Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 9781666914740, 9781666914757, 9781666914764, 1666914746

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Aging Studies and Ecocriticism

ECOCRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Katarina Leppänen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Recent Titles Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters, edited by Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives, edited by Scott Slovic, Joyjit Ghosh, and Samit Kumar Maiti An Ibero-American Perspective on Narratives of Pandemics, edited by Zélia M. Bora, Animesh Roy, and Ricardo de la Fuente Ballesteros The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest: Uncanny Encounters, by Stacy Hoult The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II, by Dilek Bulut Sarikaya Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871, by Nicole C. Dittmer

Aging Studies and Ecocriticism Interdisciplinary Encounters Edited by Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Balestrini, Nassim Winnie, editor. | Hoydis, Julia, editor. | Kainradl, AnnaChristina, 1981- editor. | Kriebernegg, Ulla, editor. Title: Aging studies and ecocriticism : interdisciplinary encounters / edited by Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2023] | Series: Ecocritical theory and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023020217 (print) | LCCN 2023020218 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666914740 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666914757 (epub) | ISBN 9781666914764 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Aging in literature. | Ecology in literature. | Ecocriticism. Classification: LCC PN56.O4 A37 2023  (print) | LCC PN56.O4  (ebook) | DDC 809.93354—dc23/eng/20230608 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020217 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020218 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii ‌‌Introduction: Time, Relationality, and Fears of Endings: Encounters between Aging Studies and Ecocriticism Nassim W. Balestrini‌‌, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg PART I: AGING BODIES AND ENVIRONMENTS



Chapter One: “A World in Flux”: Temporality, Aging, and Environmental Change in V.S. Naipaul’s Late Work Silvia Gerlsbeck

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Chapter Two: Footprints in the Jungle: Creating a Legacy in the Rainforest 41 Christian Lenz Chapter Three: “Zoological Outcasts” and the Aging Other‌‌ in Jean Rhys’s Late Short Stories Jade E. French

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Chapter Four: Embodying Age(ing) in the Non-Human World in Lorna Crozier’s Poetry Núria Mina-Riera

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Chapter Five: Beyond Reproductive Futurism: Harold and Maude’s Ecological Aesthetics Simon Dickel

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‌‌‌‌‌‌‌Chapter Six: Time Travel, Age/ing, and Ecology in the German Netflix Series Dark (2017–2020) Tina-Karen Pusse and Michaela Schrage-Früh v

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PART II: GROWING OLD AMID ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES

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Chapter Seven‌‌‌: Imagining Longevity and Sustainability in Walter Besant’s The Inner House and William Morris’s News from Nowhere 119 Adrian Tait Chapter Eight: Literature and the “Cultural Scripting” of Aging and Dying 133 Stephen Hahn‌‌ Chapter Nine: Caring (for) Futures: Intergenerational Justice in Contemporary Drama Julia Hoydis

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‌‌‌‌Chapter Ten: Old(er) Women and the Apocalypse: Three Dramatic Representations 163 Julia Henderson and Katrina Dunn Chapter Eleven: Learning to Live Well within Limits: Exploring the Existential Lessons of Climate Change and an Aging Population 183 Albert Banerjee PART III: AFTERWORD



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Chapter Twelve: Emergent Cosmic Return: The Field of Possibilities for Aging in a Proposed New Geological Epoch Peter J. Whitehouse Index



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About the Editors and Contributors



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Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Urša Marinšek for her generous support and diligent proofreading of this volume. We are also grateful to Anna Aschauer for her assistance in compiling the index.

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‌‌Introduction Time, Relationality, and Fears of Endings: Encounters between Aging Studies and Ecocriticism Nassim W. Balestrini‌‌, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, and Ulla Kriebernegg

In recent decades, the humanities have witnessed the development of various interdisciplinary fields. Among them two, in particular, tackle challenges for present and future generations: critical aging studies and ecocriticism. This collection presents the first substantial encounter between these two fields that share concerns with processes of change, narratives of crisis and decline, complex temporalities, and questions of intergenerational justice. They also engage with competing ideologies of efficiency, exploitation, and endurance versus those of sustenance, care, and survival. Putting them into conversation furthermore reveals how their respective emancipatory research agendas challenge hegemonic scientific and medical discourses. Yet even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks—such as those of gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, or posthumanism—there has been little scholarly interaction between environmental and aging studies in the humanities. While cultural age has been addressed in discourse on sustainability and in social-ecological transformation research—for instance in environmental gerontology, where scholars advocate for studying the relationship between older adults and their socio-physical environment (e.g., Hoh et al. 2021; Peace 2022; Skinner, Winterton, and Walsh 2020)—in philosophically or sociologically oriented aging studies, ecology and sustainability are rarely discussed. Notable exceptions include Rick Moody’s work on eco-elders (2008). Literary and cultural studies tend to be open to intersectional and environmental concerns, as the impact and rise of scholarship in ecofeminism 1

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and green postcolonial studies show. Generally, ecocriticism has come a long way since the formation of the field in the 1990s and first landmark publications such as Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader (1996). Over the last two decades, ecocriticism has not only expanded to include all kinds of environments, genres, and texts (see Slovic 2010, 5); it has also embraced the deconstructivist and decolonizing impulses from especially Indigenous and feminist studies (see, e.g., Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch (2012); Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010); Salma Monani and Joni Adamson’s Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies (2016)). The radically revised third edition of Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism (2023), out with Routledge as our volume goes to press, adds chapters on climate apocalypse and Indigeneity, which are testimony to ecocriticism’s embrace of the decolonial and to the all-pervasive concern with discourse of endings, finitude, and apocalyptic imaginaries. Meanwhile, volumes like Extending Ecocriticism, edited by Peter Barry and William Welstead (2017), broaden the field’s focus into the realm of aesthetics, public art, and heritage studies. Commenting on the development and future directions of ecocriticism in 2010, Scott Slovic noted that, aside from an increasingly comparativist, transcultural orientation, approaches likely to gain importance include material and empirical ecocriticism and questions of social transformation, ethics, and justice. Time has proven him right (see, e.g., Timothy Clark’s 2019 The Value of Ecocriticism and the volume Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Wojciech Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder (2023)). Trying to respond to pressing political and cultural concerns of the present without losing sight of historical trajectories renders aging studies and ecocriticism a natural critical match. Yet, age is still rarely included as an explicit category of analysis in ecocritical readings— one of the gaps our volume seeks to address. At the same time, aging studies scholars have grappled with questions of gender, dementia, disability, migration, and other intersectional aspects. The recent relaunch of Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, edited by Aagje Swinnen and Anita Wohlmann, has been welcomed enthusiastically by scholars in the field as it represents the central hub for researchers in the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS) and the North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS). The journal features fundamental texts that document the development of the field as it happens, while it also serves as a venue for new directions in aging studies research. Furthermore, two book series are central to the development of the field: One of the first series that has seen the production of more than 20 volumes since 2010 is Aging Studies, edited by Heike Hartung, Ulla Kriebernegg, and Roberta Maierhofer. More recently, Bloomsbury Studies in the Humanities, Ageing and Later Life,

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a new series launched by Kate de Medeiros, also caters to the needs of the booming field. Moreover, two important books that showcase the latest developments are just about to come out: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina, and the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging, edited by Valerie Lipscomb and Aagje Swinnen. Both illustrate the wide array of critical approaches that scholars in the field of literary aging studies employ, from environmental studies and cultural geography to critical race theory, postcolonialism, and queer studies. While the humanities have only just begun to see connections between aging and environmental studies, the nexus between medical/health issues, aging, and environmental issues has been receiving increasing and significant attention for a little longer (Ayalon et al. 2021; Filiberto et al. 2009). This is a reflection not only of the advancing threat and realities of climate change and related crises but also a result of the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the editorial team of The Gerontologist, a flagship in geriatric and gerontological research that also considers the humanities and arts, decided to promote research on climate change in a special issue on “Climate Change and Aging” that will be published in 2024. 2022 also saw the publication of the Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities, the first systematic study highlighting the multiple linkages between these interdisciplinary research fields and taking a decidedly global approach. Aiming to uncover the simultaneous threat the climate crisis poses to human health, the handbook’s editors explain how the pandemic has intensified the connections between the medical and environmental humanities. The introduction helpfully argues for the parallels between recognizing (human) vulnerability by becoming aware of the finitude of one’s existence and the emergence of the environmental movement, which is similarly “crisis-focused and is predicated on a declensionist narrative: the formerly Edenic planet has declined from its one-time purity (and health) as a result of human activity” (Slovic, Rangarajan, and Sarveswaran 2022, 1). Considering the emphasis on the recognition of processes of vulnerability, precarity, loss, and extinction, combining aging studies and ecocriticism appears to be a highly beneficial and necessary critical move to probe further into these intersections. This is all the more relevant as aging studies has always put forward a critical perspective on topics such as vulnerability, loss, and dependency by going beyond simplistic notions of aging as burden and decline. Support for the necessity of this endeavor is provided by Kathleen Woodward, one of the founding scholars of cultural aging studies. In her contribution to the fourth volume in the Handbook Series Critical Humanities and Ageing (Goldman, de Medeiros, and Cole 2022), which seeks to address new directions in aging studies in the twenty-first century, she argues that

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up until now books on climate change and the Anthropocene have tended to ignore aging, while critical aging studies pay little attention to cultural studies of climate change. Previously, she had already scrutinized some of the implications of “aging in the [A]nthropocene” (see Woodward 2020) through a reading of Margaret Drabble’s novel The Dark Flood Rises—one of the few boundary texts thus far which have been analyzed from both an ecocritical and a critical aging studies vantage point. A further important impulse comes from Sarah Falcus who argues that especially dystopian fiction points to both species and planetary vulnerability, while it simultaneously presents the possibility of change, thus alerting readers to the option that devastation and crisis may be avoided (2020, 65). Our volume seeks to broaden the range of literary primary texts by including poetry, the short story, novel, drama, film, and TV-series. This results in exploring variegated cultural representations of crisis and change and in revealing the critical potential of shared approaches and concerns between both fields. In the following sections of this introduction, we will highlight three areas of thematic and conceptual concern we deem particularly relevant: ecologies of time and space, relationality and care, and fears of endings and decline. A main drift of critical inspiration to combine aging studies and ecocriticism is provided by postcolonial and Indigenous studies and here especially with regard to conceptions and experiences of time and temporality which drive inquiries in both fields at this moment of planetary crisis. As Woodward explains, this is because “we experience time conceptually, with time in the time of climate change acquiring new valences of meaning, including one we might call existential” (2022, 200; also see 199). ECOLOGIES OF TIME AND SPACE Time necessarily looms large over attempts at understanding both aging as a process and age as a condition associated with time periods of varied lengths. These processes and conditions can refer to temporal frames—from a single organism’s life span to the developmental stages of our universe—or to specific moments, such as a certain age on a specific anniversary or the ostensible temporal pivot that indicates the switch from one (potentially geological) era to the next. The centrality of time thus offers a case in point as to why it is anything but surprising that dialogue between aging studies and ecocriticism provides fertile ground for contemplation and debate. Especially in the context of climate change, which encompasses temporal and spatial dimensions that individuals can hardly fathom and that are impossible to represent in their systematic entirety, ecocritics have suggested a method of oscillating between sharply diverging “scales: shallow and deep histories,

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human life and all life, local ecologies and planetary dynamics” (Tomlinson 2017, 30; also see DeLoughrey 2019, 2; Braidotti 2019, 38). Time also invites thinking about scientific and technological, sociocultural and faith-based, as well as hands-on and aesthetic dimensions. In recent ecocriticism, the deep time of geology and of Earth Science has been discussed in conjunction with human life-time as well as with notions of conservation, sustainability, social justice, and time–space relations in the humanities and arts. Competing temporal scales create awareness of conceptualizations of time as constantly in flux, yet punctured with individual deaths that are given components of life cycles, and as threateningly finite dystopian vistas of apocalypse and extinction. Western ideas of chronology and continuity are increasingly being contrasted with non-Western and, in particular, Indigenous conceptualizations that include loops, circles, and spirals—which do not necessarily reject teleology wholesale, but which do not share the kinds of directedness that imply specifically Eurocentric, Enlightenment-derived thinking about human progress. In his monograph The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty distinguishes between “the globe” as “a humanocentric construction” and “the planet, or the Earth system” as something much larger that thus “decenters the human” (2021, 4). To his mind, the largeness of the “planet”/“Earth system” does not only contextualize our planet within an immense universe (also see 75), but it also requires thinking in terms of “deep” history. Although humans can obviously not be experientially connected to “deep” history, they can develop an “awareness” of other histories than the one of their own individual life (15). Chakrabarty’s focus on experience then extends to his claim that “[w]e humans never experience ourselves as a species” because “one never experiences being a concept” (43). From the perspective of studying the arts, such a limiting and limited notion of experience can and should be questioned. Rather than foregrounding individuals’ empirical knowledge, ecocritical scholarship scrutinizes artistic works as vehicles of thought, imagination, and awareness that—more often than not— will lie outside a specific recipient’s own experience. While Chakrabarty does not seriously consider how the arts and the sciences could come together in climate change communication, he ends his book by highlighting the importance of connectedness. He proposes that “mutuality” requires awareness of a single finite life and that a collection of interrelated lives could then “form a community of sentiments and experiences” (190). According to his closing argument, deep time has begun to play a role in conceptualizing “human-historical” time because we feel increasing pressure to engage with both time scales (192). This function ascribed to “mutuality” echoes what literary and cultural studies scholars in the area of planetarity theory would call “relationality,”

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especially because the orientation towards some form of community awareness or community building is the same. This is particularly central to ecocritical engagement with postcolonial theory and with recent discourse on decoloniality, which is meant to replace economically oriented ideas of globalization with planetary perspectives. As a “conception and practice” decoloniality rejects new abstract universals which usually reiterate Western universalism; instead, it is rooted in “relationality,” that is, in “interdependence in search of balance and harmony of life on the planet” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 1). Decolonial theory as developed by Indigenous scholars from the Andes rethinks both geographical interrelations and temporal linkages in ways that inquire into how concepts that have hitherto been widely unknown outside Indigenous contexts offer alternate or complementary approaches to dominant thought patterns imposed by a long history of colonialism and imperialism (11, 60, 81, et passim). Reaching back in time to precolonial eras, non-Western forms of thinking demonstrate—according to Mignolo and Walsh—how cosmology provides the basis for epistemology, which in turn determines ontology.1 Adding further temporal dimensions to the long-dominant sole focus either on celebrating Enlightenment progress or on critiquing imperialism and the oppression of non-Western peoples, decolonial approaches to time and relationality facilitate new ways of thinking about cultural ecologies and about processes such as aging and futurity. Kyle Whyte, a Potawatomi scholar who favors collaboration with “allied scholars,” emphasizes that reviving Indigenous knowledge systems strengthens tribal communities and enables all humans to be cautiously optimistic despite current apocalyptic predicaments (earlier iterations of which numerous Indigenous communities, albeit certainly not all, have survived seemingly against all odds) and, thus, to translate a vision of the future into a source of strength for the present (see Whyte 2017, 154, 158). Importantly, Whyte’s argumentation dismantles encrusted Western notions of Indigenous temporalities as being stuck in the past and, instead, offers these temporalities as a sorely needed impetus to move forward. His simultaneous perspective on specific localized communities and larger time–space considerations, moreover, coheres with Amy Elias’s observation that “the twenty-first century began with an insistent return of history [. . .] in the context of geographical spatiality” (2012, 738; also see DeLoughrey 2019). While politicians and economists were rather dumbstruck by certain global developments, she argues, artists and humanities scholars were already armed with concepts and approaches that emphasize “an imperative of connection” (739), an ethical turn, and a “relational aesthetic” (a hotly debated term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the late 1990s) without slipping into utopianism (740, et passim).

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Overcoming notions of modernity that favor Western Enlightenment universalism as well as postmodernist conceptualizations that collapse time and space into one another, this response has been opening up perspectives that emphasize plurality and that suggest nodes of interrelatedness and participation within diverse understandings of time and space in “a late-Bakhtinian” chronotope (749). But, as the essays in this collection show, such a perspective is not at all limited to reading post-1945 works of art; instead, it can inform the way we scrutinize earlier artefacts that were, up until now, interpreted through the lenses of individual development or national cultures (see Buell 2007). The ethical turn inherent in concepts like relationality and decoloniality also surfaces in how ecocriticism has decisively moved away from being a heuristic approach that is simply tied to environmentalist agendas (such as conservationism and sustainability). Rather, as Stacy Alaimo argues, scholars have acknowledged that “[q]uestions of social justice, global capitalist rapacity, and unequal relations between the Global North and the Global South are invaluable for developing models of sustainability that do more than try to maintain the current, brutally unjust status quo” (2012, 562). The creative work of the arts and the critical thought inherent in and beyond the arts are, then, central to approaching time and processes of becoming (Braidotti 2019, 51). Particularly the notion of “active becoming” (61), which Braidotti associates with a focus on relationality rather than on identity discourse that foregrounds the individual, offers promising links to the concerns of aging and care studies. RELATIONALITY AND ECOLOGIES OF CARE In taking a life course perspective, aging studies have contributed to thinking about how becoming can be conceived of. Contrary to popular conceptualizations of old age, which tend to define old age as a distinct period in life, older people themselves emphasize the continuity of the ageless self (Kaufman 1993) amid changes across the life span. Yet, cultural representations of age often remain locked in primarily negative stereotypes, whereas youth remains a remarkably fluid and seemingly almost infinitely expandable category, that is, a “moveable marker” (Woodward 1991, 6). Therefore, it is necessary to analyze representations of age and aging across the life course from a cultural perspective in order to regain an understanding of this fluid definition of identity. Analyzing cultural representations reveals that old people are discursively constructed as a binary counterpart to youth. They are categorized as the Other in public discourse. In this regard, aging studies show that the social construction of the “old” as a separate group, according to Katz

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(1996), can be explained by the historical development of almshouses, the precursors of old people’s homes, as defined by the Elizabethan Poor Law (1601), namely as an “institution of population differentiation” (Katz 1992, 209)—the differentiation of the population according to age, social standing, and physical ability. The binary construction of old and young, which is a dominant and culturally powerful discourse, entails a framing of societal interactions and conflicts as generational issues. Scapegoating “the old” in debates on environmental issues may shift the focus away from and conceal other socio-political problems that need to be tackled, including social inequalities and fault lines that run throughout generations. By emphasizing instead the heterogeneity of the group of old and young, the quality of diverse relationships between people of different generations comes into focus. These relations, as Fisher and Tronto insightfully put it, are also an expression and practice of care which “includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, 40). Thinking of human relations as care-relations further helps to overcome “the aversion to ‘dependency’ in modern industrialized societies that still give prime value to individual agency” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 4). Both aging and care studies agree that the dominant and idealized paradigm of active and successful aging as the opposite of the dire social imaginary of the fourth age perpetuates neoliberal progress narratives. This is reflected in dystopian fiction, where questions of responsibility and connectedness are discussed, often limiting representations of old age to narratives of catastrophe and burden (Kriebernegg 2018, 46) and presenting an ideal image of self-sufficient, capable individuals. In the tradition of care research, interconnectedness is evident not only in human relations. Emphasizing the reciprocity of care relationships broadens the perception of social interactions, and anthropocentric conceptions can be left behind: “But it is important for us to recognize that people, animals, plants, and other natural and artificial things are enmeshed in practices of care” (Tronto 2019, 28). María Puig de la Bellacasa continues thinking along these lines, as she does not limit care-relations to human life only but rather connects them to “more than human worlds” (2017, 1). Similarly, Deborah Horsfall et al. theorize an ecology of care which includes rethinking the last phase of human life as a place where relationality is in the center (2015, 7). Another relevant context are representations of intergenerational relationships in climate fiction that bring care to the center of attention. Such texts often revolve around the question of what one can and should do in the face

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of another person’s or being’s suffering and needs. In this volume, we argue that age and aging needs to be part of this conversation in ecocriticism, and vice versa. As Garrard (2012, 10) claims with regard to ecocriticism, the focus on identities, genealogies, and phenomena as being shaped by language and culture—a valid, necessary move to deconstruct and expose stereotypes and various -isms—can lead to a disregard for “nature” as real. This runs counter to another parallel between ecocriticism and aging studies: their respective activist agendas. In the case of ecocriticism, this means “an avowedly political mode of analysis” (2012, 3) geared towards critiquing anthropocentrism and the nature/culture binary, human exploitation of nature—in other words, everything captured under the umbrella conception of the Anthropocene— and seeking to trigger change and more sustainable climate futures (or, indeed, any futures at all). Meanwhile, a pervasive trend in aging studies centers on critiquing idealized and highly normative conceptions of age as successful, active, and productive aging (see Cruikshank 2013) as a time that needs to be tackled and optimized. Concepts of aging and sustainability thus share a programmatic character; and they tend to presuppose active human beings that have agency and are capable of change in the first place. This is the reason why the contributions to this volume remain firmly centered on the human but do not perceive it to be at the center of the world. Instead, they all recognize ontological relationality in the sense that humans cannot be separated from the natural world; that they are not always just in but “with the world” (Haraway 2016; emphasis added); and that they share a living earth. These conceptions are central to material ecocriticism and approaches such as Latour’s NatureCulture and Gaia theory (Latour 2017), but also to the environmental justice movement. The chapters reflect an understanding of environment—where all processes of age and other changes inevitably take place—as places where humans and nonhumans interact, where they “live, work, and play” (Adamson, Evans, and Stein 2022, 4). These entanglements are also at the heart of a holistic One Health approach which deprioritizes the figure of the (human) patient in favor of a wider awareness of embedded ecologies and global health in an era of zoonotic pandemics and the climate crisis. In our current moment when the definition of “ecology” as ‘everything being connected to everything else’ has truly “become a truism,” as Joni Adamson and Steven Hartman aptly put it, it is therefore necessary to try and capture the “syndemic” instead: “the structural linkages that connect and reinforce [. . .] pathologies occurring simultaneously at planetary, societal, communal, familial, individual and biological levels” (2020). The notion of the syndemic, which highlights the inextricability of environmental factors, health, well-being, and justice, is also helpful in signaling the need to reframe and combine discussions of ecological, medical,

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and socio-cultural issues—discussions which are shaped by a strong sense of the future as finitude. FEARS OF ENDINGS AND DECLINE As any bringing together of multidimensional disciplines will show, there are striking convergences of vocabularies, rhetorics, and perspectives between aging studies and ecocriticism. The most noticeable ones include discursive constructions and metaphors taken from medicine and from natural disasters, which shape a predominant rhetoric of inevitable decline, crisis, and catastrophe. It typically finds expression in narratives of crisis (be it demographic or environmental) and of disasters such as avalanches, floods, and giant tidal waves such as tsunamis. To only give a few examples, aging is frequently “seen in terms of the grey waves that will flood the rich countries of the world” (Baars 2012, 159) or as a looming threat of population growth and longevity causing a “tsunami of old people” (see Woodward 2022, 204; Charise 2012, 1). Stephen Katz traces the roots of this ageist metaphor back to the nineteenth century when the older population was constituted, in “Malthusian-tinged, alarmist debates,” as a subject of knowledge and politics that emphasized the increasing “number, neediness, and poverty of elderly persons as a primary social problem” (Katz 1996, 72). He critically examines population as a lens through which older people have been demographized and calls this phenomenon “alarmist demography” (1992, 204). This alarmist discourse and its ageist metaphors often remain unchallenged across the environmental humanities and in ecocriticism, where the current perception of the climate crisis and the notion of a sick, suffering, dying, or “damaged planet” (Tsing et al. 2017) continues to be reiterated with increasing urgency and frequency; as Hannigan notes: “Employing a series of medical metaphors, our planet is depicted as facing a debilitating, perhaps terminal, illness” (1995, 72). In many literary texts, above all in contemporary climate fiction, we find a coupling of metaphors and parallels created between a declining planet and declining bodies of the flawed, aging protagonists such as Michael Beard in Ian McEwan’s Solar or Tyrone Tierwater in T.C. Boyle’s Friend of the Earth. In aging studies, the pioneer scholar to critically expose and challenge the dominant socio-cultural narrative of age as a “peak-and-decline narrative” (and its predominant associations with deterioration, loss, decay, and death) is Margaret Morganroth Gullette. For Gullette, decline is a powerful metaphor for the imaginary of aging as loss; thus, it is particularly hard to contain (2004, 11). Books such as Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (1997) and Aged by Culture (2004) have encouraged

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aging studies scholars to resist and challenge limiting, ageist, and damaging narratives of aging primarily as the process of losing agency. Instead, they emphasize that aging, first and foremost, means development and change over time without predetermined qualitative judgments. However, we might have reached a tipping point in the sense that narratives of a “crisis of capacity” (Charise 2012, 1)—or, as Kathleen Woodward terms it, the “statistical panic” created by the “sense of omnipresent risk” (2009, 14)—are beginning to change: the threat of an ever-growing population of old people which intensifies inter- and intragenerational conflict over resources has been transformed into a threat of a loss of life expectancy for humanity as a whole. This time around, this also applies to the affluent countries in the Global North. Accordingly, Woodward describes the present as a transition: “[W]e are moving from a century characterized by unprecedented gains in longevity, a kind of golden age of aging, albeit only for certain people and notwithstanding fears of decline, and we are entering an era that will [. . .] be characterized by losses in life expectancy” (2022, 205). Beyond exploring crisis narratives and chronicling their evolution, it remains a crucial task to challenge and deconstruct them, along with persistent binaries such as young/old and nature/culture and—in the process—to continue to seek an elusive, precarious balance between fostering hope for the future and accepting loss, decline, and extinction, perhaps leading to a reconciliation with finitude. The engagement with this narrative struggle and the search for alternative stories/narrative patterns shapes research on climate fiction, climate communication, and affective ecocriticism (Balestrini 2019; Weik von Mossner 2017; Zapf 2016). But, in fact, the question “Where’s the hope?” (Bilodeau 2018), posed by dramatist Chantal Bilodeau, one of the co-founders of the global Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) project, applies equally to both fields. Ecocriticism and aging studies grapple with the rejection of linear progress narratives, dystopian and utopian scenarios, with perceptions of the future as an inevitable decline towards death and extinction (relating to the declining body and the planet), and with trying to assert hope and agency through a sense of intergenerational solidarity. Still, as many narratives analyzed in this volume demonstrate, the concern with climate change and environmental issues can also lead to imaginaries which engage, however critically, with an intensification of ageist discrimination and reinforce the binary split between us and them. As Kainradl and Kriebernegg point out, the dominant narrative of old age/old people as a burden is tied to ageist constructions of the life course and thus to finite resources; therefore, it assumes new urgency in times of climate change (see 2020, 170), although the debate as such is far from new (see Tait and Hoydis in this volume). What remains is trying to reveal and understand vulnerabilities, to

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seek a shared solidarity through experiences of loss, decline, and endings— whether they are caused by aging or by environmental degradation. OUTLOOK TO CONTRIBUTIONS The contributions in this volume address intergenerational and ecological concerns in light of multiple theoretical perspectives and through case studies. Seeking to address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality that shape ecocriticism and aging studies, the book is divided into two thematic sections: While temporality plays a role in all chapters, Part I, “Aging Bodies and Environments,” explores the interrelations between gendered bodies, the non-human environment, and specific spatial settings. The contributions approach these issues through different critical lenses, beginning with Silvia Gerlsbeck’s chapter located at the intersection of postcolonial theory, aging studies, and ecocriticism. It enquires into the representation of processes of aging and environmental change in novels by Indian writer V.S. Naipaul. Focusing on The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994), Gerlsbeck proposes that Naipaul’s late novels evince an increasing awareness of the effects of man-made environmental change and express the theme of visible change and flux in the landscape as connected to issues of aging and the progress of time. Christian Lenz explores the depiction of the Amazonian rainforest, that is, one of the world’s environments currently most threatened by human exploitation and destruction, discussing the notion of legacy as “the footprint” one leaves behind in two contemporary novels: State of Wonder (2012) and Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée (2020). While the legacy, a central concept in aging studies, is usually meant to benefit future generations, it can also be motivated by selfishness and a desire to be remembered, regardless of the repercussions for other people—here the Indigenous population—and the environment, as Lenz’s reading shows. Both texts present older characters who, in the process of trying to inscribe themselves into the environment, disregard the rainforest as an ecosystem and habitat. Jade E. French draws on animal studies, aging studies, and modernist studies to suggest that cultural fears of aging are interconnected with fears of unseen non-human life. As the analysis of selected examples from Jean Rhys’s late short story collections Tigers Are Better-Looking (1962) and Sleep It Off, Lady (1976) demonstrates, metaphorical references to animals considered vermin and fears of unseen, abject creatures both function to reinforce negative binaries between human and non-human beings, younger adults and older adults—thus echoing ageist as well as anthropocentric tropes.

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The experience and social perceptions of aging and the interplay between (older) human bodies and the non-human world are also central to Núria Mina-Riera’s analysis of works by Canadian poet Lorna Crozier. Borrowing from conceptions of embodiment in aging studies and material ecocriticism, as well as Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Mina-Riera discusses how the personae in Crozier’s poetry collections What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017), God of Shadows (2018), and The House the Spirit Builds (2019) contemplate and interact with non-human nature, and how the depiction of climatic elements exposes a pervasive ageism towards older women in Western societies. In the next chapter, Simon Dickel draws on queer studies to criticize ecocriticism’s tacit complicity with heteronormativity and reproductive futurism in his reading of Colin Higgins’s novel and Hal Ashby’s film Harold and Maude (1971) as a narrative of queer aging. He argues that the movie entails a critique of chrononormativity, an understanding of temporality rooted in heteronormativity. Harold and Maude’s queer positionality offers a view on nature, the built environment, and art that values sensual experiences in the present—an approach which Dickel describes as ecological aesthetics. Tina-Karen Pusse and Michaela Schrage-Früh’s contribution deals with the popular dystopian German Netflix Series Dark (2017–2020), in which characters in the fictitious town of Winden travel back and forth in time, seeking to change, prevent, or ensure past or future events leading to a nuclear apocalypse. The authors explore intersections of age and environmental responsibility, zooming in on the series’ juxtaposition of younger and older characters, the representation of intergenerational conflict, and the ways in which the disruption of linear time and the creation of multigenerational selves affects individual characters throughout their life-course as well as the community. Dark, as their reading shows, has a distinctly ecological dimension, which includes its exposure of anthropocentrism, the mythical setting of cave and forest as liminal spaces, and finally the “dark ecology” (Morton) of the nuclear power plant and time travel itself. Part II, “Growing Old Amid Environmental Crises,” is specifically concerned with the long crises of climate change and conceptions of apocalypse and the Anthropocene. It opens with Adrian Tait’s approach which combines the study of aging with material ecocriticism, and brings this to bear on two speculative late-Victorian novels in which questions of age and aging are entangled with society’s response to the problem of sustainability. In Walter Besant’s dystopian fiction, The Inner House (1888), and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), as Tait’s reading underlines, the lived particularity of actual experience—experience that necessarily extends to older age and ultimately death itself—lies at the root of any attempt to create a sustainable civilization.

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Stephen Hahn’s contribution engages with cultural scripts by which aging and dying persons enact end-of-life scenarios in typical patterns signifying social and personal value. Current research in aging studies and medical humanities on these scripts suggests a transition from traditional religious schemata to more secular ones that emphasize late-life psychological growth and integration, espoused by key clinicians or memoirists of the latter twentieth century. Hahn argues that literary sources from early modern examples in the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) to late-modern examples in contemporary poetry (c. 2000) add to the repertoire of such scripts and map them effectively to complex issues of aging and dying in the twenty-first century. Taking its cue from the rise in British plays about climate change that coincides with a boom of plays about aging, Julia Hoydis explores links between aging studies and ecocriticism in contemporary drama, focusing on examples that tackle climate change, care, and dementia in aesthetically different ways: Tamsin Oglesby’s Really Old, Like Forty, RedCape Theatre’s 1 Beach Road, Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, and John Godber’s Crown Prince. Her chapter argues that intergenerational justice emerges as a key theme in texts that engage with discourses of environmental and demographic crises, as well as with narratives of decline and loss. Hoydis concludes by turning to MaryAnn Karanja’s short play “Birthday Suit” as an example that underlines the concern with intergenerational justice but shifts the dominant declensionist narrative to solidarity beyond the nuclear family. Julia Henderson and Katrina Dunn continue the analysis of contemporary ecotheatre, focusing on three works by female playwrights, Jordan Hall’s Kayak, Yvette Nolan’s The Unplugging, and Churchill’s Escaped Alone. All are set during or following apocalyptic catastrophes and feature old(er) women as central characters. Analyzing the plays, this chapter weaves in threads of theory and critique from aging studies, feminist theatre and performance studies, and ecocriticism, to argue that this new trope of old(er) women in the apocalypse has particular power because it uses estraged, double-aged, difficult old(er) women to challenge destructive social orders in desperate need of change. The playwrights, as Henderson and Dunn show, harness the shock and warning value of apocalypse while continuing to explore the connections between oppression, productive change, and dramatic form—helping us see, with greater compassion and insight, the interrelated materiality of the human and nonhuman worlds. While the previous chapters stem from scholars in literary, cultural, and theater studies, Albert Banerjee explores the existential lessons of climate change and the aging population from the perspective of gerontology. He suggests that the climate crisis and the challenges of caring for an aging population offer rich opportunities to tell different stories about who we are and

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what matters. Climate change, he argues, reminds those who have forgotten that humans have always been part of nature and must live within its limits. Rather than promoting a vision of autonomous individuals that master aging, gerontologists have a role to play in enabling people to live with limitations, such as mortality, finitude, and vulnerability. By grappling more honestly with these limitations, gerontologists may contribute to the cultivation of sustainable ways of living in the world, that is, as mortal beings who are part of nature. Peter J. Whitehouse, finally, provides an apt afterword to this volume, contextualizing human endeavors throughout life within an expansive framework that seeks to transcend the strictures of modernity (and its intimate connection to settler-colonialism) and to reconceptualize the ways humans perceive themselves as part of a worldwide ecosystem in the Anthropocene. Demonstrating how he can understand his own selfhood and experience, Whitehouse contemplates aging parallel to lifelong processes of learning. He suggests that the theoretical concept of the “field” encourages the perception of interrelations among areas of human endeavor that otherwise may go unrecognized. When we perceive interconnected crises, be they social or ecological, we may achieve a “cosmic return” that incorporates knowledge derived both from the newest insights in physics and from ancient Indigenous thought. Such an enhanced and complex understanding of the human spirit may lead to striving towards more justice and a better life in the future. Jointly, the chapters in the book demonstrate the potential of specific genres to narrate relationality and age, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges of imagining changes, endings, and survival in the Anthropocene. As the first step towards putting both fields in conversation, this collection aims to offer new pathways into understanding human and nonhuman ecological relations. Our volume asks what “growing old at the end of the world” (to rephrase an article title by Sarah Jaquette Ray (2018)) actually means and what insights imaginative worlds in different genres provide regarding the relation between aging and climate change. Woodward’s call for research avenues in this field—including new materialist approaches, the study of aging, longevity, death, sustainability, legacy, questions of justice, of different timescales and cultures (see 2022, 200)—is heeded here. This volume nevertheless remains far from being comprehensive. Instead, it initiates a conversation that will hopefully inspire further interdisciplinary encounters in the future. NOTE 1. On further examples of Indigenous thinking that predates what contemporary humanities scholars claim as new ideas, see Bignall and Rigney (2019).

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REFERENCES Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. 2022. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Adamson, Joni, and Steven Hartman. 2020. “From Ecology to Syndemic: Accounting for the Synergy of Epidemics.” Bifrost Online (June 8). https:​//​bifrostonline​.org​/ joni​-adamson​-and​-steven​-hartman​/. Alaimo, Stacy. 2012. “Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures.” PMLA 127, no. 3 (May): 558–564. Ayalon, Liat, Norah Keating, Karl Pillemer, and Kiran Rabheru. 2021. “Climate Change and Mental Health of Older Persons: A Human Rights Imperative.” The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 29: 1038–1040. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​ /j​.jagp​.2021​.06​.015. Baars, Jan. 2012. “Critical Turns of Aging, Narrative and Time.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 7, no. 7: 143–165. Balestrini, Nassim W. 2019. “Transnational and Postcolonial Perspectives on Communicating Climate Change through Theater.” In Addressing the Challenges in Communicating Climate Change Across Various Audiences, edited by Walter Filho, Bettina Lackner, and Henry McGhie, 247–261. Chur: Springer. Barry, Peter, and William Welstead, eds. 2017. Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bignall, Simone, and Daryle Rigney. 2019. “Indigeneity, Posthumanism and Nomad Thought: Transforming Colonial Ecologies.” In Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, 159–181. New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield. Bilodeau, Chantal. 2018. “Introduction.” In Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays, edited by Chantal Bilodeau, xv–xvi. Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel. Boyle, Tom Coraghessan. 2000. A Friend of the Earth. New York: Penguin. Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2007. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale.” In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 227–248. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Charise, Andrea. 2012. “‘Let the Reader Think of the Burden’: Old Age and the Crisis of Capacity.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4 (May 31): 1–16. https:​//​arcade​.stanford​.edu​/sites​/default​/files​/article​_pdfs​/OCCASION​_v04​ _Charise​_053112​_0​.pdf Clark, Timothy. 2019. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Cruikshank, Margaret. 2013. Learning to Be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press. Drabble, Margaret. 2017. The Dark Flood Rises. Edinburgh: Canongate. Elias, Amy J. 2012. “The Dialogical Avant-Garde: Relational Aesthetics and Time Ecologies in Only Revolutions and TOC.” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (Winter): 738–778. Falcus, Sarah. 2020. “Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction.” In Literature and Ageing, edited by Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen, 65–86. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer. Falcus, Sarah, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina, eds. Forthcoming. Handbook to Ageing in Literature and Film. London: Bloomsbury. Filiberto, David, Elaine Wethington, Karl Pillemer, Nancy Wells, Mark Wysocki, and Jennifer True Parise. 2009. “Older People and Climate Change: Vulnerability and Health Effects.” Generations 33, no. 4: 19–25. Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. “Towards a Feminist Theory of Care.” In Circuits of Care: Work and Identity in Womens’ Lives, edited by Emily Abel and Margaret K. Nelson. Albany: State University of New York. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. ———. 2023. Ecocriticism. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Goldman, Marlene, Kate de Medeiros, and Thomas Cole, eds. 2022. Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues. Milton: Taylor & Francis. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 1997. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2004. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hannigan, John. 1995. Environmental Sociology. London and New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hoh, Jasmon W.T., Siyao Lu, Yin Yin, Qiushi Feng, Matthew E. Dupre, and Danan Gu. 2021. “Environmental Gerontology.” In Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, edited by Danan Gu and Matthew E. Dupre. Cham: Springer. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-3​-319​-69892​-2​_1126–1. Horsfall, Deborah, Ainsley Yardley, Rosemary Leonard, Kerrie Noonan, and John P. Rosenberg. 2015. End of Life at Home: Co-Creating an Ecology of Care. Research Report. Penrith: Western Sydney University. https:​//​apo​.org​.au​/node​/143226. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin, eds. 2010. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge. Kainradl, Anna-Christina, and Ulla Kriebernegg. 2020. “‘They Say We Messed It Up. Killing the Planet with Our Own Greed.’ Alternswissenschaftliche Überlegungen zu einem generationengerechten Klimadiskurs in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching

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Tomlinson, Gary. 2017. “Two Deep-Historical Models of Climate Crisis.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (January): 19–31. Tronto, Joan C. 2019. “Caring Architecture.” In Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for A Broken Planet, edited by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny, 26–32. Boston: MIT Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Vakoch, Douglas A., ed. 2012. Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature. Lanham: Lexington. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. 2017. Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Weik von Mossner, Alexa, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Wojciech Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder. 2023. Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Whyte, Kyle. 2017. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55, nos. 1–2 (Spring/ Fall): 153–162. Woodward, Kathleen. 1991. Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Bloomington: Indiana UP. ———. 2009. Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of the Emotions. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2020. “Aging in the Anthropocene: The View From and Beyond Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises.” In Literature and Ageing, edited by Elizabeth Barry with Margery Vibe Skagen, 37–63. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer. ———. 2022. “Aging in the Anthropocene. Generational Time, Declining Longevity, Posthuman Aging.” In Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues, edited by Marlene Goldman, Kate de Medeiros, and Thomas Cole, 199–207. Milton: Taylor & Francis. Zapf, Hubert. 2016. “Cultural Ecology as Literature—Literature as Cultural Ecology.” In Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, 135– 153. Berlin: De Gruyter.

PART I

Aging Bodies and Environments

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Chapter One

“A World in Flux” Temporality, Aging, and Environmental Change in V.S. Naipaul’s Late Work Silvia Gerlsbeck

In a 2016 article, Indian author Omair Ahmad comments on the omission of environmental change in contemporary literature and attributes this to authors’ complicity in first-world environmental exploitation and ignorance: “By catering to an urban, prosperous and global community, [. . .] [t]he literary community is not innocently unaware, but actively complicit in a process that allows us to ignore the damage that climate change is doing to the lives of the poor” (2016, n.p.). Ahmad specifies this general complicity of the global literary market by mentioning Trinidad-and-Tobago-born British writer V.S. Naipaul, whose dissociation from the poor and the rural, he states, lead to a profound inability to comprehend the environments he describes (2016, n.p.). Ahmad’s attitude towards Naipaul’s work is by no means an exception: Chris Searle’s famous reproach “Naipaulicity: A Form of Cultural Imperialism” (1984) accuses the author of denying formerly colonized countries to “think big, organise big or use big words” (51; italics in original). Searle argues that when reading works like Guerrillas (1975) or A Bend in the River (1979), “you will discover that for Naipaul’s conception of Africa and the Caribbean, progress, freedom and futility all swim together” (51). It is precisely the notion of progress that lies at the heart of Naipaul’s negotiation of environmental concerns. I propose that reading environmental experiences in his late work through representations of age suggests another interpretation altogether, where progress and futility, as a necessary—and destructive—correlation emerging from capitalist imperatives, is foregrounded in terms of 23

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the effect it has on human and non-human actors, on bodies, memory, and understandings of temporality. This suggests another major theme in Naipaul’s oeuvre, which has, however, received almost no scrutiny to date: the processes and meanings of growing old(er), particularly as it relates to memory and temporality, and its importance for narrative structure. Preoccupations with age, remembering, and thereby constructing a narrative (identity) proliferate in Naipaul’s—the “Grumpy Old Man[’s]” (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 128)—work, and a closer look at his novels reveals the obsession with this form of change, in terms of portraying aging, illness, and decay, as in Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion (1963) or The Enigma of Arrival (1987). On the level of narrative, this often finds expression in a constant revisiting of former experiences and earlier episodes narrated through the point of view of an older, ostensibly more mature narrative instance, suggesting aging comes with a privileged insight. Next to Enigma, this is also a central mode in Finding the Centre (1984) and A Way in the World (1994). His writing provides an interesting case study, as both topics—ecological change as well as growing old and its ramifications—are less openly commented on and rather more subtly inferred. Yet it is precisely the vagueness with which these topics are approached that sheds light on the anxiety that surrounds them, a peculiarity my paper will explore by drawing on two of Naipaul’s late novels that negotiate both the realization of environmental change since the 1980 and also the dominant attitude of denial towards it, making them perfect exemplars of the zeitgeist: The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. These novels, this chapter argues, demonstrate an increasing awareness of anthropocentric environmental change and its effects on humans and nature and, further, of the Global North’s responsibility for change that particularly affects the Global South—or in DeLoughrey et al.’s words, how portrayals of “the natural world [. . .] [evidence] the relationship between landscape and power” (2005, 4). In this sense, Naipaul’s texts also negotiate myths of Englishness as they are tied to the land(scape) and its ecology, particularly against the backdrop of Thatcherism. There are some curious, as of yet unexplored overlappings between these concerns with aging in Naipaul’s middle-to-late period, that is, after a discernible shift in his writing has taken place (King 2003, 136). In this stage, like the writer having entered his middle age, middle-aged characters recalling the past and revisiting memories also populate Naipaul’s texts. Issues of aging and the progress of time, I propose, are connected to the theme of visible change and flux in the landscape and environment, and anxieties about change are often expressed through the aging body, struggles with remembering, or the imaginary flight into childhood. Change, in concomitance with its deferral or disavowal in the texts, is figured as unspeakable, and where language fails, the aging body serves as a stand-in for the

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representation of crisis. Secondly, I contend that change, as it pertains to the body and the environment, is emblematic of the creation of the text itself; as connected to the concern of establishing a narrative identity, it also resonates with questions of writerly responsibility in the face of ecological change. Naipaul’s work, if read through the lens of ecocriticism and its mediation through age, offers a poignant comment on global environmental changes through its episodic interweaving of different times and locales. The temporalities that structure the works and reflections on the passing of time negotiate epistemologies of a linear connection of past, present, future, and their implication in Western enlightenment ideology. POINTS OF DEPARTURE: CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AND NARRATIVES OF AGING In Caribbean literature, environmental concerns, although always implicitly present, have only recently attracted more attention. While ecocriticism has emerged as a major critical paradigm in the last two decades, with Glotfelty and Fromm’s essay collection The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) as quasi-inaugurating anthology, ecocritical perspectives on postcolonial, particularly Caribbean literature, are much younger, even marked by a form of belatedness (DeLoughrey 2011, 265). Since the mid-2000s, works such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley’s volume Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (2005), Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s monograph Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2010), or Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), have put environmental concerns center stage. Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett’s introduction to their collection The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics (2016) makes an outstanding claim for the Caribbean’s centrality to the development of a capitalist world order and the ramifications for ecological systems, and the particular aptness of Caribbean literature for ecocritical readings. They quote David Watts on the region’s most severe traumas in the last centuries, where, next to the removal of aboriginal people and the enslavement of Africans on plantations, a “third trauma” of “environmental degeneration” in the region in form of “resource extraction and anthropogenic climate change (including rising sea levels and extreme weather events)” must be emphasized (Campbell and Niblett 2016, 1). Factors include agricultural procedures like large-scale deforestation to gain space for plantations, natural disasters like hurricanes, coastal erosions, flooding, or land subsidence (Singh 1997). Watts’s study dates from 1987, around the time of Naipaul’s late work, and both speak to the contemporaneity of the increasingly visible ramifications of an integrated “capitalist

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world-ecology” (Campbell and Niblett 2016, 3), that is, the capitalist world system’s shaping of “human and extra-human natures on a global scale” (4), in which the depletion of Caribbean environments must be understood within a continuum of colonial-capitalist exploitation, and their encoding in literature.1 Amitav Ghosh’s recent work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) even traces these effects back to the beginnings of British imperialism. He highlights the connection between changes to terrestrial landscapes and the planetary atmosphere, a connection still largely unthinkable in the 1980s, which goes back as far as the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a period of cooling, the Little Ice Age occurring precisely at the time of Europe’s onslaught to North America (2021, 52–53). In the wake of this event and the subsequent large-scale perishing of Amerindians, the reverting of farmland to forest is believed to have caused a “reverse-greenhouse effect” (52). Yet, as Richard Grove (1995) or Campbell and Niblett (2016) foreground, while concerns over processes such as deforestation permanently influencing not only landscape, but also climate, date back centuries, measures against it have mostly conceded to socio-economic concerns and capitalist profit seeking. More so, as the latter argue, “the impotence of conservationist measures” hinges on the fact that “a particular mode of production organizes, and is itself constituted through, a specific configuration of relations between humans and the rest of nature” (2). Nature is always already formed and structured by relations of power, which ecocritical perspectives have served to make legible through the deconstruction of its privileged position as an essential, unquestioned category. While intersections between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism are by now well-established, gerontological perspectives on Caribbean literature are sparse and in their intersection with ecocritical perspectives even rarer. This lacuna is surprising, as the epistemological foundations of postcolonial theory and of aging studies to some extent overlap: scholars in the prolific field of cultural gerontology have, like the former race and ethnicity, emphasized age as identity marker and the category, because of its fluid boundaries, as especially apt for deconstructive approaches (Kriebernegg and Maierhofer 2013, 10). The underexplored link between postcolonial and aging studies might lie in the unease to emphasize yet again the corporeal, which a gerontological perspective necessarily entails, for fearing a “retrogressive step [. . .] that takes us back into the territory of biological determinism and the narrative of decline” (Twigg 2004, 60). Yet there are contentual as well as formal overlappings, and it is precisely at the level of the body where this is most manifest as age “is—if nothing else—an embodied experience” (Barry 2015, 136). For one, environmental change directly impacts upon bodily health or the way we age. This resonates with insights from feminist gerontology, where scholars like Julia Twigg have also emphasized the “limits of social constructionism,”

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as aging “forces the reality of the body on to the analytic stage” (2004, 63). Conceptually, as Terry Gifford’s Green Voices suggests, both categories are geared around the poles of “growth” and “decay” (1995, 15), suggesting there might be a similar set of tropes that applies to both fields, that is, that of birth, maturing, productivity, decaying, or dying. Rhetorically, both aging and environmental change are often expressed as forms of untimeliness, as losing hold on a promise of futurity and the feeling of being too late, resulting in textual modes of vagueness, evasion, or denial. In terms of critical theory, both the subject matter of ecocriticism and the body, as a factor in aging, “belong to the order of nature; what we understand of that nature, however [. . .] belongs roughly speaking to the order of history” (Said 2007, 1; italics in original)—in other words, both age and the environment are to be recognized in their material dimension, yet they are still always subject to discourse. Insights from new materialism shed a light on embodiment and forms of aging in focusing on the interaction of bodies—young, old, healthy, ill—with their environment and in pointing out “the importance of bodies in situating empirical actors within a material environment of nature, other bodies, and the socioeconomic structures that dictate where and how they find sustenance” (Coole and Frost 2010, 19). As such, while not everything that “interferes with living systems is ‘alive’ in the biological sense,” agency still “assumes many forms,” and the meanings produced by non-human material entities “influence in various ways the existence of both human and non-human natures” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 3). The insight that agency is inherent to matter and, consequently, that aspects such as species extinction or climate change are to be understood as a “conversation between human and manifold nonhuman beings” (4) is highly relevant for conceiving of aging—the human dimension—as intertwined with the non-human (but, at least partly, humanly caused) factors of environmental change. Iovino and Oppermann’s focus on conversation also implies the importance narrative texts have in constructing, mediating, and understanding these interactions. Postcolonial theory here provides an additional important deconstructive link that furthers enquiries into the power dynamics—social, political, economic—to which these materialities are subject. Moreover, it can help to attest to the relations of center and periphery, self and other, hegemony and subjection within a person and thus transcend a mere chronological view of the life course (Kunow 2016). In their intersection, postcolonial, aging, and environmental studies are suited to provide tools for ideological critique, to analyze various power hierarchies, and to attest to the critical tension between discourse and materiality. In terms of narrating change, genre is of crucial importance. Heike Hartung has shown how aging is made manifest in narrative structures and how a changed concept of human development and life as “an abstract and dynamic

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principle” emerges with and is reflected in generic structures, and its manifestation in polar opposites young and old finds its ideal representation in it (2016, 1–3). Naipaul’s late work mediates environmental observations and processes of aging through various mock forms of life writing. The Enigma of Arrival, for example, is termed a novel but interspersed with events and experiences pertaining to the author Naipaul. Both this novel and A Way in the World interweave “fact and fiction, history and autobiography in an attempt to explore the genesis of the ‘writing self’” (Feder 2001, 20). In foregrounding the retrospective glance at a life and the recollection of memories, the autobiographical mode attests to changes—individual, social, environmental—in their various forms and their assessment from the present of the first-person narrator. Further, as it is often tied to crisis, aging must also be read in conjunction with the “end of the liberal narrative of the autonomous subject” and the questioning of ideologies of progress (Hartung 2016, 3), which, as a Western enlightenment discourse, particularly resonates with postcolonial concerns. As age is related to a progressivist notion of time, and in narrative particularly to the adherence to a story that has a clear beginning and ending, which are linearly connected (3–4), the disruption of this linearity can also be read as undermining Eurocentric values. Hartung shows how an accelerated aging process and bodily disintegration, as anachronistic elements in a story, potentially serve as a criticism of this progressive notion (7–8). This resonates with ecocritical concerns, as depictions of aging and the environment intersect in criticism on ideals of progress that lie at the heart of a capitalist world ecology. Recent work in the field of ecocriticism has also started to enquire into how ecological crisis inflects narrative form and offers similar insights. Ursula Kluwick, for instance, states that narrative forms in which climate change is rendered often tend to be marked by vagueness—regarding its audience or reactions to it, which stands in contrast to the predominance of narrative forms that are based on progress or advancement (2014, 504–505). It is then in negotiations of linearity, progress, and concomitant processes of denial, deferral, and digression and their narrative manifestations where an enquiry into the intersection of environmental change and aging proves most productive. CHANGING LANDSCAPES AND AGING BODIES IN THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL (1987) Naipaul’s eleventh novel is commonly seen as a watershed novel in his work as regards his relationship to both England and Trinidad and has been received more ambivalently than its predecessors. While Naipaul’s earlier work was often heavily criticized for its portrayal of the Caribbean and

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Africa, The Enigma of Arrival is perceived by many to cast a more reconciliatory view on especially Trinidad (cf. Tiffin 2005, 211). The depiction of the English landscape has also yielded quite different interpretations: while some intertwine the aspect of ruin so central to the novel with the ruins of Empire, others see this precisely as Naipaul’s nostalgic attempt to memorialize an almost bygone England and a celebration of “the empire in the moment of its closure: the moment of his arrival” (Baucom 1999, 182). As such, the novel’s reception is exemplary for the critical unease regarding the ambivalence and political evasiveness of Naipaul’s works, where the author’s “‘metacolonial’ tentativeness” and “modern understanding of truth as processual trust in evidence shared with others” raises suspicion in postcolonial criticism (Barnouw 2003, 1). In the novel, readers follow an unnamed Indo-Trinidadian writer who has retreated to rural Wiltshire, his earlier travels to various locations, interwoven retrospectively by the first-person narrator, as well as his journey to his sister’s funeral in Trinidad at the novel’s end. The English countryside and mediations on its dereliction are at the heart of the novel, with three of the five chapters entirely set in Wiltshire. By now, the landscape as palimpsest and even resonances with ecocritical concerns have been identified as dominant themes in Enigma, particularly with regard to the mode of the pastoral and the deconstruction of this domesticating mode (Casteel 2007, 11).2 With the pastoral resting on anthropocentric assumptions (Love 2003, 66), in Thatcher’s England it is, next to the economic benefits of the rural heritage industry, connected to a conservative and exclusionary idealization of the countryside, which functions as a “battleground” for identity politics. As Lucienne Loh has shown, the countryside is ideologically positioned as a space of reprieve from the upheavals in the urban spaces, such as the Brixton or Handsworth riots in 1981 and 1985, respectively (2010, 96), which, in Enigma, leaves the narrator as racial and ethnic Other uneasily located within the idealized temporal and spatial order. As the landscape is subject to constant revisions, thereby turning it into a canvas of various historical inscriptions and of memories of England and Trinidad, and mediated through a middle-aged narrator, the passing of time is likewise a central aspect of the novel. In this vein, old, in the novel, is often tied to antiquity and stability and contrasted with young, or new, in which the old seems more desirable and change “dreaded” (Naipaul 1987, 53) by the narrator and is consequently oftentimes denied or displaced. In Enigma, the theme of change and flux is central, and environmental change often goes hand in hand with physical exhaustion. For one, the complex representations of the (anti-)pastoral and concomitant notions of the body in crisis are expressed through the narrator’s reflections on age and his deteriorating

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health “through many climates” (211). Moreover, the focus on time and the complication of its linear passing negotiate the meaning of environmental change and connected socioeconomic transformations, which is particularly tied to agricultural modernization processes. Change is figured as posing a limit to understanding and language, whereupon the narrator resorts to literature to impose meaning—in this way, the people in the Wiltshire village, for instance, become “emanations” of “literature and antiquity and the landscape” (25). From the outset, the middle-aged narrator-cum-writer’s perspective frames the novel, and his perception itself is filtered through the lens of middle age. In the first chapter “Jack’s Garden,” set in rural Wiltshire, he is around 40 to 50, the second chapter then narrates the experiences of the younger self and subsequent chapters cyclically revisit episodes from the first chapter. While the older narrator only feigns to have arrived at a deeper understanding, the novel performs shifting views on earlier episodes and memories and is constantly engaged with rewriting itself, thus pre-empting progressivist notions of time. Unlike in A Way in the World and most of Naipaul’s work, the gaze here is, for large parts, turned inwards, at the English countryside. From this perspective, anxieties regarding environmental changes in the Global North come into focus while still remaining connected to processes of colonial exploitation, particularly in form of the “Great House (‘the Manor’) and planter-overseer (the Landlord)” (Tiffin 2005, 207), and, additionally, the frequently interspersed brief references to imperial history. The staged anxieties regarding the narrator’s perception resonate with a dominant attitude to matters of environmental change in the late 1980s. In 1988, Lydia Dotto makes out “denial” as dominant reaction towards then growingly visible large-scale environmental problems, coupled with feelings of powerlessness and psychic paralysis (55–56). Although the narrator sees change all around—for example, in the increasing mechanization of the milk industry and the concurrent malformation of cattle (Naipaul 1987, 16), which ultimately vanishes altogether (81)—he withholds specification and the naming of its reasons. As understanding fails, he resorts to his “literary eye” (22) or the mode of the pastoral, which palimpsestically inscribe landscape with clichés and mitigate the anxiety of the unspeakable by displacing it onto the realm of literature, thereby securing his subject status. The narrator’s flight into a literary imaginary promises ontological security and a means to speak, yet simultaneously veils change induced by global processes, for instance in the depiction of a sheepshearing as out of a Hardy novel that contrasts the stark reality of “the roaring highways [. . .] around us” (18). The narrative mode of repeating vignettes or phrases and the often page-long descriptions of a seeming rural idyll create an impression of stasis, despite the narrator’s outspoken emphasis on change. The resulting impression of conservation and arresting an image, also emphasized in the narrator’s admittance that “I

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saw the hand of man, but didn’t sufficiently take it in, preferring to see what I wanted” (27), performs and exposes a denial of change and man’s role in it. This resonates with the idealization of “rural heritage as a tangible record of past greatness inherently coded through white and imperial ideologies” within Thatcherite economics and ideology (Loh 2010, 70). The reasons for change are often interspersed en passant, for instance in the brief reference to the “modernity of the new [farm] management” (Naipaul 1987, 42) and to the increasing industrialization of the agricultural Wiltshire. More telling are the images of large-scale farming altering the landscape and the concomitant taking down of Jack’s garden and his greenhouse (56–58), making the cottages look like they stand “in a kind of waste ground” (58), which reveals Thatcherite attempts at conservation within a context of economic growth as mere ideological deflector. This is most visible in the chapter “Rooks,” where the eponymous birds haunt the landscape looking for trees because all the “elms had finally died in the valley” (269). Interpreted as bringing either “death or money” (281), they speak to the options within capitalist modernity. Yet as the novel progresses, these hints at the cause and magnitude of change interspersed in the first chapter become fewer, whereas the focus shifts to the people affected—aging, getting sick, dying. Change, in this way, is displaced, and the narrator’s misremembering of landscape parallels the misrecognition of its inhabitants, like Jack: “I had thought of him as a young man. But I saw now that his beard was almost grey; he was in his late forties, perhaps” (32). Yet the increasing focus on age towards the end of “Jack’s Garden” evidences an encroaching awareness of humans being affected by their environment. Age is ambivalently figured in Enigma in this context and arguably serves to make visible the changes otherwise veiled through the pastoral mode, the literary images, or the narrator’s vagueness. Despite the idealization of antiquity and old age, there is an awareness that the change in landscape is intricately connected with and mirrored in the inhabitants: “Everyone was ageing; everything was being renewed or discarded” (32). With the approaching realization of change comes sudden aging and illness, similar to what Barry has stated for narratives of aging, which often mediate the aging body as “experienced in sudden, shocking encounters, making us other to ourselves” (2015, 135), implying it as the “end of the signifier” (136). The figure of Jack is emblematic here: the revelation of Jack’s illness (Naipaul 1987, 43) and his untimely death are surprising, they are inferred as a by-product of modernization, as they concur with the emphasis on the change brought by new inhabitants, farmworkers carrying “the grimness of industrial workers,” turning the shed into “a little factory” (54), employing a “wrong” scale of farming (56) so as to ultimately strip “the earth [. . .] finally of its sanctity” (58). The narrator, shortly after, also falls ill while walking past Jack’s now changed cottage (82) and is pushed “week by

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week, [. . .] month by month, into middle-age” (83).3 A similarly mysterious illness befalls the landlord of the estate who hides in the manor (173–174) and whose arrestedness in the “untouched, untroubled world” (254), reminiscent of a more grandiose period of Empire, turns to morbidity. The inevitability of change manifests and is made readable through these bodies, whose pathology is paired with the onset of middle-age and, in the narrator’s case, a “dislocation” of memory (283). The aforementioned haunting of the rooks and images of desolation causes a shift in the perception of time and memory: “Then memories began to be jumbled; time began to race; the years began to stack together; it began to be hard for me to date things” (269). The change in temporality, which is mirrored in the overall structure of the novel in repetitions and retellings of episodes, and the othering of middle-age challenges a “positivist structure of progress” (Barry 2015, 140)—of age, development, time, or narrative. The valley and its inhabitants represent a microcosm of larger global developments; indeed, they are corporeally infiltrated by these, and they even suggest another consequence: where the young workers moving to the valley have children, Jack, the landlord, or the narrator himself, consistently figured as protecting the valley, are all childless, which suggests a succumbing of the old order to modernization processes and anthropocentric environmental change. These observations resonate with the novel’s genre as well. As a Künstlerroman, it uses the body as a self-referential mode to refer to the text itself, where the aging body can function as a disrupting element, as an intrusion upon the text, threatening its fictionality (Rivera Godoy-Benesch 2020, 80–81), and disturb its evenness and any semblance of a coherent ideology. This can be related to the changing environment, as both intrude upon a Western ideology of progress that Naipaul is otherwise said to mimic so faithfully. The renunciation of linear temporality and a strict chronology, particularly in the narrator’s attempts to remember and see again, are counter to the topic and structure of Bildung as teleological that is central to the novel. This has ramifications for a politics of representation in the context of climate change, too. By slowly disclosing the ramifications of man-made change through a continuous revisionary process, without privileging any version, it suggests that it is the writer’s task to perform an infinite rehearsal of his material rather than resort to didacticism to affect readers. This is powerfully suggested by the novel’s ending, a rendering of the narrator’s sister’s death in Trinidad and her memorial. Here, the sublimated and displaced change in his surroundings in Wiltshire is connected to transformation in Trinidad, which is rendered more bluntly, hinting at the disproportional impact and the even greater untimeliness of ecological change for the South through global capitalism. There, money coming from the fracking of oil and gas has “ravaged” the landscape, so much so that it can now only be described with negators

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(Naipaul 1987, 316–317), making it an unrepresentable abject. The refuge in the pastoral, in images of antiquity the novel has until then performed, is revealed as ultimately futile. In an uncanny pairing with the chapter’s central death, progress is rendered sinister: “We had made ourselves anew. [. . .] we couldn’t go back. There was no ship of antique shape now to take us back. We had come out of the nightmare; and there was nowhere else to go” (317). DEFERRING CHANGE IN A WAY IN THE WORLD (1994) In A Way in the World, the preoccupation with the modalities of time (passing), growth, and growing old in a changing environment is even more foregrounded and already encapsulated by the novel’s subtitle A Sequence: while readers would typically expect a linear narration of events, Naipaul seemingly employs this denominator only to frustrate such expectations by jumbling up chronology. In the text, similar events recur in nine episodes in altered form, shifting back and forth in time and held together by the motif of “lost landscapes” (Chew 2008, 107).4 In another generic mixture—of autobiography, travelogue, and history narrative—and spanning geographical and cultural places such as Venezuela, Trinidad, East Africa, and England, the novel combines the narrator’s personal history with fictionalized historical sketches of Trinidad, thus emphasizing the history of change pertaining to the country. Similar to Enigma, the narrator’s preoccupation with vision and memory and his reflection on different ages and time spans that structure the narrative can also be tied in with a gradual increase in understanding. This relates to the reorganization of nature, anthropocentric environmental change, and how they impinge on his sense of self, visible in the different genres through which he mediates his experiences and the attempts at imposing order and fashioning a linear personal history. Yet more explicitly than in Enigma, these processes are foregrounded in their global and diachronic dimensions. Like in Enigma, anxieties surrounding change are inferred from the outset. The reference to age and changing times that sets the tone for the novel (Naipaul 1994, 1) concurs with a proliferation of dates in the narrative, from as early as Christopher Columbus’s third journey to Trinidad in 1498 to Raleigh’s search for El Dorado in Trinidad in 1595, or the beginning of the family history of the narrator in 1938 in Port of Spain. Both the explicitness of the dates as well as the continuous references to the writer’s age illustrate the necessity to ground oneself in history, to impose an order onto a life, all of which depend on memory—they constitute not only an attempt “at pinning the place down” (Chew 2008, 108), but also at pinning personal history down. In this vein, the narrator’s first job, starting on his seventeenth birthday, is

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emblematic: he acts as a clerk in the Registrar-General’s Department, where his task is to copy out birth, marriage, and death certificates (Naipaul 1994, 20). By ordering the life of his clients he attempts to inscribe them into a linear temporality. Metafictionally resonating with the task of the writer (particularly of autobiography), this early episode encompasses the novel’s concern with registering change and growing old. Yet memory in the novel is unstable, acts of remembering and narrating exhibit no clear linearity but often return to earlier places and episodes and foreground different notions of time and thus age. For elaborating on the connection of time and place, that is, age and environment, and their non-linear trajectory, I will exemplarily focus on the sections “A New Man,” set predominantly in Trinidad and Venezuela, and “Home Again,” the novel’s last section that joins and culminates the occupation with age and environment in previous episodes, now in a not nearer specified location in East Africa. These two episodes most urgently convey the text’s preoccupation with change caused by capitalist, neo-colonial processes of restructuring the Global South. Landscape in “A New Man” is frequently revealed as the narrator’s imaginary construct, subject to changing with age, and the narrator’s efforts at making its inscribed histories visible are often rendered as subject to nostalgic idealization, particularly through a mental retreat to childhood. Yet this is not to say that landscape is a mere metaphor for the narrator’s inner state, but rather that the imaginary retreat to different landscapes he “had known as a child and felt [. . .] part of—the western parts of Port of Spain; the forested hills to the north-west; the sugar-cane plains to the south [. . .]: a simple small-island geography” (207)—can be seen as a flight from anxiety in the face of external global change. Crucially, the transition that has overcome Trinidad and the vanishing of its population is, in a foreshadowing of anthropocentric climate change, narrated through the trope of the weather: ideas “of time, distance, the past, the natural world, human existence” remain impenetrable, as “a different weather seemed to attach to this vanished landscape (like the unnatural weather in an illuminated painted panorama in a museum glass case), a different sky” (207–208). Memory does not serve the narrator to create a reliable image of the past, and the dwelling on the impermanence of time, place, and with it the narrator’s self-fashioned identity evidence, as Shirley Chew states, notes of panic (2008, 108). Yet where Chew connects the panic that transpires from the narrator’s rapid “cutting across memories steadfastly repeated over time” (106) to the exilic condition of being disconnected from local place, the passage above implies another meaning—the dread felt in light of ecological change caused by neo-imperial processes of exploiting the island for resources. Thus, the narrator’s reflections on the vanishing of the Amerindian society and the realization of the need to relinquish the “romantic way of looking” at the

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island (1994, 72) are tied in narratively with changes in the twentieth century, particularly the changing landscape of Trinidad from the 1950s onwards and the oil boom in Venezuela, and are embedded into a narrative of ongoing environmental exploitations that have impacted upon the native landscape. The magnitude these events carry for the older narrator are visible in the denial of change, where “the idea of a recent wiped-out past,” of “different crops and fields and vegetation (and seasons)” necessitates “to let go, to let the mind spring back to an everyday, ground-level vision that took in only what could be seen” (208–209). The notion that this disavowal might stem from a memento mori in face of man-made environmental change—the hint at different seasons is even there, bracketed away—is supported by the immediate narrative shift to London, accompanied by a shift in time: “It was easier in London, separated by many years and some thousands of miles from that ground-level view [. . .]. From that distance, [. . .] the landscape of the aboriginal island became fabulous” (209). Returning with this mythical vision to Trinidad, he is, however, soon made aware of the image’s treacherousness in face of the land now “stripped, shaved down to a kind of rough grass” (209). The notion of stripped, shaved, scrubbed land unites the episodes in A Way in the World in their geographic and historic variety. The younger activities of deforestation, desertification, and soil sealing are narrated in the episodes set in West and East Africa as well and are interwoven with the changes in landscape during plantation agriculture, particularly the building of sugar-cane fields and the industrialization of sugar production and concomitant processes of ecological exploitation.5 In this way, the novel implies that climate change is to be understood as part of a continuum of colonial profit-seeking and neo-colonial forms of oppression. In an attempt to defer the realization of change, the search for “the perfect tropical landscape” (213) takes the narrator to Venezuela instead—a displacement both in space and time—to a memory of the place after his eighth birthday, where the reality of a “wiped-out” civilization was unfathomable. The frequent shifts in time, approaching the landscapes from the memory of childhood, read like a flight into a childlike imaginary, where the present state of affairs can be deferred. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the constant retreat of the older narrator into his childhood reverberates with Slavoj Žižek’s more recent comment on state powers and big capital’s attitudes towards ecological catastrophe and the gap between knowing and believing that structures our approach to environmental change: “we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen” (2011, 328; italics in original). With the suspension of aging by an imaginary withdrawal to childhood, an idealized, innocent version of it, taking in “only what could be seen,” the narrator confers a “metaphysical” (Naipaul 1994, 209)—that is, inevitable—dimension onto extinction and

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denies the anthropocentric factor in it. This attempt at reasserting narratorial agency is, however, ultimately revealed as futile, as neither the child’s perspective nor the suggested certainty of history writings can gloss over the gaps in the story. Yet while the effect of, as the narrator of Enigma phrases it, the “hand of man” (Naipaul 1987, 27) is rendered as not yet discursively present, the temporal shifts between present and past, also on the novel’s superstructure, that is, the movement between different time frames that characterize the chapters’ relation to each other, as well as the shifts between England and Trinidad in the narrator’s perspective also indicate that this threat has already disturbed the narrative order. The inability to maintain this state of denial is particularly obvious at the end of the novel, in the episode “Home Again,” where the narrator recounts his travels to a not nearer specified East African location and his encounters with Blair, a Trinidadian “kind of roving ambassador” (1994, 353) in the country. The narrator’s praises of change in East Africa, his initial admiration of the country’s “exotic beauty” (344) brought about by stripping it clean of “haphazard local bush” (343), is rendered doubtful by the description of the people in charge as “ill-looking” (349), of an “inflamed brain,” and ultimately close to dying (361). Blair, who countered the country’s exploitation of resources by politicians as well as businessmen (366), is ultimately murdered. His murder, supposedly by political opponents, symbolically connects death and large-scale ecological change in the former colonies and evokes the specter of plantation slavery: “Blair’s body had been found in a showpiece banana plantation many miles from the capital. This plantation had been created with foreign advice and money and was intended to be a model for the collectivized farms of the future” (367). The Caribbean man’s death in a plantation in Africa, in a kind of reverse middle-passage, hints at the ideologies underlying promises of foreign money and ideas of progress and growth and their negative consequences for the Global South. Blair’s death also stages the fact that under present economic conditions, “Caribbean peoples lack autonomous control over the production of nature, and hence over the production of social reality” (Niblett 2014, 58). Resonating with the fact that the fear of aging is often displaced onto a fear of death, and thus of the subject’s fear of being annihilated (Barry 2015, 133), the narrator, in a protective move, tries to disavow the events and to memorialize Blair at the very end, rendering him immortal by imagining him “alive in that banana plantation” (Naipaul 1994, 367). Yet in the novel’s last paragraphs, the abjected truth breaks in: “I used to have a fanciful picture of the ceremonial return of Blair’s body to Trinidad,” yet “[t]hat hadn’t happened, so that picture of the casket and the steps and the men in dark suits had to be set aside” (369). What remains is only “a shell of the man” (369). Ultimately, the anxieties that filter through the novel’s depiction of environmental change in a sublimated form manifest openly in the

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undeniable death and leave the narrator with unanswered questions. Linking with the epigraph at the novel’s outset, the lines from Tennyson’s 101st canto of In Memoriam—“And year by year our memory fades/From all the circle of the hills”—, the final attempt at remembering Blair, in its deficiency, seems a performance of the fading of memory, which resonates with the global challenge to bear in mind the ramifications of ecological change. CONCLUSION: GROWING OLD IN CHANGING ENVIRONMENTS In Naipaul’s often criticized work, which frequently employs a tourist’s gaze on other environments, landscapes are often compared with and contrasted to the narrators’ imaginations, even idealizations of Englishness. Yet where Caribbean environments, in literary history, have been subject to being expressed in an English, colonial form (Campbell and Niblett 2016, 9), the focus on environmental themes in his work pre-empts these attempts. By approaching English, Trinidadian, Venezuelan, or various African landscapes through an overarching focus on effects of global capitalism, the impacts of a capitalist world-ecology on ecologies of the Global North and, more devastatingly, on those of the Global South become visible. Reading the novels of Naipaul’s late period next to each other serves to paint a diachronic and global image of the joint embeddedness in discourses of progress and realities of exploitation. In both novels, the infringement on the environment through such processes as agricultural modernization or the extraction of resources and the resulting restructuring of landscapes, which, in A Way, are more directly than in Enigma tied in with climatic change, are never voiced in terms of an outspoken criticism. In this way, both texts perform a contemporary attitude of evasion and denial. Instead, however, they resort to Ersatz tropes that serve to mediate these transformations. In Enigma, these comprise predominantly images of bodily decline and, in A Way, the metonymic shifting between different memories. Both changes pertaining to the body and memory, as also tied in with the materiality of aging, serve as stand-in for the as of yet unspeakable change that has infiltrated the narrators’ respective surroundings. As such, it is also crucial that both novels employ each a generic categorization that the texts’ respective strategies then undermine, as this alerts readers to not take the novels’ claims at face value but to read them against the grain: the categorization of Enigma as novel is, to some extent, unsettled by the blurring of boundaries between novel and autobiography, and in A Way, the expectations the description as sequence raises are frustrated through the non-linear narrative progress.

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In this sense, Naipaul’s work is quite susceptive to environmental perspectives, particularly when combined with a focus on aging. As landscape and change is continuously inscribed into Eurocentric frameworks, always ideologically moulded, the focus on the anxieties surrounding the human factor, particularly palpable in mediations of aging, offers a way to read beyond these idealizations and approach what is otherwise rendered as a gap. This simultaneously shows the limit of Naipaul’s ecocritical potential as this approach to some extent privileges human experience and renders the environment a “backdrop for anthropocentric events” (DeLoughrey 2011, 270). Yet the anxious enquiry into an adequate novelistic form to represent these changes and respond to existential crises in textual form as well as the refusal of textual closure both texts evidence can be taken as a poetological comment, as positing a need for a politics of representation that entails that writers continuously return to their material and perform a rewriting of seeming certainties and established knowledge. NOTES 1. As work by Redclift (1984) and Dotto (1988) as well as Thatcher’s famous three speeches on climate change show, concerns about global environmental change, the anthropocentric factor in it, and, to a lesser degree, resulting power imbalances between the Global North and South entered public consciousness from the mid1980s onwards. 2. Thus, the novel has variously been called pastoral, anti- or post-pastoral (Huggan and Tiffin 2015, 128). 3. Indeed, the long-time residents of Wiltshire are often affected by a fast-approaching, abrupt middle or old age and the decline associated with it. 4. Cf. Michael Valdez Moses for a precise itemization of the chapters’ respective temporal framework (2019, 210). 5. In a different context, Niblett has poignantly called this “saccharine despotism” (2014, 59).

REFERENCES Ahmad, Omair. 2016. “Authors Are Part of the Climate Change Problem.” The Wire, July 27, 2016. https:​//​thewire​.in​/politics​/authors​-are​-part​-of​-the​-climate​-change​ -problem. Barnouw, Dagmar. 2003. Naipaul’s Strangers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Barry, Elizabeth. 2015. “The Ageing Body.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude, 132–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baucom, Ian. 1999. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Campbell, Chris, and Michael Niblett. 2016. “Introduction: Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the Caribbean.” In The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, edited by Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett, 1–15. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Casteel, Sarah Phillips. 2007. Second Arrivals. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Chew, Shirley. 2008. “‘Strangers to Ourselves’: Landscape, Memory, and Identity in V.S. Naipaul’s ‘A Way in the World.’” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 5, no. 2: 103–14. “Climate, Freedom and Denial: What ‘Green Thatcherism’ Teaches Us Today.” 2019. The Economist, November 22, 2019. https:​//​www​.economist​.com​/open​-future​/2019​ /11​/22​/climate​-freedom​-and​-denial​-what​-green​-thatcherism​-teaches​-us​-today. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–46. Durham: Duke University Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley. 2005. “Introduction.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, 1–30. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley, eds. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2011. “Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place.” In The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, 265–75. London: Routledge. Dotto, Lydia. 1988. Thinking the Unthinkable: Civilization and Rapid Climate Change. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Feder, Lillian. 2001. Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gifford, Terry. 1995. Green Voices. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. London: John Murray. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Grove, Richard. 1995. Green Imperialism: Green Imperialism. Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartung, Heike. 2016. Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman. Abingdon: Routledge. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. 2015. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

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Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2014. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. King, Bruce Alvin. 2003. V.S. Naipaul, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kluwick, Ursula. 2014. “Talking about Climate Change: The Ecological Crisis and Narrative Form.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 502–516. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kriebernegg, Ulla, and Roberta Maierhofer. 2013. “The Ages of Life: Living and Aging in Conflict?” In The Ages of Life: Living and Aging in Conflict?, edited by Ulla Kriebernegg and Roberta Maierhofer, 1–18. Bielefeld: transcript. Kunow, Rüdiger. 2016. “Postcolonial Theory and Old Age: An Explorative Essay.” Journal of Aging Studies 39: 101–108. doi: 10.1016/j.jaging.2016.06.004. Loh, Lucienne. 2010. “Rural Heritage and Colonial Nostalgia in the Thatcher Years: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival.” In Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture, edited by Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho, 96–114. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Love, Glen A. 2003. Practical Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Naipaul, V.S. 1987. The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections. London: Penguin. ———. 1994. A Way in the World: A Sequence. London: Minerva. Niblett, Michael. 2014. “Specters in the Forest: Gothic Form and World-Ecology in Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute.” Small Axe 44, no. 2: 53–68. Redclift, Michael. (1984) 2010. Development and the Environmental Crisis: Red or Green Alternatives. Reprint, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Rivera Godoy-Benesch, Rahel. 2020. The Production of Lateness: Old Age and Creativity in Contemporary Narrative. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. Said, Edward W. 2007. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Vintage Books. Searle, Chris. 1984. “Naipaulicity: A Form of Cultural Imperialism.” Race & Class 26, no. 2: 45–62. Singh, Bhawan. 1997. “Climate-Related Global Changes in the Southern Caribbean: Trinidad and Tobago.” Global and Planetary Change 15: 93–111. Tiffin, Helen. 2005. “‘Man Fitting the Landscape’: Nature, Culture, and Colonialism.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, 199–212. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Twigg, Julia. 2004. “The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology.” Journal of Aging Studies 18: 59–73. Valdez Moses, Michael. 2019. “Worlds Lost and Founded: V.S. Naipaul as Belated Modernist.” In Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present, edited by Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, 197–222. New York: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

Chapter Two

Footprints in the Jungle Creating a Legacy in the Rainforest Christian Lenz

In their 2005 study of interviews with people of old age or dying from cancer, Elizabeth Hunter and Graham Rowles found a striking consensus among their interviewees: Few of us are comfortable with the idea that we live, we die and that is it. We want to believe there is a purpose in life and that we will make a mark of some kind, perhaps only in the memories of our descendents [sic], but a mark nonetheless. We were here; we thought; we loved; we created. This is the fertile ground from which the desire for legacy sprouts. (328)

Leaving a mark means that one’s earthly presence can be evoked and retraced after one has passed on. It is comparable to a footprint which signifies a presence even if the person who imprinted the mark onto the ground is no longer there; it is the legacy left behind to be remembered by: “What is given or inherited is the persistent, layered trace of real perceptions, a lineage and legacy authenticating memories, distinguishing them from purely imaginary events” (Trimm 2017, 64). As a result, Jean-Luc Marion writes that such a phenomenon should be admitted “its right and its power to show itself on its own terms” (2002, 19; italics in original). Legacy, therefore, must be understood as both the conceptual reasoning behind the giving and the lasting effect of the gift of the person about to pass on that manifests this giver after their disappearance. By applying Marion’s and Ryan Trimm’s thoughts on this “largely unexamined metaphor” to fictional texts, legacy is revealed to be “a concept of dynamic complexity” (Trimm 2017, 65). Yet, instead of focussing only on the repercussions for the recipients of the gift, this essay 41

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will consider the intentions of the givers displayed in the ordonnance of their legacy, drawing attention to the processes (cf. Hunter and Rowles 2005, 330). The concept of legacy represents important implications for aging studies because it refers to the awareness of a human being’s mortality. As the study by Hunter and Rowles shows, it is especially old people or those terminally ill who think about gifting persons dear to them with a token of some form to be remembered by and thus to extend their life beyond death. Moreover, the gift that is presented as legacy doubles as giver synecdochally and is able to preserve the human being about to vanish forever. That this can be problematic will be shown by drawing on two recent novels in which the old white European protagonists want to inscribe themselves into history as benefactors of (all) humankind due to either prospecting or protecting South American rainforests. Western cultures with no direct connection to a rainforest tend to culturally reduce these spaces to jungles (cf. Slater 2004, 172). Yet, these tropical environments “are more than simply collections of trees but intricate systems working on the basis of many connections” (Juniper 2018, 55). Defined by Vermonja R. Alston’s as “contested terrains located at the intersection of economic, political, social, cultural, and sexual ecologies” (2016, 93–94), environments equally include “people, plants, and non-human animals [. . .] and indigenous knowledge” (Wisker 2017, 427). Rainforests must therefore be considered as complex networks that should not be claimed by societies without any direct connection to this specific environment, manipulated into jungle versions and used in crafting a legacy to prolong one’s life. The two texts chosen for the analysis present their protagonists in the last stages of their life cycles. State of Wonder and Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée are 21st century novels from the United States and France, respectively, whose stories are principally set in tropical rainforests. Ann Patchett’s New York Times bestseller State of Wonder follows scientist Marina Singh into the Amazon rainforest. She is looking for Dr. Annick Swenson, who has discovered the reason why an Indigenous tribe’s female population does not experience menopause. Swenson, who is in her 70s, turns out to be a dictatorial ruler who has suppressed the natives and subjects them to her experiments and tests. While State of Wonder presents strong female protagonists, the characters in Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée are older Frenchmen Pierre Mayaou and Antoine Perron, who follow their friend’s invitation to Guyana. Although Pierre hates the lush vegetation and its fauna initially, when he witnesses the destruction from illegal and legal gold prospecting, Pierre feels called to action to save the environment. Although the two texts discussed in this essay are quite different—one is a feminist re-writing of a contested (post)colonial classic, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the other an instalment in an on-going graphic novel

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series, they are similar in that they ecocritically engage with their aging white protagonists who want to imprint their legacy onto an environment; both Dr. Annick Swenson and Pierre Mayaou disregard Indigenous actors, their identity and interconnection with the environment, so that the white protagonists can craft a legacy from the rainforest. They want to leave a footprint although the ground is not theirs to tread upon. The texts are presenting readers with Western hubris, and although the two protagonists display good intentions (Swenson wants to reverse the menopause, Pierre vows to stop destructive gold prospecting), it is ultimately their desire to be remembered that informs their actions. Very little has been written about the potential the two novels present as intersections of both aging studies and ecocriticism, and this essay aims to close that gap. It will do so by drawing on the philosophical implications of the notion of legacy that finds application in both these disciplines. DEFINING LEGACY Legacy is an expression that is used to establish gravitas and longevity. Yet, the concept is rather complex, even more so, if one wants to distinguish it from inheritance or heritage. In philosophy, eminent thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Jacques Derrida have discussed the phenomenology of these terms (cf. Trimm 2017, 65) and Marion thus infers that “if the phenomenon is defined as what shows itself in and from itself (Heidegger), instead of what admits constitution (Husserl), this self can be attested only inasmuch as the phenomenon first gives itself” (2002; italics in original). Generally speaking, legacy, inheritance, and heritage depend on a giver who gifts a gift to a givee, and it can signify both positive outcomes (such as valuable heirlooms) or negative ones (for example hereditary diseases) (cf. Ryber-Webster and Tighe 2019, 6–7). What the three different terms legacy, inheritance, and heritage have in common is the notion of time and the idea of the gift as (im)material object. Beginning with the former, for a legacy to be considered as such, a form of disappearance, usually death, needs to precede the gifting or is anticipated (cf. Trimm 2017, 81). Yet, at the same time, the different temporal levels—the past of the giver/legator and the present of the givee/legatee—collapse via the gift: “an ecstatic [. . .] dimension of time, one where past, present, and future are interwoven with one another, are not whole moments, are not separate” (Trimm 2017, 75; cf. Ryber-Webster and Tighe 2019, 3). Due to the gift, the past is no longer lost along the disappeared giver, it is drawn into the present by passing it down or on to the givee. Hence, the past connects to the present. The final level of time, the future, is somewhat implied in the gift due to the process of the first

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collapse. A legacy is intended to persist, it should not merely pass from giver to givee as the inheritance does, it is the Janus face that bridges the levels of time. Therefore, the future is equally drawn into the present and the legator already anticipates the futurity of their legacy when bequeathing it to the legatee: “Enmeshed in an individual’s culture, legacy offers the potential for a highly personal contribution to the future” (Hunter and Rowles 2005, 328). This contribution can appear in many forms, most prominently as a (im)material object. Already hinted at above, the gift from the giver to the givee is usually thought of as inheritance, the most material of the three types. It is that which can be touched and fiscally assessed and it can come in various sizes and shapes, from an heirloom brooch to a manor house to a certain amount of money. Naturally, legacy as gift must be thought of as conceptual; it represents the disappeared legator in a way that suggests a difference to heritage: in the latter, the “giver acts perfectly because he [sic] disappears perfectly” (Marion 2002, 97). Thus, heritage as gift becomes forever an Other, it draws attention to the disappearance of the giver. With a legacy, the legator is a dominant asset to the gift, it is him or her that looms large due to their inevitable inscription into and enablement of the gift itself—gift and giver amalgamate into the legacy presented to the legatee. Moreover, this process is not finite, future legatees can inscribe themselves into the legacy as well, yet the initial legator will always be recognized as the most important and dominant aspect as well as asset of the legacy. It follows that “a single legacy yields myriad heritages to different facets of the present laying claim to it, to different futures arising from it” (Trimm 2017, 78). Yet, Trimm argues that a legatee can select their preferred past to receive (78). While this is definitely true for an inheritance which can be accepted or disclaimed—especially as part of a larger estate, a legacy is not so easily dissembled and chosen from. Its conceptual nature is tied to the gift but it is not the gift as such. As has been stated above, the legacy is powerful in itself and although it might need recognition, the legatee can be an unspecified number of people the legator might not even know personally. In fact, legacies are at their most potent if their cause is disarticulated from any direct beneficiary. Hence, the legator as instigator must be considered the most important agent in the transaction. Due to the fact that legacies—just like heritage and inheritance—depend on the disappearance of the giver, the most obvious group of legators are those of old age since they are statistically closest to the end of their lives: “One of the many euphemisms for dying—passing on—is also a term for transmission of material and immaterial legacies” (Kane 1996, 5; italics in original). People tend to be concerned with three types of legacies: first, bodily legacies such as genetic and health issues (e.g., hereditary diseases), but also to donate their bodies to science; second, material legacies like heirlooms, possessions and symbols such as university chairs donated

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in their name; third, legacies of values, which have been addressed above: personal, cultural, and social values (Hunter and Rowles 2005, 333). It has to be understood that these are not mutually exclusive and can indeed overlap. However, the third form, legacy of values, was the most important to the interviewees from the study cited at the start of this essay (342) as even those without direct descendants wanted to ensure that they have passed on something of themselves in this fashion. This can be attributed to the fact that direct descendants—one’s biological family—are usually not the sole recipient of legacies (as opposed to inheritances): “Legacy thinking might also entail responsibility to shape attitude and behavior change at the level of family and community” (Frumkin, Fried, and Moody 2012, 1436). This definition is congruent with Hunter and Rowles’s legacy of values as well as the symbolic material legacy. Everything else—even the genetic aspect of the biological legacy—needs to be understood as inheritance. In the following, two literary examples will be analyzed that deal with the notion of leaving a mark before disappearing from this earthly plane. The novels both present protagonists without direct heirs or descendants, which means that they cannot pass on a (direct) material legacy. Moreover, the texts deal with legacies in connection to a rainforest. Not only are these stories set in the tropical rainforests of Brazil and Guyana, these environments inspire the various characters’ ideas about leaving a legacy. Especially the notion of objectifying the environment and exploiting it evinces the concept of legacy as an important element of environmental studies and ecocriticism. While often considered as “‘external’ to human activity,” the environment is always affected by human (inter)actions (Phillips and Mighall 2013, 2–3). When humans use the environment to create a legacy from as well as with it, the process diminishes the agency of the natural world with all its components and disregards Indigenous autonomy. By inscribing themselves into the environment to create a legacy, the white protagonists from the two novels appropriate and overwrite Indigenous knowledge and identity to manipulate the environment into a storage facility of their selves and their actions (cf. Hunter and Rowles 2005, 335). Their intentions might be to create a better future (cf. Frumkin, Fried, and Moody 2012, 1434), but their means to do so are highly exploitative and questionable. Becoming aware of the process of creating legacies, ecocriticism is helpful to diagnose exploitation when it is coded as beneficial to all as is the case in the first example, State of Wonder. A STATE OF WONDER, A LEGACY OF PROBLEMS Ann Patchett’s feminist retelling of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Wisker 2017) narrates the story of Marina Singh, who travels to the Amazon

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to find Dr. Annick Swenson. The elusive scientist lives with the Indigenous tribe of the Lakashi where she researches the tribe’s reasons for continuous female fertility. The notion of legacy presented in the novel testifies to Swenson’s selfishness and disregard of the environment. In the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, Annick Swenson has lived for 10 years among the Lakashi and has found that the women of the tribe are fertile until they die because they digest the bark of the Martin Tree (Patchett 2012, 92–93). Now, at 73, Swenson seems to be close to being able to synthesize the biological process and the company paying for her research could distribute a drug—in the Western parts of the world. Swenson’s methods to research the bark of the Martin Tree reveal her understanding of the environment of the rainforest: in a conversation with fellow scientist Singh, the septuagenarian states that There’s nothing a Westerner loves more than the idea of being cured by tinctures made of boiled roots. They think this place is some sort of magical medicine chest, but for the most part the treatments here consist of poorly recorded gossip handed down throughout the ages from people who knew very little to people who know even less. There is much to be taken from the jungle, obviously—I am here to develop a drug—but in most cases the plants are as useless as the potted begonia that grows on your kitchen windowsill. The ones that do have potential can only be medicinal when they are properly employed. For these people there is no concept of a dosage, no set length for treatments. When something works it seems to me to be nothing short of a miracle. (Patchett 2012, 180–181; emphases added)

In this acerbic statement, she reveals her ideas about various forms of legacy and the connection between legacy and the environment. Swenson describes a transaction here, with information being passed down from one person (knowing very little) to another. According to the scientist, this transaction is merely a form of inheritance as a lot of information is lost in the process and, so Swenson says, the heir is not particularly concerned with either the loss of knowledge or a desire to recover it. The gift, in this case the medicine, is detached from the knowledge of why the gift works. It cannot be considered a legacy, as the potential legator is not present in the gift itself, the loss of knowledge testifies to this. Were it still attached to the gift, the legator and their contribution to the treatment of their recipients would be more prominent and thus the profound knowledge of the medicine would be important to the construction of the legacy itself. In Swenson’s opinion, Westerners regard the rainforest as a “magical medicine chest,” some mysterious place that holds the cure to every ailment imaginable. She does indeed agree that there is potential in the jungle, but she is equally convinced that the natives are as clueless about the possibilities of the environment as the

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Westerners who romanticize it. Veronica Davidov calls the rainforest with its many opportunities to find bases and components for multiple drugs a “pharmaceutical cornucopia” (2013, 247–248), which must be considered to be a culturally-coded jungle version of the biological rainforest. This is important insofar as Davidov’s definition includes the notion that the rainforest is a de-nationalized space without geopolitical affiliations which, ironically enough, is regarded as “global property” because the drugs can benefit the whole world (248). This is a version of the colonial practice of claiming “empty lands” which was “used to legitimate violence and [to] dehumanize Indigenous habitants” (Howkins 2010, 29), only this time, the idea of being beneficial to all presupposes the emptiness. The environment is part of a legacy, the gift itself, but a legator is curiously absent, it is just claimed by the (Western) givees. Swenson goes even one step further; she detaches the Indigenous people from the medicine and therefore the rainforest as origin of the same when she equates “these people” with Westerners and their potted begonias: the former use the various medicines without any profound background knowledge while the latter do not even consider the flowers on their windowsills to be of any use. She is derisive in her statement whilst inserting herself into the transaction of knowledge; only scientists like her can conserve knowledge, harness and develop it, and thus make it available; in short, only they can create a legacy from the rainforest. That this process will affirm ignorant Westerners’ perception of the rainforest as a “magical medicine chest” is irrelevant to her—but it shows that the legacy she intends to create is two-fold: first, she is going to help postmenopausal women to reverse the process and thus will be acknowledged as the successful enabler of this process—the giver of this gift. Second, she is responsible for constructing a legacy from the rainforest for entire populations not living there, thus detaching the rainforest from its original inhabitants and inserting herself in the equation of legator (Swenson’s rainforest) gifting a gift (fertility) to countless givees (post­menopausal Westerners). The legacy is less fertility as such but the drug she has created from the rainforest. It is ironic that she derides Westerners who believe in the “medical medicine chest,” but is actively shaping this perception with her experiments and drugs. Additionally, Annick Swenson constructs this manipulated version of the rainforest as a pharmaceutical cornucopia because this allows her to detach the native actants from the rainforest, both the Lakashi and the trees, and reinsert them in her jungle laboratory. Swenson’s forceful detachment of the native population from their natural habitat is no coincidence. Throughout the novel, she shows both her disregard and disrespect for the Lakashi tribe. To test her theories and the drugs, she has turned the entire tribe into her laboratory experiments, and they must endure vaginal swabs and the drawing of blood samples. This results in a

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disengaged people that seems to exist only to serve Swenson’s desire to create a legacy for herself. Moreover, in order for her to live forever due to her legacy, the Lakashi are forced to forfeit their individuality and bodies. This notion can be complemented with Judith Fletcher’s idea of the Lakashi being ghosts of the Underworld that is stylized here as the Amazon by Patchett (cf. 2019, 192–194). The Lakashis’ one-dimensionality strips off their agency and they present as the spectral rem(a)inder of the atrocities of Western scientists whose interference leaves behind automata no longer minding the scientists’ invasion of their bodies. The rainforest can be understood as an interlacement of Indigenous peoples, animals, and the endemic flora, and Swenson’s intrusion into this network, both via her disregard as expressed in her statement to Marina and her actual physical invasion of the Lakashis’ bodies, disrupts this finely tuned equilibrium. Because the rainforest’s ecosystem functions—as it apparently has before Swenson’s appearance, the Lakashi seemed to be able to pass on their knowledge when the young imitated their elders; the idea of leaving a mark is never addressed. The advents of non-endemic persons beget the idea of legacies, and it is revealed to be a destructive process: it is not just Annick Swenson and her rainforest-cum-laboratory, but Swenson’s predecessor Martin Rapp. The discovery that the bark of a specific tree prolongs female fertility is attributed to him and thus these arbores are named in his honor: the Martin Tree, “the greatest botanical discoveries of our age” (Patchett 2012, 287). It is telling that the Lakashi knew of the tree before the arrival of Rapp (and Swenson), but it is Rapp who is credited with the discovery. He and his acolytes appropriate and overwrite Indigenous knowledge, which is itself a “colonial politico-cultural [legacy]” (Nyambi and Mangena 2016, 2). The white scientists display a collective colonialist hubris and perceived superiority as presented in Swenson’s statement quoted at the beginning of this subchapter. Swenson bemoans knowledge being lost due to the natives’ ignorance—but the scientists have never shown any interest in learning the names given to the flora and fauna by the Indigenous actants that live in a harmonious relationship with them (cf. Wisker 2017, 427). This shows that Indigenous knowledge is deemed to be inferior to Western science. Rapp died before he could finish his research and the synthetization of the Martin trees’ bark, but Swenson has taken over this project. She therefore becomes a prosthesis of Rapp (cf. Trimm 2017, 93; Stiegler 1998, 152). Yet, she must finish her research in order to be able to inscribe herself in the Rapp legacy, which has started with his (re-)naming of the environment, a colonial practice (cf. Nyambi and Mangena 2016, 5). Since she is already in her seventies, she is in the last stage of her life cycle. Therefore, she needs to pass down her knowledge in one or two forms: either release the information of the synthesized drug or nominate her replacement. Yet, she still does not share her knowledge with others; were she interested in helping everybody as she

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claims (Patchett 2012, 319), she would make the discovery known. Swenson says she does not publicize her research so that Marina’s company continues funding her synthesizing of an antimalaria cure from a mushroom that grows on the Martin trees. But her inhumane treatment of the Lakashi puts her altruism in question. H. R. Moody writes that elders “could cultivate a long view of the future [and] also serve as custodians of memory of the past” (2009, 72). Swenson does look to the future as she develops drugs that could (potentially) help the world (that can afford the drugs), but instead of actually gifting the drug to the public, Swenson only cultivates the idea of what she considers to be her legacy. When Marina leaves Swenson in the end, it is highly likely that the old scientist will perish just like her literary template Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: lonely and surrounded by riches—in this case knowledge instead of ivory. Her disregard of the younger characters in the novel, her protégé Marina, the boy she kidnapped from another Amazonian tribe, and her stillborn child, shows that Swenson’s legacy is that of a selfish woman who disregards her chances for generativity, a transcendence of human stages in life. Defined as consisting of “several dimensions: biological (reproduction), parental (nurturing), technical (teaching), and cultural (storytelling, transmitting meaning and values)” (Frumkin, Fried, and Moody 2012, 1435), Swenson fails on all accounts. But it is especially the cultural dimension of generativity that must be stressed here for she upholds the notion of the “magical medicine chest” when she only ever teases the discoveries but never lets anybody actually benefit from it. OLD GEEZERS AND SELFISH LEGACIES The second example is the sixth volume from Wilfrid Lupano and Paul Cauuet’s graphic novel series Les Vieux Fourneaux series (English title: The Old Geezers). Titled L’Oreille Bouchée (“the clogged ear”; unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own), the text deals with different versions of leaving a legacy. Instead of exploiting both the environment as well as the Indigenous population enmeshed in the same, the titular old men come to the realization that “letting go” of one’s need for a legacy is the most sustainable way to preserve the environment for future generations. The graphic novel follows the two Parisian septuagenarians Pierre Mayaou and Antoine Perron, who are invited to Guyana to meet their friend Émile Carabignac. Once there, they star in an amateur production of the meeting between Tongan King ‘Ulukalala II and his people and corsairs sailing under the British flag (Lupano and Cauuet 2020, 29). The play shows how the Europeans try to explain the meaning and value of gold to the Tongans, but the Indigenous people do not see the need to exchange their goods for

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something as worthless as gold as it cannot be eaten and will turn its owner into a selfish miser. Eventually, the king commands the raid of the ship, which is then sunk—with only the useless gold and jewels aboard. The play has been put up for the local children to learn about Indigenous history and the colonizers’ attempt to exploit the native people. After the performance, Pierre and Antoine discover that Émile has actually found the corsairs’ sunken treasure. The play does not only present the background knowledge how Émile was able to find the gold, it equally mirrors what the friends see the next day on a trip into the Guyanese rainforest: the environment has been destroyed with felled trees, barrels, and other debris left behind, and pools carrying discolored water. Antoine asks their friend: “Qu’est—ce que c’est que le carnage?” (What—what is this carnage?) to which Émile replies, it is a “mine d’or clandestine” (Lupano and Cauuet 2020, 42; an illegal gold mine). The friends were led to one of many abandoned sites at which gold diggers pan for gold and poison the environment with quicksilver and potassium cyanide in the process. These oftentimes illegal operations have created a disembodied legacy as it has changed the rainforest in a way that has made it uninhabitable for any living being. It appears almost cynical to speak of givers in such a context: the perpetrators of the destruction are unknown and the direct givees of the “gift” of pollution are not human but plants and animals, which suffer first (cf. Riempp 2016, 116). This is one of the cases in which the gift is not connoted positively and a problem for future generations—both human and non-human. “Gold is currently Guyana’s most important export product along with agricultural products such as sugar and rice” (Riempp 2016, 115), but whereas the latter can be grown almost infinitely, the former must be found and thus violently extracted from the earth. The friends are then driven by their guide to another spot. Here, she explains, the government planned a legal gold mining project, and although it was stopped for the time being, the guide is sure that it will be undertaken in the foreseeable future. She tells the men that in all natural habitats with gold deposits such projects are planned or already underway (46). Moreover, the guide charts the way of the Guyanese gold, from the soil to a wedding band. The novel provides the matching images (45) and presents both the joy of the white bridal couple and the destroyed rainforest, which seems to be unknown to the blissful couple. Pierre is immediately enraged and promises help: “Une armée de militants affûtés comme des lames, qui va venir foutre un bordel international!” (46; An army of activists sharp like knives who are going to make an international mess!). What is interesting here, is the fact that he means men and women like him, old people. In Paris, Pierre is the leader of a group of guerrilla-like septua- and octogenarians who disrupt the system and draw attention to the plights old people are subjected to, creating visibility. When Antoine points

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out that the Guyanese hospitals might have enough on their hands without having to help newly-arrived Parisian pensioners, Pierre is even more furious; screaming into the environment, he vows to erect protest camps in the middle of the jungle, and when they die, their corpses will compost and nourish the soil (cf. Lupano and Cauuet 2020, 46). Pierre intends to inscribe himself into the fabric of the environment and to help protect it, depicting the rainforest as a helpless jungle. Yet, earlier, when he is in the deep rainforest for the first time, he is also screaming, albeit for an entirely different reason: “Mais ici, je suis en danger! Ici, la nature est trop naturelle!” (16; But here, I am in danger! Here, nature is too natural!). He prefers the pollution of metropolitan Paris to the clean air of the rainforest because the latter is “too natural” for him. Therefore, it cannot be the environment that Pierre is concerned with when he wants to save it from exploitation—the novel suggests he still wants to matter in his old age, the same way his youthful anarchist self always talked about (cf. Lupano and Cauuet 2020, 52). Having failed to create a legacy in Paris apart from the occasional short-lived disruption or civil disobedience—which usually gets him into more trouble than it does any good—he now sees his chance to help an entire country. His idea to become part of the environment (his decaying body turning into fertilizing compost) is another form of exploitation as he is foreign matter, both metaphorically and literally: he does not really belong to Guyana, he is a mere tourist. Thus, Pierre wants to create a legacy, to matter, for the right reasons—to help protect the environment—and the wrong—he wants to be a white savior, which means that “a white messianic character saves a loweror working-class, usually [. . .] isolated, non-white character from a sad fate” (Hughey 2014, 1). Pierre constructs the entire Guyanese people as isolated from professional help and as inept to avert the situation and to protect the rainforest themselves. The environment as such is a passive agent in this transaction, enabling Pierre to fashion it into the gift itself, and its salvation as his legacy. By imagining himself (and other old white people) to fuse with the rainforest as compost, he tries to cement his connection to the legacy and establish natural immortality—he becomes one with the environment. Yet, his earlier outburst that the rainforest is too natural betrays his vision for the environment: he does not want to become part of it, he wants the jungle to become him, less natural, more Parisian, and thus, in a way, polluted. It is the same egocentric behavior that informs all of his actions. That this process is mirroring the invasive destruction of the environment is lost on him—but not on the guide who politely declines Pierre’s offer: “non merci” (Lupano and Cauuet 2020, 47). She continues to explain that the Guyanese people want to fight for themselves and by themselves, they do not need white people explaining to them how to fight back. She would rather have the Parisians return home and make the French people understand about

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the problems, be multipliers of what they have seen for themselves—advocating for the same kind of visibility Pierre and his group attract in Paris. As she decidedly refers to “les blancs de la metropole” (7, the whites from the big city), she is aware of the idea of the white saviors. The guide cuts Pierre’s desire for an invasive and polluting legacy short, thus strengthening the native population’s position as being able to fight back on their own and, therefore, protect the rainforest from another, however benign form of exploitation. At this point, Émile comforts his friend by explaining that they can indeed help the people by giving back what has been taken from them: he donates the entire treasure from the corsair ship he has found. What is more, the friends help the guide stage it in such a way that it appears that she has found the treasure previously buried under the soil of the rainforest. Not only does the money help fund the local communities’ fight against the mining operations, it reverses the process of the exploitation by putting the gold back into the ground. It can now supposedly be discovered by those who present no direct interest in the economic riches—like king ‘Ulukalala II—but in the power it wields to protect the rainforest’s legacy as an important environment for everyone. The gold, previously constructed as a gift itself, is now enabling the protection of the rainforest, but it is detached from its actual giver, Émile. He becomes invisible because the guide as representative of the local communities steps in to use it to establish the possibility of a lasting legacy once more. Thus, Émile and the other “old geezers” become part of the legacy of values, rather than a material legacy; they are not part of the rainforest itself but of the conservation, of the social, cultural, and therefore valuable legacy. Émile suggests that they do not need to be remembered to make an impact. WHITE PEOPLE’S GENERATIVITY AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S LEGACIES Old age has one assess what one leaves behind after one’s disappearance— has one left a footprint to be remembered by, and if so, is it a valuable legacy? In the texts, the three characters Annick Swenson, Pierre Mayaou, and Émile Carabignac are all in their seventies and have entered the last stage of their life cycle. They are childless and thus their only chance is a legacy of values—yet apart from Émile, the characters want to leave a footprint where they should not tread, namely Indigenous territory. Whereas Pierre only dreams of entering into the transaction that would produce his legacy, Swenson has already manipulated the environment to such an extent that going back seems impossible due to the “traumatic impact of abstract economic systems on [the] local ecologies and subjects” (Dasgupta, quoted in Wisker 2017, 414). Recognizing that one’s legacy is not more important

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than the Indigenous population’s autonomy is an important step, one that is introduced by the guide who stops Pierre in L’Oreille Bouchée. Swenson and Pierre behave like colonists, but the guide makes clear that the fight needs to happen in multiple places if the global community wants to stop the exploitation and thus the destruction of the planet, opting for a cultural and technical generativity (Frumkin, Fried, and Moody 2012, 1435). Conceptualized by Erik Erikson, generativity “is the ability to transcend personal interests to provide care and concern for younger and older generations” (Hutchison 2019, 276). Swenson and Pierre need to be aware that their selfish pursuits are not helpful. But they have the chance to make a difference, to become what Moody calls “eco-elders,” advocates for the environment that help future generations with their acquired knowledge (2009, 72). Instead of considering their own longevity, they should contemplate that of planet Earth; instead of only considering problems that are part of the past, they should help preserve the environment amid the challenges such as exploitation and climate change (cf. Frumkin, Fried, and Moody 2012). The concept of eco-elders is located at the intersection of aging studies and environmentalism. It is here that the past experiences of the legators are presently gifted to future generations of legatees, so as to learn from them. However, the gifting proves to be problematic in the two texts because the white protagonists want to “help” with the results of their knowledge (scientific and activist, respectively) that they acquired during their long lives, but not the knowledge itself. This way, they are an integral part of what they pass down. More specifically, both their endeavors can be traced back to reverse processes of infertility, either of the female body or the poisoned soil. In a way, they want to return the world to an earlier, younger state of (perceived) newness and immaculateness which can be read as a metaphor for their own desire to return to a time in which their bodies are not riddled with signs of old age such as problems to walk (Swenson) or a weak bladder (Pierre). But it is their exaggerated sense of self which is strongly intertwined in these altruistic procedures. Moreover, while Pierre at least envisions legatees of his activism, namely the Guyanese people, Swenson remains entirely isolated: with no children and no desire to publicize her research soon, a future is thus disqualified. Legacies connect the various temporal levels, yet Swenson and Pierre are only concerned with the present rather than the future. Were they to actually help (other) future generations, they would not exploit the rainforest: the environment is reduced to a mere transmitter of the results of the characters’ knowledge and is devalued in the process just like the people, plants, and animals that actually comprise the rainforest. Both characters do not see the rainforest for all its trees, they do not understand the environment and are blinded by their desire to create a legacy; they even disregard the Indigenous experience and claim their natural habitat.

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While the two previous examples feature white protagonists and have been written by white authors, the critically acclaimed movie El Abrazo de la Serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent, 2015) depicts an Indigenous experience. Written and directed by Colombian native Ciro Guerra, this movie presents the old shaman Karamakate who has to come to the same realization that “a legacy signifies the past [which] is not contained within that lost time but lives on” (Trimm 2017, 84). His connection to the environment has vanished when he refused to share his knowledge with a white anthropologist, and it is forty years later that he receives another chance. As a young man, another Indigenous man told him to educate the selfish anthropologist. The revered scientist “can teach the whites. [. . .] If we cannot educate the whites, it will be our end. The end of everything” (El Abrazo de la Serpiente, 01:27:00). Old Karamakate realises now that this is indeed true and, thus, he feels “a sense of legacy—a concern for the well-being of those who will come after [him]” (Frumkin, Fried, and Moody 2012, 1434). Without a deeper understanding of the environment there will be no salvation and preservation of the environment, in this case the rainforest. It is here that the Indigenous form of legacy differs from that of the white characters. When old Karamakate allows another white scientist to partake in the drug he created from a mystical flower, the camera assumes the white man’s position and Karamakate advances on the audience, having the viewer experience the colorful shapes alongside the white man; it is the first time the black-and-white movie displays color. The vision is abstract but ultimately puts the audience in the position of the legatee of Karamakate’s knowledge that the environment is part of everyone and that it must not be abused and exploited or ruthlessly manipulated—the viewers realize their position in Karamakate’s legacy, his journey becoming theirs. Instead of being presented with a drug that can cure one’s illness (State of Wonder) or a well-meant but encroaching intervention (L’Oreille Bouchée), El Abrazo de la Serpiente invites its audiences to reconsider and learn from the old protagonist’s experience—the movie espouses generativity and a legacy of values through its vanishing old protagonist. After Karamakate’s disappearance, the white scientist becomes the new shaman, bringing the knowledge of the rainforest (people) to everyone and proving that the rainforest might indeed be “global property,” thus everyone’s asset to protect. But exploiting or protecting the rainforest because of selfish reasons is not the way forward. White people can help save the rainforest, become eco-elders in their respective home countries, but it is neither their space nor their prerogative to leave a footprint behind in an Indigenous environment—no matter their age.

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REFERENCES Alston, Vermonja R. 2016. “Environment.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David Pellow, 93–96. New York: New York University Press. Davidov, Veronica. 2013. “Amazonia as Pharmacopia.” Critique of Anthropology 33, no. 3: 243–262. Fletcher, Judith. 2019. Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture. The Backward Gaze. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frumkin, Howard, Linda Fried, and Rick Moody. 2012. “Aging, Climate Change, and Legacy Thinking.” American Journal of Public Health 102, no. 8: 1434–1438. Guerre, Ciro, director. El Abrazo de la Serpiente. Buffalo Films, 2015. 2hrs., 5 min. DVD. Howkins, Adrian. 2010. “Appropriating Space: Antarctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism.” In Making Settler Colonial Space. Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, edited by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, 29–52. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hughey, Matthew W. 2014. The White Savior Film. Content, Critics, and Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hunter, Elizabeth G., and Graham D. Rowles. 2005. “Leaving a Legacy: Toward a Typology.” Journal of Aging Studies 19: 327–347. Hutchison, Elizabeth D. 2019. Dimensions of Human Behavior. The Changing Life Course, 6th edition. Los Angeles: SAGE. Juniper, Tony. 2018. Rainforest. Dispatches from Earth’s Most Vital Frontlines. London: Profile Books. Kane, Rosalie A. 1996. “From Generation to Generation: Thoughts on Legacy.” Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging 20, no. 3: 5–9. Lupano, Wilfrid, and Paul Cauuet. 2020. Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée. Paris: Dargaud. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moody, Harry (Rick). 2009. “Eco-Elders: Legacy and Environmental Advocacy.” Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging 33, no. 4: 70–74. Nyambi, Oliver, and Tendai Mangena. 2016. “The Way We Name Now: Postcolonial Perspectives from Southern Africa.” In The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa, edited by Oliver Nyambi, Tendai Mangena, and Charles Pfukwa, 1–17. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Patchett, Ann. 2012. State of Wonder. London: Bloomsbury. Phillips, Martin, and Tim Mighall. 2013. Society and Exploitation Through Nature. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. Riempp, Eva. 2016. “The New Wild West? Gold Rush in the Rainforest of Guyana and Suriname.” Comparative Indigenous Studies 268: 113–139. Ryber-Webster, Stephanie, and J. Rosie Tighe. 2019. “The Legacy of Legacy Cities.” In Legacy Cities Amid Decline and Revival, edited by J. Rosie Tighe and Stephanie Ryberg-Webster, 3–17. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Slater, Candace. 2004. “Marketing the ‘Rain Forest’: Raw Vanilla Fragrance and the Ongoing Transformation of the Jungle.” Cultural Geographies 11: 165–180. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Trimm, Ryan. 2017. Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain. New York: Routledge. Wisker, Gina. 2017. “Imagining Beyond Extinctathon: Indigenous Knowledge, Survival, Speculation—Margaret Atwood’s and Ann Patchett’s Eco-Gothic.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 11, no. 3: 412–431.

Chapter Three

“Zoological Outcasts” and the Aging Other‌‌ in Jean Rhys’s Late Short Stories Jade E. French

A cultural aversion to animals considered pests often causes an effective response in humans, provoking something of an irrational fear that must be (sometimes literally) squashed and destroyed (McTier 2013, 37). In this chapter, I close read late short stories by Jean Rhys that use references to animals considered vermin to analyze how cultural fears of aging are interconnected with fears of unseen creatures. As Lucinda Cole (2016) notes, even in animal studies, insects, rodents, and bugs have often been overlooked in favor of mammals considered “charismatic megafauna” (6).1 In the short stories under discussion, I liken Cole’s “zoological outcasts” (7) to the Rhysian outcast, who is gendered as well as acutely aware of their age and social position, race, and class. Rhys’s heroines often identify with the non-human (be those animals, objects, and even ghosts) as a way of escaping their own damaged psychological states and endangered bodies (Johnson 2015, 209). As a negotiation between the human and non-human, Rhys exploits the binary that sees insects and rodents viewed by the characters as extreme outsider others to the human. Yet, even as a binary is established, these human and non-human relationships permeate one another’s supposed boundaries. In this chapter, I thus explore how Rhys finds a fluid exchange between human and animal characteristics that serve to emphasize the age differences in her characters and their self-comprehension of aging. Rhys’s work “demands to be part of an eco-critical project” (Gildersleeve 2011, 32). For Rhys, the natural world is never an uncomplicated or innocent setting, but oftentimes can be as “uncontrollable and untamed and 57

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unknowable” as the inner psychological motives of her subjects “own emotional landscapes” (Savory 2015, 103). Kelly Sultzbach in Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination (2016) dispels the dualism of modern urbanization and Romantic pastoral by outlining how modernists were always concerned with the “slippery exchanges of human, nature and animal” (3). As a modernist author, Rhys layers the experiences of the human and non-human, loosening their supposed differences to demonstrate how her characters experience both alienation and identification with the pests or vermin that populate their surroundings. Philip Armstrong (2008) concedes that in literature, authors can only ever represent animals “through the mediation of cultural encoding” (2). However, following the “tracks left by animals in texts” can help us understand the potency of these cultural configurations between the human and non-human (Armstrong 2008, 3). Jonathan Goldman (2011) gives one example of these “tracks” in Rhys’s texts, where her interest in animal life acts as a study in contrasts: where Rhys’s outcast protagonists are subjugated by gossip, control, and surveillance, animals achieve a type of prosaic subjection that might be enviable. In this chapter, I examine instances of zoomorphism, which codes human behavior in animal terms, as well as track the symbolic resonance of vermin to examine how Rhys culturally configures insects and rodents in relation to her aging, outcast protagonists. In Rhys’s work, non-human animals and objects often signal a breakdown between protagonist and environment. Yet, it is often aging that signals a breakdown between the protagonist and self. Indeed, the aging process has been identified as a key contribution to the feelings of alienation experienced by her characters (Hagley 1988). As Cynthia Port (2001) suggests, Rhys’s early fiction grapples with an internalized ageism, where a woman turning thirty marks not only the end of youth but of social capital. Rhys’s characters have a deep “dread of female aging” that is presented as an “ongoing investment in a speculation that will inevitably lose value over time” (Port 2001, 207). Rhys’s exploration of aging is also, I suggest in this chapter, compounded by the animal life that undergirds the city and the village; the unseen, uncanny creatures that seemingly lurk in silence, at once known to exist but repressed, ignored, and sometimes culled by an unthinking human-life above ground. Often older women are compared to insects and rats, taking on qualities that suggest they should be hidden away or even, in the most extreme case, destroyed. If in Rhys’s 1930s fiction “spatial and environmental terms [. . .] call attention to the unjust power relations that besiege her characters” (Kalaidjian 2020, 140) then, I suggest, by her late short stories, these terms are heightened to magnify and examine her characters’ fears of aging and complicated intergenerational power relations. In these short stories, the characters’ fears of aging relate to abjection in the Kristevean sense, by which a breakdown occurs between the self and



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other resulting in deep feelings of disgust. For Kristeva (1982), abjection is a “more violent” (14) version of uncanniness that binds the self to something we seek to ignore: “[Abjection] is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object” (13). For Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs (2011), the association of abjection with aging arises from a perceived loss of agency, self-control, and social agency that leads individuals to “deny, ignore or reject” embodied realities (141). Rhys purposefully uses verminous creatures (associated with a disruption of identity and social order) to show what her characters “permanently thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva 1982, 12). In Rhys’s short stories, I suggest the characters’ fears of aging lead them to project the abject onto the zoomorphic representations that occur in each text so that they might ignore and reject the aging subject. I begin this chapter with examples of the ways Rhys uses animal characteristics, particularly animals considered vermin, to describe older women and their relational networks. Although often read as simply signaling abjection, I suggest that these moments of transformation also highlight the complex, social nexus that these women inhabit. In three short stories—“From a French Prison” ([1927] 2007a), “The Insect World” ([1976] 1996), and “A Solid House” ([1963] 2007b)—descriptions of humans with animal traits indicate a breakdown of social life. In the second half of the chapter, I close read “Sleep It Off, Lady,” ([1972] 2007c) in detail as an example of how intergenerational friction between the narrator, Miss Verney, an older woman, and Deena, a young child, is heightened by the presence of an invisible rodent. In this story, I suggest musophobia (a fear of rats) is linked to gerascophobia (a fear of growing older) in ways that reinforce negative binaries between human and non-human, younger adults, and older adults. RHYSIAN OUTCAST: ZOOMORPHIC OLDER WOMEN Throughout her short stories and novels, Rhys often uses anthropomorphism to animate non-human animals, objects, and even ghosts with human characteristics (Talviste 2019; Johnson 2015; Konzett 2002). In the face of such extreme antagonism, Rhys’s heroines engage in an “outsourcing of identity” to the non-human, that push at the boundaries of embodiment (Johnson 2015, 209). This exteriorizing anthropomorphism serves to emphasize the interior feelings and states of being experienced by the Rhysian outcast, women who are cruelly mistreated by others and who experience intense loneliness, exile, and poverty. In this section, though, I would like to explore where Rhys also reverses this process, using zoomorphism—animating humans with animal characteristics. Goldman (2011) suggests that Rhys specifically uses vermin

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to “cast characters as abject” (154) and that this abjection serves to highlight how characters exist outside of normative social systems. Beyond signifying abjection, though, Rhys’s verminous evocations broaden the scope from individual cruelty between characters to the systemic issues that underpin such hostility. As Cole (2016) reminds us, the term vermin refers neither to a biological classification nor to genetic similarities of the animals linked under its umbrella. These animals are instead connected through what they represent, an “often unstable nexus of traits: usually small, always vile, and, in large numbers, noxious and even dangerous to agricultural and socio-political orders” (1). The danger to the socio-political order in Rhys’s texts is often not the outsider, but those who reject her at a level of social dysfunction. Animals considered vermin have long been used in literature to depict slippery representation of power imbalance and social dysfunction. Perhaps the most famous human-vermin exchange is Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis (1915), who awakens one morning to find he has transformed into a monstrous insect. The transformation sees Samsa become a “living metaphor of his life as a human” and, in becoming a trope, he is representative of the parasitical human relationships explored in the novel (Ortiz-Robles 2016, 1–2). The Metamorphosis demonstrates how the more unhuman Gregor seems, the more inhuman his family’s behavior appears (Hollingsworth 2001, 198). In Rhys’s early novel Voyage in the Dark, she similarly uses insect imagery to signal inhumane and parasitical human relationships, as the protagonist’s fear of her own animality becomes a signifier of class conflict (Adkins 2016, 7–29). Anna, the protagonist, rejects the notion of aligning herself with the white, working-class people she sees as “swarm[ing] like woodlice when you push a stick into a woodlice-nest” (Rhys 2000a, 7). Here humans turn into a swarm, morphing into a metaphor of threat and destabilization. In these examples of Rhys and Kafka, the insects and vermin stand in for deeper held misgivings about the human species, the imbalances of power, and an inhumanity between protagonist and social world. An early short story, “From A French Prison,” purposefully uses a zoomorphic literary device to demonstrate hierarchical structures within an institution. Rhys (2017a) casts her eye over a crowd gathered on the prison’s visiting day, where “prisoners may speak to their friends through a grating for a quarter of an hour” (10). Throughout the story, the cast of characters held— in a queue by the row of visiting boxes like a holding pen—are compared to animals. The voices coming out of the visitors’ telephone meld together and highlight the homogeneity of the crowd, they become insectoid as “a monotonous and never-ending buzz” (11). The prison warden sitting in the shadows “like a huge spider—a bloated, hairy insect born of the darkness and of the dank smell” (11) becomes the ultimate watchman, as the spider’s many eyes and legs poised in the dark turns the guard into a living panopticon,



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observing all elements of the queue without them knowing quite if they are being observed. Finally, when the warden is challenged by two young women (who call him a dirty cop) “[t]he queues looked frightened but pleased: an old woman like a rat huddled against the wall and chuckled” (11). Similar to Kafka’s Samsa, the old woman momentarily turns into a monstrous creature. Her agency is glimpsed as she laughs in approval at the young women, but she is so marginalized from the action that she also cleaves to the prison walls. We do not see her again. At the top of the power structure sits the guard and at the bottom, a forgotten old woman. For Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (2009), these animal traits and social types serve to emphasize the story’s central alienation, that of the old man and small child who open the story. Rhys paints the old man as a rather pitiable figure, with “gentle, regular features,” “miserably clothed” (10) who holds onto the “matchlike” boy (10), they are painted as innocent and naïve compared to the prison’s knowing regulars; they cannot speak French and do not know how to orientate the queue. As they are kicked out, the old man bends his head and mutters to himself as we get a glimpse of one final transformation. The little boy both begins to take “tiny little trotting steps” (12) as simultaneously “[h]is mouth drooped” (12). In these actions, the child mimics the old man’s demeanor, bending towards the floor and trotting—doglike—to keep up with a new, adult understanding of the world. In these zoomorphic exchanges, humans take on animal qualities that underscore the power relations in the institution, highlighting hierarchies in the micro-social world of the prison. In “The Insect World,” a young protagonist, Audrey, begins to hallucinate that the humans on the London Underground are transforming into insects as she deals with a deep fear of aging. First, as she changes tubes at King’s Cross, the innocuous seeming passengers of the London Underground suddenly “looked like very large insects. No, they didn’t look [sic] like large insects: they were insects” (Rhys 1996, 1565). In Poetics of the Hive, Cristopher Hollingsworth explores the meanings of “viewing human collectives as an insect society,” which allows an individual to view humanity from a distance but to also “conceive of this whole as philosophically different from ourselves” (Hollingsworth 2001, 3). As Audrey begins to increasingly align the humans on the Tube with the insects in the book, this act “marks her serious alienation from human beings” (Savory 2015, 102) particularly as humans developed an “instinctive hatred of insects and belief that they will always be [. . .] the enemy of mankind” (McTier 2013, 40). Rhys uses the insects as a distancing tool, showing Audrey’s split self is increasingly at odds with her surroundings as the familiar turns unfamiliar and sets her apart from the collective. Second, Audrey imagines the sand fleas laying eggs inside people, distressed at the idea that “there you were—infected—and not knowing a thing about it” (1564). That in Rhys’s short story the human element is

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figured as both the insect and the host suggests that infection is self-inflicted, and that mankind’s biggest enemy is itself alongside the hidden horrors, prejudices, and violence that are often ignored. One element Audrey does not consider, though, is her own capacity for violence and her prejudice, particularly against older women. Audrey’s fear of aging acts in the same way as the termites and jiggers, becoming a buried belief that resides deep within, waiting to resurface at the first sign of uncanny recognition. It might be said that Audrey has an internalized fear or anxiety of aging (Brunton and Scott 2015; Lynch 2000), and as she imagines the jigger laying eggs in her fellow travelers, she notices an older woman standing in front of her. In doing so, Audrey’s hidden fears about the insects are transposed into thought, as Rhys tells us: “It was funny how she hated women like that [. . .] Elderly women ought to stay at home. They oughtn’t to walk about. Depressing people!” (1564). The older woman is “jutting out [. . .] Standing right in the middle, instead of in line” (1564) and emerges from the imagined swarm of insect/humans to become a singular insect/individual. In Hollingsworth’s study of insects as literary metaphors, he notes it is the individual bug that is particularly “psychoanalytically potent [. . .] for arousing an apprehension of what we call the uncanny” (Hollingsworth 2001, 191). The isolated insect (vulnerable, perhaps ready to be squashed) “much more easily and intensely evokes both our pity and our cruelty, feelings we similarly find—or discover missing in ourselves” (Hollingsworth 2001, 196). Audrey’s capacity for cruelty is triggered as she “hardly blame[s] the service girl, galloping up in a hurry, for giving her a good shove and saying under her breath ‘Oh get out of the way!’” (1565). The galloping service girl has enough social horsepower to knock the older woman, who begins to fall. Throughout the story, to retain her own sense of self, Audrey consciously reminds herself she is younger compared to the “Old Things” (1564) that shop in the same department store. She again tries to distance herself from the older woman who is knocked over, noting disparagingly her “dank hair and mean-looking clothes” (1565), despite Audrey herself earlier being forced to purchase an “enormous [and] shapeless” (1564) dress by an even younger shop assistant. The younger shop assistant judging Audrey as she judges older women suggests age-related prejudice is relative. However, it is not Audrey’s own embodied experience in the dress shop but the rather older woman’s fall that prompts a reckoning with the aging experience that Audrey attempts to separate herself from throughout the story. Distrust between generations is also explored in Rhys’s (2017b) short story “A Solid House.” The lodging house becomes a closed environment where a younger woman, Teresa, and an older woman, Miss Spearman, and other aging characters such as Captain Roper, are forced to share the same space.



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The relationship between Teresa and Miss Spearman appears cordial on the surface, as they tackle the realities of living through the blitz. The story opens with the two characters in the cellar, sheltering during an air-raid: “Pressed flat against the cellar wall, they listened to the inexorable throbbings of the planes. And above them the house waited, its long, gloomy passages full of echoes, shadows, creaking—rats, perhaps” (221). The flickering presence of the rat signals a shift in the normal order of things. The women are in the cellar, minimizing their presence as they lie flat against the wall, almost becoming part of the structure like the old woman “From a French Prison.” As they press against wall, they can feel the inescapable “throbbings” of the planes, which turn into living creatures through the dull sound of an unrelenting pulse. In the cellar, the house looms above. Devoid of human presence, the passages echo and creak—it is now the domain of the rats. Teresa’s discontented thoughts are woven through the action, echoing, and reverberating like the gloomy, creaking passages above her. The rats appear only briefly, and then only as a disconsolate possibility. As Teresa imagines a game of hide-and-seek in another basement, in her childhood, she wonders: “Why leave this good, this perfectly safe, windowless cellar” (222). The house purports to be solid but it is the cellar that represents true stability. This opening inversion of the women occupying the cellar, and the rats occupying the house, echoes the implicit power imbalances that are presented through the story. These intergenerational power imbalances are again indicated through zoomorphic transformations. Miss Spearman is seemingly a respectable landlady, which Sylvie Maurel (1998) reminds us is “a species which [Rhys] is always highly suspicious of” (66). Rhys describes the older woman in birdlike and feline terms, embodying both the predator and the prey: “Her arms were thin as drumsticks, her chest bony, her hair soft as cat’s fur” (221). Although outwardly innocuous, there is something brittle beneath Miss Spearman’s downy exterior. Maurel suggests this story has an underpinning of hidden violence that is always threatening to spill out into the rest of the house. Miss Spearman presents herself as someone doing good in the world—she speaks of hiring her cleaning lady, Nelly, out of “love” and betterment for the working class. Her acts of charity belie her bias. When she mentions checking in on an older, blind woman, Teresa notes “She said the words ‘old lady’ in a patronizing, pitying and scornful tone” (224). Miss Spearman has negotiated some power for herself by being relatively not-as-old as those she purports to help as well as manipulating a younger, more naïve, Teresa. Indeed, Miss Spearman is equally as dismissive of the younger generation, as she notes “[a] lot of people are feeling [the blitz] now [. . .]. Of course, not these young heartless people” (228) who she thinks do not feel the effects of the war as acutely as she does. Teresa, though, counteracts this by asking: “Do you think

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young people are heartless? Aren’t old people heartless? And people who are getting old—aren’t they heartless too?” (228). For Teresa, heartlessness occurs across the life span and is not only a factor of youth. Teresa becomes increasingly aware that small transactions and power plays are taking place all the time between women on the home front at all ages. Underlying the judgmental comments by Miss Spearman is a rejection of interdependence between people, animals, and things. For the landlady, it has become necessary during the blitz to be an individual. Rhys momentarily zooms out from the conversation, switching from the interior to an exterior focus on a “ginger cat sat staring at birds. You could see his neat paw-marks in the damp mould” (228). The juxtaposition recalls Miss Spearman, whose catlike nature toys with Teresa despite the landlady having a “neat” or polite appearance. As Miss Spearman wonders if people will be expected to burrow underground considering the blitz, Teresa thinks, “[d]on’t worry, everything will survive somewhere—the polished floors, the bowls of roses, the scented hair, the painted nails. Some will sink, but others will swim” (227). The increasing inhumanity of the human world is indicated by the privileging of luxuries—roses, perfume, nail varnish—above care for one another. The second half of the story reveals a room in the house that holds such luxuries, with “[g]old brocade curtains,” “glass paperweights,” and “white jade vases” (233) dotted around the room. Most strikingly, though, Miss Spearman makes a point to show Teresa four taxidermized “stuffed birds” saying “[a]ren’t they beautiful?” (232). The power relations between them feel even more menacing, as it is revealed Miss Spearman’s domain is one in which the symbolic survivalist instinct associated with vermin surfaces will challenge Teresea to either sink or swim. In these examples of the Rhysian outcast and their zoological counterparts, human and non-human binaries and intergenerational power dynamics abound. If vermin “trouble human exceptionalism and blur species boundaries” (Keiser 2017), then the presence of rats and insects in these short stories serve to heighten the breakdown in the human world when such exceptionalism is proven to be at best, hollow, and at worst, violent and heartless. Species boundaries are overtly blurred in Audrey’s exterminating instinct in “The Insect World” where the older woman becomes conflated with a singular flea. In “From a French Prison” the most marginalized character—the old woman—is briefly brought into view as a rat. On the other hand, some older women seek their power back through zoomorphic metaphors, like Miss Spearman who becomes both prey and predator as she seeks stability through wartime profiteering. Furthermore, the Rhysian outcast is always judged based on her relative age, whether that is Audrey fearing turning thirty or the middle-aged Miss Spearman’s disdain for both her “old lady” and the heartless young. Beneath these seemingly straightforward binaries of human/



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animal or younger/older lie complicated and messy relationships exacerbated by overarching social and political forces. These forces might be seen in the prison’s orderly queue overseen by the spiderish warden, and in Audrey and Teresa holding on to their sanity under blitz conditions. In the next section, I examine in more detail how the binaries between youth and age are further destabilized by the presence of an invisible rat. “SLEEP IT OFF, LADY”: THE SUPER RAT AND COMMUNITY BREAKDOWN The final years of Rhys’s life were spent in Cheriton Fitzpaine cottage, in Devon. This period was commented on by herself as a period of isolation, due to a prolonged absence from her previous literary circles. Rhys wrote about her ambivalences about the rural remoteness she experienced in Devon. At first, Rhys reported that she enjoyed the village and being surrounded by quintessential bucolic English countryside, noting in particular the cows outside her window, yet this pastoral idyll soon dissipated (Pizzichini 2010). Now, Rhys complains, the cows break into her garden, and she becomes increasingly frustrated with the farmer, pitting herself against him as he refuses to put up a fence. Here, the natural world annexes her domestic space, showing scant respect for the human demarcations put in place. Rhys’s domestic space is further interrupted by the presence of rodents. In a letter, Rhys (1995) writes: . . . [T]here are alarming sounds from above where the hot water pipes are (Things [sic] larger than mice?) But I pretend not to hear them. Altogether this is a rather nightmarish place and why it should have been chosen as a refuge I do not know. . . . but you see I am even more terrified of landladies (lords) that [sic] I am of mice or solitude. (246–247; italics in original)

In Rhys’s house, she pretends not to hear the mice and rats that rattle around and opts instead to use them as psychological material for an autobiographical exploration of her village life, ironically turning any expectations of a pastoral idyll into a “nightmarish place.” It is a setting that allowed Rhys to explore in more depth the relationship between abjection, ageism, and animals, particularly in the short story “Sleep It Off, Lady.” “Sleep It Off, Lady” is set in a small, rural village not unlike Cheriton Fitzpaine. Throughout the story Miss Verney is checked in on by various neighbors including a handyman called Tom and a cleaner, Mrs. Randolph, who assist her with everyday tasks. Although independent, Miss Verney lives alone in a cottage that is in various states of disrepair, which requires

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help and upkeep from her neighbors. These interactions build a dismissive dynamic between Miss Verney and her neighbors, as they become indifferent to one another even when small acts of kindness occur. While it seems to be a cohesive rural community, in this short story the dynamic landscapes of change experienced in later life play out on a small stage—primarily in Miss Verney’s house and shed—and end with a significant intergenerational breakdown between Miss Verney, a child, and the community. In the opening of the story a conversation between Miss Verney and a neighbor on the nature of death signals that Miss Verney is seen as different from the others in the village because of her age: “You know, Letty, I’ve been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.” “No dear,” said Mrs. Baker. “It isn’t strange at all. It’s quite natural. We old people are rather like children, we live in the present as a rule. A merciful dispensation of providence.” . . . Mrs. Baker said ‘we old people’ quite kindly, but could not help knowing that while she herself was only sixty-three and might, with any luck, see many a summer . . . Miss Verney, certainly well over seventy, could hardly hope of anything of the sort.” (Rhys 2017c, 360)

Mrs. Baker repeats overused tropes about aging, suggesting older people are childlike and ruled by presentism, thus revealing her ageist attitude to Miss Verney. Mrs. Baker, at sixty-three, feels comparably youthful, and thus claims her superiority, much like Miss Spearman in “A Solid House.” Mrs. Baker reasons Miss Verney being “well over seventy” is saddled with a foreshortened future and, as such, her ruminations on death are to be expected. Mrs. Baker hides these views from Miss Verney, and this covert judgment is one of many that give a glimpse not only of how the community sidelines the older woman but also how they hide their own fears of aging from themselves. Throughout the story, the main symbol of Miss Verney’s ruminations on dying is a large garden shed, which ruins the view from her window. This “hateful shed” is a huge, cavernous “waste of space” (360), falling apart with flaking paint, a broken roof, and an assortment of broken furniture inside. After consulting numerous builders, she is told the shed is too big to be removed, which leaves her feeling “so old, lonely and helpless” (362). The shed magnifies Miss Verney’s isolation, a void of space crammed with broken objects that mirror back in their dilapidated state her state of collapse as she breaks down crying. She dreams the shed is “a very smart, shiny, dark blue coffin picked out in white” (362) and fears that the shed will outlast her, that “[l]ong after she was dead and her cottage had vanished [the shed] would survive” (362). The shed has become a site of death, burial, and tribute, coaxing



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out of Miss Verney a begrudging acceptance as she wonders if she should paint the shed white to improve (and perhaps purify) it. This momentary respite is punctured though as, in a moment of almost divine intervention, “the sun shone through a chink in the wall” and illuminates “a large rat” (363). The illuminated rat becomes a grim reaper figure, the guardian of the shed/coffin that flickers into view as a living memento mori for Miss Verney. The rat that haunts Miss Verney takes on epic proportions morphing from a “large rat” into a “huge rat” before disproportionately becoming a “Super Rat” (363–364). Rhys’s depiction of vermin, particularly in her late work, has been read as revealing her interest in exploring how her protagonists exist outside of social systems whereby “unnamable abjection is accompanied by an exploration of anonymity” (Goldman 2011, 135). The fear and disgust Miss Verney feels towards the rat is not unsurprising, considering a longstanding ratphobia that has demonized the creature in modern literature.2 In “Sleep It Off, Lady,” the rat similarly “function[s] as [an] image of menace, harm and predation” (Savory 2015, 102). Miss Verney no longer feels at home, worrying “I can’t stay alone in this place, not with that monster a few yards away” (365). The fear of the rat becomes linked to a general gerascophobia that flows through the village. On the surface, in Rhys’s work rats are often hidden and invisible creatures that serve to underline the abjection, loneliness, and isolation of her characters.3 In “Let Them Call It Jazz” (1962), the protagonist, Selina, wonders why shadows are being cast in an otherwise empty room. When she enters the cellar she finds, much like Miss Verney’s shed, it is “full of old boards and broken-up furniture,” which come to embody Selina’s exhaustion and make her feel “tired like old woman [sic]” (159). Behind these items she “see[s] a big rat there one day” (160) revealing just what is creating the shadows in the empty room. The rats flicker into view for only a moment and indicate the deeper, hidden psychological concerns of their protagonists. These rats symbolize that which the protagonist does not want to see, even though their imperceptible presence might make them feel anxious, terrified, or even prematurely aged. The modernist rat, as Maud Ellman understands it, signifies “[t]he abject [. . .] which culture casts away in order to determine what is not itself, through rituals such as burning, burial, and exorcism” (2010, 15). Miss Verney is unable to destroy neither shed nor rat, “proving that the abject always springs back” (Ellman 2010, 15) and cannot be easily ignored. Miss Verney is cast from the opening as an aging subject through the eyes of Mrs. Baker. Other neighbors begin to also deny and reject Miss Verney’s calls for help; first it is the builders who refuse to take down the shed. Next, the handyman, Tom, offers to exterminate the rat, telling her, “I put down enough stuff to kill a dozen rats” (364). But when Miss Verney protests it is still there, he alludes to her drinking, asking, “Are you sure it wasn’t a pink

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rat?” (364) and shaming her into silence. Jenny Bavidge (2010) describes how rats are emblems of “shameful domestic anxieties” (106) and for Miss Verney the presence of the rat not only heightens her social dislocation but also her drinking habits. She cannot trust another neighbor who cleans for her, Mrs. Randolph, because she is a gossip who “wouldn’t be able to resist telling her cronies about the giant, almost certainly imaginary, rat terrorizing her employer” (365). As the neighbors begin to doubt Miss Verney, she begins to doubt herself. The neighbors attempt to cast away, ignore, and diminish both Miss Verney, as abject aging subject, and the modernist Super Rat, as abject representation of her psyche. The rat acts as a wedge that pushes her neighbors further outside of her sphere. By refusing to see the rat they refuse to see Miss Verney’s increasing alienation. In a final act of intergenerational breakdown, it is not the rat but rather a “bovine child” that marks the completion of Miss Verney’s isolation. Deena, a young girl, is described like a timid animal as she “advanced cautiously” (370) and stands with “an expressionless face” (370). Her cow-like mannerisms indicate she is part of the herd, a sentiment that is reinforced as she neglects to help Miss Verney and instead reflects her mother’s contempt, saying “Everybody knows that you shut yourself up to get drunk. People can hear you falling about. ‘She ought to take more water with it,’ my mum says. Sleep it off, lady, said this horrible child, skipping away” (370). Comparing Rhys’s earlier stories in the collection with the latter, Thomas Staley suggests that Rhys’s collections present the uncanny way “the very old and very young share the same vulnerability,” which often leads to a shared sense of exclusion and allows them to penetrate the “hypocrisy and prejudice which society erects to protect itself” (1979, 127). Yet, in “Sleep It Off, Lady,” this shared outcast status does little to engender intergenerational solidarity. Through Deena’s eyes, we see that Miss Verney has been thoroughly judged and found wanting by her neighbors. After Deena skips away, Miss Verney has only her own anxieties to reckon with, as she begins to remember “her fear of the rat” and “strained her eyes to see into the corner where it would certainly appear” (370) from the abandoned paraphilia that lines the shed. Death approaches, “[s]o Miss Verney waited in the darkness for the Super Rat” (370–371). The neighbors only resurface the next day as “the postman [. . .] found her” (371), he tries to get her to drink some whiskey but it dribbles down her face. This stark finale reflects the total breakdown in relationships between Miss Verney and her community. As Maurel suggests, this breakdown is partly because “her voice, unheeded or unheard, exposed to social scorn, does not matter, and because social representations of the aged are more powerful than their own voices” (2020, 144). Yet, Miss Verney also has a classist view of her neighbors and has always shunned Deena, “cross[ing] over the road to avoid her” (367). Miss Verney views her neighbors as



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gossiping employees rather than a shared community, and in turn they view her (as reported by Deena) as “stuck up” (370). Goldman suggests that Miss Verney dies because “society valued her as less than vermin” (2011, 155). Even more so, though, in dying, Miss Verney becomes an uneasy, uncanny intergenerational mirror as she reflects to the community their hidden fears, hypocrisies, and judgements. The doctor states Miss Verney’s cause of death is a “heart condition” (371), perhaps reminding us of Teresa’s proclamation of heartlessness across the generations in “A Solid House.” It is ultimately a lack of love and care that leaves Miss Verney at the mercy of the Super Rat. As Eric Santner (2009) suggests, to take part in a “new ethics of neighbor love” we must be able to embrace the “creaturely” or uncanny elements of one another, which “locates our responsibility in our capacity to elaborate forms of solidarity with this creaturely expressivity that makes the other strange not only to me but also to him or herself” (Santner 2009, xiii). Rather than an attempt to dispel the dualisms of the human and non-human, this way of circumnavigating that which we would rather avoid (in this short story, the experience of aging and isolation) becomes “a specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms” (Santner 2009, xix). The invisible Super Rat in Rhys’s story represents a total breakdown of community compassion, as various neighbors attempt to destroy or dispel the rat (Tom with poison, Mrs. Randolph with heavy stones) rather than accepting it, and by extension Miss Verney’s version of events and her experiences as an older woman. By examining the human/non-human binary, Rhys uses hidden creatures to demonstrate a larger picture of social dysfunction. It is not the individual human or animal that is abject, but the way in which they are culturally and socially positioned. In “From a French Prison,” an old woman’s rattish appearance is a momentary monstrous transformation that serves to underscore the horror of the prison that corrupts the young boy. In “The Insect World,” the motif of the London Underground passengers turning into a swarm of sandfleas serves to highlight the old woman who juts out from the crowd, and prompts Audrey into a state of terror. In “A Solid House” and “Let Them Call It Jazz,” the fleeting sounds and shadows of rats in the basements and houses signify the isolation and exhaustion of the protagonists, underscored by predatory intergenerational dynamics. The Rhysian outcast finds moments where she is aligned to insects or rodents, those “zoological outcasts” (Cole 2016, 7) who indicate the impacts of abjection, loneliness, and marginalization on the protagonists’ psyche. It is in “Sleep It Off, Lady” that we find the most sustained comparison between the older outsider and the destabilizing force of the rodent. As Miss Verney confronts her fear of dying, the Super Rat looms large in her imagination and acts as conduit towards her final act of total isolation. As the community collectively decided this is an

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imagined rat—and therefore manages to avoid their collective fear of aging and abjection—Miss Verney also becomes easy to dismiss, ignore, and reject even as these actions lead to damaging consequences. Through the zoological outcast, Rhys uses the long-standing binary between human and non-human to parallel ageist attitudes to anthropocentric tropes and in doing so reveals the ultimately inhuman behavior that underpins both. NOTES 1. For example, Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2008) purposefully “leave[s] unexplained the implicit category of vermin” (288) to question the relationship between cat and rodent, but only discusses them in relation to the implications of adopting feral kittens into the domestic space. 2. For example, in George Orwell’s 1984 (1991) the ominous Room 101 confronts Winston with rats, a symbol of his deepest fear; T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land (2019) makes reference to rat’s alley, which conjures up the terror of the trenches of World War I; and in Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague (2002) the presence of dead rats spreads panic and disease in a community. 3. Rhys elsewhere aligns the image of the rat with a sense of menace: in the unfinished autobiography Smile, Please she notes a doomed love affair that takes place in a theatre where “[t]here were supposed to be rats in the dressing-room but I never saw one” (Rhys 2016, 67), and in Wide Sargasso Sea the protagonist Antoinette hallucinates “two enormous rats” that terrify her as she enters into a mirroring trance “staring at those rats and the rats quite still, staring at [her]” (Rhys 2000b, 50).

REFERENCES Adkins, Peter. 2016. “Beastly Lives: Animality and Postcolonial Embodiment in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.” Litterae Mentis: A Journal of Literary Studies 3, 7–29. Armstrong, Philip. 2008. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Bavidge, Jenny. 2010. “Rats, Floods and Flowers: London’s Gothicized Nature.” In London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination, edited by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard, 103–120. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Brunton, Robyn J., and Greg Scott. 2015. “Do We Fear Aging? A Multidimensional Approach to Aging Anxiety.” Educational Gerontology 41, no. 11 (November): 786–799. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/03601277​.2015​.1050870. Camus, Albert. 2002. The Plague. London: Penguin Modern Classics. Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine. 2009. “Finding a Voice: Women Writing the Short Story (to 1945).” In A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story, edited by Cheryl



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Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm, 96–113. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https:​ //​doi​.org​/10​.1002​/9781444304770​.ch7. Cole, Lucinda. 2016. Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eliot, T. S. 2019. The Waste Land. London: Faber and Faber. Ellmann, Maud. 2010. The Nets of Modernism: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. 2011. “Ageing Abjection and Embodiment in the Fourth Age.” Journal of Aging Studies 25, no. 2 (April): 135–142. doi:10.1016/j. jaging.2010.08.018. Gildersleeve, Jessica. 2011. “Jean Rhys’s Tropographies: Unmappable Identity and the Tropical Landscape in Wide Sargasso Sea and Selected Short Fiction.” ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 10 (December). https:​//​doi​.org​/10​ .25120​/etropic​.10​.0​.2011​.3403. Goldman, Jonathan L. 2011. Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hagley, Carol R. 1988. “Aging in the Fiction of Jean Rhys.” World Literature Written in English 28, no. 1: 115–125. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/17449858808589050. Hollingsworth, Cristopher. 2001. Poetics of the Hive: Insect Metaphor in Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Johnson, Erica L. 2015. “‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys’s Posthuman Imaginary.” In Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, by Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran, 209–227. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1515​ /9781474402200–014. Kafka, Franz. 2019. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. London: Penguin Classics. Kalaidjian, Andrew. 2020. Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keiser, Jess. 2017. “Humans, Parasites, and Other Vermin.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 58. Konzett, Delia Caparoso. 2002. “White Mythologies: Jean Rhys’s Aesthetics of Posthumanism.” In Ethnic Modernisms, by Delia Caparoso Konzett, 127–166. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1057​/9780230107533​_4 Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Lynch, Scott M. 2000. “Measurement and Prediction of Aging Anxiety.” Research on Aging 22, no. 5: 533–558. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0164027500225004. Maurel, Sylvie. 1998. Jean Rhys. Red Globe Press London. https:​//​link​.springer​.com​ /book​/10​.1007​/978​-1​-349​-27006​-4. ———. 2020. “Inaudible Voices in Sleep It Off Lady.” Women: A Cultural Review 31, no. 2 (April): 138–148. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/09574042​.2020​.1759604. McTier, Rosemary Scanlon. 2013. “An Insect View of Its Plain”: Insects, Nature and God in Thoreau, Dickinson and Muir. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., Publishers.

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Ortiz-Robles, Mario. 2016. Literature and Animal Studies. Literature and Contemporary Thought. London: Routledge. Orwell, George. 1991. 1984. London: Penguin. Pizzichini, Lilian. 2010. The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys. London: Bloomsbury. Port, Cynthia. 2001. “Money, for the Night Is Coming: Gendered Economies of Aging in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys.” In Women Aging Through Literature and Experience, edited by Brian Worsfold, 99–115. Lleida: Edicions de la Universitat de Lleida. Rhys, Jean. 1995. Letters 1931–1966. London: Penguin Twentieth Century Classics. ———. 1996. “The Insect World.” In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 1561–1568. London: Norton. ———. 2000a. Voyage in the Dark. London: Penguin Modern Classics. ———. 2000b. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin Modern Classics. ———. 2016. Smile, Please. London: Penguin Modern Classics. ———. 2017a. “From a French Prison.” In The Collected Short Stories: Jean Rhys, 10–12. London: Penguin Modern Classics. ———. 2017b. “A Solid House.” In The Collected Short Stories: Jean Rhys, 211– 225. London: Penguin Modern Classics. ———. 2017c. “Sleep It Off, Lady.” In The Collected Short Stories: Jean Rhys, 360–371. London: Penguin Modern Classics. Santner, Eric L. 2009. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Savory, Elaine. 2015. “Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences.” In Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, edited by Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran, 85–106. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1515​/9781474402200–014. Staley, Thomas. 1979. Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sultzbach, Kelly Elizabeth. 2016. Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talviste, Eret. 2019. “Strange Intimacy: Affect, Embodiment, Materiality, and the Non-Human in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys.” PhD diss., Northumbria University.

Chapter Four

Embodying Age(ing) in the Non-Human World in Lorna Crozier’s Poetry Núria Mina-Riera

Contemporary Canadian writer Lorna Crozier (b. Swift Current, Saskatchewan, 1948) has advocated in her work for the need to both protect the natural environment and respect older people. These are pressing issues as, on the one hand, the environmental crisis threatens the survival of both human and non-human species on our planet. On the other hand, discrimination and prejudices towards the aged, namely ageism, is widespread in Western societies. These two concerns are often intertwined in Crozier’s poetic oeuvre, which invites a literary analysis that combines ecocritical and aging studies perspectives. In this sense, theories of embodiment, and more specifically Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, offer a productive approach, as both embodiment and abjection are major notions of both fields of study. From such a joint theoretical perspective, this paper aims at interrogating the ways in which Crozier’s poetry—especially that published since Crozier turned 60, namely upon Crozier’s entrance into young-old age—depicts human aging bodies as simultaneously affected by and affecting the natural environment. It is my contention that non-human nature plays a central role in Crozier’s metaphorical representations of older bodies. Specifically, the aged speakers’ observation of the non-human world as well as their contact with it and work in it allow them to grasp some crucial insight or wisdom about life in old age. That is to say that the teachings received from non-human nature allow the older human personae in Crozier’s poems to value old age as a meaningful stage within the life-course and, in turn, empower themselves to defy the dictates of ageism. Concurrently, the older human speakers’ interrelationships 73

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with the non-human world bespeak the need for humans to recognize the uniqueness and worth of non-human nature. THEORIES OF EMBODIMENT IN AGING STUDIES AND MATERIAL ECOCRITICISM Theorizations of embodiment can be found in both aging studies and material ecocriticism. The ensuing section summarizes the main theories of embodiment in both fields and highlights the points at which they converge. The aim is to formulate a joint theory of embodiment which allows for what could be termed an ecocritical aging analysis of not only Crozier’s late poetry but of any literary work. From an aging studies viewpoint, embodiment is defined as “the experiences in and through our aging bodies” (Hurd Clarke and Korotchenko 2011, 500). As such, embodiment not only centers on the materiality of the human body but also on both the social and personal identities and practices that the corporeality of aging encompasses (Gilleard and Higgs 2015, 17). In our Western consumerist societies, embodiment is closely related to body image, especially in the case of women (Vares 2009, 515). In this vein, the embodiment of aging into old age is often presented as a decline narrative, since old age is understood as a life stage dominated by illness and dependency (Gullette 1997). In order to avoid both looking and feeling old, self-care products, cosmetic surgery, and active lifestyles aim at extending midlife indefinitely by “masking, reversing or forestalling the signs of bodily ageing” (Marshall 2015, 213), as theorized by Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth through the concept of the mask of aging (1991). In this sense, maintaining a fit and younger bodily appearance contributes “to combat ageism and to maintain cultural [as well as social] capital based on youthfulness” (Liechty et al. 2014, 5). However, such a dominant narrative of aging as decline makes individuals solely responsible for both the appearance and health of their bodies, thus disregarding both their socioeconomic and genetic conditions. As a result, the socially-expected resistance against appearing old is not available to—or indeed desired by—all older individuals, who, carrying the supposed stigma of old age, are likely to suffer from age discrimination. Such social attitudes reveal the close connection between embodiment and identity (Twigg 2004, 65–66). Thus, exposure to ageism may become internalized from an early age, as young people “are being prepared [. . .] to relate decline to aging-into-adulthood and to expect it” (Gullette 2004). In turn, the internalization of ageism may result in functioning and health issues in later life. For instance, Becca Levy’s research found that “older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging were significantly more likely to engage in

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health practices [. . .] than were those with more negative self-perceptions of aging” (2009, 335). In order to counter aging embodiment as synonymous with decline, Linn Sandberg proposes the notion of affirmative old age. Sandberg suggests that bodily changes in old age can be understood from the perspective of “positive difference” (2013, 19). That is to say that, “the very same person who may experience his or her bodily changes as a loss and threat or challenge to subjectivity [. . .] may also experience the changes in his or her body as producing something new and unforeseen” (20), as can also be observed in Crozier’s poetry. From a material ecocriticism perspective, embodiment is regarded as a process in which the human body interacts with the material world. That is to say that the matter that forms our bodies and the matter that forms the natural world are interconnected. Accordingly, Nancy Tuana discusses the porous boundaries between the human body and the environment, which she calls “viscous porosity.” Tuana (2008) explains that “[w]hile that porosity is what allows us to flourish—as we breathe in the oxygen we need to survive and metabolize the nutrients out of which our flesh emerges—this porosity often does not discriminate against that which can kill us” (198). Likewise, Stacy Alaimo (2010) uses the term “trans-corporeality” to explain that the body is not an entity in itself but a system within systems over which we have no control (10); it is “a space of intrusion” by toxins (83) which may lead to a number of illnesses. Such an understanding of human embodiment as continuous with the non-human world encompasses what Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann term an “entanglement of agencies” (2012, 455). In other words, that “human agency [. . .] is knit together with more-than-human agency” (Tuana 2008, 196). The interactions between human and non-human bodies and their respective agencies are regulated by discourse. As Iovino (2012) explains when reviewing Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s edited collection of essays, Material Feminisms (2008), “embodiment and discursivity are co-extensive and mutually permeable” (135). In this sense, literature often reveals social discourses that are harmful for both human and non-human embodiment, as is the case with Crozier’s poetry. One such noxious discourse about embodiment is encapsulated in the notion of the abject. Proposed by Julia Kristeva, the abject is a concept in embodiment theories which is employed in both aging studies and material ecocriticism’s research. Kristeva (1982) studies the construction of abjection based on Freudian and Lacanian theories of child development. Although the abject eschews identification, Kristeva explains that the abject is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or

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health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. (1982, 4)

In this sense, both older individuals’ bodies and non-human nature are often regarded as abject. Age scholars who examine depictions of the so-called fourth age, which is often associated with old old age in its connection to frailty and dependency, reveal dominant ageist social attitudes that posit the aged body as abject in Western societies. This is what Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs term the “embodied abjection of agedness” (2011, 139). An example of this abjection is the use of adjectives with negative connotations often employed to describe old bodies, such as “sagging” flesh, which Crozier employs in a humorous manner to deconstruct such detrimental stereotypes. Analogously, material ecocriticism scholars examine discursive depictions of the non-human world as abject. To use Stephen A. Rust’s words when analyzing the horror film The Wall (Alan Parker 1982), “Western cultural perceptions of nature [regard it] as civilization’s abject Other—a framing which situates society in a competitive rather than cooperative relationship with the environment” (2014, 557). Therefore, the notion of abjection establishes an interrelationship between embodiment in aging studies and in material ecocriticism. AN ECOCRITICAL AGING ANALYSIS OF CROZIER’S POETRY Using an ecocritical aging perspective, I will examine Crozier’s three most recent poetry collections, namely What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017), God of Shadows (2018), and The House the Spirit Builds (2019). These collections were published when Crozier was 69, 70, and 71 years old, respectively. They depict embodiment from a young-old-age perspective, which has been defined as comprising 60–75 (Lachman 2001, 135) or, sometimes, as the narrower age range of 65–74 (Little 2016, 535). Therefore, Crozier can be defined as being in the third age, due to not only her age, but also her dynamic lifestyle, as her ongoing publications, active participation in literary festivals, and teaching of creative writing workshops demonstrate. Likewise, the human speakers in the poems that will be examined in this article can also be said to belong to the third age. Such a selection of poems by Crozier illustrates the interconnection between human embodiment in old age and interaction with the non-human natural world from different perspectives. Namely, both the older speakers’ time spent in the garden and exposure to the weather lead to reflections of aging that ultimately reveal the impact of ageism on older

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persons, especially women. Besides, Crozier’s use of anthropomorphism as a literary device offers a critique of the ways in which both non-human nature and older people are made invisible. Finally, Crozier proposes two different ways for humans to both become aware of and cherish the existing human entanglement and material continuum with the non-human world, which in turn contributes to treasure life partners and cope with anxiety towards nearing death in old age, respectively. GARDEN AND WEATHER: REVELATIONS OF AGEISM AND ITS IMPACT ON WOMEN The interplay of the older human body and the non-human natural world in Crozier’s poetry often encompasses human interactions with both the garden and the weather. Direct contact with the soil and both close attention to the liminal space of the orchard, as man-planted and yet non-human nature, and climate elements contribute to the older persona’s well-being. That is, such an interaction unveils age-related stereotypes and, subsequently, challenges them by offering a non-normative approach to them. Particularly, the older female personae’s attunement to the natural world is what allows them to learn life lessons, which endow them with agency. Following such a trajectory, “When the Bones Get Cold” (Crozier, What the Soul Doesn’t Want 2017, 13) and “Some Morning God” (Crozier, What the Soul Doesn’t Want 2017, 16) depict the effect of both tending and walking around the garden, respectively, on the human personae’s respective older bodies. In “When the Bones Get Cold,” Crozier connects the effect of the husband’s gardening on his body to the wife’s easing of emotional pain. The older persona’s husband’s hands become roughened due to his work in the orchard. Consequently, when he caresses his spouse, he conducts a peeling of sorts on her skin: “His fingers, chapped from gardening, sand my skin” (l. 4), even though he cannot see such an effect on his wife’s body because he is losing his eyesight, as previously mentioned in the poem. The ungendered persona, who will be assumed is a woman, as Crozier focuses on heterosexual relationships in her work, mentions that her husband’s sight issues result in his mental image of his spouse not being modified by the passage of time. That is to say that, in response to such a physically impairing condition, the persona does not lament herself. In its stead, she sees the bright side of it by means of asserting: “I am made beautiful by loss” (l. 6). Nonetheless, the fact that the persona cherishes an unchanging body image in old age exposes the pervading ageism of Western societies, especially for women. As Margaret M. Gullette states, “people are aged by culture and that decline is the narrative about aging-past-youth systematically taught to us

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from on high” (2017, xiii). While Crozier does not challenge normative constructions of old age in this poem, she does emphasize a personal way to overcome them by placing a reflection about this in the concluding lines of the poem. Specifically, she claims that she finds some comfort in accepting that she is “not a mountain, not a river, not a tree” (Crozier, “When the Bones” l. 10). Thus, the persona accepts the situation she finds herself in, that is, both her husband’s physical handicap and her own aging process, via comparing herself to the non-human natural world. On the one hand, she accepts her husband’s sight loss with equanimity and does not describe his impairment as an object of derision, in line with Sandberg’s theory of affirmative old age. Sandberg explains that “affirmative old age aims to acknowledge the material specificities of the aging body and is an attempt to theorize the aging body in terms of difference but without understanding it as a body marked by decline, lack or negation” (2013, 12). Abjection of agedness is thus avoided by the persona’s acceptance of her older husband’s blindness. On the other hand, the older female speaker’s acknowledgement of human transience, and therefore of her own mortality, is only possible by celebrating the longer life of plants and the almost everlasting life of geographical features. Such teachings learnt from the non-human world allow her to avoid aging self-stereotypes and thus contribute to the persona’s well-being in her later years. As such, neither the older couple nor the natural elements the persona compares herself to are defined as abject. Similarly, “Some Morning-God” depicts the influence of the persona’s interaction with the garden on her own sense of embodying old age. During her walk through the garden, the persona establishes an analogy between the hibernation-like process of the garden in a cold November in which the pond is already frozen, and her own aging process, that is, her experience of moving towards old age. The persona compares her movements and thoughts in old age to those of the hibernating turtles in her pond whose legs move in their sleep: “Your body is restless, too. It hearkens back/to that other time when the world was new and you/one of many beauties yet to lessen” (lines 8–10). The older female persona shows an interiorization of widespread ageism in Western societies by claiming that aging into old age has made her less beautiful than in her youth. Thus, “Some Morning-God” concurs with “When the Bones Get Cold” in its depiction of a double standard of aging for women. According to Susan Sontag (1972), Getting older is less profoundly wounding for a man . . . there is a double standard about aging that denounces women with special severity. . . . Being physically attractive counts much more in a woman’s life than in a man’s, but beauty, identified, as it is for women, with youthfulness, does not stand up well to age. (30)

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Moreover, the fact that the speaker describes her own body as restless suggests that she cannot sleep well because she knows that she is no longer young, which triggers some anxiety due to her perceived loss of aesthetic capital. In this case, the poem does not offer a way out for the older persona, whose observation of her garden in winter ends with an image of an invisible Morning-God, in the shape of an animal which approaches her “[. . .] and lies low” (l. 16), as if about to attack her. Therefore, Crozier concludes “Some Morning-God” with an image of the older female speaker as prey, which metaphorically stands for her inability to escape being targeted by culturallyentrenched ageism and its associated ageist self-perceptions. The interplay between gender and embodiment of old age is also present in “God of the Disregarded” (God of Shadows 2018, 40), in which a clear interaction between the older human body and non-human natural elements is depicted. The omniscient speaker in the poem narrates the embodiment of loneliness of an aged lady, who, missing physical contact with another human being, enjoys the wind’s play with her hair and body: “[. . .] Only/the wind fingers the old woman’s hair (how she longs to be/touched), opens her unbuttoned jacket” (lines 2–4). In fact, even if loneliness may be an issue at all ages and cannot be assumed to be a universal aspect of old age as this would be an age stereotype (Barreto et al. 2021), loneliness and social isolation of older persons have been found to have a strong impact on older adults’ both mental and physical health (Berg-Weger and Morley 2020, 243). In addition, the quotation carries some sexual connotations in the wind’s opening of the old woman’s coat, as if intending to caress what is underneath, thus suggesting her corresponding yearning for physical contact. Such an unmet desire, as Crozier describes the old woman as feeling lonely, points towards a critique of women’s sexuality in old age as a social taboo. In this sense, Laura Hurd Clarke and Alexandra Korotchenko explain that “old and old-looking bodies, especially aged female bodies, [are socially recast] as unappealing, asexual, and even unworthy of notice” (2011, 496). Further, Bianca Fileborn et al. assert that despite such age-related social stereotypes in Western cultures, “it is well established that many individuals desire sexual intimacy and continue to engage in various forms of sexual activity throughout their later years” (2015, 117). Fileborn et al.’s claim is in line with Crozier’s depiction of the older woman’s desire for intimacy in the poem. EXPOSURE OF NON-HUMAN NATURE AND OLDER PEOPLE’S SHARED INVISIBILITY Crozier often underscores the agentic power of non-human nature in her work. In order to do that, she employs a number of literary strategies, namely

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anthropomorphizing non-human nature and presenting non-human elements as gateways to wisdom, among others. Such an approach allows Crozier to uncover ways in which both non-human nature and older people are made invisible. This is the case of “God of the Disregarded,” in which Crozier juxtaposes a critique of the invisibility of older women—as examined above—with a critique of humans for failing to pay attention to the non-human world. As the title to the poem suggests, both older women and the non-human natural world are socially disregarded. Nevertheless, Crozier endows both the natural elements and animals with the willingness to modify their behavior so that humans, and more specifically city dwellers, become aware of the non-human elements in their environment. Particularly, non-human agency encompasses both the stop of the snowfall and birds’ attempt to draw human attention to themselves. Such an anthropomorphizing of non-human nature in the poem underscores both the importance of humans to notice the changes in the non-human world and nature’s agentic power. The literary technique of anthropomorphizing non-human nature in order to foster awareness is examined by ecologists as a tool for species conservation, which may or may not result in the desired outcomes (Root-Bernstein et al. 2013, 1578). Similarly, material ecocriticism considers anthropomorphism a strategy which can grant “matter access to articulation, by way of stories that co-emerge with the human in their differential intelligibility” (Iovino 2015, 82). As such, Crozier’s anthropomorphism of both climatic elements and nonhuman animals in the poem voices the shared invisibility and othering of both older individuals and the natural world in present-day Western societies. In turn, the observation of the non-human world can lead humans to wisdom about the self in old age. In this sense, “Glass Vase, White Table” (The House the Spirit Builds 78) depicts the embodiment of old age as a process of physical weakening and, yet, of enlightenment in terms of self-knowledge: “When you are that fragile, that wrung thin/(there’s been illness, there’s been worry, there’s been growing old),/[. . .]/you’ll see the purest, clearest part of you” (lines 1–2, 4). Such an insight into the self is presented as analogous to the free shining of light in winter when no obstacle blocks it. Light, as one of Crozier’s main leitmotifs in her poetry, guides the human speaker in the poem towards emotional growth. Nevertheless, Crozier does not describe in the poem the persona’s psychological elaboration of the life events that have rendered him/her frail in old age. In its stead, Crozier endows frailty with the power to reveal an older person’s true self which, as described in the subsequent lines, will be reflected in the snow like a gemstone. Crozier’s understanding of frailty is in line with Wendy Lustbader’s concept of “successful frailty.” To quote from Lustbader (2000), “[s]o long as we believe that little meaning can be found in frailty [. . .]. We will conclude that frailty itself

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drains life of meaning” (24), whereas “relationships grow through frailty’s demands” (23), as physical and emotional vulnerability may both contribute to family becoming closer and to grant individuals time for introversion, as is the case with Crozier’s poem. With the use of snow as another of her main tropes from the non-human natural world, Crozier encourages her readers to incorporate the teachings of nature into their own mindsets. Namely, the beauty and power of nature allow the readers to distance themselves from ageist perceptions of physical decay in old age as abjection. Likewise, Crozier’s focus on self-learning in old age moves away from the objectification of fragile bodies and towards the empowering idea that humans keep evolving throughout the life-course and until the moment of death. This notion is in line with theories of aging as a progress narrative, according to which identity is fluid, as it “changes over time” (Gullette 2004, 121). THE BLURRING OF BOUNDARIES BETWEEN NON-HUMAN NATURE AND (OLDER) HUMAN BODIES Crozier also advocates for an understanding of human embodiment as continuous with the materiality of the non-human world. With such an aim, she imagines non-human elements infiltrating human bodies both as a symbolic teaching method and as part of the decomposing process of human corpses. Such a blurring of boundaries between non-human nature and human bodies becomes especially prominent in old age, when nature becomes a guide towards well-being in the face of future death. In “God of Astonishment” (God of Shadows 2018, 53), Crozier presents the need to value both the uniqueness of fauna and long-standing relationships in old age. Crozier describes the day-to-day actions of several wild animals, such as bats, spider crabs, and cockroaches as rare sights for humans. The speaker in the poem offers a minute attention to detail of these animals’ lives, which is only possible through close observation of the non-human world. In turn, this reveals a deep admiration for such animals. The sense of awe that the poem transmits is underscored by the fact that, according to the speaker, God of Astonishment reveals herself through such animals’ doings. Nonetheless, Crozier laments humans’ lack of attention to the marvels of the non-human world, as metonymically represented by God of Astonishment’s revelations. In order to counter such an issue, which distances humans from the non-human world, Crozier discloses that God of Astonishment is “tempted to startle us in our tracks, to/place her fiery mouth upon our mouths and fill our lungs/with marigolds and bees” (lines 18–20). That is, Crozier imagines an extreme solution to human disregard for nature that would consist in

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forcing the materiality of the non-human world to become enmeshed in our human bodies. While crowding human respiratory organs with flowers and pollinating insects might result in the death of the humans in question, Crozier proposes the human embodiment of the non-human world as a last resort; one that would allow humans to have a deep insight into the non-human world and thus understand its worth. The theme of astonishment that underlies the poem connects the embodiment of astonishment for the non-human world to the embodiment of astonishment for life-long spouses. Crozier thus reveals the importance of valuing long-standing relationships in old age. That is to say that Crozier advises aged couples not to take their loved ones for granted. Crozier exemplifies her point by showing an older woman’s excitement and bliss at hearing her husband arrive home. As such, Crozier employs the carpe diem trope to transform routine actions into moments for rejoicing in old age, given the limited amount of time that couples have to delight in each other’s company in late life. Crozier’s poem is in line with research on the psychology of aging, as older individuals’ sense of happiness has been closely related to social connectedness, including time spent with their spouses (Waldinger and Schulz 2010, 422). Finally, Crozier also depicts the acceptance of old age and upcoming death in the speaker’s belief that his/her essence will not vanish once he or she passes away because the materiality of his/her body will become intertwined with the materiality of the non-human world, as can be observed in the poem “The Least of Things” (What the Soul Doesn’t Want 2017, 46). The older persona’s attitude towards nearing death is one of life-long learning until the moment of death, as suggested by the persona’s humble acceptance of all the knowledge she has not acquired yet: “I don’t know the least of things” (l. 3). Moreover, the persona is learning to be ready for the last of the human transitions or rites of passage, namely death, as evidenced by the speaker’s following statement: “My mouth to lion’s mouth,/my ear to the earth’s huge singing” (lines 9–10). These lines are reminiscent of the words often pronounced at Christian burial services, namely “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” In this manner, Crozier incorporates the idea not only of communion with nature but also of the cycle of death and rebirth. Crozier’s persona accepts his/her own future death with equanimity, as a result of suggested feelings of personal immortality through the continuity of his/her essence in the lion and the earth. Therefore, Crozier’s portrayal of aging into old age is devoid of anxiety regarding approaching death, or what Kenneth Doka calls “existential grief” (2002, 22). The continuity of the persona’s essence in the materiality of the non-human world implies that the persona’s corpse will not only “become subject to natural recycling” but “life and health [will also] arise from the putrefying corpse,” to phrase it in Christopher Todd Anderson’s words when

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discussing A. R. Ammons’s Garbage (1993) and Walt Whitman’s “This Compost,” (1867) respectively, as instances of American garbage poetry (2010, 39, 38). This poem by Whitman is considered to be the first American garbage poem, in which Whitman’s speaker first regards the human corpses as disgusting rubbish—and therefore treated as abject—to later realize their chemical transformation into nutrients that enable crops to grow (Anderson 2010, 38). That is to say that garbage poetry transforms waste into the source of aesthetic beauty, as it often allows for contemplative or spiritual experiences (54). In this sense, both American garbage poems and Crozier’s “The Least of Things” highlight ways in which the respective agencies of (older) humans and the non-human world become entangled. CONCLUSION The ecocritical aging analysis of a selection of poems from Crozier’s latest poetry collections, namely What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017), God of Shadows (2018), and The House the Spirit Builds (2019), reveals an interconnection between human embodiment of old age and the non-human world from different points of view. Such a representation of embodiment does not lead to abjection either of old age or of non-human nature. In the poems examined, Crozier depicts common circumstances related to the embodiment of old age, such as gradual loss of vision and bodily weakening. Nevertheless, the interaction with the non-human natural world and the teachings it offers allows Crozier’s personae to focus on the gains of old age rather than the losses. Crozier’s poems also expose the pervasive ageism that dominates Western thought and older individuals’ internalization of it. Specifically, the ageist prejudices uncovered by Crozier’s poems relate to the social standards of body image in old age as dominated by youthful-looking bodies and the impossibility of Crozier’s personae to attain such standards. Crozier also poses a twofold, interlaced critique of, on the one hand, the invisibility and isolation of older people and their concerns, such as sexuality; and, on the other hand, the human lack of attention to non-human nature. To counter such issues, Crozier underscores the importance of love both for the embodiment of old age and the stewardship of the non-human world. Lastly, Crozier envisions the embodied continuity of the human and the non-human world as a transformative experience. That is, becoming enmeshed in the materiality of the non-human world may seem to be the only possibility for many humans to become aware of the uniqueness of the non-human natural world. In addition, Crozier’s persona’s realization that his/her human essence will not vanish when he/she dies but become a material part of the non-human natural world

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signifies both the ultimate breaking of boundaries between the materiality of the human and the non-human worlds, and the appeasement of fears of nearing death in old age. REFERENCES Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2008. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ammons, A. R. 1993. Garbage. New York: Norton. Anderson, Christopher Todd. 2010. “Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and the American Garbage Poem.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17, no. 1: 35–60. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isp155. Barreto, Manuela, Christina Victor, Claudia Hammond, Alice Eccles, Matt. T. Richins, and Pamela Qualter. 2021. “Loneliness around the World: Age, Gender, and Cultural Differences in Loneliness.” Personality and Individual Differences 169, 110066. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.paid​.2020​.110066. Berg-Weger, M., and John E. Morley. 2020. “Loneliness in Old Age: An Unaddressed Health Problem.” Journal of Nutrition, Health, and Aging 24, no. 3: 243–245. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s12603​-020​-1323​-6. Crozier, Lorna. 2017. What the Soul Doesn’t Want. Calgary, Alberta: Freehand Books. ———. 2018. God of Shadows. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. ———. 2019. The House the Spirit Builds. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. Doka, Kenneth. 2002. “Death in Life.” In Living with Grief: Loss in Later Life, edited by Kenneth J. Doka, 17–32. Washington: Hospice Foundation of America. Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth. 1991. “The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodern Life Course.” In The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited by Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage. https:​ //​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.4135​/9781446280546. Fileborn, Bianca, Rachel Thorpe, Gail Hawkes, Victor Minichiello, Marian Pitts, and Tinashe Dune. 2015. “Sex, Desire and Pleasure: Considering the Experiences of Older Australian Women.” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 30, no. 1: 117–130. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/14681994​.2014​.936722. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. 2011. “Ageing Abjection and Embodiment in the Fourth Age.” Journal of Aging Studies 25: 135–142. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.jaging​.2010​.08​.018. ———. 2015. “Aging, Embodiment, and the Somatic Turn.” Age, Culture, Humanities 2, no. 1: 17–33. Gullette, Margaret M. 1997. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2004. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2017. Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hurd Clarke, Laura, and Alexandra Korotchenko. 2011. “Aging and the Body: A Review.” Canadian Journal on Aging/La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 30, no. 3: 495–510. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1017​/S0714980811000274. Iovino, Serenella. 2012. “Steps to a Material Ecocriticism. The Recent Literature about the ‘New Materialisms’ and Its Implications for Ecocritical Theory.” European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment (Ecozon@) 3, no. 1: 134–145. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.37536​/ECOZONA​.2012​.3​.1​.461. ———. 2015. “The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and How Interpretation Works.” Anglia 113, no. 1: 69–86. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1515​/ang​-2015–0006. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 19, no. 3: 448–475. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/iss087. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Lachman, Margie E. 2001. “Adult Development, Psychology of.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 135–139. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Levy, Becca. 2009. “Stereotype Embodiment: A Psychosocial Approach to Aging.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18, no. 6: 332–336. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​ .1111​/j​.1467–8721​.2009​.01662​.x. Liechty, Toni, Nuno F. Ribeiro, Katherine Sveinson, and Laura Dahlstrom. 2014. “‘It’s about What I Can Do with My Body’: Body Image and Embodied Experiences of Aging among Older Canadian Men.” International Journal of Men’s Health 13, no. 1: 3–21. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3149​/jmh​.1301​.3. Little, William. 2016. Introduction to Sociology: 2nd Canadian Edition. Victoria: BCcampus. https:​//​opentextbc​.ca​/introductiontosociology2ndedition​/. Lustbader, Wendy. 2000. “Thoughts on the Meaning of Frailty.” Generations 23, no. 4: 21–24. Marshall, Barbara L. 2015. “Anti-Ageing and Identities.” In Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, edited by Julia Twigg and Wendy Martin. London and New York: Routledge. Parker, Alan, director. 1982. The Wall. Goldcrest Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Tin Blue Productions. Root-Bernstein, Meredith, Leo Douglas, A. Smith, and Diogo Veríssimo. 2013. “Anthropomorphized Species as Tools for Conservation: Utility beyond Prosocial, Intelligent and Suffering Species.” Biodiversity and Conservation 22: 1577–1589. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s10531​-013​-0494​-4. Rust, Stephen A. 2014. “Comfortably Numb: Material Ecocriticism and the Postmodern Horror Film.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) 21, no. 3: 550–561. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isu083.

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Sandberg, Linn. 2013. “Affirmative Old Age—the Ageing Body and Feminist Theories on Difference.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 8, no. 1: 11–40. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3384​/ijal​.1652–8670​.12197. Sontag, Susan. 1972. “The Double Standard of Aging.” Saturday Review of The Society (September 23): 29–38. Tuana, Nancy. 2008. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Twigg, Julia. 2004. “The Body, Gender, and Age: Feminist Insights in Social Gerontology.” Journal of Aging Studies 18, no. 1: 59–73. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​ .jaging​.2003​.09​.001. Vares, Tiina. 2009. “Reading the ‘Sexy Oldie’: Gender, Age(ing) and Embodiment.” Sexualities 12, no. 4: 503–524. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1177​/1363460709105716. Waldinger, Robert J., and Marc S. Schulz. 2010. “What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Social Functioning, Perceived Health, and Daily Happiness in Married Octogenarians.” Psychology and Aging 25, no. 2: 422–431. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1037​ /a0019087. Whitman, Walt. 1867. “This Compost.” The Walt Whitman Archive. Accessed May 18, 2023. https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/142.

Chapter Five

Beyond Reproductive Futurism Harold and Maude’s Ecological Aesthetics Simon Dickel

Writing about age in Hal Ashby’s 1971 movie Harold and Maude is significant beyond its subject matter of the intergenerational love between 79-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon) and 19-year-old Harold (Bud Cort), because the film itself brings my own aging process to my attention.1 In my late teens, the videocassette with the dubbed version of the film taped from German television was among the few films I saw most frequently, I assume it must have added to fifteen times. At the time, I also had the American film poster on the wall of my room. Watching the film for the first time, I was slightly younger than the film’s protagonist Harold. The film itself, however, already had a vintage feel to it, because it had been made before I was even born. Today, I am in the middle of the age-span between the protagonists Harold and Maude, namely 30 years older than Harold and 30 years younger than Maude, both of whom stopped aging. Watching the film today, I have no other choice than to relate it to my own aging process and wonder about what became of the teenager once so fascinated by the couple Harold and Maude, a couple who realized their love against the adversity of the societal institutions and their normative ideologies, namely the family, psychiatry, the military, and the church. Because of the film’s humorous critique of normative orders and the characters’ unrelenting opposition to what is expected of them, which includes normative expectations of sexual desire, I always felt it had what I can now call a gay sensibility.2 Next to the director Hal Ashby, a representative of the movement of filmmaking known as New Hollywood, writer Colin Higgins was of central 87

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importance to the film. He wrote the screenplay and the novel of the same title; it was his thesis for the M.F.A.-program in screenwriting at the film school of UCLA (Colin Higgins Foundation).3 Academic writing on the film always omits the information that he was an openly gay man who died from AIDS-related complications in 1988 when he was 47 years old.4 However, this appears to be important information in light of the queer approaches to temporality that inform my reading of the film. The silence about Higgins’s sexuality, who wrote Harold and Maude just after the Stonewall riots during the early days of the gay liberation movement, and about his untimely death is complicit with dominant conceptualizations of time, which are currently discussed as chrononormativity, an approach to temporality based on heteronormativity.5 In this essay I will argue that the narrative of Harold and Maude’s intergenerational love is constructed in opposition to chrononormativity and entails a queer critique of a society in which social recognition always relates to a life lived according to a temporality rooted in heteronormative expectations. Chrononormativity refers to the social imperative that certain goals should be reached during specific periods of one’s life, such as getting an education, getting married, and having kids. Many of these expectations are grounded in heteronormative scripts and are often incompatible with queer lives.6 Building on approaches that combine queer theory’s critique of chrononormativity with ecocriticism, I will analyze how Harold and Maude entails an ecocritical critique which is based on the way this couple is constructed in opposition to what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” The protagonists’ opposition to chrononormativity is depicted as one reason why they can approach life and death as well as the perception of nature and art differently from the majority of the other characters in the film. Rather than obtaining an instrumental relation towards the natural world, Harold and Maude live in the moment, appreciate fleeting images of beauty, and are aware of the mortality of themselves and other human beings. I will argue that the characters Harold and Maude are constructed as queer subjects who are in opposition to society’s instrumental relation to nature and heteronormative approaches to temporality. As an alternative, they embody a phenomenological approach towards nature and the built environment, which values the experiences of all senses in the present. QUEER AGING At first glance, a characterization of the heterosexual couple Harold and Maude as queer may appear counterintuitive. However, building on Linda M. Hess’s definition of “queer aging,” a term she uses for “narratives that

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negotiate aging at odds with and in resistance to the norms that shape aging within chrononormative culture” (Hess 2019, 11), I contend that Harold and Maude can safely be called a narrative of queer aging, even though the protagonists are not positioned as LGBTQI. Film and novel emphasize that Harold and Maude are at odds with and in resistance to the social norms that police aging—both as individuals and as a couple. In Harold and Maude, both main characters are constructed in opposition to heteronormativity, even though they form a heterosexual couple. For example, Harold’s resistance against heteronormative expectations is visualized when he stages a fake suicide each time his mother arranges a meeting with a prospective fiancé. What is more, his character stands in opposition to hegemonic ideals of masculinity. This becomes evident in the sequence that satirizes the ideal of military masculinity in a conversation with Harold’s uncle Victor, a veteran of the Second World War. Accordingly, Christopher Beach characterizes Harold as “a neurotic and desexualized figure whose awkward body language and pale, masklike face denote the antithesis of mainstream Hollywood masculinity” (Beach 2009, 56). Maude—at age 79—has not lived her life according to normative expectations of getting married and raising children. Her position on the fringes of society is visualized through the place she lives in, a former rail car symbolizing a life that is not settled but rather dynamic and open to change (cf. Hunter 2016, 81). The rail car furthermore points to Maude’s biography before emigrating to the US. As the narrative later reveals, she is a survivor of the Shoah and was deported to a concentration camp as a young woman. Through the juxtaposition of Maude’s rail car with Harold’s home, a huge mansion with a garden, the precariousness of her existence is further emphasized. Mejar Dhir observes that “the pictorial disorganization of Maude’s environment in relation to the highly ordered, symmetrical composition of Harold’s home strengthens the sense that her influence threatens to derail the repressive forces that attempt to mold and constrain him” (Dhir 2010, 103; cf. Beach 2009, 61). Maude’s character further undermines normative constructions of time because she announces at the beginning of the film that she will end her life on the coming Saturday, her eightieth birthday: “‘Of course,’ she said, laughing and catching her breath, ‘there is no doubt that this body is giving out. I’m well into autumn. I’ll have to be giving it all up after Saturday’” (Higgins 2005, 53). Whereas Harold does not grasp the meaning of her comment, the viewer/reader knows from the beginning that she will die within one week, the narrated time of the movie and the novel. The joy she experiences in different occasions of the narrative is for the moment, and not directed towards the future. This approach to time becomes most evident in the episode with the artist Glaucus whose aim is to carve a sculpture of Maude in the nude out of an ice block. Doomed to fail with this project because of the melting

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ice, the model and the artist experience joy while he is working on the sculpture; this joy is not about the materialistic expectation of a finished product. Maude’s vanishing image sculpted from the ice-block mirrors her life which is lived for the moment rather than in orientation towards the future. I will show that such references to fleeting beauty are repeated throughout the narrative. Maude’s character clearly contradicts the dominant filmic representations of old women that can be found throughout the history of film. In their 2000 study “The mirror has two faces,” Elizabeth W. Markson and Carol A. Taylor analyze a huge sample of portrayals of old men and women in films that were released between 1929 and 1995 and conclude that in contrast to depictions of older men, those of “older women [. . .] are more likely to embody ageist stereotypes, mirroring the still persistent cultural belief that a woman’s essence lies in her youthfulness—itself a symbol of her procreative potential” (Markson and Taylor 2000, 155–156). Throughout their article, they state that cultural beliefs about old women are linked to their ability to procreate, identifying a devaluation of women after menopause. Even though the filmic representation of Maude as a postmenopausal 79-year-old woman clearly contradicts the stereotypes they identify in the other films, they conclude that her character, too, serves as a confirmation of their findings. They interpret her decision to commit suicide at the age of 80 as the filmic statement that women should not be older than that: “Even the youthful exterior of Ruth Gordon’s Maude conceals the despair of ‘80 is long enough’” (Markson and Taylor 2000, 156). Contrary to their statement, I contend that her suicide signifies a unique approach to life, which contradicts normative temporality. Even if Markson and Taylor regard the depiction of the relationship between Harold and Maude, which clearly contradicts dominant biased narratives of relationships between an older man and a younger woman, as a notable exception to stereotypical images of aging women, they are critical of her death: That she ends the relationship by committing suicide, however, raises another gender issue: would a story featuring an 80-year-old man in love with an adolescent woman end with his suicide? Probably not, as May-December relationships, such as 73-year-old actor Tony Curtis’s 1998 real-life marriage to a 28-year-old woman, at best raised eyebrows when reported in People magazine! (Markson and Taylor 2000, 149)

This quotation points at a shortcoming of their study. Throughout their text, they compare filmic representations with real life and treat both as being on the same level. What is more, the factual error that Maude commits suicide, in order to end the relationship, seems to escape them entirely. Their negative

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view on Maude is surprising: if one relates the depiction of Maude to their own results, one finds a portrayal of an old woman which clearly contradicts the stereotype of the romantically and sexually uninvolved older woman who is well-off. In contrast, Maude is a sexually active postmenopausal woman who is romantically involved with a man who is 60 years younger than herself, and she is poor. As a couple, Harold and Maude are constructed in opposition to chrononormativity. This is visualized through the setting of their first meetings. Both enjoy attending the funerals of strangers, and it is at a funeral that they first speak to each other. Their relationship begins in a place and situation that position them as outsiders and make unmistakably clear that plans for the future are inappropriate. This missing promise of the future resonates with what Edelman calls “reproductive futurism.” In his influential polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman states that within US culture the figure of the Child, which he capitalizes so that it does not get confused with actual children, and the idea of the nuclear family are of such central importance that they are needed to maintain the symbolic order: “That figural child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed” (Edelman 2004, 11). In Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction & Film, Heather Latimer builds on Edelman’s approach in her analyzes of fictional narratives: “If we are always focusing on protecting our future generations rather than facing our own mortality we are given the illusion that our lives have purpose, order and form so long as we can ensure those future generations should exist” (2013, 147–148). Harold and Maude are constructed in opposition to the symbolic order. Rather than being oriented towards future generations, Maude actively faces her own mortality to the degree that she decides when she wants to die. Her relationship with Harold undermines reproductive futurism. It is opposed to the expectation that heterosexual relationships should procreate, and this failed promise of the future determines how others react when they learn about Harold’s wish to marry Maude. Edelman states, “Whatever refuses this mandate by which our political institutions compel the collective reproduction of the Child must appear as a threat not only to the organization of a given social order but also, and far more ominously, to social order as such, insofar as it threatens the logic of futurism on which meaning always depends” (2004, 11). The power of the normative expectation of reproductive futurism is visualized when the reactions of four representatives of societal institutions are humorously displayed in the film. The priest Father Finnegan is the one who most explicitly rejects Harold’s plan to marry Maude because “a marital union is concerned with the conjugal rights. And the procreation of children” (Higgins 2005, 130). He

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continues to state that the idea of intergenerational sex makes him sick and makes clear that the relationship undermines social values: “I would be remiss in my duties if I did not tell you that the idea of . . . ” He swallowed. “ . . . intercourse—the fact of your young, firm . . . ” Lowering his eyes, “ . . . body . . . ” He stroked his forehead “ . . . co-mingling with the withered flesh, sagging breasts and flabby buttocks of the mature female person – . . . ” He rubbed his hand despairingly across his mouth. “ . . . frankly and candidly, makes me want to vomit.” (Higgins 2005, 130–131; italics in original)

Philipp Drake points out that the spectator is implicated in this sequence, as well as in the parallel sequences with Uncle Victor and Dr. Harley, because of the stylistic device of breaking the fourth wall and the characters directly looking into the camera and addressing the viewer. With regard to Father Finnegan’s performance, he states that “the zoom in on the priest during his monologue in particular, emphasizes, through the use of heightened, caricatured performance, the grotesque nature of imposing such moralizing judgements on the two protagonists” (Drake 2018, 174). It is not only Father Finnegan, but also Harold’s mother as well as the veteran Uncle Victor and the psychiatrist Dr. Harley who are opposed to the marriage. Whereas Uncle Victor calls the relationship abnormal, Dr. Harley tries a Freudian explanation and comes up with the Oedipus complex. The concerns voiced by these representatives of ideological state apparatuses (church, military, psychiatry) are emphasized and ridiculed on a formal level. All men are seated under portraits of men central to their profession, Pope Paul VI, Richard Nixon, and Sigmund Freud, to make clear that their opinions are rooted in ideologies that are larger than their personal views (cf. Houston and Kinder 1972, 15; Drake 2018, 174; Beach 2009, 62). Their rejection of intergenerational sex resonates with Gayle S. Rubin’s seminal 1984 essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Sexuality.” Rubin analyzes the hegemonic discourse about sex and states that cross-generational sex is seen as “bad sex” and thus belongs to the “outer limits” of what she calls the “charmed circle.” The charmed circle is a diagram depicting “good sex,” such as sex of married couples or heterosexual sex with a partner of the same generation, at the center and “bad sex,” such as anonymous, gay, or cross-generational sex, to be outside of it (Rubin 1993, 13). Beach confirms that the age-gap-relationship between Harold and Maude is socially unacceptable: “The relationship between Harold and the nearly octogenarian Maude is presented as clearly outside the acceptable limits of American society” (Beach 2009, 56). The unacceptability of their relationship is also mirrored in the representational politics of the film itself, because a kiss between Harold and Maude was cut out of the movie’s final version, and Hal Ashby was not allowed to depict sex between the two. He could only hint

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at it by showing fireworks at night and Harold and Maude in the same bed the next morning, while Harold is blowing soap bubbles—a further metaphor for the enjoyment of fleeting beauty (cf. Drake 2018, 173; Beach 2009, 56). Still, Drake contends that “despite the absence of the depiction of sex, the level of intimacy between the two characters was (and remains) taboo breaking in its presentation of intergenerational relationships” (Drake 2018, 174). For these reasons, Harold and Maude’s romantic and sexual relationship can be considered to be in opposition to the normative orders of its time and can be regarded queer.7 Through the depiction of the societal opposition to Harold’s wish to marry Maude described above, the narrative makes clear that society and its institutions revolve around the image of the Child, which “sets the limit on what is imaginable politically and gives subjects a fantasy to invest in so they may ward off their own lack, ward off the death drive and the queer, in hopes of maintaining the illusion of the symbolic wholeness, identity, and meaning” (Latimer 2013, 148–149). The queer positionality Harold and Maude embody has to be warded off by the other characters, because it threatens the symbolic order Western society relies on. Harold and Maude’s shared attitude towards death, their pastime of attending funerals and driving around in a hearse, Harold’s staged suicides, and Maude’s actual suicide signal that their approach to the death drive is not an evasion but a confrontation, which results in a different positioning towards the symbolic order. The narrative furthermore suggests that Maude’s existential confrontation with the threat of death as a surviving victim of the Shoah is one reason for her different attitude towards life and death. As cross-generational sexuality and love are outside of the realm of the socially acceptable, Harold’s conversation with his mother about his relationship with Maude is reminiscent of a gay coming out. For the first time, Harold starts a conversation with his mother and tells her about his feelings for Maude. Despite her negative reaction, he leaves the situation smiling. The whole scene is depicted as a rite-of-passage, from which Harold emerges a changed person. This sequence signals Harold and Maude’s gay sensibility and supports my reading that Harold and Maude represent “the image of the queer (which can be any number of queer figures [. . .], including gay men and women, feminists, and those in favor of abortion)” (Latimer 2013, 147). INTERGENERATIONAL ECOLOGICAL CRITIQUE On a surface level, Harold and Maude’s leanings to environmentalism can be directly seen in the depiction of Maude’s relation to the natural world: she feeds the birds in front of her window and grows flowers, she tells Harold

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that she used to liberate animals from pet shops, and is opposed to zoos: “‘At one time I used to break into pet shops and liberate the canaries, but I gave it up as an idea before its time. The zoos are full and the prisons overflowing. My, my. How the world so dearly loves a cage’” (Higgins 2005, 35). In one scene, she and Harold rescue an endangered tree from the city and plant it in a forest. Harold and Maude’s closeness to nature is emphasized when they name two flowers to represent themselves, a sunflower for Maude and a daisy for Harold. When they are taking a walk by a vegetable field, Maude states: “I love to watch things grow” (Higgins 2005, 56), and when asked by Harold about her relation to other humans, she replies: “They are my species” (Higgins 2005, 121), signaling a consciousness that is critical of anthropocentrism. On a deeper level, Harold and Maude resonates with Catriona Sandilands’ outline of a queer ecocriticism. In her essay “Queer Life? Ecocriticism after the Fire,” Sandilands builds on Edelman and argues that the discipline of ecocriticism would benefit, if the heterosexual couple were to be displaced as its key cultural referent. She states that “if ‘queer’ is to mean anything at all, it must include a continual process of displacing the heterosexual couple at the centre of the ecological universe” (Sandilands 2014, 311).8 I have argued above that Harold and Maude inhabit a queer positionality, because their intergenerational relationship subverts heteronormative expectations of procreation, even if they are a heterosexual couple. Consequently, I suggest, that the film’s depiction of this couple supports the aim to displace “the heterosexual couple at the centre of the ecological universe”—because Harold and Maude undermine reproductive futurism and thus criticize society’s instrumental relation to the environment: Encompassing the Child whose innocence must be protected from challenge, the future anterior authorizes an instrumental relation to the present, and especially to the Other whose present may be seen as a threat to the future of the Same. If the future is the goal and the present is understood as a condition of “what will have been,” then what is—however horrific—becomes justifiable in light of its necessity of giving rise to the future. (Sandilands 2014, 309)

The narrative of Harold and Maude evolves around the queer intergenerational relationship, which is considered a threat by the institutions representing reproductive futurism, because—owing to Maude’s age—the relationship is constructed in opposition to the figure of the Child and the normative life usually expected of heterosexual couples. The relationship thus represents queer negativity, which Sandilands regards as a needed alternative in the formulation of critical ecology. Building on Nicole Seymour’s seminal 2013 study Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological

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Imagination, in which Seymour offers readings of queer films and literature in order to reflect on the intersections of queer theory and ecocriticism, Sandilands asks: “To what extent might a queer negativity facilitate a more profoundly critical ecology, one in which the future is clearly an ecologically necessary consideration but its imagination is not exhausted by the hegemonic forms of sociality of the present?” (Sandilands 2014, 309). Harold and Maude’s queer positionality not only serves as a corrective to instrumental reason and reproductive futurism, the depiction of how Harold and Maude relate to each other and the natural world offers a glimpse to ways of being-in-the-world that are not informed by instrumental reason. Harold and Maude is rooted in the US counterculture of the late 1960s, such as the anti-war-movement, the green movement, and the New Left. Dhir aptly describes Maude as being “representative of the non-conformist spirit and a commitment to anti-establishmentarianism” (Dhir 2010, 101). Among the texts that most influenced the New Left in the United States were the writings of the representatives of the Frankfurt School, most notably Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). Like them, Maude is depicted as a European Jew and expatriate in the United States. Her biography as a Jew and survivor of a concentration camp exemplifies what the Frankfurt School identified as the negative consequences of enlightenment ideas, namely the industrial mass murder of Jews during the Shoah. Marcuse’s critique of the instrumental domination of nature has not only influenced the New Left and the ecology movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it is also one point of reference for the theoretical foundations of ecocriticism (cf. Luke 1997; Brio 2005). Brio finds elements of the major ideas of ecocriticism in Marcuse’s writings and states that his theories entail a: systematic critique of how science and technology constitute an abstract machine of subordination, forcing everyday life to suit the dominating imperatives of capital and instrumental reason, while this order also restrains an emancipatory potential for reconciling humanity and its environment in nondestructive liberating modes of production and consumption. (Brio 2005, xvi)

The narrative implicitly suggests that Maude’s past is one reason for her specific approach to life. She does not make future plans; her life is embedded in the here and now. The way the narrative depicts her as living for the moment and being attentive with all senses can be described in phenomenological terms, and I contend that it relates to what phenomenologist Gernot Böhme calls “ecological aesthetic.”9 Phenomenology has developed as a philosophical tradition critical of enlightenment ideas, most specifically the Cartesian dualism between body and mind. As human beings, phenomenologists state, we are always already oriented in time and space. This understanding of the

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situatedness of human beings leads to a different conceptualization of the relation between humans and the natural world. Currently, phenomenological ideas are discussed within all disciplines of cultural studies, and ecocriticism is no exception. In his contribution to the 2014 Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Timothy Clark builds on Böhme’s outline of an ecological aesthetic and states that “aesthetic atmospheres [. . .] are inseparable from the fact that the body, as part of nature, participates in the showing and letting-be-felt of things in their multiplicity and varied tonalities. To cultivate an ecological aesthetic necessarily entails acceptance of oneself as a finite body, one that exists in reciprocity with natural forms and processes” (Clark 2014, 280). Maude has accepted herself as a finite body, and she experiences her surroundings in a way that could be described in terms of ecological aesthetics. Her being in nature is depicted as an aesthetic experience: “I like the feel of the soil, don’t you? And the smell. It’s the earth. The earth is my body. My head is in the stars” (Higgins 2005, 74). After they climb a tree, an episode which is only narrated in the novel, she states: “Imagine! Here we are, cradled in a living giant, looking over millions of others—and we are part of it” (Higgins 2005, 75). Böhme relates his theory of ecological aesthetics to the perception of works of art, when he speaks of a “turn from meaning to experience” (2016, 6). He describes the process of experiencing works of art as “being bodily present at the place where the work of art is” and states that “in order to adequately appreciate what these works of art are requires exposing oneself to the atmosphere they are radiating” (Böhme 2016, 6). Böhme names land-art as an example, but his description of the experience of the aesthetic atmosphere of art can be related to two of Maude’s artworks she shows Harold on his first visit. One is a machine called “Odorific,” the other is a wooden sculpture. Both have in common that the aesthetic experience relies on other senses than the visual. Odorifics are artworks Maude created to experience olfactorily: “Have you noticed that art ignores the nose?” she said. “It’s true. So I said let’s give the old schnauze a treat. Have a kind of olfactory banquet. I began first on the easiest—roast beef, mown grass—then I went on to these.” She picked up the metal cylinders and read off their titles: “‘An evening at Maxims,’ ‘Mexican Farmyard.’ Here’s one you’d like: ‘Snowfall on Forty-Second Street.’” (Higgins 2005, 50–51)10

Whereas the Odorific is experienced through smell, the wooden sculpture requires touch. The film depicts the sculpture as an abstract work of art with a smooth surface and orifices. When Harold appreciates the way it looks, she explains to him that it is not meant to be perceived visually but through the sense of touch. She emphasizes the sensual experience when she encourages

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him to “stroke, palm, caress, explore” the artwork (Higgins 2005, 52; italics in original): Harold . . . put both hands firmly on its smooth surfaces. He stepped closer, and as he moved his hands he found himself enjoying the feel of the polished wood. His hands became more daring. They swept around a large hole and for a moment he felt the odd compulsion to stick his head inside it. He controlled the impulse, but it refused to go away. He looked over his shoulder at the kitchen. Maude was humming behind the door. His hands continued outlining the opening and suddenly he stuck his head in it, quickly pulled it out, and took two steps back from the sculpture. He looked around. Maude was still humming in the kitchen. No one had seen him. He relaxed, clapped his hands together, and smiled. (Higgins 2005, 52–53)

The way these artworks are meant to be experienced ties in with Maude’s outlook on life, the natural world, and her bodily orientation and being-in-the-world that involves all senses. Dhir states that “Maude exerts a kind of rebellious influence and awakens Harold’s aesthetic appetites. She introduces him to various tactile pleasures, including music, exotic foods, and sex” (2010, 101). Accordingly, Beach observes that Maude “exposes Harold to the joys of music, art, and philosophy, and opens him up to the pleasure of the senses” (2009, 51). These aesthetic appetites extend to the perception of the artworks Maude creates and exemplify an embodied way of being-in-the-world. The topics of intergenerational love, death, and ecological aesthetics in perceiving art culminate in a sequence set at the Emeryville mudflats, an area which is located in Oakland. During the 1960s and 70s, amateur artists chose this area to create temporary sculptures from driftwood and debris, which could be seen when crossing the Bay Bridge. One night, Harold and Maude sit between the Emeryville mudflat sculptures and watch the sunset. In this scene, aesthetic experience refers to both, the environment as well as the temporary amateur artworks, which undermine an instrumental market-oriented understanding of art. It is in this situation that Harold first sees Maude’s tattooed number from a concentration camp on her wrist. As Harold remains silent, Maude’s past is a tacit subtext of the sequence. Maude then implicitly comments on antisemitism by quoting Alfred D. Dreyfus, whose incarceration on devil’s island in 1895 was motivated by antisemitism, when she sees a flock of seagulls: “‘Dreyfus once wrote,’ said Maude softly, ‘that on Devil’s island he could see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany he realized they had only been seagulls.’ She looked at Harold and smiled. ‘To me,’ she said, ‘they will always be glorious birds’” (Higgins 2005, 100). The sequence and dialogue suggest that her own experience of antisemitism and threat of death are related to her outlook on life and the way she perceives

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natural beauty and art. Here, the film’s approach to nature and art relates to Böhme’s “theory of atmospheres becoming an aesthetic theory,” understood as “a critical theory of our contemporary civilization” (2016, 6). The narrative ends with Harold embodying the ecological aesthetics he learned from Maude. Whereas his outlook on life before meeting her can be described as cynical, he now embraces a new way of approaching life, which offers an alternative to instrumental reason and the normative orders enforced by his family, the military, the church, and the psychiatric profession. Following Maude’s advice, he is playing the banjo. He decides against committing suicide and is attentive to the present moment, his surroundings, and his senses. NOTES 1. Whenever I use the term “intergenerational” in this essay, I am referring to relationships of consenting adults. 2. The film avoids any direct references to homosexuality. Even a trailer for the film ends with the sentence: “Harold and Maude Say: Get Together Regardless of Your Age, Race, Creed, Color or National Origin . . . Thank You.” It is noteworthy that the sentence does not add the category of gender (Trailer). 3. The narratives and the dialogues of the novel and the film are often identical, because Higgins is the novelist as well as the screenwriter. Consequently, I will refer to both film and novel and quote directly from the novel, whenever the filmic dialogue is identical. 4. Today, the Colin Higgins Foundation, which Higgins founded in 1986, supports numerous LGBTQ-projects (cf. Colin Higgins Foundation). 5. In 1988, the year of Higgins’s death, Hal Ashby died from cancer, when he was 59 years old. In contrast to the silence surrounding Higgins’s life and death, Ashby’s biography and cause of death are frequently mentioned in the literature. 6. Hess sums up that Elizabeth Freeman’s “chrononormativity” is but one term to theorize the normativity of time. Other terms, such as Lee Edelman’s “reproductive futurism,” J. Halberstam’s “queer futurity,” or Tom Boellstorff’s “straight time” are currently in use to think through the relation between time and heteronormativity (Hess 2019, 4)—even if they differ in terms of the question if and how a utopian future for queer people can be imagined. 7. Even though Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder, who wrote an article for the feminist journal Women and Film when the film was first released, are sympathetic with the gender-reversal of the age difference of the partners, they make a spectacle of it by emphasizing that Maude could be Harold’s grandmother: “HAROLD AND MAUD [sic] presents the most extreme reversal; she is eighty (old enough to be his grandmother) and he is twenty” (Houston and Kinder 1972, 11, italics in original) and describe this relationship between two consenting adults as that of “woman and manchild,” suggesting Harold’s immaturity. This is also the title of their essay, which seems to be partly rooted in the ageist discourse of its time.

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8. Robert Azzarello’s critique strikes a similar note. He states: “Environmental studies must begin to take account of anti-queer sentiment in the history of the environmental movement and to acknowledge the ways in which a knowledge of the natural is always already a sexual kind of knowledge and often with heterosexist assumptions” (Azzarello 2008, 153). 9. Here is a second parallel to the writings of Herbert Marcuse, which have phenomenological leanings (cf. Brio 2005). 10. The filmic dialogue slightly differs from this quotation.

REFERENCES Ashby, Hal. Director. (1971) 2002. Harold and Maude, written by Colin Higgins. Paramount Home Entertainment. DVD. Azzarello, Robert. 2008. “Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” In Queering the Non/Human, edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, 137–158. Aldershot: Ashgate. Beach, Christopher. 2009. The Films of Hal Ashby. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Böhme, Gernot. 2016. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. Edited by Jean-Paul Thibaud. London: Taylor & Francis. Brio, Andrew. 2005. Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clarke, Timothy. 2014. “Phenomenology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 276–290. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colin Higgins Foundation. Accessed 14 January 2022. https:​//​www​.colinhiggins​.org. Dhir, Meraj. 2010. “A Gestalt Approach to Film Analysis.” In Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, edited by Scott Higgins, 89–106. New York: Routledge. Drake, Philipp. 2018. “Becoming Hal Ashby: Intersectional Politics, the Hollywood Renaissance, and Harold and Maude (1971). In The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era, edited by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, 165–184. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hess, Linda M. 2019. Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Higgins, Colin. (1971) 2005. Harold and Maude. Stuttgart: Reclam. Houston, Beverle, and Marsha Kinder. 1972. “Odd Couple: Woman and Manchild in Harold & Maude, Minnie & Moskowitz, Murmur of the Heart.” Women and Film 2: 10–15. Hunter, Aaron. 2016. Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Latimer, Heather. 2013. Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.

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Luke, Timothy W. 1997. Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Markson, Elizabeth W., and Carol A. Taylor. 2000. “The Mirror has Two Faces.” Aging and Society 20: 137–160. Rubin, Gayle. (1984) 1993. “Thinking Sex: Notes Towards a Radical Theory of Sexuality.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 3–44. New York: Routledge. Sandilands, Catriona. 2014. “Queer Life? Ecocriticism after the Fire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 305–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trailer of Harold and Maude. Accessed 15 January 2022. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​_ckWTn​-y5Rw.

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌C hapter Six

Time Travel, Age/ing, and Ecology in the German Netflix Series Dark (2017–2020) Tina-Karen Pusse and Michaela Schrage-Früh

In view of ecological challenges such as climate change, environmental pollution, and the threat of nuclear disaster, generations are increasingly pitted against each other, with so-called baby boomers often taking the blame for carelessly depriving younger generations of their future (Smith 2020; Meisner 2021; Elliot 2022). As we will argue in this chapter, a linear, chronological concept of time and aging underlying such a binary construction of young versus old is undermined by the dystopian world presented in the German Netflix series Dark (2017–2020), a series which brings together considerations of age, ecology, and accountability. Through the double lens of age studies and ecocriticism we will consider the juxtaposition of younger and older characters, the representation of intergenerational conflict, and the ways in which the disruption of linear time and the creation of multigenerational selves impact on individual characters throughout their life-course as well as on their community. Connectedly we will discuss the ecological dimension of the series: its exposure of anthropocentrism, the mythical setting of cave and forest as liminal spaces, and the “dark ecology” (Morton 2018) of the nuclear power plant and time travel. The series was aired in three seasons between 2017 and 2020 and was met with both public and critical acclaim. It has been compared to similarly successful international formats such as Stranger Things (2016–) and has been praised for opening “a new chapter in German television storytelling” (Batori 2021, 1). Dark’s convoluted plot revolves around a nuclear accident in the fictitious German town of Winden, a small village surrounded by forests, with 101

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its nuclear plant, a school, and a police station offering the only opportunities of regular employment. The nuclear accident creates a wormhole located in a cave beneath the plant, through which the town’s inhabitants travel in time between the years 1887 and 2052 (seasons 1 and 2) attempting to alter the course of events, and increasingly also travel between two parallel universes brought about by a quant event in a third “origin universe” (season 3).1 Aris Mousoutzanis aptly sums up the complexity “of a serpentine tale set across six major timelines and three universes, involving four families, which amounted to 28 main characters, many of them in three different versions of themselves (from the past, present, and future)” (Mousoutzanis 2020). It is noteworthy that Dark stays with the sites of collapse and destruction rather than proposing the world of the forest as a place of healing or relief. While we increasingly feel the effects of climate change, pollution, soil depletion, ecological loss, war, and pandemics, forests have become culturally loaded with the idea of their healing properties. This dimension of the forest is rejected by Dark. No cure of sporadic forest bathing will soothe the characters’ or the spectators’ anxieties, and the strong nature/culture binary that is present in so many narrations in similar settings is rejected.2 Likewise, time travel does not allow the characters to escape into an idyllic past or a redemptive future. In this sense Dark “stays with the trouble” as Donna Haraway or Timothy Morton would phrase it, showing the sites of the forest and the nuclear power plant as a continuum of collapse for which to take full responsibility. It thereby rejects the staging of wilderness, the nature/culture binary that has almost become inevitable for narratives in forest settings. When compared to other postapocalyptic or dystopian narratives, Dark is also peculiar in that it does not focus on or hardly even portrays mundane acts of survival. We know very little about what people in its postapocalyptic universe (season 3) eat, where they sleep, or how they build community. There is no heroic prepper paradise with body bags, shelter building, hunting, armament, and leadership quarrels.3 Instead, its protagonists remain wrapped in their personal exchanges stemming from before the nuclear event, engaging in the same questions of who can be trusted when and in which version of themselves. As Anna Batori notes, “[t]he theme of Dark is time itself” (2). In this sense the dystopian landscape remains a superficial backdrop to interpersonal conflicts and the protagonists’ obsession with rewriting the past. This is initially done by means of time travel facilitated by the wormhole, which reveals chronological time to be a construct. Past, present, and future exist side by side and are simultaneously intertwined. As various inhabitants of Winden learn about this and travel back and forward in time, seeking to change, prevent, or initiate events leading to the nuclear apocalypse in 2019, they repeatedly confront past and future versions of themselves and others. In doing so they are burdened with the responsibility of reconsidering past and



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future choices and required to continuously reposition themselves within their community, not unlike online game avatars who have several lives and can go back to previous levels to change decisions. However, this is complicated by the fact that they cannot revise decisions by slipping into their younger selves’ bodies, but only by meeting their younger selves and convincing, forcing, or manipulating them to change or stay on course. This often involves hostile confrontations, especially since their younger selves tend not to recognize their older versions. Despite all these manipulation methods, it turns out that events still unfold in the same way in each time loop, and that the interferences of older time travelers only took place because they had already taken place in the past and therefore need to be repeated. This situation is further complicated in season 3 with the introduction of a parallel multiverse version of Winden, which features the same, if slightly modified characters and character constellations (Martha died in universe one, Jonas never existed in universe two), and the revelation that it might be impossible to save both worlds: either Jonas’s or Martha’s world will have to be sacrificed—or indeed, as the final episode reveals, both worlds, as both turn out to be “ein Fehler in der Matrix” (a glitch in the matrix)4 and will have to be destroyed if the origin universe is to be restored. Considerations of time, aging, and accountability, then, are central in a series that deals “with time travel through a multigenerational discourse” (Batori 2) and links these themes to ecological concerns via the dark ecology of the nuclear power plant. The series can thus be read in terms of what Hubert Zapf describes as the “epistemological dimension [of ecocriticism] in which linear monocausal concepts of thought, agency, and time are questioned and superseded by nonlinear concepts of complexity and recursivity” (2016, 135). As Sarah Falcus has argued, “[t]hreats to the future, and by extension therefore our ways of imagining the future, are both inextricably linked to and metonymically represented by generational disorder and by figures of ageing” (2020, 66). And indeed, despite the simultaneous existence of multigenerational selves that seems to undermine any clear-cut binary of young versus old, hope for change or salvation in Dark is ultimately placed on the younger characters, specifically Jonas Kahnwald and Martha Nielsen, who throughout the series are manipulated by and placed in opposition to their older selves, renamed as Adam and Eva, and are increasingly driven by the need to avoid turning into their future versions. Nevertheless, as suggested by the final episode, liberation from the endless cycle of destruction and misery becomes possible only by means of intergenerational collaboration facilitated by the older characters’ insight and growth and by the younger characters’ acceptance of personal sacrifice. One character who plays a central role in this is the older self of Claudia Tiedemann, a triangulating element that breaks the dyadic entanglement of Jonas/Adam and Martha/Eva, as she is no longer

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driven by desires and love interests but in her oldest manifestation embodies wisdom, in the sense of cultivating both her empathy with other characters and their journeys and her thorough research of time travel, the God particle and multiverse theory. As the oldest and longest time traveler (she discovers the possibility to time travel already in 1986 and we see her development in four age stages) and the only traveler with a presence in the “origin world,” she eventually is able to correctly identify the moment in which origin Winden split apart and to coordinate the multigenerational rescue mission. From the first episode onwards, it becomes obvious that Winden is a dark place in more than one sense of the term. Not only is it a place surrounded by dark woods, perforated by a partially geological, partially artificial cave system, subject to continuous rain (Jonas’s world) or fog (Martha’s world), and dominated by the ugly grey building of the nuclear power plant, but it is also a place of secrets, mutual mistrust, and little hope for change. The general set design is indeed very dark, comprised of muted colors, so that when this design is interrupted by a few colored objects (Jonas’s yellow raincoat, wallpaper in the 1986-time travel bunker, Elisabeth’s beanie), these clearly stand out. Repeatedly, residents of Winden—across all three worlds—express their frustration with the town, referring to it as a Krebsgeschwür (cancerous growth). Eine Welt ohne Winden (a world without Winden) is, in fact, a toast performed during social occasions by several characters. But as much as they want to escape, their entanglement with their hometown is such that they cannot leave it throughout their lifetimes. A young Charlotte darkly warns her future husband upon his first arrival in Winden: “Winden ist wie ein schwarzes Loch. Wenn du einmal drin bist, kommst du nie wieder raus” (Winden is like a black hole. Once you’re in it, there’s no way out). Even though the events in 1986 are set against the Chernobyl disaster as evidenced by newspaper covers included in its set design and the warning articulated by a young version of Hannah not to stand in the (contaminated) rain for too long, characters are surprisingly unfazed by anything that happens outside their inner circle of friends, foes, and family. Environmental concerns are strangely absent, despite the fact that in Germany of 1986 and 2019 ecological groups feature prominently in public discourse. Especially in the 1980s, nuclear power plants and waste sites were often surrounded by protest camps. That there are no protesters around the nuclear power plant, not even prominent bumper stickers or flyers on cars or in the school buildings even in the direct aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, and no graffiti covering the signboards advertising happy family residencies in direct proximity to the plant, already exposes Winden as a place that is very disconnected from the rest of Germany in this time zone, a Foucauldian heterotopic space. It is only middle-aged pre-time traveler Claudia Tiedemann, new CEO of the nuclear power plant, who is shown to be conflicted about whether to



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disclose to the public a supposedly minor recent accident, covered up by her predecessor, and the reason why she decides to keep the secret is her discovery of the time portal that would become public knowledge if the accident was disclosed. Yet to the spectator these ecological contexts are strikingly present. The physical environment of Winden appears as a merger of a Romantic forest landscape and what Timothy Morton (2018) describes as a site of “dark ecology,” where complex man-made structures and technologies require our attention, awareness and care and don’t allow us to decouple them from what we are used to calling nature, but what is really the ideological container for everything from which we are separating ourselves, in the name of, amongst others, Christianity, Cartesian Philosophy, Romanticism, Agrilogistics, or Capitalism. In fact, material objects (the leaking nuclear waste container, the amulet, construction blueprints, the time travel book, technology, clothes such as the yellow raincoat, and finally the God particle) demonstrate that they, as much as interacting humans, penetrate each other and are not ontologically exhausted by their relation to humans. The electromagnetic field and high frequency sound emanating from the opening of the wormhole in the Winden caves rupture the eardrums of birds and make them fall from the sky as they lose their sense of orientation. They also kill a flock of sheep, whose hearts stop in panic when their eardrums burst. Objects also have their own time travel timelines, sometimes as intentional transport, sometimes as accidental bycatch that becomes significant for protagonists only over time, such as Ulrich Nielsen’s mobile phone, which is initially perceived as a mysterious object of art and later becomes a key component in a mobile time machine. As animals and trees die around them, the travelers only wake up to these warning signs when they grow to apocalyptic dimensions, threatening the human species.5 Winden is also the dark place where children have mysteriously disappeared in the woods—first in 1986 and, following a similar pattern, again in 2019. What starts out as a common fairy-tale narrative—the hero falls asleep in a cave and notices that 20 years have passed when he steps out— turns out to be a time travel into the past. The disappearance of 11-year-old Mikkel Nielsen in 2019, 33 years after that of his then teenage uncle Mads, sets off the events unrolling over the first season. One by one, inhabitants of Winden discover that it is possible to travel back in time in 33-year intervals, initially through a passageway in the cave near the nuclear power plant and later with the aid of a time machine. As the plot of the first season unfolds, time travelers from the past and future arrive in the Winden of 2019, seeking to orchestrate events and manipulate other characters, including their own younger selves, into actions that serve their own opaque agendas. In doing so they often unwittingly trigger the very events they seek to prevent, making it impossible to tell apart cause and effect, a phenomenon referred to as “causal

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loop” or “bootstrap paradox” in the series (Cyr, n.d.). The most prominent of its bootstrap paradoxes being that H. G. Tannhaus (his initials an obvious allusion to dystopian writer H. G. Wells) is working on a time machine without much success, but then receives a visitor from the future bringing him a book with construction plans authored by his future self, so that he follows his own instructions and copies the book. The book thus comes into existence only through this act of reverse self-plagiarism. Tellingly, the spectator’s first idea about the time zones the protagonists have landed in can be derived from the state of the forest. As we observe them stepping out of the cave, for the most part, our historic environmental knowledge exceeds that of the protagonists. We see periods of heavy agricultural forestry and trees suffering the effects of acid rain in 1986, a period of recovery in 2019, as well as total destruction in 2052. As they wander from the forest into Winden, their orientation in time increases as they gather information from car types, clothing styles, or bus timetables. Thus, their spatial and temporal orientation converges. Having become unable to match up what David Lewis refers to as personal versus external time (1976, 146), their slight but constant disorientation is visible in small gestures such as relying on their senses of smell more than they rely on expiry dates, for instance when drinking milk. The series features a large cast of characters but centrally revolves around four connected families: the Dopplers, the Nielsens, the Kahnwalds, and the Tiedemanns. In addition to the families’ multigenerational makeup consisting of children, parents, and grandparents, individual characters are encountered at various stages of their lives and contrasted with their younger and older selves. For instance, in 2019 Helge Doppler is presented as an old, confused man living with dementia in a care home in Winden; he is plagued by his conscience over crimes committed in the 1980s and is driven by the need to undo these deeds and alter the course of events. This primarily concerns the death of children he kidnapped to conduct time travel experiments. Middle-aged Helge is depicted as a simple-minded pawn controlled by the priest Noah, one of the travelers, who, in turn, works on behalf of Adam, the force behind Sic Mundus Creatus Est, a quasi-religious, anti-free-will order. Aware of the wormhole in the caves near the nuclear power station, Helge, as an old man, travels back to 1986 to confront and kill his younger self. However, it is his old self that is killed in the process while his younger self survives without heeding the older man’s warning. The chasm between the two characters becomes apparent when the older Helge initially addresses his younger self in the second person only to correct himself: “Du musst aufhören . . . Ich muss aufhören” (You’ve got to stop . . . I’ve got to stop). As is the case with several other characters throughout the series, the younger characters fail to recognize their older selves, while the older selves feel estranged from their



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younger versions. The same is true of parents who fail to recognize their time-traveling adult children. Thus, a middle-aged Helene Albers kills her own middle-aged daughter, Katharina Nielsen, without recognizing her. The uncanny familiarity, however, triggers her trauma of having had an illegal abortion in her teens, leading her to believe the uncannily familiar stranger is an apparition of the daughter she aborted: “Du bist nicht real, du kommst aus der Hölle, ich hab dich weggemacht!” (You’re not real, you have come from hell, I got rid of you!) The inability to intuitively recognize a younger or older version of either oneself or a close family member indicates a certain self-centered indifference and emotional detachment inherent in most of Winden’s inhabitants, a feature mirrored by the cold and gloomy environment. For characters more perceptive of such resemblances, such as Egon Tiedemann (“Ich vergesse nie ein Gesicht” [I never forget a face]), the oscillation between familiarity and strangeness in the time travelers’ faces is a constant source of unrest, alienating him from pre-time traveling versions of those characters. He perceives his daughter as cold-hearted when she starts resembling the “witch” he once met, or he suspects young Ulrich Nielsen of being responsible for the disappearance of the latter’s brother, because his face reminds him of middle-aged time-traveling Ulrich he arrested 33 years ago for attempted murder of a child. As children and middle-aged characters leave their zones, the voids they leave behind alter and traumatize the lives of their non-traveling, oblivious family members. In fact, Winden is saturated with intergenerational trauma, and the parental experience is one of the series’ most prominent underlying themes. This is exemplified by Ulrich Nielsen, who travels back to 1953, driven by the need to prevent his brother’s and son’s kidnapping. His brutal attempt to kill the boy Helge, whose future self will be responsible for the children’s disappearance, leads to his imprisonment and later admittance to a psychiatric ward, where he will be locked away for the rest of his life (while the very trauma that Helge experienced as victim of this attack will later render him susceptible to the influence of Noah). Like his wife Katharina and his lover Hannah Kahnwald, Ulrich is one of the uninitiated time travelers, who never understands the larger picture, or his role within it, and whose impulsive attempts to retrieve his child are therefore doomed to fail. Finally, as we only find out at the very end of season 3, Tannhaus’s grief and his drive to bring his son and granddaughter back to life is what brings the two worlds of Dark into existence in the first place. If we read them not only in terms of a time travel/multiverse narrative, but also, in hindsight, as representations or uncanny doubles of Tannhaus’s psyche, it is only consistent that they are filled with (or rather emptied of) children and catastrophes happening in the aftermath of these losses.

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Time travel alerts the spectators to the chasm between what David Lewis refers to as “time itself, external time” versus “the personal time of a particular time traveler: roughly, that which is measured by his wristwatch” (146). Time travelers “experience moments of external time out of order [. . .]. In the case of time travel to the past (backward time travel), [. . .] moments that are earlier in external time are experienced as later in the time traveler’s personal time” (Cyr, n.d.; italics in original). In Dark the ability to time travel disrupts the time travelers’ life-course. They age and even die but at the same time they remain “all ages and no age” (Segal 2014, 4), existing in a multiplicity of selves, trapped in an endless cycle of repetition that they cannot break. In other words, the more they return or move forward to the same time at short intervals, the more versions of themselves at different ages are present in the same time zone. In one scene, Eva assembles as many as three different versions of her younger self, Martha, around her, with a young Martha watching in shock as a just slightly older version of herself shoots Jonas. Similarly, an adolescent Jonas, only one day older than his double, replaces himself to catch a last moment with Martha at the lake, just before he becomes a drifter in time to move restlessly between the years 1888 and 2052 in various versions of himself. We witness middle-aged Jonas trying to build a time machine to escape from the year 1890, while his teenaged self, guided by Claudia, is preoccupied with a similar task in the apocalyptic future. His adolescent, middle-aged, and aged versions constantly travel through time, without a chance to settle down and build ordinary relationships. For him and the other travelers, personal and external time are completely out of sync. Thus, his middle-aged version temporarily sleeps in his 2019 adolescent self’s bedroom, sharing the house with his likewise middle-aged mother Hannah. Later Hannah, still in middle age, visits her now aged son in the future, where Jonas/Adam will murder her to prevent her from thwarting his plans. The divergence of personal and external time also leads to biologically impossible, uncanny constellations, as exemplified by Charlotte Doppler’s relationship to Elisabeth, who is simultaneously her daughter and her mother. The disruption of the time travelers’ chronological life stages and the multiplying of their selves seem to preclude not only character formation but both interpersonal and intergenerational connection in any conventional sense. At the same time, while it may temporarily allow the characters to detach themselves from and disavow responsibility for their own actions, which ostensibly are committed by others, the cyclical construction of time shows how everything—and indeed everyone—is connected and impacted by their own and others’ actions across different time periods. While at one level the spectators soon understand that the multigenerational selves presented are all versions of the same characters at different life stages, the fact that these selves are portrayed by different actors reinforces the sense



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of discontinuity between them. There is less and less outward resemblance between the adolescent, middle-aged, and old versions of Jonas and, what is more, all three seem driven by contrary goals and motivations. One lens through which to view these constellations is Robert N. Butler’s well-known concept of life review, “an inner experience or mental process of reviewing one’s life” (1963, 65) that, according to Butler, occurs naturally in later life and through which “revived experiences and conflicts are surveyed and reintegrated” (66). In Dark, this inner psychological process is turned outward as older characters physically travel back in time, confronting their younger selves and actively seeking to influence or reassure them. As Lynne Segal notes, life review tends to reveal “complex layerings of identities”: “As we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age” (4). In this view, the younger versions of ourselves are still a part of us as we age, their traces preserved within us like a set of nesting dolls, sewn into our memory and psychic fabric. This concept is externalized in Dark, where older characters address their actual (rather than remembered) younger selves, explaining to them that they must undergo painful and difficult experiences to turn into their present older selves. In Adam’s words, addressed to his younger self Jonas: “Ich zu sein, ohne vorher du gewesen zu sein, ist unmöglich” (Being me without previously having been you is impossible) and: “Mich, wie ich jetzt hier stehe, kann es nicht geben, wenn du nicht den gleichen Weg gehst wie ich” (The I that stands here now cannot exist if you don’t follow the same path as I did). Since becoming their older versions is not the most desirable of goals for those at the beginning of their journey, these words often have the opposite effect, which, again is the desired effect, since the older characters already know of their previous rebellious strikes and remember these very moments as well as their reactions to their words. In this respect, the encounters serve to reassure the older characters of their sense of control over their lives as well as of the purpose and righteousness of their past (and future) actions. Yet in view of the cyclical recurrence of events and the perceived lack of free will and agency, the endeavor of individually reviewing one’s life seems almost futile. However, while various middle-aged or older characters travel back in time to either reassure or manipulate their younger selves, occasionally they bring messages for other characters, for instance when the old version of Claudia Tiedemann travels back to 1953 to ask her then still young father’s forgiveness for an act her middle-aged self will commit in 1986. In a poignant scene, old and middle-aged Claudia embrace each other, with the latter requesting: “Sag’ Papa, dass es mir leid tut” (Tell dad I am sorry). Such scenes suggest a process of inner (self-)forgiveness and successful reintegration of unresolved conflicts that the life review seeks to achieve.

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Yet, the confrontation between a character’s young and old selves can also lead to moments of uncanniness, especially on the part of the character’s younger versions who experience an intensified form of what Kathleen Woodward has termed the “mirror stage of old age.” Referring to an older person’s sense of detachment and self-alienation when seeing their aged reflection in the mirror, Woodward (1991) argues: “[T]o see one’s own aged body with a shock of recognition is to experience the uncanny” (63, italics in original). Jonas’s mirror image is Adam, who embodies what Jonas will become in old age: “Ich bin deine Zukunft” (I am your future). He also holds a mirror up to Jonas, showing his younger self what he carries within him already. In view of the young man’s palpable repugnance vis-à-vis his older double, Adam remarks: “Wir empfinden die tiefste Abneigung denen gegenüber, die uns am ähnlichsten sind” (We feel the deepest dislike for those who are most like us). The duality of young versus old becomes most apparent in the central characters of Jonas/Adam and Martha/Eva. While young Jonas and Martha are lovers, Adam and Eva are each other’s nemesis, pulling characters in opposite directions. Even though Adam and Eva are Jonas’s and Martha’s future selves, the discrepancy between the young and old characters could not be more blatant. It is highlighted by the name change, indicating that the characters’ older selves have taken on a new identity of mythical proportions while also having undergone a “negative transformation over the years” (Batori 2021, 9). In Jonas’s and Adam’s case the difference between younger and older self is exacerbated by Adam’s disfigured looks lending him the abject appearance of an alien. While his skin condition is ostensibly caused by his excessive time travels or burns received when his middle-aged self was working on the prototype of a time machine in 1890, it is noteworthy that none of the other frequent time travelers are disfigured to a similar extent in old age.6 Jonas’s horror as he recognizes Adam by the only scar that they already share, stemming from being almost hanged when first visiting the apocalyptic future, reveals to him that a lifetime of suffering lies ahead, in which he will turn into an evil presence and which will require him to integrate a negative double, the opposite of what he strives to become. Eva indeed bears a much stronger outward resemblance to and continuity with her younger selves, including a single scar she herself inflicts on a younger version of Martha—as a continual reminder to her younger self that she belongs to Eva’s, rather than Adam’s side.7 Both Adam and Eva manipulate their own as well as their opponent’s younger selves. They are depicted as ruthless and merciless in their attempts to either end the cycle (Adam) or prolong it (Eva). Thus Adam, in his desire to end the cycle and achieve his personal version of paradise (an endless, timeless void), does not shy away from killing his mother Hannah and from



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sacrificing Martha. Given that his ultimate aim is to destroy the knot, individual killings appear meaningless in proportion, yet his lack of emotion displayed while committing these acts is chilling. Eva, in turn, is driven by her maternal instinct to protect her son’s life, even though her son (the “Unknown”), as a threefold manifestation of avenging angels (a middle-aged man with himself as a child and as an old man on each side), is one of the key contributors to the suffering dished out in the town of Winden and embodies the devastating consequences of an existence without development, change, and growth. This necessitates the endless repetition of the cycle, including the nuclear apocalypse. What Adam and Eva both have in common is that their younger selves despise them and seek to avoid turning into them. When Jonas eventually learns that his nemesis, Adam, is the old version of himself and that his current, well-intentioned actions will lead to the development of his uncanny, abject double (and in Adam’s view, must therefore continue), the shots of this scene, in a strangely sacral setting, show to the spectator what the younger protagonist resists to realize: that victim and perpetrator are merged into one mythical hyper-persona. Shown in alternating shots, both framed by candles and doorways that create a visual connection between them, chiaroscuro lighting, with all the memento mori insignia of a Renaissance oil painting (with Jonas’s white shirt and Adam’s white priest collar standing out in stark contrast), this scene lifts their confrontation to mythical proportions. It alludes to Adam as “the first man” and representative of the whole “fallen” species of humans, and Jonas as a same-ish but messianic figure who is burdened with the expectation to save everyone, accepting the suffering that this entails, but it also shows that these two are one, looking either towards his future or his past. Jonas is an early stage of being Adam, the stage where messianic drive again and again leads to an eternal return of the same: the nuclear accident but also the resurrection of lives in the lead-up to a new cycle, where he, now aged, can meet the new younger doubles of loved ones in their renewed “stage of innocence.” That his features are disfigured by time travel more than anybody else’s might be a representation of the dehumanizing, alienating effect of his repetition compulsion. This leads, in the last stage of his life, to the conviction that the cycle needs to be destroyed, which finally aligns him with Claudia Tiedemann’s goals, though he is lacking her insight into how this could be achieved. The importance of the life-course and its formative experiences that can lead to growth and insight is exemplified by the character of Claudia, who undergoes a process of inner change and Reifung.8 At one point she defines life as “eine Ansammlung verpasster Chancen” (an accumulation of missed opportunities) and her time-traveling life is spent trying to redeem past mistakes, such as neglecting her daughter Regina. Throughout most of the series she appears as a villain ruthlessly pursuing egoistical goals and is referred

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to as “weißer Teufel” (white devil) by several characters, including her own father. However, in contrast to Adam and Eva she is ultimately the one to find the loophole that will end the cycle of misery. Old Claudia thus embodies wisdom that she passes on to Adam, who, in turn, passes it on to his younger self and Martha/Eva, leading both to the realization that “Wir sind schuld an diesem niemals endenden Déjà vu” (We are to blame for this never-ending déjà vu) and Adam to inform his younger self: “Es gibt einen Weg, wie du nicht zu mir werden musst” (There’s a way you can avoid becoming me.) That this way entails never having existed at all is a sacrifice both Jonas/ Adam and Martha/Eva are eventually prepared to accept. To conclude, as is revealed in the very last episode of season 3, the cycle of misery can only be broken through both intergenerational collaboration and self-sacrifice. Only when the desire to save the world is no longer motivated by the desire to save oneself and one’s immediate loved ones can the knot be disentangled. In this regard, Dark resembles other recent Netflix productions such as Stranger Things in which the willingness for personal sacrifice is presented as a crucial factor in overcoming dark, destructive forces. Here, however, the onus of redemption is placed firmly on the younger characters, partly assisted but more often hindered by the middle-aged parent generation, while older characters, driven by scientific hybris or greed, play a more sinister role. In contrast, Dark displaces this broader theme of generational conflict into the microcosm of individual characters, with the younger characters rebelling against their older selves as they might against a parent or as millenials might against baby boomers. In doing so, it ultimately unsettles the ostensible duality of young versus old by constantly reminding the spectators that the multigenerational selves, no matter how opposed they may be to each other, are still one and the same person. Accordingly, for young Jonas and Martha at the end of their journey of having met all their future selves, personal sacrifice for the sake of the common good becomes a most gratifying endeavor. When it comes to eco-anxiety one of its central features is individual helplessness in the face of large scales in which shifts are required, and the exceedingly small scales in which individual action or inaction make a meaningful difference. When Jonas and Martha, guided by their older selves, finally understand that their very existence created two universes in which the apocalypse happened while suppressing the one universe in which it did not, their “little me” and “big me” (Morton 2018, 19) become identical, and the uncanny void between the insignificance of small individual actions and the enormous destruction caused by the accumulative nature of all small actions dissolves. In the narrative of Dark, their egos shrink and expand simultaneously: while they each represent a whole universe, they also cannot die in a conventional sense, but only disappear into a void of not ever having existed.



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This circumvents the “big scale anxiety paradox”: when they realize that they are the ones causing the loop by insisting on living and giving in to being drawn to one another, universes can be shifted back into order, by the small act of stopping a single car. Significantly, although young Martha and Jonas are the ones sent on the mission to complete this goal, the insight required to understand how “everything is connected” stems from the older characters. While this age-related allocation draws on well-worn stereotypes of youthful idealism and activism as opposed to the wisdom and insight of old age, it all the same highlights the importance of intergenerational understanding and collaboration in view of pressing global challenges. NOTES 1. The six time zones that the travelers can traverse, separated by 33 years each, are 1887, 1920, 1953, 1986, 2019, and 2052. The year of the apocalypse, 2019, is depicted as the present and roughly corresponds to the spectators’ present when the series was first aired in 2017. 2. Multiple examples of the forest’s ambivalent status as a place of healing and, simultaneously, insanity can be found in Madness in the Woods. Representations of the Ecological Uncanny, edited by Tina-Karen Pusse, Heike Schwarz, and Rebecca Downes. 3. From an ecocritical perspective, approaching Dark with theories derived from new spins on nature writing, such as Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination, will not get us far. Neither, thankfully, does Dark buy into postapocalyptic accelerationist paradigms, where the salvation of the few allows for building better futures either more in “harmony” with nature by making nature obsolete through new technologies. A short summary of the history of ecocritical thought can be found in the introduction of Sabine Lenore Müller and Tina-Karen Pusse, From Ego to Eco. Mapping Shifts. From Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism. 4. All translations from the German original are ours. 5. The exception to this is again Claudia, whose little dog Gretchen is a companion animal frequently exchanged between versions of herself, as it also travels between 1986 and 2019. Dead animals, or animal cartoons and toys, however, feature strongly in the series. Both, Mikkel and Elisabeth are attached to a fox soft toy, Elisabeth also wears a fox beanie, Charlotte and Helge collect dead birds as children, and the 1986 bunker is covered in animal cartoon wallpaper, featuring foxes, hares, and hedgehogs. These allude to a fairy tale in the Grimm corpus where a hedgehog wins races by disguising the fact that two hedgehogs are present in the race, the second placed, conveniently, close to the finish line. (We are thanking the depths of reddit for this catch.) 6. This concerns, for instance, Claudia Tiedemann, whose old version, though visibly aged, with long wild hair and wrinkled skin, and referred to as a “witch” by several characters, shows no marks, burns or scars rendering her “abject”; and to Noah, who does not appear to visibly age at all, which is due to the fact that he dies

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as a middle-aged man (as we only find out in season 3). Contrary to his presence as an uncanny, ghostlike, ubiquitous, and almost ageless figure for much of the series, we realise in season 3 that of all characters he spent the shortest personal time as a traveler. 7. A similar continuity is provided between the versions of Jonas/Adam by means of the rope mark around their neck, however, in older versions of Jonas/Adam this prominent mark is often hidden by a collar. 8. Regina is in many ways reminiscent of a character in a Reifungs- or Vollendungsroman, experiencing growth and insight as she ages and actively engages with her past and future selves. For a detailed overview of this genre cf. Michaela Schrage-Früh and Margaret O’Neill, “Novels of Ripening: The Maturation of the Bildungsroman.”

REFERENCES Batori, Anna. 2021. “‘Everything is Connected’: Narratives of Temporal and Spatial Transgression in Dark.” Journal of European Television History and Culture 10, no. 19: 1–12. https:​//​www​.viewjournal​.eu​/article​/10​.18146​/view​.246​/. Buell, Lawrence. 1996. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Butler, Robert. N. 1963. “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged.” Psychiatry 26, no. 1: 65–76. Cyr, Taylor W. (n.d.). “Time Travel and Causal Loops in Dark.” Andphilosophy.com The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. Accessed February 17, 2023. https:​//​andphilosophy​.com​/2020​/07​/06​/time​-travel​-and​-causal​-loops​-in​-dark​/. Elliott, Rebecca. 2022. “The ‘Boomer Remover’: Intergenerational Discounting, the Coronavirus and Climate Change.” The Sociological Review 70, no. 1: 74–91. Falcus, Sarah. 2020. “Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction.” In Literature and Ageing, edited by Margery Vibe Skagen and Elizabeth Barry. 65–85. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer. Lewis, David. 1976. “The Paradoxes of Time Travel.” American Philosophical Quarterly 13, no. 2 (April): 145–152. Meisner, Brad A. 2021. “‘Are You OK, Boomer?’ Intensification of Ageism and Intergenerational Tensions on Social Media Amid Covid-19.” Leisure Sciences 43, nos. 1–2: 56–61. Morton, Timothy. 2018. Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Mousoutzanis, Aris. 2020. “Dark: Meta-Complexity and National Identity in a Global Context—Part I.” CST Online. https:​//​cstonline​.net​/dark​-meta​-complexity​-and​ -national​-identity​-in​-a​-global​-context​-part​-i​-by​-aris​-mousoutzanis​/. Müller, Sabine Lenore, and Tina-Karen Pusse, eds. 2017. From Ego to Eco. Mapping Shifts. From Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Odar, Baran bo, and Janetje Friese, creators. 2017–2020. Dark. Netflix.



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Pusse, Tina-Karen, Heike Schwarz, and Rebecca Downs, eds. 2020. Madness in the Woods. Representations of the Ecological Uncanny. London: Peter Lang. Schrage-Früh, Michaela, and Margaret O'Neill. 2023. “Novels of Ripening: The Maturation of the Bildungsroman.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung, and Raquel Medina, 11–23. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Segal, Lynne. 2014. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London: Verso. Smith, Marie Danielle. 2020. “Inside the Corrosive New Generational Blame Game.” Maclean’s (January). https:​//​www​.macleans​.ca​/society​/inside​-the​-corrosive​-new​ -generational​-blame​-game​/. Woodward, Kathleen. 1991. Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zapf, Hubert. 2016. “Cultural Ecology of Literature—Literature as Cultural Ecology.” In Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, 135– 153. Berlin: De Gruyter.

PART II

Growing Old Amid Environmental Crises

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Chapter Seven‌‌‌

Imagining Longevity and Sustainability in Walter Besant’s The Inner House and William Morris’s News from Nowhere Adrian Tait

How might we integrate the fields of ecocriticism and aging studies? One approach is to seek out a common methodology; another is to identify common areas of interest, where the concerns of one overlap with the concerns of the other. This chapter sets out to do both, by integrating new materialist theories with ecocritical concerns, thereby creating a “material ecocriticism” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1–3), and then bringing this approach to bear on the problematic issues of aging, overpopulation, and sustainability as they feature in two notable nineteenth-century instances of speculative fiction: Walter Besant’s The Inner House (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). In the two novels, society has found a way to address the problem of the earth’s finite carrying capacity, but with utterly opposed consequences for older people. In the “intergenerational community” of Morris’s imagining, “there is an abundance of aged people, places, and things” (Chase 2009, 234): older people are an integral (indeed essential) part of a flourishing but also sustainable society that lives in intimate contact with its environs. In the socially manipulated and geo-engineered world of Besant’s dystopian near future, by contrast, older people have simply been eradicated as a precondition of sustainability. Before developing this analysis of the novels—Besant’s now all but forgotten, Morris’s still widely read—my first step is to elaborate on the (eco)critical approach to aging that it assumes. Formally established in the 1990s, ecocriticism is today a theoretically diverse field of study concerned with the 119

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interplay between human cultures and nonhuman natures; “the widest definition of ecocriticism,” notes Greg Garrard, “is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history” (2012, 5). In the last decade, ecocriticism has been influenced by new materialist theories, with their emphasis on the co-constitutive entanglements that collapse the nature/culture and human/nonhuman binaries; Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) is a much cited and perhaps defining example of the new materialist approach. A material ecocriticism is, therefore, mindful of the ecological impact of these performative, processual interactions—or, after Barad, “intra-actions” (Barad 2007, 33)—at both the micro- and macropolitical levels (Oppermann 2014, 23). These intra-actions are no less important to an understanding of the way in which older age is lived, experienced, and constructed, as a function of corporeal and cultural interchanges: (older) age is, as new materialist theories suggest, a material-discursive formation, whose very complexity challenges reductive attempts to define what aging is (ontologically) or should be (ethically), or how it can be studied and understood (epistemologically). What such an approach may usefully highlight is the tension between the particularity of an individual’s lived experience, and the generalizations inherent in those cultural and social policies which set out to define older age and manage an aging population. As Helen Small points out, society’s view of older age is often stubbornly caught up in banalities that “betray the basic poverty of our vocabulary” (2007, 3). Yet “the ‘greying of Western societies’” is, as Small observes, a “pressing social and political concern” (2007, viii). It is also a concern with an environmental dimension. As concerns rise over the impact of human behaviors—and in particular, Western lifestyles—on the environment, so do anxieties over the size of the global population, which has almost doubled in the last half-century (Roser, Ritchie, and Ortiz-Ospina 2013). In developed countries in particular, this population growth has less to do with birth rates than with improvements in people’s overall health and wellbeing, leading to a “population pyramid” in which the proportion of older people is steadily growing (Ritchie 2019). But whilst the possibility that the human population might exceed “the long-term carrying capacity of its ecological context” (Clark 2015, 80) is a perfectly legitimate concern, the issue is culturally and politically toxic (81; see also Garrard 2012, 106; Clarke 2018, 1–5): when raised, notes Adele E. Clarke, it is all too often greeted by a “booming silence” (2018, 4). As Timothy Clark explains, the very real fear is that the cumulative environmental impact of a growing human population demands solutions that are simply incompatible with the individual freedoms and rights that Western societies consider inalienable (2015, 81–83). Given that this growing population is also characterised by its “increased longevity” (Clark 2015, 81), this is no less a concern for the ecocritical approach



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to questions of aging that this chapter is concerned to develop: indeed, the tension between the micro-political particularities of lived experience in an aging population and their wider connections to macro-political questions of global environmental impacts is one that a new materialist or material ecocritical framework is well suited to explore. Significantly, however, concerns over the earth’s ability to sustain a growing human population are not new. As Garrard explains, Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was the first to predict that a growing population would outstrip its own means of subsistence, leading to crisis and conflict (2012, 102). In turn, Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) played an instrumental role in the development of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, “and later, the emergence of ecology” (Garrard 2012, 102). At the same time, “Malthusian philosophy and Darwinian-informed theories” stimulated “nascent ideas about euthanasia” (Reeves 2017, 95), prompting a number of late-Victorian writers to consider what this might mean in relation to older age. Walter Besant (1836–1901) was one of those writers. WALTER BESANT’S THE INNER HOUSE In The Inner House, Besant describes a future in which medical science has invented a longevity elixir that makes it possible to live forever. Jealously guarding the secret of this Great Discovery, the scientists establish a new community at Canterbury, with a population capped at 24,000. In order to ensure that their society remains sustainable, the scientists impose a strict policy of birth control, but infinite longevity also brings with it a kind of spiritual and creative stagnation to which extinction may seem preferable. Moreover, it will transpire that this utopian future was founded on a “Great Slaughter, when it was resolved to kill all the older men and women in order to reduce the population to the number which the land would support” (Besant 1888, 24). A sustainable longevity has been bought, in other words, at the cost of “the Massacre of the Old” (Besant 1888, 44), but in turn, longevity has led to a kind of half-life. The irony is self-evident: the cultural construction of older age as a state of inevitable decline and dependency—“the conflation of older age with compulsory decline” (Charise 2012, 4)—has licensed this most extreme of societal interventions, yet the utopia that results from it is itself increasingly paralyzed by its growing age. The College of Physicians that has made longevity possible “has destroyed everything—everything that makes life possible—and it tells the People to be happy because they live” (Besant 1888, 97). “All earthly things must have an End” (192), and that recognition inspires a rebellion premised on the belief that older age and a sense of an

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ending is a necessary part of a life well lived: “it is the anticipation of death that charges life with meaning and intense emotion” (Machann 1995, 132). As a new materialist reading of the novel underlines, the absence of an ending—and, therefore, of the narrative or trajectory that aging implies—is not the only, nor even the most important factor in the ruinous impact of this social experiment. As the narrative insists, the experiment is caught up in and crippled by a twofold process of generalization and abstraction, which on the one hand denies the specificity of an individual’s lived experience, and on the other, denies the corporeal reality of an embodied existence. The human body is itself the emerging product of material-discursive intra-actions and interchanges that complicate lived realities and often defy the assumptions that society makes about what aging is or should be. In this putative utopia, that mistake is writ large. Simply, society has mistaken uniformity for equality, creating a state in which individuality and idiosyncrasy is obliterated. Every citizen is dressed and treated alike, on the basis that they are all alike: “the very faces of the People are growing all alike” (Besant 1888, 35). “[P]erhaps in the far-off future,” declares the sinister Dr. Grout, “all will be at last exactly alike, and the individual will exist, indeed, no more” (35). “Here is true happiness,” he insists; “[n]othing to hope, nothing to fear—except accident; a little work for the common preservation; a body of wise men always devising measures for the common good; food plentiful and varied; gardens for repose and recreation, both summer and winter; warmth, shelter, and the entire absence of all emotions” (35). Yet life cannot be so reduced, and Besant’s novel embodies that message in the very conventionality of its realist form, which necessarily (re)instates particularity: the realist novel demands a distinctive plot, well-defined characters, and perhaps even an ending in which good prevails. Since Grout is the villain of the piece, there must also be a hero, and preferably a love story. Henry Linister, the Chief Physician and Grout’s superior, is recruited to the rebel cause when his love for the Lady Mildred is rekindled, reminding him of what it is to live, to feel, to be. In turn, Linister and his rebels rediscover a whole of range of human emotions and interests, including a passion for literature itself. As he tells Grout, “[o]ur people are reading again—the old Literature is full of the Soul: they are reading the great Poets of old, and are beginning to understand what they mean” (Besant 1888, 192). In this moment, and as new materialist thinking itself underlines, Linister and his rebels have recognized that their happiness is a product of both a material and a discursive context, and literature is a part of that material-discursive dynamic; it too is agential, and no less so than the carefully engineered biosphere in which their contrived existence is sustained. Indeed, Besant’s novel is itself caught up in a material-discursive dynamic, in which his arguments play their part in what was then a lively debate about how best to construct a viable and just



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society: as the novel dramatizes, people are not simply interchangeable units, and treating them as such—still less transforming them into a biologically engineered, undifferentiated mass—is not what should be meant by equality. Interpreted in this way by the scientists, “equality” constitutes of a denial of freedom, including the freedom to die on one’s own terms, and freedom is itself an essential constituent in a happy life. Without freedom, no one can flourish. Freedom is not therefore some abstraction, but a concept that is and must take a material form: it is the freedom to enjoy a real, an embodied life, a fleshly existence, subject to the opportunities and the indignities of the aging process. As Linister tells Grout, he and his rebels will give up the elixir, and “the new active life will make men once more familiar with the old figure who carried a scythe. There will be accidents; new diseases will arise; age will creep slowly on—the Great Discovery will be quietly forgotten in minds which you had made so dull that they could not understand when we rescued them what it meant” (Besant 1888, 192). Yet this will also be a life open to all the pleasures that an embodied existence brings, such as love. This, too, has been ignored by the College of Physicians. The Physicians are, however, impervious to Linister’s arguments. Even the rebellion fails to shake them from their position. As members of the resistance movement cede from society and set off to start their own community, Grout (the College’s new leader) looks forward to the time when “the last stage of Humanity will be reached—an inert mass of breathing, feeding, sleeping flesh, kept by the Holy College—the Triumph of Science—free from Decay and Death” (Besant 1888, 193). (Grout will still have plenty of people on whom to continue his social experiment: refusing to substitute one generalised conclusion about human nature for another, the novel emphasises the chilling fact that many of Grout’s shapeless citizens reject the rebellion, perfectly prepared to accept a stultifying life without freedoms in return for the stabilities and certainties that accompany it.) As Linister’s rekindled feelings for Mildred underline, love is not the preserve of the young. Indeed, it is precisely because age is no impediment to strong and passionate feelings such as love that the rebellion is (at least in part) successful. Here, once again, the novel’s dramatization of an individual’s actual experiences contradicts the construction on which the Great Massacre was predicated: that older age is inevitably characterized by physical and mental infirmity. As Karen Chase observes, this pejorative construction was becoming an integral part of Victorian thinking about aging (2009, 2); today, notes Andrea Charise, it has been naturalized in an often apocalyptic “language of ageism” (2012, 3). By no means everyone was prepared to accept that construction: as his utopian novel News from Nowhere illustrates, William Morris (1834–1896) was amongst those who preferred to see older age in much more positive terms.

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WILLIAM MORRIS’S NEWS FROM NOWHERE In Morris’s society of the future, relationships are unhindered by social constraints, or more or less arbitrary social constructions. Instead, notes Chase, relationships of all kinds—platonic, sexual, romantic, but also intergenerational—“are the ‘natural’ extension of fully realized lives within a healthy environment” (2009, 236). It is this twofold cultivation of a healthy, sustainable environment and fully realized lives that has created a generation of equally healthy, long-lived people. They are not, therefore, the product of “eugenics, separation of undesirables from the main community [. . .], or euthanasia,” as it has been argued (Reeves 2017, 104), but the happy side-effect of a way of life that is explicitly presented as the antidote to the society of Morris’s own day. At the time, “the concern over the physical, mental and moral deterioration of the British race [was rapidly becoming] an obsession” (Chinn 1996, 91), and the correlation between environmental factors (such as urban squalor) and health, life-expectancy, and even physique were becoming more and more evident. As Carl Chinn observes, many critics of the late-Victorian period extrapolated from these findings a social Darwinist argument that the urban poor were becoming a separate, degenerate race (1996, 90–91). How, then, does Morris propose to remedy the ills of his day—and do so without invoking the eugenicist narratives that were in the ascendancy— and what account does his vision take of population size, then accelerating rapidly? Britain’s population was 27 million in 1851, but by 1891, it had increased by a further 10 million (Office for National Statistics 2015); to contemporaries, this was a pressing concern. In News from Nowhere, Morris depicts a post-revolutionary utopia, in which the state has withered away, its place taken by an anarcho-socialist vision of a communal life. In this garden-like world, where everyone takes a hand in working the land at harvest-time, lives are now much healthier, and no elixir is needed to prolong a “green old age” (Morris 2003, 141). Yet the population has stabilized of its own accord (63), without the need for tyrannical intervention. How is this possible? In Morris’s intricate portrayal of a utopian future, several factors have come together to create a truly sustainable society. The first relates to the abandonment of industrial modernity and the deliberate rejection of consumer capitalism. There is no longer an inevitable tendency towards over-production, nor a constant craving for goods to consume, nor a restless demand for newness. Instead, alienated, industrialized forms of production have been supplanted by the mindful and deliberative creation of hand-crafted goods. The making of these goods is its own form of reward, and they are valued because they are beautiful, functional, and enduring. They are made to last, in



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a society that values the things that do last, like the old locks along the length of the Thames: perfectly fitted to the job they do, the locks are carefully maintained (Morris 2003, 145–146). The disappearance of industrial forms of manufacture has also resulted in a cleaner and healthier environment, marred neither by chimneys and factories nor by the mines needed to extract raw materials. This matters, because society as a whole now lives in a way that more clearly emphasizes, recognizes, and respects the co-constitutive nature of the entanglements with which human existence is caught up. Cities survive, but in a much diminished and much greener form; the population is now more evenly spread out, and more obviously involved and imbricated in its natural surroundings. This is the world as garden, or perhaps, kitchen-garden, in which there is a great deal that is ornamental and not just useful. Fields are on a smaller scale, and old orchards are cultivated; forests and wildernesses also have a place. As one character observes, “we like these pieces of wild nature, and can afford them, so we have them” (Morris 2003, 64). Moreover, the forests play an important part in the education of children: they “come to play in the woods for weeks together in summer-time [. . .] We rather encourage them to it; they learn to do things for themselves, and get to notice the wild creatures” (24). Books have almost no place in an education which is, instead, practical and hands-on, and the root of a shared realization that, in all its forms, human and nonhuman, matter “matters”; that it is, as Barad insists, agential (2007, 32–35). As such, it too plays a lively and active role in creating society—and sometimes, the role it plays is stubborn, unyielding, problematic; it is not always a willing partner. As one character puts it, with admirable directness, “we pass our lives in reasonable strife with nature” (Morris 2003, 50). This sense of society’s deliberative, conscious involvement in and intra-action with its environs—its recognition that this involvement constitutes “reasonable strife”—is reflected in what little survives of its formal, political structures. Power has been devolved to the local level, where environmental impacts are most obviously felt and most easily addressed. Whilst communities are still networked to form a larger whole, that process of devolution has created a sense of engagement with decision making from which no-one is excluded; everyone has a stake in the future of society, and a meaningful voice in their own future. That empowerment also has a bearing on the status of women. Celebrated for their role as care-givers and home-makers, they have not entirely escaped the domestic ideology of Morris’s own day (see Morris 2003, 51–52), but they are nevertheless equal and equally independent members of a society that is far more free-thinking: the implication is that women now have much more control over their own fertility, which has in turn proven to be a significant factor in shaping society’s demographic.

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The related point is that, as society has grown healthier and rates of mortality have declined, there is less pressure to have large families. As the reader is told, “[a] mother has no longer any mere sordid anxieties for the future of her children [. . .] she is spared the fear (it was most commonly the certainty) that artificial disabilities would make her children something less than men and women: she knows that they will live and act according to the measure of their own faculties” (Morris 2003, 53). Dick and Clara, for example, have had two children, which in a society where accidents and illness have not been entirely banished, may in fact be slightly less than it needs to perpetuate itself. Another of the reasons for this declining birth-rate relates to the status of older people. In a society (like Morris’s) that made no provision for the care of older people but the workhouse, there was a positive incentive to have a large family, since at least some of the children would survive to care for the parents in their older age. In Morris’s utopia, by contrast, older people are valued, and their care is considered a communal responsibility. The related point is that older people need less care, because they remain healthy and vigorous: as Chase points out in her own reading of the novel, the young and the old “often seem indistinguishable” (2009, 234). Indeed, there is a strong sense in which Morris’s vision anticipates recent scientific research, which suggests that “late life should be described as a stage or phase of life, not an ever more precipitous slope of decline” (Small 2007, 250). Crucially, therefore, Morris’s society has found a way to ensure that both human and nonhuman nature flourishes. “[C]areful and appreciative habitation” (Morris 2003, 140) is the basis of society’s ecological awareness, but society is no less careful about human wellbeing, which is itself enhanced by its constant contact with the material world. As the novel’s time-travelling narrator observes, people here are thoroughly caught up in “all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the last new house, the plenty or lack of such and such birds” (47); they are, in new materialist terms, almost preternaturally conscious of the entanglements that constitute their own being. The novel’s narrator, William Guest, is also, however, a skeptical commentator. Entranced as he is by the charms of this new world, he recognizes that its achievements bring risks. Those risks stem, in part, from society’s success in overcoming the indignities and infirmities that may accompany older age, and in so doing closing the gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. The people of Nowhere remain hale and hearty well into older age. As they increasingly appear physically indistinguishable, however, and as the very categories designating advanced age begin to seem redundant, so they begin to resemble the undifferentiated mass that Grout has contrived in his biologically engineered dystopia. Without the prospect of death to give meaning and shape to a life, the citizens of Nowhere often appear lost in the present, undeniably alert to the cycle of the seasons, mindful of the soil they



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are tilling, the wood they are turning, and the stone they are working, but less aware of time itself, and its deeper, broader meanings. As Chase observes, Guest worries that so settled and uneventful an existence verges “on monotony” (2009, 239), even that it encodes “an ominous ‘no time’” (240). What is life without struggle, Guest wonders; does it not lead to that loss “of creative vitality” (234) which Besant himself predicted? How can society itself survive, without its own historical consciousness—its own sense of the struggles that shaped it, the battles that had to be fought, the challenges that had to be overcome—and without its own, longer view of complex ecological dynamics that play out (as we now appreciate) over more-than-human time scales? Without those perspectives, it is too easy to take for granted everything on which this idyll depends (Chase 2009, 238), and quietly, passively allow it to come undone. Without those perspectives, in other words, this outwardly sustainable society lacks resilience; perhaps it is questionable whether it can be called “sustainable” at all. “Paradise has its paradoxes,” notes Chase, and this is one; but is it therefore true, as Chase adds, that “Morris displays the contradiction without resolving it” (2009, 236)? Whilst Guest records numerous encounters with characters whose age he simply cannot guess, he also records—and positions as central to his narrative—several other encounters in which the character’s (older) age is not just an obvious but a prominent part of who they are. As these encounters underline, their advancing age is also a reason why they are important to society, an importance which, perhaps because of his own historical consciousness, Guest appreciates in a way that his younger hosts sometimes do not. “Old Hammond” (his nickname explicitly situates him in relation to his age) is a case in point (Morris 2003, 45). Hammond is “over a hundred and five” (45), but his other nickname signals the role he has to play—and feels he must play—within society: he is “the sage of Bloomsbury” (135). A scholar, antiquarian, and historian, Old Hammond has withdrawn from the kind of active, manual, or craft-related employment with which society is now preoccupied, and instead focuses on building up as complete a picture of Nowhere’s history as he can. Needless to say, he finds Guest’s recollections as fascinating as Guest finds his account of Nowhere’s revolutionary emergence and establishment. As Guest discovers, Old Hammond is not alone in this desire to preserve society’s history: as Guest’s journey takes him out of London and along the Thames, he encounters Henry Morsom, “an old, but very bright and intelligent man, who seemed in a country way to be another edition of old Hammond” (Morris 2003, 152). Together, Hammond and Morsom collect and preserve what society itself may now tend to disvalue: a strong sense of its own, complex history, both human and ecological. In so doing, they play a cautionary role in preserving society, reminding it that it cannot live only in its present, but must be aware of where it has come from,

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and where it may yet end up; as Guest himself inquires, “[w]hat is to come after this?” (155). It is, in part, their own age that makes them more mindful of passing time, and of the changes that time brings, frailty included; age (and sometimes infirmity) has brought them a wisdom which this youthful society does not truly possess. Consequently, it is significant that this same society sees fit to keep them and sustain them, even if it does not fully understand or appreciate the role they have to play in preserving it. What they bring to society is, from a new materialist perspective, both living proof of the continuing importance of the body itself, as the corporeal focus of the interchanges and intra-actions between human and nonhuman, cultural and natural realms, and, conversely, a mindfulness of the role of discourse, as a conduit for and expression of power. Preoccupied with the material world, society has forgotten that its own formation and indeed its own continuance depends just as much on discursive regimes of the very kind that Old Hammond and Morsom interrogate, explore, and patrol; these two old men recognize, in other words, that what is in question are the material-discursive formations through which society continually and iteratively comes into being (Barad 2007, 33–35). If anything, figures such as Old Hammond may in their own lives err too far in the opposite direction: the ever-alert Guest draws pointed attention to Hammond’s apparent indifference to his surroundings, living in a “dreary classical house [. . .] as bare as need be” (Morris 2003, 45). It is rather as if, preoccupied with oral and written histories of times when “we were not so assured of peace and continuous plenty” (47), the lively, material world around him has begun to fade from view. Perhaps, to Old Hammond, the past seems more alive, more real than the present. This would certainly explain the peculiarities of another of the novel’s elder statesmen, the curmudgeonly “old grumbler” (Morris 2003, 132) of chapters 22 and 23. There is, as Guest’s narrative quietly encodes, a charming but also ultimately rather tedious sameness about the inhabitants of Nowhere; a time of peace has supplanted an age of struggle, but it has also erased the differences that lend a society both its vitality and its sources of creative tension, and stripped its citizens of something of their character. The “old grumbler” is, as his nickname suggests, determined to act as the antidote to that tendency towards a self-satisfied sameness. He is, in other words, a contrarian, who on principle takes up the opposite view to those around him. Since those around him are mostly quite confident that they live in the best of all possible worlds, he is equally adamant that they do not, and the past from which Guest hales is much superior. In a society that lives in the moment, largely ignores books and book-learning, and lives communally, the old grumbler believes that a society governed by the free-for-all of self-interest was necessarily a more vital one.



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The literature of the Victorian period testifies to the fact: “books of the past days,” he claims, “are much more alive than those which are written now; and good sound unlimited competition was the condition under which they were written” (Morris 2003, 129). “I cannot help thinking that our moralists and historians exaggerate hugely the unhappiness of the past days,” he concludes, to Guest’s consternation; these “splendid works of imagination and intellect” (129) are proof. His granddaughter, Ellen, is not convinced. On the one hand, she feels that books have no place in the midst of lives so fully and consciously engaged in the material world, a world which can and should itself be read as a text. “[I]t is the world we live in which interests us,” she ripostes; “the world of which we are a part, and which we can never love too much” (Morris 2003, 129). As she adds, “throwing open the casement wider and showing us the white light sparkling between the black shadows of the moonlit garden, [. . .] ‘these are our books in these days!’” (129). On the other hand, she is quite clear in her own mind that, whatever the merits of the books in which her grandfather immerses himself, they do not excuse (and would never have compensated for) the harsh realities of the world in which they originated. As she points out, those realities would have affected him perhaps most of all: “in the good old days,” she continues, “a harmless and lazy old man like you would [. . .] have pretty nearly starved” (130). Ellen’s logic is impeccable—as far as it goes. But her dismissal of the discursive dimension that books embody, and her exclusive focus on ecophenomenological encounters with the material world, does betray a certain complacency and narrowness in outlook that (busy with his books) her grandfather offsets. As Morris underlines, in this subtle and persuasive account of the role that aging can play in a resilient society, it is this act on the “old grumbler’s” part that helps to reestablish the dialectic on which society’s selfawareness depends. CONCLUSION As Clarke points out, a rapidly expanding human population is “affecting ecologies and biodiversity ever more devastatingly” (2018, 1). Yet the nature of this relationship (between population and its impact) is complex, and the subject as a whole remains a controversial one (Clarke 2018, 4). The discussion is all the more fraught because questions of aging are caught up in it, as, globally, the world’s population lives longer. Arguably, “longevity means more time for illness, and implies that greater effort and resources will need to be devoted to keeping well” (Porter 1997, 710); the related concern is that

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an aging population will in and of itself place greater demands on the earth’s carrying capacity. This discussion is not, however, a new one. In the Victorian period, the population doubled, and growing numbers of people began to live into older age, generating a new category of political and scientific discourse (Chase 2009, 1). The corollary was, however, that “old age” was by default defined as a problem, a conceptual structure that assumes frailty (Tait 2019). This is no less a problem today, as the World Health Organization points out in its recent (2021) Global Report on Ageism, which highlights the way in which terms such as “the elderly” are used pejoratively to stereotype “older people as universally frail and dependent” (World Health Organization 2021, xx). Significantly, however, and as Charise has discussed, the nineteenth-century novel became an important site for contesting narratives of “burden, difficulty, or disruption” (2020, xxv), and “plotting new textualizations of older age as [. . .] fluid [and] non-teleological” (xlii). This fluidity—this particularity—is reflected most strongly in William Morris’s characterization of figures such as Old Hammond, Morsom, and Ellen’s grumbling grandfather, all three quite distinct from each other, each in his own way happy, and happy because allowed to live out a full and autonomous existence. Thus, human flourishing depends on the particularity of lived experience, which necessarily involves the aging process. As Morris stresses, this may or may not involve physical frailty or illness: as evidence today underlines, “[f]ears that increased longevity will reward us only with extra years spent in decrepitude and dependency are not [. . .] being realised” (Watts 2006, 332). But with or without any marked physical decline, older age represents a vital and climactic stage in human existence which cannot be gainsaid or denied but must instead be embraced, as a thing of value in itself, and of perhaps unexpected benefits to society as a whole. Older people should be valued, Morris’s novel suggests, because (amongst much else) they embody the flow of time, and convey that sense of an ending without which a life is (paradoxically) incomplete. As these characters also demonstrate, age can bring with it experience, wisdom, different and perhaps critical but also important perspectives on the present. Without them, and without the dialectic they engender, society is itself not fully realized and not fully resilient; its sustainability, forged in the moment, will only ever be momentary. Thus, and in a kind of anticipation of a new materialist onto-epistemological and onto-ethical framing of a sustainable human existence, Morris’s self-styled “Epoch of Rest” (the novel’s subtitle) derives its sense of self and of (self-)worth from its own appreciation of the intimate entanglements with which it is caught up, entanglements whose wider temporal and spatial significance it is precisely the role of older people to highlight and point out (their very individuality is part of the point: that



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a free, flourishing, and sustainable society is one in which idiosyncrasy has a place). In Walter Besant’s altogether bleaker alternate, humankind’s future has been bought at an inhuman cost. Yet this is itself only a part of the price that has been paid for a form of environmental equilibrium that amounts to stasis and stagnation. Lives that have been infinitely prolonged are also lives without purpose or meaning; they amount, as Besant suggests, to a denial of a complete life. Furthermore, this future society depends on the kind of systematic control that denies any form of individuality and idiosyncrasy, without which human flourishing is itself impossible. That cutting short carries over into the way in which society manages its environment, whether for food, for recreation, or beauty; nonhuman nature has, like human nature itself, ceased to be self-willed, but is now simply a function of managerial inputs. As a new materialist approach highlights, these macro-political decisions reflect a categorical failure to understand the multi-scalar complexity of human and nonhuman life, a complexity that operates over time and space in ways that older people may be well placed to appreciate. Older people are a resource: as Morris stresses, it is only with their involvement that society is able to maintain a judicious balance between population size, way of life, and ecological carrying capacity; it is only with the sense of an ending that their lives embody that society is able to look forward to its future and escape the trap of the present. REFERENCES Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Besant, Walter. 1888. The Inner House. New York: Harper & Brothers. Charise, Andrea. 2012. “‘Let the Reader Think of the Burden’: Old Age and the Crisis of Capacity.” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 4: 1–16. https:​ //​arcade​.stanford​.edu​/sites​/default​/files​/article​_pdfs​/OCCASION​_v04​_Charise​ _053112​_0​.pdf. ———. 2020. The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chase, Karen. 2009. The Victorians and Old Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chinn, Carl. 1996. Poverty Amidst Prosperity: The Urban Poor in England, 1834– 1914. Lancaster: Carnegie. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Clarke, Adele E. 2018. “Introducing Making Kin Not Population.” In Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, 1–39. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. 2014. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Machann, Clinton. 1995. “Violence and the Construction of Masculinity in Walter Besant’s The Inner House.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 4, no. 2: 131–140. Morris, William. 2003. News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Characters from a Utopian Romance. Edited by David Leopold. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Office for National Statistics. 2015. UK Population Estimates 1851 to 2014. https:​//​www​.ons​.gov​.uk​/peoplepopulationandcommunity​/populationandmigration​/ populationestimates​/adhocs​/004356ukpopulationestimates1851to2014. Oppermann, Serpil. 2014. “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 21–36. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Porter, Roy. 1997. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. London: HarperCollins. Ritchie, Hannah. 2019. “Age Structure.” Our World in Data. https:​//​ourworldindata​ .org​/age​-structure. Reeves, Nancee. 2017. “Euthanasia and (D)evolution in Speculative Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 45: 95–117. Roser, Max, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. 2013. “World Population Growth.” Our World in Data. https:​//​ourworldindata​.org​/world​-population​-growth. Small, Helen. 2007. The Long Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tait, Adrian. 2019. “A Disabling View of Old Age? Charles Dickens and Victorian Perspectives on Ageing.” In Jeszcze raz o starości z chorobą (On Ageing and Illness, One More Time), edited by Hanna Serkowska and Maciej Ganczar, 163– 177. Warsaw: Warsaw University Press. Watts, Geoff. 2006. “Looking to the Future Revisited.” In The Cambridge History of Medicine, edited by Roy Porter, 331–340. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. World Health Organization. 2021. Global Report on Ageism. Geneva: World Health Organization. https:​//​www​.who​.int​/teams​/social​-determinants​-of​-health​/ demographic​-change​-and​-healthy​-ageing​/combatting​-ageism​/global​-report​-on​ -ageism.

Chapter Eight

Literature and the “Cultural Scripting” of Aging and Dying Stephen Hahn‌‌

Recent attempts to address the situation of “the old” approaching death examine “cultural scripts” by which aging human subjects conclude their lives in a world where the ability to prolong or shorten life raises the question of the value of life in apparently novel ways. Observing the ability of medical practitioners to assist in the process hastening the termination of life as well as to offer support for its extension, researchers Naomi Richards and Marian Krawczyk pose the question: “What is the cultural value of dying in an era of assisted dying?” (2021). According to their study, scripts for dying encode cultural values determining the way a person’s death and, implicitly, their life, may be interpreted and valued. They suggest that the most traditional among these scripts encode painful death as a trial of self-worth that may provide an example of courage to those who remain living. Summarizing the literature on “death and dying” of the late twentieth century, they claim that this scenario of death as a struggle of the soul has lost favor due to the movement from a religious to a secular culture which interprets late old age as a period of “psychological growth” in which the person integrates past experience and imparts wisdom to those who remain living. They attribute this alternative scripting to the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Mitch Albom, and Randy Pausch (Richards and Krawczyk 2021, 62–63). Such scripts, in their view, ameliorate the drama of the heroic suffering script but fail to eliminate the possibility of physical, emotional, or spiritual suffering as a prelude to death. Instead, they argue that “assisted dying” makes available a third script incorporating the ability of the aged and dying person to access a means of avoiding pain in order to manage pragmatically their end-of-life affairs, in effect enabling the self to write its own script for dying, an approach to the 133

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end of life as a period of “compassionate care,” imparting “compassion by a different means” (Richards and Krawczyk 2021, 64).1 Despite the appearance of clinical grounding for these observations, supported to a degree by references to prior practitioners, there is nothing to indicate that any of these “scripts” are strongly tied to specific cultural or religious groups or historical periods, and the limited description of types of scripts hardly seem exhaustive of actual or imagined cases. The idea of cultural scripting, however, offers promising grounds for further exploration. Absent more comprehensive clinical observation of such scripts as they are enacted, it is difficult to imagine an exhaustive taxonomy of ways in which aging persons facing death may become effective agents in composing the “scripts” for their own end of life scenarios. Yet it is possible to imagine that they may do so. Moreover, attaining a clear understanding of the role that ecological and economic pressures may have in the scripting of these scenarios is a strong aspiration. Elucidation of these possible scenarios is one step toward such elaboration. This essay argues that works of literature can assist us in contemplating a variety of approaches to or “cultural scripts” for aging and dying without claiming that any one is necessarily most accurate clinically, most appropriate morally, or most satisfying experientially. Indeed, to elaborate upon the subject of dying and late old age without reference to the heritage of literature that confronts the cultural situation of old, infirm, or terminally ill subjects denies us access to a rich heritage of understanding when faced with the complex, multi-dimensional situation of the self at the end of life. An early modern writer who represents the possibilities of literature as a source of imaginative engagement with aging and the approach of death, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) provides insight into aging and death as a culturally embedded phenomena with moral, spiritual, and political significance. His poems on these subjects may help us to understand the late aging and/ or dying self as a more complex, multidimensional subject—a subject both passive and active, interacting with its world and the people in it as more than a diminishing point of consciousness or weakening protagonist in a presumed “battle” against an overpowering foe. Additionally, Wordsworth wrote at a time of ecological and economic crisis in which the fate of marginalized populations, such as unsupported widows, old persons without pensions or property, and parentless children (of which he had been one) were particularly susceptible to an untimely mortality. Finally, Wordsworth’s influence in this vein of his poetry extends into the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In the conclusion to this essay, I examine briefly the work of two contemporary women writers, Rhina P. Espaillat and Gail Mazur, who adapt Wordsworth’s themes of the gift of life and use of inheritance to contemporary cultural contexts. In one poem, by Espaillat, early worldly

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inheritance proves an ambiguously disappointing benefit cutting the heir off from community with his brother (both figures, following the original parable, are figured as male); in another, by Mazur, the idea that organ donation may provide a “gift of life” underwrites an ironically unstable bargain, from the perspective of moral benefit, in the cause of sustained or assisted living. Across a span of two centuries, all three writers draw on the tradition of Hebrew and Christian scriptures while responding to social circumstances of aging and dying in their respective secular milieus. The moral import of their poems resides in the reader’s response to them, rather than in an extrinsic set of religious doctrines. WORDSWORTH AND THE SCRIPTING OF AGING AND DEATH IN A TIME OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS, C. 1800 Wordsworth began his poetic career in a revolutionary age in which political, economic, and social changes resulted in the displacement of large segments of the population from traditional means of living on familiar ground. Colonial and international wars had depleted the English nation’s resources while movements toward the consolidation of landholding and the rise of concentrated industry resulted in the disruption of the lives of the poor, working, and middle classes. While often remembered for his poems about children and his identification of childhood as a blessed period of existence, Wordsworth is, as the literary historian and critic Willard Spiegelman notes, arguably “the first modern spokesman for old age” (Spiegelman 1985, 83). It is notable that Spiegelman uses the word modern in his characterization of Wordsworth, for the prevailing conditions just outlined are typically those that define cultural modernity. In Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802), written and assembled with the partial collaboration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge but decidedly Wordsworth’s own project, and in his poems on related themes, Wordsworth turned lyric poetry into a new and unexpectedly public genre of poetry reflecting on the theme of “what man has made of man” (a line introduced and repeated for emphasis in “Lines Written in Early Spring”). The naming of the volume as Lyrical Ballads suggests an entwining of poetic voices between reflective, narrative, and dramatic modes—spanning an arc from private reverie to public speech. Central to the procedures of these poems is the dramatic encounter between a normative narrator (and interlocutor) lyrically musing on life and corresponding characters whose experiences are seen to display varying degrees of eccentricity regarding social norms. These characters are then induced to tell their own more or less instructive stories for the benefit of the interlocutor and subsequently to readers of the poems. The old persons depicted among

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these characters are frequently revealed to be engaged in marginal employment (such as the famous “leech-gather” of “Resolution and Independence”), to be reduced to vagrancy and abject poverty (e.g., “The Female Vagrant,” “The Old Cumberland Beggar”), or to be displaced economically by remote causes of ownership in land, war, and urban vices (as in the minor epyllion titled “Michael”). Looking beyond English shores to the boundaries of European colonialism, these dramatized portraits also include that of an unnamed Indigenous woman who is left behind to die as her hunter-gatherer people migrate in the quest for sustenance (in “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman”). A primary cause of the displacement of the characters is economic or environmental change beyond the control or ken of the victim of that change. Culturally, their plight is indicative of what the historian Rob Nixon calls “attritional catastrophes” of social change beyond the direction of individuals and the “slow violence” of such change (Nixon 2011, 7). While other works of literature ascribe dire consequences to such changes, Wordsworth’s poetry is particularly effective for depicting so tactfully and subtly the rise of what David Bollier has called an “impersonal, individualist, transactional-based ethic of the market economy” (Belier 2014, 79). Even in the case of “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” somewhat anomalous in the collection, where the apparent justification of her abandonment by her community is the self-preservation of the community in a resource-scarce environment, the imaginary tale is appended to a supposedly factual account of a European explorer in a period when Indigenous people of the Northern Hemisphere were under unilateral pressure of displacement from their homelands, subject to new sources of disease and threats to social cohesion. While presenting a variation on the pattern of many of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, as well as on the focus on the Englishness of those subjects, this poem participates in what will become one of the strongest cultural scripts of the culmination of life in a death memorialized as both a loss to and a reaffirmation of the value of community. As an example of the structure of a typical “lyrical ballad” by Wordsworth, we encounter the aging “leech gatherer” in “Resolution and Independence,” an early poem on the poet’s search for a vocation, as the old man is discovered finding his way with failing sight to harvest leeches for medicinal uses in diminished quantities and rarer locations (due to the enclosure of property and restriction of access).2 The causes of his being hard-pressed are implied rather than directly stated not only as a consequence of Wordsworth’s deliberately sparse style, but most probably for political reasons, as the poet evades being directly seditious (Heffernan 1998, 239). Briefly recounting his life’s narrative, the leech-gatherer becomes a touchstone for our understanding of Wordsworth’s emphasis on ecological and economic change, as the speaker of the poem discovers this solemn human subject confronting a diminishment

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of natural resources in the environment. The “leech-gatherer” mimics in his action the search of the speaker of the poem in seeking fugitive inspiration, also scarce, and causing him to discover it in an unlikely place, the leech-gatherer’s firm resolution of mind in his old age, so that he stands as a reproof to the wandering poet’s vagaries: I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit Man so firm a mind. (lines 137–138; Wordsworth 1892, 124)

The leech-gatherer’s self-possession under duress of body and the environment brings the narrator up short by turning the tables on his conventional habits of mind, including the usual mind-body ratio equating health with a sound mind in a sound body and sickness with its opposite. In Wordsworth’s scripting of late aging and dying, inversion is thus an important rhetorical figure, allowing for a critique of the assumptions and presumptions of the socially normative interlocutor attempting to fix mottoes onto behavior and phenomena that run contrary to his maxims. Such dramatic encounters between the normative narrators and those characters leading a fugitive existence whom members of the nominally learned, socially privileged world would customarily scorn are shown to possess an eloquence surpassing the artificialities of customary association. From the standpoint of social science, Wordsworth’s portraits of these characters admittedly register as anecdotal (indeed, one is titled “An Anecdote for Fathers”); like all literature, their effectiveness in addressing social circumstances is based in their ability to evoke a sense of aptness rather than to prove a determined fact. At the same time, their representation of persons in multiple dimensions of experience provides a contrasting richness to the abstractions of statistical representation. These marginal figures represent characters rich though poor, enduring though bound toward death.3 In Wordsworth’s poetry, such aging characters display resilience, even under circumstances of ecological and economic duress. The “Old Cumberland Beggar” provides an example of a character who once functioned to stir the encompassing community’s sense of well-being through offering him alms and reviving their feelings of charity. The narrator of the poem claims to have known the old “beggar” since his own childhood, and comments that “then/ He was so old, he seems not older now” (22–23; Wordsworth 1893b, 114) in one of a number of figures of speech that emphasize how close to the limit of possible length of life the man exists. His observations lead the speaker of the poem to an intervention with the imagined audience of his discourse as he exclaims:

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But deem not this Man useless.—Statesmen! ye Who are so restless in your wisdom, ye Who have a broom still ready in your hands To rid the world of nuisances; ye proud, ............................... . . . deem him not A burden of the earth! (lines 67–70, 72–73; Wordsworth 1893b, 115)

Vehemence is all in the repetition of commands. According to the speaker’s insights, the old man performs a duty to the community: . . . While from door to door, This old Man creeps, the villagers in him Behold a record which together binds Past deeds and offices of charity, Else unremembered, and so keeps alive The kindly mood in hearts which lapse of years, And that half-wisdom half-experience gives, Make slow to feel, and by sure steps resign To selfishness and cold oblivious cares. (lines 87–95; Wordsworth 1893b, 116)

The argument for forbearance of and support to the old man is rooted in the idea that common feelings are awakened by care for the old and perish in its neglect. The old man himself functions in the perceptions of the villagers as an inscription (“a record”) of “past deeds and acts of charity” that “binds” together their past and present feelings (as pages in the binding of a book) in a contemporary antidote to “selfishness” and “cold oblivious cares.” The poem thus presents a complex argument for the importance of the care of its older members within the life of the community as the old man reminds readers of their own mortality and encourages them to cultivate humility. In keeping with Wordsworth’s procedure of “turning the tables” to highlight by contrast the assumptions underlying a point of view, “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” presents the case of what Wordsworth calls in his headnote to the poem (and thus, presumably in his authorial presence and not a distanced persona) a “Northern Indian,” as a culturally typical case of one of such who “from sickness, is unable to continue his journey with his companions [. . .] is left behind” with supplies and clothes and information about the route on which “his” companions are to travel. Initially Wordsworth uses the masculine pronoun, but then shifts to say that “the females are equally, or still more, exposed to the same fate” referring the

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reader to “Hearne’s Journey from Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean.”4 If other of Wordsworth’s characters in Lyrical Ballads and the early poems can be thought of as precursors of the increasingly realistic representations of the poor, sick, and abject in Victorian fiction, the Forsaken Indian Woman does not have her own language in the poem; rather, the ventriloquist-poet attempts to translate her remote grief to current passion through verses of a type Wordsworth had himself criticized in commenting on a poem on a similar theme by William Cowper (see Mason 1992, 91–92). There is no vehicle other than the imagination for the “lament” of the woman to be conveyed to the present reader, as she is “forsaken” and without anyone to hear her plea. The idea here, unfortunately, is all, and the poem lacks the dramatic aspect of encounter and revelation that other lyrical ballads have. Yet it is an idea that becomes important in the modern cultural scripting of death and the acceptance of death through this poem and through many repetitions of the trope of the “dying Indian” in historical and quasi-anthropological narratives.5 Indeed, one of the veins of inquiry in the study of aging and dying is carried out among Indigenous people of North America who provide easily accounted for control groups for research.6 The idea of acquiescence in solitary sacrificial death, leaving others (individually or corporately), better off through one’s own demise, lives on even in the midst of populations that otherwise show by empirical research that they seek to deny death as an outcome of aging: What other significance or purpose might the management of one’s affairs at the end of life have in the cultural scripting of aging and death than to benefit the community or some members of it, or at least in dying to do no harm? WORDSWORTH AND THE SCRIPTING OF AGING AND DYING IN A TIME OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS, C. 2000 One could argue that as insightful and suggestive as Wordsworth’s poetry may be regarding the predicament of aging and dying persons, it is nevertheless indicative of another time and cultural moment and therefore calls upon readers imaginatively to resituate themselves in another cultural context and its habits of expression. It is important, then, to observe the continuities as well as the differences between Wordsworth’s time and circumstances and our own, and to consider the contribution that the observation of continuity can provide. The work of two approximately contemporary American poets, previously mentioned, illustrates the continued relevance of traditional sources to the interrogation of the value of life, in effect translating themes of aging and dying from an early modern to a postmodern or late modern context in which worldly dissipation and the squandering of life persist

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along with the desire to sustain life in a transpersonal manner through novel technologies—in this case, the technology of transplanting organs from the recently deceased to those threatened with death. Among contemporary poets writing from the vantage point of old age, Rhina P. Espaillat exemplifies the incorporation of a sense of ecological and not merely personal precarity in the poems collected in Where Horizons Go. The title of the volume itself suggests that the metaphor of the horizon involves not a stable end point to an ongoing process but a phenomenon that is capable both of moving in relation to the human subject and of disappearing (as in go away) with the disappearance of the subject. Put another way, the poetics of this volume suggest that the human subject creates horizons of self in the process of living and that the shaping of these horizons define us in the process of becoming. In Land’s End, Gail Mazur also uses the metaphor of a terminus or limit—in this case grounded in the literal point on Massachusetts’s Cape Cod that is the setting of a central poem in the collection—which is also metaphorically a habitation, a garden, and a precarious node of life. Mazur’s phrase “land’s end” expresses, as does Espaillat’s “till Kingdom Come” (in the poem “Review,” 1998, 33), an awareness of a finitude not merely of the individual but of the human as it is woven now into the cultural scripting, at least for some people and cultures, of the community, the collective, the shared life whether considered in a biological or a spiritual dimension or some combination of both. Each of these writers explores alternate scripting’s of aging and the end of life to interrogate and resist the reduction of the value of life to simple exchange- or use-value. In Mazur’s “Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth’s” (Mazur 2020, 184–187), the narrator returns to a haunted specter created by Wordsworth out of the biblical materials of the Parable of the False Steward (Luke 16.1–13). Here the sense of the gift of life is embodied in the figure of a woman driving her car, who carries in her purse “a Living Will” which promises to convey the gift of life to another. But the poem takes an ironic turn as the narrator imagines that she (the organ donor) dies in an accident after having hit another “old woman” crossing in front of her car. She imagines herself as having constructed a bargain so that “what she’s got in her body” may make up for “whatever virtues she lacks,” and to ensure that, in the end, she “won’t just be someone dead.” Yet the plan fails. The poem quite obviously and unsentimentally reconfigures the idea of the gift, and through it the question: what is the value of a life? The poem concludes with a somber tone in grafting in three lines from Book I of Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, “The Prelude”:

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Unprofitably travelling toward the grave, Like a false steward who hath much received And renders nothing back. (lines 267–269; Wordsworth 1893c, 15; Mazur 2020, 186)

Like in Mazur’s poem (and Wordsworth’s), Espaillat, in her last two lines of “The Prodigal Son Goes Over Notes for His Memoirs,” draws on a New Testament parable (Luke 15.11–32), ending with the prodigal son ironically reflecting on the message he intends to leave for the benefit of his resentful and less worldly brother: Why scourge him with a truth less truth than taunt, how little in the world there is to want? (lines 13–14; 1998, 40)

Poems such as these extend Wordsworth’s habit of attentiveness to the words of the aging and dying, an attentiveness attuned to the awareness of irony inherent in creating scripts to avoid precarity and death. Awareness of the variety of ways in which the aging subject may attempt to script their own death scenario only to have circumstances reveal further contradictions and complications is not simply a literary procedure: it reflects something inherent to our human situation. Reading poems such as these may assist us as helpers, practitioners, and people who just happen to be involved to be attentive to the precarity of attempts to extend our control of outcomes through “assisted living” or “assisted dying” to the end of more compassionate care. NOTES 1. Arriving too late to be fully integrated into the argument of this chapter, “A Responsible Death: Valuing Life from Mortality Tables to Wearables” by Tamara Kneese provides an important analysis of the calculus of economic considerations in contemporary “death-care practices in the United States” as an extension of an ethics of “personal responsibility” that entails “managing [one’s own] death” as another facet of worker productivity” (2022, 73). 2. See Alda Baltorp-Lewis’s essay for an extensive close reading and analysis of “Resolution and Independence” and the figure of the leech-gatherer in an eco-critical framework. 3. For an analysis of the significance of the anecdote as a genre spanning the domains of imaginative literature and modern social science, with specific reference to Wordsworth’s poetry, see Wood (2019, 173–179).

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4. An excerpt containing this anecdote from Hearne’s 1795 treatise (the full title of which is A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson Bay to the Northern Ocean) can be found in Mason (1992, 385). 5. Arguably the most famous and influential poem in this genre and period is Philip Freneau’s “The Dying Indian” (1784). See the extensive analyses from ecocritical and cultural perspectives in Bergland, The National Uncanny, and Richardson (Mi’kmaq), The Savage and Modern Self. 6. Dennis and Washington (2018) exemplifies a vein of research involving Indigenous North American people particularly subject to ecological change, revealing the tension between active and passive roles in the scripting of the aging subject and his, her, and their approach to dying.

REFERENCES Bastrop-Lewis, Alda. 2018. “Thoreau’s Woodchopper, Wordsworth’s Leech-Gatherer, and the Representation of ‘Humble and Rustic Life.” In Theology and Ecology Across the Disciplines: On Care for Our Common Home, edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser, 39–52. London: T&T Clark. Bergland, Renee. 2000. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover: University Press of New England. Bollier, David. 2014. Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the History of the Commons. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Dennis, Mary Kate, and Karla T. Washington. 2018. “‘Just Let Me Go’: End-of-Life Planning Among Ojibwe Elders.” The Gerontologist 58, no. 2, 300–307. Espaillat, Rhina P. 1998. Where Horizons Go. Kirksville: New Odyssey Press. Heffernan, James A. W. 1998. “Wordsworth’s ‘Leveling’ Muse in 1798.” In 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, edited by Richard Cronin, 231–253. New York: Palgrave. Kneese, Tamara. 2022. “A Responsible Death: Valuing Life from Mortality Tables to Wearables.” In The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the TwentyFirst Century, edited by Shannon Lee Dowdy and Tamara Kneese, 73–103. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Mason, Michael, ed. 1992. Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads. London: Longman. Mazur, Gail. 2020. Land’s End: New and Selected Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Richards, Naomi, and Marian Krawczyk. 2021. “What Is the Cultural Value of Dying in an Era of Assisted Dying?” Medical Humanities 47: 61–67. Richardson, Robbie. 2018. The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Spiegelman, Willard. 1985. Wordsworth’s Heroes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wood, James Robert. 2019. Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wordsworth, William. 1892. “Resolution and Independence.” In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Vol. II. Edited with memoir by Edward Dowden in seven volumes. 119–124. London: George Bell & Sons. ———. 1893a. “Lines Written in Early Spring.” In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Vol. IV. Edited with memoir by Edward Dowden in seven volumes. 199–200. London: George Bell & Sons. ———. 1893b. “The Old Cumberland Beggar.” In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Vol. V. Edited with memoir by Edward Dowden in seven volumes. 113–119. London: George Bell & Sons. ———. 1893c. “The Prelude.” In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Vol. VII. Edited with memoir by Edward Dowden in seven volumes. 7–27. London: George Bell & Sons.

Chapter Nine

Caring (for) Futures Intergenerational Justice in Contemporary Drama Julia Hoydis

In the interdisciplinary realm of the environmental humanities, intergenerational justice is quickly becoming one of the most central issues. Debates about the future of the planet, the increasingly forceful impact of global warming in the present, and the violent historical trajectories that have led up to it highlight urgent matters of care—about human and non-human others and the environment.1 In addition to discourses of interrelated crises, environmental and demographic, as well as dominant narratives of decline and loss and the struggle to set stories of hope and agency against them, they suggest multiple links between topical concerns in aging studies and ecocriticism. This chapter sets out to explore some of these links, focusing on the negotiation of intergenerational justice and issues of care in contemporary drama. It will address questions about how the dramatic texts depict topics such as loss of health and habitats, generational time and conflict, and how they imagine futures of care and caring about (in)just futures. Looking at developments in post-millennial British drama reveals a significant rise in plays about climate change from around 2010 onwards (see Johns-Putra 2016; Hoydis 2020) that coincides with a boom of plays that deal with age and aging (see Moore 2014).2 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this finds aesthetic expression often in apocalyptic scenarios, ushering in a new heyday of dystopia in British drama (see Sierz and Tönnies 2021). While the (post)apocalyptic and dystopian remains a dominant narrative template, along with a strategic use of humor, other plays experiment with responses in different poetic modes, as the analysis of four plays which premiered in the UK 145

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between 2007 and 2016 will show. Arguing that questions of care and individual and collective justice in the face of crisis emerge as key themes in these works, I will first consider two plays that tackle care and dementia in radically different ways and have received little critical attention so far: Tamsin Oglesby’s Really Old, Like Forty Five (2010a) is a dystopian satire and a response to the playwright’s experiences of visiting her mother in a bleak care facility for people suffering from dementia; meanwhile RedCape Theatre’s 1 Beach Road (2011) is a slow-paced, elegiac play based on real-life experiences of people in the Norfolk village of Happisburgh and creates a powerful metaphorical link between Alzheimer’s and coastal erosion. The second part looks at two plays which focus more explicitly on aging and climate change. While both use elements of humor, they dramatize different temporal scales and different agencies of the older characters. Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016) employs surrealism to intersect the now of an afternoon tea party with projections into catastrophic futures. John Godber’s Crown Prince (2009) is set in a Bowling Club on a hill that becomes the characters’ refuge when the low-lying city of Hull is flooded; the drama covers a time span of twenty years in a realist, linear plot line. The plays, while written by playwrights from different generations, are mostly set in one small location (a house near the coast, a garden, a bowling club, and the surrounding green) and in the present or near future. They either feature small casts of characters from one isolated age group (1 Beach Road; Escaped Alone) or from three–four generations (Really Old, Like Forty Five; Crown Prince). These aspects obviously impact on the framing of intergenerational justice and responsibility in the works, with conflict and different attitudes taking priority in the multi-generational plays over questions of coping with loss and survivor’s guilt in the monogenerational plays. The short play “Birthday Suit” by Kenyan writer MaryAnn Karanja will serve as a final counterexample in the conclusion, as it underlines the concern with intergenerational justice, but shifts the declensionist narrative which prevails in the other plays to one of solidarity and agency beyond the nuclear family. Before turning to the plays, I will briefly sketch the theoretical background for linking theories of intergenerational justice and studies of aging and drama. In his 2006 introduction to the Handbook of Intergenerational Justice, Joerg Tremmel argues that: “The concept [. . .] may very well become an intellectual leitmotif” (2006, 1) of the twenty-first century. Since then, it has gained traction across disciplines and while debates still tend to be dominated by law and the social sciences (as the selection of articles in the Handbook shows), the global environmental justice movement has given rise to the concern with futurity and intergenerational ethics also in the humanities. As Joni Adamson sums up, “intergenerational justice has become one of the keywords and key goals [. . .], and thus suggests itself as an important future direction

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for the environmental humanities” (2017, 122). The concern with this leitmotif coincides with growing awareness of the Anthropocene and the human species’ long-lasting and destructive influence on conditions on earth. This is tied to new understandings of interconnectedness and relationality, of the fact that nothing and no one exists in isolation. The Anthropocene thus ushered in renewed concern with the relational paradigm of intergenerational justice and an ethical obligation to posterity. For it is paradoxically the increasing awareness of an ending of life, “of the finitude and fragility of our one and only Earth,” explains Emmanuel Agius, that caused “a sudden and amazing upgrading of the theme of the ‘future’ in almost every area of contemporary life” (2006, 318). Overlapping with long-standing concerns in aging studies, this also means an increasing interest in questions of risk management, in longevity and population development, in care, health, and well-being. Therefore, as scholars in both aging studies and ecocriticism have recognized, intergenerational justice and imaginations of futurity are mutually dependent. While interpretive gerontologist Jan Baars argues that the “[c]oncern with intergenerationality presupposes openness or commitment to having a future” (2012, 152), ecocritic Greg Garrard similarly posits: “Only if we imagine that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility” (2012, 116). The latter refers to the main challenge of motivating people to accept responsibility and act accordingly. In theory, intergenerational justice, which comprises justice between the old and the young as well as between present and future generations, is thus seen as one of the most important reasons to strive for sustainability and the protection of nature (Tremmel 2006, 2). But this is, of course, neither a new insight, nor are visions and debates of intergenerational justice a recent phenomenon. Influential social theories of the past, Marxism for example, have aimed at improving the present and the future of mankind, while philosophical and scientific debates, especially in nineteenth-century Britain, have responded to fears such as overpopulation and finite resources—most notably and contested being perhaps the writings of Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill. These ideas have also found reflection in fictional texts, for instance in novels by Walter Besant or William Morris (see chapter 7, Adrian Tait, in this volume). In the twentieth century, a milestone text to bring the topic of intergenerational justice into contemporary philosophical debates was John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). But Rawls’ idea that every generation will have more than the previous one, if the “just saving principle” is observed (see Rawls 1971, 284–293), is clearly outdated. The current moment, and this is also what shapes the theatrical and other fictional representations, is marked by darker rather than brighter futures: “The leading affect,” Dieter Birnbacher notes, “is the fear of future deteriorations instead of the hope for coming improvements” (2006, 27). While the scope and limits of intergenerational solidarity, that is, of

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responsibilities to the old and the young and to the not-yet-born, are hard to define in a general way, there is consensus that the future is mainly threatened by two developments: exponential growth in the human utilization of nature and exponential population growth, which also includes the longevity revolution in many parts of the world. According to the 2022 UN report on World Population Prospects, already one in ten people in the world is over sixty-five years old, projected to rise to 16 percent by 2050 (United Nations 2022). At the heart of the debate is therefore intergenerational justice in an aging society—often framed as a demographic crisis amidst another one, namely that of climate change and environmental degradation. Theatre responds noticeably to the changing context of an aging society and over the last decade the topic of old age has become pervasive in British drama.3 Critic Aleks Sierz notes how “until quite recently, you couldn’t move for plays about youth. Now, there’s an avalanche of dramas about aging, usually in the context of dementia and family life” (2015). Recurring topics in the plays include questions about how an aging population impacts on western economies, conflicts between millennials and the baby boomer generation, care, Alzheimer’s disease, euthanasia, and a good death or what Margaret Morganroth Gullette calls “duty-to-die” versus “right-to-die” discourses (Gullette 2016, 244; see Casado-Gual 2020, 246; Moore 2014, 168). All these are part and parcel of intergenerational justice, while also corresponding to clusters of narratives predominant in aging studies. Scholars here stress a focus on senescing and health issues (especially Alzheimer’s), the depiction of aging as social-existential problem and crisis in the sense “that what is going on now in terms of global population aging is unprecedented, pervasive, profound and enduring” (Mangan 2013, 19; see Baars 2012, 148), and, finally, ageism as the potential reinforcing of fears of the aging process, and stereotyping presumptions about increasing vulnerability and loss of competence. Most plays, as Bridie Moore concludes in a survey of more than twenty productions in UK theatres that deal with aging reinforce “inadvertently [. . .] a narrative of decline, predicated on a youth/age binary and a narrowing of meaning as age advances” (2014, 190). Michael Mangan similarly mentions the dominance of the master narrative of decline in theatrical representations (2013, 9). Genre has a lot to do with this phenomenon. There is an ongoing and still unbroken trend towards dystopia in contemporary British drama, as several critics have observed. Graham Saunders speaks of a turn towards “catastrophic millenarianism” (2019, 22), Trish Reid notes a “dystopian turn” with a marked focus on futurity (2019, 77), Eckart Voigts and Merle Tönnies (2020) comment on the rise of “surreal dystopias” on stage. The apocalyptic certainly remains a dominant and productive template in (Western) ecodrama, often leading to a paralleling of looming disasters (see also chapter

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10, Henderson and Dunn, in this volume). Mixing menace with satire and absurdist comedy, many plays employ these narrative modes to interrogate current cultural and political concerns. As Jen Harvie argues, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when economic precarity also intensified violence against old people, contemporary drama uses dystopian impulses and satire to reveal the destructive effects of ageist neoliberalism (see Harvie 2018, 4). Oglesby’s Really Old, Like Forty Five is a good illustration of this. The play, which premiered in 2010, integrates two modes and settings. The first is the domestic realism of a London family home, consisting of three siblings in their seventies and eighties: Lyn, Alice, and Robbie. Lyn suffers from Alzheimer’s and has a daughter and a sixteen-year-old adopted granddaughter who becomes a teen-mum by the end of the play, which thus features members of four generations. Alice, suffering from other ailments such as increasing deafness and mobility issues, is the caretaker of her thirteen-year-old grandson Dylan. Robbie, the oldest of the three, is in denial about his age and tries to keep up a façade of pretending to still work as an actor, dying his hair, and dating much younger women. One of them is “really old, like forty five” (RO 47)4—at least in the eyes of grandson Dylan. The line from which the play borrows its title is thus an ironic reference to the fact that perceptions of age are never objective but always relational. Meanwhile Robbie’s masquerade goes as far as wearing a full-face mask, desperately trying to avoid being forced into child-care or, if no longer appearing fit for that, into volunteering for medical experiments and an early death. In the scenario imagined in the play, these are the only two options available for remaining useful to society. The second mode is therefore an overt political satire in which the government officials declare: “This is our task. To banish forever the association of old age with irrelevance. To give everyone a function, regardless of their age, and to make their last days on earth as fulfilling as they can possibly be” (RO 19). The state steps in to solve the care crisis by making the two problem groups, the under-sixteens and over-sixties, take care of each other, seeking to “diffuse both these demographic timebombs” (RO 17) simultaneously. Other creative solutions to tackle the crisis, which is described as an “unprecedented situation which [. . .] ha[s] reached epidemic proportions” (RO 17), and the threat of finite resources are explored in the play’s second main setting, the government-run hospital, tellingly named “the Ark.” Here, cruel experiments with a new Alzheimer’s drug and palliative robotic nurses take place. The latter is, in fact, depicted as a successful solution to the care crisis. The post-human character of Mimi (played on stage by a human actress) appears as the most caring and humane. The drug, however, does not have the desired effect of improving memory function; instead, it has the side-effect of ending lives relatively swiftly and

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painlessly. Confronted with these first results of the drug trial, the government officials and the medical professionals jointly devise a plan to use the pill to eliminate people once they are no longer useful. In the play, it is the members of the middle generation, the thirty–sixty-year-olds, who are largely relieved of care duties and who get to control the suffering of the old and to decide who is eligible when for a pleasurable death: MIKE: It would be up to the consultants to select the most appropriate and deserving. AMANDA: Of course. MIKE: Although I think it’s fairly obvious, isn’t it, when someone has lost touch with reality? (RO 81)

The use of positively connoted terms like “appropriate” and “deserving” is highly sarcastic, as is the disguise of a premature death sentence as an elitist selection process and the description of patients with dementia as having “lost touch with reality.” In an interview, Oglesby, who names visiting her mum in a bleak care facility as motivation for writing the play, explains that she tried to use “comic shock tactics” (Oglesby 2010b) like those in Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). This eighteenth-century satire famously proposes to solve the burden of masses of poor people and hunger by selling children and eating them. In the play, the government official ponders a similar strategy of gerontocide: “Chimpanzees, for example, devour each other. I’m not suggesting, obviously, that we eat our old people. Apart from the ethical questions, people are, as I understand it, of dubious nutritional value once past the age of child rearing” (RO 17). While the motif of gerontocide reoccurs throughout English literary history, it functions here as an argument against a cruel “burden of care” rhetoric.5 In Act II, Lyn is in hospital on the Alzheimer’s drug trial, after her daughter Cathy refuses to care for her at home: “I can’t be a mother not now, god, not to her not like this, I just, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s just, it’s not that I don’t love her, it’s just I’m too young to die” (RO 45). Caring for someone with dementia is here equated with dying, at least by a member from the middle generation. Really Old explores the issue of caretaking for the young and the old focusing on members of different generations, highlighting questions of competence and responsibility, for example, if teenager Millie is fit to look after her own baby. An ironic twist sees the government official Monroe, aged fifty-three, being admitted to the Arc, after having been diagnosed with a high risk of developing dementia. He is literally being given a taste of his own medicine, as Lyn switches his regular pills with her own suicide pills. This display of

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cunning and resilience means that she will go on living, while he shows signs of the side effects of the drug that will induce a premature death. Following this scene, the play draws to a rather conventional narrative close, ending with a death (Robbie’s) and a birth. At the funeral, Cathy and Lyn promise Millie to help share care duties for her newborn daughter, uniting everyone in a fleeting moment of intergenerational conviviality and hope for the future. Still, the play narrates old age as inevitable decline and intergenerational conflict about care duties and finite resources as a crisis. It employs satire and dystopia to provoke the search for more humane, alternative futures of care, but without offering a new narrative. 1 Beach Road, written by Solveig Holum, takes an aesthetically different approach, mobilizing elegiac beauty and repetitive rhythm rather than dark humor to confront the subject of care and dementia. The play, a 2011 touring production by Turtle Key Arts together with RedCape Theatre, features two female performers in the roles of Jane and Victoria, both in their late thirties and early forties. Caught in the rain while on a coastal walk, Jane stops for tea and meets Victoria. The two women fall in love and decide to run a seaside B&B on 1 Beach Road together. This setting is inspired by the Norfolk village of Happisburgh, where Beach Road is at high risk of vanishing in the not-too-distant future, as it is being eaten away by the rising sea. Meanwhile the house, whose sea view was initially blocked by a row of bungalows, is situated right at the edge of the cliff at the end, after coastal erosion and the council’s failure to invest in new sea defences have led to the disappearance or removal of the surrounding buildings for safety reasons. In the play, the process of coastal erosion parallels Jane’s memory loss, who, aged forty-one, develops early onset dementia. The shared future the women try to build is threatened by both developments which they are unable to control or stop, let alone reverse. RedCape Theatre, who also run community workshops for people with dementia, drew on recorded real-life experiences for the play. They interviewed the residents of Beach Road, perhaps the “first UK climate-change refugees” (BR 5), as more than twenty-four meters of land and many houses have been lost there over the past two decades. While the villagers helplessly face the risk of losing their homes and feel abandoned by the government, these fears are intertwined with recorded experiences of people dealing with early onset dementia, a cruelly rapid decline of memory function that advances typically much faster than dementia in later years. This condition functions as “a rich and heart-breaking metaphor for what was already happening to the women’s home; an eroding mind living on the edge of an eroding coast” (BR 5), explains Cassie Friend, the actress of the character of Jane, in the preface to the playscript.6 It is a remarkably slow-paced play, which relies on metaphors, visuality, rhythm, and repetitive actions, rather

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than dialogue or plot. As Lyn Gardner notes in her review, “1 Beach Road is attuned to the rhythms of the sea, the routines of daily life in which meals are eaten and the washing endlessly hung out to dry” (2011). Water and sand also play important roles, signifying the steady, inevitable passing of time and the human inability to stop both processes of erosion. During a guided seaside tour, Jane alerts their B&B guests to the beauty and vulnerability of the sandstone cliffs and the environment, noting how attempts of human intervention are inevitably failing against the power of the encroaching sea: “Revetments or not, it only is a matter of time. From up here, you can see clearly what’s coming. Yes, sir, and what’s going” (BR 25). The dialogue between the two women is shaped by a strong sense of broken promises, of time running out much faster than what they had been told to expect. Victoria: But they said we would have fifty years. [. . .] Victoria: Where does that leave us? Jane: With a sea view from every room in the house. (BR 27)

They experience a growing sense of injustice, fueled both by the comparison of their own lives with what the people living before them in the area had and the random blow dealt to them by Jane’s illness. Telltale signs include her forgetting small words like tide, but on every visit to her doctor she forgets a few more parts of the repetitive set of test questions given to her. Victoria initially decides to cling to hope against the odds: “Oh come on Jane, it’s not that bad. We could still have years. We still have the road and the garden” (BR 33). Meanwhile Jane struggles to cope with loss—of chunks of coast and memory alike. She furthermore rebels against the perceived disconnect between her illness and her age: “Like an old person. Isn’t it what old people get? I’m 41, Vic. You’re going to have to learn to do the washing because I might have accidents” (BR 40). Anger and helplessness in the face of a condition one cannot control intersect with of a sense of loss before it is supposedly due or fair to expect it. Increasingly, Jane’s progressing loss of memory puts a strain on their relationship. Victoria, in the role of the caretaker, reacts with despair and frustration, as Jane keeps redoing things like taking down the laundry she is trying to put up. At the same time, the environment changes around them; with the sea coming steadily closer, birds and plants disappear. Eventually, Victoria says to her partner, “You’ve already gone Jane. You’re not here anymore” (BR 48)—a sentence that also applies to the overwhelming sense of change and loss felt considering the state of the environment. In the final scene, Jane dresses in her swimming clothes and climbs up on the cliff, Victoria out on

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a walk later sees her “swimming or flying, but underwater” (BR 50). The lights fade to the sound of waves crashing. The ending asserts Jane’s right to agency; she chooses to end her own life by “swimming” away, relieving Victoria of the burden of her care in the future. Victoria’s future remains uncertain, but she must endure the loss of a beloved person, presumably soon followed by the loss of her living space and livelihood. 1 Beach Road is not a dystopian but in many ways a realist play, and it gives room to beauty and to hope of release and freedom. But the portrayed escape from the reality of dementia is equally dark as in Really Old, the solution here being suicide rather than euthanasia. Putting the question of caring for future generations and the environment rather than the question of caring for people living with Alzheimer’s center stage, Churchill’s 2016 play Escaped Alone differs from the other plays especially through its more complex treatment of time. It is also surreal and absurd rather than elegiac or satirical. It is much more solely focused on the old generation and abstract notions of future generations, rather than contact between the young and the old, as in Really Old, or the painful process of facing illness and a loss of habitat that feels unjust and premature, as in 1 Beach Road. It features four women, all “at least seventy” (EA 4). The three friends Sally, Lena, and Vi are drinking tea in the garden, when they are joined by their neighbor, Mrs. Jarrett, who walks past. The women discuss various topics, such as family, TV shows, their favorite birds, and the passing of time—all in fragmented memories, delivered in typical Churchill style in elliptical sentences. The back cover of the playscript describes the drama as “tea and catastrophe.” This is a fitting summary, because in contrast to the domestic realism of the sunny afternoon tea party, at the end of each of the play’s eight sections Mrs. Jarrett steps out of the scene and delivers a monologue (in the stage production, this is typically shown through the stage going to black or the other characters freezing). These vignettes, told impersonally in the past tense, interrupt the space/time logics of the play and are removed from the rest of the action. Audience members or readers do not know whether these are visions or memories of events that have happened elsewhere. They are about catastrophic events such as rain and floods, hunger, disease, fires, chemical pollution, and storms. One can connect these passages to the intertextual reference inherent in the play’s title—the quote “I only am escaped alone to tell thee” from the Book of Job (a text mainly about the problem of unmerited suffering) and Melville’s haunting classic tale of Moby Dick. Like Ishmael, Mrs. Jarrett assumes the role of a sole survivor, either delivering a warning message or bad news about the future. In any case, her reports are equally horrifying and witty, as the following two examples show:

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MRS. J: The chemicals leaked through cracks in the money. [. . .] Sometimes the cancers began in the lungs and sometimes on the fingertips or laptops. The remaining citizens were evacuated to camps in northern Canada where they were sprayed and victimised, and the city was left to sick foxes, who soon abandoned it for lack of dustbins. (EA 17) MRS. J: The illness started when children drank sugar developed from monkeys. [. . .] Planes with sick passengers were diverted to Antarctica. Some got into bed with their dead, others locked the doors and ran until they fell down. [. . .] The last survivors had immunity and the virus mutated, exterminating plankton. (EA 29)

The play juxtaposes temporal and global scales—the present, the deep time of the Anthropocene, and the future as well as global and local settings—in the monologues and dialogues, respectively. This illustrates how the focus on the here and now neglects elsewhere and the future. One might read it as criticism of the aging baby boomers, who are responsible for causing the disasters but are now cast in the role of the guilty survivors, as mainly the young (babies and children) seem to have fallen victim to the disasters described in the monologues, or as foreshadowing of catastrophes that will not affect the older generation personally anymore. One can also take the characters as stand-ins for everyone who ignores global warming and the current state of the planet—the same way that the other women ignore Mrs. Jarrett—or as a dramatization on what the coming generation stand to lose, as there might be no garden tea parties and meetings with old friends for them. The play thus highlights intergenerational interdependencies as well as those between humans and the environment. While the association between old age and apocalyptic paradigms in the play is still strong (see Casado-Gual 2020; chapter 10, Henderson and Dunn, in this volume), it also depicts a positive view of aging, at least in the sense that there is a kind of comradery between the three women who are friends; they care about each other and have contact with their families. However, even if the play does not overtly replicate ageist decline narratives—in contrast to the future of the planet and coming generations which looks distinctly bleak—the women each battle with their own afflictions, such as trauma and fears. In the last scene, Mrs. Jarrett repeats “terrible rage” twenty-five times. But like her other monologues, this outburst gets no response from the others. Instead, it is followed by a final dialogue, where all four women—fully absorbed in the present and oblivious to anything else, least of all the future—agree on the now being pleasant, after all: LENA: still it’s nice VI: always nice to be here

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MRS. J: I like it here SALLY: afternoons like this. MRS. J: And then I said thanks for the tea and I went home. End. (EA 42)

Regarding intergenerational justice, one either sees the characters signifying resilience in the face of the horrific future scenarios that are out there, or as blatantly displaying indifference and survivor’s guilt (see Casado-Gual 2020, 239), for these catastrophes await the young in the present and future while they are safe from them. Characteristically, Churchill’s play does not resolve this complicated ethical question. The final case-study, Godber’s play Crown Prince, first performed by Hull Truck Theatre which Godber was involved with between 1984 and 2010, is an environmental satire set in the near future. It employs largely realist narration, and, like 1 Beach Road, it is connected to a real-life location and stages the “slowly violent” (Nixon) impact of global warming, relying mainly on dark humor to convey its warning message. It is also centrally concerned with intergenerational differences and questions of responsibility. The play’s first run took place from May 31 to June 23, 2007, days before a devastating flood hit Hull.7 Crown Prince, Julie Hudson notes, was thus not a reaction to this real-life event but “a forward-looking response to the concerns of his [the playwright’s] children about climate change and the propensity of Hull [. . .] to flood” (2020, 51). It covers a time span from 2007 to 2027. The setting is Beech Hill Bowling Club, whose members Jack, a former miner and shop-owner, Ted, a former fisherman, actor and playboy Ronnie, and Caroline, a doctor, are all sixty-one at the beginning and eighty-one at the end of the play. Initially sceptical about the devastating effects of climate change forecast by Jack’s granddaughter, Faye, a green activist who is seventeen years old in the beginning, they are forced to confront the reality as the years pass by: The bowling green dries out and the temperatures reach unbearable heights. Members of other generations represented in the play include delivery man Matt, who ages from twenty-seven to forty-seven, and Faye’s baby daughter, who is born later. By 2027, Hull has been flooded and its residents are forced to seek refuge on the bowling club hill. At this point in time, Jack has lost his beloved wife, May, aged sixty-eight, and Ted his wife, Alice, whom he cared for at home for over four decades. Like many other cli-fi or ecoplays, Crown Prince employs the device of clashing opinions about climate change and varying levels of concern, denial, and activism. The generational conflict is illustrated through Jack and his granddaughter Faye, whom Jack describes as “one of these who thinks the world’s doomed, [. . .], she’s obsessed with the end of the world” (CP 251). Her attitude is met with incomprehension or ridiculed by the older men,

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retirees in what are now recognized as exploitative professions such as mining and fishing, as futile doomsday prophesizing. Jack tells her: “I know this, Faye lass, you can’t change the world and it’s a waste of time trying” (CP 279). Especially in the first half of the play, Faye functions as the voice of reason, who delivers scientific information and warns of the abuse of the earth. Meanwhile Ted refers to his own generation as “an endangered species” (CP 255; also 330), both because times are changing and people who share his ways and beliefs are dying out, also because age and climate change make it impossible to survive. With the conversation circling mainly around changes in the club, in society, and in their aging bodies, the old generation initially appears as being in denial or confused, whereas the young—represented by Faye—are concerned and the middle generation acts irresponsibly, trying to hold on to a status quo as if nothing were changing. For example, Max keeps delivering ethically dubious choices of supplies to the aging club members, such as pork pies and frozen prawns. He drives an airconditioned van, while Faye walks or uses her old bicycle. Many scenes highlight poignant generational differences, for example when Faye considers her own death and the implication of cremation for the environment. May reports to Jack, in disbelief: MAY: She says bury me under a tree, it’s better for t’ planet. JACK: (crying) Oh dear! MAY: She says they’re having to build bigger furnaces in Hull to get rid of the bodies, she says it’s not good for the environment but they’ve put bigger fires in. It’s because there’s so many fat folk, there’s so many fat folk they won’t burn so easy, Jack. (CP 267)

Faye is determined to fight for change; however, the struggle will eventually lead to her being hospitalized in Act II, set in 2022, to be treated for “[m]ental exhaustion” (CP 303) that has resulted from her frustration of people not listening to her warnings. Meanwhile Jack is slowly coming round to the idea that climate change is real, but he is full of resignation and grief after the loss of his wife. In his eyes it is equally futile to seek to better his life, for example by finding another companion or changing his habits, as it is to try and save the planet: “There’s other things, Faye: simple pleasures in life, without worrying about the bloody planet. We die whether you worry or not” (CP 280). The play stages a gendered difference between the male and female characters when it comes to taking action for future change. In contrast to the men, who remain up there on the hill, “bowling while the earth burns” (CP 281), Caroline eventually announces that she has had enough of the club and decides to leave and go abroad for a while: “To help, to work. [. . .] Like they

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say, we don’t know how long we’ve got left” (CP 307–08). At this point, she is physically impaired by her advanced age and struggles to get up the hill on her bike. Still, she tries to counteract Jack’s fatalism and his excuses that it is all too late for them anyway: Jack: Earth’s been changing for years, it’s bound to run out of resources one day, but we’ll be long dead, so there’s no need for us to worry about. Caroline: We should be doing something about it though, that’s why I came on my bike, well I did try . . . (CP 290)

Aging is, yet again, portrayed as loss and decline: various aches and pains add more limitations and discomfort for the characters. Thus, their aging process parallels climate change and a worsening of living conditions for all generations. Ronnie, who suffers multiple heart attacks, comments that: “There isn’t one organ I’ve got that I’m not taking tablets for” (CP 324); in another tragically comedic scene, Ted is unable to get off this chair because of his arthritic knee. But advanced age also grants the characters a kind of anarchic, if irresponsible freedom in the face of a nearing end (e.g., they smoke cannabis and cigarettes, water the green in defiance of drought regulations, and run an illegal fridge). By contrast, Max, in his forties, is not coping well with his own physical as well as the social and environmental changes around him. He struggles with an increasing lack of resources (pork pies having become a precious commodity) and rising petrol prices but has not changed his routines in two decades or assumed any responsibility for taking action. Confronted with a completely flooded Hull, he admits that, unlike the older generation, he always expected “the world wo-wou-would end in my lifetime”; thus, he is now only surprised by the inaccuracy of scientific predictions about the future: “Fire and ice they said, looks like they were wrong though, it l-looks like it’s going to be w-water!” (CP 313–314). Seeing that fire and ice when occurring together will produce water, Max’s conclusion is all the more myopic and reveals his wilful detachment from and passive acceptance of the realities of global warming. The motif of the flood is also a characteristic narrative signifier of the instability and despatialization caused by the Anthropocene. It shapes many contemporary “water narratives,” as Erin James shows in a recent study of prose fictions (2022, 127); it clearly also applies to dramatic texts such as Crown Prince and, to a lesser degree, 1 Beach Road. After a dark conclusion to Act III, which closes with Jack’s declaration: “It’s all bloody finished!” (CP 331), the final act brings a tentative, conventional turn to hope for the future, emphasizing continuity and values such as nuclear family, intergenerational support, and friendship. The ending depicts a range of different conditions of old age, with all characters displaying some

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capacity for resilience. The bleak diagnosis—which, however, also provides a sense of comforting stability to the characters—is that nothing is likely to change (for the better) amidst a process of shared decline that they must endure. Ronnie tells Caroline, who has returned to England and the club after years abroad, that there is “global warming, war, terrorism, famines, death and migration but as you can see it’s just the same here” (CP 346). Faye, now mother of a baby girl, has moved in with her father into the club house, having reduced their carbon footprint as much as is possible. Visibly rejuvenated by being a great-grandfather, Jack is now onboard with this lifestyle. Meanwhile Ronnie, still working as an actor well into his eighties, is supported by a similarly aged female agent and has recently remarried. Ted, almost completely blind, is excited about the plans for a big bowling game and party next weekend, exclaiming: “yes, let’s keep swimming while we can” (CP 349). It remains a central question in the environmental humanities and in aging studies how narratives of despair and decline might be complemented with other stories about agency and resilience. In this endeavor, what kind of hope might dramatic imaginaries of intergenerational futures and care bring to the table? While empirical studies about the effects and impact of drama are still scarce,8 noticeable attempts are being made to utilize art to imagine just and sustainable futures and inspire hope for change, for example by the global Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) project, led by Chantal Bilodeau (see Balestrini 2020; Hoydis 2020, 340). One of the short plays, all no more than five minutes in duration, commissioned by playwrights from around the world for the CCTA run in 2019, is MaryAnn Karanja’s “Birthday Suit.” It serves as a final counterexample to the works discussed in this chapter, as it underlines the concern with intergenerational justice, but shifts the declensionist narrative which prevails in the other plays. It is set in a prison, where Riziki, a female character in her late sixties modelled on Nobel prize winner and leader of the Green Belt Movement Wangari Maathai, bonds with a young woman in her twenties, Pam. The stereotypical generational roles in terms on concern, denial, and activism are reversed. Rather than as a crisis, conflict, or topic laden with either guilt and blame, the struggle for intergenerational justice and care is depicted as a joint effort—in the socio-political arena, rather than within the nuclear family. It is the older Riziki who, full of energy and hope, convinces Pam that the future is still worth fighting for, in response to the younger woman’s attempt to stop Riziki from continuing to take on a burden that is not hers alone to carry: “You cannot save the world all by yourself” (216). There are manifold connections between aging studies and ecocriticism that remain to be explored in contemporary ecodrama, especially also in transcultural comparison between works from Global North and South, with

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intergenerational justice forming the strong link that shapes the imaginaries of (more often than not, dystopian) futures for humans and the planet. The plays also demonstrate how the concern with climate change and environmental issues can lead to imaginaries that stage an intensification of ageist discrimination and reinforce the binary split into us versus them. The fact that narratives of old age as a burden are tied to fears of finite resources, caretaking, and issues of justice, which assume new urgency in times of global warming (see Kainradl and Kriebernegg 2020, 170), is reflected in plays like Really Old and Crown Prince. The texts criticize these narratives mainly through the use of dark humor. Pluralizing fears and threats, they employ the trope of the clash of generations but also subvert it to show, however fleeting, moments of solidarity and conviviality. Meanwhile 1 Beach Road and Escaped Alone experiment with different rhythms and modes to raise questions of responsibility and to show the impact of passing time and the erosion of environmental and other stabilities in the Anthropocene. Both climate change and generational thinking, as Kathleen Woodward has argued, come with similar challenges of grasping the complexity of causalities and time spans involved—still what is often lacking is a recognition of how they intersect and, the ability to see “generational time as a strength or capacity of imagination rather than a crippling constraint” (Woodward 2020, 54). Contemporary drama, as the analysis has shown, is uniquely equipped to imagine and explore these intersections, mobilizing laughter and fear, all the while the depiction of generational time and futures of care involve readers and audiences—“affectively as well as cognitively” (54). Plays may help us not only to understand generational time but also the human experience of aging with its complexity and (in)justices and the fact that “[t]here is life at all levels, at all ages” (Fuchs 2014, 76; see Lipscomb 2012, 121). Intergenerational justice deserves attention as a central topic in ecodrama, also regarding issues such as reproductive futures and care throughout the human life span. Beyond capturing fears of bleak futures, chronicling decline, and satirizing blame, dramatic texts can embrace interdependencies between generations and humans and the environment, negotiate ethical responsibilities, and imagine future scenarios—in other words, they address many issues currently at the heart of both aging studies and ecocriticism. NOTES 1. I am consciously bracketing the important debate about justice, futurity, and the rights of non-human others and nature here. While this topic deserves exploration in contemporary drama studies, it requires a separate study. Positioning the analysis at

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the intersection of aging studies and ecocritical drama studies, the focus is limited to humans in this chapter. 2. This parallel emergence of aging and eco-dramas remains largely unexplored to date, exception being essays by Casado-Gual (2020) and Harvie (2018), which begin to link critical studies of aging and drama with discourses of the Anthropocene. 3. Following in the wake of pioneering scholarship in cultural aging studies, such as Gullette’s Aged by Culture (2004), the number of studies on cultural representations of aging has been growing steadily over the last two decades. Aging studies are still somewhat underrepresented in theatrical criticism, texts, and practices, despite important works by scholar such as Lipscomb (2012; 2016) and Fuchs (2014). Many of the book-length studies to date by, for example, Bastings (1998) and Mangan (2013) mostly deal with the US-American cultural context and theater and performance practices rather than the dramatic texts themselves. 4. In the following, in direct citations the plays are given as: Really Old, Like Forty Five—(RO), 1 Beach Road—(BR), Escaped Alone—(EA), Crown Prince—(CP). 5. On the literary motif of gerontocide in connection to Malthusian discourses of demographic catastrophe, see also Kainradl and Kriebernegg (2020, 178–179). 6. The play script was published in 2016, through RedCape Theatre. The stage production of the beautiful, inventive performance, which mixes film, live performance, and soundscape, is also available on DVD. See https:​//​www​.redcapetheatre​ .co​.uk​/resources. 7. This kind of life-imitating-art that can be found in much contemporary climate fiction (e.g., Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019), published weeks before the occurrence of devastating wildfires in Los Angeles). 8. See, for example, Brooke Wood’s insightful study (2020) which draws on the material of her PhD dissertation, an audience reception study of performances of CCTA plays in the US.

REFERENCES Adamson, Joni. 2017. “Roots and Trajectories of the Environmental Humanities: From Environmental Justice to Intergenerational Justice.” English Language Notes 55, nos. 1–2: 121–134. Agius, Emmanuel. 2006. “Intergenerational Justice.” In Handbook of Intergenerational Justice, edited by Joerg Chet Tremmel, 317–332. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Baars, Jan. 2012. “Critical Turns of Aging, Narrative, and Time.” International Journal of Aging and Later Life 7, no. 2: 143–165. Balestrini, Nassim Winnie. 2020. “Writing Plays That Are Climate Change: [An Interview with Chantal Bilodeau].” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. 8, no. 1: 34–46. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1515​/jcde​-2020–0004. Basting, Anne Davis. 1998. Stages of Age: Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Birnbacher, Dieter. 2006. “Responsibility for Future Generations—Scope and Limits.” In Handbook of Intergenerational Justice, edited by Joerg Chet Tremmel, 23–38. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Casado-Gual, Nuria. 2020. “Staging the ‘Crisis of Aging’: Old Age as the New Apocalypse in The Children and Escaped Alone.” In Understanding the Discourse of Aging: A Multifaceted Perspective, edited by Vicent Salvador and Agnese Sampietro, 233–252. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Churchill, Caryl. 2016. Escaped Alone. London: Nick Hern Books. Fuchs, Elinor. 2014. “Estragement: Towards an ‘Age Theory’ Theatre Criticism.” Performance Research 19, no. 3: 69–77. Gardner, Lyn. 2011. “1 Beach Road—Review.” The Guardian, September 26, 2011. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/stage​/2011​/sep​/26​/1​-beach​-road​-review​?newsfeed​ =true. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Godber, John. 2009. “Crown Prince.” In Plays: 4. Our House, Christmas Cracker, Crown Prince, Sold, 239–350. London: Methuen Drama. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 2004. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016. “Politics, Pathology, Suicide, and Social Fates: Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.” Modern Drama 59, no. 2: 231–248. Harvie, Jen. 2018. “Boom! Adversarial Age, Chromonormativity, and the Anthropocene.” Contemporary Theatre Review 28, no. 3: 332–344. https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.1080​/10486801​.2018​.1475364. Hoydis, Julia. 2020. “(In)Attention and Global Drama: Climate Change Plays.” In Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change, edited by David Holmes and Lucy Richardson, 340–348. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. James, Erin. 2022. Narrative in the Anthropocene. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Johns-Putra, Adeline. 2016. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli‐Fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism.” WIREs Climate Change 7: 266–282. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1002​/ wcc​.385. Kainradl, Anna-Christina, and Ulla Kriebernegg. 2020. “‘They Say We Messed it Up. Killing the Planet with Our Own Greed.’ Alternswissenschaftliche Überlegungen zu einem generationengerechten Klimadiskurs in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties.’” LIMINA Grazer theologische Perspektiven 3, no. 1: 166–191. DOI: 10.25364/17.3:2020.1.8. Karanja, MaryAnn. 2020. “Birthday Suit.” In Lighting the Way. An Anthology of Short Plays about the Climate Crisis, edited by Chantal Bilodeau and Thomas Peterson, 213–218. The Artic Cycle. Lipscomb, Valerie Barnes. 2012. “‘The Play’s the Thing’: Theatre as a Scholarly Meeting Ground in Age Studies.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 7, no. 2: 117–141. ———. 2016. Performing Age in Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Mangan, Michael. 2013. Staging Ageing: Theatre, Performance, and the Narrative of Decline. Bristol: Intellect Books. Moore, Bridie. 2014. “Depth, Significance, and Absence: Age Effects in New British Theatre.” Age Culture Humanities 1: 163–195. Oglesby, Tamsin. 2010a. Really Old, Like Forty Five. London: Oberon Books. ———. 2010b. “Elderly People Are Not a Burden to Be Dumped.” The Telegraph (February 3, 2010). https:​//​www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/news​/health​/7144213​/Elderly​ -people​-are​-not​-a​-burden​-to​-be​-dumped​.html. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Original Edition. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. RedCape Theatre. 2016. 1 Beach Road. Written by Solveig Holum. London: Turtle Key Arts. Reid, Trish. 2019. “The Dystopian Near-Future in Contemporary British Drama.” Journal of Contemporary British Drama 7, no. 1: 72–88. Saunders, Graham. 2019. “Masters (and Mistresses) of Menace.” Journal of Contemporary British Drama 7, no. 1: 12–28. Sierz, Aleks. 2015. “Review: Plaques and Tangles, Royal Court Theatre.” (October 21, 2015). The Arts Desk. https:​//​theartsdesk​.com​/theatre​/plaques​-and​-tangles​ -royal​-court​-theatre. Sierz, Aleks, and Merle Tönnies. 2021. “‘Who’s Going to Mobilise Darkness and Silence.’ The Construction of Dystopian Spaces in Contemporary British Drama.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 9, no. 1: 20–42. Tremmel, Joerg Chet. 2006. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intergenerational Justice, edited by Joerg Chet Tremmel, 1–21. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2022. World Population Prospects 2022: Summary of Results. UN DESA/POP/2022/TR/NO. 3. Voigts, Eckart, and Merle Tönnies. 2020. “Posthuman Dystopia: Animal Surrealism and Permanent Crisis in Contemporary British Theatre.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 8, no. 2: 295–312. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1515​/jcde​-2020​-0024. Wood, Brooke. 2020. “Hope in Action: Studying the Impacts of Climate Change Theatre Action 2019.” In Lighting the Way. An Anthology of Short Plays about the Climate Crisis, edited by Chantal Bilodeau and Thomas Peterson, 42–50. The Artic Cycle. Woodward, Kathleen. 2020. “Aging in the Anthropocene: The View from and Beyond Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises.” Literature and Ageing, edited by Elizabeth Barry with Margery Vibe Skagen, 37–63. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer.

‌‌‌‌C hapter Ten

Old(er) Women and the Apocalypse Three Dramatic Representations Julia Henderson and Katrina Dunn

Works of ecotheatre often engage apocalyptic devices to encourage greater awareness of ecological destruction and to warn against impending disaster. In this paper we look at three ecotheatre plays: Kayak by Jordan Hall, The Unplugging by Yvette Nolan, and Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill, all of which are set during or following apocalyptic catastrophes and feature old(er) women at their center. They are all written in the second decade of the twenty-first century by prominent professional women playwrights of the English-speaking world (two Canadian and one British). Each play has a unique vision for how an ecological apocalypse might unfold. They differ considerably in their construction of aging, old(er) age, and age-related stereotypes, and their detailing of how old(er) age is intertwined with narratives about the environment. They also vary significantly in their chosen dramatic forms, particularly in their construction of time and memory, and in the degree to which they incorporate recognizable dramatic structures. Analysing these three striking plays, we weave in threads of theory and critique drawn from age studies, feminist theatre and performance studies, posthumanism and ecocriticism. Our goal is to shed some light on this provocative new trope—old(er) woman in the apocalypse—and tease out its origins, messages, and possible contributions to human and nonhuman survival. Incorporating an apocalyptic event allows contemporary playwrights to grapple with the future consequences of decisions taken now. Lawrence Buell has written that “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (1995, 163

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285). However, the challenge that climate change constitutes for traditional dramatic theory is only beginning to be mapped. The shocking turn of fortune that Aristotle deemed so vital to the workings of tragedy in Poetics (1982, 1452a22-3), and that became a frequent, abiding aspect of dramatic structure in Western traditions, is radically reimagined when viewed through a posthuman lens. The “unexpected event that arrives from the future, which cancels everything we had thought to be the case” (Currie 2013, 127), aligns nicely with our global predicament, but its shocking quality reveals a failure to understand ourselves as embedded in a deeply interrelated materiality. As Clifford Leech suggests: “The ‘suffering’ presented in tragedy is an image of something we intellectually know is in store for ourselves but cannot in imagination properly anticipate” (2018, 67). Timothy Morton says that “trying to see our own death—is a common ecological fantasy” (2007, 72), and Roy Scranton, in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, argues that representing cataclysm teaches us how to “live with and through the end of our civilization” (2015, 22). While the markers of tragedy bring an obvious power to stage apocalypse, ecocritics have varying views on whether existing dramatic structures such as ancient tragic form or the more recent and still-prevalent strictures of the well-made play, both historically used to inscribe the subjugation of women, non-western civilizations, and nature, are useful for thinking through the future of the planet. Chantal Bilodeau (2016) answers this question by referencing Naomi Klein’s (2014) argument in This Changes Everything that we cannot fix climate change by using the economic system that created the problem in the first place. Bilodeau asks if it is “ethical to embrace a dramatic form that was designed to justify inequality and violence,” and suggests that we need a “conscious use of dramatic structure in service of societal change.” The shock and warning value of apocalypse may need original dramatic inventions if it is to avoid reinscribing theatrical narrative with the very ideologies that are hurtling us towards its real-life occurrence. Apocalyptic imagery has been commonly employed to rhetorically link environmental disaster to conceptions of aging and old(er) age. In “Beyond Apocalyptic Demography: Towards a Moral Economy of Interdependence,” Ann Robertson defines apocalyptic demography as “catastrophic projections of the burden to society of an aging population” (1997, 426), noting such constructions of old(er) populations are supported by a rhetoric of dependency and need. As age historian Pat Thane details, “There is a widespread tendency to stereotype anyone past a certain age as identically old, vulnerable, dependent, and a burden on, rather than a contributor to, their families and communities” (Katz, Kavita, and Thane 2021, 26). The language of apocalyptic demography is infused with what Chivers terms “panicked metaphors,” the most prominent example being “the silver tsunami” (2021, 1) which

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links population aging to large-scale environmental destruction. Sociologist Stephen Katz also describes how “the aging population [. . .] is projected as a monstrous entity set upon destroying welfare states and generational futures” (2014, 18). Such metaphors evoke a sense of fear and dread about increasing numbers of old(er) adults, especially “so-called frail older people” and people living with dementia (Chivers 2021, 1). Chivers argues that the effects of such metaphors are “not merely linguistic but also have cultural, material, and social consequences because of the concepts they rely upon” (2). Given that public rhetoric so prominently yokes old(er) age to environmental disaster it is reasonable to assume it has influenced cultural imaginaries. Not surprisingly, then, this chapter’s three plays feature old(er) characters literally at the center of an apocalypse. That the old(er) central characters these playwrights focus on are women should not seem unusual. In Figuring Age, Kathleen Woodward astutely argues: “Women are also subject to what I call a ‘double aging’ or ‘multiple aging.’ Unlike men, women in mainstream culture in the United States [or more broadly the Anglophone West] today are struck by aging as it is defined by our culture far earlier than men” (1999, xiii). Woodward’s own rhetoric— especially the term “struck”—conjures up images likening the experience of aging to violent weather conditions like lightning or flash floods, all compounded by the reality that women experience age-related prejudice sooner and more extremely than men. Theatre has its own specific negative stereotypes of old(er) women which have recurred for centuries, some of which we explore in the analyses below. However, since the 1970s, feminist theatre and performance scholars have labored to expose the ways in which theatrical representations employ culturally determined gender codes that reinforce discriminatory stereotypes (Phelan 1993, Dolan 1991, Diamond 1997, Case 1990). In her landmark Unmaking Mimesis (1997), Elin Diamond argued that the effects of classical mimesis leave us ill-equipped to recognize or examine this kind of cultural conditioning. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s estrangement techniques (making the familiar strange to reveal underlying social and economic circumstances), she argues for a “gestic” feminist response whereby artists and audiences refuse to submit uncritically to patriarchal imagery scripted to be natural (49). The role of dramatic form has figured prominently in these discussions, with special attention given to modern realist works with roots in the well-made play (penned by men) that feature “difficult” women prominently in their plotlines (Nora, Hedda, Miss Julie, Bernarda Alba), and the threat that these women present to the wider social order. Standing outside male-dominated hierarchies, these characters’ defiance has had particular social impact, and demanded shifts in well-made form to accommodate their stories. Theatre theorist Elinor Fuchs, building on these shifts, has engaged Diamond’s gestic feminism to probe ageism in theatre, linking the decline

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narrative to Aristotelian theatre’s “linearity and determinism” (2016, 147), which is also prevalent in the well-made play. Using a Brechtian sensibility, she proposes that old(er) characters engage a kind of estragement, “a hybrid of ‘age’ and ‘strange’” (2014, 76), to productively step outside of familiar and socially constructed experience. Building on the web of theoretical threads laid out above, we argue that this new trope of old(er) women in the apocalypse has particular power because it taps into the apocalyptic demography of old(er) age, using “estraged,” “double aged,” “difficult women” to challenge destructive social orders in desperate need of change. The playwrights we profile harness the shock and warning value of apocalypse inside unique dramatic creations with differing relationships to existing dramatic structures, thereby continuing to explore the connections between oppression, productive change, and dramatic form. The impact of intertwining old(er) women characters with environmental narratives helps us see, with greater compassion and insight, the interrelated materiality of the human and nonhuman worlds and bring that relationality more clearly into view. KAYAK Canadian playwright Jordan Hall’s first full-length play, Kayak (2011), won a number of awards and garnered productions that showcased its haunting portrayal of the devastating cost of climate change denial. In this work, Annie Iverson, the play’s central character, is considered old at the chronologically relatively young age of 56. It bears noting here that age can be defined in a range of ways,1 but in this play Annie is constructed culturally and relationally as beyond her prime, despite having a chronological age much younger than would generally be considered socially old in North American culture. The beginning of the play finds Annie on an expanse of ocean, waking up to the blue light of early morning after a rough sleep in her kayak. She scans her surroundings but finds nothing. She tells us that the kayak is not actually hers but belongs to her son, Peter, who only took up the sport because of his detestable eco-feminist girlfriend, Julie. Kayak is a fight for the future trapped in this hostile triangular relationship, revolving around a vessel that is both life-preserving and visibly shaky. Alone in her wobbly cocoon Annie is our main focus as she manages her food supply, struggles to work her GPS, and tries to protect herself from sunburn. In production, the kayak that is the play’s set floats at waist height, supported from below but lit so that the floor and support structure are invisible. In this central image, the imagined sea is subconscious, “where the self becomes indistinguishable, where our humanity and subjectivity is challenged” (Trubridge 2016, 2). The action of

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the play, however, exists in the waves of memories that assail Annie, as the elements take their cruel toll and scramble her senses. Peter and Julie handle her recalibration, materializing in flashes of the past around her, shoving and rocking the kayak as Annie works her way through layers of conflicting emotion. We learn that Peter is inconsolable after a breakup with Julie, and that Annie has failed to stop her son from flying off to reunite with Julie at a dangerous environmental protest at China’s Three Gorges Dam. Her planned camping trip with Peter ruined, Annie attempts to return home, but the highway is blocked by rising waters. In China, the dam has burst, sweeping away Julie, Peter, the protest, and a city of millions, and setting off chain reactions all over the world: harsh rains, monsoons, mudslides. Annie uses the kayak strapped to the vehicle’s roof to paddle home, but the markers of her world have disappeared. Hall’s Kayak unapologetically positions the unfolding climate apocalypse as a generational struggle. As a portrait of climate change denial, Annie is a mouthpiece for the perceived ethical absenteeism of her generation. Her lifestyle, with its touchstones of freedom, success, progress, and security, denies the toxic by-products that underpin it: As Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use” (2015, 341). The many judgments that Annie receives from Julie in the flashbacks, aimed at making her curb the carbon footprint of her upper middle-class consumer habits, she finds both distasteful and enraging: “people have lives and habits and comfort foods and places they need to go. And that doesn’t change because you make them feel guilty and uncomfortable” (Hall 2011, 16). In Simon Estok’s formulation, Annie has “ecophobia” and displays an antagonistic stance towards nature (2018, 49). In her attachment to her son, Peter, her character also borrows from traditional theatrical stereotypes of old(er) mothers portrayed as domineering, smothering, and martyred (Hanson 2006). In contrast, the younger female character, Julie, is rendered very much in the style of Morton’s “beautiful soul” (2007, 109–123). Full of morbid saintliness and yearning, she washes her hands of the corrupt world through activism, quietism, and blame of others. For Annie’s family, she is a barrage of “new opinions about our ‘selfish’ lives. No meat. No corn. Nothing from further than 100 miles away. No new clothes [. . .] it was just exhausting.” We are told that she also makes herself unpopular in her activist community: “Even the people who were supposed to agree with her couldn’t stand her” (Hall 2011, 20). As the play unfolds, Julie’s layers are revealed. Hall’s Author’s Notes and Dedication to the published play reveal that Julie is based on Rachel Corrie, who was killed by Israeli Security Forces in 2003 while protesting with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine. Hall is interested in the judgments that surfaced about Corrie’s actions in the furor that surrounded her death, judgments that labelled her misguided, naïve, and

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extremist (5). Late in the play, Julie articulates the drive behind her activism as actually aligned with Annie’s need for security and comfort but divested of the old(er) woman’s conviction that these things exist in the consumer culture in which they live: And you think I’m not terrified? I don’t have some martyr complex. I don’t want to die. Mostly, Mrs. Iverson, I want to finish my English degree, and maybe take my playboat down some good rides in the summer. But if they can say right is wrong and kill anyone who disagrees, then how am I supposed to be safe? In my classes? In my boat? So no. This first. This has to come first. (34–35)

Adrift in the kayak, Annie’s engagement with a few seminal stage properties grounds her survival story in the materiality of the end times. Her food supply consists of a packet of chocolate, a bag of marshmallows and a sleeve of graham crackers: the ingredients for S’mores—a concoction made completely of manufactured food but strangely meant to be consumed in the wild. Down to her last marshmallow, she devours it and tosses the plastic bag into the ocean to spite Julie. She constantly returns to the GPS beacon clipped to the side of the kayak in her desperate attempt to regain a sense of control over the world through technology. Its messaging system gives her no recognizable markers for where she is, and she is convinced that she would find her directions home if she were to uncover the source of its malfunction. Hovering to the side of the kayak during one of these episodes, Julie remarks: “It isn’t broken” (21). This new liquid landscape is writing a new language for the GPS without landed markers. It is Annie’s half-full Evian bottle, however, that draws the most significant lines of connection between her previous life, her current state, her body, and the body of water on which she now floats. She is rationing her water supply, so she occasionally allows herself a sip, but often she puts the bottle back in the kayak with no water consumed. Eventually though, a wave strikes the kayak, sending the Evian bottle flying into the ocean, swallowing Annie’s last connection to the convenient lifeline of her previous existence. By play’s end, paddle gone, she is surrounded by the drifting traces of the plastic supports of her life, now out of reach and merging into the poisonous soup in which she floats. In approaching its climax, Kayak employs the mother of all apocalyptic tropes, Noah’s Ark, as a palimpsest with many layers. It begins with Peter’s Star Wars–tinged version as a 10-year-old: “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there lived a man named Noah. He had the biggest zoo in the whole universe, with lions, and penguins, and great big elephants. Two of every kind of animal. One day, God told Noah that everyone in the land was bad, and he was going to send a flood” (22). Julie’s version, incorporated into one of her protest speeches, focusses instead on Noah’s relationship to his

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neighbors: “Clinging to the Ark as the waters rose [. . .]. The price of boarding the Ark has always been murdering the people who don’t get saved, whether you do it up close and personal or from millions of miles away [. . .]. Unless you want to start working to stop the flood now” (28–29). Near the end of the play, Annie finishes the story with an estraged remake that incorporates her epiphany that Julie is actually deeply good and that the younger woman’s environmental awareness and activism were correct all along. There was a dam. That’s the part of Noah’s story that isn’t in the bible. . . . It was made of the best brick from hundreds of miles around, and because it was easy, all the people in the valley took their bricks from its sides. They did it for centuries. . . . Noah took the bricks, just like everyone else, but one day . . . he noticed a trickle of water, thin as a pulse in a little girl’s wrist. . . . Noah ran home crying that the dam was about to burst. But the dam was miles high, and miles thick, and no one believed him. (40)

Max Haiven has analyzed the prevalence of dam-breaking imagery in blockbuster films as an obsession with the “unimaginable causality” of water (2013, 219). Dams haunt our cultural imagination with the ghosts of the violence that brought them into being and threaten us with the accumulated pressure of our collective denial of their damage and our dependence. Hall’s imagined flood plays into deep-seated fears about the breaking point and potential agency of the nonhuman, validating our fears that if we hit nature hard enough that “nature punches back at humans” (Alaimo and Heckman 2015, 146). Throughout Kayak Julie and Peter have been using charts and post-it notes to do their environmental organizing on boards upstage of the main action. Gradually we see a shape emerge from what we perceived to be haphazard: Its form is that of the continents. As the flood engulfs the globe, “the post-it map of the world tumbles down in a cascade of paper.” Annie narrates this moment: “And then the world ended” (42). The final moments of Hall’s play retain some grand biblical residue from the Noah story: “An enormous light strikes Annie from on high, as from the deck of an ocean freighter. Julie’s voice comes down with the light. JULIE: It’s okay Mrs. Iverson. We’re coming down to get you” (46). Though we are not quite sure if we are to take this at face value or as a hallucinatory side effect of sun stroke, the play ends in an absurd deux ex machina—Annie is rescued by her son and Julie manning a giant arc—they become the redeemers, she is the redeemed. Despite its daring foregrounding of the impending consequences of anthropocentric hubris and climate catastrophe, through the conflict between Annie and Julie, Kayak effectively constructs the old(er) generation as self-interested, inflexible, ignorant, and at fault for environmental disaster, and the younger generation as saviors trying to fix it. This is reinforced by

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the play’s structure. Despite its flashbacks and pointed breaks in reality, the plot progression largely fulfils expectations without offering a possibility of challenging stereotypes of old(er) age. In its relationship tryptic, Annie is the only character who is ungrounded, at sea, without a footing. She is shown to be disoriented, confused, lost, and uncertain of particular memories. This gestures toward our society’s belief in the ubiquity of age-related memory loss and the difficulty of old(er) individuals. Annie is led by the young through accumulating steps toward the recognition of guilt and wrongdoing, a classic recognition (or anagnorisis) in Aristotle’s formulation (1982, 1452a). Embedded in the play’s “OK Boomer” dismissal of the diversity of generational ecological perspectives, the character of Annie can be read as an ageist construction that yokes environmental ignorance to those who are no longer young, and ignores the value of trailblazing old(er) environmental activists such as David Suzuki, Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, Erin Brokovich, and Winona LaDuke (to name a few). THE UNPLUGGING With The Unplugging (2013), Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan acknowledges her debt to Velma Wallis’s retelling of a traditional Athabascan story that warns against the dangers of leaving older people behind (Nolan 2013, 69). In her breakout novel Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival (1993), Gwichʼin author Wallis follows two pre-colonial abandoned older women as they use their land-based skills to not only survive, but rescue their penitent community from starvation. Nolan is a former Artistic Director of Canada’s first and largest Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth, and in her re-retelling of this ancient story, the two central female characters, Elena and Bern, have been exiled from a formerly technological society in the wake of a global power collapse that Bern dubs “the unplugging” (2013, 29). When questioned by the play’s third character, young Seamus, about her supercilious moniker for an apocalypse that has destroyed half the world, Bern defends her choice of words: “I used to think of it as the earth waking and shaking like some great dog, and all the machines and wires being shaken off like so many fleas [. . .]. But that was really negative. The unplugging is more benign” (29). In this version of the apocalypse “planes drop out of the sky, lights go out, money becomes nothing more than a firestarter” (21), but it is also a knowledge catastrophe: “think of all the information that disappeared, in a blink. All the things we stopped writing down and putting in books” (10). Similar to Kayak, the not-so old, old(er) generation (“Fifty is the new eighty, I guess” [5]) is considered ignorant and dispensable at the beginning of the play. In the feudal society that has

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emerged from the cataclysm, the women are cast out because they are beyond child-bearing age during a time when lack of food and growing disease inspire a Malthusian ruthlessness. As Bern laments, “The power goes off and suddenly we’re nothing more than breed mares” (21). However, there is never the suggestion that the old(er) generation acted alone to cause the destruction of world order. Rather, the disaster seems to be the Earth’s response to the accumulated lack of care by all generations: “people indiscriminately taking and using and wasting without any thought to the future” (31), “no one knew where their food came from [. . .] our men refused to take responsibility for anything” (57). Regardless of culpability, the two women are ejected because of what is perceived to be their diminished ability to contribute. Quechua scholar Sandy Grande has placed this mentality squarely within “the structures and logistics of the settler/capitalist state,” further clarifying that “the aging body can only be viewed as a crisis of decreased labour power and increased social expenditure; an amortization that has only worsened under neoliberalism” (2018, 168). Where Annie in Kayak struggles for survival in a watery medium, Elena and Bern, double aged and deemed a burden, are banished into December snow and cold, “without so much as a can of food” (Nolan 2013, 51). Surviving through the winter by squatting in an abandoned cabin, Bern, and especially Elena, begin to uncover a wealth of land-based knowledge hidden deep in their intergenerational memories. At first this process is murky and unsure. Surprised by Elena’s resourcefulness, Bern asks where her skills come from. Elena recalls, “my grandma, I guess. She never really trusted the technology [. . .]. Fixed things instead of throwing them out” (12). As a child, when Elena was abandoned by a negligent father, her grandmother would show up and “we’d go out on the land. Check her traps, hunt, pick medicines” (13). Impressed by Elena’s “pebeepebonbon—rabbit stew” (17), Bern asks, “Is that your language?” and Elena replies, “I don’t know. I don’t think so” (22). As the months wear on, however, both women reach deeper into what Susan Hill has called the “pre-colonial mind” (quoted in Watts 2013, 22), their intergenerational knowledge resurfacing as they trap hares, shoot a moose and preserve it as moose jerky, pick rose hips for vitamin C, and access a host of other gifts from the nonhuman world: an enviable post-apocalyptic bounty. In a Euro-centric construct, these skills might be organized under the rubric of survivalism (or “prepping”), but in Nolan’s play-world they are imagined as the integral markers of a return to self. Bern says to Elena, “Back there, I never would have guessed that you were this person—so capable” (19), and later Elena asserts, “we are becoming, Bernadette. Becoming who we are” (50). Mohawk/Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts would see this transformation as a return of Indigenous agency that has been diminished under colonial domination, and might describe their new worldview as the

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“Place-Thought” of Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe cosmologies, dwelling outside the epistemological-ontological Euro-Western framework (2013, 21–32), living in harmony with the environment, respecting animals, and taking only what is needed. Elena and Bern’s skillful abundance eventually attracts the attention of the young spy from their former community, Seamus, and the two are faced with the ethical question of whether to hoard or share, with obvious reference to early Indigenous/explorer and settler relations. Elena perceives him as a threat: “he hasn’t come back to take us, just to take what we know,” to which Bern replies, “how can I not teach him? We are surrounded by food” (51). Towards the end of the play, their former community’s violent feudal leader has died and Seamus returns as an envoy of a new movement to honor and incorporate the land-based knowledge he has seen the two women perform: “we started to talk about new leaders. And—elder—leaders” (66). The invitation he offers is also a kind of return; as Grande points out, “[w]ithin Indigenous communities elders have always held places of distinction as knowledge keepers, spiritual and political leaders, and attendants of past, present, and future generations” (2018, 169). In contrast to Kayak’s rendering of old(er) age, the Unplugging’s Elena and Bern are eventually shown to be knowledge keepers, mutually-sufficient survivors, caring friends, and living in communion, rather than opposition, with the natural world. Even within this depiction, there is helpful diversity and conflict. Elena, heartbroken by her daughter’s complicity in her banishment, is initially reluctant to survive, and accepts her society’s judgement: “me? A useless old dried up—” (5). Saddled with the nickname “Eeyore,”2 for her passive negativity in her previous life, it is only the challenge to survive that liberates her focussed skill and wily management of their environment. Bern learns from Elena, though never matches her level of craft, and struggles to tame her lifelong obsession with sensual pleasure: “I was the grasshopper, singing and dancing while the industrious ants were harvesting and storing for the winter” (20). Even the end times do not dampen Bern’s lustiness. She first attempts to initiate intimacy with Elena, but this new possible evolution of their relationship is too much for her friend (22–25). Instead, Bern takes Seamus as her much younger lover when she happens upon him in a nearby cabin. Here, Bern’s character resists common portrayals of old(er), post-menopausal women as asexual or “the sexless and comfortable grandmother” (Woodward 1999, 170) and flouts the narrative of decline through her ongoing interest in sexual pleasure: “I wasn’t ready to be asexual, Elena, I wasn’t ready to be invisible” (48). However, Nolan does not stray far from the historical senex amans theatrical stereotype which, in its female version (Mangan 2013, 98–103), constructs the old(er) female character as the butt of sexist, ageist jokes and inappropriately in love with a younger man, whose

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interest in her is for the purpose of gaining material wealth or social status. Elena fears this outcome when Seamus disappears with some of their food, but he eventually honours Bern’s knowledge and experience, “you were smart, you made me smarter” (44), and the two women are afforded improved social standing in the end. So, on the one hand Nolan re-configures the stereotype and allows Bern visibility through her sexual relationship with Seamus. On the other hand, however, the play still references the stereotype of an older woman inappropriately in love with a younger man and perhaps misses an opportunity to further challenge ageist notions of older women’s sexual relationships, such as, for example, allowing Bern to enjoy sexual pleasure without negative consequences. Nolan reaches for an anti-colonial temporality with four nonverbal scenes placed at intervals through the narrative that always begin with the stage direction “time passes” (Nolan 2013, 16, 26, 46, 59). As the characters in The Unplugging begin to chart time by the moon, these scenes describe the movement of celestial bodies in relation to the material world: “Time passes, moving from Bear Moon,3 February, to Snow Crust Moon, March” (46). As dramaturg Rachel Ditor notes in her Foreword, “The spare stage directions for these transitions are an invitation for the creative team (and reader) to invent the physical and visual world of the play” (IV) and reveal the unfolding human/nonhuman synergy emerging in the increasingly estraged timescape of the play-world. Mark Rifkin describes these attempts at what he calls “temporal sovereignty” as “non-identical to colonial frames of references,” and an “expression of the multiplicity of Indigenous peoples’ ways of being and becoming” (2017, 178–79). In western dramaturgical terms, the play gives a subtle chronology that shows that the two women were exiled five months (or moons) after the unplugging and that they meet Seamus after having been on their own for two to three months (30). By the tenth moon, their society is asking for their return. This elongated timeline flies in the face of the Aristotelian unity of compressed time and is more akin to Brecht’s idea of “non-Aristotelian theatre” (quoted in Willett 1964, 46), as realized in epic theatre, with its jarring skips of time and dramatic action that stretches into months or years. However, the more important feature here is that Elena and Bern grow “out of sync with settler time” (Rifkin 2017, xiii), finding their own rhythms as they attune with their unique Place-Thought. While time moves forwards, it also moves backwards, rediscovering a world defined by Indigenous knowledge and a new ancient/future way of being in the world. Despite this past/future tension and epic temporal scale, the play structure follows a linear unfolding that owes a debt to the tradition of the tragedy-informed well-made play. The characters begin in a situation of challenge (they are traveling through weather that is “so cold” that they are at risk of “freez[ing] to death” after they have been “Exiled? Because we are old”

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[Nolan 2013, 3–5]), and they struggle to overcome various obstacles (isolation, limited food, lack of light). Bern’s lover betrays them, and then, in a quintessential well-made climactic scene in which all problems are resolved, he returns, sees the error of his ways, asks for forgiveness, and offers reconciliation (leaving a “beautiful fish” (63) on their doorstep as an attempt at apology and reconciliation). Elena and Bern accept the apology, and Seamus reveals that three people are waiting outside (a “good man” named Will, Elena’s daughter Valerie, and her grandson Archer [81]), representing the community that is welcoming the women back. Effectively, the younger generation is redeemed, catharsis occurs, and some kind of world order is restored. The play’s implied future, however, is not a traditional return to normalcy. We understand that by respecting female elders, land-based knowledge will be retrieved through matrilineal channels and a new path forward will be forged based on a deeper imbrication with the nonhuman. As the last line of the play suggests, we should “want to remember—everything” (88). Nolan offers alternative constructions of old(er) aged female characters by positively imbuing them with environmental responsibility, ancestral and land-based wisdom, and also staging their strong friendship bond which helps them survive against adversity. ESCAPED ALONE Escaped Alone (2016) by British playwright Caryl Churchill marked her fifth decade of playwriting with a repertoire of, at the time, over 25 plays. A major innovator of late-twentieth-century theatre, she is known for her feminist works that experiment with language, structure, and form, and address themes of power, sexual politics, and capitalism. Escaped Alone is no exception. The play centers around four women in their 70s (Sally, Vi, Lena, and Mrs. J), and begins as Mrs. J, walking down the street, notices the other three women she has “seen before” (37) gathered in a garden, and decides to join them. Unlike in Kayak and The Unplugging, Escaped Alone’s four septuagenarian characters are all chronologically (not just relatively) old. In this play, characters from younger generations are not staged, but none-the-less they form an important part of the older female characters’ relational identities. Following their first meeting, the play alternates between oddly disjointed garden scenes between the four women on a number of summer afternoons in which they discuss their families, their former jobs, and changes in their day-to-day life, and a series of seven monologues in which Mrs. J describes, and possibly inhabits, an ambiguous apocalyptic past or future filled with scenes of horror and despair. The rendering of old(er) age within the play’s narrative, combined with the presence of four actual old(er) bodies on stage

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(if the play is cast age-appropriately), as well as the fact that Churchill herself was 77 when Escaped Alone was first produced, creates portraits of female old(er) age that not only challenge negative age stereotypes, but also protest the ideals of patriarchy and capitalism that focus on competition, individual achievement, and ruthless destruction of the environment. In this play the old(er) women are not cast as other, like Annie in Kayak and Elena and Bern at the outset of The Unplugging. Churchill creates a drama untethered to this theme, instead unconventionally staging complex but enduring friendships between old(er) women to represent community. As Elaine Aston argues “the quartet of septuagenarian women proposes women’s neighborly networking as a way of offering mutual care and support as opposed to a creed of self-centred individualism” (2020, 105). The women “all have each other’s keys” (Churchill 2016, 38) as a safety measure and are attentively attuned to each other’s needs, as demonstrated when Lena notes she “should go to the dentist” but “can’t seem to,” and Sally responds “I could always go with you” (42–43). Their mutual connection is best captured in scene 6 where they all sing together in harmony, “singing for themselves in the garden, not performing for the audience” (60). Though Aston contends that in Escaped Alone the female characters all exist in a kind of anxiety state, she argues that their anxieties are products of a capitalist system (2020, 102), not their own aging. We add that such anxiety does not disorient the characters, who are all constructed fully aware of time, space, and events. For example, in scene 5, Sally delivers a monologue about her fear of cats, which, although troubling in its obsessive anxiety, also shows her recall her home in such specific detail that there is no question of her orientation to space or the finesse of her memory (Churchill 2016, 57–58). As Aston argues, Churchill’s construction allows us to “feel-see our way to understanding ourselves within (and against) a socially and ecologically damaging neo-liberal capitalist ‘totality’” (2020, 101). That the story is told by old(er) working-class female characters is part of the dialectical shock of recognition. While they are members of a capitalist society with a distressing imperial legacy, they also offer voices and embodied presences that are typically made silent and invisible in that society, and they do so communally. As Núria Casado-Gual astutely posits in “Staging the ‘crisis of aging,’” Churchill’s portrayal of old(er) age in Escaped Alone “is associated with companionship, and helps create a collective life review through which the characters make sense of their own loves and, ultimately, of their old age” (2020, 246). The group scenes are intersected throughout the play by wild and contrasting narrations of apocalypse given at regular intervals by Mrs. J. In the past tense, she describes landslides that create societies of subterranean mutants (Churchill 2016, 40), money that leaks poisoned chemicals that result in empty cities (49), mass starvation because “eighty percent of food was diverted to

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TV programmes” (54), windstorms unleashed by property developers to clear out the poor (60), a virus unleashed from sugar developed from monkeys (61) (this one has alarming similarities to both COVID-19 and the Monkeypox outbreak), and fires that birth new zero-population countries (66). Expanding on Casado-Gual’s point, these monologues could be considered part of a collective, socio-cultural life review that chronicles the disturbed material and ecological web we inhabit. Proposed by gerontologist/psychiatrist Robert N. Butler, the concept of “life review,” refers to: A naturally occurring, universal mental process characterized by the progressive return to consciousness of past experience, and particularly, the resurgence of unresolved conflicts; simultaneously, and normally, these revived experiences and conflicts can be surveyed and reintegrated . . . prompted by the realization of approaching dissolution and death, and the inability to maintain one’s sense of personal invulnerability. (1963, 66)

Through Mrs. J’s monologues, each detailing ecological and social despair, Churchill provokes us to recall past (and imagine potential future) environmental breakdowns, and the cumulative layering of the monologues forces us into recognition of our collective contribution to ecological vulnerability and impending disaster. However, this is not the recognition of Aristotle. In this play there is no glimpse of a deus ex machina or cathartic release that restores world order and allows us to forget about environmental destruction or the horrors of ageism. Rather, the events are described in the past as though they have been endured, but in their creative combination of facts and fears, they exist in an estraged past, present, and future all at once. Aston suggests that Churchill employs Sianne Ngai’s notion of “stuplimity,” an aesthetic experience that prompts audiences to experience works affectively as both astonishing and fatiguing (2020, 104). As Aston argues, through the repetition of similarly-themed and -constructed monologues, “Churchill renders capitalism as a ‘stupefying object,’ the ‘stupidity’ of which thickens as line by line, monologue by monologue, the disasters pile up” (2020, 104). In fact, one of the last moments of the play finds Mrs. J repeating the phrase “Terrible rage” consecutively 25 times (Churchill 2016, 74). Casado-Gual fairly suggests there is a dehumanizing, automatized nature to this repetition (2020, 252) and it reveals Mrs. J’s own body as “‘unnatural’ at the end of the play” (248) (a point we argue depends greatly on the performance). Casado-Gual, though, also questions whether “the four older women [are] meant to represent ‘resistant bodies’ in a constantly threatening universe, whose old age connotes endurance and resilience?” (248). We lean toward this second interpretation, and agree with Aston and her application of “stuplimity,” that is, that in Mrs. J’s terrible rage monologue, repetition demands an always new and very

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human engagement with these words (2020, 107). The repetition produces disorientation which, in this world, becomes productive rather than pathological. It is a conduit for an authentic response to a corrupt and violent world. More so than the other plays profiled in this chapter, Escaped Alone innovates with dramatic structure, language, and discourse, and to such a degree that it might be experienced as menacing. While Casado-Gual recognizes the anti-Aristotelian qualities of the text in her sophisticated analysis, she argues that, Churchill place[s] [her] older characters on the edge of a dangerous abyss, which signifies their apparently placid later years as being under constant threat. Through this process of signification, their old age becomes not only a source of fragility but also a potential source of tragedy, in the Aristotelian sense, as it may elicit both pity and, mainly, fear. (2020, 239)

However, we counter that Churchill not only resists the age stereotype associating later years with placidity but also pushes against ageist narratives through the use of unconventional dramatic form. Since her play is not Aristotelian in structure, we posit that it does not foreground fear and pity about old(er) age. A master of Brecht’s estrangement techniques, Churchill makes the familiar ladies’ garden party as strange as it could be, revealing complex structures at work on her characters. She draws her play structure inspiration from quantum physics, that world of tiny particles where the laws of classical mechanics do not apply. Sally first mentions “quantum” in scene 1 (Churchill 2016, 39) and by scene 3 they discuss “parallel universes” as disorienting but satisfying story form (45). Churchill’s structure nods to this theoretical fractured multiverse where the laws of reality, and cause-and-effect realism, definitely do not apply. Aston convincingly argues in Restaging Feminisms that, using this structure, Churchill forces the audience into disorientation for the purpose of highlighting the exploitation of nature (2020, 103). Fear of the future is rooted in the environmental destruction laid bare in Mrs. J’s monologues; thus, it is not isolated to any point on the life course, but encompasses all of them. We are not taught to dread becoming old but rather to fear environmental collapse and the forces that cause it. The material and natural world that the characters inhabit has distorted beyond recognition and the action of the play sees the characters testify to this truth from a place of refracted clarity enabled from their vantage point on the life course. The play then serves to shift the audience’s horizon of expectation regarding older women, by staging them as individuals that understand environmental destruction and worry about the Earth’s future, rather than reiterating the stereotype of older characters as ignorant and/or responsible for ecological disaster. The playwright uses a range of dramatic techniques to achieve this

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quantum disorientation. These include fragmented dialogue (characters often interject mid-sentence changing topics and at other times finish each other’s thoughts), ambiguous time (the play’s time period is never specified), nonlinear temporal shifts (the relationship of the garden scenes to the apocalyptic settings of Mrs. J’s monologues is unclear), rapid imagistic turns from humor to horror (the end of scene 4 bridges from Vi telling a knock-knock joke to Mrs. J launching into a starvation apocalypse monologue with “The hunger began [. . .] ” (Churchill 2016, 53–54)), accumulation of surreal images (Mrs. J’s monologues heap description of disaster upon disaster), and scenic dislocation (the play’s landscapes lack geographic and temporal specificity). The cumulative effect of these devices does not suggest the characters’ loss of orientation to time or place or disruptions to their memories as can be the case in stereotypical portrayals of old(er) age. Rather, the repeated and layered use of these theatrical techniques (along with the characters’ ever-present attentiveness to specific details of time, space, and experience), allows the audience to accept them as intentional devices employed for the purpose of highlighting the threats of capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental disaster. Despite this lack of clarifying detail, given the play’s ecocritical stance, the dramatic spaces of the play demand careful consideration. Casado-Gual clearly emphasizes a dual reading of the play, highlighting that positive views of old age are constructed through the older women’s relationality and interdependence (2020, 246). However, in her consideration of space, she argues that the domestic garden is a space of seclusion “in which the older characters are isolated, not only physically, but also in generational terms,” and that in Mrs. J’s monologues “it is the younger members of the population, especially babies and children, who seem to have absorbed the bulk of the chain of disasters in the play (8, 17, 22, 29, 37), whereas survivors like them [the women] are presented as almost predators” (2020, 239). It is true that babies and children are foregrounded in the socio-political critique proffered by Mrs. J’s monologues (“Four hundred thousand tons of rock paid for by senior executives split off to smash through the roofs, each fragment onto the designated child’s head” [Churchill 2016, 40]). However, we suggest that Churchill uses the monologues to point fingers at the real predators responsible for the destruction: “senior executives” (2016, 40), “property developers” and “the army” (60). Working with “tv programmes” and “lottery tickets” (54), they wreak havoc with the lives of “bonded workers” (44) and “Shanty towns” (60) as well as the very young. We further propose that the juxtaposition of the garden with Mrs. J’s apocalyptic monologues makes the space seem more like a sanctuary where the four women process the flux around them. Because the temporality of the play is ambiguous, it is uncertain whether they have already endured catastrophe or whether it is yet to come. But in the opening sequences, the characters refer in the present to numerous

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other people (Elsie, Barney, Kevin and Mary), including their younger relatives (Sally’s granddaughter Rosie, Mrs. J’s son Frank, Vi’s unnamed son, and her nephew Thomas and niece Maisie) (37–40), which opposes the idea that they are isolated. Rather it suggests they have current social, intergenerational interactions beyond their intimate garden circle that are important to their relational identities. It is also key that the play begins with Mrs. J’s observation that the door in the fence to the garden is open, and she goes in (Churchill 2016, 37), suggesting the women’s receptiveness and inclusive invitation to those that might happen upon them. Rather than the straight path to resolution offered by traditional dramatic form, Churchill’s estraging dramaturgical structure creates considerable space for reflection on the myriad systems of power at the root of environmental ruin. Here we see and feel the folly of a patriarchal, capitalist system, and its culpability for environmental destruction, and the playwright’s nuanced character constructions challenge old age stereotypes, specifically those surrounding “difficult” old(er) women. Though the play’s title is taken from the Book of Job (1: 15), “I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” suggesting a singular survivor of horrific tragedy for which they become testifier (in some sense this might be Mrs. J), the action of the play is actually communal and suggests that living on is best done in deep relationship with others and the natural world. CONCLUSION Some ecocritics, like Roy Scranton, have proposed that observing the apocalypse on stage allows us to rehearse our own deaths and the death of the planet. Audiences of any age that practice dying in this way train their senses to deal with challenges and avoid threats, and fuel their aspirations for change. With this new trope of aging women in the apocalypse, with its “estraged,” “double aged,” “difficult women” asserting the truth and danger of environmental threats and the interrelated materiality of the human and nonhuman worlds, ecotheatre has birthed a memorable character nexus through which to navigate some of the most important issues we face today. This trope also brings us closer to the etymological roots of the word apocalypse: an unveiling. Lifting the veil of our cultural conditioning, we can see “how a play’s dramatic structure works to expose or conceal, subvert or reinforce dominant age ideology” (Henderson 2016, 120), or suggest “conscious use of dramatic structure in service of societal change” (Bilodeau 2016) such as action on climate change. The old(er) women characters recounted in this chapter hunger for life, love, truth, and company as they navigate the end times, all with the intent that we might hear and respect them and make

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drastic changes to our ways of being in the world. Their force is agentic. As Timothy Morton suggests: “Even ecological apocalypticism has a streak of wishful thinking” (2007, 161). NOTES 1. Age is defined in a range of ways. Though not exhaustive, some important ways to define age include the following: Chronological age refers to the number of years a person has lived. It is deeply intertwined with social age, defined by Woodward as “the meanings that a society accords to different categories of age, with the instruments of social policy providing clear-cut measures” (2006, 183). In North America, older adults generally become eligible for seniors’ discounts, pension plans, and age-related social funding around the age of 65, making this chronological age a marker of when citizens are considered socially old. Beyond social age, Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that “we are aged more by culture than by chromosomes” (101). Cultural age refers to “the meanings or values that a culture assigns to different people in terms of age” and has important relationships to issues of status and power (Woodward 2006, 183). As Woodward contends women broadly experience ageism at younger chronological ages than men (1999, xiii). Another means of thinking about age is in terms of a person’s generational positioning. In the plays discussed, all central characters are constructed as older, by virtue of being contrasted with younger generations. 2. Eeyore is a fictional character in British author A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books, which were written in the 1920s and have been widely embraced as beloved children’s books within the Anglosphere and beyond for generations. The rights to the books’ material and characters are now owned by the Disney corporation. Eeyore is generally portrayed anthropomorphically as a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, and sarcastic grey stuffed donkey who is a friend of the title character, Winnie-the-Pooh. 3. The animal metaphors prevalent in Nolan’s text (Eeyore, grasshopper, Bear Moon) allude to the belief among many Indigenous people that being aligned with the animal world is empowering and generates respect and honor. Venessa Watts describes how “in many Indigenous origin stories the idea that humans were the last species to arrive on earth was central; it also meant that humans arrived in a state of dependence on an already-functioning society with particular values” (25).

REFERENCES Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2015. “Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, edited by Ken Hiltner, 143–153. New York: Routledge. Aristotle. 1982. Poetics. Translated by James Hutton. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Aston, Elaine. 2020. “Towards the Great Moving Left Show? Recitals of Socialist Feminism.” In Restaging Feminisms, 87–114. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Bilodeau, Chantal. 2016. “Why I’m Breaking Up with Aristotle.” HowlRound—A Knowledge Commons by and for the Theatre Community (April). https:​//​howlround​ .com​/why​-im​-breaking​-aristotle. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap. Butler, Robert N. 1963. “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged.” Psychiatry 26: 65–76, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/00332747​.1963​.11023339. Casado-Gual, Núria. 2020. “Chapter 12: Staging the ‘Crisis of Aging’: Old Age as the New Apocalypse in The Children and Escaped Alone.’” In Understanding the Discourse of Aging: A Multifacted Perspective, edited by Vincent Salvador and Agnese Sampietro, 233–255. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1990. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2015. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” In Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, edited by Ken Hiltner, 335–352. New York: Routledge. Chivers, Sally. 2021. “‘With Friends Like These’: Unpacking Panicked Metaphors for Population Ageing.” Societies 11, no. 3 (69): 1–11. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3390​/ soc11030069. Churchill, Caryl. 2016. Escaped Alone. London: Nic Hern Books. Currie, Mark. 2013. The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Diamond, Elin. 1997. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. London: Routledge. Dolan, Jill. 1991. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. New York: Routledge. Fuchs, Elinor. 2014. “Estragement: Towards an ‘Age Theory’ Theatre Criticism.” Performance Research 19, no. 3: 69–77. ———. 2016. “Rehearsing Age.” Modern Drama 59, no. 2: 143–154. Grande, Sandy. 2018. “Aging, Precarity, and the Struggle for Indigenous Elsewheres.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31, no. 3, 168–176, https:​ //​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/09518398​.2017​.1401145. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 2004. Aged by Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haiven, Max. 2013. “The Dammed of the Earth.” In Thinking with Water, edited by Cecelia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 213–231. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Hall, Jordan. 2011. Kayak. Toronto: Samuel French. Hanson, Kristin. 2006. “Stage(d) Mothers: Mother-Daughter Tropes in Twentieth-Century American Drama.” PhD diss., Louisiana State University.

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Henderson, Julia. 2016. “I’m an Old Fucking Woman as of Today”: Sally Clark’s Dramaturgies of Female Aging.” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3, https:​//​ageculturehumanities​.org​/WP​/im​-an​-old​-fucking​-woman​-as​-of​ -today​-sally​-clarks​-dramaturgies​-of​-female​-aging​/. Joint Committee on the New Translation of the Bible. 1970. The New English Bible with the Apocrypha. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, Stephen. 2014. “What is Age Studies?” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, 17–23, https:​//​ageculturehumanities​.org​/WP​/what​-is​ -age​-studies​/. Katz, Stephen, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, and Pat Thane. 2021. “‘To Understand All Life as Fragile, Valuable, and Interdependent’: A Roundtable on Old Age and History.” Radical History Review 139: 13–25. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1215​ /01636545–8822578. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster. Leech, Clifford. 2018. Tragedy. New York: Routledge. Mangan, Michael. 2013. Staging Ageing: Theater, Performance and the Narrative of Decline. Bristol: Intellect. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nolan, Yvette. 2013. The Unplugging. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked the Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham: Duke University Press. Robertson, Ann. 1997. “Beyond Apocalyptic Demography: Towards a Moral Economy of Interdependence.” Ageing and Society 17, no. 4, 425–446. Trubridge, Sam. 2016. “On Sea/At Sea - an Introduction.” In Performance Research 21, no. 2: 1–6. Wallis, Velma. 2004. Two Old Women: an Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage, and Survival. 2nd ed. Kenmore: Epicenter Press. Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1: 20–34. Willett, John. 1964. “Editorial Notes.” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic by Bertolt Brecht. New York: Methuen. Woodward, Kathleen M. 1999. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2006. “Performing Age, Performing Gender.” NWSA Journal 18, no. 1, 162–189, https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/4317191.

Chapter Eleven

Learning to Live Well within Limits Exploring the Existential Lessons of Climate Change and an Aging Population Albert Banerjee

I want to begin by sharing two experiences. The first takes place in a long-term care facility. It is exemplary, known for its commitment to research. Having some time before a visit with a resident, I log onto the facility’s website. There I encounter a video about the organization.1 Curious, I click play. On the screen, the organization’s logo appears set against a black background. It fades as music starts softly, building dramatic tension. Images of neurons flash on the screen, then middle-aged people walking, swimming, strolling. Active. A male voice asks us to “Imagine a world where age is nothing more than a number, a place where people live long, active lives with strong bodies and vigorous minds. Welcome to the next generation!” The voice goes on to assert that the research arm of the organization is “transforming the experience of aging, becoming a global center of excellence for innovation. Our vision is to evolve into a dynamic, entrepreneur centric model for translating science into innovation.” The music is uplifting. The singer chants: “We gotta change the world!” It ends, leaving me feeling oddly unsettled. It is a familiar narrative about the possibilities of scientific innovation. Nothing new. And yet the discomfort lingers. The second experience was of a participatory symposium called “Awakening the Dreamer,” organized by the Pachamama Alliance, a coalition of northerners and the Achuar, an indigenous group based in the rainforests of Ecuador. 183

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While the Achuar appreciated efforts to preserve the Amazon rainforest, they believed that if those in the Global North really wanted to protect their lands permanently, they would need to go to work in their part of the world “to change the dream of the North” (Pachamama Alliance 2011). “A dream,” as the Pachamama describe, “rooted in consumption and acquisition.” Through a series of videos, personal reflections and discussions, the symposium went on to suggest the current environmental crisis was, at least partially, a result of a “cultural story” that saw humans as separate from nature and the natural world as a resource. This dream contributed to environmental degradation as well as the exploitation of peoples around the world. Surprisingly, it did not result in fulfillment among those of the Global North. Participants in the symposium like myself described similar experiences of isolation, anxiety, and working hard for scant security with little time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Indeed, many of the pastimes we shared were forms of numbing. What made this symposium such a compelling experience was how it high-lit the contradiction between the plight of a planet exploited for the supposed benefit of those in the Global North and our lack of ease. Despite the abundance of material goods many of us lived anxious, stressed, and deeply disconnected lives. “We talk,” Wilkinson and Picket (2010) observe, “as if our lives were a constant battle for psychological survival, struggling against stress and emotional exhaustion, but the truth is that the luxury and extravagance of our lives is so great that it threatens the planet” (3). In drawing attention to this contradiction, the symposium questioned the dream at the heart of modern life, that if we had more progress, more growth, simply more . . . we would be happy. The symposium helped me make sense of the unease I felt while watching such a hopeful video about the end of dementia. The future being imagined was a fragment of the dream that the Pachamama were referring to. I was being shown a fantasy of progress into strength, in which people with dementia would no longer exist, and we would all age into ecstatic activity. Finally, we would be satisfied. It was a vision that reframed vulnerability as a temporary aberration to be corrected through a progress brought to us by science and capital. My unease was my body’s recognition of being lied to. *** It might seem strange that an environmental symposium would have any bearing on aging well. Yet both these domains evince a story we in the Global North have been told of our ability to overcome natural limitations, to free ourselves from the shackles of our fleshy nature and natural habitat. It is a story that assumes this would be a good thing: that we should aim for a world where our desires for control can be fulfilled. It is a universalizing story, it

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tends not to recognize diversity in people, values, goals, or ways of knowing and living. Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code (2006) refers to this dream as the social imaginary of mastery. While its roots are in the European enlightenment, it has become a globally dominant narrative, fueled by and legitimating scientific progress, industrial development, and growth capitalism. It is a powerful story. Its machine metaphor has enabled us to break the world into small pieces to know and control it. But this reductionist, mechanical vision has blind-spots. It misses interconnection, which is not only fundamental to life but helps explain why the parallels between climate change and the aging “crisis” are not always obvious. Watching this fantasy of mastery in a care home was jarring. The context challenged the narrative. I was surrounded by care staff who were laboring in difficult conditions, caring for frail older adults in under-resourced environments. The impoverishment of care work was not hard to connect to these beliefs in progress, whose promise kept sustainable care at bay: because we will not need it in the future being imagined. That this fantastical story was told by the very institution that employed care workers and was home to people with dementia is a testament to how deep the social imaginary of mastery runs. In this chapter, I suggest that the climate crisis and the challenge of caring for an aging population offer opportunities to re-imagine our dreams and aspirations beyond fantasies of mastery. They offer the possibility for us to reevaluate our ways of being in the world, to rethink our connection to nature and one another and, most importantly, to learn to live well within limits. To support these claims, I begin by exploring the existential dimensions of climate change. I draw on postcolonial scholarship that understands the role the social imaginary of mastery has played in generating the current climate crisis. This social imaginary promises transcendence from the human condition, an escape from mortality and the vulnerabilities this entails. It is highly seductive and plays on our fear of death. Thus if we in the Global North are to reimagine our dreams beyond fantasies of mastery, I suggest we will need to confront mortality and the fears it engenders. I draw on recent research from terror management theory (TMT) that has found a connection between the fear of death and the will to domination. Thankfully, TMT research also finds that terror and domination are not the only responses to mortality. There are cultural traditions that can help us learn to live with mortality and cultivate non-supremacist relations with the natural world. Indigenous knowledges for instance, whether they be from western indigenous traditions or eastern contemplative traditions, are exemplary in this regard. I briefly review notable research on indigenous orientations to mortality before turning to my own

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discipline of gerontology, noting my comments apply equally to the broader field of aging studies. One might assume that gerontology would be a site for more accepting orientations to aging and finitude. For the most part, it is not. There are, however, promising lines of inquiry such as narrative and contemplative orientations that I consider briefly, which outline an agenda that engages with limitation and suggest ways of acting in the face of finitude beyond a wish for control. Addressing limitation, as these perspectives do, offers a more honest, pragmatic and sustainable agenda for gerontology, one that takes to heart the realities of finitude and can contribute resources—knowledge, narratives, metaphors, practices—that may enable us to live well within limits. Such an agenda will assist with the care of older peoples and can provide rich resources to cultivate more sustainable ways of being in the world. FRAMING THE ISSUE I begin by framing climate change such that its existential roots may be seen. In his book on sustainability and the psychosocial subject, Adams (2016) argues that “climate change” has emerged as the “predominant imaginary” because it “has been successfully accommodated within the framework of the physical science” (15). In other words, the issue has come to be understood in a materialist manner as a problem of molecules (too much CO2, e.g.) and temperatures (restricting temperature rise to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius). This understanding makes a good deal of sense. Science has been essential to making the environmental crisis known. Without science, one might experience discrete weather events while remaining unaware of broader patterns, how they have been shifting, and why this was happening. But framing the issue in scientific terms limits other interpretations, solutions, and agents (Adams 2016, 25–28). It becomes easy to leave the matter to scientists; after all the science is too complex. Or people may end up paralyzed, as is the case in some countries, by debates about the validity of that science. Or believing it is a technical problem, some may remain assuaged by the hope that scientists will develop technological fixes just in time, like in the movies.2 The environmental crisis has, perhaps more recently, come to be framed as a failure of growth capitalism (Baer 2021; Monbiot 2021; Wright and Nyberg 2015). It is represented as the consequence of a political and economic system that requires constant expansion and submits both nature and people to the imperative of profit. Within this frame, the means of averting catastrophic warming, Klein (2014) insists, “are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die” (14).

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A political economic framing brings the issue closer to home, rooted in everyday production and consumption, shaped by the ways we organize our lives and the socioeconomic system that we depend upon. This framework provides a more encompassing lens than the scientific perspective, recognizing that growth capitalism is not only responsible for global warming but for the exploitation of peoples. This narrative thus connects unsustainable development with social injustice and economic inequality. Within this frame, climate change, while urgent, is not the problem but a symptom of something deeper: a flawed political economic system. In attending to the social imaginary of mastery, I am not denying the above frames but adding a connective layer. I follow postcolonial scholars such as Nandy (1988), Shiva (2016) and Ghosh (2021) in understanding the scientific revolution, growth capitalism and industrial society as part of the same project that saw the world as a resource to be exploited. A key moment in the flourishing of this project can be traced to the Enlightenment. This was a time of incredible optimism, where it was imagined that progress would free humanity from the shackles of nature (Jones 1975). And indeed, its achievements have been remarkable for some. However, the story it told about humanity was based on supremacist assumptions. It saw humanity—or more accurately upper class, white European males—as separate from and above nature. It understood the natural world as dead matter, a machine, that could be known by taking it apart. The knowledge produced would bring the machine under control, for it was not truly alive, and certainly no longer sacred (Merchant 1988). Even the Christian god was pushed out of the frame, given the spot of prime mover. The divine set the whole mechanical clockwork in motion, that was all. This reductive, materialist and mechanical approach to the world lends modern science an air of secularism. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Canadian historian of technology David Noble (1997) points out, it is a profoundly religious endeavor. Modern science and technology, he argues, is grounded in “a pathological dissatisfaction with and deprecation of the human condition” (207). It has continually sought to transcend our natural limitations. This aspiration to transcendence lurks in the background, though at times—as with the video on dementia—it becomes palpable. This is a narrative of salvation through technology. As Noble writes: Although today’s technologist, in their sober pursuit of utility, power, and profit, seem to set society’s standard for rationality, they are driven also by distant dreams and spiritual yearnings for supernatural redemption. . . . [t]heir true inspiration lies elsewhere, in an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation. . . . They are taking flight from the world, pointing us away from the earth, the flesh, the familiar—offering salvation by technical fix. (207)

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Attending to this aspiration to transcendence through fantasies of mastery encourages a nested understanding of the crises we are facing, in which the material and political economic exist within a social imaginary of mastery. It also suggests we need to cultivate other imaginaries and tell other stories, ones that will enable us to celebrate our inherent connection nature and the fact that we are inescapably mortal and therefore inevitably vulnerable and interdependent. No mission to Mars will save us. What this desire for transcendence suggests is that lying behind the will to mastery is a fear of the human condition. Thus, if we are to return to earth, if we are to live sustainably, and to understand ourselves as part of the natural cycle of life, then we will need to grapple with the fears of being mortal and the tragedies (and joys) of living limited, human lives. RESPECTING THE FEARS It is worth facing the fear lurking behind the pretense to mastery. Losses can cut deeply. Grief may take us over. Facing our mortality means realizing the world will continue without us, calling into question the worth of our life and legacy. The social imaginary of mastery suggests that these losses can be avoided. Social conditions can produce gains and mitigate some losses. They certainly have for some people, though unevenly and often the expense of others. But facing mortality means acknowledging we are all vulnerable. Wherever we may live, we all live with impermanence and finite time. We will lose everything we love; the deeper we love, the greater the loss. These are no small things. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (1973) insisted that the fear evoked by confronting mortality was one of the main drivers of domination. In other words, systems of domination were attempts to manage the terror of death. For Becker, the primary strategy of denying death was through the creation of “heroic” narratives, like the narrative of mastery, to compensate for the feelings of powerlessness in the face of mortality. The story I encountered in the care home, that together we can eliminate dementia, was a contemporary example of the denial Becker was referring to. The video’s uplifting music and images of fit adults jogging promised that science and technology will afford us a vibrant life, where the frailties of our flesh are held at bay. Rather than suggest our bodily “ailments” may be the grounds for politics and social care as Zechner and colleagues (2022) propose, the heroic dream of mastery vanishes them. In doing so, it reaches deep into our bodies. It does not convey merely an idea but an affect: an embodied sense of power, hope and freedom from vulnerability.

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Becker’s work has given rise to a subfield of social psychology called Terror Management Theory (TMT) that has sought to test these ideas. Thus far, hundreds of experiments have supported Becker’s insights into the existential drivers of domination (for a review see Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg 2015). TMT research has found that when people are confronted with their mortality they may behave cruelly. They also tend to adhere more firmly to their worldview and prefer people who affirm them. When afraid, we buy in harder and care less in other words. “The way that people respond to thoughts of death,” according to Park and Pyszczynski (2019), “involve attitudes and behaviors detrimental to both themselves and others (e.g., aggression prejudice, stereotyping, materialism, unhealthy behaviors)” (102). However, cross-cultural research reveals that terror is not a given response (Park and Pyszczynski 2016). Cultural narratives and practices shape emotions and can support more positive relations with both death and the natural world. Indeed, there seems to be much to learn from those knowledges that colonial science initially dismissed as backward. Research on indigenous knowledges from North American and South Asia for instance, indicates that more accepting attitudes towards mortality encourage more sustainable ways of being. Rowe and Mathews’s (2021) research with North American indigenous communities is a case in point. They argue that indigenous peoples hold friendlier relations with mortality and this attitude emerges from and contributes to “non-supremacist” worldviews in which humans do not stand separate and above nature but are intimately integrated with the natural world. Indigenous people, for instance, understand that in death, they contribute their bodies to nature, becoming food for the plants and animals that nourished them when they were alive. Such stories do not hold people as separate and frame death in life affirming ways. Writing about the Coast Salish nation in Canada’s west coast, Rowe and Mathews (2021) note that the boundaries between life and death are porous. The spirits of dead ancestors, for instance, are honored, fed and spoken to. They continue to exist among the living. Their view of life and death is thus cyclical. Death is not an end but a continuum along which personal relationships are extended. Rituals and ceremonies enable the internalization of these narratives and this, they suggest, helps quell existential fears and the impulse to fantasies of domination. As Rowe and Mathew describe: “Indigenous nations use story and mindfulness techniques such as ceremony and ritual to transform fear and denial of death into an affirmation of earthly life. This reduction of existential fear, in turn, supports non-supremacist worldviews and produced better ecological outcomes” (19). Research on Eastern contemplative traditions, such and yoga and mindfulness, suggest that these practices can support people in facing their mortality

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as well as being present to the difficult emotions that may arise, resulting in more compassionate and less controlling ways of being in the world (Kabat-Zinn 2005). The practice of mindfulness, for instance, involves cultivating an ability to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment. Mindfulness meditation trains people to notice and be with their experience. Being with is a different subjectivity than that produced through narratives of mastery which encourage judgement and risk detection. Research indicates that mindfulness meditation enables individuals to be present with their fear of death. For example, in a study of mindfulness among hospice workers, and Davies (2005) found that the practice enabled hospice workers to become intimate with fear, to “abide in the midst of emotions,” and to hold these feelings in a nonjudgmental manner. The practice enabled workers to support the dying. They were able to hold the fear of their dying clients, to acknowledge this fear without judging or trying to fix it. This created a sense of ease. In reading their interviews one senses a way of being that is very different from the will to mastery, one that is more open and receptive. There is no rock singer chanting “we gotta change the world,” and yet the world is transformed by being present. In another study on mindfulness, Park and Pyszcynski (2019) found that meditative practice facilitated non-defensive responses to mortality. They suggest this was made possible by the fact that meditators were better able to be present to their feelings. As they explain, meditation “produces a mindful state in which people are better able to tolerate unpleasant thoughts and, therefore, have less need to suppress them” (115). They also react less defensively, and do not need to compensate by taking refuge in a “worldview defense” (115). Thus, cultural practices can mitigate fear and the need to respond through narratives of mastery or some other strategy of compensatory domination. Responding “defensively to thoughts of death, by initially suppressing such thoughts and then defending one’s worldview when they rebound,” Park and Pyszczynski (2019) conclude, “is not an inevitable response to this existential problem” (115). There is much to learn from such traditions and how they have grappled with the challenges of finitude. As Rowe and Mathews (2021) observe, “cultures that recognize the fear and defensiveness that we humans can easily feel in the face of finitude and that in turn have developed resources for facing and transforming that fear are more likely to produce non-supremacist and egalitarian worldviews” (19–21). These cultures and traditions hold important lessons for moving beyond narratives of mastery. They may serve at sites for gerontological research, guided by an agenda concerned with exploring more receptive ways of engaging with finitude. A topic I turn to next.

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THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF GERONTOLOGY One might think that gerontology, the study of age and aging, would be a place where we would cultivate rich and vibrant alternatives to the social imaginary of mastery, confronting, as we do, the significant limitations that come with being mortal. Yet, this is far from the case. The discipline of gerontology is complicit in promoting narratives of mastery. Indeed, we benefit from the fears of an aging population, promising to find solutions to help mitigate the burden frail bodies will place on health and social care systems. Consider successful aging, one of gerontology’s most influential approaches (Katz and Calasanti 2015). It is predicated on the claim that not only can we distinguish between “pathological” and “normal” aging, but we can further divide normal aging into “usual” and “successful” aging (Rowe and Kahn 1987, 143). This distinction rests on the ability to intervene and prevent the losses “usually” associated with aging. One ages successfully when such factors are controlled. This theory sets up an entire research agenda that seeks to identify “modifiable risks” for normal aging as well as interventions to manage them. Successful aging is clearly a child of the social imaginary of mastery. It promises, according to its early proponents Rowe and Kahn (1997): “the avoidance of disease and disability, the maintenance of high physical and cognitive function, and sustained engagement in social and productive activities” (433). Not only is this the dominant approach within gerontology but it has become so influential in the Global North as to be considered a “contemporary obsession” (Lamb 2017, 1). What about those aspect of normal aging that cannot be modified? Within this research paradigm, nothing is said. It is silent. Even engagements with Eastern contemplative practices such as meditation and yoga, which hold such promise as we saw above, are colonized by researchers dreaming of mastery. These wisdom traditions are reduced to interventions that promise to increase balance, strength, and flexibility (Khalsa and Elson 2020). Thus, when facing aging and mortality, where fears may be heightened, gerontologists offer the false balm of a heroic narrative. In doing so, the profession encourages people to buy into a dream that threatens our ecosystem. However, there are reasons to be hopeful. Critical and humanistic strands of gerontology have long-challenged narratives of mastery. I want to briefly consider narrative and contemplative approaches, since they exemplify the way some gerontologists are grappling with limitation, without defining it in advance as a problem to be solved. Rather than neglect those aspects of life that cannot be controlled, narrative gerontology has emerged as a rich subfield offering theoretical, empirical

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and practical strategies to work with finitude and loss as a normal part of life (Kenyon, Bohlmeijer, and Randall 2011; Randall 2019). Narrative gerontologists begin with the assumption that there is a gap between what happens and the meaning these events are given. In this gap there exists the possibility to engage, reflect, and create. Using the narrative metaphor, gerontologists attend to the ways in which people use story to give events meaning, to incorporate them in the flow of their life, to heal and to create themselves anew. The perspective reveals an interior, biographical life that is not reducible to biology. It also reveals the myriad of ways people engage with the journey of aging, finitude, loss, and suffering without succumbing to narratives of decline or aspiring to fantasies of mastery (Randall and McKim 2008). It is possible for instance, for people to “re-story” their lives such that initially negative events—such as an accident, illness or divorce—may become part of a new story, chapter or sense of self. Narrative gerontologists are providing theoretical and practical resources to engage with finitude through what has come to be termed narrative care (Irwin-Kenyon 2016). Contemplative orientations to aging provide another promising area of scholarship (Sherman 2010; Moody 2016). As with narrative gerontology, contemplative approaches attend to the interior dimension and understands humans as both interpretive and existential/spiritual beings. Contemplative orientations recognize that wonder, vitality, meaning, and fulfillment may be generated through the reflective engagement with the present (Merton 1961). By learning to pay attention, by learning to be present with thoughts, feelings, emotions, events, there is a movement deeper into life. Kenyon (2011), writing about tai chi describes it as a “journey to life” (238; italics in original). Unlike pastimes that numb us, that protect us from feeling too much, contemplative practices nurture openness and a connection with ourselves from within an attitude of acceptance. The valuation of transcendence is another aspect of the contemplative orientation that moves beyond narrow individual concerns (Sherman 2010). Contemplative orientations explore the various ways in which people may learn to see themselves as connected to others, to nature, to the past, to future generations, or to the divine. Researchers exploring contemplative perspectives, such as Corwin (2021), reveal that these practices can transform lived experience by facilitating an embracing of aging and finitude more generally. Indeed, they teach us that embracing finitude enables the deepening of one’s experience of being alive. Both narrative and contemplative orientations are promising because they put finitude at the heart of aging, as Dutch gerontologist Jan Baars (2012, 2017) suggests we must. Rather than promise to rid society of all modifiable weakness, Baars asks gerontologists to consider the central task of the aging process is to learn to live with limitation, with the gains and losses, trials

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and tribulations of life. From this perspective, aging occurs not as a problem but as a resource. Aging is, according to Baars (2017), “the most important experiential source of knowledge about what it is to live a finite life” (970). Engaging with finitude, whether it be through contemplative, narrative or other approaches, can foster novel ways of “being” in the world (Sherman, 2010). These ways of being do not inhabit the conventional social imaginary of mastery but an imaginary in which it is worthwhile exploring what might be gained through presence, attention and appreciation. The above lines of inquiry admit that one must prepare for aging. Grappling with finitude takes knowledge, skill, support, and community. This requires, what Davis (2020) notes is comparatively absent in the Global North, a rich culture of aging and a diversity of perspectives on mortality. Thus one of the aims of gerontological scholarship should be the fostering of rich “wisdom environments” that can support the journey through these challenges to life (Randall and Kenyon 2001). Such an agenda would involve attention to those experiences, knowledges and traditions that enable people to grapple with limitation. Success here does not mean eliminating limitation but being able to live well with it. It would ask, as Toivonen (2022) does, how might agency be enacted outside an ethos of control? It would engage with contemplative practices, such as yoga or meditation, as technologies of self that cultivate a sense of satisfaction that is not dependent on getting and spending (Banerjee and Kilner 2021). This is a gerontology for mortals. Its agenda would support gerontology not only in caring for people as they age but would contribute resources for a more sustainable social imaginary. An imaginary that is honest about the human condition and enables living well within limits, whether they be mortal limits or the carrying capacity of our planet. The two are not so different. CONCLUDING REMARKS What I have claimed in this chapter is that climate change and the challenges of adequately supporting an aging population have their roots, at least partially, in a modern story of progress that promised a utopia through the achievements of science, technology and capitalism. Most of us in the Global North have been born into a world oriented by this imaginary of mastery: an imaginary that framed humans as separate from nature and in control, that taught us to view the natural world as material and mechanical, and encouraged us to treat it and others as resources for the fulfillment of our desires. In the face of increasingly apocalyptic messages, whether they be about the looming climate catastrophe or the “grey tsunami” (Curley 2022), there are valuable lessons to be learnt by recognizing the existential roots of these

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crises as a flight from our fleshy nature. There are also rich opportunities for cultivating ways of living well within limits, not as a form of sacrifice, but recognizing that these limits are productive. Finitude makes us who we are and can become a call to engage more receptively, deeply and compassionately with ourselves, others and the world around us. That is not a bad way to live. I have also suggested that gerontology and aging studies more broadly have important roles to play in the cultivation of a more sustainable social imaginary that can enable us to live well within limits. Aging, as Baars (2017) observes, is the ultimate school for learning to live with limitation and loss. A gerontology for mortals reminds us that we will all die and that we ultimately lose everything we love. A good life needs to be cultivated within this context. Indeed, it always has been. Identifying resources—knowledges, practices, metaphors, and stories—that can support us in bearing limitation and more importantly in seeing the productivity of mortality is essential if we are to live more sustainably and compassionately. This is an agenda that must humbly engage with other cultures and traditions to identify resources for living well within limits. It is an agenda that reminds gerontologists of the seemingly forgotten fact of their subject matter: the study of aging is not the same thing as the study of older people. It is broader, recognizing that the wisdom produced from such inquiries will be of relevance to people of all ages, and perhaps even more relevant for the young who are just embarking on their finite lives of love and loss. Finally, it is an agenda that is of profound relevance to the climate crisis, that will have something of value to contribute to the cultivation of sustainable ways of living in the world, as part of nature. I conclude with a caveat. I am not calling for a better balance between research that fights death and research that accepts death. This is a common refrain. But the metaphor of balance fails to recognize the power of social imaginaries. As the Pachamama Alliance (2010) warn, many of us in the Global North are constrained by a dream that shapes what we aspire to; it colors the way the world occurs to us, and it is not a trivial matter to exit it because its assumptions shape what we believe we should want and the knowledge we need to get it. A social imaginary is a context we inhabit. What I am suggesting then is twofold. On the one hand, gerontologists may want to consider as part of their research mandate the challenge of learning to live with limitation (notably aging, loss, death, dying). On the other hand, gerontologists should also place research oriented by a will to mastery (notably research which aims to solve some of the problems of aging, cure diseases, and prevent certain forms of loss) within a context that acknowledges limitation. This is not about balance. It is about context and contributing to a more sustainable social imaginary. Curative and preventative research is valuable. Perhaps dementia can be eliminated. It may be a worthwhile endeavor. But we must learn to strive for this without suggesting that salvation will come

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from the elimination of limitation, one disease or problem at a time. In this regard, there is no future exodus from the human condition to be promised. There always only will be the imperfect now. There always only ever was. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the funding of the New Brunswick Health Research Foundation Research Chair in Community Health and Aging which made the writing of this chapter possible. I would also like to thank Sachne J. Kilner for introducing me to yoga and the many conversations this inspired, and Julie Banerjee for her tireless editing. NOTES 1. While I am referring to a personal visit, my colleagues and I later returned for research purposes with a promise of anonymity. I do not cite the video as a result. However, the aspiration to cure dementia is not unique to this institution. 2. For a notable exception see Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay (Netflix, 2021), 2hr:18mins.

REFERENCES Adams, Matthew. 2016. Ecological Crisis, Sustainability and the Psychological Subject. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Baars, Jan. 2012. Aging and the Art of Living. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2017. “Aging: Learning to Live a Finite Life.” The Gerontologist 57, no. 5: 969–976. Baer, Hans. 2021. Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative World System. 2nd ed. Lanham: Lexington Books. Banerjee, Albert, and Sachne J. Kilner. 2021. “Cultivating a Self-Aware Self: A Study of Yoga as Transformative Health Practice.” Paper presented at the European Sociological Association Annual Conference: Sociological Knowledges for Alternative Futures, Barcelona, Spain, August 2021. Becker, Ernest. 1973. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press. Bruce, Anne, and Betty Davies. 2005. “Mindfulness in Hospice Care: Practicing Meditation-in-Action.” Qualitative Health Research 15, no. 10: 1329–1344. Code, Lorraine. 2006. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Corwin, Anna I. 2021. Embracing Age: How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Curley, Kevin. 2022. “Surging Grey Tsunami on Course for Province.” Moncton Times, June 20, 2022, A1. Davis, Joseph E. 2020. “Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Aging.” In The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well, edited by Joseph E. Davis and Paul Scherz, 1–19. Notre Dame: Notre Dame. Ghosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irwin-Kenyon, Gary. 2016. Pathways to Stillness: Reflect, Release, Renew. Victoria: Friesen Press. Jones, W. T. 1975. “The Age of Reason.” In A History of Western Philosophy: Hobbes to Hume, 2nd ed, revised, 1–13. New York: Harcourt Brace. Kabat-Zinn, Jon. 2005. Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York: Hyperion. Katz, Stephen, and Toni Calasanti. 2015. “Critical Perspectives on Successful Aging: Does It Appeal More Than It Illuminates?” The Gerontologist 55, no. 1: 26–33. Kenyon, Gary. 2011. “On Suffering, Loss, and the Journey to Life: Tai Chi as Narrative Care.” In Storying Later Life: Issues Investigations, and Interventions in Narrative Gerontology, edited by Gary Kenyon, Ernst Bohlmeijer, and William L. Randall, 237–251. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenyon, Gary, Ernst Bohlmeijer, and William L. Randall. 2011. Storying Later Life: Issues Investigations, and Interventions in Narrative Gerontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Khalsa, Sat Bir Singh, and Lauren E. Elson. 2020. An Introduction to Yoga: Improve Your Strength, Balance, Flexibility, and Well-Being. Boston: Harvard Health Publishing. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lamb, Sarah. 2017. “Introduction: Successful Aging as a Twenty-first Century Obsession.” In Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives, edited by Sarah Lamb, 1–23. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 1988. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: HarperCollins. Merton, Thomas. 1961. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: Penguin Books. Monbiot, George. 2021. “Capitalism is Killing the Planet.” The Guardian (October 30, 2021). https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/environment​/2021​/oct​/30​/capitalism​-is​ -killing​-the​-planet​-its​-time​-to​-stop​-buying​-into​-our​-own​-destruction. Moody, Harry (Rick). 2016. “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience.” In Contemplative Social Research: Caring for Self, Being, and Lifeworld, edited by Valerie Malhotra Bentz and Vincenzo M.B. Giorgino, 6–15. Santa Barbara: Fielding University Press. Nandy, Ashis. 1988. Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Noble, David F. 1997. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Pachamama Alliance. 2011. “Awakening the Dreamer: Changing the Dream.” Boulder: Gaiam. Park, Young Chin, and Tom Pyszczynski. 2016. “Cultural Universals and Differences in Dealing with Death.” In Denying Death: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Terror Management Theory, edited by L. A. Harvell and G. S. Nisbett, 193–213. New York: Routledge. ———. 2019. “Reducing Defensive Responses to Thoughts of Death: Meditation, Mindfulness, and Buddhism.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116, no. 1: 101–118. Pyszczynski, Tom, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg. 2015. “Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 52: 1–70. Randall, William L. 2019. “The End of the Story? Narrative Openness in Life and Death.” Narrative Works 9, no. 2: 152–170. Randall, William L., and Gary Kenyon. 2001. Ordinary Wisdom: Biographical Aging and The Journey of Life. Westport: Praeger. Randall, William L., and A. Elizabeth McKim. 2008. Reading our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rowe, James, and Darcy Mathews. 2021. “Death Denial, Human Supremacy, and Ecological Crisis: Indigenous and Euro-American Perspectives.” The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics 8, no. 1: 13–32. Rowe, John W., and Robert L. Kahn. 1987. “Human Aging: Usual and Successful.” Science 237 (4811): 143–149. ———. 1997. “Successful Aging.” The Gerontologist 37, no. 4: 433–440. Sherman, Edward. 2010. Contemplative Aging: A Way of Being in Later Life. New York: Gordian Knot Books. Shiva, Vandana. 2016. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace. London: Zed Books. Toivonen, Heidi. 2022. “What Environmental Narratives Can and Cannot Do for our Sense of Agency: Exploring the Limits of Narrative.” Paper presented at Narrative Matters Conference, Mercer University, Atlanta, May 17–19, 2022. Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone London: Penguin Books. Wright, Christopher, and Daniel Nyberg. 2015. Climate Change, Capitalism, And Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-destruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zechner, Minna, Lena Näre, Olli Karsio, Antero Olakivi, Liina Sointu, Hanna-Kaisa Hoppania, and Tiina Vaittinen. 2022. The Politics of Ailment: A New Approach to Care. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

PART III

Afterword

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Chapter Twelve

Emergent Cosmic Return The Field of Possibilities for Aging in a Proposed New Geological Epoch Peter J. Whitehouse

Human societies are changing rapidly due to entangled ecological and social crises. Many beliefs and behaviors of the modern era seem inadequate to address our ever increasing environmental, political, and economic turmoil. Human population growth, especially the increase in number of older people, is a major driving force for these changes. Our ecological impact is driven even more by our irresponsible behaviors, more than just our numbers. Elders are often viewed as contributing to our current problems, like intensifying strain on health care systems, but could also be seen as an opportunity. Elderhood does not emerge solely by growing old but is earned by giving back to those less experienced. This chapter explores how we should and can transform concepts, values, metaphors, and stories to meet the challenges and opportunities for survival and flourishing. It places growing old (and growing the new) in the context of broader cultural changes that are birthing new community forms and social orders. In this chapter we use the concept and metaphor of field to explore boundaries among human endeavors in life, culture, aging, health, and learning. The Anthropocene is a label given to the geological future. I and others call for a cultural response that is no less than a reinvention of modern civilization, which we label cosmodernity with some hesitation (Nicolescu 2014). For most of its life this chapter was entitled “Emergent Cosmodernity” rather than “Emergent Cosmic Return.” Modernity itself is a problematic term especially for Indigenous and other peoples who view the western model of modern progress as part of destructive coloniality. The cosmic is emerging in yet a 201

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new turn spiraling on previous turns. Culture change is based on examining old concepts and associated stories and replacing them with others that are more likely to promote survival and even flourishing. To do this we will not only explore general categories like science, art, nature, and culture, but also specific topics including the author’s autobiography, brain aging, and intergenerational education. By examining several fields of human endeavor involving health and education we will expose limitations of modernity and reveal how our relationships might evolve in and to the ecosystems that support us (Gergen 2009; Hunarī and Boleyn 1999). The concept of fields (and of relationships among elements in a single field and in and among different fields) is a key metaphor to understand the ecological and social evolution of the patterns in our lives together and with our planet. The concepts and practices of the fields critical to aging over time and space will be our overarching consideration (Whitehouse et al. 2014; Whitehouse 2018). THE ANTHROPOCENE The Anthropocene, a proposed new term for our current geological epoch, is the predominant concept being used by geologists to label the growing planetary impact of human beings. This controversial term has not yet been officially approved by the International Union of Geological Societies as there is still discussion about when the relatively stable previous epoch, the Holocene, stopped and the Anthropocene began. Where in the geological strata do we place the so-called golden spike that marks the impact of humans? The leading candidates are radioisotopes that signal the introduction of nuclear weapons after the Second World War. Other considerations include the deposition of plastic waste, but others suggest earlier time points associated with the development of large-scale agriculture. But beyond agreeing to a golden spike, the term itself engenders further controversy (see Davies 2016, 76). We need to start by challenging proposed labels for human wantonness, such as the already much used term Anthropocene itself. Not all humans have damaged planetary systems equally, hence alternative terms like the Capitalocene or Plantationocene (also limited in scope) that highlight the role of economic forces need to be considered. Does the term Anthropocene adequately recognize the colonial domination of our life world by destructive powerful elements in our modern civilizations, most notably ecosystem and social justice–destroying neoliberalism (Whitehouse 2018; Bendik-Keymer 2020)?

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As we enter the so-called Anthropocene, it is time to rethink and revalue what it means to be individual human beings and to be “civilized” (Biello 2016; Whitehouse 2018; Bendik-Keymer 2020; Scranton 2015; Bendel and Read, 2021). Environmental degradation and associated social unrest are the result of almost eight billion humans living beyond our Earth’s abilities to sustain the life of our species and others (McKibben 2010). Called the Great Acceleration and said to have started in about 1950, the growth in our numbers has been notable for the large increase in humans living to 85 and beyond and for our collective huge ecological impact. We are amid the Sixth Extinction where our species is responsible for the elimination of many forms of living creatures and threatening our own. In this chapter I will not review in any detail the evidence for the growing environmental and social devastation facing us now and increasingly so in the near future. The devastation is evident in everyday weather and news. Fortunately, the social reaction is growing more active. Many, but particularly the youth, are calling for more aggressive action through groups like Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, and Deep Adaptation (Bendel and Read 2020). In a deeply personal book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World Daniel Sherrell, a young, yet experienced activist, writes a letter to his yet unborn child about what he calls the Problem. His ploy of not naming the death and destruction except as a capitalized problem creates uncertainty about what we are facing and whether we can solve it. It is through intergenerational interaction that change might occur in ways to support more flourishing communities and allow young potential parents to bring children into the world with some hope. Cocreating a healthier present together will allow the past to participate in a common future forming process that will also eventually become a past again in cycles of temporal reciprocity across generation and across the ages. It is time for older people, the complacent and privileged, relatively wealthy middle classes to join the fight. Recently founded by Bill McKibben and others, Third Act is asking “experienced” adults (over 60) to step up, support youth, personally disinvest from banks that support fossil fuels, and protect voting rights and hence democracy. This group is currently struggling with a common problem—what do you call these “experienced” adults? Are they older adults, seniors, elders, or potential elders? Elderhood is both a state of mind and an identified role in society, achieved by those who celebrate and practice life-long, community-based wisdom seeking. It is not granted in isolation nor is it based purely on chronological age. It is a narrative-based life stage that varies from culture to culture and individual to individual and is universally grounded in diverse experiences, deep reflection, and human dignity. Communities can provide opportunities to become an elder but such possibilities can be limited by poverty and social

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unrest. Being an elder requires the capacity to listen deeply to others. Elders employ play and creativity in service of others, offering historical perspectives to younger generations and thus helping shape the future. Elderhood is often associated with recognition that personal mortality is closer than it has ever been and a sense of transcendent freedom from the constraints of success and productivity-oriented adulthood. Although far from the proverbial “second childhood,” elderhood has a natural affinity with the joys and freedoms of childhood. Ancestorhood is the next stage beyond elderhood, yet we often forget the power of our deceased relatives’ stories to influence the still living. We need to re-member them. Some modern politically and professionally motivated geriatric and gerontological organizations criticize the use of the term “elder” by promoting the term “older adult” rather than “elder.” They assert that the word elder promotes a form of ageism, that is, unfair discrimination against those in their later years. In my view these groups themselves are often the source of discrimination by putting their own power-driven interests over the opportunities for chronologically advanced people to be narratively creative closer to the end of their lives. And the role of ancestors would not likely enter their thinking about health concerns today; after all when people stop breathing, they are gone. But death can be viewed as fundamentally more social than biological. Dominant, colonializing cultures metaphorically steal individual minds and may actually kill people before their elderhood has had a chance to blossom. Seven-generations Indigenous perspectives on aging in community cry out for greater attention. A contemporary deeper reconsideration of both elderhood and ancestorhood should embrace our own mortality. Considering death itself as an essential part of life creates genuine hope that dying may serve our legacies, not only as individuals but as a species. In the opinion of this author and many others who appreciate, at least to some degree, the depths of our current plight, much more death and destruction lie ahead. I write this chapter in the hope that it can inform new narratives and identify key points in the stories for activism to decolonialize the neoliberal techno-scientism that impoverishes our lives with individualistic and materialistic values and false hopes and expectations. We do not so much call for new metanarratives but a pluriverse of stories grounded in different conceptions of life and flourishing (Biello 2016; Escobar 2018). Some of the new stories are in fact rooted in older more Indigenous cosmologies. To accomplish this transformation, we need to imagine what it means to be human actors, particularly as our roles change with age.

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PATTERNS OF AGING As individuals and as a species, aging involves dramatic changes occurring over different time scales, as well as geographic and cultural spaces. Appreciating both the potential for and necessity of change over the course of our personal lives and in the evolution of our societies is a foundation of collective wisdoms necessary for survival and flourishing. Also critical is the appreciation of our own personal limits and those of the earth systems that we inhabit. Juxtaposing contemporary explorations of individual death and potential species extinction exposes both profound depths, as well as limits, to life. The beauty of these creative patterns of existence, as well as their unraveling, can be explored through both art and science. Perhaps our most fundamental integrative skills involve oral and written narrative embracing other communicative forms including visual images and embodied cognition (Lundwall 2015). These modes of exploration can lead to rich conversations about the relationship between art and science and the role of patterns in both. We are pattern detectors and designers in all aspects of our lives (Lent 2017; Lent 2021). Perhaps most critically, we need to reexplore the nature of and boundaries between ostensibly separate concepts, not only art and science, but objectivity and subjectivity and nature and culture. It is a time to seek new cohesion as it emerges in the face of complexity rather than impose our own preexisting and outdated intellectual scaffolding (Letiche, Lissack, and Schultz 2011). Part of this process of reweaving the patterns of life and aging is recognizing the contextual importance of the concepts of space and time. Stories of the life course emerge with a sense of place in a particular temporal frame, but narrative offers us new ways of imaging the relationships between space and time. FABRICS OF SPACETIME Time permeates our individual lives including our relationships with each other and with other parts of nature. As a concept it is malleable, and we can learn to change it. Time is not just the ticking of an object like a clock but manifests in many different narratively constructed forms. Both modern physics and imaginative storytelling, including oral, written, and embodied forms like dance, give us power to understand temporal relationships differently. Time can stretch and even turn upon itself in cycles of living activity. The relationships among past, present, and future are fluid and offer creative possibilities for being fully present now. We can look back as we move forward. We are ancestors and descendants at the same time. Indigenous

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concepts of relationships over time extend our thinking into and beyond seven generations into creative cosmologies (Topa and Narváez 2022). Time is not independent of space. According to current scientific and certain Indigenous cultural cosmologies, we exist in spacetime fields of possibilities for relationships, a cosmic web (Hales 1984). Through different fiction and nonfiction narrative forms we can weave the fabric of time in creative ways to imagine new possibilities for our lives (Lent 2021). We need once again to reexamine conceptions of the life course, what we call aging, and with that exploration, reconsider death itself (Scranton 2015; Servigne et al. 2020). How can we appreciate more deeply our relationships to other living creatures that extend far back and forward in time? Energies in probability fields gives us a different metaphorical way to look at ourselves as we age. We are not just discrete minds and bodies that exist in the moment in specific locations; we are distributed processes of interconnectedness, as is all of nature (Topa and Narváez 2022). CONCEPTS OF FIELD The concept of field is critical to exploring the boundaries between age studies and ecocriticism (Hales 1984) and to creating new ways of organizing knowledge into wisdom. It is a word full of metaphorical possibility. Fields are critical domains to explore as we look for a future based on new imaginaries. Here we explore several types of fields relevant to aging and life embedded in space and time. Modern physics gives us new foundational knowledge of the universe as composed of spacetime probability fields where space and time are not viewed as separate. Processes and relationships emerge as more important to frame our understanding of the universe than structures and objects (Nicolescu 2008). Even the ostensible clear-cut boundaries between the subjective and the objective are being challenged. Where and how does consciousness manifest in the universe? Concepts from physics, like relativity and uncertainty, inspire us towards deeper understandings of how our world works. Biological relativism is challenging neo-Darwinian biology that is based on now outdated reductionistic and deterministic concepts of physics and genetics (Noble 2017). Fields of all kinds are in constant motion. Literal fields in many forms, such as meadows, are critical ecosystems being both created and decimated by deforestation and industrial mono-crop agriculture. The very concept of land (fields, forests, etc.) and land ethics are key to rethinking our relationships to nature. Relationships to land were key in the birth of modern bioethics (Potter 1971) and in many Indigenous traditions (Topa and Narváez

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2022). Above ground the plants seek illumination by shifting growth patterns of leaves and move in place in response to wind, water, and fire. Animals of course move even more visibly in their quest for the next meal or mate. And within every organism, life is constantly in microscopic and submicroscopic motion. Below ground a complex web of interconnected roots and channels supports vast movement of life, all largely invisible to those above. In fact, the entire Earth is in constant motion making it philosophically and practically more valid to think of nothing as static and all structures as fluid. Life is more about animated processes and relationships than structures and objects (Nail 2021). Academic life is composed of overlapping fields of human intellectual endeavors increasingly being driven by transdisciplinary (not just inter-) perspectives. Both biological and cultural fields of inquiry are essential to creating change. Evolutionarily, the boundaries between fields, forests, and urban areas are places of creativity and innovation. Emergent cultural forms appear at the boundaries of intellectual and ethical discourses. The modern separation of nature and culture is leading to fused words like natureculture (Latour 2017). The two cultures of science and humanities are no longer being viewed as in opposition as manifest in the blended concept of artsci. The quests for understanding and creating patterns is common in many fields of human endeavor, inside and outside the academy. Social life is full of people moving between career fields and migrating over time to different geographical areas as a result. Political turmoil creates refugee displacements, often separating the generations. Such life transitions are challenging us to reinvent the roles of older people in society. Are our current universities fluid enough to foster such intellectual innovation? Do they support lifelong learning and provide educational opportunities for elders who seek to contribute to change rather than rest on their previously acquired laurels? No, they are not and do not. They are rife with political bureaucracy and dysfunctional social stories that often inhibit learning and wisdom. Universities are increasingly mimicking business practices in their own structures and processes and too often focus on producing students who will fit in existing economic models of work and not fostering citizens capable of critical thinking about existing neoliberal power structures. This paper plays with fields of objective/subjective relational possibilities. All fields have boundaries—whether literally in terms of fences and other ecosystems or as overlapping conceptual systems. For the remainder of the chapter, we will explore four concepts of fields related to aging. First, autobiography: the author will relate his story as a transdisciplinarian (Nicolescu 2008) who has explored and evolved through and with many fields from bioethics to cognitive neuroscience. Second, culture: we will explore fields of culture (not ignoring its relationship to nature) and use the term cosmodernity

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with reservations but to capture some of this imaginative possibility. Included in this intellectual journey will be fields as they appear in literature and science. Third, aging brains: we will explore one specific field well known to the author at the interface of aging and environment, namely brain health and dementia. Fourth, education: we will explore the vast field of education asking how we can enhance relationships between people across time and space to create the collective wisdom necessary to flourish. In each field exploration, I will use one of the blended concepts as a tool for discovery, starting with objective/subjective and ending with natureculture. LIFE AS A FIELD OF AUTOBIOGRAPHIC POSSIBILITIES (EXPLORING OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE) Perhaps the greatest intellectual challenge in the new thought spaces that are emerging is to rethink the historical and conceptual separation of the objective and the subjective. We are children of Descartes’s division of the mind and body, not to mention his demeaning attitudes towards nonhuman living creatures and appeals to religious ideology. My own cultural background is “Western” and my critique more focused on its hegemony. I am inspired by a glimmer of sense of wisdoms from other traditions from both the “East” and from Indigenous cultures. The author myself has been exploring this mind/ body separation in his own life and in my role as a healer (to mix pronouns intentionally). I first offer a more “objective” description of the structure of his academic life and credentials divided into temporal blocks imposed by society followed by a narrative description and a moment of angst that seem to liberate a more subjective exploration of his life course. MORE OBJECTIVE In traditional academic resume terms, Peter Whitehouse is professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve University and at the University of Toronto of Medicine as well as current or former Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Nursing, Bioethics, Cognitive Science, Psychology, History, Organizational Behavior, and Design and Innovation. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and MD-PhD (Psychology) from The Johns Hopkins University and joined the faculty. In 1986 he moved to Case to create the University Alzheimer Center. In 1999 he cofounded The Intergenerational School, a public multiage community school. His fields of endeavor are cognitive/brain health, integrated health care, intergenerational

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learning, interprofessional practice, deep bioethics, organizational aesthetics, narrative epistemology, transmedia performance arts, and the big history of civilization. MORE SUBJECTIVE Before the celebration of life that created me was the chaos and hope of post–World War II London and the new nuclear age. As a relatively privileged, white male, Anglo-Saxon, nominally Protestant baby born to a medical officer and nurse educator stationed at the War Office, I am only very partly, but meaningfully responsible for the Great Acceleration of human population and resultant impact on the planet. Hence I contributed to, in however small a way, the emergence of the so-called Anthropocene. As a cognitive scientist whose graduate studies focused on interhemispheric differences in processing words and images (Whitehouse 1981), I came to see different forms of attention as key to wisdom. As a neuroscientist and expert on brain structures affected in dementia, I came to see the limitations of reductionistic science and, for that matter, domain-specific narrow expertise (Whitehouse 2014). As a geriatric neurologist I came to be critical of overmedicalization (Whitehouse and George 2008). I have seen the dementia field capture brain aging and hold it tight in the grasp of scientism and neoliberalism (George and Whitehouse 2021). As a bioethicist inspired to think like a mountain by Aldo Leopold and Arne Naess, I see metaphors as key to co-creating healthier stories. I see mainstream bioethics narrow in its moral scope as it is co-opted by biomedicine and its material progress agenda (Whitehouse 2003). As a father and grandfather, I am joyful and worried. As a performance artist whose character Sylvanus the Tree Doctor is named for the Roman god of forests and their boundaries, I ask what humans can learn about health from trees and forests (Whitehouse 2021). As a semiotic animal, I see words as necessary, but limited, communicative vehicles demanding constant reevaluation, some dying, and some being born. Rich and deeply connected words like transdisciplinarity, interprofessional, and intergenerativity guide me in the creation of new stories. As a storyteller, I see new literary genres emerging that may guide our social transformation, for example apocalyptic science fiction and apocalyptic magical realism. As an emerging activist, I need activation and organizing. As an asymptotic postmodernist (getting closer and closer but never touching some state beyond modernity), I see cosmodernity as a problematic label because it includes in the term the baggage of the word modernity. Yet it does signal the need for more cosmically driven, enlivened, and re-enchanted civilizations. As a Homo sapiens, I wonder what the entry in the Encyclopedia of the Universe will say about our species’ claim that being

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sentient and self-reflexive provides advantage to life. As a life-long learner, I see learning as passionate, purposeful, and spiritual. As a transcendent spiritual entity, I see new concepts of individual and collective humanity emerging that might permit us to survive our own self-created sixth extinction. As a soon to be biological dead living creature, I wonder about legacy through narrative and hope for the return to Earth through natural burial without casket or chemicals (ideally under a tree). As I write these characterizations of the field of my life as more (or less) objective and subjective, I find them inadequate and confusing to myself. As I write this chapter, I am also in parallel filling out my new university Faculty Information System Annual Review Form and listening to music on a break from an online Ecoversities conference, organized by a group of hundreds of mostly young and diverse people. The sessions featured leaders from around the world, including those from Indigenous and multilingual communities committed to self and social transformation in universities and beyond. Let’s not call them conversations about higher education but about deeper education. I feel the path dependencies of my own university as it forces me into measurable boxes and defines success by the categories they provide. The unease I feel is the tension between the apparent liberation of being tenured and the pull of accountability. How do I balance being responsible to myself, the planet, or to my employer from which I feel significant alienation? In this space and time, I feel the complexity of the relationships between the objective and subjective coming to (my) life. FIELD OF CULTURE—“COSMODERNITY” (FURTHER EXPLORING SPACETIME) For the past several decades modernity has been stuck in transition—a state called ambiguously and controversially postmodernism. Modernism itself is a difficult term to grasp but encompasses elements of industrialization and technoscience as well as degrees of freedom in literature to experiment with new forms like the novel itself. Modernity is also associated with troubling concepts such as coloniality, industrialization, capitalism, injustice, and globalization. Modernism also represents an extension of the Western Enlightenment view that human rationality is the key to being human and is the origin of human exceptionalism that allowed us to believe that we could transcend our animal nature and dominate, rather than participate in, planetary systems. Culture was king and nature but a servant. Postmodernism emerged as an unsettled feeling that all was not right with modernity. Material progress had been made to incredible extents, but it had not advanced human happiness, as it divided humans into haves and

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have-nots. But even the rich were unfulfilled. Life appeared complex and fluid beyond our current ways of understanding. Exploration into new worlds of thought was expanded in a quest for the resolution of this unease. The World Wars (and as I write the war in Ukraine) challenged the idea that the modern human had somehow moved beyond savagery. However, postmodernism lost its force as a cultural movement as unskeptical technoscience and increasingly unregulated capitalism advanced to capture our minds and limit our ideas about the nature of wealth and health in aging. What did “post” mean? Narrow views of mind-sapping but allegedly productive work, driven by consumption and capitalism came to colonize our lives. We became even more materialistic and addicted to fossil fuels. All the consumer goods provided to us only increased damage to our planetary home. We did not truly free those in slavery even as we increased our own enslavement by destructive models of progress. Democracy, our true hope for liberation, itself became captured by the neoliberal juggernaut. And key to both democracy and capitalism, the appreciation of imposing limits to balance power, seemed lost. Alternative concepts and terms for the new form of civilization exist to consider. Thomas Berry, the cultural historian who directed the American Teilhard Association for decades, said that our Great Work was to create a New Story as the basis for an Ecozoic Era characterized by deeper relationships with each other and nature (Tucker, Grim, and Angyal 2019). He built on the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s ideas of collective spiritual development. This movement remained embedded in a broad Catholic and ecumenical religious framework as it linked itself to the Big History project of bringing the full scope of the journey of the universe into human consciousness. Many of these different concepts of the future of civilization do embrace the point of this paper, that is, the need for a return to ideas of the cosmic. We will hold the tensions among past, present, and future, and between science and spirituality, and use the broad term cosmodernism (without fear quotes). Two books—by Basarab Nicolescu and Cristian Moraru—advanced the understanding of this concept of cosmodernity as seeking to bring back the big-picture cosmic context to deepen the lives of modern humans. Modern physics, which did much to dissolve the clear separations between space and time, added confusing complexity in its discovery of dark energy and matter. Its quest for the Theory of Everything and Grand Unified Theories seemed to falter. Nicolescu, a theoretical physicist, promoted the idea of the transdisciplinary (Nicolescu 2008, 2014) and founded the International Center for Research on Transdisciplinarity (CIRET). He explored concepts and methodologies for understanding complexity and levels of reality. In looking at fields collectively, he exposed hidden, ineffable, transcendent, and

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spiritual dimensions. He creatively spanned boundaries in which space and time became entangled. The disciplines of modernity are losing their power in universities and elsewhere; they seem more self-serving than society-serving. It is time to go not only “between” as in interdisciplinary but “beyond” as in “trans.” So, too, cosmodernity challenges the most colonizing modern frame of mind of all, the unholy alliance between neoliberal econopolitics and the dominant quasi-religion, scientism. Our faith that individuals would be served by and would in turn serve market forces and believe in the apparently limitless and thus often false hopes of technoscience crumbled. Moderns gained their possessions (or perhaps better said their possessions owned them) but lost their opportunity for liberation and happiness. Cosmodernity emerges for this author from the convergence of past forms of old knowledge and present cultural transitions. Indigeneity is being reborn as we see the cosmologies of native peoples deeply informing our hollowed-out conceptions of nature. Trees, we relearned, could think, communicate, and learn (Kimmerer 2021; Kohn 2013). We looked back even to the beginning Big Bang through the perspectives of what we came to call Big History and saw something humbling about our origins. We are an animal species that learned well but not well enough to avoid the hubris of its own self-declared exceptionalism. We out-competed everything else for biomass (except for bacteria, viruses, and perhaps insects) but also for ecological irresponsibility. This self-pride and the idea of limitless growth doomed the modern experiment. We lost the essential wisdom that had gained over millennia that there are forces that should and will eventually constrain our human greed. Our own life spans and planetary boundaries limit us in fundamental ways, even as they create possibilities for aging wisely. Perhaps cosmodernity will allow us all to see ourselves as indigenous to our origins and our planet as we create more just and sustainable civilizations. Modernity had given us globalization with all its false promises for accelerated development spreading from Global North to Global South. Globalization was the work of humans; planetary imagination is the work of humans in nature at an even more expansive spacetime scale. Cosmodernity aligns with the planetary. Global economic development produced the Great Acceleration. Now, however, some recognize that there are many barriers to implementing the global vision of ever-growing economic development, including the capacity of our planet to support such rapacious growth. Cosmodernity originated with transdisciplinary Earth Systems Science as such a manifestation in science. Perhaps the humanities have been more challenged to enter the transdisciplinary world. The very term humanities points to human exceptionalism. Certainly the humanities include some self-criticism and reflection as this book itself demonstrates, but one can argue that the mainstream sees history, culture, and the arts through perspectives that do

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not fully embrace the embeddedness of humans as a part of nature. Do we deserve the attention that the humanities give us largely because we invented the written word? Take history, for example. The fields of historiography and meta-history tell us that historical ideas and practices are dependent on cultural context and that different conceptions of historical studies have existed through time. The field of Big History, which is treated with some suspicion by mainstream historians, tries to provide us a perspective on the entire 14 billion years of the history of the universe. On a planetary scale, it integrates the geologic, ecologic, and anthropologic into a more cosmic view of deep time. Of course, our human existence is but a minuscule entry on the latter parts of that vast timeline. Big History tells us that our human narrative is not a story of great men, nor the story of people in general, but the story of how human civilization emerged in relationship to the environment. Environmental history within the mainstream did emerge as a subfield but with a rather limited perspective (Chakrabarty 2021). Big History teaches that human civilization depends on how we organize to learn together. Through history how we learn to adapt to climate change is key to flourishing or not. The relationships between human beings and trees and forests are one illustration of how human communities and civilizations have related to nature through time (Harrison 1992). At some point we descended from trees and became bipedal. The savannas (fields of a sort) became our home and eventually we learned to not only hunt and gather but to farm. With agriculture, human social forms were transformed as population growth and ecological impact accelerated. Trees fueled our fires and became lumber to build our cities, masts, and sails to power our ships, and paper to disseminate our knowledge. We also cleared forests on enormous scales to support agriculture. We became civilized, meaning city dwellers, as the rate of urbanization accelerated dramatically. Cities became the source of much cultural invention but also of environmental degradation. Although always present, nature seemed lost in the maze of the built environment. If we ask how we are doing today relating to trees and forests as they are cut down, burned, and destroyed, we can ask how future big historians will write (if they exist) about the health of our relationships with forests today (Chakrabarty 2021). Even as we consider the written word as what defines the history of Homo sapiens, we should also consider prehistory, as Big History itself does. What forms of thought are possible within an oral tradition (Lundwall 2015)? Before we had the written word and books to transmit our knowledge through time, what creative power did oral storytelling have in community? How did oral cosmologies evolve that taught different lessons than the ones we learn today in school about the power of nature and the nature of human relationships with Mother Earth? Going back even before language, if we consider humans as semiotic animals, what does that tell us about our very nature as

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communicative creatures that we have forgotten? Gesture and mimesis were and still are powerful forms of communication that we too often forget when we consider ourselves only as spoken or written words storytellers. In general, in a brain-dominated modern culture, we forget that communication and memory involve deep somatic forms. In addition to Basarab Nicolescu’s book From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture and Spirituality (Nicolescu 2014), Christian Moraru’s book entitled Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (Moraru 2011) explores the emergence of cosmodernism. Using American literature as his textual corpus, Moraru describes the evolution of ecological frameworks from ego-logical frameworks. His complex book considers topics such as onomastics, metabolics, and metamorphics as he explores the changes in words and embodied cognition in contemporary American literature. He demonstrates how literature moves us from the modern imperative through the cosmodern turn to cosmodernism itself. What words, metaphors, and genres of narrative are needed and what cosmologies do we need to unfold to tell stories of radical change (Bateson 2010)? How do we see ourselves as semiotic animals, not just storytelling humans, in ways that will allow changing modernity itself (Greenblatt 2011; Kohn 2013)? What can we understand about our human powers to appreciate the world around us and yet also the limitations in our abilities? Next, we will turn to the brain and mental life and its limits. THE FIELD OF BRAIN HEALTH: ALZHEIMER’S AND DEMENTIA (EXPLORING ARTSCIENCE) The field of dementia and brain health claims to be a manifestation of the success of modern science and contemporary capitalism, but actually represents much of the worst of both (Whitehouse and George 2008; George and Whitehouse 2021). It is the epitome of our addiction to false hope. Driven by faith in progress and profit, it is based on shaky assumptions and unrealistic expectations supported by individual and institutional corruption. Changing the concepts surrounding dementia and brain health offers a potential lever to shift dramatically the way we think about the brain, aging, health, and our societies. The dementia field is based on the idea that Alzheimer’s is a single disease that is clearly different from aging. The faith that it (actually they) can be cured by drugs that will in turn save our health care system from bankruptcy and improve quality of life of all of us is a field-serving fantasy (Whitehouse and George 2008). We suffer from a form of cultural dementia about brain aging with a touch of psychosis. Our thinking and values are distorted and out of touch with reality that we have many more

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serious age-related health challenges that actually have tractable solutions, like hydration- and nutrition-related diseases. We forget lessons from the past, do not plan realistically for the future, and meanwhile exhibit behaviors that lead to poor function in daily life for all of us, like drinking/water availability, eating/food supply, waste disposal, etc. This cultural dementia not only limits our thinking about clinical dementia but life in general (George and Whitehouse 2021). Alzheimer’s is a syndrome that is related to aging. It is heterogenous with multiple causes including environmental factors. Drugs to treat dementia directly have and will likely continue to be ineffective in improving quality of life or saving money (indirect effects on cognitive decline like antihypertensives and statins do provide value). Public health measures, like getting toxins out of the water and air, have been demonstrated to be effective and could increasingly become more so with appropriate investment. Lay advocacy organizations, drug companies, and coopted experts overpromise and only deliver for themselves, not patients and society. Efforts to reimagine dementia using the power of the arts are emerging. Market forces captured both art and science as they generated a few wealthy practitioners and less positive impact on society at large. In times past, art was more intimately related to community and culture change. Artists, and art itself, may have lost energy to challenge power (Gablik 2004). Driven by their bottom lines, galleries and museums control which artists get the privilege and reward of their creations being displayed. Art must play its role in challenging modern culture and reenchanting itself with a sense of revolutionary purpose (Gablik 1991). Science, too, has focused on individual accomplishment; the quest for and recognition of individual Nobel prizes has distorted science, even in the Alzheimer’s field. Scientists often argue for science for science’s sake, just as some artists say the same for the intrinsic value of art for art’s sake. Perhaps dementia will be a place where more cooperative science really emerges and artists regain their voice in challenging the view that dementia should just be framed as a biological problem to be fixed to someone’s great fame and fortune. Besides serving as a case study for needing to shift our thinking about the brain and health, can our understanding of cognitive mechanisms and brain function help us understand how we as a species came to such a crisis point in our history? Are there biological substrates for modes of thought, even wisdom? My own graduate work focused on interhemispheric differences in processing words and images and how attentional mechanisms operate in the brain (Whitehouse 1981). Iain McGilchrist (2021) has written extensively about how the left and right hemispheres communicate with and look at the world differently. Much of the knowledge has been gained by studying

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patients in whom the major pathway connecting the two hemispheres (corpus callosum) has been surgically cut to prevent the spread of epileptic seizures along those fiber tracts (so-called split-brain patients). The left and right sides of the visual fields in both eyes send information exclusively to one or the other hemisphere. Most fundamentally, McGilchrist believes that the differences between the two hemispheres relate to how we pay attention. The left hemisphere (in most people; sometimes the right) controls language output and thus tends to dominate discourse in the life space. It pays attention to the task-oriented, linear, and logical operations, for example, the bird pecking for seed or bureaucrat in a cubical working on a spreadsheet. The right hemisphere scans the world more broadly, looking for the context of the behavior, for example, perhaps watching for a cat potentially stalking the bird or the worker reflecting on the family photo on his/her desk and wondering about the purpose of his/her endeavors. According to McGilchrist, the right hemisphere is more connected to the body and embraces more humility in relating to the world. It is less self-centered. Its involvement in language processing includes the use of metaphors and emotional coloration of discourse. As the reader can perhaps discern McGilchrist believes that left hemisphere domination is destroying our world. The broader, more embodied, and emotionally engaged processing of the right hemisphere is more likely to lead us into cosmodernity. But whichever hemisphere we are considering, we change our brains/minds through learning—to which we now turn as our next field of endeavor critical to aging and the environment. THE FIELD OF LEARNING—INTERGENERATIONAL (EXPLORING NATURECULTURE) We started this chapter sharing parallels between current conceptions of individual human aging in personal time and of the evolution of human species in geological time. Both phenomena ask us what is unique to our lives as they approach the end and our species as threatened by extinction. What have we accomplished as persons and a people? What has been our unique contribution to life? Arguably it is something to do with intentional learning. All living creatures have biological purpose: to stay alive and promote more life. We have cultural intentions when we become committed to ideas perhaps more profound than mere survival and genetic proliferation (Sherrell 2021). As a species we are great pattern recognizers and pattern designers. Our abilities to see interrelationships, whether in science, art, or life, and to imagine futures are our strengths. Humans are also designers (Caplan 2005). Yet like so many sources of potentially radical creativity, the field of design has

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been captured by instrumental, profit-seeking technoscience. It is time to recognize our interdependence in the making of new worlds and release design energies, especially of the feminine variety, to produce more convivial and yet pluriversal futures based on care (Escobar 2018). We accomplish our patterning work through communication, not just oral or written narrative products but through embodied semiotics. Humans are constantly developing new narrative forms that are essential to cultural transformation A new subgenre of science fiction is focusing on the challenges of the climate crisis (CliFi). Inspired by a wave of pioneering feminist science-fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin) we are now seeing explorations of subjects like the power of financing (Robinson 2020) and the difficulties of geoengineering (Stephenson 2021). Can this new genre help us stretch our minds and spirits into new thinking about time and space yet to be? How do the technologies of gaming, virtual reality, social media, and transmedia (elements of the same story distributed across different media) enhance our story-telling into the future? Can they be rescued from neoliberal profiteering? Will we use these new narrative forms to deepen learning rather than distract us from the challenges ahead? Communication and enhanced learning are key to creating knowledge among current and future generations. Deeper dialogic discourses that revisit old patterns and inspires new ones are essential. As earlier human civilizations faced climate change, learning how to adapt and become more resilient were key survival traits. Eventually those who were better learners contributed to our success as a species, but we also got ahead of ourselves and felt ourselves above other creatures and somehow immune to the laws of nature. We lost the essential humility at the foundation of wisdom. Learning limits is key. Today we have created the climate crisis and we need to enhance our collective wisdom by revisiting humility, enhancing imagination, and renaturalizing ourselves as living creatures. Decoloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 2018) is a major force for reimagining through not only the decolonization of Indigenous lands but also the rethinking of basic concepts we use every day, the cultural waters that we inhabit but take for granted. Relearning and unlearning become more critical than new data for data’s sake. Modernity is critically linked to colonization of land and colonial influences on our minds. Education is key to birthing cosmodernity. But we must also remember that education was a key to the coloniality of modernism, as in the attempts to eradicate Indigenous culture in residential schools. Innovation in lifelong learning is essential for human survival and flourishing. We need to return to the value of intergenerational learning where the diversity of life experiences and the lessons at different stages of life contribute to opportunities for deeper learning and collective wisdom. Intergenerational relationships have been a key to our survival from the very

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beginning as hunter gatherers and farmers, but they have been submerged in the complexities of social relationships in modern life. Time to bring them back into the foreground, particularly in learning environments. Examples of the power of multiage education are three public intergenerational schools in Cleveland that include learners from childhood to elderhood (Whitehouse et al. 2014). In 2000 we created the first public intergenerational community school to celebrate aging and diversity in order to create rich experiential, intergenerative learning opportunities for all participants. Intergenerative, a new word we have coined, goes beyond intergenerational to include other connecting concepts like international, interdisciplinary, and interprofessional (Whitehouse 2013). The three community schools remain committed to the dual aspects of their mission statement: lifelong learning and spirited citizenship. One consistent programmatic focus was building relationships through sharing stories. The signature program was originally called Reading Mentors, until we realized that the term Learning Partners better captured the reciprocity. Literacy (and numeracy) is the foundation to provide our learners of all ages confidence to interact with the world at large. From its beginning, the school featured experiences in nature, such as intergenerational gardening and field trips, to foster a sense of engagement with nature. We have also developed programs to encourage global intergenerational learning through Intergenerational Schools International (now InterHub). One of the programs that has inspired our intergenerational work in Cleveland is the Legacy Project based near Toronto, Canada. Their 7-Generation work features a concept of Village Learning through Elders-in-Residence. They feature relationship-based, experiential programming that is potentially broadly applicable as it uses existing infrastructure found in every neighborhood. They also feature trees and associated metaphors in their work. The need to transform education goes beyond elementary school into all forms of so-called higher education. Universities are struggling with their role in society and a variety of alternative forms are emerging (Ford 2002; Staley 2019). Universities are organized around departmental structures and academic disciplines. It is time for universities to address the challenges more seriously that we face as a species, including the climate crisis and social injustice. Universities need to stop being part of the neoliberal world of fostering haves and have-nots and more directly address the wicked problems of today and tomorrow. One mechanism is to break down the barriers between disciplines and focus on the development of transdisciplinary approaches which celebrate complexity, encourage different perspectives, and recognize the mysteries and wonders of life. We need to recognize what we do not know and challenge ourselves to be critical of what we think we do know. The PhD, named after a “love of wisdom,” is in fact most often the epitome of narrow

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specialization. Breadth and depth are alternative geological metaphors for the nature of scholarship that may more wisely address wicked systems-level challenges. It is time to generate new form of scholarship (transdisciplinary) that blend and enrich disciplinary efforts to frame and address the complex challenges we face. But in addition to learning new cognitive skills on the way to enhance intelligence, we need to appreciate that passions and emotions also undergird wisdom. To accomplish this balance, we must enhance attention to values and ethics; when rationality falters, the gut/heart leads. We need deeper bioethics (Whitehouse 2018). This term was inspired by the Deep Ecology of Arne Naess and emerged from conversation with my mentor in bioethics, Van Rensselaer Potter, who invented the term bioethics in 1970. He also developed the concept of a global bioethics and a network of kindred spirits to explore this concept. Global meant bioethics that was international (and planetary) but also intellectually broad. Deep bioethics added to the perspective of global the spiritual and aesthetic aspects of ethics that emerge from connections to nature. Mainstream bioethics is too narrowly focused on principles, like autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence. Another colleague, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, developed a concept that moves us beyond a focus on individual autonomy to collective anthroponomy, meaning a kind of autonomy-in-relationship, recognizing current and historical injustices in our relationships (Bendik-Keymer 2020). He, as many others, explores how coloniality has led us down a destructive path degrading the humanity of all involved. Indigenous belief systems, particularly those focusing on relationships to land, deserve to be honored today, as we recognize the past disgraces of settler colonialism. Indigenous belief systems offer us a deeper understanding of how humans should relate to the natural environment and to each other across time and space. In the explorations of new (and rediscovery of old) ways of thinking about the nature of human beings, we need to find new hope. This new hope is not the false hope of finding individual leaders who will rescue us using new technologies but rather a collective hope that supports action. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up, as David Orr has said (Orr 2010). And hope will come in part from learning to govern ourselves and organize our economics in right relationships to other living creatures and the planet itself (Jennings 2016). Understanding and teaching how political and economic power operates in human societies is key to a more hopeful future. Power manifests in our lives in different ways and like other concepts in this paper is subject to reimagining (Heinberg 2021). Are we addicted to power in unhealthy ways? What about the importance of distributed horizonal power, not just top-down vertical influence? Energy as a powerful metaphor can inform our understanding of how modernity emerged (Daggett 2019). Isaac Newton resisted

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its use as a basis for his new physics. The Victorians with their focus on coal and steam promoted energy as an influential concept as it became associated with capitalist control of labor. Energy production had been closely linked to work, as it had been to slavery. Energy can also be used in play often with greater joy that in work. Humans are naturally playful, especially as children, but such play can and should continue throughout the life course. It is a source of our creativity. Energy can mean spiritual energy—something that can be gained as we age, even if our bodies lose abilities to do certain work. In fact, finding the energy is a concept clearly relevant to individuals living into elderhood. Older people who remain energetically engaged have power in the world both as individuals and nodes in relational networks built over time through a lifetime of experiences that can be shared intergenerationally. Both the words power and energy have histories that can inform their future use in fueling transformation. Perhaps sharing power horizontally and rethinking energy in more than physical and economic terms might lead to focusing less on productive work and more on creative play and pleasure in society. Perhaps we can rethink the goals of development efforts as not just economic but psychological, social, and spiritual. CONCLUSION The imbroglio of current human existence demands radical shifts in thinking, valuing, and behaving. Innovation at and in the boundaries of ideas of separation between human culture and nature, values and thinking, and science and art is driving the creative integration of these fields of human imagination. We are looking for unity in diversity. Reimagining aging can contribute to this transformation; seeing the bigger picture brings us to think on planetary scales with different and longer conceptions of time. The necessary new cosmologies grounded on older Indigenous ideas and illuminated by the lessons of modernity, especially from fields like theoretical physics, new biological relativism, neural systems, multispecies anthropology, earth sciences, and ecological humanities, may allow learning experiences to emerge in new organizational forms and birth social orders responsive to the new geological epoch. The conversation between the objective/subjective self and the objective/subjective social context are allowing new conceptions of individual humans and humanity to emerge. Ideas and ethics emerging from our lives over extended time and beyond our own mortality will become a playing field for new imaginaries. The stakes are high. If we learn well, transformations of cosmic proportions might emerge from our current chaos and produce

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happier futures. If we do not wise-up, then our legacy individually and as a species will be bleak. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Danny George, Annette Leibing, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Rick Moody, Stephen Katz, Brian and Susan Buppa for not only commenting on the paper but their personal and professional inspiration. As I received this helpful feedback I realized there are different conceptions of some of the “isms” I discuss, especially postmodernism and neoliberalism, and that there are other “isms” like posthumanism and postsecularism that could have been considered. However, my basic point remains that we are moving from “post” into something else which I believe can be captured by the emergent, but tension-producing, concept of “cosmodernity.” The prefix “cosmos” should promote pluriversal approaches and also provoke mystery; both desirable in my view. Maintaining the coloniality-producing component of the term, that is, “modernism,” recognizes its saliency in our current times and hopefully when modified with the cosmic suggests a warning that radical change is necessary. I would like to also express gratitude to Case Western Reserve University, University of Toronto, and the Shigeo and Megumi Takayama Foundation for their decades of support. REFERENCES Bateson, Mary. 2010. Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom. New York: Knopf. Bendel, Jem, and Rupert Read. 2021. Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bendik, Keymer J. 2020. Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene: On Decoloniality. New York: Routledge. Biello, David. 2016. The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age. New York: Scribner. Caplan, Ralph. 2005. By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons. 2nd ed. New York: Fairchild Publications. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daggett New, Cara. 2019. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press. Davies, Jeremy. 2016. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press.

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Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Ford, Marcus Peter. 2002. Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University. Westport: Praeger. Gablik, Suzi.1991. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames & Hudson. ———. 2004. How Modernism Failed. New York: Thames & Hudson. George, Daniel, and Peter J. Whitehouse. 2021. American Dementia: Brain Health in an Unhealthy Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gergen, Kenneth J. 2009. Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2011. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton. Harrison, Robert. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hales, N. Katherine. 1984. The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Heinberg Richard. 2021. Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Hunarī, Morteza, and Thomas Boleyn. 1999. Health Ecology: Health, Culture, and Human-Environment Interaction. London: Routledge. Jennings, Bruce. 2016. Ecological Governance: Toward a New Social Contract with the Earth. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. Kimmerer, Robin W. 2021. Old Growth: The Best Writing about Trees from Orion. Great Barrington: Orion Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lent, Jeremy. 2017. The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. Amherst: Prometheus Books. ———. 2021. The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Letiche, Hugo K., Michael Lissack, and Ron Schultz. 2011. Coherence in the Midst of Complexity: Advances in Social Complexity Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lundwall, John K. J. 2015. Mythos and Cosmos: Mind and Meaning in the Oral Age. Pleasant Grove: C&L Press. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. McGilchrist, Iain. 2021. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspective Press. Moraru, Christian. 2011. Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McKibben, Bill. 2010. Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books.

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Nail, Thomas. 2021. Theory of the Earth. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nicolescu, Basarab. 2008. Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice. Cresskill: Hampton Press. ———. 2014. From Modernity to Cosmodernity; Science, Culture, and Spirituality. New York: SUNY Press. Noble, Denis. 2017. Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orr, David W. 2010. Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr. Washington: Island Press. Potter, Van Rensselaer. 1971. Bioethics: Bridge to the Future. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Robinson, Kim S. 2020. The Ministry of the Future. New York: Orbit Books. Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Servigne, Pablo, Raphaël Stevens, Gauthier Chapelle, and Geoffrey Samuel. 2020. Another End of the World Is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It). Medford: Polity Press. Sherrell, Daniel. 2021. Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. London: Penguin. Staley, David J. 2019. Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stephenson, Neal. 2021. Termination Shock. New York: William Morrow. Topa, Wahinkpe (Four Arrows), and Narváez, Darcia. 2022. Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Tucker, Mary, John Grim, and Andrew Angyal. 2019. Thomas Berry: A Biography. New York: Columbia Press. Whitehouse, Peter J. 1981. “Imagery and Verbal Encoding in Left and Right Hemisphere Damaged Patients.” Brain and Language 14, no. 2 (November): 315–332. ———. 2003. “The Rebirth of Bioethics: Extending the Original Formulations of Van Rensselaer Potter.” Faculty Scholarship 52. https:​//​commons​.case​.edu​/ facultyworks​/52. ———. 2013. “Interwell: An Integrated School-Based Primary Care Model.” London Journal of Primary Care 5, no. 2: 83–87. ———. 2014. “The End of Alzheimer’s Disease—from Biochemical Pharmacology to Ecopsychosociology: A Personal Perspective.” Biochemical Pharmacology 88, no. 4 (April): 677–681. ———. 2018. “Aging in the Anthropocene.” In Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, edited by Dominick A. Dellasala and Michael I. Goldstein. Vol. 4. 137–146 Elsevier. ———. 2021.“Fifty Years of Dementia: A Transdisciplinary and Intergenerative Lifelong Learning Adventure in the Field.” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 83, no. 2: 487–490.

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Whitehouse, Peter J., and Daniel George. 2008. The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Whitehouse, Peter J., Kathy Sykes, and Daniel R. George. 2014. “Ecological Change and Aging: A Need to Think Deeply and Act Quickly.” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 80, no. 1 (December): 3–9.

Index

Ahmad, Omair, 23 Ammons, A. R.: Garbage, 83 Aristotle, 164, 170, 176; Poetics, 164 Ashby, Hal, 98n5; Harold and Maude (film), 13, 87–98 Becker, Ernest, 189; The Denial of Death, 188 Besant, Walter: The Inner House, 13, 119, 121–23 Bilodeau, Chantal, 11, 158, 164, 179 Boyle, T. C.: A Friend of the Earth, 10 Brecht, Bertolt, 165–66, 173, 177 Butler, Robert N., 109, 176 Cauuet, Paul: Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée, 12, 42, 49–54. See also Lupano, Wilfrid CCTA. See Climate Change Theatre Action Churchill, Caryl: Escaped Alone, 14, 146, 153–55, 163, 174–79 Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), 11, 158 Cole, Lucinda, 57, 60, 69 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 135 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 42–43, 45–46, 49 Cowper, William, 139

Crozier, Lorna, 13, 73–76; “Glass Vase, White Table,” 80–81; “God of Astonishment,” 81–82; God of Shadows, 13, 76, 83; “God of the Disregarded,” 79–80; The House the Spirit Builds, 13, 76, 83; “The Least of Things,” 82; “Some Morning God,” 77, 78–79; What the Soul Doesn’t Want, 13, 76, 83; “When the Bones Get Cold,” 77–78 Dark (Netflix), 13, 101–13 De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 211 Derrida, Jacques, 43 Descartes, René, 208 Drabble, Margaret: The Dark Flood Rises, 4 Espaillat, Rhina P., 134–35; “The Prodigal Son Goes Over Notes for His Memoirs,” 141; Where Horizons Go, 140 Freneau, Philip: “The Dying Indian,” 142n5 Ghosh, Amitav: Gun Island, 160n7; The Nutmeg’s Curse, 26 225

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Index

Godber, John: Crown Prince, 14, 146, 155–58, 159 Guerra, Ciro: El Abrazo de la Serpiente, 54 Hall, Jordan: Kayak, 14, 163, 166–70 Hardy, Thomas, 30 Hearne, Samuel: A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson Bay to the Northern Ocean, 139, 142n4 Heidegger, Martin, 43 Higgins, Colin, 98nn3–5; Harold and Maude (book), 13, 87–98 Hollingsworth, Cristopher, 60, 61, 62 Holum, Solveig: 1 Beach Road, 14, 146, 151–53, 155, 157 Husserl, Edmund, 43 Kafka, Franz: The Metamorphosis, 60–­61 Karanja, MaryAnn: “Birthday Suit,” 14, 146, 158 Kristeva, Julia, 13, 59, 73, 75 Lacan, Jacques, 75 Latour, Bruno, 9, 207 Leopold, Aldo, 209 Lupano, Wilfrid: Les Vieux Fourneaux: L’Oreille Bouchée, 12, 42, 49–54. See also Cauuet, Paul Maathai, Wangari, 158 Malthus, Thomas, 121, 147, 160n5; Essay on the Principle of Population, 121 Marcuse, Herbert, 99n9; OneDimensional Man, 95 Mazur, Gail, 134–35; Land’s End, 140; “Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth’s,” 140–41 McEwan, Ian: Solar, 10 McKay, Adam: Don’t Look Up, 195n2 Melville, Herman: Moby Dick, 153 Mill, John Stuart, 147 Milne, A. A.: Winnie-the-Pooh, 180n2

Morris, William: News from Nowhere, 13, 119, 124–31 Naess, Arne, 209, 219 Naipaul, V. S., 23–38; A Bend in the River, 23; The Enigma of Arrival, 12, 24–25, 28–33, 37–38; Finding the Centre, 24; Guerrillas, 23; Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion, 24; A Way in the World, 12, 24–25, 28, 30, 33–38 Nolan, Yvette: The Unplugging, 14, 163, 170–74, 180n3 Oglesby, Tamsin: Really Old, Like Forty Five, 14, 146, 149–51, 153, 159 Parker, Alan: The Wall, 76 Patchett, Ann: State of Wonder, 12, 42, 45–49, 52–54 Potter, Van Rensselaer, 206, 219 Rawls, John, 147 RedCape Theatre, 14, 146, 151, 160n6 Rhys, Jean, 57–59, 65; “From a French Prison,” 59, 60–61, 64, 69; “The Insect World,” 59, 61–62, 64, 69; “Let Them Call It Jazz,” 67, 69; “Sleep It Off, Lady,” 12, 59, 65–70; “A Solid House,” 59, 62–64, 66, 69; Tigers Are Better-Looking, 12; Voyage in the Dark, 60 Sherrell, Daniel, 216; Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, 203 Sontag, Susan, 78 Stranger Things, 101, 112 Swift, Jonathan: A Modest Proposal, 150 Tennyson, Alfred, 37 Wallis, Velma: Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival, 170

Index

Wells, H. G., 106 Whitman, Walt: “This Compost,” 83 Wordsworth, William, 14, 134, 135; “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” 136, 138–39; “The Female Vagrant,” 136; “Lines

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Written in Early Spring,” 135; Lyrical Ballads, 135; “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” 136, 137–38; “The Prelude,” 140–41; “Resolution and Independence,” 136–37

About the Editors and Contributors

Nassim W. Balestrini is full professor of American studies and intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, where she also serves as director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Beforehand, she taught at the universities of Mainz, Paderborn, and Regensburg (Germany), and at the University of California, Davis. She has published monographs on Vladimir Nabokov and on opera adaptations of nineteenth-century American fiction, essays on hip-hop life writing and rap poetry (e.g., in Popular Music and Society and in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies), on intermediality theory and practice (e.g., a special issue on “Depicting Destitution Across Media” for the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings), on American poetry, fiction, and drama, especially on climate change theater. She has edited collections on Adaptation and American Studies (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011) and on Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2018, with Ina Bergmann). Her current research focuses on contemporary poetry and on climate change theater. Albert Banerjee is the NBHRF research chair in community health and aging and assistant professor of gerontology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada. His research focuses on the existential assumptions that have shaped the Western approach to healthy living. With the aim of contributing to a more compassionate, equitable, and sustainable society, his current research explores alternatives to the social imaginary of mastery. He is investigating, on the one hand, the logic of care and its application to nursing homes and, on the other hand, contemplative traditions and the unique relationships they enable to both living and dying. Simon Dickel is professor of gender and diversity studies at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. He is the author of the books Embodying Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Narratives of Disability, Race, and Sexuality (2022) and Black Gay: The Harlem Renaissance, the 229

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About the Editors and Contributors

Protest Era, and Constructions of Black Gay Identity in the 1980s and 90s (2011). Among his coedited books are Alle Uns: Differenz, Identität, Repräsentation (2022) and Queer Cinema (2018). Katrina Dunn is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film, and Media, where she teaches acting, directing, and theatre studies. Her scholarly chapters and articles explore the spatial manifestations of theatre, as well as ecocritical theatre, and have been published in several edited collections, as well as national and international journals. In 2021, her dissertation, Empty House: Real Estate and Theatricality in Vancouver’s Downtown, co-won the Canadian Studies Network’s Best PhD Dissertation Prize. In 2022 her chapter proposing a posthuman rethinking of mimesis, “Coproducing Mimesis,” won CATR’s Richard Plant Award for the best long form article. She has twice won the Robert G. Lawrence Prize for an emerging scholar. Katrina’s long career as a stage director and producer has had considerable impact on the performing arts on Canada’s West Coast and has been recognized with numerous awards. Jade E. French is an early career researcher affiliated with Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Her work explores the poetics of aging in modernist texts, with a specific focus on the late works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes. She has seen work published to date in Women: A Cultural Review, Feminist Modernist Studies and The Times Literary Supplement. She also runs the curatorial project Decorating Dissidence, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic, and political qualities of craft from modernism to contemporary. Her next project will examine effects of fear in post-war literary representations of aging, care, and care homes. Michaela Schrage-Früh is a lecturer of German at the University of Galway, Ireland. She is the author of Emerging Identities: Myth, Nation and Gender in the Poetry of Eavan Boland, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Medhbh McGuckian (WVT, 2004) and Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She has published widely on literary and cultural representations of gender and aging and is coeditor of five edited collections on the theme, most recently Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2022) and Ageing Masculinities in Contemporary European and Anglophone Cinema (Routledge, 2023). In 2015 she cofounded the Women and Ageing Research Network (WARN). She was part of the Irish research team of the ERC-funded project “Mascage: Ageing Masculinities in European Literatures and Cinemas” (2019–2022) and Principal Investigator of the IRC-funded project “Restorying Ageing: Older Women and Life Writing” (2021–2022).

About the Editors and Contributors

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Silvia Gerlsbeck is a lecturer and research associate in the department of English Studies at the University Koblenz-Landau, Germany. She completed her dissertation on performances of authorship and masculinity in the AngloCaribbean Artist Novel at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität ErlangenNürnberg. In her thesis, she rereads novels of the Windrush generation in light of their creative negotiation and refraction of European literary traditions. Her most recent publications include articles on the body in Caribbean British writing and masculinity in speculative Caribbean literature as well as the coedited collected volume The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter (Palgrave, 2022). Her research interest and teaching activities include Black British and Caribbean literature, masculinity studies, theories and representations of authorship, body studies, speculative fiction, and posthumanism. Stephen Hahn is professor emeritus of English, William Paterson University (US) and a member of the advisory board of the William Carlos Williams Review. Author or coeditor of five books, he has published widely in the field of modern literature and culture. He currently teaches through the Maine Coastal Senior College located in Damariscotta, Maine (US) and is the leader for adult education at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Yarmouth, Maine. He is a graduate of Amherst College (1975) and received his PhD from Rutgers University (1983). Of interest in the field of aging are his recent and forthcoming studies “‘The Old Man . . . ’: Mimesis of Memory in William Carlos Williams’ Late Poetry” (William Carlos Williams Review, 2020) and “Something Urgent . . . to Say . . . ’: William Carlos Williams and the Subject of Aging.” Julia Henderson is an assistant professor in the department of occupational science and occupational therapy at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research projects involve collaborative creation with people with lived experience of dementia, older adult activism, and creative accessibility approaches for older adult performers. She is creative accessibilities facilitator with Western Gold Theatre, a professional senior theatre company in Vancouver, Canada, and vice chair of the North American Network in Aging Studies. Julia’s research is published in the Journal of American Theatre and Drama, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Leisure, Thornton Wilder Journal, and Age Culture Humanities. In 2021, she coedited the special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on “Age and Performance: Expanding Intersectionality, and in 2022 she coedited the Age Culture Humanities Forum on “Contested Language and the Study of Later Life.”

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About the Editors and Contributors

Julia Hoydis is full professor of English literature at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Previously, she was academic program manager at MESH—Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany; she also held teaching positions and fellowships at the universities of Graz, Duisburg-Essen, Cologne, and Cambridge. Her research areas include the English novel, contemporary drama, literature and science, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Current projects explore processes of transcultural adaptation and questions of intergenerational justice and future-making across different media. She is author of Risk and the English Novel (De Gruyter, 2019) and Tackling the Morality of History: Amitav Ghosh and the Ethics of Storytelling (Winter, 2011). Her latest book Climate Change Literacy, coauthored with Roman Bartosch and Jens Martin Gurr, was published by Cambridge University Press (Key Elements in Environmental Humanities Series) in 2023. She is general editor of Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies. Anna-Christina Kainradl is a doctoral researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz, Austria. Her dissertation focuses on old age and migration in the context of the Austrian healthcare system, analyzing the sensitivity of medical-ethical theories to intersectional discrimination. She also teaches medical ethics at the Medical University of Graz and is involved in projects dealing with age, autonomy, knowledge, health literacy, and migration. Her publications discuss age(ing) in the context of health, care, and climate change. Ulla Kriebernegg is full professor in cultural aging and care studies and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC) at the University of Graz, Austria. In her research and teaching she focuses on North American literary and cultural studies, aging and care studies, and medical and health humanities. Her latest book, Putting Age in its Place deals with the spatiality of care in cultural representations of care homes. Ulla is chair of the Age and Care Research Group Graz and is a founding member and past president of the European Network of Aging Studies (ENAS). She coedits the Aging Studies book series (Transcript) and is associate editor of The Gerontologist. Since 2020, she has been a fellow of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society, Canada. Ulla has taught internationally (US, Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba, Uruguay) and has won several teaching and research awards. Christian Lenz is an assistant professor of British literature at the Technical University Dortmund, Germany. His research focuses on the impact and representation of geographical spaces in literature and other cultural texts. He is

About the Editors and Contributors

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currently working on a monograph on depictions of the rainforest in multiple media and in various genres. Furthermore, he is interested in erotic fiction, youth culture as well as 20th and 21st century literature. Christian Lenz’s first book was on cultural geography and romantic literature. Tina-Karen Pusse is a lecturer of German literature at the University of Galway, Ireland. She is the author of Von Fall zu Fall. Lektüren zum Lachen (Rombach, 2004), and has published articles, edited volumes, and periodicals in the areas of gender studies, modern German poetry, Franz Kafka, fictional autobiographies, theory of laughter, and ecocriticism. Most recently she coedited: From Ego to Eco. Mapping Shifts from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism (Brill, 2018), and Madness in the Woods: Representations of the Ecological Uncanny (Peter Lang, 2020). She is a member of the Ecocriticism in Ireland network, a board member of the German Studies Association in Ireland, coeditor of Germanistik in Ireland, a member of the editorial board of Journal for Ecohumanism, and a committee member of the Humanities and Social Sciences section of the Royal Irish Academy. Núria Mina-Riera is both a PhD candidate of contemporary Canadian poetry and an assistant lecturer at the University of Lleida in Spain. Her dissertation analyzes the formation process of Crozier’s “late style” from an interdisciplinary approach of aging and ecocritical studies. As an assistant lecturer, she teaches literature and culture of the English-speaking countries from a postcolonial perspective, poetry in English, and British history. An active member of research group Dedal-Lit from the University of Lleida, she has participated in both ecocriticism and aging studies national and international conferences and has published coauthored articles in major journals from both fields of study, such as Ecozon@ and The Gerontologist. She has also collaborated with research group RATNAKARA from the University of Lleida, serving as secretary of the organizing committee of the conference “Aquatic Cartographies: Oceanic Imaginaries, Histories and Identities,” which was held at the University of Lleida in July 2022. Adrian Tait is an independent scholar and ecocritic with a particular interest in Victorian and early modern literary responses to environmental crisis. He has published related papers in a number of scholarly journals, including Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Ecozona@, the European Journal of English Studies, and Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, and contributed to essay collections such as Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Literary Ecologies (2017), Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice (2017), Perspectives on Ecocriticism (2019), Literature and Meat Since 1900 (2019), Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of

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About the Editors and Contributors

Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020), Cultural Histories of Ageing (2021), and Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman (2022). Peter J. Whitehouse is professor of neurology, psychiatry, neuroscience, cognitive science, and organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, Canada. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and MD-PhD (Psychology) from Johns Hopkins University (with field work at Harvard and Boston universities), followed by a fellowship in neuroscience and psychiatry and a faculty appointment at Hopkins. In 1986 he moved to Case Western Reserve University to develop the University Alzheimer Center. In 1999 he founded, with his wife, Catherine, The Intergenerational School, a unique public multiage, community school (www​ .tisonline​ .org). He considers himself an intergenerative, transdisciplinary designer, and activist. His fields of endeavor are cognitive/brain health, integrated health care, intergenerational learning, interprofessional practice, deep bioethics, organizational aesthetics, narrative epistemology, transmedia performance arts, planetary health, and play. He is currently a fellow at the University of Oxford, UK.