University of Florida ‘You have a story to tell’: Overcoming the hyperobjectivity of climate change through literature Kaylyn Ling Undergraduate English Honors Thesis Dr. Terry Harpold Dr. Stephanie Smith Spring 2020 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................3 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................4 PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY ...................................................................................................8 INCONSISTENCIES OF NARRATIVE ...................................................................................26 A COUNTRY’S CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES ...............................................................41 CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................50 WORKS CITED .........................................................................................................................51 2 ABSTRACT The relationship between humans and the environment has been deeply studied, provoked, and explored across literature, but no literary genre has addressed representation of this relationship as significantly as climate fiction. Climate fiction is loosely defined as a field of literature dealing with anthropogenic climate change and its effects, both speculative and proven. This genre has radically influenced the way we tell stories about the human–natural world connection. The environmentally minded diegetic stories embedded into climate fiction are as complex as climate crisis itself; these stories are delivered in different ways, from oral narration to amateur documentaries, in turn affecting the way knowledge is shared, stored, and understood, and they precipitate ecological lessons of massive consequence. This paper will use Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Aaron Thier’s Mr. Eternity (2016), and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) to investigate the function of narration in climate fiction. Narration develops literary ideations of sustainability and responsibility in the late Anthropocene. These three contemporary novels, characterized by their fractured structure and heteroglossic textures, showcase extremely nuanced representations of storytelling. The characters in these novels overcome the representational challenges of climate change by transgressing temporal and spatial limits. The context, multiplicities, and uncertainties of each story gives shape to abstract ecological thought. This investigation will address human exceptionalism, memory, ontology, and the agency of nature within the literary imagination. KEYWORDS: climate fiction, climate change, storytelling, temporal, memory, representation 3 INTRODUCTION It is impossible to pinpoint where or when anthropogenic climate change begins or will end in human history. Humankind has maintained a contentious relationship with the environment for centuries, and the complexity of the earth’s ecological issues has expanded far beyond an easily defined temporal or spatial scope. Even when attempting to mark a concise climate crisis timeline beginning with the invention of the steam engine, or the industrialization of agriculture, the phenomenon is too generalized and graphically dispersed to admit of a precise date. In other words, from its notional inception, climate change resists simplification. Climate crisis does not adhere to a monolithic definition, which poses many representational challenges. Explaining, depicting, and understanding such a geophysically, politically, and culturally massive phenomenon has never been done before, but writers1 are leading the way in conquering these representational challenges. Writers are taking to novels and short fiction, newspapers, and blogs alike to craft literary pictures of the climate crisis. They humanize what philosopher Timothy Morton has termed a “hyperobject”—something so “massively distributed in space and time relative to humans” (1) that it cannot be easily understood or represented. The literature of interdisciplinary writers is shaping incomprehensible tales of ecological turmoil into empathetic narratives of humanity, expanding the ways in which we envision our relationship with the environment. Climate fiction is the principal literary genre currently leading the visualization of climate crisis. Works in the genre speculate how climate change as a hyperobject fits into narrative representations of the past, present, and future. They “make environmental crisis thinkable” by 1 Rob Nixon in Slow Violence prefers the term “writer-activist,” referring to someone who is a watchdog for environmental injustice; liaison between institutional and populist action; and leader of humanizing ecological issues (5). 4 “combin[ing] extrapolative and cognitive mapping of technoscientific innovation with sociopolitical and ethical critique” (Garforth 240). By reaching into several disciplines at once, climate fiction is able to produce a holistic approximation of climate crisis. Fictional projections of ecological disaster and human survival are typical of the genre. Often, diegetic narratives of climate fiction are also extraordinarily layered. They feature stories within stories tightly interwoven with one another; their connectedness reflects the “viscous” nature of climate change (Morton 37). Climate change “sticks” (Morton 36) to the individuals and institutions that it touches. Because this viscous hyperobject has become so entangled with all worldly aspects, climate change must be met by new ways of storytelling capable of overcoming the temporal and spatial limits of more conventional representations. This paper will use Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018), and Aaron Thier’s Mr. Eternity (2016) to explore representational complexities of narrative in climate fiction. These three contemporary novels feature vastly elaborate, fractured narratives employing an exhaustive span of characters and settings. Even minor characters are nuanced in purpose, attitude, and influence. As a result, the protagonist becomes loosely defined as these books prove that everyone has their own stakes in the portrayed climate crisis. Character analyses of the idiosyncratic Oblivia Ethylene from The Swan Book and the larger-than-life Daniel Defoe in Mr. Eternity are studied in conjunction with the minor characters that intersect their lives. All aspects of Oblivia and Defoe’s lives are deeply and complexly entangled with climate crisis, demonstrated through the uniquity of their experiences and the language used to develop them. The Overstory, on the other hand, provides a useful framework to examine the sociopolitical ramifications of climate activism, especially in current- day America. All three books are written in the last decade, making them contemporary pieces of 5 climate criticism, but none so readily engage with the real-world contemporary as Powers’s novel. When analyzed in juxtaposition with one another, these narratives craft an ecological rhetoric that resonates with prescience of the climate crisis to come. Climate fiction has its finger on the pulse of the contemporary ecological movement, and the characters, events, and themes reflect accordingly. Moreover, the construction of each novel mirrors the immensity of ecological crisis. Mr. Eternity and The Overstory are heteroglossic,2 switching point of view through a series of ostensibly well-defined character voices, while The Swan Book is told by an omniscient narrator. The difference between voices allows subjectivity within an individual experience, while simultaneously building an objective and intersectional picture of a collective experience. The language in the selected texts, especially in Wright’s story of aboriginal realism, is deeply evocative, nuanced, and mature both in language and theme. Elliptical prose traces the same themes of love, ecological responsibility, sociopolitical activism, trauma, and connectivity across the three books. The broadness of their scope cannot be understated. Each novel defies being canonized into a “self-contained, knowable, and easily delineated body of literary works” (such as ‘Australian literature’) but instead reinvents itself as “an undecidable and shimmering arrangement of bodies, countries, and stories” (Barras, “The Law” 3). Mr. Eternity reaches as far back as sixteenth-century South America while The Swan Book probes deeply the future of post- climate change Australia, as each author contends with the consequences of environmental action (or inaction). 2 The simultaneous use of many voices, dialects, or languages, which introduces social or ideological complexity, as explored in The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981. 6 While these books accomplish much in their establishment of narrative scope and depth, they still face gargantuan, and sometimes irreconcilable, challenges of representation. Each novel’s fragmented style and structure breeds ambiguity. Climate fiction, like climate change itself, is in a constant battle with uncertainty—while scientific data, predictive models, and progressive policy reflect a real planetary emergency, attempts of depicting something as large and slow as climate change raises more questions than answers. Rob Nixon describes environmental crisis as a