letters on this page are a congealed linguistic landscape, but my writing process is a nonlinear, dynamic and textual ecosystem. Indeed, my greatest challenge in trying to account in writing for the dynamism of the reading process was to avoid reduction. In his poem “The Meaning of Existence” Les Murray explains: Everything except language know the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time v know nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe. Even this fool of a body lives it in part, and would have full dignity within it but for the ignorant freedom of my talking mind. (2012, 77-78) If, as Murray suggests, the universe is the expression of the meaning of existence, then an account of this universe based on a radical ontological separation of observer and observed can never be faithful, even remotely. The “liberation” of the speaking subject from the material world is, in Murray’s poem, inappropriate and foolish. As I see it, what matters is not so much the speaker’s freedom from the universe and language’s alienation from it, but rather the speaking-and-reading organism’s enmeshment within it. Here I can only agree with Murray, but also with Scott Slovic who addresses the apparent disconnection held by many between literary analysis and world analysis (Slovic 2008, 28) and instead proposes “to embrace the literary text as language that somehow contributes to our lives “out in the world” (28). Reading is an intellectual activity, but it cannot be only about intellectualizing: it also has to be about experiencing. Therefore, before illuminating the context of reading, it would be worth illuminating one’s context of reading. The first step towards an encounter with “the world and literature together” (28) is to encounter one’s world first. My story then in this thesis is not about all readers, it is about my reading. My reading of texts, but also my reading of the world, of its history. Writing about reading is not a clever antithesis. It is the process that underlies these very words you are now perceiving and processing. A long time ago, before I even contemplated going to University, when I was naively trying to make sense of the meaning of existence,1 I found out that creative writing could help me combine my experience of the world and my experience of literary texts. Following Slovic’s cue to embrace storytelling (28) and Professor Tom Griffiths’s advice to take academic research outside of academic buildings to the public, I have decided to include one such combination. The poem below is entitled “CrossHatched.” It emerged from the 1 I now know, like Murray, that the meaning of existence is existence itself! vi very patterns that made up my Canberran environment in 2013-2014, but it is also the result of my intellectual engagement with the historiography of Australian environmental attitudes, including Australian Indigenous art practices and ways of knowing.