Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction 9783839465875

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Natalie Dederichs Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

Critical Futures  | Volume 2

Editorial This book series brings together critical perspectives on the discourses, narratives, and cultural practices that shape imaginaries of "the future." Positioning futures as critical asks us to recognize the role of worldmaking in the face of multiple planetary crises as a matter of urgency and risk. At the same time, critical futures signify a turn towards complexity beyond the rhetoric of utopia and dystopia. At the intersections of the environmental humanities, speculative fiction, and science & technology studies, Critical Futures offers opportunities to explore the potential of literature and the arts to shift habitual ways of ordering the world and strives to promote epistemologies, pedagogies, and ethics suited to the messy realities of more equitable and ecologically viable futures. This series is edited by Moritz Ingwersen, Solvejg Nitzke, Regina Schober and Jens Temmen.

Natalie Dederichs received her doctorate in Anglophone literatures and cultures at the University of Bonn, where she also worked as a research assistant for the DFG Research Training Group 2291: Gegenwart/Literatur. She completed her teacher training at the ZfsL Düsseldorf in 2022. Her research interests include ecocriticism and environmental philosophy, literary theory, English language teaching and education for sustainability.

Natalie Dederichs

Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

Thesis: Zugl.: Bonn, Univ., Diss., 2021

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2023 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6587-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6587-5 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839465875 ISSN of series: 2941-0258 eISSN of series: 2941-0266 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements .......................................................... 7 1.

Introduction ............................................................9

2.

There is Something in the Air Climate, Literature, and the Atmospheric Turn........................... 31 2.1 Towards an Aesthetics of Literary Atmospheres ......................... 31 2.1.1 In the Presence of Absence: The Atmospheric Experience ....... 36 2.1.2 Literary Spheres: Text, Contact, and the Reader .................. 41 2.2 Material Ethics and the Affective Agency of Atmospheres............... 58 2.3 Gothic Nature and Uncanny Atmospheres .............................. 70 2.4 Entering a New Dark Age: Atmospheric Re(lation)ality  and the Anthropocene Imagination..................................... 93 3.

Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age The Corporeal Dimension of Toxic Atmospheres in John Burnside’s Glister and Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island.............................. 109 3.1 Posthuman, Post-Nature, and Lit(t)erature ............................. 109 3.1.1 “Nothingness haunts being”: Experiences on the Threshold between Toxic Spaces and the Self in Glister .......... 119 3.1.2 “Clustering out like fungi”: Liminal Modes of Being  in Marrow Island ................................................ 137 3.2 Making Sense of Embodied Permeability ...............................153

4.

Reading Matters, Material Readings Traces of Agency in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy ...... 157 4.1 Weird Terroirs and Other Terrors ....................................... 157 4.2 Traces of Atmospheric Agency .........................................168 4.3 Atmospheric Agency of Literary Traces ................................ 187 5.

Going Glocal Spatial Dissonance and The Multiscalar  Experience of Ambient Literature....................................... 201 5.1 Glocal Points of Access ................................................ 201 5.2 Ambient Literature and the Storying in and of Spacetime ............... 210 5.3 Where to Read from Here: Duncan Speakman’s  It Must Have Been Dark By Then......................................... 221 6.

Conclusion Atmospheric Disturbances in Turbulent Times......................... 239

7.

Bibliography ......................................................... 255

Acknowledgements

Writing can be a lonesome activity. This is even more so the case when you’re living through a global pandemic and have to complete much of your work in quarantine. I’m deeply grateful that I have been surrounded by people whose enthusiasm and emotional as well as professional support has guided me through these turbulent times. The names of the dear friends I owe a debt of gratitude are too many to mention here. Know that your constant support, feedback and encouragement has made this book the collaborative project that it is. What started out as a doctoral thesis completed in 2021 at the University of Bonn has by now passed through the hands of many talented and inspiring people, some of which I would like to thank individually. First and foremost, my deepest thanks go out to Roman Bartosch for his sustained mentorship throughout the years. If it hadn’t been for one of Roman’s many thought-provoking classes in the early days of my English studies at the University of Cologne, I would probably have missed out on the kind of ecocritical research that continues to amaze me until today. Thank you for opening doors that I never even knew existed. I would also like to thank my PhD supervisor Barbara SchmidtHaberkamp as well as Kerstin Stüssel and Marion Gymnich, for their careful readings of my thesis and for chairing my thesis defense. I am grateful to the DFG and, of course, to my colleagues and the staff at the GRK 2291: Gegenwart/Literatur for supporting this project from the very beginning. This book wouldn’t have seen the light of the day with-

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out the many stimulating discussions held in different colloquia at the University of Bonn. Thanks are due to Luisa Bott of transcript and to Regina Schober, Solvejg Nitzke, Moritz Ingwersen and Jens Temmen for accepting my book for the Critical Futures series. I also thank Duncan Speakman for giving me access to the audio files of his It Must Have Been Dark By Then. Special thanks go out to my friend Mascha Wieland. Her razorsharp observations and suggestions made during our many Zoom meetings really helped me improve my initial drafts. I would also like to thank the whole team of Erste Generation Promotion e.V. and Torsten Kathke for allowing a first-generation student like me to ask anything about the at times strange world of academia. Finally, I would like to thank my amazing parents Carmen and Kurt for their unwavering love and support. This book is dedicated to you.

1. Introduction

With global temperatures on the rise, a future in which planet earth will have changed beyond recognition is slowly but steadily creeping up on us. We may have become used to experiences with extreme weather events in a geological epoch that has tellingly been denoted the “Anthropocene” (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), but the large-scale changes that human activities have been introducing to the material world are taking on a new, unsettling quality.1 The most prominent and alarming 1

A clear date as of which the Anthropocene seems to have started from has yet to be agreed upon. In the broadest possible sense, the Anthropocene denotes a time span starting with the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago, thus providing an alternative wording for the current geological epoch that is commonly accepted to be called the Holocene. Supporters of the term Anthropocene take issue with the idea that the last glacial maximum and the agricultural revolution seem to have happened coincidentally, proposing instead to take seriously the impact that human action is having on planetary environments (cf. O’Hare 2019: Web). Other approaches date the beginning of this new geological epoch back as recently as 1945, as they consider the Atomic Age to mark the starting point of how human “activity poured unprecedented amounts of persistent organic pollutants into the environment, ramped up the rate of animal extinctions and created geological features that had never before existed” (Subramanian 2019: 169). Whenever I speak of the Anthropocene in this book, I do so in a way that aligns with approaches that place the beginning of this epoch in the mid-20th century. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that an increasing number of literary writers seem to have self-reflectively taken up on the issue of environmental degradation in the past few decades, as have scientists within and beyond the growing field of the environmental humanities. For discussions on humanity’s role as a new geological force in the

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sign of the anthropogenic imprint on planet earth’s biosphere is, without doubt, climate change. Ever since scientific observations of atmospheric conditions and phenomena in the late 19th century have drawn attention to the problem of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide in the industrial era, there have been discussions concerning the effects of agricultural expansion and accelerated urban development on global climate.2 Ranging from theories of a looming ice age to more recent approaches to global warming, the unsettling future scenarios presented by atmospheric research soon gained public attention.3 Consequently, a sense of environmental crisis has slowly been entering the contemporary imagination and led to a renewed interest in the investigation of systemic social-natural relations. The environmental movement of the 1960s had already challenged the anthropocentric view on the natural world with an ecologically oriented way of thinking. Approaches to the study of planetary ecology became popular and resulted in greater investment in the research on the interaction between organisms and their surroundings and the general principles underlying environmental change. While it cannot be denied that scientific facts and concrete data about planetary interconnectedness made an important contribution to explaining the environmental crisis in terms of the human enmeshment with a complex surrounding world, these abstract representations of knowledge also seem to have resulted in misunderstandings of the problem of climate change. Ursula Kluwick, for instance, notes that most verbalisations of climate change are too far removed from the everyday life of many individuals to make them care for environmental issues:

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age of the Anthropocene, see also Crutzen & Stoermer (2000); Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill (2007). It was Svante August Arrhenius who first assessed large-scale changes in global climate with regard to CO2 emissions caused by industrialised countries (cf. Arrhenius 1896: 237-276). For a detailed history on cultural reactions to climate theories, see Behringer (2010).

1. Introduction

Climate change discourse permeates our culture, but it tends to circulate through it without offering concrete docking points to normal citizens, who continue to remain unclear about the relation between climate change and their own lives, and, specifically, about the impact of their own actions and choices on global climate change. (Kluwick 2014: 505) As the scientific communication of climate change lacks a sensuous dimension, it cripples an individual and human scale engagement with this phenomenon, and, as Kluwick goes on, “does not – or only very rarely – prompt public or even political acceptance” (507). And even if scientists opt for apocalyptic rhetoric to make their climate-related predictions more vivid and persuasive, there is reasonable doubt regarding the usefulness of “the affective power of pathos” for communicating “the facts or logos” (Garrard 2004: 99, emphasis orig.) about environmental issues.4 What further complicates becoming more sensitive to the reality of anthropogenic climate change is that it cannot be grasped or experienced as such, but only in local manifestations of weather. As a quasi-object or “hyperobject” (Morton 2013), this abstract spatiotemporal presence is appallingly real, and yet it only hides beneath the layers of the earth’s atmosphere as well as those of environmental discourse. Whereas weather is expressed in local and situated meteorological events, the physical atmosphere and its relation to global climate remains an abstraction of scientific data representations. Changes in climate or the hole in the ozone layer cannot be sensed in the here and now, as is the case with weather, but become apparent in long-term projections based on past and present measurements. As a historical

4

Turning to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Garrard identifies in how far “environmental apocalypticism has had to face the embarrassment of failed prophecy” (2004: 100). As a means to persuade people of a notion of urgency rather than to prove them with scientific facts, environmental apocalypticism always runs the risk of reducing “complex, long-term issues […] to monocausal crises”, thus “’produc[ing]’ the crisis it describes” (105).

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construct and a slow, non-linear process, climate change cannot be visualised nor experienced as such and thus takes on the character of what Eva Horn calls a “catastrophe without event” (2014a: 111, my translation). Weaved into the history and future of planet earth, climate’s omnipresent and yet elusive nature indeed turns it into a volatile phenomenon which takes shape over time. However, the negative side-effects of the anthropogenic impact on terrestrial ecosystems and the physical atmosphere become more and more evident in the present rather than in the future. The eeriness of climate change lies in the fact that it is everywhere and nowhere. It uncovers the limits of human knowledge and control of the world. We know that climate change is a fact, but we cannot determine exactly when and where its consequences will unfold (cf. Horn 2014b: 342). Being as imperceptible as it is, climate change shakes concepts of physical presence and destabilises anthropocentric notions of agency. It can only be accessed indirectly through models and data and is heavily dependent on processes of mediation to become visible at all (cf. Nitzke 2016: 90). Still, it exists and continues to affect and be affected by human beings in the present moment. As much as “we are […] in an obvious looplike relationship with the problem [of the damaged biosphere]” (Morton 2016: 37), relating to the atmospheric forces that change us as much as we are changing them has been a challenge in Western epistemology, to say the least. As a consequence, an increasing number of researchers in the environmental humanities have been calling these current times as being fundamentally uncanny: not necessarily because we are suddenly confronted with strange and abrupt shifts in our lived environments.5 The alarming signs such as melting glaciers and accelerated sea level rise have been predicted by scientists for quite some time, after all. Likewise, the impact that anthropogenic climate change is having on planetary ecosystems is gradually evolving over decades, usually surfacing in our present as subtle as other forms of environmental degradation. Rather, these times are uncanny 5

Whenever I use the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ in this book, I mean to refer to the human species as a whole.

1. Introduction

because we are reminded of “the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocuters” (Ghosh 2016: 30). Indeed, the various forms of “vibrant” material agency (cf. Bennett 2010: viii) manifesting in immediate, local weather events as much as in more abstract, planet-wide transformation processes make it clear that human life is imbricated with more-than-human forces that seem to resist an all too easy empirical observation and signification.6 “Haunted” as we are by the presence of multiple environmental histories, imagined futures, freakish weather conditions, and the many abstractions presented to us in the form of omnipresent and yet elusive phenomena such as climate change, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that “[t]he winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts” (Gan, Tsing, Swanson & Bubandt 2017: 1). Among these numinous figurations, the concept of the atmospheric certainly plays a special role. Used in a metaphorical sense to refer either to the physically, socially or aesthetically reinforced conditions that surround us (cf. Heibach 2012: 11), the atmospheric points to the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments. On the one hand, the atmospheric plays an important role and functions as a rich metaphor in climate change discourse. Atmospheric science, for instance, uses the term to describe the dynamics of the invisible and yet physical layers of gases surrounding the earth. The idea that planet earth is surrounded by an atmosphere which protects us from the vacuum of and radiation in outer space allows us 6

David Abram was the first to use the term “more-than-human” in his The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), providing a less deficit-oriented and more affirmative way to describe life forms other than human beings. Whereas the commonly used term “non-human” implies that man is the measure of things (and life) and that everything not holding up to this standard is automatically of lesser worth and indeed occupies a radical outside position, the term “more-than-human” turns this anthropocentric thinking on its head: the human being is but one specific, walking-talking agent among many others and, what is more, is always already an “expression of the animate earth that enfolds us” (Abram 1996: 90). It is with this in mind that I will use this term throughout this book whenever I refer to what otherwise would run under the label of the ‘non-human’.

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to imagine the ideal conditions under which life can be formed. And it is through more recent metaphors such as the ‘hole’ in the ozone, the latter being one of the many atmospheric layers of planet earth, that we can visualise the effects that carbon emissions are having on the climatic conditions that we find ourselves in. In aesthetic and literary practice, on the other hand, the atmospheric becomes of interest not only in terms of representational modes, but as part of the very materiality and effects of the works in question. Connecting environments, bodies, and/or aesthetic cultural products, the atmospheric as encountered in and through aesthetic atmospheres is understood to be the “‘[i]n-between’ between environmental qualities and human sensibilities” (Böhme 2000: 14). This means that it is not unlike climate, which according to Hulme “is weather which has been cultured, interpreted and acted on by the imagination, through story-telling and using material technologies” (2016: 11), though it may as well be figured in terms of meteorological imaginations in works of art and literature. Rather, it is an affective experience manifesting in felt atmospheres that emerges through the creative engagement between two or more bodies, in this case the embodied, phenomenal experience of the perceiver and the material embodiment of the perceived, e.g. an architectural or other space, a work of music, art or literature etc. Since aesthetic atmospheres resist being represented mimetically and do but exist as imaginary presences, they rather must be understood as emerging agencies opening up affective spaces. It is in this relational dynamism inherent in the production of aesthetic atmospheres that makes the atmospheric a particularly fruitful category to theorise the tensions and fuzzy borders between perceiver and perceived, subject and object. And since negotiating these tensions against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change is a prime concern in the environmental humanities, the atmospheric, understood in terms of being culturally produced, provides numerous points of entry for discussions on the affective and ethical affordances of aesthetic experience. It is no surprise then that there is quite a boom of cultural approaches to physical and figurative manifestations of the atmospheric

1. Introduction

on the one hand (Lewis 2012; Büttner & Theilen 2017; Ungelenk 2018; Nitzke & Horn 2020) and to the characteristics of aesthetically reinforced atmospheres on the other (Böhme 1995; Morton 2002 & 2007; Chandler 2011; Spinner 2011 & 2016). What seems to be missing, however, is a theoretical and decisively ecocritical engagement with the destabilizing and yet transformative potential of literary encounters with atmospheres in an age of climate crisis. While there also have been explorations of the aesthetics of atmospheres more generally (cf. Böhme 1995) and the methodological peculiarities of literary atmospheres in particular (cf. Spinner 2011; Spinner 2016; Dederichs 2021a) as well as of narrative moods (Gumbrecht 2012), literary atmospheres have not yet been analysed as rigorously against the backdrop of the Anthropocene present in which they emerge. This is rather surprising, given that it is through our creative engagement with literary fiction that we are affected by and at the same time faced with the task to find ways to respond to textually reinforced ambivalences and tensions – ways of engagement, that is, which at the same time need to be trained to be able to “imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era” (Ghosh 2016: 33). With regard to contemporary literature and the climatically changing present in which it is produced, this book identifies the need to investigate the affective, aesthetic, and ethical affordances of literary atmospheres to better understand – and clarify – the transformative potential of fiction that is claimed by ecocriticism in particular. This also necessitates a nuanced analysis of the specific relational and uncanny dynamics of the atmospheric and the implications thereof for the reading and writing of fiction in a climatically changing present. It is with this in mind that I propose that we need to shift attention to the irresolvable ambiguities and tensions between material forces and discursive processes that crystalise in literary atmospheres on the one hand, and that constitute and are part of ecological reality on the other. And where to start if not with literary fiction, where the interrelatedness of matter and text, reader and world(s) plays such an important role in the aesthetic experience?

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As this book will demonstrate, encounters with the atmospheric in literature bear potential for shifting the focus of attention to the relationality of the human mind, body and the environment, as well as to the reality of the mutual interdependencies between human and morethan-human agency. I will show in how far literary engagements with the abstractions of and tensions between scalar interdependencies in a climatically changing present seem to participate in the production of a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality: that is, both the narrative negotiation of spatial and temporal embeddedness in the planetary here and now and a literary invoked sense of human beings’ uncanny interconnectedness with the more-than-human world. In the past three decades, the question as to what kind of narratives affect and are affected by such a relational thinking has driven most of the research in the environmental humanities and led to serious controversies within a discipline that still seems to be driven by “the politics of consciousness-raising” (Gerhardt 2006: 223). In the ever-growing field of what has come to be known as ecocriticism, the complex interrelations of human culture and the physical environment, or, to be more precise, between literary language, readers, and the more-than-human world have been analysed more closely (cf. Glotfelty 1995: xix). In the 1990s, so called first-wave ecocriticism placed emphasis on nature writing, which led to a privileging of realism and mimesis in explorations of “literature’s capacity for articulating the nonhuman environment” (Buell 1995: 10). In The Environmental Imagination (1995), Lawrence Buell discusses the potential of realist nature writing to foster ecological awareness so as to define the “environmental dimension of literary texts” (14). His notion of the environmental text or an “environmentally oriented work” (7) rests upon faith in the ‘power’ of literature’s referentiality, which has recently come under attack for being anti-postmodern: Traditional philosophical worries about the ability of language to represent the world, the worries which lie behind Buell’s brief on behalf of realism, make no sense in the light of our evolutionary history and scientific practices, though practical worries about that ability are of course another matter. We could lose language and keep the world,

1. Introduction

but if we did we would be much less adept at managing the world than we currently are, and would have to rely more on our opposable thumbs for aid and comfort than we now do. (Phillips 2003: 167) As Phillips goes on, “literature can point to the world, but only in the sense that it can indicate a specific aspect or feature of the world, which it must describe and locate in more or less detail for a competent reader who understands what it is trying to do” (181). Accordingly, it is important that we are not fooled into believing that the fictional landscape is just “a place of literal reference”, as Buell suggested in his earlier work (1995: 85). More than that, aesthetically constructed worlds seem to carry symbolic qualities that call for interpretation. That being said, aesthetically mediated realities can negotiate material power relations precisely because they are unlike reality itself (cf. Trexler 2014: 208) – and regardless of how far away fictional worlds are from our perception, they can indeed address us in a direct way. This tendency to “question organicist models” yielded what Buell himself identified as “second wave” environmental criticism (2005: 22). No longer interested primarily in realism but geared towards a more critical exploration of the socio-cultural implications of the environmental crisis, second-wave ecocriticism focussed also on fictional responses to environmental degradation and ecological inequalities. Thus, they adopted a more culturally diverse, yet still dominantly human-centred stance towards the issue of environmental injustice. According to Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic, it is on the basis of a request for a more transcultural scope on the study of environment and human as well as more-than-human agency that a third wave of ecocritics has ultimately emerged in the 21st century (cf. Adamson & Slovic 2009: 6-7). Third-wave ecocriticism sees a shift away from the study of fictional or non-fictional representations of local, romantic wilderness towards the adoption of a more planetary sense in the reading of fiction. Ideas such as Hubert Zapf’s notion of literature as cultural ecology prove particularly useful in this context as they consider the literary text as an “ecological force” that “[…] in this sense is the self-reflexive staging of complex ecosemiotic life processes on the boundary of culture-nature

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interaction” (2016: 28, emphasis orig.). Here, literature is believed to be engendering notions of relationality and interdependence regardless of whether a text mediates an ecocentric representation of the world. As a result of the recent shift from anthropocentric thinking to a more holistic world view, special attention has recently been given to imaginaries of “naturalcultural” entanglement in environmental philosophy and aesthetics (cf. Haraway 2016). In literary studies, notions of the “text as matter” (Iovino 2012: 61) are more and more focussing on the material-discursive dynamics of cultural texts and approach questions of narrative ethics from the perspective of what has come to be known as material ecocriticism. The project behind this most recent offshoot of new materialist research and “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty 1996: xviii, emphasis added) is to overcome the conceptional dualisms of nature and culture and to work towards more inclusive patterns of thinking the world’s visible and invisible phenomena. Based on the assumption that “reality emerges as an intertwined flux of material and discursive forces, rather than as [a] complex of hierarchically organized individual players” (Iovino & Oppermann 2014: 3), material ecocriticism partly resists the ongoing demateralisation of the world into linguistic constructions and instead emphasises the pivotal role of materiality in ecological relationships: Developing in bodily forms and in discursive formulations, and arising in coevolutionary landscapes of natures and signs, the stories of matter are everywhere: in the air we breathe, the food we eat, in the things and beings of this world, within and beyond the human realm. All matter, in other words, is “storied matter”. It is a material “mesh” of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces. (Iovino & Oppermann 2014: 1) Material ecocriticism has a bone to pick with the predominant anthropocentric worldview, especially its discourse-centric varieties, and clearly calls for a reconsideration of the interrelation between human and more-than-human agencies. It recognises the multiple and

1. Introduction

irresolvable tensions that exist between material forces and discursive processes which constitute and are part of ecological reality today. At the same time, it helps us to explore the role of literature in co-creating and making accessible the ambiguous interrelatedness of matter and text. Approaches in this field thus make an important contribution to the study of how literature may shape environment-related values without defining a text’s ecocritical potential in terms of genre-related modes of environmental representation or didactic intention. With the help of material ecocriticism, we can shed light on the notion of interaction and meaning making between world, text, and reader, which is also central to the discourse on aesthetic communication. This is why I will draw on material ecocriticism in my exploration of the transformative potential of encounters with literary atmospheres. To get a grasp on the aporias that come with climate change, it seems, we need to attend to what we cannot see, touch, smell or hear, but sense and aesthetically frame still. Tabas argues that [i]f ecology is the study of organisms and their relations to their environments […] then being a realist ecologist is being sensitized to that which not only is visible but which is also withdrawn or wholly other; that which is reality but also ungraspable within all naturalist accounts of the ambient world. (Tabas 2015: 15) Attending to literary atmospheres might be one way to re-address Anthropocenic complexities and explore the “contact zone[s] where human and non-human forms of life, natural environments, economies, and technologies are inextricably intertwined” (Nitzke & Horn 2020: 2). Since literary atmospheres make a claim on us with an affective agency that is distributed between reader and text, they appear particularly suited to make tangible the “bodily intra-actions with all forms of material agency as effective actors” (Iovino & Oppermann 2012a: 88) that pervade earthly relations.7 An ecocritical take on literary atmo7

The concept of “intra-action” has been originally proposed by Karen Barad in an attempt to capture the relational essence of her agential realist framework. In her Meeting the Universe (2007), Barad describes in how far intra-action “signifies

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spheres allows for an embodied understanding of climate change because it is through atmospheric encounters that we are drawn into an affective engagement with the surrounding world. This exposure to aesthetically reinforced configurations of agency, so I suggest, creates an immersive and yet disruptive experience of otherness that affects us bodily and seizes us into thought. At the same time, looking at the relationship between human and more-than-human life in terms of atmospheric entanglements allows for an embodied and relational approach to ecological existence. Such an understanding moves beyond the binary thinking that still seems to dominate ecocritical discourse and that I want to challenge through my readings of contemporary ecofiction. Channelling insights from the new materialisms about distributed agency and combining them with approaches to aesthetic experience coming from fields as diverse as ecocriticism, reader-responsecriticism, affect theory, and media studies, I will provide a new way of dealing with the atmospheric architectures not only of literary texts, but even more so of planetary existence. The concept of the uncanny is central in this regard, as it can be applied to explore the repressed and neglected dimensions of our precarious enmeshment with morethan-human agency. In this context, the term Atmosfears mentioned in the title of this book can be read in light of the challenges coming with representing – or, rather, not representing – climate and environment-related aporias and the fears coming with them in the age of ecological crisis. To date, there are a handful of approaches to the different fears and anxieties that seem to have resulted from human beings’ ambivalent relationship with the more-than-human world. In the face of environmental degradation, destruction, and disasters, feelings of unease regarding the environment have, for instance, been the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognises that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (Barad 2007: 33, emphasis orig.). I will come back to the productivity of this concept for theorising the uncanny relational poetics inherent in literary atmospheres in Chapter 2.

1. Introduction

theorised under the concept of “ecophobia”. While in clinical psychology ecophobia has traditionally referred to a phobia against one’s dwelling or an unreasonable fear of home, its meaning has changed with the growing of popular as well as political concerns over climate change in the 21st century. In the environmental humanities, Simon C. Estok has approached ecophobia with regard to the question of “how contempt of the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse” (2009: 204). According to Estok, ecophobia is less a result of being overly concerned, or worried about, ecological problems, but rather a symptom of “anthropocentric arrogance and speciesism” (216). As such it signifies a deeply conditioned mechanism resulting from the fear of losing control over whatever is subsumed under the concept of ‘nature’, including body hair, plants and animals (208). According to Estok, popular representations of monstrous ‘nature’ in plays, novels, news reports, and in any other form of “voyeurism” (214) offered by the TV landscape are consequences of this fear of and loathing for the nonhuman world. In a similar vein, environmental health issues such as allergies, diseases, or injuries mixed with socio-economic shocks alarmed the public sphere and shed a light on widely ignored mental health problems caused directly by information on or experiences with environmental change. Against this background, the term eco-anxiety or what Albrecht labelled “solastalgia” emerged to provide a clearer wording for the emotional distress caused by fears of environmental destruction on the one hand, and “the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory” (Albrecht 2007: 45) on the other hand. As a study of the American Psychological Association suggests, people whose livelihoods depend on natural resources and inhabitants of environmental riskprone areas are more likely to be affected by the mental health impacts of climate change.8 However, first-hand experience with environment8

For an overview on the likely psychological impacts of climate change on mental health and the risk-groups, see for example American Psychological Association (2017).

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related disasters and their aftermaths are not the only source of ecoanxiety. Reading of or watching traumatic hazards occur from afar can also foster what elsewhere has been coined “environmental depression” (Walsh 2009: Web). A recent story in “The Current” on CBC Radio tells of the acute state of heightened eco-anxiety of The New York Times blogger Liz Galst, who became increasingly aware of her chronic fear of the environmental future while reporting on global warming (cf. Smith, Colabrese & Mak 2017: Web). As she stated elsewhere, the sight of cars emitting carbon dioxide and the thought of how much fossil fuellingpower is needed to run for instance elevators and the internet would trigger severe panic attacks (cf. Galst 2006: Web). Such negative feelings of exposure to the menacing threats deriving from an ailing planet are but one side of the coin of Atmosfears. The other certainly is the uncanny recognition of humanity’s share in “the events set in motion by global warming” (Ghosh 2016: 32), and thus our fundamental implication in the environments that surround us. The latter understanding of Atmosfears, which I will apply in my case studies, does neither denote emotional distress caused by fears of environmental doom, nor anxieties of losing control over whatever is subsumed under the concept of ‘nature’.9 Rather, it captures the uncanny relational aesthetics inscribed into atmospheric encounters, with this aesthetics allowing us to negotiate the tensions between language and reality that is also central to the concerns addressed by material ecocriticism in particular: that is, the task to overcome the dichotomies between “the discursive and the material, the logos and the physis, mind and body” (Iovino & Oppermann 2012a: 87, emphasis orig.). In this sense, Atmosfears appear more as markers of the tensions coming with our affective and relational being in the world. Literary and cultural studies can recapitulate and translate the different Atmosfears accompanying Anthropocenic imaginary, which have been circulating in moments of crisis and inspired discussions of how popular imaginations of the environment structure life in ecological realities. What most recently has been dubbed the “ecoGothic” (Smith 9

See Albrecht (2011) for a psychological contextualisation of eco-anxiety.

1. Introduction

& Hughes 2013; Parker 2016) or the “ecogothic” (Keetley & Sivils 2018), for instance, has already laid the crucial groundwork for exploring the uncanny aspects of the interrelations between humans and the morethan-human world, mostly with regard to imaginaries of bodily transgression and views of the more-than-human world in anthropomorphic terms. Whereas the ecogothic has originally been defined in terms of an analytic mode that has given itself the task to reveal “how current ideas about ecocriticism can be applied to Gothic narratives in order to help draw out their often dystopian ecological visions” (Smith & Hughes 2013: 4), more recent approaches have proposed instead to regard it as “a literary mode at the intersection of environmental writing and the Gothic” that “typically presupposes some kind of ecocritical lens” (Keetley & Sivils 2018: 1).10 Regardless of whether one wants to understand it as a theoretical lens or a mode of writing, the circulation of Gothic discourse in the writing and theorisation of ecological interrelations sug10

Both Smith & Hughes’ and Parker’s understanding of the ecoGothic is essentially the same. They define it as a theoretical lens or framework and not as a genre. According to Parker, “[t]his distinction is important as it is one of the predominant means by which we may discern between the ecoGothic and ecohorror” (Smith & Hughes 2016: 217, emphasis orig.). Where both approaches to the ecoGothic seem to differ, however, is in their view on which texts are open to ecoGothic analysis: whereas to Parker only Gothic fiction is of interest to this ecocritical subdiscipline (cf. Parker 2016: 218), Smith & Hughes seem to be more ambivalent about restricting their analysis to a specific genre. This impression is at least supported by the essays in their seminal volume, dealing either with Gothic literature in a narrower sense or with contemporary works of ecohorror. Most recently, Keetley & Sivils have taken up on the ambivalent use of the term, describing the ecogothic (note the spelling difference) in terms of a specifically “gothic ecocritical lens” (Keetley & Sivils 2018: 1, emphasis orig.) that is open to a variety of texts, Gothic or not. My understanding of the term ties in with such a broader focus on literary texts that explore uncanny imaginations of ‘nature’ in one way or another, which is why I will spell it out as the ecogothic throughout this book. Rather than using the ecogothic as a means to define a specific genre of writing the environment or the Anthropocene, however, I will apply it to explore the uncanny implications of the relational thinking fostered by ecocritical theory on the one hand and contemporary speculative ecofiction on the other.

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Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

gests that negotiating environment-related fears and anxieties is and has been a prominent concern in literary culture. Ranging from more traditional works of Gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th century to more recent literary and filmic productions in the field of ecological horror or, for short, ecohorror,11 animating ‘nature’ as a ghostly or even monstrous force beyond human control has become a prominent trope to give expression to the anxieties aroused by experiences with or imaginations of our inevitable exposure to the morethan-human world. However vividly such cultural texts depict life forms other than human beings as vital and intelligible agents, I see a problem with the binary thinking that the ecophobic fears as expressed in works of ecohorror reintroduce to ecocritical theory. By imagining ‘nature’ as a threatening force that robs humanity of its control and dominance over the world, ecohorror seems to nurture the nature/culture divide that material ecocriticism in particular tries to break down. A problem, that is, to which I will attend more closely within this book as well. The texts I have chosen for my analysis echo a mode of writing that, too, is perceptible to the problems that narratives of ‘evil culture’ versus ‘monstrous nature’ pose for responding to the complexities of environment-related change. Falling under the broad category of ecofiction, they do not belong to the genre of ecohorror, nor are they Gothic stories in the narrower sense of the word, though they all evoke a sense of an “eerily ambient” (Parker 2016: 218) and strangely “vibrant” more-

11

While a clear definition of the genre of ecohorror has yet to be agreed upon, there is a difference between traditional Gothic stories that explore uncanny notions of the environment and wilderness and contemporary genre fiction that explicitly deals with climate change and environmental risk (cf. Parker 2016: 217-218). Other approaches go as far as to include any literary or filmic production into the genre of ecohorror that deal with environment-related horror in the form of animal attacks or any other “fright flicks in which nature turns against humankind” (Foy 2010: 167). Whenever I refer to ecohorror in this book, I mean literary and filmic ‘texts’ that explicitly deal with and/or dramatise climate-related risks and thus broadly fall under the category of the ecological thriller (cf. Kerridge 2000) or what also has been referred to as climate fiction or “cli-fi” (cf. Bloom, n.d.: Web).

1. Introduction

than-human world (cf. Bennett 2010: vii). Nor are they environmental risk narratives that explicitly deal with the present challenges of climate change. Rather, the texts I will look at in the course of this book sit uneasily between the genre of environmental writing and ecohorror, reworking Gothic tropes of more-than-human agency and multispecies entanglement while at the same time avoiding to imagine the natural world as a horrific, menacing other. What the different literary forms I will attend to in my case studies have in common is that they challenge and eventually overcome the human-animal divide by foregrounding relationality as an uncanny, yet fundamental ontological condition of being in and with the world. The circulating fears in these novels are less about losing control over the more-than-human world, as they are about the (im)possibility of our inevitable embeddedness in and embodiment of atmospheric conditions and relations. In other words, the range of Atmosfears developed in the literary works that I will have a closer look at in this book are linked to the uncanny relational aesthetics inscribed into atmospheric encounters in particular and planetary interrelations more generally in an age of climate change. In reading works of ecofiction that put notions of the atmospheric entanglements between humans and other life forms front and centre, it is not my attempt to construct a corpus of text that serves best to narrate life in the Anthropocene. Nor is it my intention to develop a taxonomy of the different expressions of environment-related fears in contemporary ecofiction. By sketching the relational and uncanny aspects and dimensions of literary invoked notions of atmospheric re(lation)ality, I rather aim at opening up the discussion on the multitude of forms of narrating the horrors of a climatically changing world. What is at stake here and what I will flesh out is the theoretical and interpretative significance of literary atmospheres and the implications of their relational and uncanny nature. The task at hand thus is to explore the ways in which literary atmospheres can be productive in making us relate to the environments that we shape and that shape us. With the emergence of the concept of anthropogenic climate change, creative engagements with the environmental crisis seem to have rapidly increased and call for a refined theoretical take on

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Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

ecological relationality.12 In view of literary writings defined by their responsiveness to the “polyphonic story of the world” (Iovino & Oppermann 2012a: 88), it is reasonable to inaugurate the ‘atmospheric turn’.13 I will draw on this latest theoretical shift by first discussing how the increasingly uncanny agency of aesthetic figurations of the atmospheric is framed in literary theory and practice. In Chapter 2, I will review approaches to the production and reception of aesthetic atmospheres and work towards a definition of literary atmospheres as affective agencies that interact with the reader. While ecocritics recently have been paying closer attention to the role of the aesthetic-affective experience provided by narrative texts in sensitising readers for notions of ecological relationality (cf. Bartosch 2017a; Rigby 2011; Iovino 2010), studies of narrative ethics so far have largely ignored the transformative potential of atmospheres as both literary topos and aesthetic effect. This chapter invites readers to rethink the role atmospheric reading experiences can play in engendering notions of ecological relationality. It does so by bringing together three perspectives: first, an exploration of how the atmospheric and its perception within and beyond literary worlds has been treated in aesthetic theory as well as in phenomenology, in particular with regard to experiences of the uncanny; second, an ecocritical response to the affective and ethical value of literary encounters with textual gaps and ambiguities; and third, an exploration of the productiveness and limits of Gothic approaches to

12

13

For analyses of the topos of weather and the physical atmosphere in literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, see Reed (1984); Bate (1996); Lewis (2012); Attanucci (2014). The “atmospheric turn” was first specifically proclaimed in the call for papers of the conference Staging Atmospheres - Theatre and the Atmospheric Turn held in London in December 2017 (cf. Welton & Woods 2017: Web). Well before this, however, researchers such as Böhme (1995) had already contributed significantly to a renewed understanding of the role of atmospheres in aesthetic practice and performance. Though I will draw on the preliminary theoretical work done in the field of aesthetic production more generally, I will contribute to the atmospheric turn by exploring the role of atmospheres in a literary context in particular.

1. Introduction

the defamiliarizing and transformative potential of fiction. Reviewing extant research and discussions on contemporary ecofiction, Chapter 2 will finally propose a fresh take on the storying of the uncanny entanglement of humans and the more-than-human world by introducing the idea of a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality. I will draw on material ecocriticism to explain my text choice and comment on the negotiation of experiences of liminality, ambivalence, and multiscalarity that these texts seem to provide. The following case studies explore different aspects of this relational and uncanny poetics in more detail. In Chapter 3, I will turn to two recent novels, John Burnside’s Glister (2008) and Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island (2016) to show how a growing body of ecofiction seems to work through life in the Anthropocene by way of less horrific, yet deeply unsettling imaginaries of fragile embodiment. In my analysis, I first review how atmospheric encounters are rendered uncanny in these novels through expressions of our environmental unconscious, in particular with regard to imaginaries of toxic embodiment. This enables me, in a second step, to comment on the experience of in-betweenness so central to encounters with the atmospheric within and beyond fiction. Finally, this chapter points out the ways in which contemporary ecofiction frames bodily-material transgressions through which readers can engage with the tensions that arise from our atmospheric embeddedness in a shared, polluted, and climatically changing world. Not unlike novels that heavily rely on the trope of pollution to stage the diffuseness of the boundaries between human and morethan-human life, the growing body of New Weird fiction, too, engages with the ambivalence inscribed into the Anthropocene experience, thus illustrating the representational challenges posed on us by global, large-scale issues such as climate change. Drawing on the last chapter’s insights on literary negotiations of uncanny material embodiment, Chapter 4 turns to another aspect of a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality: the limits and possibilities of verbal language when faced with uncanny materialisations that surround and act upon us. This chapter explores the transformative potential of literary encounters with the elusive and ineffable by returning to what has been said about

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Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

the productiveness of textual gaps and ambiguities in the preceding chapters. The suggestive, non-linear and literally ‘weird’ writing of Jeff VanderMeer appears as a particularly promising point of departure into a closer analysis of the atmospheric and thus the relational as well as uncanny aspects of reading contemporary ecofiction: firstly, because VanderMeer’s novels more often than not invoke uncanny notions of more-than-human agency; secondly, they replace sublime and horrific imaginaries and fears of ‘nature unleashed’ with unsettling notions of the alien-within, therefore challenging the dualistic separation of humans from nature as celebrated in the Western hemisphere. Through a more nuanced analysis of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), I discuss and point to literature’s potential to cultivate in readers a kind of responsiveness to uncertainties and ambiguities that might be of use beyond the realms of fiction as well. Chapter 5 then leaves the strangely contaminated grounds, ecotonal areas and coastal hinterlands narrated in Glister, Marrow Island, and The Southern Reach Trilogy and sets out for a search of the translation of notions of atmospheric re(lation)ality in a similarly ambivalent, yet more augmented space: it is the ‘glocal’ city that is the starting point for my last investigation of how literary encounters with our uncanny atmospheric entanglements might affect new ways of thinking the horrors of climate change. The chapter turns to the pervasive media project Ambient Literature (2016-2018), which has productively put to use the idea of an interconnected world in a literary context. I analyse Duncan Speakman’s mobile-locative narrative It Must Have Been Dark By Then (2017), as it enables readers to experience and be affected by the productive tensions that arise when encountering multiple scales such as the local and the global at once through the reading – and walking – of fiction. I will point out how Speakman’s performative, participatory, site-sensitive, and multiscalar approach to the storying of an uncanny sense of atmospheric and planetary enmeshment captures precisely the relational dynamics of reading that we might want to consider more seriously if we are to analyse literary atmospheres in an ecocritical framework. The question that we need to ask today is not so much about the ways in which human and more-than-human beings inhabit a shared

1. Introduction

environment; it is even more important to consider how we narrate our fundamental entanglement with this world. It makes a crucial difference whether the troubled relationship between human and morethan-human beings is narrated in terms of violent exposures to ‘hostile nature’ or whether it is explored through embodied, yet uncanny experiences of atmospheric re(lation)ality. Far more than to sublime imaginary alone it seems that we need to be exposed to modes of writing that think the local in relation to the global, that bring home in how far abstract, hard to grasp forces are inextricably linked with what can indeed be experienced in the immediate present. With this in mind, I finally show in how far practicing and communicating scale-sensitive modes of reading becomes more important in a hyper-connected world as ours. Literary fictions that allow readers to engage with uncanny notions of the atmospheric play an important role in this context. They pave the way for readerly negotiations of human beings’ share in the construction and shaping of reality, both within and beyond literary spheres of interaction. In view of the different forms of writing presented in this book I will also emphasise that the affective affordances of literary fiction are framed and supported but not necessarily determined by specific media formats or genres. Rather, this book proposes that the transformative potential of fiction is connected to affective experiences of tensions and ambivalences as reinforced in moments of readerly reception. With the challenges of environmental crisis upon us, rethinking the capability of words to make us not only reflect upon, but also experience planetary interconnectedness seems to be more urgent than ever.

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2. There is Something in the Air Climate, Literature, and the Atmospheric Turn

2.1

Towards an Aesthetics of Literary Atmospheres

Speaking of the atmospheric is, in the truest sense of the word, a hazy matter: while the term “atmosphere” is, in a first approximation, related to meteorological concepts (Greek ἀτμός: steam, vapour + σφαῖρα: ball, sphere), it has entered everyday language to give voice to the unspeakable. A good teacher, for instance, is concerned with creating and promoting a positive classroom atmosphere, while at the same time government representatives may notice changes in the national or global political atmosphere. One speaks of the depressing atmosphere of a cloudy day or the uncanny atmosphere of the nocturnal flora and fauna and may even say of a person that they are surrounded by a very specific atmosphere. Atmospheric qualities are equally attributed to social and environmental spaces and phenomena as well as to objects and persons, which is why “atmospheres are indeterminate above all as regards their ontological status” (Böhme 1993: 114). Not only do we encounter the physical atmosphere as an integral part of our earthly existence every time we switch on the TV for the latest weather forecast before we step out of the door to take a deep breath of ‘fresh’ air, but constantly step into atmospherically charged situations, interactions, environments. Atmospheres are omnipresent in “design, stage sets, advertising, the production of musical atmospheres (acoustic furnishing), cosmetics, interior design” (Böhme 1993: 123), so that it does not take a geophysicist or atmospheric chemist to realise what it means to be

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Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

surrounded by atmospheres. And yet, the lack of a universally agreed definition of the concept of atmosphere makes it hard to approach it in theoretical terms. Christiane Heibach’s differentiation of atmospheres according to their spaces of production provides a useful basis from which to define the term in a more reflective way (cf. 2012: 11-12). Taking a heuristic point of view, she classifies atmospheres into the categories of physical, social, and intended atmospheres. Whereas physical or “first-order atmospheres” (11, my translation) encompass phenomena of air and climate, social or “second-order atmospheres” (11, my translation) describe those atmospheres which may be encountered in communicative and societal contexts. According to Heibach, physical and social atmospheres share the fact that they emerge from and are influenced by interactions between subjects and environments, thereby differing from the last category of intended or “third-order atmospheres” (11, my translation). Defined by aesthetic practices, intended atmospheres are first and foremost constructed phenomena in contemporary consumption culture (11-12). As an integral part of socio-cultural reality, they play as much an important role in advertising, design and recreation industries as they do in the context of artistic expressions such as theatre and, as it will become clearer in the pages to follow, literary writing. While Heibach’s attempt at explaining the special character of intended atmospheres in terms of the medium through which it is reinforced to some degree disregards reception aesthetic insights into the production of atmospheres, her work contributes to the establishment of an aesthetics of atmospheres in literary and cultural studies. Her take on atmospheres as diffuse phenomena that can be perceived as much as they can be produced shows parallels with Gernot Böhme’s “New Aesthetics” (Böhme 1993: 114-116). Calling for an in-depth analysis of the role of atmospheres in phenomenology, Böhme has taken on the challenge of exploring forms of atmospheric reception contexts for a general theory of aesthetic perception. His theory of aesthetics, which has been informed by an ecological approach to aesthetic discourse, breaks with the age-old notion of aesthetics as a theory of judgment, and therefore shifts the emphasis from

2. There is Something in the Air

questions of taste and canonisation to processes of the production and perception of aesthetic experiences. The reintegration of the concept of aisthesis into aesthetic theory as well as Böhme’s primary focus on the share of atmospheres in what he calls “the progressive aesthetization of reality” (1993: 125) opens up new possibilities for the study of how art can engender a non-dualist notion of the relationality of environmental and bodily sensitivities. Aesthetic theory, Böhme avers, must be concerned with the rediscovery of our organic embeddedness into ecological reality, for we can only understand and eventually find new and more sustainable forms of dwelling, if we “integrate the nature that we ourselves are, i.e. the human body, into our self-awareness” (2014 [1995]: 14, my translation). Since art highly depends on processes of perception and reception, it can maybe most strikingly exemplify how sensory experiences, translated and reinforced in (audio)visual and textual atmospheres, contribute to an awareness of the shared reality of human and morethan-human agencies. In his Essays zur Neuen Ästhetik [‘Essays on New Aesthetics’] (2014 [1995]) Böhme therefore dedicates a whole chapter to the making of atmospheres and their effect on human states (cf. 100168). Architectural work, landscape design, and scenography, Böhme proposes, are paradigmatic examples of aesthetic products that offer atmospheric modes of experience (27). Later he also claims that music and language, too, can generate atmospheres (35-39). His idea of the manufactured nature of aesthetic atmospheres therefore seems to be inspired by Walter Benjamin’s claim that paintings are characterised by an “auratic mode of existence” (1963: 20, my translation). Since Böhme observes that “classical aesthetics has only ever dealt with three or four atmospheres, namely the beautiful, the sublime […] the Picturesque […], and finally the characterless atmosphere, or atmosphere in general, the aura” (2017: 24, emphasis orig.), he calls for a nuanced take on aesthetic practice. In Hirschfeld’s Theorie der Gartenkunst [‘Theory of Garden Art’] (1779) Böhme finds “the practical knowledge of aesthetic workers” (2017: 24) that is needed to make explicit the processes behind the production of the many atmospheres we may encounter in everyday life. Although the aesthetics of garden design had

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been developed in the sixteenth century already, Hirschfeld’s theory of garden art helps to explore the intersections of aesthetics and atmospheres in more detail.1 His focus on the ways in which the interplay of different environmental elements and arrangements produce specific atmospheres revealed, for instance, how a melancholic atmosphere can be created by a silent soundscape, shadowy places, dark coloured vegetation and ponds, ancient and thick trees, and still floating water (cf. Hirschfeld 1779: 211). Accordingly, Hirschfeld’s insights on the effects of “water, light and shadow, colour, woodlands, hills, stones and rocks, and finally also buildings” (Böhme 2017: 27) on the character of a region helped Böhme to elaborate on the complex dynamics of the production of aesthetic atmospheres. In contrast to Hermann Schmitz, whose philosophical research on the phenomenology of atmospheres holds that atmospheres are detached from qualities of things and subjective dispositions and instead are holistic, free-floating phenomena (cf. 1969: 100), Böhme stresses their manufactured dimension. Being a result of the interaction between material ecstasies and human states of mind, atmospheres are not only represented but are part of the phenomenal quality of aesthetic spaces. Yet, they only take shape through the affective responses from those who experience them (cf. Böhme 2014 [1995]: 33). Böhme therefore connects an aesthetics of reception with a new aesthetics of production, highlighting the importance of environmental stimuli and personal mood in the making of atmospheric experiences. Atmospheres 1

That landscapes can be designed in a way that is supposed to engender very specific affective responses in those who look at or wander through them, was an insight developed in the field of garden design as early as in the sixteenth century. As Horace Walpole states in the introductory notes of his translation of Hentzner’s Paul Hentzner’s Travels in England (1797), the latter being a German lawyer who documented his journeys through England during the late Elizabethan era, “[w]e are apt to think that sir William Temple, and king William, were in a manner the introducers of gardening into England: by the description of lord Burleigh's gardens at Theobalds, and of those at Nonsuch, we find that the magnificent, though false, taste, was known here as early as the reigns of Henry VIII.” (Walpole 1797: vii).

2. There is Something in the Air

can be produced and encountered in different branches of aesthetic work, including literary writing. However, Böhme’s work on the atmospheric potential of language plays a minor part in his œuvre, as he is most interested in architectural and design-related atmospheres. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that […] atmospheres can also be generated by words or paintings. After all, the peculiar quality of a story one reads or listens to is that it not only tells us that a particular atmosphere prevailed somewhere else but that it summons this atmosphere itself, that it conjures it up. (Böhme 2017: 27) The emotional and in some cases even physical sensations provoked by poems or novels suggest that literary language indeed creates an atmospheric space where readers can exercise their feelings and experience a sense of relationality. As Susan Feagin (1996) suggests, affective responses are essential for literary appreciation and require active emotional involvement and imaginative activities on the side of the reader. A pounding heart, tears, feelings of tension or uneasiness are only some of the reactions of those who are deeply moved by a specific story. (Feagin 1996: 8). Such theories of aesthetic appreciation help us understand the cognitive and affective value of the process of reading, yet they miss out on the role of textual components for mental stimulation. While it cannot be denied that reading, understanding, appreciating, and affectively responding to literary language hinges on complex reading skills and strategies and thus is a matter of education, it should also be noted that affective reading experiences are for a large part provided by textual and narrative elements as well as personal dispositions. As Roman Bartosch puts it, “narration and textual composition as well as readerly affective response are the crucial elements of a poetics of relationality” (2017a: 47). Reading atmospheres provides an opportunity to experience our being in the world via affective processes. In that the literary sphere presents the reader with imaginary “linguistic, perceptual, experimental and communicational presences” (Zapf 2012: 85), it invites them to be attuned to what is encountered on a textual level. Literature there-

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fore serves as a testing ground for the sensual and bodily exposure to the world. While my analysis will take reader-response theories into consideration to discuss the significance of atmospheres in literary writing and reception, I will also address perspectives on the material dimension of and the textual strategies used in the production of literary atmospheres. Before going into detail on how literary writers can produce these “moving emotional powers, spatial carriers of moods” (Böhme 2017: 20), it is however necessary to first outline some of the characteristics of atmospheres. In the following subchapter I will therefore give a general overview on approaches to the ‘atmospheric experience’ to lay the foundation for a detailed discussion of the affective agency of literary atmospheres and their ecocritical potential.

2.1.1

In the Presence of Absence: The Atmospheric Experience

The question concerning the basis of human experience of the present has been – and still is – controversially discussed in philosophy.2 In phenomenological research, corporeal modes of experiencing life have been central to the study of the relationship between human perception and spatio-temporal reality, at least since Husserl and MerleauPonty.3 Defending a concept of emotions as atmospheric phenomena 2

3

The different theoretical approaches to the relationship between human perception and the spatio-temporal reality are too manifold to be discussed in one single book. Since phenomenological research in particular has been concerned with atmospheric experiences, the following subchapter will review discussions of the role of atmospheres for human perception in the body philosophical approaches of Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme. Embodiment plays a central role in both Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as they argue that it is through the body that we are oriented in the world. Contra Cartesian mind-body dualism and inspired by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty claims, for instance, in his Phenomenology of Perception that “[t]he body is the vehicle of being in the world” (94), and so the world “appears to us in so far as we are in the world through our body, and in so far as we perceive the world with our body” (2003 [1945]: 239).

2. There is Something in the Air

in interpersonal spaces, Hermann Schmitz’s new phenomenology links mentalistic views on lived experience with a theory of the felt body. To be in the here and now, according to Schmitz, means sensing things, positioning oneself to things and the world, and bodily experiencing the present in its ambivalent entirety. Accordingly, what is experienced as the present is more than a temporal concept or memory. It is the sensual experience of what he refers to as “Hier-Jetzt-Dasein-DiesesIch”, that is the unity of here, now, existence, immediacy and the self (Schmitz 1964: 205). Central to this corporeal experience is the felt body or Leib as the multi-sensual instance of a person’s material body or Körper. Corporeality, in this sense, is not so much the organic make-up of the human being. Rather, it describes the spatial extension of human sensuousness, which may be understood as a phenomenal space surrounding and emanating from a person. The concept of atmosphere is important here, as it supports Schmitz’s notion of the communicative and spatial dimension of corporeality. What human beings can sense with their felt body, is, Schmitz says, “emotions as atmospheres poured out spatially” (2012: 39, my translation). According to this definition, atmospheres are spacefilling emotions occupying the frameless space around the perceiving subject. When stepping into a space that has been atmospherically charged by the presence of persons, the felt body senses the atmosphere and either negotiates the emotions perceived and felt in that very moment or is deeply moved by them (cf. Schmitz 2012: 43). Böhme calls the latter process of being attuned to an atmosphere “experience of ingression”, while the former process of trying to set the perceived atmosphere and the subjective mood in relation to one another is referred to as “experience of discrepancy” (2001: 46-50). It is this experience of space tuned in a way that cannot be brought into accordance with one’s personal disposition that plays an important role in the definition of atmospheres as “quasi-objective emotions”: the fact that I can sense emotions that are neither mine nor anyone else’s eventually proves the autonomous existence of atmospheres (Böhme 2001: 48). However useful Schmitz’s approach to atmospheres is with regard to explaining their affective agency, it also proves highly problematic:

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according to his definition, atmospheres are phenomena free-floating in space, waiting only to be experienced and reflected upon by a human perceiver (cf. Schmitz 2012: 39). Such a purely spatial concept of atmospheres as borderless and yet unlocalizable phenomena dismisses their co-constructed nature and thus cannot be used to explain the coming into existence of aesthetic atmospheres. Böhme presents an approach that accounts for both the importance of material qualities and personal dispositions or feelings in the making of atmospheres. As argued above, atmospheres are in-between phenomena that are neither possessed by things nor deriving from subjective sensing alone, their ontological status is now understood to result from the interplay between the perceived and the perceiver. Atmospheres become the shared reality of human beings and the more-thanhuman world (cf. Böhme 2017: 23). Arguing in favour of a study of ecology which includes aesthetics, Böhme finally proposes a new ecological aesthetics of nature.4 His call for a pragmatically oriented philosophy of nature is grounded on his observation that the environmental crisis is first and foremost a result of a troubled human self-relation (cf. 2002a: 259). In European modernity, the ongoing technologisation of the world has fostered the degradation of nature as an objectified and instrumentalised ‘Other’ of human culture. As Kate Rigby rightly observes, Adorno and Horkheimer already identified “the paradoxical, even self-defeating dimension of the modern conquest of nature” (Rigby 1992: 115), which is based on the fact that it has not as much resulted in liberation and freedom as it has in “man’s denigration of his own body” (Adorno & Horkheimer 1979 [1947]: 233). In turning to aesthetic theory, Böhme hopes to establish a new ecological ethics capable of reaffirming ecological relationality and thus undoing this human self-estrangement. What he finds in modern German aesthetics, however, seems disillusioning at first. Rather than a

4

While Böhme has published numerous articles on aesthetics and nature, some of his key works on the ecological aesthetics of nature include Für eine Ökologische Naturästhetik (1989), Natürlich Natur (1992b), Die Natur vor Uns (2002a) and Essays zur Neuen Ästhetik (2014).

2. There is Something in the Air

theory of sensual experience of nature and the body, Böhme observes that aesthetics has for a long time represented a theory of taste and art criticism: Today’s Aesthetics as a critique of judgement, an extended art of reading, hermeneutics maybe, is anything but what its name implies, namely a theory of sensual perception. It is not concerned with affective understanding, let alone with bodily affectivity. (Böhme 1989: 32, my translation). Such an aesthetics does not enable a rediscovery of “nature for us in that we are animals” (Böhme, 1992a: 92). Therefore, Böhme returns to the pre-Hegelian and pre-Kantian programme of aesthetics of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, which, Böhme argues, was originally concerned with perfecting human sensuousness (cf. Böhme 1989: 8). This rediscovery of the sensuous presence of the body in the here and now seems to be vital for a renewed understanding of both human embeddedness in earthly environs and the environmental crisis, which is why sensuous perception is a key concept in Böhme’s “New Aesthetics”. By drawing on Aristotelian theory of perception, which regards things in their ecstatics or their perceivable presence, Böhme’s aesthetic theory develops a relational view of the world. Such a view attempts a radical break with the nature-culture dichotomy inherent in modern thinking, and instead asks for a more inclusive notion of nature as a socially and affectively constructed ‘Other’ that human beings both inhabit and embody. According to Böhme, atmospheres are central to the aesthetic experience. He notes that the introduction of atmospheres as quasi-objects of perception means that sensuous experience is an experience of things in their bodily, that is, precisely in their spatially extended, presence. […] Atmospheres are the “light” and the “timbre”, the mood which things disseminate around themselves and in which they reciprocally shroud themselves. Atmosphere is what the perceiver bodily steps into and what modifies, from the side of things, his disposition. Atmospheres are the medium, or rather a state of the medium. (Böhme 1992a: 100)

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If it is true that “the primary object of perception is atmospheres” (Böhme 2017: 35, emphasis orig.) and that it is through the perceptual experiences of atmospheres that human beings relate to the world (cf. Böhme 2001: 83), then the concept of atmospheres needs further explanation. It is again Böhme who provides a helpful description of the characteristics of atmospheres. Whereas atmospheric phenomena (e.g. sound, time of the day, season, weather phenomena, or temperature) are “Halbdinge” [half-things] to the extent that their amorphous existence can be documented or measured, atmospheres always carry with them subjective attributions (e.g. the atmosphere of a sad night) and thus combine both, quasi-objective and quasi-subjective qualities (cf. Böhme 2001: 59-60). Consequently, atmospheres are felt presences that come into being in the moment of their perception. The description of atmospheres in spoken language is no less complex than the emotional effect they may have on their perceivers. Böhme proposes five categories of “objectively identifiable elements” (2014 [1995]: 75) which are commonly used in aesthetic practice to generate atmospheres and help define their different manifestations in more detail. The first group he refers to as “synästhetische Charaktere” [synaesthetic characters] (76). Features that are known for directly appealing to the senses, e.g. representations of colours, linguistic and metaphorical synaesthesia, or sensory impressions of light and temperature belong to this category. Then again, signifiers of atmospheres need not necessarily be synaesthetic to have a sensual effect on the perceiver. What Böhme refers to as “social characters” (2017: 62) are examples of how non-synaesthetic qualities can be used to produce atmospheres. Shaped by cultural and social factors, social characters “radiate an atmosphere that belongs to a particular form of life” (62). Social characters can thus be understood as conventionalised signifiers of spatio-temporal phenomena. Other examples are atmospheres of poverty, wealth, and elegance (cf. Böhme 2001: 88-89). If an atmosphere is described by using adjectives of emotion (e.g. sad, serene, severe, depressive etc.), it is determined by “Stimmungen” [characters of mood] (89), whereas the description of the atmosphere of a communicative situation as calm, tense and hostile entails “kom-

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munikative Charaktere” [communicative characters] (90). As a last category of characters of atmospheres, Böhme introduces “Bewegungsanmutungen” (89), which can be roughly translated as “impressions of movement”. These characters play a role as soon as an atmosphere is experienced as being wide, claustrophobic, vast, and oppressive (89). To reflect on atmospheres obviously requires cognition, so more attention needs to be given to language and its affective affordances. Apart from the above mentioned and relatively brief suggestions of how atmospheres become manifest in literary writings, however, Böhme’s New Aesthetics does not take issue on the specific atmospheric potential of literary language. One of the reasons for this is that Böhme is more concerned with the immediate, phenomenal experience of the “actuality” or reality outside of works of art than with the “reality” which is signified in a work of art.5 It is the former in particular that Böhme identifies to be productive for the “training of aesthetic perception” (2001: 179, my translation) in his theoretical framework, which is surely why he focusses so extensively on architectural atmospheres and spatial art. However, the creative engagement with literary worlds bears potential, too, to both experience and address the affective agency of aesthetically reinforced atmospheres, which is why a more nuanced analysis of the dynamics of literary atmospheres seems in order.

2.1.2

Literary Spheres: Text, Contact, and the Reader

Although atmospheres appear to possess a performative or agential dimension, human language partakes in the process of creating aesthetic atmospheres. In aesthetic practice, no other field of work is as productive in – and undoubtedly as dependent on – using the creative potential of linguistic expressions to reinforce atmospheric experiences as literature. Literary atmospheres are, however, a complex and rather abstract matter: I cannot bodily step into the atmospheric environment or architecture provided by books or poems. Literary atmospheres do 5

For Böhme’s differentiation between actuality and reality, see his Aisthetik (2001: 56-58; 118-123), as well as his Atmospheric Architectures (2017: 94-95).

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not emanate from the spatio-temporal presence of a piece of paper in a book, although the materiality of a text can indeed contribute to the intensity of literary atmospheres as we shall see later. I do not sense literary atmospheres when I pick up a book, but only when I read it. Even if I stand in front of the Book of Kells, what I am sensing in that moment are not literary atmospheres but the spatio-temporal atmosphere radiating from this historical artefact. This means that literary atmospheres are a matter of the imagination and become captured in the medium of language. Apparently, affective and cognitive processes overlap in the aesthetic experience of literature. This interplay of language and affect subverts the Cartesian dualism of mind and body. It further points to a relationality between text and reader that in turn corresponds with the narrated relationality between atmospheric environments and perceiving agencies in the diegetic world of literary fiction (cf. Bartosch 2018: 215). Since experiencing literary atmospheres requires affect, directed attention and reading comprehension skills, they are particularly dependent on a responsive dialogue between the perceiver (the reader) and the perceived (text). Although there are certain preferences and settings or atmospheres of reading that may support the effect of specific literary or reading atmospheres, these atmospheres can be experienced everywhere and any time the book through which they are reinforced is opened and read.6 The way in which authors of fiction arrange narrative strategies to create literary atmospheres indeed pre-structures the reading process, although authors cannot fully determine how the reader reacts to intended atmospheres. What follows is that literary atmospheres result from the complex interplay of text, reader, and their contact with each other. In the previous chapter, I have demonstrated that words are essential for reflecting upon atmospheres and their characteristics. If a literary work uses ekphrastic language to present the reader with a description of atmospheres or atmospheric experiences of characters, it calls to 6

I borrow the distinction between the reading of atmospheres and the atmospheres of reading from Chandler (2011: 564).

2. There is Something in the Air

mind what Timothy Morton refers to as “ecomimesis”, that is a form of realist description of the environment which includes a thinking of the surrounding world in conceptual categories (cf. 2007: 32-33). Morton, who differentiates between “weak ecomimesis” as a rhetoric of situatedness that operates “whenever writing evokes an environment” (32), and “strong ecomimesis” as an expression of “the here and now of writing” (33), is ambivalent about the use of the concept of ecomimesis in a “poetics of ambience” (33, emphasis orig.). Although he acknowledges that “[i]t is the job of ecomimesis to convey [a] sense of atmosphere” (34), his “ambient poetics” (32) makes clear that it takes more for the atmospheric environment of a story to be evoked than explicit descriptions and representations of atmospheres. As much as a text does not need to provide a name for an emotion to present and eventually evoke feelings, the text does not necessarily need to make any reference to specific atmospheres to succeed in evoking an affective dimension in which the atmospheric reading experience can take place.7 Whether realist writings really engender an atmospheric reading experience will have to be answered by other, more empirically-oriented studies of literature. It is not my aim to question the usefulness of realist aesthetic or mimesis for literary theory – Dana Philips (2003) already did so in great detail – nor am I arguing against the effectiveness of representations of the ‘real’ world in literary writings. Vivid descriptions of surroundings and the weather are, after all, an important narrative aspect that generate the tone of a literary work (cf. Morton 2007: 44). What I am doing, however, is joining the line of argument of form-oriented critics that the literary work [must be reimagined] as an instrument to be played, where the textual dynamics guide the player to increased interpretive and functional skills […]; and the rupture of the narrative and the consequent reimagining and representation of consciousness not as a continuous stream but as the emergent result of local interactions

7

For a differentiation between presenting and evoking emotions in literary fiction, see Nünning (2017: 33-44).

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between cascading neural processes and subcognitive agents, both biological and mechanical. (Hayles 2008: 84) Those “textual dynamics” include content and formal composition, which are mutually dependent on one another and unfold their atmospheric potential only in the act of reading. From this it follows that thinking and presenting atmospheres is not restricted to either the content or the formal level. Such an opposition of content and form, which traditionally “sets formal properties apart from any connection the work has to ethical, historical, and social issues” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 151), ignores the fact that textual meaning is created in what Derek Attridge calls “performative reading” (152). Attridge’s focus on literature as an event or performance in which words not only mean, but simultaneously “show us what it is to mean” (153), reinforces a noninstrumental and non-generalising approach to literary interpretation. If “[f]orm and meaning […] are part of the same happening” (160), one can hardly reduce interpretation to an analysis of formal properties, even in text-centred approaches. Meaning, Attridge claims, is already taken up in formal features, as they provide the reader with a meaningful experience or “memory” of how, that is in which order and with which effects, they happened to her or him in the process of reading (cf. 2017 [2004]: 157). Arguing that the agency of literary atmospheres can only be expressed by ekphrastic language would therefore disregard their multicausal nature. Rather than merely suggesting or representing meteorological figurations of the atmospheric, literary language invites the reader to co-construct aesthetic atmospheres (Böhme 2014 [1995]: 73). This communication between reader and text renders the aesthetic experience an “intra-active becoming” (Barad 2007: 422, n15), which means that aesthetic effects must be understood as part of a creative exchange rather than a predictable outcome of formal qualities. Elisabeth Grosz argues that [a]rt [and literature] thus captures an element, a fragment, of chaos in the frame and creates or extracts from it not an image or representation, but a sensation or rather a compound or a multiplicity of sensa-

2. There is Something in the Air

tions, not the repetition of sensations already experienced or available beyond or outside the work of art, but those very sensations generated and proliferated only by art. (Grosz 2008: 18) Literary atmospheres are a good example of how literary meaning is always produced in “the mobilization of meanings, or rather of the events of meaning: their sequentiality, interplay, and changing intensity, their patterns of expectation and satisfaction or tension and release, their precision or diffuseness” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 153). Their in-between condition mark atmospheres as present absences, unclosing an atmospheric space between perceiver and perceived. As such, they allow us to translate “absence into imaginary presence in a holistic conception of life that is the ecocultural domain of art” (Zapf 2012: 93). The volatile nature of literary atmospheres means, however, that they cannot be mimetically represented as such, but only through “insignia” of the atmospheric (Böhme 2001: 67): when intending to create an uncanny reading atmosphere, for instance, a writer of fiction needs to know that ‘the uncanny’ is signified by a sense of disorientation and wonder resulting of a failure of recognition or control, as well as by moments of transgression and transcendence, and the entanglement in an obscure and strangely familiar reality. Since the uncanny atmosphere cannot be depicted in concrete images, writers may integrate descriptions of dark and labyrinthine, dream-like places into their writings or confront the reader with abject presences and paranoid beings. Later, I will have something to say about the narrative and formal peculiarities of the uncanny in more detail. But for now, suffice it to say that literary atmospheres can be reinforced through signifiers of the atmospheric, including specific environment-related phenomena and aspects. By modelling inaccessibilities and invisibilities, literary atmospheres induce a sense of disorientation and loss. Their inherent ambiguity thus reveals the limits of readerly and human agency. As crystallisation points of subjective dispositions and material qualities, atmospheres are hybrid agencies which put into question any existing subject-object dualism. In literary atmospheres human and morethan-human dimensions meet and exist in relations to one another

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and it is in the translation of this relationality into human language that we might find ourselves speechless. However, I see a real chance in this difficulty of representing the unrepresentable through literary language for atmospheric writing. When literary atmospheres are something bordering the irrational, transgressing time and space, and being caught in the moment of perception, then they can unfold their full potential when captured not only in words, but also in-between the lines of a book. This contributes to the experience of literary atmospheres in a nowness that is more than a realist description of reality. To provide an atmospheric reading experience, then, a literary text needs to translate the relational dynamics – and ambiguities – inherent in embodied, phenomenological encounters with atmospheres. Spinner proposes that the aesthetic experience of atmospheres in literature is supported when a text conveys a sense of perception, space, corporeality, presence, and resonance as part of the “basic human experience” (2011: 205). Using examples from poetry, theatre, and prose from the 18th to the 20th century, he demonstrates how the interplay of synaesthesia, a sense of space and presence, corporeality and existential experiences, and a resonance between the subject and the environment captures the atmospheric experience and creates literary atmospheres (Spinner 2011: 202-205). Spinner argues that literary synaesthesia is certainly one of the most common stylistic devices used to conjure up an overall atmospheric impression for the reader. Less a verbal image than a diffuse superimposition of semantic elements and sensory impressions (cf. Theilen 2008: 59), literary synaesthesia foregrounds invisibilities, turns absences into imaginary presences and shifts the focus from representation to aisthesis. Research on synaesthesia commonly suggests a differentiation between synaesthesia as a perceptual phenomenon (‘real’ synaesthesia) and synaesthetic metaphor (cf. O’Malley 1957; Harrison & Baron-Cohen 1997). While there is no doubt that literary synaesthesia is expressed via figures of speech, there seems to be a diffuseness to it that renders it different from other metaphorical expressions:

2. There is Something in the Air

We can say, without need for apprehension, that synaesthetic metaphors are indeed metaphors. Moreover, they can work just like most other metaphors (however that actually is!). The problem is, how easily can we say that they are derived in the same manner? For if they are not derived like other metaphors but have a type or extension/variation of truth behind them, do they come to have meaning via the same semantic processes as other metaphors? (Day 1996: Web) Synaesthetic metaphors in literature cannot be described and understood with regard to their decorative function. What is gained from the reading of synaesthesia is more than an image, but precisely Attridge’s notion of a memory of the experience of the words (cf. 2017 [2004]: 157). Indeed, literary synaesthesia is not about making the reader see, taste, smell, touch, or hear things, but highlights a diffuseness that is the actual object of synaesthetic language (cf. Theilen 2008: 57). When the narrator of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), for instance, tells the reader that Robert Kerans, the main protagonist of the novel, “felt the terrible stench of the water-line, the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases” (2008 [1962]: 13), tactile perception takes over the function of the olfactory sense. Here, scents are described to be felt, not smelled. This transformation of one sense into another is characteristic of literary synaesthesia. While it is debatable whether or not the reader can smell or feel the stench that is invoked in this scene, the mental imagery invoked here questions existing beliefs and boundaries of bodily experiences and distracts the reader with a diffuseness that I will be theorising as atmospheric re(lation)ality. As Morton puts it, synaesthesia tries to “disrupt our sense of being centred, located in a specific place, inhabiting ‘the body’ from a central point” (2007: 44). Consequently, literary synaesthesia is one possible means to detect the atmospheric through our readerly response to the literary text. In his more recent work, Spinner broadens the list of characteristics of literary atmospheres by adding the aesthetic effects of word choice and prosody and, thus, more formal elements (2016: 312-313). He

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stresses that literary atmospheres are dependent on the reader’s conception of place and space, which is why texts must be written in a way that allows the reader to imagine the literary environment as if they were themselves inhabiting it (311). Whereas Spinner’s analysis shortly mentions that elements such as prosody and narrative form, too, may contribute to an atmospheric reading experience, his overall conceptualisation of literary atmospheres shows a preference for realist modes of writing the environment.8 He therefore only presents fractions of what literary atmospheres actually are. The atmospheric or “ambience”, according to Morton, “denotes a sense of circumambient, or surrounding, world” (2007: 33, emphasis orig.). In the context of his ambient poetics, Morton argues that “[a]mbience, that which surrounds on both sides, can refer to the margins of a page, the silence before and after music, the frame and walls around a picture” could be applied “as easily to music, sculpture, or performance art as it could to writing” (34). Morton, other than Spinner, adds a more material and performative dimension to the phenomenon of atmospheres. Morton mentions six strategies that may be used to convey a sense of atmosphere: “rendering, the medial, the timbral, the Aeolian, tone, and, most fundamentally, re-mark” (34, emphasis orig.). Rendering, a term that Morton borrows from cinematography, describes the attempt “to simulate reality itself” (35). It implies a sense of immediacy conveyed for example via narrative interruptions such as parenthetical voices that both remind the reader of the fact that they are reading a fictional text 8

By using the example of Robert Walser’s short story “Der Greifensee” (1899), Spinner elaborates on the function of the first-person narrator as a mediator of literary atmospheres (cf. Spinner 2016: 310-313). As a figure of identification for the reader, Spinner claims that the narrator of this story verbally expresses experiences of space, corporeality and aesthetic perception. Thus, atmospheres are evoked through the narrator’s use of indefinite expressions such as numeral adjectives (Spinner 2016: 313). This privileging of first-person narrative for mediating atmosphere is problematic, as it disregards that the mediation of atmospheric experiences can be realised in other forms of writing, too. It also ignores the role of the material quality of the text, the reading environment, and, most importantly, the role of the reader in the evocation of atmospheres.

2. There is Something in the Air

and deceive them into believing that the story itself is interrupted by the voice of the narrator. Rendering is a device that “encourages us to switch off our aesthetic vigilance” (35). The Aeolian, according to Morton, refers to an illusion established by the text itself: that sound and images are created by invisible forces, which continue to convey a “sense of processes” (41) without a subject or an author. Since “it has no obvious source” (41), the Aeolian is about audio-visual impressions that appear “without or despite the narrator’s control” (42). In the same way that the player of the aeolian harp, the wind, remains unseen, we cannot perceive the source of aeolian phenomena in literary writings (42).9 In this respect, the Aeolian effect brings to mind what Buell has said on the function of environmental writings in the context of his “Aesthetics of Relinquishment”: it “has to be able to imagine nonhuman agents as bona fide partners” in order to “raise the question of the validity of the self as the primary focalizing device for both writer and reader” (1995: 179). The Aeolian, which literally describes a state relating to or caused by the action of the wind, also sheds light on the very diffuseness I have already theorised in the section on synaesthesia. It is a reminder of the fact that things can happen without or despite human witness and action. The ability of the Aeolian to sensitise for “blankness” is one of the main reasons why Morton thinks it to be so productive for evoking ambience (cf. (Morton 2007: 43). Another element of Morton’s environmental aesthetics is tone. This narrative aspect is “a matter of quantity, whether of rhythm or imagery” and therefore accounts for “the amplitude of vibrations” (45). At the same time, is refers to “a notion of place”, that is “a zone of ecological

9

The aeolian harp or lyre was a popular instrument in the nineteenth century and came to represent the experience of creative resonance between mind and environmental forces in the Romantic imagination. In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), for instance, the speaker begs the autumnal wind to “make me thy lyre” (2019 [1819]: 398), and thus to be permeated by aeolian powers in order to become a creative energy or a “[w]ild spirit” (397) himself.

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transition” (43). According to Morton, ekphrastic descriptions are particularly useful to imply tone: as ekphrasis holds the reader’s attention to narrative detail, it makes them realise the “space-time continuum in an artwork, to the point at which time comes to a standstill” (43). It slows down the reading experience, which is why it is through tone that “ambience enters the time dimension” (45). Morton equals tone with the mood or Stimmung that emerges from a work of art. It is produced, Morton claims, through the medium or “instrument” of atmosphere (43) and “makes us aware of our ears, just as much as it makes us aware of the atmosphere” (44). While rhythmic language and structure or “musical suspension” (44) are important to generate tone, the focus here is not on the musicality of form, but on the way this musicality disrupts the reader’s sense of time and evokes “a sense of sheer space” (46). His ambient poetics is further defined by what Morton calls “remark”, a term he lends from Derrida. Being “a kind of echo […] that makes us aware that we are in the presence of (significant) marks” (Morton 2007: 48), the re-mark describes the act of framing. It establishes the difference between (subjective) place and (objective) space, background and foreground “out of an undifferentiated ground” (49) and allows the reader to perceive the spaces and voices that lie within the margins. Its purpose is to include the discussion of margins and that which they try to make appear ‘in-between’ into our political and ethical decisions (51). The re-mark does not only question dichotomies, but even more so the very existence of the categories that make up those dichotomies. Morton’s explanation of re-mark remains rather suggestive. It is, however, rather safe to assume that a poetics of ambience, or what he later calls “the poetics of anywhere” (2010: 50), is as productive in offering an experience of relationality, as it breaks with the expectations of the reader (Morton 2002: 53). More than just being about something, atmospheric writing foregrounds a “mode of contact, that turns out to be the content” of the literary work (54, emphasis orig.). The “abstractness and emptiness of space itself”, as invoked by atmospheric writing, “heighten[s] a sense of the radical non-identity of things” (55). This, Morton argues, may finally “deconstruct personhood into ambience, atmosphere, surroundings, dwelling, environment” (54).

2. There is Something in the Air

The narrative peculiarities of literary texts allow atmospheres to be both presented and engendered. Since the text can not only capture literary descriptions of atmospheres but is itself an embodiment of constructed atmospheres, literary writing can make us experience atmospheres in manifold ways. Morton’s functional approach to literary atmospheres, however, raises questions concerning their material embodiment in the text as well as on the role this materiality plays in the atmospheric reading experience. One of the elements of Morton’s ambient poetics that accounts for the material dimension of literary atmospheres is what he calls “the medial” (2007: 36, emphasis orig.). It refers to a strategy meant to foreground the phatic function of a text and the aesthetic medium in which literary writing appears. Morton claims that “[p]hatic statements make us aware of the actual air between us […]. They point out the atmosphere in which the message is transmitted” (37). They function as medial statements that both hold up the illusion that reader and writer inhabit the same place and, even more so, point out “the very medium of the voice or of writing itself” (38). Medial statements, too, can include what Morton refers to as another element of ambient poetics: “the timbral” (39, emphasis orig.). The timbral refers to “sound in its physicality” and is not “about its symbolic meaning” (39). The timbral foregrounds voice itself as “the medium that utters [statements]” while at the same time “pointing out the physicality and materiality of the language” (40). It is not about timbre as such, as sound does not exist but only in mediated form, but about the materiality through and in which it appears. If “a guitar note brings to mind the wood out of which it is made” (40), then the read word, whether read aloud or not, is reminiscent of both the paper on which it is written or printed and the (literary) voice by which it is uttered. Morton’s concept highlights that voice gets into the text not because the narrator or protagonists actually speak but because the reader projects their own concepts of voice onto the text (cf. Jahn 2001: 695). The timbral also highlights the musicality of the form and refers to the prosody of a text. The rendering of the timbral voice of a text is central to the aesthetic experience of literary reading and, so Morton, “one of the strongest ambient effects” (2007: 40). Other than tone, which as we

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have seen is about the quantity of rhythm and imagery, the timbral is a matter of the quality of the ‘tuned’ text. It accounts for the way the reader tunes in to the text and therefore expresses a physical contact between the reader and the read word or text. While Morton sheds light on the sonic contact zone between reader and text, a literary text’s “dimension […] in which communication takes place” (2007: 37) is also opened by the act of reading itself. If literary statements are medial to the extent that they appear in the dimension of the page and on paper, we come into contact with the printed text even before we actually read it: we take it in our hands, touch it, hear the sound of the turning pages as we leaf through the book in which it is published, maybe smell and, though extreme as it may sound, even taste its paper. Sabine Gross, for instance, demonstrates that the act of reading is not only a cognitive performance, but also a sensual-physical activity. Understanding reading as an encounter and interaction between two bodies, that is the body of the reader and the body of the text (cf. Gross 2000: 167), Gross develops a material approach to literature that scrutinises what Genette has conceptualised as “paratext” (1997 [1987]: 1). Gross asks how the staging of a book influences the reading experience and what she calls “Textlust” [lust for reading] (2000: 180). The material appearance of a book, which according to Gross includes size, weight, quality of paper, texture and colour of the cutting edges and the book binding, print space, font, and illustrations, contribute to the overall aesthetic effect of a book and may even cause some sort of memories of or “sensual imprinting” of its reading (167, my translation). This of course raises questions concerning the atmospheric potential of digitalised literary texts as we find them in ebooks or on the internet. Gross argues that technological displays in which literary texts appear violate the reading process as they impinge on the reader’s freedom to choose how to read (e.g. where to begin a book) and where to read. Her critique is targeted specifically at the way in which digitalised texts immobilise the reader. Indeed, we have to admit that it is rather inconvenient to carry around our PC to read a story in the park. Gross, who wrote her essay well before the era of eBooks and smartphone reading apps, could of course not know how easy it would be to read online

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and ‘on-the-go’ in the 21st century. Her pessimistic depiction of new media is therefore in need of re-evaluation. However, her message that the materiality of text contributes to the overall reading experience is still valid. Rather than looking for matter in text, Gross analyses the materiality of text as the actual text. If we connect this line of thought with the concept of reading atmospheres, it may be worth to not only look for atmospheres in a text or as embodied by its materiality, but also to understand atmospheres as affective agencies that can be read as much as they can interact with the reader. This allows us, in turn, to apply the aesthetics of literary atmospheres to all sorts of literary texts – regardless of whether they have been printed or digitalised. As Serenella Iovino, one of the leading figures in materialist ecocritical theory, reminds us [i]n fact, matter is everything but a conceptual abstraction. From the standpoints of environmental thought, ‘materiality’ is the condition through which bodies act with and relate with each other, shaping other bodies; it is the condition whereby the health of living beings is mirrored and mutually determined by the ecological balances or imbalances of their environments or, in other words, the condition by which a toxic place determines toxic bodies and toxic life-styles determine toxic places. (Iovino 2012: 51) The place in which I read, which, as we have learned from Böhme, can have a peculiar atmospheric quality, therefore can have an influence on the atmospheric reading experience.10 Gross is aware of this fact and spends a whole section in her essay on different reading contexts and situations. The variation of the different stagings of reading ranges from “Parallel-Inszenierung” (2000: 172), which is a creation of a reading situation that mirrors the environment and atmospheres reinforced through the narrative, to readings in environments that stand in stark

10

In this context, Hogan reminds us that “our affective response to a situation, real or fictional, is not a response to an isolated moment, but to the entire sequence of events in which that moment is located, whether explicitly or implicitly” (2003: 5).

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contrast to the actual reading atmosphere. While there are approaches to literary education that stress the importance of making students read in atmospheres and environments which correspond to the narrated spaces as well as the overall reading atmosphere of a text (cf. Rupp, Abstiens & Reinsch 2011: 336-337), this must not necessarily support literary understanding. Indeed, it makes a difference for the atmospheric reading experience whether one reads a text “online at home […]; in a Penguin paperback translation while sitting under a tree (which species?); or in a medieval manuscript in a European library wearing cotton gloves to protect the parchment” (Chandler 2011: 563). Moreover, how one reads (e.g. in sitting, lying or standing position, in pyjama or evening gown) contributes as much to the atmospheres of reading as the place in which one reads (cf. Gross 2000: 173-175). However, it is important to note that the choices as to where one reads depend on individual preferences and habits, and that those preferences vary across gender, cultures, text genre, and time periods (cf. Gross 2000: 174-175). Since literary atmospheres only unfold their affective potential or effect in the presence of a reader who reads in a specific atmosphere, they are influenced by the very phenomenon they try to reinforce. Literary atmospheres appear as affective agencies which are produced in the intra-active process of reading. Accordingly, [...] all those qualities that are of interest to the analyst – its unity; its repetitions and variations; its representation of action, space, and time; its meanings – result from the interaction between the work’s formal structure and the mental operations we perform in response to them. (Thompson 1988: 31) This means that the practice of reading goes hand in hand with a practice of embodied cognition, which is a “distribution of the ‘mind’ throughout the body and into the environment” (Keane 2013: 60). To be affected by art means to participate in a feedback loop with one’s surroundings. Understanding aesthetic experience as an embodied experience allows a rethinking of literary atmospheres as a shared corporeal information that affects as much as it is affected by the earthly

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agencies with which it interacts. Donna Haraway’s theorisation of the object of knowledge as a material-semiotic actor within the “apparatus of bodily production” (1988: 591) already helped to rethink the human being as just one actor interweaved in the communication with other agencies. Reading, in this sense, is a dialogic and creative practice, which places the reader in an interactive sort of creative becoming. If we want to conceptualise literary atmospheres as affective agencies and analyse their aesthetic and ethical effect, we need to take into consideration readerly contribution to the co-emergence of atmospheric re(lation)ality. In discussions on the meaning of a literary text, and specifically in those approaches to literary interpretation that insist on the autonomy of the literary work, it is sometimes forgotten that literature is made to be read and owes much of its meaningful existence to the responsive interaction between reader and text. Wolfgang Iser most pervasively accounts for the importance of reception aesthetics in the exploration of literary meaning-making. Arguing that the subject matter or “virtuality” of the literary work lies somewhere in-between the authored text and its readerly realisation, Iser reveals the “dynamic nature” of literary fiction (cf. 1976: 38, my translation). He argues that [t]he work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader – though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. (Iser 1972: 279) When we compare Iser’s definition of this convergence with what we have said about atmospheres, we find that both concepts share an indeterminate quality. I would like to suggest that the convergence of text and reader is accomplished by and realised in literary atmospheres and the atmospheric reading experience they provide. This assumption is

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further supported by what Iser says about the importance of textual gaps in literary meaning-making. Iser claims that [...] with the literary text we can only picture things which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the texts, we should not be able to use our imagination. (Iser 1972: 288) Since literary atmospheres become manifest, among other things, in the gaps or unwritten aspects of a literary text, they are clearly a part of what “stimulates the reader’s creative participation” (Iser 1972: 280). The meaning of a text, in this sense, is realised in its aesthetic and affective affordances which draw the reader into the interpretative process. The reader is forced, Iser says, “to reveal aspects of himself in order to experience a reality which is different from his own” (286-287). However, and as close as the reality of the reading experience is to the experience of the real world, as it, too involves processes of retrospection and anticipation, the individual filling of the gaps does not enable us to hear the wind or feel the cold we are reading of. In this context, Grosz reminds us that [a]rt is not the activation of the perceptions and sensations of the lived body […], but about transforming the lived body into an unlivable power, an unleashed force that transforms the body along with the world. (Grosz 2008: 22) Literary atmospheres are less objects of perception or pre-existing agents, but rather expressions of a creative friction between reader and text, engendering an affective dimension that stimulates the reader to become involved in the literary meaning-making process. According to Vera Nünning, the emotive responses to literature fall into three categories: narrative emotions, biographical emotions, and aesthetic emotions (cf. 2017: 40). Narrative emotions derive from the reader’s response to features such as plot and discourse and can be stimulated by empathy or sympathy with characters or narrators. They can be emotions that readers have not yet experienced in their own life

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“and would not be able to identify in interactive encounters” (49). Biographical emotions are relived emotions which are animated “by certain stimuli [of the work’s formal system] and by retrieving emotional memory” (Schneider 2014: 20). Personal memories are crucial to our response to literature, which is why the same text may be interpreted differently by different readers (cf. Iser 1972: 283). The last group that Nünning refers to as aesthetic emotions are described to be “affective responses to aesthetic features such as style or rhythm of the language” (2017: 40). When a reader affectively reacts to a story, it follows that their reaction must not be understood as the result from an appraisal or experience of a concrete, real life situation but rather of a process of projection of some of their own feelings and experiences onto the characters and the course of the story. By filling in the gaps of the text with preferred twists, turns and outcomes (cf. Hogan 2003: 149), the “readers’ empathy is linked to their own appraisal of the [fictional] situation in question” and informed by their “superior knowledge or [their] own interpretations of the event, which can differ widely from that of a character whose perceptions and thoughts they follow” (Nünning 2017: 44). One must not forget that in the virtual reality of literature we react to verbally mediated descriptions or evocations of emotions and not, as is the case in face-to-face communication, to immediate (facial) expressions, gestures and the tone of voice (cf. Lyytikäinen 2017: 251). Instead, the reader agrees to their role as a ‘shape-shifter’: someone, that is, who continuously takes the perspectives of others while at the same time maintaining a critical distance to them to make sense of the situation one is presented with. Such shape-shifting has influence on the affective agency of literary atmospheres, since the reading process is informed by the reader’ willingness to get involved in a character’s or narrator’s emotions as well as by their reactions to emotive stimuli inherent in storied objects, events and settings. These emotion-triggers are genre-specific and “mediated by moods that relate to genres” (Lyytikäinen 2017: 252). Similarly, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argues that narrative “frames” lead to what she calls “models of coherence”, thereby guiding the reader in the

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interpretative process (1983: 123). Based on mediated concepts of both the real world (such as a sense of continuity, chronology and causality) and literary conventions (such as genre specific patterns) the reader is enabled to form hypotheses concerning what, where and why things happen in a story the way they are depicted (cf. 123-124). The aesthetic response must be understood as an affective complex that is different from other forms of cognitive responses precisely because the reader’s reaction is not prompted by perceptual cues, but “novelistic cues” (Auyoung 2015: 586). On the one hand, these novelistic details invite readers to co-construct literary meaning and involve them in a creative process of cultural becoming (cf. Zapf 2002: 7). On the other hand, they direct the readers’ attention to a world that extends beyond the fictional text, which is why they may evoke the pleasure of recognising implied persons, events, and scenes that feel real. Since there is more to the text than what is implied on the written page, Elaine Auyoung argues that novelistic cues prompt the reader to experience a “wistful sense of longing” (2015: 589). Part of the enjoyment of literature thus lies in the affects enacted in the suggestiveness of literary language: affects, which in turn are “coloured by an awareness that they are being prompted by art” (Attridge 2015: 279). Rather than a subjective force, Pieter Vermeulen argues that literary affect is an “effect of the inability of literary works to fully contain the intensities they irresistibly unleash” (2015: 9). Literary atmospheres become important in this context, as they operate on this kind of “unreadability” (9, emphasis orig.), which seems to be so important to evoke aesthetic affect. Literary atmospheres are invisible energies that keep readers on reading by involving them in the realisation of a poetics that may be called atmospheric re(lation)ality.

2.2

Material Ethics and the Affective Agency of Atmospheres

Why taking atmosphere as a core concept for a literary theory of the aesthetic-affective experience of reality and relationality? What is it that makes atmosphere such a productive and promising candidate for a

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book concerned with elaborating on the role of literature in making accessible the invisibilities of the age of ecological crisis? Is it because the term as such refers to a major geophysical agency in the reality of global warming? Or is the reason to be found in the creative becoming that characterises both its evocation and perception? The answer to these questions lies somewhere in-between. First and foremost, talking of atmosphere in literary theory makes sense because this concept, however vague it may appear, is an integral part of literary writing and reading. It is no accident that generations of students have been asked by their language teachers to ‘describe the atmosphere of the text’. Back then, you were not supposed to describe notions of latency or synaesthesia reinforced through a text, though quoting rhetorical devices or passages that express certain moods or a sense or lack of perception would have certainly awarded you with extra points. No, it was the atmosphere of the text that your teachers were interested in, and it is very likely that you never came across what they really meant with that. A glance at the assessment sheet of a class test I took on George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) in 12th grade, in which I had to describe the atmosphere of the novel’s opening scene, reveals that my former English teacher was interested in narrative strategies evoking the environment in which the story is staged, including descriptions of weather, architecture, natural environs, colours and so forth. Regarding the significance of the term in the earth sciences, it is hardly surprising that literary atmospheres are associated, too, with aspects of weather, climate and the environment. Indeed, this strong environmental dimension makes them particularly interesting for an ecocritical analysis of how the environment is imagined and conceptualised in the making and understanding of what Trexler calls “Anthropocene Fictions” (2015). Numerous writers of fiction have been focussing on the “emotional, aesthetic, and living experience of the Anthropocene” (Trexler 2015: 6) in the past few decades, thus making visible the changing relationships between human beings and the environment. In mediating human responses to and experiences with toxic landscapes, disasters, contemporary waste culture, environmental exploitation and modification, life in the technosphere, encounters and

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interferences with more-than-human organisms in an uncannily familiar reality, literary fiction supports learning to be affected by climate change. In this context, Matthew Kearnes claims that we need “to allow climate change to teach us, to cultivate an affective form of bodily learning together with an Anthropocene subjectivity alive to diverse forms of sense making necessary to reconstruct our own entanglements with processes of environmental change” (2017: 42). The aesthetic-affective dimension opened in the creative act of reading represents one of the many promising ways in which literature is productive in approaching and modelling the somewhat ‘ghostly’ presence of climate change. Being able to cope with the “liminal space between things” (Morton 2014: 269), to accept things as given without falling into reductionist modes of thinking the material world is a competence which needs to be given more attention in the environmental humanities: [e]cological materialism must thus urgently investigate and come to terms with nothingness—unless it wants to be part of the problem, the reduction of things to smaller or more general (and thus more real, because more present) things: the problem that created the conditions in which carbon emissions began to cause human history to crisscross with geological time, the crisscross we now call the Anthropocene. (Morton 2014: 279) To Morton, the awareness of our inability to access the world goes hand in hand with a melancholy that is characteristic for the ecological thought. In his Ecology Without Nature (2007), he argues that we need to be reminded of the pain of living in a reality that is not as bright as nature documentaries, post cards, and other realist modes of environmental representation try to make us believe. He claims that we need to preserve what he refers to as “the dark, depressive quality of life in the shadow of ecological catastrophe” (2007: 187). Art can help us to do so, but only if it evokes what is not necessarily visible to our eye. Therefore, Morton refuses to think the world in the categories of nature and culture, outside and inside. If one is to experience the more-than-human world, so Morton, one will have to be open to what cannot be fully grasped or known (2016: 5). This

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experience of uncanny otherness through which we can explore a sense of our relational, atmospheric implications in the world, so I have been arguing throughout this chapter, can be provided by the atmospheric experience and, in particular, by the atmospheric reading experience. The feeling of relationality resonating with the atmospheric reading experience needs closer attention here. That human and more-thanhuman beings are part of a shared material world is often voiced in the environmental humanities.11 When Donna Haraway, for instance, provocatively claims that she is not a posthumanist, but a “compostist” because “we are all compost, not post-human” (2016: 101-102), she does so to emphasise the inextricable interconnectedness of human and more-than-human forms of life, which she simply refers to as “earthlings” (4). This kind of relational thinking in the humanities which “considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy cycles” (Zapf 2008: 851), has for a large part been put forth by ethical approaches to ecological co-existence. Post-modern philosophers such as Timothy Morton or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have been theorising the complex entanglement of all earthly entities and environments, and thinkers in the emerging field of human-animal studies, too, call for a reconsideration of human and more-than-human agency (cf. Ohrem & Bartosch 2017). At the same time, material approaches to the “literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-thanhuman nature” (Alaimo 2010: 2) have been radically challenging an anthropocentric world view by reconsidering the identity and agency of more-than-human entities. Developing an ethical perspective that accounts for the co-creative becoming of material reality, new materialists ground their theories on a notion of the hyper-connectivity of matter and meaning. What has most recently been called “material ethics” is, according to Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 11

In this context, Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology that “everything is connected to everything else” (1971: 16) is a popular truism that has been circulating in ecocritical theory for quite some time now.

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[…] an ethics based on the co-extensive materiality of human and nonhuman subjects, in a perspective which necessarily implies moral horizontality; it is also an ethics focused on the way discursive constructions and material bodies intra-act in given socio-political contexts. A material ethics is an ethics that considers the levels of embodiment of the concept into material reality, and vice versa, the way matter (as bodies, natures, forms of existence) is conceptualized in and modelled by discursive practices. (Iovino & Oppermann 2012a: 85) As such, a material ethics supports a posthuman perspective of a world in which the lines between the human and the more-than-human are becoming increasingly blurred. The question of how the mutual dependency of different forms of existence affects the co-construction of material reality has been frequently asked in posthuman theory. Concepts such as “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010: 2) or “intra-action” (Barad 2007: 197) have been introduced during the heyday of the material turn to stress a relational understanding of “bodily natures” (Alaimo 2010: 2) or “naturecultures” (Haraway 2008: 15). Karen Barad’s theory of “agential realism” (2007: 132), for instance, theorises a posthuman performativity of material agencies in a way that acknowledges the inseparability of bodies from the phenomena in which they exist.12 Accordingly, material agencies do not pre-exist as such, but rather “emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (Barad 2007: ix). Such a “thinking across bodies” (Alaimo 2010: 2) necessarily calls into question the privileging of human creativity in the shaping of reality, and instead sets it into relation to other forms of agency. Agential realism views the world neither from an anthropocentric nor ecocentric angle; rather, it takes a closer look at the “intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering” (Barad 2007: 381, emphasis added). This does not mean, however, that posthuman perspectives on reality disregard the strong human factor that has contributed to the ecological

12

I will comment further on Barad’s agential realist take on the formation of matter, in particular with regard to her new materialist approach to quantum physics’ interpretation of “in/determinacy” (Barad 2012: 8) in my Conclusion.

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crisis. There is no doubt that human actions have been altering planetary ecosystems, but we should be more critical about the pursuit to manipulate and control the material environment, which is, after all, “a realm of often incalculable, interconnected agencies” (Alaimo 2010: 21). One of the implications is that human agency needs to be imagined “over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (Chakrabarty 2012: 1). When posthumanist visionaries argue in favour of an agential dimension of more-than-human objects or forces, they do not imply that those actants are endowed with human intentionality or subjectivity (Barad 2003: 827). Rather, more-than-human matter is described to possess a narrative agency, which expresses its ability to articulate itself “by way of stories that co-emerge with the human in their differential intelligibility” (Iovino 2015: 82, emphasis orig.). Agency, in this context, is not something someone or something possesses, but rather a dynamic force field in which the stories embodied by the different interacting forces cooperatively compose meaning and reality. The concepts of matter as a “storied matter” and agency as a “narrative agency” have been crucial to recent studies of material ecocriticism (cf. Iovino 2015: 79). Analysing both the re-presentation of more-than-human matter in narrative texts and matter as “a site of narrativity” (Iovino & Oppermann 2012a: 83, emphasis orig.), material ecocriticism can be said to trace the performative agency of materiality in its textual and narrative dimensions. In doing so, it follows Stacy Alaimo’s demand that “ecocriticism must develop modes of analysis that do not continue to emphasize the ‘disjunction between text and world’ […] but instead reveal the environmental traces within all texts” (2010: 8). Narrative texts, in this sense, are not reduced to literary writings but include all stories embodied by material agencies. Seen from this point of view, a book, for instance, can be perceived as a story in a story in a story. The literary story we ultimately read carries with it a publishing story which, as Clayton Childress shows in his Under the Cover (2017), is a tale about how the intra-action of different actants of the fields of creation, production and reception gives birth to a book (cf. Childress 2017: 12). When we look at the pages, however, what we also see is a

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story of a dead tree, which in turn, confronts us with the ecosystem this tree once was a part of and so on and so forth.13 This reading into the “thick of things”, Iovino claims, enables us to understand how “narrative agency and human creativity integrate each other producing new and more complex levels of reality” (2015: 82). Levels of reality which, after all, are filled with liminal spaces not necessarily visible to the eye, but existing still (cf. Morton 2014: 276). New materialists’ sensitivity to relationalities thus “depends upon a collective ability to move toward atmospheric intricateness […] and toward the ongoing learning that each new distinction/relation provides” (Keane 2013: 60, emphasis orig.). The process of what Jondi Keane describes as “becoming atmospheric” (61) plays a decisive role in engaging us with our bodily interrelatedness with more-than-human life and can be triggered by the embodied cognition of modes of relation.14 The concept of atmospheres, whether physical, social or aesthetic, is a promising one in this context, as atmospheres present the outcome of complex processes of interaction and interrelation between two or more bodies. The physical atmosphere surrounding our planet, for instance, does not represent either culture or nature. It is neither a conventionalised signifier for pristine nature nor can it be defined without reference to the human imprint on it. A similar relational dynamism is expressed by social and aesthetic atmospheres, as they, too, represent ecological becomings that react to as much as they are acted upon by human bodies (cf. Morton 2014: 274). 13

14

In a similar fashion, Morton tells the story of a table and what we can learn from coming to terms “with the always already of actually existing, coexisting beings” (2014: 275). According to Keane, “[b]ecoming atmospheric occurs when the readymade object transforms into the ready-to-be-made event already moving toward the extended life of cognition where material and thought share events but not extents. This ready-to-be-made event no longer belongs to an abstract space but constitute a place in which the internal movements build up momentum sufficient to initiate action (make distinctions that produce relation between material forms) and initiate change (reontextualize distinctions)” (2013: 61, emphasis orig.).

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It is this responsive dialogue between two or more material forms that is central to the evocation of any atmosphere, and that is of particular importance in literary experiences. Conceptualised as phenomena that bring into tension realities in- and outside of a given text, literary atmospheres draw attention to the “physical architecture” (Morton 2014: 271) in which they appear, thus carrying with them a highly environmental aspect. With the help of the insights of material ecocriticism, which, as we have learned, not only looks for matter in text but, most importantly, analyses matter as text, we can theorise literary atmospheres as a dynamic play of indeterminacy or an enactment of affective agency. Literary atmospheres are entangled in a web of narratives and meanings and draw their agency from the stories and affects they generate in relation to other material forms and their stories and affects that, in turn, mirror and structure reality (cf. Iovino & Oppermann 2012b: 462). They do not pre-exist the reading act but must be understood as co-creatively enacted experiences of tensions or frictions between text and reader. To understand how these atmospheric frictions as well as the different possible affects that they may produce come into being, let us have a look once again at Iser’s approach to the production of literary affect. Iser describes how the reading subject is always tasked to form “mental images” in relation to a given text precisely “because the ‘schematized aspects’ of the text only offer us knowledge of the conditions under which the imagery object is to be produced” (1980 [1978]: 137). These images fill in the gaps that, according to Iser, every literary text is leaving for us to propel our imagination, absorbing the reader “into what he himself has been made to produce through the image; he cannot help being affected by his own production” (140). It is in this “flight” into mental images coloured by the reader that Iser finally identifies in how far literary texts can “take us out of our own given reality” (140). This immersion into specific imaginaries of a story world or what Iser refers to as “irrealization” (140) is, however, not an act of escapism that “wean[s] us away from realities” (1987: 390). To the contrary, this literary illusion-making is an ambivalent act that forces us to constantly negotiate between our “involvement in and observation

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of those illusions” (392), thus bringing the reality outside of the text in fruitful tension with the images, illusions or expectations built on the basis of a given text. Accoding to Iser, then, [t]he significance of this process lies in the fact that image-building eliminates the subject-object division essential for all perception, so that when we ‘awaken’ to the real world, this division seems all the more accentuated. Suddenly we find ourselves detached from our world, to which we are inextricably tied, and able to perceive it as an object. And even if this detachment is momentary, it may enable us to apply the knowledge we have gained by figuring out the multiple references of the linguistic signs, so that we can view our own world as a thing ‘freshly understood’. (1980 [1978]: 140) This “awakening” is, however, less a revelatory moment felt after having finished a book than it is an act of aesthetic recreation constantly interrupting the flow of the reader (cf. Iser 1987: 393). It is while reading already that we possibly can experience the productive tensions between the different contexts and realities that are set into relation with each other by the reading subject. We are inside as much as outside of the text all the time, entangled with it through our affective, atmospheric engagement with the story (cf. Caracciolo 2020: 16). Making connections and bridging gaps by co-creating literary atmospheres thus seems to represent one possibility to experience “the multiplicity of players involved in this big pattern of material-discursive agencies” (Iovino & Oppermann 2012a: 87). The complex interplay of readerly creativity, disposition and the narrative agency of the text indeed leads to a kind of “dialectical tutoring”: “literature”, so argues James Wood, “makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life” (2009: 53). And reading forms of life – whether human or more-than-human – and coming to terms with our intra-active existence in a shared reality eventually lies at the heart of material ecocriticism. Rather than measuring or preaching the impact of literature on the attitudes of readers, which is indeed a practice that runs the risk of

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being ridiculed for regarding literature as an eco-political tool, material ecocriticism is a discipline that makes us rethink contemporary and ossified views of nature-culture relations, and that repositions our existence in relation to other things, beings, and forces through the thorough investigation of literary experiences of relationality. This means that the ecocritical potential of literature is not necessarily to be found in works of fiction which more or less openly advocate life in harmony with nature or environmental action – to the contrary: a moralising undertone in fictional writings about the environmental crisis is likely to remain ineffective in pedagogical terms (cf. Kluwick 2014: 504). Instead of seeking to elaborate on the activist potential of literature, ecocriticism could benefit from evaluating the ecocritical efficacy of literature with regard to other criteria. The agency of literature, according to Zapf, […] consists not in the correct representation of some extraliterary reality or ecocentric ideology but in the fact that literature itself, precisely by its aestheticizing transgression of immediate referentiality, becomes an ecological force-field within culture, a subversive yet regenerative semiotic energy which, though emerging from and responding to a given sociohistorical situation, still gains relative independence as it unfolds the counter-discursive potential of the imagination in the symbolic act of reconnecting abstract cultural realities to concrete life processes. (2001: 88) Literary texts are productive in bringing into view the norms, contradictions, and hierarchies that make up reality by lending voice to the neglected agencies of our present time. Translating visible and invisible material realities, literature encourages the reading – and hearing – of the ‘Other’ of culture, thus fostering notions of inhabitation and “anotherness” (Murphy 1998: 40). The experiences of “morphing” and “scaling”, both of which Bartosch identifies to be central for the aesthetic affect or effect provided by literature (cf. 2017a: 36), exemplify why it is literary fiction in particular which offers such a promising basis for experiencing our troubled relationship with the more-than-human word. Scaling, which describes the thinking-together of “the individual, the national (or communal) and the global dimension” (44), supports Ur-

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sula Heise’s demand that ecocriticism needs “to point to ways of imagining […] localism from a globalist environmental perspective” (2008: 89). It is implemented by transgressions of time and place, which happen frequently in works of literary fiction and, at the same time, are harmonised by the literary form (cf. Bartosch 2017a: 45). Similarly, “morphing” is triggered by a transgression of one’s own perspective. This “thinking-with other, even nonhuman, characters, and assuming another’s point of view and feeling” (42), according to Bartosch, engenders a relational experience between the reader and the text’s focaliser. The reading of more-than-human perspectives further brings with it a conflict which Timo Maran identifies to lie in the “semiotization of matter”: every time literature narrates matter, syntactic elements and thus human codes are used to “transform matter according to our human perceptions and understandings” (2014: 142). If we take seriously one of new materialism’s insights that “[t]he world is not raw material […] for humanization” (Haraway 1991: 198) but an actor itself, then it may at first appear that we run into serious difficulties if we dare to anthropomorphise the more-than-human environment in and outside of literary fiction. Of course, our way of perceiving and reading the world from a human perspective is unavoidable, since we cannot but constantly humanise things because we are essentially human. It becomes a problem, however, if this argument is used to disregard matter’s own semiotic potential. Just because matter does not use the narrative logic of human signs and forms to articulate itself, researchers in biosemiotics argue, this does not mean that it does not possess a form of intelligibility.15 Rather than trying to abandon the human gaze on planetary reality, ecocritical theory must seek to enhance it with “a sense of what it means to be human in the anthropocene” (Vermeulen 2015: 152). While we must be attentive to the anthropocentrism implied by the depiction of reality and material agencies in human language, litera15

The biosemitician Wendy Wheeler notes, for instance, that words and discourse are only “one aspect of semiotic communication amongst other, unconscious and ‘gestural’, ones” (2006: 17).

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ture nevertheless provides a contact zone of affect and interpretation in which we can witness what it means to be part of a co-creative process of meaning-making. Literary atmospheres draw the reader into and become articulated in the intra-active process of reading. As shifting force fields that affect as much as they are affected by the reader, literary atmospheres make us experience the creative construction of the diegetic reality. This, in turn, fosters a more general sense of relationality that may impact the ways in which the material reality is perceived. As world, text, and reader enrich one another, they get caught in a looplike relationship. Re(lation)ality, a paranomasia in which the words reality and relationality collapse into each other, captures this very notion of ambiguity and in-betweenness expressed by and experienced in literary atmospheres. The fact that literary atmospheres dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, outside and inside (the text), visibilities and invisibilities just to leave us with a sense of being part of a larger project of meaning making has something uncanny about it. “Isn’t this the essence of ecological awareness?” Morton asks, and concludes that [t]here is something sinister about discovering the mesh. It’s as if there is something else – someone else, even – but the more we look, the less sure we are. It’s uncanny: there is something there, and there isn’t. […] The uncanny stirs because total interconnectedness enables it. (2010: 53) A poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality reveals the “transience of our corporeal materiality” (Estok 2014: 131), or, to put it in Alaimo’s words, our “trans-corporeality” (2010: 2) and redirects our attention to the repressed awareness of our bodily exposure to and immersion in appallingly real ecological cycles. To invoke a notion of atmospheric re(lation)ality is therefore to experience both the harmony and the horror of planetary interconnectedness. While literary atmospheres can take on many different forms, it is therefore hardly surprising that their affective agency is more often defined in terms of an uncanny effect on readers.

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Approaching literary atmospheres with a darkened version of the ecological thought as proposed for instance by Morton’s concept of “dark ecology” (2016: 5), allows us to evaluate what literary expressions of the uncanny can tell us about our relationship with the more-than-human world.16 In the chapters to follow, I will turn to the narrative constructions of a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality to show in how far imaginaries of our uncanny entanglement with the more-than-human world can be seen as productive in challenging the ways in which we think about human agency. Contemporary ecofiction invites us, I will argue, to be affected by an uneasy sense of our immersion in and dependency on invisible systems and cycles. As I will show, the example of Gothic modes of writing the environment proves to be particularly fruitful to outline the uncanny relational aesthetics and affective agency of literary atmospheres. A mode of writing for which, after all, “atmosphere is the all-important thing” (Lovecraft 1973 [1927]: 16).

2.3

Gothic Nature and Uncanny Atmospheres

The ambiguous relationship between human beings and the more-thanhuman environment has spawned multiple narratives of uncanny nature from the heyday of the Gothic novel in the late 18th century to the present day. In times of uncertainty in particular the Gothic mode returns in literature and culture to narrate and comment on sociopolitical tensions and conflicts. Given that “strangeness, the uncanny nature of nature, abounds in the Anthropocene” (Gan et al. 2017: 8, emphasis orig.), the current times seem to provide a fertile ground for dark imaginations of planetary presents and futures, indeed. 16

First explored by Morton in his Ecology Without Nature (2007) and later picked up again in his Dark Ecology (2016), Morton loosely defines dark ecology as the “dark-depressing”, “dark-uncanny”, and “dark-sweet” dimension of ecological awareness (cf. 2016: 5). As such, it gives voice to the “[w]eird weirdness” of living in loop-formed interrelationships with other beings within “a universe of finitude and fragility, a world in which objects are suffused with and surrounded by mysterious hermeneutical clouds of unknowing” (Morton 2016: 6).

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It may come as no surprise, then, that Gothic rhetoric is omnipresent in the environmental humanities and beyond: in the face of more and more environment-related disasters, life is sometimes imagined to “persists in the shadow of mass death” (Gan et al: 8, emphasis orig.). In a similar vein, Timothy Morton claims that the ecological thought has a depressive quality expressed in what he calls “a ‘goth’ assertion of the […] queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world” (Morton 2007: 184-185). Indeed, the Gothic provides a perfect lens through which we can apprehend our exposure to the seemingly hidden fears and anxieties associated with ecological reality. As a mode which, according to Jerrold Hogle, demonstrates “that oppositions of all kinds cannot maintain their separations, that each ‘lesser term’ is contained in its counterpart and that difference really arises by standing against and relating to interdependency” (2002: 11, emphasis orig.), the Gothic subverts oppositions between self and other, human and non-human, and culture and nature. By negotiating fears of the unknown as well as by questioning what we think we know to be true, it allows us to redefine ourselves in relation to more-than-human agencies and figurations, while, at the same time, addressing changing anxieties associated with otherness. Since the Gothic, as Allan Lloyd-Smith claims, “is about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present” (2004: 1), it derives much of its effectiveness from bringing culturally encoded ambivalences and sources of wonder and fear back to the consciousness of its readers. Throughout the last three centuries, it has therefore been used to give voice to uncertainties about political, societal, and technological developments in times of transition and radical change (cf. Hurley 2002: 194). The Gothic, as a mode, can be said to act upon anxieties of human violence and self-alienation as expressed in political and technological revolutions, colonialism, wars, disasters, and religious and societal oppressions.17 17

For an overview of the historical and cultural events which seem to have been feeding Gothic narratives in the European and American Gothic tradition, see Smith (2013).

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By working through personal dilemmas resulting from the conflict between existing cultural norms and the secret longings and buried memories of the self, the Gothic is a framework for destabilising conceptions of cultural and personal identity. Thus, it allows us to see how texts respond to the presents within which they were created (cf. Smith 2013: 7). Repeatedly exposing protagonists to supernatural forces and monstrous figures in dark and desolate environments and places such as forests, graveyards, castles, and hidden chambers, the Gothic juxtaposes and crosses the boundaries of reality. In doing so, the Gothic reality mostly follows the physical laws of the empirical world. Elements of the supernatural or the fantastic can only be found within monstrous or spectral agencies or marvellous events, which then appear as abnormalities in a world similar to the non-fictional world of the reader. Introducing liminal spaces, the Gothic evokes “the inexpressible, the unspeakable, the inexplicable” (Yang & Healey 2016: 4) and thus opens up a diffuse sphere in which changing cultural ambivalences become manifest. This characteristic diffuseness of Gothic spaces and figures is congruent with the Gothic mode itself. As it draws on other genres as much as it influences them, the Gothic is a transgressive and permeable aesthetic category. Understood as a mode rather than a genre, we can identify Gothic imaginations in- and outside of the genre of Gothic fiction (cf. Hillard 2009: 689). This indeterminacy of the Gothic mode goes hand in hand with a tendency to deal with whatever lies beyond our rational understanding. Therefore, it may come as no surprise that the Gothic mode is concerned with reinforcing a sense of the uncanny. In psychology, the phenomenon of the uncanny has been extensively discussed with regards to feelings of fear and disorientation. Whereas Ernst Jentsch argued that a situation becomes uncanny when the subject cannot be certain about the inanimateness of an object or the aliveness of living things (Jentsch 1906: 197), Sigmund Freud approached the uncanny by explaining that it is triggered by the return of the repressed, i.e. infantile complexes that find their way back into individual consciousness. In both theories, a situational alienation effect which puts the individual sense of reality into question is central to the psycholog-

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ical concept of the uncanny. Accordingly, we feel frightened when that which seems most real and ordinary to us suddenly reveals new and unexpected aspects or qualities. Literary writings make extensive use of this horror of ‘not feeling at home’ in a specific place or situation any longer by locating the uncanny in a strangely alive world, a world which ultimately resists any attempt at domesticating it. In texts that employ the uncanny, this means that the surrounding world in which protagonists live, their oikos or home, is the kind of defamiliarised place that according to Freud terrifies not with a sudden strangeness, but with “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (2003 [1919]: 148). This return of the repressed triggers an experience of the strangely familiar, a déjà-vulike feeling which Freud calls das Unheimliche or “the uncanny” (134). According to the traditional understanding of the uncanny in psychology, much of the “fear and dread” (123) aroused by the uncanny is attributable to a paradoxical reversion of the homely or “heimlich” to its opposite, the unhomely or “unheimlich” (132). However, what is central to the uncanny and what has been disregarded by Jentsch and Freud is its atmospheric condition. The phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs claims that the uncanny is a special variation of space-filling atmospheres (cf. Fuchs 2011: 170). According to Fuchs, surroundings are always atmospherically charged and invite emotional and physical reactions and responses of those who are bodily present in them (Fuchs 2000: 194). Similar to Böhme, Fuchs highlights the role of subjective as well as environmental qualities for triggering atmospheres, which then enforce their affective tinge upon whoever perceives them. Therefore, atmospheres appear as what Fuchs calls “Resonanzphänomene” [phenomena of resonance] (2000: 239, emphasis orig.). As such, they diffuse their affective qualities and thus work towards attuning or immersing the perceiver into their specific ambience. Böhme argues that since an auratic immersion alone must not necessarily lead to a recognition of the atmosphere in which one finds oneself, the experience of atmospheric immersion or “ingression” is always accompanied by an experience of “discrepancy” (cf. Böhme 2000: 15). In that the perceiver senses an abrupt change

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of atmosphere via stepping into it from inside another one, they are compelled to reflect on how the prevailing atmosphere can be brought into accordance with their personal disposition. The negotiation of ingressive and contrastive experiences of “spheres of presence” (Böhme 2014 [1995]: 33, my translation) that are created in our being in or with them ultimately allows us to reflect on the specific atmospheres that we seem to be sensing. The uncanny, which according to Hermann Schmitz is characterised by a particularly persistent and intrusive suggestion of unease (cf. 1969: 280-285), is a good example of this disruptive potential of atmospheres. The uncanny comes into existence when familiar surroundings take on ambivalent characteristics and leave behind considerable uncertainty as to what exactly is causing this sudden situational estrangement. Instead of being able to clearly identify the source of diffuseness, one is left with an all-encompassing feeling of agitation. According to Schmitz, this unsettling feeling imposes itself on the space of lived experience of the perceiver until their surroundings are experienced as confining and dreadful (cf. 1964: 283). Familiar patterns in and relations to the surroundings suddenly appear strange to the perceiver, which is why the uncanny, understood as a specific form of the atmospheric, disturbs subjective orientation. Since it blurs the boundaries between the supernatural and the natural, and the more-than-human and the human, the uncanny always induces a sense of loss: loss of orientation, loss of control, loss of autonomy, or, put more generally, loss of power. Literary texts which excessively deploy the uncanny to evoke atmospheres of disorientation and ambivalence experiment with this human fear of loss. Other than is the case with life-threatening situations of fear, in which the sudden feeling of powerlessness seems to isolate the perceiver from their surroundings (cf. Schmitz 1964: 198), literary encounters with the uncanny emphasise the relational component inherent in moments of situational and environmental obscurity. The uncanny, in this sense, supports the evocation of atmospheres which haunt as much as they incite wonder in readers. Thus, the uncanny goes hand in hand with dark or Gothic imaginations of the natural world and humanity’s ambivalent position in and relationship with it. As “immanent

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portents of the past and its other history that exist in a parallel reality juxtaposed to the inscripted history of the present culture” (Mogen, Sanders & Karpinski 1993: 17), Gothic environments are the stage on which the dark underside of culture unfolds. Ranging from fears concerning the disconnection from pristine nature in the long nineteenthcentury Gothic novel to the discomfort of encountering the new, other world as depicted in literary works of the American Renaissance and to more modern anxieties of an imminent environmental catastrophe, Gothic environments play an important role in commenting on environment-related anxieties of their respective cultures and presents. They compel the reader to face a more-than-human world that acts more autonomous than many of us would like to believe and thus prove productive in both, narratives of loss of control over ‘nature’ and narratives which put notions of our affective and embodied relational being in the world front and centre. At the same time, however, imaginations of Gothic environments demonstrate that the familiar independence of nature from mankind, its alleged otherness, cannot be identified in a world where the human imprint seems to be omnipresent. What is staring back at protagonists who encounter Gothic environments is not necessarily some transcendental idea of nature as other than human, but a defamiliarised version of the anthropogenic as an agency that is as determined by its surroundings as it is determining it (cf. Crosby 2014: 518). This reflection of the self in more-than-human beings and vice versa, as demonstrated for instance in more recent Gothic depictions of anthropomorphised surroundings, bewildered or intoxicated persons, or monstrous figures or vegetation, invokes a very specific sense of the uncanny: the ecological or environmental uncanny (cf. Giggs 2010: 201; Ghosh 2016). According to Giggs’, this ecological reversion of the uncanny “is perhaps best encapsulated as the experience of ourselves as foreign bodies” (2010: 3). In this sense, the uncanny is a reminder of our “intimate connection” with the more-than-human world (cf. Ghosh 2016: 32-33). This mutual relationship and the fears associated with it become of special interest in the present day, as the frequency and magnitude of environment-re-

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lated events seem to make us increasingly aware of the dramatic impact of human action on ecosystemic relationships. To understand what makes uncanny and at times even apocalyptic imaginations of the environment as we find them in contemporary literary productions possible, however, we first need to have a closer look at the long nineteenth-century aesthetic of nature and its Gothic revision thereafter. The second half of the eighteenth century saw a shift in looking at the material world which undoubtedly had a great influence on the construction of what we now call nature. While an instrumental view on nature as both an object of scientific interest and an agricultural resource base dominated the enlightened thought of the beginning the century, an unprecedented appreciation of the intrinsic value of nature marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in Europe. Closely related to this shift from an interest in understanding and ultimately controlling the power of nature for the benefit of mankind to a disinterestedness that valued instead the aesthetic experience provided by wild nature is a new understanding of human beings’ relation to the material world. Before the Industrial Revolution could lead to a dominance of mankind over material processes, ‘nature’ was the place of the struggle for survival. It was not until scientific and technological developments provided human beings a certain autonomy that the concept of nature as a menacing opponent appeared yet again. The visible consequences of processes such as urbanisation triggered a nostalgic longing for untouched and idyllic landscapes, which came to be increasingly expressed in aesthetic responses to the Industrial Revolution (cf. Breuer 2012: 22). As Rolf Breuer remarks, one of the most apparent movements in the direction of a more liberal view on the environment can be seen in the development of the English landscape garden in the eighteenth century (cf. Breuer 2012: 23). Other than the symmetrically structured formal gardens, which dominated garden art from the late Middle Ages to the Baroque Period, English landscape gardens display an idealised view on wild landscapes. Plants and trees were no longer tamed and forced into geometrical forms, but rather arranged in a way that allowed them to unfold ‘naturally’. This imitation of untouched nature in the English landscape garden not only brings to

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the forefront a new concept of the beautiful in the context of landscape aesthetics, but also suggests a rediscovered sympathy for the environment. Natural environments no longer frighten, but, to the contrary, are celebrated for their purity and primitiveness.18 In art and literature of the 17th and 18th century this tendency to idealise the affective aesthetics of rural places is reflected in the pastoral mode. Reaching from depictions of landscape gardens to the wilds of fields, lawns and forests, the literary mode of the pastoral is expressed in “any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban” (Gifford 1999: 2). The growing sense of human beings’ isolation from nature fuelled pre-modern views of ‘nature’ as a “sacred book written by God” (Bate 2001 [2000]: 30), which is certainly why visions of the pastoral idyll were so heavily dominated by Christian depictions of the herdsman’s relationship to his flock. No longer interested in ideal, humanised landscapes which are supposed to serve human needs, such Arcadian visions of the harmonic interdependence between mankind and the more-than-human environment shifted the focus from fears of losing control over nature to fears of human estrangement from that very nature. In this context, ‘nature’ no longer functioned as a purely aesthetic object or dangerous opponent but was now seen as an interactive force that affects human sensibilities. In this context Donald Worster claims that although “[t]he term ‘ecology’ did not appear until 1866”, […] the idea of ecology is much older than the name. Its modern history begins in the eighteenth century, when it emerged as a more comprehensive way of looking at the earth’s fabric of life: a point of view that sought to describe all of the living organisms of the earth as an interacting whole. (1994: x, emphasis orig.) Alongside the moralised idea of landscape as a primeval state of being to which, as Rousseau famously claimed in his “Discourse on the

18

See also Hunt & Willis (1988) for a more detailed discussion of English landscape and garden aesthetics of the 17th-19th century.

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Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men”, society should return (cf. 1997 [1755]: 203-204), there suddenly existed a more pantheistic world view that stressed the role of the environment in shaping the human body and consciousness. This view ultimately paved the way for theories of evolution at the dawn of the 19th century (cf. Lehmann 2017: 123-124). This example already hints at the contradictory views on the more-than-human world at that time. These contradictions become even more accentuated when looking at the intersectionality of pastoral and sublime, and ecophilic and ecophobic imaginations of the environment in literary writings of the 18th century. Next to literary attempts to represent ‘nature’ as it is, that is, in a Romantic sense, as a pure and lost golden age (cf. Bate 2001 [2000]: 2830), works were written that aimed at evocating rather than just representing place with language. Decades before a notion of what Jonathan Bate refers to as “Romantic Ecology” reached a peak in the almost impressionist works of William Wordsworth (cf. Bate 1991), the pioneers of what has come to be known as the Gothic mode had already recognised the importance of sublime, beautiful, and picturesque depictions of wild nature to evoke certain affects in their readership. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) extended the imagination of picturesque landscapes by a more darkened trope, which introduced readers of the Gothic novel to descriptions of wild landscapes filled with sublime encounters. Discussing the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime in his aesthetic theory, Burke comes to the conclusion that [f]or sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. (1990 [1757]: 113)

2. There is Something in the Air

It is in notions of darkness, confusion and uncertainty found and sensed in nature that Burke finally traces “a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear and determinate” (58). In contrast to the beautiful, which excites the desirable passion of love, the sublime thrives on an ambivalent experience of pain and pleasure. The source of the Burkean sublime are terrible objects which, instead of causing immediate harm, affect their perceiver from a safe distance. What is triggering the sublime is not a direct exposure to violence, but rather an inkling of pain and danger as is excited by the apprehension of death. As a result, the sublime produces “a sort of delightful horror” (123), a feeling of astonishment and terror that is, after all, “the ruling principle of the sublime” (54). It is no coincidence, then, that authors such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe applied Burke’s list of elements of the sublime, including terror, obscurity, power, and vastness, to their literary writings to evoke what Burke termed “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (36) in their readers. Long nineteenthcentury Gothic novelists, for instance, integrated evocations of landscapes and their sublime effect on characters into their texts to set the characteristic tone of the Gothic mode. According to Alice Davenport, Ann Radcliffe in particular knew how to experiment with “the dramatic contrast of the sublime and the beautiful to create picturesqueness” (2016 [1794]: 79). In Radcliffe’s Gothic Romances of the 1790s outdoor spaces do not only take over a decorative function as picturesque landscapes through which characters move but, most importantly, have a specific purpose for the heroines and the plot. To what extent the environment undermines her characters’ moral and emotional dispositions and thus operates on the narrative tension built by the storyline, may be best exemplified by Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). While benevolent characters like Emily, her loving father Monsieur St. Aubert or her admirer Valancourt find pleasure in sublime nature and, moreover, are inspired by grand scenes “with a finer spirit, and […] an indescribable complacency” (Radcliffe 2009 [1794]: 93), Emily’s coldhearted relatives Madame Cheron and Monsieur Quesnel remain insensitive to natural beauties. Living in an estate surrounded by “square

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parterres, and artificial fountains” (249), Madame Cheron, for instance, seems to prefer tamed and ordered landscapes over wild nature. Her indifference towards landscape values and her ecophobic tendencies mirror her ignorant treatment of her niece Emily, who is later forced to live with Madame Cheron. Besides echoing her characters’ morality and their connection to God and nature, Radcliffe’s landscape aesthetics is also used to create tension in the story’s characters, plot and settings. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator recounts Emily’s sheltered childhood in La Vallé, where her father’s moral instruction leads her to develop an aesthetic sensibility as well as a strong appreciation of natural landscapes. The idyllic picture of this ideal family life in “pastoral simplicity” (9) is accompanied by detailed descriptions of beautiful and sunny landscape scenes. When the death of Emily’s mother and a lethal illness of her father eventually tear the family apart, however, the landscape suddenly darkens: […] she walked into the garden, and down to the terrace, that overhung the river. The sun was set; but, under the dark branches of the almond trees, was seen the saffron glow of the west, spreading beyond the twilight of middle air. The bat flitted silently by; and, now and then, the mourning note of the nightingale was heard. (200-201) The changes in Emily’s life and disposition resonate with a change in the description of her surroundings. The serene atmosphere of the beginning of the novel gives way to a more desolate one, which continues to expand as the story unfolds. Emily’s journey away from her childhood home into the hostile walls of the castle of her aunt’s husband Signor Montoni is literally a journey from light into darkness. While the nature loving Emily still finds solace even in the gloomiest environments, her encounters with the sublime seem to darken with every step she takes in the direction of Udolpho. Arriving at the castle at dawn, when “the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain” (462), Emily experiences a feeling of the numinous. As the nightfall obscures her view of the environment, her mind gives in to a series of terrifying encounters bordering the supernatural. As soon as daylight arrives

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again, however, “the glooms of superstition” (492) disappear into thin air. The same scene which filled Emily’s mind with terrific images only a few hours ago, is now presented in a more hopeful and picturesque light: Nearer, towards the west, opened the mountain-vista, which Emily had viewed with such sublime emotion, on her approach to the castle: a thin dusky vapour, that rose from the valley, overspread its features with a sweet obscurity. As this ascended and caught the sun-beams, it kindled into a crimson tint, and touched with exquisite beauty into the words and cliffs, over which it passed to the summit of the mountains. (493) What Robert Geary refers to as Radcliffe’s “trademark ploy of explaining away the supernatural” (1992: 51), is closely related to the author’s tendency to switch between images of the sublime and the beautiful, and between darkness and light: every time her characters are affected by terrific sights, soon picturesque scenes will quiet their upset minds. While this indeed scales down Radcliffe’s sublime to a “tamed sublime” (Geary 1992: 45), her knowledge of eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics nevertheless helps her to create gloomy and vivid atmospheres and vibrant environments, which not only respond to but also affect her heroines’ moods and feelings (cf. Kröger 2013: 19). More than once in The Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance, Emily feels strangely alarmed by the lighting and weather conditions as well as by the sounds of the environment and thus seems to be prone to meteoropathy. She does not merely project her affects onto the environment but is affected by environments and the weather. In that Radcliffe’s novel depicts how a female identity interacts and synchronises with the dynamic space she finds herself in, it stages the affective effects resulting from atmospheric encounters. The limited information given on obscure landscapes, happenings and ominous sounds as well as Radcliffe’s Gothic language, e.g. her extensive use of words such as terror, fear, gloom, awe, death and the like, too appeal to the reader’s imagination and give rise to an affective space in which an atmosphere of suspense may be experienced. However, and

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since Radcliffe’s novels disallow of the irrational to survive in the light of the day to avoid being considered as superstitious (cf. Geary 1992: 51), the external Gothic terrors found in her characters’ local surroundings leave excitement but do not discover the unsettling depths of the human psyche and earthly existence. The close relationship of Emily to the environment remains on an interpersonal and intersubjective level and does not give rise to discoveries of more-than-human ancestry and the weird complexity of ecological reality, which would become so important for the supernatural horror tales of the following centuries. Other than a mystical place in which characters immerse in order to discover themselves and their feelings, the more-than-human world was soon to be reinvented as a fear-inspiring Other in the early American Gothic fiction of the long nineteenth century. A look at the preoccupation of American Gothic authors such as Charles Brockden Brown and Nathaniel Hawthorne with supernatural encounters at the frontier and in the wilderness reveals that the American environmental imagination has, for a large part, been tinged by negative and uncanny experiences made in the more-than-human environment of the New England landscape. Rather than a romantic fear of estrangement from anything more-than-human, the violent human-animal encounters and the “vegetal haunting” (Sivils 2018: 162) as depicted in American Gothic narratives represent growing anxieties about the ambiguous relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world and point to both, fears of losing control over ‘nature’ and fears of losing individuated identity. At the heart of these stories lies the horrific experience of the frontier, which plays out in the Gothic wilderness and which confronts the culture/nature dichotomy (cf. Mogen, Sanders & Karpinski 1993: 15). Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), a novel which is supposed to accurately represent the American landscape “in vivid and faithful colours” (Brown 1988 [1799]: 4), is regarded as a prime example of the American frontier Gothic. Depicting the “perils of the Western wilderness” (3), the novel negotiates the Euro-American colonial experience of being forced to inhabit an undomesticated and unmapped environment. Old world values and theories cannot stand their ground in this

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new territory, thus affecting “new motives to curiosity” (ibid.) and uncovering unknown sources of anxiety, mystery and violence. As a consequence, Christopher Sloman argues, neither European cartography nor textual representation “can adequately capture the true nature of America” (2015: 2). Brown’s novel deals with this inability to fully grasp an environment that exists beyond the human scale. While Edgar Huntly starts with depicting the regional peculiarities of the “romantic and wild” (Brown 1988 [1799]: 6) landscapes of Norwalk in a fashion similar to the aesthetics of the writings of Ann Radcliffe, the main protagonist’s transformation from a sensitive young man to a relentless savage soon leads the novel to replace “picturesque scenes” (92) in favour of horrific and obscure renderings of the American wilderness. The deeper Edgar walks into the Pennsylvanian woods to follow the man who he believes to be the murder of his friend Waldegrave, the more he leaves behind the security of his civilised hometown and the more aware he becomes of his “extremely imperfect” (ibid.) knowledge of the wilderness. As he is gradually overpowered by the difficulties and hardships posed onto him by foreign and untrodden paths, Edgar is no longer able to make sense of the environment. His vague descriptions of the surroundings reflect his sense of disorientation: being exposed to “[c]hilling damps”, a “checquered sky”, the “chaos of rocks and precipices”, and “dizzy” heights (97-98), Edgar experiences the limits of human agency in a world so vast and complex that it exceeds human labelling and control. After having found the obviously starving and savaged Clithero on the top of a hill and being told his story of innocence, Edgar is quickly exposed to a series of violent conflicts with a hostile wilderness, which will change his sense of reality and (human) ‘nature’ forever. Bewildered by Clithero’s unexpected revelation and a deadly encounter with a panther on his return journey, Edgar quickly falls asleep in his bed just to mysteriously wake up in a dark cave. It is in this abandoned place miles and miles away from civilisation that Edgar’s thoughts and actions are from now on controlled by his basic instincts, which he describes as “the demands of nature” (173).

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Tom Hillard notes that this scene marks a critical point in this story, as Edgar “faces a breakdown between human and animal, civilized and savage” (2018: 28). His “cravings of hunger” (Brown 1988 [1799]: 155) and “the torments of thirst” (161) make him consider self-mutilation to ensure his survival: My hunger speedily became ferocious. I tore the lining of my shirt between my teeth and swallowed the fragments. I felt a strong propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth. (157) A few moments later Edgar is delighted by the thought of alleviating his pains by drinking his own blood, which is why at this point in the story, it remains unclear who exactly is the “living animal” that Edgar wants to feast on. When Edgar runs into yet another panther and is forced to kill it, he eventually rejects his cannibalistic urges. Instead, he gorges on the “warm blood and reeking fibres” (160) of the dead animal and thus, as Bernice Murphy observes, “become[s] the thing that he fears most” (2013: 99). Indeed, Edgar does not express tender feelings toward panthers, which he describes as “judicious and sanguinary spoilers” (Brown 1988 [1799]: 119). Nor does he find joy in the trade of hunting. However, his intrinsic motivation to “transcend the rest of animals in all that is common to the rational and brute” (203) is suddenly replaced by a primal instinct for survival, which is, after all, an impulse shared by human beings and animals. In what Murphy calls the “Rural Gothic”, this trope of transformation is commonly used to express deep-seated American fears of “an inhospitable ‘wilderness’ straight out of Puritan nightmare” (2013: 180). It brings to the fore ecophobic feelings towards the transformative power of the more-than-human world, which continue to permeate the imagination of American and other nation’s narratives alike. Other than Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Brown’s Edgar Huntly presents the morethan-human environments as a place of fear and horror. In this novel civilisation takes on the cathartic function formerly associated with

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‘pristine nature’. Whenever Edgar catches the sight of “a field of some acres, that had, apparently, been upturned by the hoe” (Brown 1988 [1799]: 175) or human architecture, his heart leaps with joy. While desperately trying to find his way out of a landscape which seems to vibrate with hostility, Edgar therefore confesses that “[i]n a wilderness like this, my only hope was to light upon obscure paths, made by cattle” (ibid.). His path is obstructed by “sharp fragments of stone” as well as by “creeping vines, […] ragged spines, and wreaths of moss, and copses of dwarf oaks” (174), which seem to deliberately keep him trapped inside this “maze of thickets and precipices” (203). According to Hillard, the agential wilderness rendered in Edgar Huntly does more than addressing concerns over ‘out-of-control nature’, but questions human exceptionalism (cf. 2018: 24). Edgar’s lack of control over the environment and his own body, which is carried to its extremes in the moment his sleepwalking body follows the call of the wilds and takes him into the dangerous cave, points to the arbitrariness of “long-standing Western world assumptions about the autonomous and unique elements of being human” (ibid., emphasis orig.). On his return journey, Edgar experiences his once familiar, civilised and autonomous body as strange and savage. When he first seeks shelter in a mansion inhabited by a small settler family, he realises that he does no longer pass as what he thinks to be a ‘good’ citizen: The uncouthness of my garb, my wild and weather-worn appearance, my fusil and tom-hawk, could not but startle them. […] I was somewhat aware of these consequences, and endeavoured to elude them, by assuming an air of supplication and humility. (Brown 1988 [1799]: 196-197) Similar to his abhorrent bodily condition, Edgar’s surroundings, too, suddenly seem to have taken on a disturbing quality. As he continues to make his way home to Salisbury, Edgar encounters places that are at once familiar and strange. The next white settlers’ home in which he seeks refuge from a hostile group of Delaware Indians as well as from the torments of the wilderness turns out not as civilised as it appears to be. In what Edgar recognises as the familiar ground of the Selby family,

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he is confronted with the drunken and violent head of the family who is “little in unison with the external appearances of the mansion” (218). Trapped in a reality in which concepts such as civilisation are nothing more than empty shells, Edgar faces the transcorporality of the human body. Therefore, Brown’s story is part of the genesis of what Dawn Keetley and Matthew Sivils call “the nonhuman ecogothic” (2018: 11, emphasis orig.) and must be read in the context of a longer tradition of constructing Atmosfears and imaginaries of Gothic environments. The depiction of bodies giving in to – or pouring out in – the environments by which they find themselves surrounded would become crucial to what Lovecraft refers to as “weird literature” (1973 [1927]: 64). As evolution scientists such as Lamarck and later Darwin began to challenge the illusory nature of human exceptionalism, nineteenth-century writers of Gothic fiction also began to weave notions of interdependency and processuality into their stories. Edgar Allan Poe, whose weird depictions of objects, animals and surroundings and their interrelations with human protagonists make his narratives part of the development of supernatural or “cosmic horror” (Lovecraft 1973 [1927]: 25), can be considered as highly influential for contemporary literary engagements with uncanny imaginations of the more-than-human world. Indeed, recent studies in the field of the ecogothic have long noticed the uncanny relational poetics in Poe’s narratives. While scholars such as Kate Huber focus on Poe’s construction of animal Others to disturb the “anthropocentric classification of animals as friend or foe” (2018: 85), others have been stressing the role of his vibrant depictions of objects, surroundings and plants in challenging ecophilic and ecophobic conceptions of the more-than-human world (cf. Sivils 2018; Tabas 2015; Crosby 2014). How his use of the uncanny reinforces a porousness of the human/nature divide and thus addresses our organic and atmospheric embeddedness in a strangely familiar environment, can be seen in his short story “The Fall of The House of Usher” (1839). Poe’s subtle and yet peculiar integration of fungi and vegetation into his story as well as their function in the othering of personhood and the environment should be given particular attention. Approaching the House of Usher

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after a long ride on horseback on “the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (Poe 2016 [1839]: 89), the unnamed narrator is soon exposed to “the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows” (90) which surround and are part of the House of Usher. Aware as Poe is of the emotional effects of landscapes aesthetics on the human mind, he makes his narrator note how the obscure and rotting environment fill him with “shadowy fancies” (ibid.), thus causing quite literal bodily reactions such as shudder and “a sickening of the heart” (89). Instead of a sublime effect, however, the scene leaves the narrator with a purely negative feeling of terror. Throughout the story it becomes clear that the protagonists and surroundings are intruded and transformed by the “sentience of all vegetal things” (98), which Roderick, the narrator’s mad friend and owner of the House of Usher, believes to express itself in the “condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls” (ibid.). What is striking is that Poe does not stop at deploying the affective agency of atmospheres as reinforced by descriptions and perceptions of surroundings as a mere narrative strategy. More than passive and mood-infested ambiences in which the story evolves, the uncanny atmospheres in “The Fall of The House of Usher” materialise as “masses of agitated vapor” (102) and thus take over as aerial actors. Their “vivid force of the sensations” (91) is invoked by an almost symbiotic, or, rather, parasitic interaction between the rotting house and its moulding owner, who are literally dissolved by “[a]n air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom” (92). Just as objects, the environments, and more-than-human beings encountered in the story, too, appear to be strangely alive – the overgrown house, for instance with its “eye-like windows” (90) and its “physique of the gray walls and turrets” (94, emphasis orig.) seems to look down “into the dim tarn” (ibid.) and watch everybody who walks inside and out of it – the uncanny atmospheres, too, act as dynamic forces in the story. They are described to pervade, crowd, oppress, and bewilder the human protagonists of the story, thus connecting mind, body, and the environment through their affective agency.

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Such an animistic depiction of more-than-human phenomena questions what it means to be alive. Indeed, Roderick’s “acute bodily illness” and “mental disorder” (90) and his sister Lady Madeline’s “approaching dissolution” (94) make the ground and house of Usher appear more energetic than its human residents. Seen from this point of view, the house with its “pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible and leaden-hued” (91) seems to master its master. The house “made him […] what he was” (99, emphasis orig.), the narrator admits, when he realises that his old friend Roderick has changed over the years to the extent of unrecognisability. Featuring a “cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid […]; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity” (93), he not only appears to look like the living dead, but also resembles the fungus-infested House of Usher. His “silken hair” which “suffered to grow all unheeded” and “floated rather than fell about the face” in a “wild gossamer texture” (ibid.) and the wanness which had “overspread the emaciated fingers” (95) parallels the “fungi [which] overspread the whole exterior [of the house], hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves” (91, emphasis orig.). The image of the fungus as a being which is neither animal nor plant is interesting here, because it mirrors the Usher siblings’ in-between condition. Since the narrator has difficulty to connect Roderick’s appearance “with any idea of simple humanity” (ibid.) and Lady Madeline lingers in a cataleptic state of pre-death, the Ushers truly embody a state that can no longer be clearly defined as human at all. While the transformative power of the vast and animate more-thanhuman world supports Charles Brockden Brown’s main protagonist in assuming that the more-than-human world is evil, it does neither lead to positive nor ecophobic feelings in Poe’s protagonists. As Sara Crosby notes, “[Poe’s] ‘othering’ of the environment is a gesture of respect and an indictment of the human ego” (2014: 518). On the basis of Poe’s personal negative attitudes towards rich aristocrats and their commodification of the American landscape, Crosby applies a non-hubristic reading of his depiction of the more-than-human world in “The Fall of The House of Usher” and finds that “it isn’t the tarn that infects and op-

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presses Roderick Usher and his House; rather, the lordly mansion and the lord infect and oppress the tarn” (2014: 519). Indeed, Roderick is described to possess a “mind from which darkness […] poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom” (Poe 2016 [1839]: 95). Therefore, one might indeed wonder if it is Roderick, and not the environment, which reinforces the “faintly luminous and distinctly gaseous exhalation” (102) enshrouding the house of Usher. Such a reading of the permeability of the human body, which not only infests the environment like a fungus by “stamping its image upon the natural world” (Crosby 2014: 520) but is also formed, like Roderick, by the material and affective agency of the more-than-human, engenders notions of interdependency of earthly existence. The role of literature and literary atmospheres in challenging the sense of the self is significant in this context, as the example of Roderick demonstrates: the books of his personal library, such as Holberg’s The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground (2004 [1741]), have “formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid” (Poe 2016 [1839]: 99).19 The narrator acknowledges the affective agency of literary atmospheres, a kind of agency which Poe knew exactly how to facilitate through his narration of a sentient environment and sensuous space. Adding imaginations of the split and decayed Gothic body to the already existing trope of wilderness transformation, Poe’s writings imply a kind of Weird realism based on a “wild inconsistency” between reality and “the crumbling condition of the individual stones” (91), that is human beings, that cocreate this reality. Obviously inspired by the supernatural horror fictions of Poe and LeFanu, writers of the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century approached the question of the position of human beings in the cosmos, thus taking on a more indifferentist philosophy on spatial and temporal

19

The narrator of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” incorrectly refers to Holberg’s novel as The Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm [sic!] (cf. Poe 2016 [1839: 99). For reasons of clarity, I use the original title of Holberg’s novel here.

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relations. What would later run under the label of “Weird fiction” centres on the visionary horror created by the incomprehensibility and unrepresentability of matter and “outer, unknown forces” (Lovecraft 1973 [1927]: 15). According to Lovecraft, a Weird tale is [...] based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and the local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity – and terrestrialism at the threshold. (1968: 150) The Weird, in this sense, is not so much concerned with the psychological terror caused by “secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form of clanking chains according to rule” (Lovecraft 1973 [1927]: 15) but redirects the focus on the limits of human access to the ‘known’ agencies that compromise the universe as it appears before us. In doing so, it yields what Tabas refers to as a “deeper realism” (2015: 3) of the strangeness of the more-than-human, which affects and challenges human conceptions of the more-than-human world, and yet “exists wholly independently of our experience or even our logic” (4). In the Weird, the morethan-human world is depicted to exist despite, and not for the sake of mankind. This “sense cosmic alienage” (Lovecraft 1973 [1927]: 84) of human existence can be traced as early as in Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), in which the real world and human experience of reality are opposed to each other:

2. There is Something in the Air

For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of today were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voice of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought. (Machen 1923 [1894]: 6) A similar cosmic awe is experienced by Algernon Blackwood’s protagonists in his short story “The Willows” (1907). Upon their canoe ride down the river Danube, the two traveling companions enter the remote and deserted land of the willows. Affected by a disquieting feeling of “utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements” (1973 [1907]: 8) at play in “a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows” (13-14), a feeling, as the reader learns, that lies deeper than the sublime emotion of awe and terror, the narrator’s concept of human exceptionalism is disturbed by “the spell of the place” (14): I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. […] They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible. (ibid.)

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The confrontation with monstrous vegetation or what Keetley has described as “plant horror” (2016: 1) has not only been excessively deployed in long nineteenth-century Gothicism, but also continued to occupy a special role in twentieth century Weird fiction.20 What is interesting to note here is that the unsettling suggestions of a vital and agential morethan-human reality happens in fairly mundane settings. Regardless of whether a haunted tree sends out “round and brownish” creatures to kill human beings in M. R. James’ “The Ash Tree” (2007 [1904]: 39), a strange human-like vine unsettles Ambrose Bierce’s protagonists in his “A Vine on a House” (1905), or fungous growth infests and annihilates human bodies in both William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907) and Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” (1937), it is the physical, familiar world with its vast seas, old mansions, and gloomy forests which is the stage for weird stories of assimilation and absorption. Just like Gothic horror in general, “vegetal haunting”, too, “must have a basis in the real to fully satisfy its disturbing potential” (Sivils 2018: 166). Regarding the significance of freakish entities, spidery creatures and non-vegetal growth in Weird fiction, Haraway’s concept of the “tentacular” (2016: 31) can be applied to include all of those “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities” (101) into our discussion of the more-than-human, which resist being categorised as fauna, flora, or human. Her non-binary understanding of agency is based on a processual logic of an ongoing composition of a more-thanhuman world, the “Chthulucene” (2). Although Haraway’s Chtulucene does not originate from Lovecraft’s “misogynist racial nightmare monster Cthulhu” (101), it marks an ambiguous state of “elsewhere and elsewhen” (31), a stretching of the limits of materialism that is characteristic for the realities envisioned in the transgressive horror tales of the 20th and 21st century.

20

In her introduction of her six theses on plant horror, Keetley suggests that one of the reasons why plants feature as a source of dread and horror in so many films and books is that they “suggest alternative ways of being that challenge the inevitability of (human) being” (2016: 9).

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The following chapter will move on to examine how differently contemporary works of ecofiction have reprocessed Gothic visions of the more-than-human world to write about the climatic tensions, ambiguities and fears that we are faced with in the present moment. However useful aspects of psychoanalytic criticism appear to theorise how repressed cultural anxieties become represented in certain literary symbols or metaphors, I will, however, not apply a psychoanalytical reading to the texts I have chosen for analysis. Instead of ascribing uncanny qualities to more-than-human life and diagnosing the possible fears and anxieties that could be the reason for contemporary literary engagements with notions of Gothic nature, I will draw on the uncanny as an atmospheric category that may help us to theorise the (certainly creepy) entanglement between the human and morethan-human world. Such a focus on atmospheres ultimately allows me to disrupt the nature/culture dichotomy that is reinforced by psychoanalytical dissections of uncanny literary representations of the morethan-human ‘Other’.

2.4

Entering a New Dark Age: Atmospheric Re(lation)ality  and the Anthropocene Imagination

As the horrors of anthropogenic climate change unfold faster than some of us would like to admit, the fascination with darker and maybe even repressed aspects of the environments that we inhabit seems to be more topical than ever. Pollution and the exploitation of natural resources have begun to change the planet’s climate, and so various novels have dealt either explicitly or implicitly with the challenges posed by anthropogenic environmental change over the past forty years.21 Ranging from realist novels about environmental risks to post-apocalyptic depictions of life on an devastated planet, what has come to be known 21

In his Anthropocene Fictions (2015), Adam Trexler gives a systematic compendium of climate change novels that have been written during and about the Anthropocene epoch.

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as ecologically oriented fiction or ecofiction addresses the large-scale changes that human action has introduced to planetary ecosystems. A look at how the fundamental interrelationship between humans and the more-than-human world has been framed in this “composite subgenre made up of many styles, primarily modernism, postmodernism, realism, and magic realism, and can be found in many genres, primarily mainstream, westerns, mystery, romance, and speculative fiction” (Dwyer 2010: 3) reveals that different topoi have emerged ever since the looming consequences of environmental exploitation have entered public consciousness. However, darker hued imaginations of the state of the present are certainly among the more dominating examples of how writers have attempted to make explicit processes such as climate change. In this respect, novelists seem to have been affected by what Cynthia Deitering has referred to as a “toxic consciousness” (Deitering 1996: 196). According to her examination of the extent to which U.S. fiction of the 1980s is preoccupied with toxic landscapes, there seems to have been a shift in environmental consciousness and the way human beings imagine their existence on a polluted Earth. Moving away from romanticised ideas of nature and instead providing “representations of a postnatural world, of a culture defined by its waste, and of a nation that has fouled its own nest” (202), novels written during the late twentieth century mark the beginning of a new tradition of writing about the relationship of human beings to the environment. The uncanny, which in the context of 18th and 19th century Gothic fiction served as kind of a landscape aesthetics closely related to the concept of the sublime to invoke feelings of suspense and terror, has increasingly been adapted in a very specific strand of contemporary ecofiction, usually referred to as ecological horror or, for short, ecohorror. Taking as a starting point the primeval fears and concerns that continue to pervade our relationship with the more-than-human world, ecohorror presents us with revenge tragedies “in which nature turns against humankind due to environmental degradation, pollution, encroachment, nuclear disaster, or a host of other reasons” (Foy 2010: 167). At the heart of many of these stories are often conflicts arising out of experiences with extreme weather or unprecedented disasters. Thus, eco-

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horror responds to and reproduces fears and anxieties associated with the environment, or what Simon Estok has labelled “an irrational and groundless hatred for the natural world, as subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism” (Estok 2009: 208). Ecohorror and to some degree also its theory-driven sister ecogothic certainly have grown out of this phobic fear of and loathing for the more-than-human world (cf. Estok 2019: 39). The former in particular has given rise to apocalyptic imaginaries in filmic and literary productions where environment-related processes such as climate change threaten human civilisation (Nielsen 2017: 88-89). Indeed, the coverage of the topic in contemporary culture testifies that apocalyptic rhetoric is excessively used to turn the environmental crisis into a commodifiable spectacle. The rhetoric of environmental crisis and risks – or what Heyward & Rayner have labelled as “tipping-point rhetoric” (Heyward & Rayner 2016: 86) – is omnipresent not only in climate policy and scientific research, but also in the media, as sensational news reporting and blockbusters show. Movies such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), and San Andreas (2015) dramatise past and recent climate-related disasters by presenting viewers with worst-case scenarios of possible eco-catastrophes. In a similar fashion, Breaking News sometimes make extensive use of shocking images, pompous, shrill, or explosive sound effects, and the topos of the apocalypse to provide viewers with some sort of morbid or eco-horrific entertainment. While these visual-horror and special-effects laden productions may be the most sensational examples of an apparent obsession with representations of terrifying nature, other artistic modes use music and sound to mediate and commodify very specific set of ecophobic fears regarding the natural world. “Environ-Metal” songs or post-apocalyptic audio dramas, for instance, use very specific rhetorical devices and musical elements to create a sense of environmental urgency (cf. Dederichs 2015; Rochester 2014). These examples show that popular media are spreading increased concern about abrupt climate change. This trend of inciting and even marketing a sense of “the apocalyptic sublime” (Salmose 2018: 1417) has also influenced writers of contemporary ecofiction. Pessimistic disaster novels or “ecothrillers” (Kerridge 2000) such as James Herbert’s Por-

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tent (1992), Matthew Glass’ Ultimatum (2009), or Stephen Baxter’s Flood (2008) draw on the generic conventions of action-adventure narratives and confront readers with “violent showdowns and narrow escapes” (Kerridge 2000: 247) in a world at the brink of collapse. Dan Bloom, selfdeclared father of the term “cli-fi”, sees an ethical potential in the apocalyptic imaginary of climate fiction. In an interview with The Guardian Bloom reveals that […] cli fi novels and movies can serve to wake up readers and viewers to the reality of the Climapocalypse that awaits humankind if we do nothing to stop it. […] Cli fi is not about entertainment or the next bestseller. It’s an alarm bell. (Vemuri 2014: Web) His intention to popularise “cli-fi” as the most ecopolitical and thus most important genre in the present moment is highly problematic. Although there are studies which confirm a wish for behavioural change of audiences after having watched environmental disaster movies or read works of ecohorror, the final effect of this kind of eco-tainment on viewers’ or readers’ environmental values and practices remains at best short-lived.22 Since rather dystopian environmental disaster novels use ecological dilemmas to generate drama and ecohorror and thus may be said to not only critically respond to but also participate in the creation of ecophobic Atmosfears, an increasing number of scholars in the field of ecocriticism have rightly put into question apocalyptic narratives’ potential to meaningfully address the problems of anthropogenic climate change (cf. Kerridge 2000; Goodbody 1997; Garrard 2004: 93-107; Dwyer 2010: 4-6). Fast-paced stories about nature’s revenge not only misrepresent the actual “slow violence” of climate change (Nixon 2011), but also

22

For surveys analysing the impact of The Day After Tomorrow on moviegoers, see Balmford et al. (2004), Leiserowitz (2004) and Lowe et al. (2006). These surveys report different results, thus putting a long-lasting shift in audiences’ awareness for and understanding of climate change into question. SchneiderMayerson (2018) comes to a similar conclusion in his recently published study in empirical ecocriticism on the influence of climate fiction on readers.

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leave little room for hope for mankind to rethink their failures. Either the world is depicted to end in hopeless chaos, or catastrophes are heroically fought and sabotaged by ‘manpower’, as for instance in Michael Crichton’s Flat Earth Award nominated novel State of Fear (2004).23 In both cases, tragic depictions of the environmental catastrophe indeed create environmental urgency but fail to consider solutions to the root problems of climate change. Hostile forces in nature are taken responsible for the final collapse in most of these novels without the human impact on environment-related disaster being ever considered. In this context, climate change is presented as a system failure that needs to be fixed, like a machine, with scientific and technological innovations so that humanity does not need to change its habits (cf. Swyngedouw 2013: 10-11). The trouble with apocalyptic sentiment is that it seems to have lost its activist potential in popular culture. Not quite the wake-up call provided by radical ecologists, disaster rhetoric appears as a clever marketing strategy used to influence consumer behaviour. As such, it remains questionable whether it can – and should – really sensitise people for the challenges that climate change presents. What is even more problematic about apocalypticism and other dramatic representations of climate change is that they tend to manufacture the cultural hysteria they describe and thus participate in the production of environmental crisis (cf. Garrard 2004: 105). In the context of contemporary popular culture, this new way of attracting interest in a wider audience brings psychological problems with it that compromise the usefulness of environmental rhetoric. According to Yana Milev, the ever-present artificial sense of crisis may lead to the rationalisation of sensuous events such as environmental catastrophes. In a society in which disasters and live horror are constantly narrated in breaking news, advertising and entertainment industry, pessimistic visions of the future cannot shock any

23

In 2005, a handful of students at Middlebury College in Vermont developed the idea for the first annual Flat Earth Award, a prize to be handed to a public figure “who vehemently denies the scientific consensus about global warming” (Middlebury College 2005: Web).

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longer (cf. Milev 2012: 295-300). As Frederick Buell puts it, the “consequences of apocalypse having become a way of life is that […] depiction of risk and crisis suggests no revelation, produces no awakening” (2003: 265). Besides the loss of sensation and indifference towards environmental destruction, the process of normalisation of catastrophes may also lead to an insatiable demand for more terrific and shocking disaster footage. This brings me to more tragic and even comic modes of ecohorror. Garrard proposes that we can set comic imaginations of environment-related disaster apart from tragic ones, as they tend to be more “open-ended and episodic” (2004: 87), thus allowing laughter and reflection on human failure. However, satirical allegory, too, does not come without problems for meaningfully addressing the urgency for social change. As Garrard notes elsewhere, ecological satires “explore situations of knowing but not acting” (2013: 182), which is why there is the danger that this variation of ecofiction participates in the kind of climate change denial that it eventually tries to expose (cf. 184). A good example of a novel that negotiates this ambiguity between wanting to comment on while at the same time risking to participate in the creation of climate change apathy is Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), a more realist work of ecofiction which narrates the depressing, horrific, and ironic side of “the ecological thought” (Morton 2010) by locating fear and uncertainty in mediated representations of environmental crisis. Haunted by nightmarish visions of erupting supervolcanoes, nuclear catastrophes, asteroid impacts, and other disasters capable of “unleashing a new dark age” (Rich 2013: 3), Mitchell Zukor, main protagonist of Rich’s latest novel, is losing sleep over calculating the odds of environmental worst-case scenarios. Having been given the opportunity to use his mathematical skills as a “futurist” at FutureWorld, a start-up company offering consulting services in the prediction of future catastrophes and the financial damages they may cause, Mitchell soon finds himself trapped in the business of selling apocalyptic prophecies along with catastrophe coverage to rich clients from all over the world. While he is trying to infect others with his alarmingly real and chronic eco-anxiety, an actual hurricane

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strikes Manhattan. When this “live disaster” (127) turns the city into an unmediated horrorscape, Mitchell’s worst fears seem to come true. Central to the Atmosfears experienced by the protagonists in Odds Against Tomorrow is an aesthetic pleasure deriving from watching, reading, and even thinking about terrifying scenes such as ecocidal events. As the novel shows, mass media’s depiction of catastrophes culminates in a postmodern form of “cultural anesthesia” (cf. Feldmann 1994: 405). After having attended a consultation meeting of his colleague Jane, Mitchell reveals that her clients were thrilled rather than shocked by FutureWorld’s apocalyptic imagery. The fact that “[t]hey were in love. They wanted more.” (Rich 2013: 113, emphasis orig.) shows that the omnipresence of medially communicated Atmosfears has made them addicted to a commodified version of popular culture’s discourse on the environment. Having been turned into consumers of disaster porn, it is hardly surprising that the society depicted in this novel craves “dread, worst-case scenarios, end times” (109). Similarly, Mitchell confesses that it is only within the mathematics of catastrophe that he finds some sort of revelation opening “wormholes to a sublime realm of fantasy and chaos” (3). Since the aesthetic impulse provided by the grandeur and obscurity of objects and physical spaces is a defining characteristic of the sublime, death and disaster statistics thus seem to provide Mitchell more than a mere therapeutic outlet. In fact, they function as sublime objects which are characterised by infinite power and greatness. Astounded of the complexity of the mathematics of disaster, Mitchell experiences Kant’s mathematical sublime, that is the feeling one experiences when one is overwhelmed with the “inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an object” (Kant 2007 [1790]: 85-86). The infinite possibilities of worst-case scenarios present the rational mind with a similar excess, which is why the thought of an environmental disaster alone evokes sublime emotions in Nathaniel Rich’s neurotic main protagonist. Besides wonder and delight, Mitchell’s “‘logic games’” (Rich 2013: 3) fill him with feelings of “very real terror” (ibid.). In line with Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime, Mitchell’s manufactured worst-case scenarios make him aware of the actual vio-

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lence and terror hiding in environmental catastrophes. What is further feeding his environmental fears is his growing awareness of the unpredictability of actual climate related disasters. When Mitchell is exposed to the chaos caused by hurricane Tammy, he realises to his utter astonishment that climate risks can never be calculated. Admitting that a real catastrophe is “a form of genius” (Rich 2013: 154) which exceeds all expectations, Mitchell is overwhelmed with the disaster’s strength and violence. As the sight of the scenery makes him barely capable to think and act rationally, he encounters what Lee Rozelle has termed “Ecosublimity”, that is “the awe and terror that occurs when literary figures experience the infinite complexity and contingency of place” (2006: 1). While Rozelle goes on to argue that the sublime is a necessary tool to recover readers’ “awareness of real natural environments” (3), others have criticised it for contributing to a separation between culture and nature (cf. Cronon 1995: 80). Either way, it is remarkable how many works of contemporary ecofiction use the trope of sublimity to emphasise human separateness from the ‘other’ more-than-human world. How Gothic othering serves as a strategy to model ecophobic Atmosfears can be seen in Odds Against Tomorrow when hurricane Tammy destroys the urban landscape of New York. Flooded by water and “blanketed by an uncanny iron darkness” (Rich 2013: 153), New York imprisons all of its remaining inhabitants in destroyed high-rise buildings. In this claustrophobic environment, Mitchell and his colleague Jane find themselves exposed to weather conditions so extraordinarily harsh that they seem to be brought about by some evil power. When the wind gets so aggressive that they decide to barricade the only window in Mitchell’s apartment, they catch a glimpse of a landscape which has hardly anything in common with their image of the vibrant metropolis that used to be New York: Third Avenue was now a canal, the water so high it had begun to spill over the curb. The ramp that led from the avenue to the Queens Midtown Tunnel was a cascading stream, the water leaping over itself as it rushed down the incline. The wind levitated the crushed skeletons of umbrellas, garbage cans, chunks of scaffolding. Bricks

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blurred through the air, hurtling like poorly thrown footballs until they pulverized against the sides of buildings. Or shot through windows. (153-154) Unable to deal with this othered New York, Mitchell starts to anthropomorphise the environment as a Gothic monstrosity. He describes that the “tunnel between the twin marble staircases [of Grand Central] was like a large, greedy mouth drinking the water” (173) and, apparently, also the dead human bodies floating on the surface of it. Adding to this horrifying sight, both Mitchell and Jane are exposed to life-threatening dangers such as burning debris, explosions and collapsing buildings. This return of wild and hostile nature into the artificial cityscape of Manhattan further strengthens the culture-nature divide opened in this novel and has an alienating effect on the protagonists. It is only now that they realise that environmental crisis is more than a figment of popular environmental imagination. Up to this point, the novel seems to be crammed with potential to end like your typical end-of-the-world novel. Rich, however, has other plans for his plot. It is when Mitchell and Jane decide to set out for safety in Camp Ticonderoga, an arcadian commune somewhere in Maine, that things literally start to get odd. Upon their way into the not-so-wild wilderness in the North, media reports turn Mitchell into a biblical prophet. Shocked by this news and the realisation that crisis and madness cannot even be kept outside of a place such as Ticonderoga, which by the time Mitchell and Jane arrive has been overrun by refugees, Mitchell turns his back on humanity and starts to create “his own self-contained universe” (287) in an abandoned building in the Flatlands of New York. His transformation from a civilised urbanist to a Walden-like drop-out reaches its climax when he has to face his home city in ruins. Just as New York has been infiltrated by wilderness, Mitchell, too, gradually turns into an uncivilised beast. When Jane, who by that time has moved back to Manhattan as if nothing happened, visits him in his isolated shack, she finds “a filthy bearded man with curly hair” (299) who smelled “[l]ike a wild animal” (300). As Mitchel is by no means romanticising his new way of living far away from

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civilisation as an act of eco-activism, he can certainly not be said to be living the ‘environmentalist’s dream’. On the contrary, he is re-enacting Edgar Huntly’s worst nightmare, that is living in an undomesticated environment. In a Gothic manner, then, the novel presents readers with a broken man, one that has finally been driven mad by his social, medial and environmental surroundings. Rich’s novel provides explicit critique on postmodern consumer culture, which seems to be more interested in the narration of events than in the event itself. By making his protagonist indulge in the illusion of death and ecocide happening only to others just to confront them with the real horrors of climate change unfolding in New York, Rich indeed shifts the focus from the “topos of time” to the “topos of place” to make climate change explicit (cf. Nielsen 2017: 87-88). His warning against developing a false sense of temporary environmental stability and security is, however, overshadowed by the novels ending: nobody has learned anything out of this disaster, not even the isolated Mitchell, who once again neurotically engages in calculations, not on environmental risks, but on “electric engineering and building design” (Rich 2013: 296). While I certainly would not go so far as to categorise ecohorror as “false” ecofiction (cf. Dwyer 2010: 4), its literary and filmic offshoots prove to be highly problematic for a study which is interested in exploring how literary encounters with the atmospheric may challenge our social and cultural constructions of human agency. This is because in the more-than-human world is presented as a sublime, monstrous Other that reclaims power over human civilisation in works such as Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow. While ‘the natural world’ certainly is given a voice in ecohorror, its agential force “poses a problem of control, inciting human efforts at dominance” (Keetley & Sivils 2018: 3). And as much as “traditional boundaries between the human and the nonhuman become blurred in grotesque ways” (Keetley & Sivils 2018: 11), binary thinking is the name of the game in ecohorror texts. Paradoxically, ecohorror reintroduces and nurtures the nature/culture divide that the subdiscipline of the ecogothic, at least to some extent, tries to blur. This means that imagining the entangled nature of planetary existence becomes a means to evoke a certain horrific effect or ecophobic affect and not, as

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is the case in the texts that I will analyse in this book, to challenge and eventually overcome the human-animal divide by foregrounding relationality as an uncanny, and yet fundamental ontological condition of being in or rather with the world. According to Estok, the “ecoGothic imagination itself is under the rubric of ecophobia; it is difficult, though perhaps possible, to imagine otherwise” (2019: 48). I will show that this is possible indeed. Relational thinking cannot abide clearly drawn boundaries but thrives on the disturbance of the shapes of our social and cultural constructions of nature, selfhood and the autonomous human body. While works of ecohorror indeed apply the theme of death to work through a specific, ecophobic set of Atmosfears, disruptions of matter and the body are shown, if at all, rather rapidly in the face of an imminent catastrophe. As a consequence, the depictions of death and annihilation lack the care, detail and depth which is needed to acknowledge the weird complexity of ecosystemic relations. This is not to say that ecohorror does not stage the tension between selfhood and global challenges such as the environmental crisis. To the contrary: the connection between nature and culture and the way they influence each other is a central – if not the most central – theme in ecohorror. However, it is the lack of explorations of our uncanny embeddedness in “natureculture” (Haraway 2003) as well as of the embodied experience of “[b]indings and unbindings, becomings and un-becomings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements” (Seigworth & Gregg 2010: 2) which prevents an uncanny relational poetics to come into being in works such as Odds Against Tomorrow. Fortunately, contemporary ecofiction is not limited to apocalyptic imaginaries only. As I have demonstrated in Chapter 2, the evocation of literary atmospheres always presupposes a responsive dialogue between two or more bodies, or, speaking with material ecocriticism, between mind and matter, reader and text. Literary atmospheres do not pre-exist but are always intra-actively produced. In my case studies I will show in how far a growing body of ecofiction employs this relational aesthetics inherent in atmospheric encounters to point to the larger issue of our precarious embeddedness in a climatically changing world. This

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literary turn to human beings’ inevitable implications in atmospheric conditions and relations becomes manifest, so I propose, in a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality. Atmospheric re(lation)ality is neither uplifting nor purely negative, but rather weirdly revealing. It implies an uncanny recognition of the porousness of the borders that have been constructed to demarcate the human from the more-than-human, and, therefore, appears as a literary expression of a new materialist understanding of the relationality of material existence. Atmospheric re(lation)ality brings home the inescapable ambiguity in ecological relationships between more-than-human and human beings. In doing so, this poetics allows us to address how human consciousness and being is at the same time separated and yet interconnected with the more-thanhuman world. Such a relational view on planetary existence seems to resist the linearity and quickness of both tragic and comic drama. The fluctuating nature of environment-related phenomena which tend to push the boundaries of a closed and cumulative understanding of space and time seems to become increasingly expressed by forms of writing that are sensitive to notions of in-betweenness, ambivalence, diffuseness, and multiscalarity, both on the level of content and form, and that negotiate the tensions – and uncanny implications – that arise from such volatile encounters in an age of climate crisis. Alongside still very popular dystopian and horrific revenge narratives that exploit ecophobic fears of the more-than-human world, an increasing number of writers have engaged with the ambivalence inscribed into the experience of living in the Anthropocene. Given the elusive character of present and yet curiously absent phenomena such as climate change, moving away from apocalyptic imaginaries towards uncanny atmospheric encounters indeed seems to be necessary if one wants to deal with the complex, impersonal, and often intangible flows that shape earthly life. Such a kind of atmospheric writing is of course deeply informed by the Anthropocene way of living in fragile, porous, and increasingly permeable bodies and environments (cf. LeMenager 2017: 225). A central characteristic shared by the works of ecofiction that I will analyse in this book is that they all reinforce the tension between the strange and the familiar that plays an important role in atmospheric

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encounters on the one hand, and that comes with living in increasingly unstable and unthinkable times such as ours on the other. This tension is expressed, for instance, by the way in which these works rework the lived experience of inhabiting bodies and locales that are continuously fluctuating between conflicting modes of being in time, place, and matter. Set in remote islands, abandoned towns, and other places on the edge of extinction and colonised by people going through physical and emotional rupture, transformation, and uncertainty, these works take notions of in-betweenness as well as volatile encounters seriously, fostering them not only plotwise, but even more so in their formal composition as unconventional, open-ended, weird, and even transmedia works of ecofiction. In both Burnside’s Glister (2008) and Smith’s Marrow Island (2016), pollution functions as an important trope for staging the diffuseness of the boundaries between the human and more-than-human world. By dealing with the exchange of pathogens across biological and geological bodies, these two novels bring into sharp focus how toxic atmospheres increasingly shape our perception of and interaction with the morethan-human world. At the same time, these novels illustrate the representational challenges posed on us by global, large-scale issues such as climate change. Moving beyond the drama, terror, and thrill evoked in environmental risk narratives, Glister and Marrow Island engage with the ambivalence inscribed into the contemporary experience by working through notions of becoming in and with toxic zones and atmospheres. They stage the complex and certainly uncanny intersections between the human and more-than-human world not by reworking ecophobic fears, but through narrating relational realities. Another set of novels that may be said to deal with the theme of bodily exposure to material-biological, affective, and geological forces and thus engage in writing atmospheric re(lation)ality is VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014). In this piece of ecologically-minded “New Weird” fiction, human ways of understanding, mapping, and objectifying the world are turned on their head. Dealing with materialisations that resists familiar modes of sensemaking and that nevertheless float through, compose and decompose human embodiment as such,

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the trilogy stages creative encounters between similarity and difference that also come into play in the act of reading atmospheres, both within and beyond literary environments. At the same time, the trilogy’s novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance point to another facet of what seems to go hand in hand with the turn to the atmospheric in contemporary ecofiction: they require of us to apply a serendipitous mode of reading to their weird textual environments, engaging us in a responsive dialogue with their narrative and formal expressions of ambiguity and otherness. The kind of serendipitous search for traces of atmospheric and material agency that is enacted both plotwise and in the context of reading The Southern Reach also plays an important role in the last example of contemporary ecofiction that I have chosen for my analysis. An experimental and hybrid form of mobile locative storytelling with an eco-ethical impetus rather than a traditional, book-centred work of ecofiction, Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark By Then (2017) represents yet another way to draw readers into an open-ended dialogue with atmospheric, spatiotemporal and bodily interdependencies. As the work negotiates the tensions between presence and absence, here and there, now and then, it stages the scalar complexities of our time, thus decentering the human perspective towards the world while at the same time allowing for disturbing encounters with the relational dynamics that produce us. As affect theory shows, intensities are what interconnects bodies and the world with one another. Seigworth & Gregg argue that being in and with the world involves an “ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (2010: 2). It is through experiences across “the shimmering relays between the everyday and affect and how these come to constitute ever new and enlarged potentials for belonging” (21), they argue, that the body relates to and is composed through other agencies. What they refer to as the body’s “perpetual becoming” (3, emphasis orig.), implies a polyphonous understanding of the world and, therefore, harbours a notion of our uncanny atmospheric implications in the world. The extent to which body-world relations are streaked and affected by invisible forces is central to the poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality invoked

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in the works of ecofiction chosen for my case studies. In the chapters to follow, I will examine how contemporary ecofiction challenges and disturbs the shapes of our social and cultural constructions of selfhood and the autonomous body. Since atmospheric encounters always presuppose a corporeal engagement between two or more bodies, I argue that the body, whether human or more-than-human, must be shifted to the centre if one wants to find out about how notions of atmospheric re(lation)ality become manifest in contemporary works of ecofiction. The focus will therefore be on stories which re-imagine bodily matter through biological, geological, and affective processes to negotiate what it means to be “present” in the Anthropocene. In doing so, I complement the temporal perspective on climate change with the “presence dimension” (Gumbrecht 2004: 109) of both literary and planetary atmospheres and matters. At the same time, I intend to challenge the very concept of “presence” with my readings. Literary atmospheres are, after all, an indeterminate amalgam of subjective experiences and material qualities. Although not all of the stories I have chosen for my case studies deal directly with climate change, the topic of environmental destruction resonates in each of them, like ‘the elephant in the room’. While the repression of the topic in these works might as well already function as a critical response to our repression of the material agency of the more-than-human world, it also gives way to an examination of body-world encounters through a more inclusive lens. A poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality shifts attention to embodied experiences of and the tensions coming with notions of permeability, ambivalence, and in-betweenness rather than to the event of climate catastrophe. The Atmosfears voiced in this context are less concerned with exposing ‘nature’ as the other of humanity, as they are with reinforcing an uncanny sense of the self as being neither same nor other, neither here nor there, and neither now nor then. In this sense, the body becomes a site of exploration of the abstract, absent, and dematerialised. It is this topos of the body as an ecotone, as a transitional space where affective and material agencies meet, operate and interact, which is shared by the works that await us in the following chapters.

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3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age The Corporeal Dimension of Toxic Atmospheres in John Burnside’s Glister and Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island

3.1

Posthuman, Post-Nature, and Lit(t)erature

Did you know you are a star? In 2017, astronomers in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have finally confirmed what new materialists have been arguing for years: human beings are not only positioned in a planetary reality, but are “constituted along with the world, or rather, as ‘part’ of the world” (Barad 2007: 160). According to the results of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), which aimed at measuring the distribution of elements across the Milky Way through the examination of hundreds and thousands of stars and their distinct light spectrum, human beings and the galaxy share ninetyseven percent of the atoms that make up the elements of earthly life.1 In other words, by looking at the abundance of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur in the stars of our Galaxy and comparing it to the chemical makeup of the human body, we can now officially claim to be composed of stardust (cf. Sloan Digital Sky Service 2017: Web).

1

The results are listed in “The Thirteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey”. See Albareti et al. (2017).

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Such knowledge about our elemental immersion into the world allows us to redirect our view from outside of nature toward the inside of the materiality of the environment, which ultimately is the “very substance of ourselves” (Alaimo 2010: 4). Posthuman theory makes a case for the ambiguousness of the boundaries of the human body by highlighting the ongoing actualisation or “worlding” (Barad 2007: 160) of the material relations in which we are entangled. Scholars such as Katherine Hayles have long since argued that rather than an autonomous self, the body is “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (1999: 3). Thus, posthuman theory paved the way for eco-philosophical and new materialist re-conceptualisations of bodily materialisations within and beyond the human sphere in works such as Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010), and Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble (2016). Whereas Barad devotes her book to the complex enmeshment of abstract matter and meaning in her agential realist re-interpretation of quantum physics, the other publications mentioned here identify specific material phenomena to emphasise how “assemblages” (Bennett 2010: xvii), “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010: 2), and “kinship” (Haraway 2016: 2) literally come to matter in the Anthropocene moment. Bennett, for instance, supports her idea of a new posthuman ethics with different stories on the “shimmer and spark” of the “energetic vitality” (2010: 5) inside food, fat, metals, stem cells, and worms, while Alaimo and Haraway dedicate whole chapters to the agency of either chemical substances including “pesticides, perfumes, vehicle emissions, fabric softeners” (Alaimo 2010: 115), or “chthonic [beings]”, “humus”, and “compost” (Haraway 2016: 55) in their feminist manifestos on environmental health and justice activism. A close reading of the publications of the latter two authors reveals yet another shift in the field of material ecocriticism: instead of telling readers of the glamorous side of our cosmic ancestry in the mineral material of the stars so vitally twinkling in the night sky, an increasing number of scholars seem to read the troubled interrelationship between human and more-than-human bodies and substances through a

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Gothic lens, one that directs our attention to the “dark side of vibrant, trans-corporeal exchanges” (Sullivan 2012: 529). “Human as humus has potential”, Haraway reminds us (2016: 32), and indeed, a closer look at the alarming amount of non-organic components of the soil, dirt and dust by which we are surrounded in the present moment reveals that a discussion of the corporeal dimension of toxic atmospheres and chemicals in ecocritical theory is long overdue. As early as in 1962, the marine biologist Rachel Carson was one of the first to draw attention to synthetic insecticides and their “immense power not only to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways” (2018 [1962]: 22). In the opening chapter of her seminal non-fiction book Silent Spring (2018 [1962]), Carson pictures an idyllic town “in the heart of America” (9) which gradually transforms into a withered, lifeless chemical dump village out of a toxic nightmare. “[A] strange blight crept over the area”, Carson writes, and continues to imagine how “[s]ome evil spell had settled on the community” by bringing “mysterious maladies” and “a shadow of death” (10). As it turns out, it is no Gothic spectre that haunts this imaginary American community, but “a white granular powder” (10): the insecticide DDT. Regarding the numerous toxic waste scandals which have been exposed in environmental journalism and memoirs such as Lois Marie Gibbs’ Love Canal (1982), Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream (1998), or Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic (2001), not much seems to have changed since Carson’s bleak visions of a poisoned environment. While the toxic legacy of chemical dumping in the 1960s and 70s continues to affect people, wildlife and landscapes from the City of Niagara Falls to the Romanian village Geamana, both of which became famous for their chemically contaminated grounds, new illegal and harmful landfills are showing on the map every day.2 The massive amount of

2

In the 1970s, Niagara Falls, NY, had been the scene of a series of illnesses and miscarriages that haunted people living in the city’s South-East. As it turned out, the Hooker Chemical Company had been dumping toxic waste into parts of the neighbourhood called Love Canal for years, causing public outcry and protest from alarmed housewives directly affected by this chemical disaster. In

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waste and toxins, however, hardly ever stays within the places where it has been produced. It enters the soil, seeps into the ground water, is absorbed by plants and fungi, which, in turn, are ingested by animals and human beings all around the globe. It floats through organs, cells, is passed on through bodily fluids, and, most reprehensible, is shipped to marginalised communities outside of European and U.S. American borders. The question about toxic atmospheres and the way their deadly vapour enters into the metabolic system of human beings, ecological cycles, and recent waste discussions thus is not only one of local environmental justice, but even more so a matter of global concern. Next to environmental memoirs and pieces of investigative journalism, more and more fictional and poetic works have been catching public attention for their attempts to address the toxic legacy of the 21st century. Among them is, for instance, Adam Dickinson’s experimental collection of poems The Polymers (2013).Praised by ecocritics such as Serpil Oppermann for providing a critical comment on our posthuman existence (cf. 2016: 280), this collection addresses, among other things, how we are exposed to polymeric material and chemical substances in quite ordinary commodities on a daily basis. The poem “Hail” in particular pictures vividly the reality of what I have only half-seriously referred to as the ‘Global Garb-Age’ in the title of this chapter: how plastic waste chokes our oceans and the marine organisms living in them, how we are born into a contaminated world and suck in chemicals and pollutants as early as the umbilical cord connects us to the placenta in our mother’s womb, how we are exposed to hazardous chemicals in clothing, which ultimately rinse not only through our skin, but also into

a similar tragic fashion, the now abandoned and flooded village Geamana, Romania, became famous in the late 1970s when the country’s communist regime decided to turn Geamana into a gigantic toxic lake. See Newman (2012) for an overview on how tragedies such as those happened in Love Canal have influenced contemporary environmental writing and even sparked the development of a genre that he calls the “toxic autobiography” (22).

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the wastewater, from which they have to be removed by chemical substances. Within this never-ending cycle, Oppermann rightly points out that the human body appears as “a permeable sponge in its trans-corporeal interchanges with other bodies” (2016: 278). Inspired by Haraway’s “tentacular thinking” (2016: 30), Alaimo’s take on what she calls “toxic bodies” (2010: 17), and Sullivan’s “dark pastoral” (2014: 85), the following chapter is going to dig deeper into the molecular waste which composes and decomposes the air, soil, water, and bodies in the Anthropocene epoch. This necessitates a new materialist take on the interrelationship between the human and more-thanhuman world, which holds that all beings and matters reciprocally affect each other, for better or worse. We have seen how the new materialist world view challenges the dichotomy of nature and culture and in its place presents the idea of “naturecultures” (Haraway 2008: 15) towards the end of Chapter 2. But if nature is as much in culture as culture infiltrates nature, voices such as those of the environmental theorist Bill McKibben have been asking critically whether we can talk of the category of nature any longer, in particular in a time in which our carbon footprint seems to grow larger and larger. In his The End of Nature (1989), McKibben exposes nature to be a culturally constructed phenomenon in postmodern society and proposes a radical redefinition of the planet’s environment as post-natural: We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth manmade and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us. (2003 [1989]: 60-61) Revealing that postmodernity is marked by the loss of a “sense of nature as eternal and separate” (7), McKibben accuses postmodern society of having corrupted nature to the extent that it has been deprived of its naturalness and thus of its originality and authenticity. Inextricably linked with human society, nature thus appears as a man-made thing that can no longer be defined without reference to human impact on it. However problematic McKibben’s sense of nostalgia for pristine nature

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is, as it reintroduced the nature-culture divide, his notion of an intermingled world is useful for an ecocritical discussion of the embodied experience of anthropogenic environmental change. Becoming atmospheric in the Anthropocene, to borrow Jondi Keane’s concept again (cf. 2013: 61), means experiencing the lived effects of a polluted world. This includes both, coming to terms with the permeability and materiality of our own bodies and allowing ourselves to be irritated by “the everyday experiences of garbage” (Mazzolini & Foote 2012: 6) and pollution. It may come as no surprise, then, that the discourse on contemporary waste culture has adopted a certain Gothicism. As Lawrence Buell hints at in his discussion of what he labels contemporary “toxic discourse” (1998: 654), a turn to the unpleasant aspects of environmental issues such as toxicity, pollution, diseases, waste, and dirt does not easily fall in with the Thoreauvian pastoral depiction of untouched ‘wilderness’, indeed. Rather, a Gothic disruption of the seemingly perfect order of a sanitised and yet deeply infested Western world seems to be needed to narrate our dirty Anthropocene reality.3 Many have followed Buell’s call to the turn to the rhetoric and narrative dimension of the rather dark and unclean topic of toxicity in ecocritical theory. Heather Sullivan’s “dark pastoral”, for instance, is a fine example of how we can read the invisible and dirty flows and systems in literary writings of the Anthropocene (cf. 2014: 84-85). Other than nineteenth-century American nature writing with its preference for pastoral depictions of unspoiled nature or Terry Gifford’s “post-pastoral” (1999: 149), which challenges the pastoral’s idyllic representation of the environment with an awareness of urbanised culture, the dark pastoral “functions as a trope of exposure” (Sullivan 2017: 26, emphasis orig.) in that it proposes a more inclusive view on “our inevitable immersion in natural cycles as well as an understanding of the industrial impact of humanity’s large-scale actions on the entire biosphere of the Earth” (32). Therefore, it is a useful tool for extracting dark imaginations of a world haunted by industrial diseases, 3

The notion of ‘disruption’ and the process of what Lawrence Buell calls “rude awakening from simple pastoral to complex” (2001: 37) plays a central role in the Gothicising of contemporary toxic discourse.

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global warming and dominant political, social, cultural, economic, ecological, and affective forces from literary fiction. Such a Gothic view on the material and discursive exchanges or “dirty traffic” (Sullivan 2014: 83) in a post-natural reality links embodied experiences of toxic atmospheres and particles with global environmental changes through notions of pollution. After all, it is the Gothic, as David Del Principe calls to mind, which “is wont to remind us that we are shaped not only where we come from, but by what we eat, and how we interact with the environment and all forms of life” (2014: 2). In how far contemporary waste culture seems to have become the new, disturbing normal becomes clear in what could be called works of lit(t)erature, that is, fictional stories which engage with garbage in one way or another. Before we move on to discuss how contemporary ecofiction in particular draws on imaginaries of toxic atmospheres to stage the uncanny permeability of the boundaries between organic and geological bodies, let us turn briefly to Lucy Wood’s “Floatsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict” (2018), a short story which brings into sharp focus how many works of contemporary fiction seem to have been inspired by a certain “toxic consciousness” (Deitering 1996: 196), indeed. Published in her homage to Cornwall called The Sing of the Shore (2018), this short story stages the rising conflicts between human beings and an environment which can no longer be defined and experienced outside of a petrocultural context. Set in a remote town at one of the many idyllic shores in Cornwall, the story zooms in to the dwelling place of Mary and Vincent Layton, a retired couple who moved only recently “in a small house that overlooked an empty beach” (Wood 2018: 109). The story starts out to portray a pastoral picture of an idealised rural landscape, where “everything was sorted and in order” (ibid.) and the hard work of the past few years in a “wide and rocky” (ibid.) area finally pays out for a couple who wants to spend their remaining years living to the rhythm of the sea. “There were no loose ends” (ibid.), the narrator repeats twice, but as the story evolves, it becomes clear that even the most well-ordered lives in an almost unbearable isolated environment are not free from the chaos – and detritus – created by global trade and traffic.

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Right at the beginning of the story the gloomy description of an environment which seems to be oddly out of balance blurs the vision of the picturesque scene: “[r]ows of low, dark rocks radiated out across the beach like the hands of a clock”, says the narrator and explains that “[t]hese were the worn-down layers where the cliff used to be, before it had been whittled down to its bones” (109). Though the narrator does not elaborate on the causes for the coastal erosion, it is an open secret that rises in the sea-level, increased wave heights, and extreme storms, all of which contribute to an accelerated decline of shorelines worldwide, are a result of global warming. When Mary decides to take a walk on the beach, the foundations on which her house and future are built are slowly starting to crack. In an analogy to Carson’s “A Fable for Tomorrow” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the environment in Wood’s short story also gradually takes on a darker and dirtier hue. Presenting the reader with a foreboding atmosphere, the narrator reveals how the “[c]louds hung low in the sky – they were pale, and yellow, like eyes that were old or tired” (110). Within this ailing environment which does no longer follow Mary’s logic of control, she suddenly spots an alien intruder in her not-so perfect idyll: a plastic bottle. Irritated by the sight of this object which she almost confused for the glinting surface of a patch of rock or sand, Mary decides to bury it then and there. “[T]he tide would take it away for good” (111), she thinks, but her ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude lasts only until the next morning, when she has to discover yet another “five bottles strewn across the rocks below the house” (ibid.). Though Mary still tries hard to think of ways to hide the bottles from her view, she slowly begins to realise that the plastic waste on can no longer be ignored and even resists to be thrown away in an apparently overflowing bin at the beach. To restore order, Mary picks up the bottles, carries them home into her garage just to line them up “neatly in a row” (112). With each day passing, more and more “rope, plastic, translucent strips of polythene” (113) colonise the landscape and, ultimately, Mary’s body. After another day of excessively collecting litter at the beach, strips of blue plastic are tangled in her hair, “caught in the cuff of her shirt” and “stuck to her feet” (115). Just as the smell of “rank saltiness”

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(117) has entered the pores of Mary’s skin and slowly begins to disintegrate her mind, the rubbish makes its way into the safe and sanitised home of the Layton’s, which by now resembles a foul dust-heap: The room was full. A fetid smell rose up […]. The floor was a teeming mass of boxes and crates, ropes, plastic bottles, wet shoes, chipped and broken away toys. There were reams of greasy netting with tins and plastic beads and pen lids caught in them; and a heap of oil cans and rubber gloves and mouldy bits of fabric. […] Sometimes things looked like sand, but they weren’t sand, really. (115-116) Regardless of how familiar these everyday objects seem, they become estranged when their non-biodegradable nature as plastic waste becomes visible. In their collection Histories of the Dustheap (2012), Mazzolini and Foote argue that this embodiment of being “both familiar and unexpected”, commodity and junk characterises the “ghoulish charm” of plastic (2012: 2). What has once been seen cannot be unseen, and so Mary can no longer supress the reality of environmental pollution as the translucent, sand-like plastic particles on the beach are transformed from a singular oddity to an existence-threatening permanent condition. “Where would it all go, after it had been collected? It wouldn’t really be gone, would it?” (117), Mary asks herself rather hysterically just before a massive “pile of wet netting” (118) slumps against the front door and almost traps her inside the house. Haunted by all of the uncanny objects littering her front yard, Mary anxiously heads out for the beach, slips on the sand and sprains her ankle. After her husband finds her and carries her back into the house, which is almost overflowing with dirty and oozing things from the beach, Mary recognises that it is, after all, not a fateful slip on the mossy rocks which would ruin “all the years of planning” (110). Instead, it is a huge red shipping container “almost the size of the house, draped in seaweed and barnacles” (122) which does not seem to stop emptying itself in the Atlantic Ocean. The recurring theme of toxic garbage which imposes itself on the characters as it violently enters their homes, bodies and consciousness, like an uncontrollable disease has become an important trope in contemporary literature, as Lucy Wood’s example demonstrates. So, too,

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has become pollution more generally, as it captures notions of the invisible hazards that surround human beings in the “trans-corporeal risk society” (Alaimo 2010: 20). Since writers of ecofiction in particular have engaged more openly and specifically with the topic of environmental degradation in recent years, it is no wonder, then, that imaginaries of polluted environments play a more prominent role in this genre. The predominant use of toxic byproducts as a metaphor for environmental risks and Atmosfears in literary works of the twentieth and twentiethfirst century and the role of what has sometimes been referred to as the “postnatural novel” in reproducing a “toxic consciousness” (Deitering 1996: 196) or “toxic systems” (Heise 2002: 764-773) has already been extensively discussed in ecocritical theory. What interests me here, however, is how contemporary ecofiction engages readers with notions of embodied permeability to bring into sharp focus how we are atmospherically implicated in a shared and increasingly polluted more-thanhuman world. Instead of turning to risk or disaster narratives, however, the following chapter takes a closer look at John Burnside’s Glister (2008) and Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island (2016),4 two environmental mystery novels which depict processes of toxic transference as everyday experiences of living, breathing, caring and dying in the age of climate crisis. Offering different perspectives on embodied permeability as a dynamic process of being continuous with other worldly surroundings and agencies, both novels engage the reader in thinking ‘in-betweeness’ as a relational experience that, speaking with Haraway, “change[s] the subject – all the subjects – in surprising ways” (Haraway 2008: 219). While Glister explores the reciprocal relationship between human and more-than human agencies through a more dystopian idea of shared suffering in the face of industrial pollution and environmental degradation, Marrow Island extends the discussion of ‘dirty’ interrelatedness with a more affirmative notion of the existential experience of permeability as a way of cultivating responsiveness to the more-than-human sphere. My reading of how these two novels evoke an uncanny mode

4

In the following referred to as MI.

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of registering biological, geological, and affective interrelations of human beings with more-than-human agencies will foreground both authors’ investment in exploring the boundaries between body and world through a sense of becoming in and with polluted environments and atmospheres. Rather than celebrating entangled states of being, Glister and Marrow Island focus on how dirty assemblages and relations are conjured and can be attended to, which is why I will pay particular attention to how material textures and affective connections are foregrounded in and through the narrative constructions of the uncanny in these novels. In this respect, the question of how these novels rework experiences of and movements through physical, corporal, conceptual, and linguistic boundaries is central to my analysis, as it addresses a central question posed in ecocriticism: how can we foster a recognition of the relationality between the human and the more-than-human sphere, when we are really bound to our existence as human bodies? Literature cannot solve this tension, but my point is that by involving the reader in a creative process of imagining worlds and perspectives that may lie well beyond their limits of knowledge, it opens up a void in front of which the reader has to acknowledge the limits of human agency. I want to suggest that the uncanny experiences of geographical and emotional thresholds and ontological liminalities as we find them in novels such as Glister and Marrow Island provide a particularly productive means to make explicit and discuss the atmospheric tensions provided by literature and art more generally. At the same time, I want to look specifically at the sense of atmospheric re(lation)ality that seems to be reinforced by these speculative works of contemporary ecofiction and discuss how they allow us to approach the precarious and yet inspiring embeddedness of human and more-than-human beings in a shared, polluted world through ecocritical analysis.

3.1.1

“Nothingness haunts being”: Experiences on the Threshold between Toxic Spaces and the Self in Glister

If it is true that whatever is experienced or defined as ‘nature’ today is heavily influenced by human activity (cf. McKibben 1989), then it may

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come as no surprise that the question as to what it means to dwell and take pleasure from this dwelling in a post-industrial landscape has been revisited in recent years. In this context, critique of techno-scientific modernity has been highly influential to contemporary approaches to environmental philosophy. Long before the onset of our post-industrial age, Heidegger, for instance, famously claimed to see a fundamental threat to humanity in the degradation of nature to a “standing-reserve” (1977a [1953]: 17). He sharply criticised the way in which the ongoing commodification of the environment seems to lead to an estrangement of mankind from its surroundings. In his essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1977b [1954]) he could already explore how human dominance over nature is leaving us with a certain “homelessness” or uncanniness (339). However negatively connotated the feeling of lacking a home might be, Heidegger goes on to claim that it is this homelessness which “calls mortals into their dwelling” (ibid., emphasis orig.). To overcome our homelessness, in other words, we must shape our space not to dominate over nature, but to “enter in simple oneness into things” (338, emphasis orig.). This is the essence of dwelling, according to Heidegger, and contemporary authors of ecofiction such as John Burnside seem to explore the dynamics of this “distinctive kind of building” (Heidegger 2001 [1971]: 213) in and through their literary writings. In the present era, ‘entering into oneness’ with things cannot, however, be reduced to the idea of existing in harmony with beautiful landscapes. If “the duty of dwelling”, as Burnside claims, is to teach “us a necessary awe” and this “awe is central, is vitally necessary, to any description of the world” (2006: 95), the idea of dwelling in the twenty-first century must include the challenges, dangers and fears of being in intimate contact with a post-natural reality. The Heideggerian ideal of dwelling as a situated way of being or Dasein is thus challenged with an uncanny notion of becoming in and with polluted environments. Indeed, our present industrialised landscapes are more than a source for sublimity. They, too, “offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp” (Jameson 1991: 37-38).

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Patricia Yaeger similarly shows that we can identify an “enshrining of rubbish” in the works of contemporary writers and artists, which enacts “the exultations of an older [natural] sublime” (2008: 330). Burnside’s Glister, which was published in 2008 and translated into German in 2009, is certainly no exception here, as it portrays a dystopian and highly masculine version of the confusing and awe-inspiring (in)ability of connecting to a world weirdly out of balance. Offering a confusing journey through the fragmentary experiences and corroded minds of six inhabitants of an equally disintegrating, post-industrial town located somewhere in the United Kingdom, Glisternarrates the toxic aftermath of a formerly wealth-bringing and now closed chemical plant and its ill-fated consequences for the local interrelations between more-than-human as well as human bodies and their environments. While people going mad and dying of cancer has become the new normal in the Innertown of “Homeland”, the sudden disappearance of several teenage boys in the poisonous woods of the plant area is adding an even more violent quality to the everyday life of its nihilistic and directionless population. Trapped in a state somewhere between apathy and lethargy, neither the parents nor the police care what happened to the teenagers, and so Burnside’s novel addresses what one of the focalisers later on identifies as “the sin of omission” (Glister 249): a human flaw that affects the questionable direction in which the public concern for environmental issues such as habitat destruction and climate change might take us in the twentieth-first century and beyond. As I will show, Burnside’s uncanny defamiliarisation of places through his characters’ lived experience of inhabiting ineffable, toxic atmospheres and liminal spaces rather than clearly describable topographies illustrates the conceptual and representational challenges of complex environment-related issues such as environmental change. The novel’s evocation of spatial experiences uncloses textual gaps, which leave readers with a sense of uncertainty and ambivalence, thus confronting them with their limited perspective on and control of the story. Taken together with the Gothic discourse on bodily fragility and human cruelty in the face of large-scale air pollution and soil contam-

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ination, this unsettling reading experience invites readers to take a posthumanist perspective through which, so I will argue, they are asked to challenge notions of human exceptionalism. In this context, I will identify different kinds of threshold experiences that are narrated in Glister and that seem to be symptomatic for Burnside’s development of a sense of atmospheric re(lation)ality: the corporeal sensing of space as felt presence and the physical experience of boundary violations, both leading to an inter-subjective exploration of “difference-in-relation” (Whatmore 2002: 155). Set in a town which is “irredeemably soured, poisoned by years of runoff and soakaway” (Glister 10) from a chemical plant which was shut down years ago, the narrator reveals right at the beginning of the novel that the Innertown’s community inhabits a literal “wasteland” (7): You could see evidence wherever you looked of the plant’s effects on the land: avenues of dead trees, black and skeletal along the old rail tracks and access roads: great piles of sulphurous rocks where pools of effluent had been left to evaporate in the sun. A few keen fishermen found mutant sea creatures washed up on the shore, where those great boats had once been loaded with thousands and thousands of drums of who knew what, and some people claimed that they had seen bizarre animals out in the remaining tracts of woodland, not sick, or dying, but not right either, with their enlarged faces and swollen, twisted bodies. (11) As it turns out, the fate of Innertown is inextricably intertwined with that of the plant. Ever since its closure, people “contracted terrible diseases, or they developed mysterious behavioural problems” (12). Just as the plant and the corporate body behind its construction slowly decays, the residents of Innertown, who are said to have “nowhere else to go” (30), begin to disintegrate on a physical and psychological level. People “belonged to this place”, the reader is reminded throughout the novel, not necessarily because of their socio-economic dependency on the plant and its former success in selling poison and fertilisers on the global market, and certainly not because of family ties, but because the toxic place is “in their blood and their nerves” (65).

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By drawing a disturbing picture of how the years of chemical exposure have corroded both the mentality of the working-class milieu and the physical bodies of its members, Glister addresses the impact of industrial capitalism on human and more-than-human health and its relation to larger issues of class relations and inequalities. Indeed, and as Richard Newman shows in his attempt at canonising toxic autobiographies, “geography define[s] one’s toxic destiny” (2012: 31). This is why it is no accident that chemical production and dump sites pop up in areas with an already marginalised status because of their geographic location or their residents’ ethnic or socio-economic background. What is significant about this kind of environmental injustice from a material ecocritical perspective is that the people living in such post-industrial environments fall victim to drastic othering processes. These are linked to the “dirty traffic” (Sullivan 2014: 83) between industrial chemicals and the geological as well as the human body in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, residents of post-industrial towns are faced with a deformation of the familiar environment in which their houses and communities have been built. Whether smells in the air, colours of the vegetation, or even the taste of the rain, everything seems strange in highly polluted areas, which is why residents are turned into outsiders in their own habitats. On the other hand, they are strangely included into their almost unrecognisable post-industrial towns: as soon as toxins enter and alter the landscape of post-industrial neighbourhoods, they inevitably infiltrate the human and more-than-human agencies which are living in and on them. Consequently, the human body, too, is othered as a toxic material system or organism (cf. Oppermann 2017: 413). Influenced by his own experiences with the toxic legacy of his childhood home in Corby, Northamptonshire, it is not surprising, therefore, that Burnside depicts how an industrial, working-class town is suffering from “rare cancers”, “depression”, and “madness” (Glister 12), while the more privileged people in Outertown continue to profit from the exploitation of the poor and marginalised.5 This dirty interconnected5

Born and raised in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1955 and having moved to Corby, Northamptonshire in the1970s, Burnside soon had to witness a massive toxic

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ness of capitalist forces, polluted environments, community networks and sick bodies echoes the macabre side of dwelling in ecosystems in which “[e]verything becomes everything else, moment by moment, for all time” (2). “If you want to stay alive, which is hard to do in a place like this, you have to love something” (60, emphasis orig.), Leonard Wilson, one of the few teenage boys left in Innertown who has not yet been kidnapped by a mysterious serial killer haunting that place, remarks and adds that it is the chemical plant he loves after all. Being well aware of the lethal consequences of the Innertown’s polluted air and blackened rain which he has “breathed and swallowed and digested […] for around seven million minutes” (69), Leonard evokes his version of Jameson’s “postmodern or technological sublime” (1991: 37): The chemical plant is always beautiful, even when it’s frightening, or when you can see how sad it is, when all the little glimmers of what was here before – the woods, the firth, the beaches – show through and you realise it must have been amazing, back in the old times. You can still get that feeling. Like when it’s early on a summer’s day: halflight, ruined building looming out of the shadows, the last owls calling to one another from hedge to hedge on the old farm road that runs past the east woods and down to the water. (Glister 62) It is in such epiphanic experiences of surroundings that the novel extends a geographical view of fictional landscapes with what Stephanie Frink identifies as “both the emotional dimension of space and the spatial dimension of emotions” (2014: 196). Instead of drawing a clear picture of the plant and the headland, the reader is given perceptual and

waste scandal unfolding in his new industrial hometown. Famous for its large steel industry, Corby gained public attention in the 1980s and 1990s when the unusually high number of children born with birth defects during that time was suddenly linked with the consequences of the clean-up of a former steel factory. As it turned out, the mismanagement of the industrial waste of that former plant had released critical amounts of toxic material into the atmosphere, affecting the health of pregnant women and their unborn children living in that area (cf. Williams 2009: Web).

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

affective chunks of a highly individual interpretation of what, objectively viewed, qualifies as a deadly waste ground. Unable to describe the plant in realistic detail because he is both awed and maybe also already physically and psychologically affected by the “deadly power” (Glister 60) of his poisoned surroundings, Leonard defamiliarises it as a “stretch of nowhere” (61). In this ambivalent place where everything appears only in “half-light” and “glimmers” (62), one cannot be sure of anything, not even of one’s own perception. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the fictional company grounds of “George Lister and Son” (205), name givers of both the novel and the strange machine inside the plant, is described to consist of “hundreds of derelict buildings and a network of abandoned railway tracks” (61, emphasis added). By voicing the transcendent and incomprehensible aspects of his surroundings in a vague and imprecise language, Leonard apparently tries to restore the wonder that has been associated with natural landscapes “back in the old times” (62). Thus, he enacts Burnside’s ecological poetics which is concerned “with specific locales, not to create a sense of local colour, or for any Romantic effect, but to set up a kind of metaphysical space, which is essentially empty, a region of potential in which anything can happen” (Burnside 1997: 201). The plant represents such an empty and yet highly “affective space” (Frink 2014: 202), a space which allows for highly corporeal experience of space as felt presence. As a site of atmospheric encounter, it not only structures memories and affects, but, moreover, is constructed through peoples’ affective investment in that space and their interaction with that space. Its environmental qualities trigger a kind of spatial engagement through which the teenagers’ disposition is affected. What is experienced in this moment of mutual responsiveness between “the bodily presence of humans and things, or spaces” (Böhme 2017: 20) is the affective agency of atmosphere and thus a feeling of relationality. Being constructed as a means to a certain end, the plant functions as a place of shared as well as of private identity and memory for the emotionally abandoned Innertown kids, who, due to the inertia of their unemployed and sick parents, “wander aimlessly across the piles of rubbish, […] looking for any sign of life” (Glister 110). Being at the plant creates a mystical,

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spiritual experience for the teenagers in Glister, which is normally supposed to be felt at sites of religious pilgrimage. “[W]e all feel the same way when we are out on the headland by ourselves”, Leonard remarks and tries to elaborate on this feeling: I’ve stumbled upon others now and then, and I’ve felt something break, not just in my own mind, but in theirs, too: a sense of being part of the quiet, of being outside of time and, harder to put into words, and impossible to convey to someone else, a feeling of reverence for the place, whether for the clumps of wild flowers and grasses that grow amid the broken glass and rubble, or for how still it can be on a summer’s afternoon – so still, it’s as if nothing has ever happened, here or anywhere else. So still, it’s as if no one had ever existed, and time was just about to start (66) The plant becomes a “church” (ibid.) for their celebration of loss and nothingness, a sort of holy ground where a sense of timelessness formerly associated with untouched nature can be re-experienced. Rather than a home of God or Pan, however, the plant is seen as a harbourer of a “genius loci” (211, emphasis orig.). This spirit or rather atmosphere of that place provides the kids with a feeling of belonging that they have long since forgotten in their broken families. Since the plant is “peaceful, and it doesn’t belong to anybody, and, maybe, […] it’s the only beauty [they] know” (61), it becomes an emotionalised space where individual as well as collective feelings and memories associated with ‘feeling at home’ are stored by the teenagers. Leonard’s narration reveals that this feeling is characterised by a transcendental notion of being with another, a relational experience that is, as I have argued in Chapter 2, characteristic of atmospheric encounters. Since this specific experience can no longer be found at his fathers’ place, nor in non-existent “bosky groves, or dark reed beds” (211), it is projected on the empty space of the abandoned headland. It becomes increasingly clear that the post-natural environment of the plant seems to restore order and give meaning to the kids’ otherwise meaningless existence. Thus, it fulfils a similar cultural function as the supermarket in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), a function that accord-

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

ing to Dana Phillips “used to be assigned to the pastoral” (1998: 244). Other than in DeLillo’s supermarket, however, the pastoral impulse of Burnside’s plant does not lie in the naturalisation of its technological and constructed essence. Rather, it is to be found in a recognition that human beings are part of the toxic atmospheres that they have helped create both on a geological and a social scale. Since Glister repeatedly demonstrates how our future is literally “written in our blood” (Glister 70) in a polluted world, the beauty that the teenagers find at the chemical plant has hardly anything in common with a concept of picturesque beauty known from “calendars and pictures of little white churches or mountain streams” (212). When you do not have “gardens and parks with clear lakes” (60) right on your doorstep, you need to find beauty elsewhere, even if it is in the acid snow which makes visible “the unseen pipework and fields of rubble” (64). Consequently, the “industrial wilderness” (61) at the plant must be interpreted as a dark pastoral, one that according to Sullivan “brings to our attention the seemingly hidden and ignored costs of global industrial capitalism” (2017: 26). As a space of exposure, the plant area becomes a site of self-discovery for the lost teenagers. When Leonard is wandering through what he calls the “poison wood” (Glister 63), he suddenly detects a strange little garden of flowers which turns out to be a mysterious memorial for one of the kidnapped boys. His confusion about this sight is quickly followed by an elaboration on his role as a “part of the history of that place” (197): This wood has poison running in its veins, in the sap of every tree, in every crumb of loam and every blade of grass under my feet, but it once was a place where lovers went to be secret […]. That’s part of the history too. This garden is part of the history, and my finding it is part of the history. So it’s also part of the history when I kneel down and start to dig […]. I’m not saying that I’ve found a body, I just know that there is a clue somewhere in all that dirt and grass and poison. (ibid.) The headland is a space defined by relations and history and provides the teenagers with a sense of identity and thus, paradoxically, becomes the exact opposite of a transitional and functional production site.

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Instead, the teenagers’ childhood homes represent what according to Marc Augé’s definition characterises “non-places” (2008: 77): “spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces”, that is, the link “established through the mediation of words, or even texts” (94) between people and the non-place they inhabit. Indeed, in the Innertown’s ‘homes’ people come and go, like Leonard’s female acquaintances, and if they decide to stay anyway, then it is because they are glued to their TV screens or playing sex games. Other than the teenagers’ childhood homes, where death, lethargy, and televised realities paralyse the inhabitants, the plant area is charged with meaning and “clues” (Glister 191). Therefore, it represents Burnside’s idea of a “mythical space, from which the personal and the ideological have been carefully removed” (1997: 207). It is a space free of dictation, rules, and ownership, and thus an area where teenagers can just “be something” (Glister 251, emphasis orig.). As Leonard corrects himself at a later point in the novel, it is this experience of the communal rather than of self-interested love that is needed to stay alive in his dying world. This evocation of what Tom Bristow calls “a sense of one’s depersonalised self in the (ongoing emergence of) world” (2011: 154) is characteristic of Burnside’s writings, as it allows him to realise a poetics of place which is supposed “to identify home, and to locate both speaker and listener in a space of their own, whether that space is a shared home, or not” (Burnside 1997: 201). Burnside’s view of home not as a fixed locale that we can possess but rather as a feeling of transience requires a defamiliarisation of place into a notion of space as “the fluid, the shifting, a region of unexpected potential” (205). In this regard, Burnside’s philosophy shows obvious parallels with Heidegger’s idea of “the fourfold”. To dwell in the fourfold is “a staying with things” (Heidegger 1977b [1954]: 329) and requires the capacity to accept and preserve the earth with its elements, to live under the sky and with the rhythms of seasons, to await the divinities, and to acknowledge one’s mortality (cf. ibid.: 328-329). Leonard, who out on another night of seeking solace at the plant suddenly feels that he belongs “to the lightning, and the thunder. To

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the black rain. To the cold metal. To the sky” (Glister 188), tragically enacts Heidegger’s metaphysical truth of being and thus tends towards a fascination for the liminal and undisclosed. While he is already equipped with an extraordinary aesthetic awareness for his surroundings, Leonard’s regular encounters with a man whom he calls the “Moth Man”, a mysterious and, as it turns out, dangerous nature lover named after a supernatural creature from West Virginian folklore, help him to finally enter into a state of what Florian Niedlich identifies to be the Nietzschean “metaphysical solace” (cited in Niedlich 2013: 218). It is after Leonard has been offered a “special tea” (Glister 128) by the Moth Man that he experiences a sense of interconnectedness that he knew was in him all along. Intoxicated as he is by the tea he hallucinates “in dizzying detail” how “[e]verything is one thing” and how he is “alive with everything that lives” (129). Such esoteric experiences release him from his isolated, lonesome life in the Innertown, and so he embraces the temporary escapes from reality as promised by such drug induced out-of-body-experiences. During another trip from the Moth Man’s tea, which is followed by Leonard’s cremation in a mysterious machine inside the plant, he experiences how “nothingness haunts being” (223). Leonard is pleased by the thought of falling into oblivion, of being eradicated from this world. He does not regard death as “some negative thing at all” but embraces it as a “blossoming, a natural event” (ibid.). As a consequence, he willingly accepts the Moth Man’s plan of a violent self-annihilation in the name of the Innertown peoples’ “sin of not wanting to know” (249) what happened to the kidnapped boys as well as to the ravaged landscape of the Innertown. Similarly, Alice, the fatally ill and mad wife of the novel’s corrupt police officer Morrison and another voice in Glister, imagines death as a portal through which all living things reconnect with each other to return to “the shining, communal oneness from which they had all originated” (57). Apart from the obvious religious motif, what reverbs in the novels’ strong focus on imaginations of redemption and rebirth is a Gothic impulse of evoking wonder and terror in the face of death as the last natural limit in a post-industrial reality (cf. Ladino 2012: 114). The liberating and yet “terrifying idea” (Glister 58) of ecological interconnect-

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edness is, after all, deindividuation. The novel’s spatial imagination of absence and nothingness can therefore be interpreted as part of Burnside’s larger eco-philosophical project of “stop[ping] time, in order to root the reader in eternity, to suggest, in other words, a sense of the continuum of being, as opposed to the contingencies of everyday existence” (1997: 212). By imagining the cathartic effect of the unity of past, present, and future as exemplified in Leonard’s narrations of his out-of-body experiences, Glister bridges an ambivalent notion of relationality with a subjective experience of what Heather Houser calls “the limitations to connectedness” (2014: 398). Houser finds these limits to lie in the potential health issues that post-industrial ecological interchanges may cause and argues that “ecosickness” is therefore a prominent trope in contemporary fiction. In Glister, her idea of the lethal consequences of the “material dissolutions of the body-environment boundary through sickness” (Houser 2014: 3) is indeed omnipresent. The novel’s vivid imagination of how invisible toxic flows disrupt bodily, societal and global systems brings to mind the fragility of both, material connections and the anthropocentric understanding of the autonomous individual. Another narrated threshold experience that raises questions about the boundaries between human and more-than-human spheres can therefore be identified to lie in the novel’s depiction of bodily or material disruptions. Burnside’s use of images of water exemplifies the ecological idea of existing in dynamic material flows. “Water is everywhere” (Glister 118), Leonard ponders when he is lost in the incomprehensibility of planetary matter; and just as everyone in Innertown has to live through the horrors of the toxic legacy of their surroundings day after day, the motif of water “goes round and round” (118) in the novel itself. The moment Leonard dies, for instance, the narrative voice that remains of him recalls the sound of the “slow, insistent motion of the waters” (255). With its cyclical nature, it becomes both a symbol of death and healing transformation and thus functions as an important metaphor for the transcendent imagination of Burnside’s novel. It is “the quick dark force” (238) which violently takes life by drowning people as well as a curing

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agent which promises potency, fertility, and rebirth. Like a “mysterious black current” (238), it challenges human agency in a world where “[e]verything has its own clock, its own lifetime” (119). In line with the novel’s many biblical analogies, Leonard is pictured as a post-industrial Messiah who gives his life and blood to heal or water the infertile, toxic ground of the Innertown. As the novel ends and starts with the dying Leonard’s disembodied voice, a voice that seems to be washed away in a never-ending loop of reliving and retelling the daily despair of a lost and forgotten town, it remains open whether the nothingness into which he is passing will be “hell or salvation” (4). According to Burnside, “the person must maintain his/her bounds, both in order to exist as a separate individual, and to have space in which transactions can occur” (1997: 202). While questioning the boundaries that separate the self from the more-than-human world is necessary to come to a more inclusive understanding of our place in an ecological reality, trying to transcend the self via drug abuse or suicide is not only dangerous, but, so Burnside seems to suggest, utterly useless. As much as Leonard seeks death, and as much as death can be regarded as an ecological process of decomposition, it is what robs him of his agency and disconnects him from the world. We need the experience “of being a human body exposed, moving, or standing in the open”, Burnside suggests in his essay “A Science of Belonging” (2006: 98), just as we need literature and poetry to explore the limits of the human gaze. In an analysis of Burnside’s lyrical poetry, Ben Smith similarly argues that rather than idealising transcendence, Burnside’s writings offer “a means of mapping our limited human understanding” of the concepts of self and landscape (2013: 74). Within the context of the novel, this empties into uncanny threshold experiences as narrated from the viewpoint of many different protagonists. As Glister suggests, the human perspective on the world is only one among many others. Yet, the way in which we pay attention to the world may transform our experience of it irreversibly. Glister forces the reader to practice taking different perspectives by confronting them with six different focalisers, each of whom experiences the headland differently. While Brian Smith, the major capitalist force in this novel who owns a

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large company in the Innertown, casts a cold and pragmatic view on the headland as a ground which needs to be exploited to make as much money as possible, Elspeth, one of Leonard’s lovers, views it as a playground which distracts her from the boredom of everyday life in the Innertown. To the mentally deranged Alice and her corrupt husband Morrison, who is forced by Brian Smith to conceal the child murders because it would damage the image of the Innertown and Smith’s company, the existence of the headland is nothing but a burden. Andrew Rivers, yet another social outcast and potential paedophiliac, views the headland as a safe and sealed-off haven until he is violently killed by Leonard and his friends. Most of the time, however, the reader perceives a mysticised version of the headland through the first-person narration of Leonard, who thus becomes the primal figure of identification for the reader. By jumping from Leonard’s individual experience into this pool of different perspectives just to put the reader back again into Leonard’s shoes at the end of the novel, Glister not only moves through individual, human-scale perspectives on the environment, but links them to broader and more large-scale views on societal and even global structures. The toxic atmospheres as reinforced by the text become central in this thinking together of what Timothy Clark calls the personal, the national, and the global scale (cf. 2012: 157-158). As physical and geological forces, toxic atmospheres infiltrate the biological bodies of the characters and affect them on a highly personal level. Just as they haunt their bodies, they move through neighbourhoods, intoxicate all areas of communal life and eventually taint the social atmospheres that circulate between the lethargic and sick people of the Innertown. Consequently, Glister reveals in how far individual human agency and largerthan-life economic exchanges tie in with each other, contributing to the mess that the inhabitants of Innertown find themselves in. Transgressing the scales at which one can think a polluted reality, the text’s toxic atmospheres appear as agential forces that allow for a “futural reading” which according to Clark

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[…] decenters human agency, underlining the fragility and contingency of effective boundaries between public and private, objects and persons, the “innocent” and “guilty,” human history and natural history, the traumatic and the banal, and (with technology) the convenient and the disenfranchising. (2012: 162) It is in this thinking across scales that the novel provides not only a fresh perspectivation of a complex problem such as pollution, but even more so adds to the narrative negotiation of atmospheric re(lation)ality. The novel’s fragmentary style and the way the different focalisers are connected to each other further supports the kind of uncanny relational poetics that Burnside’s novel seems to contribute to. This is also true for the novel’s nonlinear collection of subjective impressions, which may be said to challenge us to put together the little “fragments” and “clues” that we are given while reading. Since Glister is indeed “a story that has a life of its own”, it is a matter of the reader’s creative investment in the world- and space-making of this novel how they will interpret the truth about this story which not “anybody could tell” (Glister 3). This point is emphasised right at the beginning, when the narrator warns the reader that “anybody who likes can do the telling, but it doesn’t affect how the story goes in the least” (3). This claim not only acknowledges the important role of the reading process in the construction of the meaning of a literary work but is also a fitting analogy of the limited control we, the alleged authors of our own stories, are facing in a world that seems to be more and more out of balance. In other words, if life is seen as a story, and if we keep in mind that the aesthetic effect of literary texts is co-determined by the agency of a reader, then the story of life, too, underlies forces out of its author’s control. Both the characters of the novel and the reader are left with a sense of unreliability of human perception, which exposes the “arbitrary, artificial construction” of our view of reality and thus may have an uncanny effect on the reader (Grein 2000: 40). One needs “to find the right kind of attention” (Glister 64) to pay to both the text and the agential forces that Leonard’s narration is trying to evoke, and this attention sometimes exceeds descriptive language and a

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cognitive mapping of the environment. According to Kate Rigby, “earth appears as that which withdraws and remains hidden” (2004: 436, emphasis orig.), which is why she concludes that in poetic language, “earth is preserved precisely in its unsayability” (ibid.). Even though Glister is written in prosaic language, it is full of passages in which the reader becomes witness to an uncanny relational aesthetics of place as ambivalent space. Leonard, who clearly is a mediator of this aesthetics, tries to look beyond what is visible in his narration of his lucid experiences of the headland’s atmospheric architecture. He never attempts to map his environments because the area of the headland and its industrial sites are too confusing and spacious to be grasped by human consciousness. Consisting of “inner rooms within rooms” (Glister 63), just like the multivocal and non-linear narration of the novel, the headland is not a topography through which one can navigate easily without pausing and wondering at “all the hidden angles and recesses” (64). As he is convinced that “[i]t’s not description you want, anyway, it’s something finer” (211), Leonard applies a phenomenological approach to his place- or rather space-making experience. Concentrating on what lies in-between “one place and another” (63) he recounts what turns out to be only fragments of a larger vision of “communal oneness” (57) as reinforced by the multi-perspectivity of the novel itself. In trying to restore that feeling of oneness at the plant area, Leonard ponders upon the inadequacy of verbal language to express his encounter with what he calls the “spirit of the place”: It was present, and I always thought it was talking to me. Not in words, though. Not like that. It was more like pointing. It was there, pointing to something I should know about, something I should have seen beyond the things I was seeing, but it wasn’t concerned with what you could say in words. (211) What the reader is offered in passages like this is an affective attunement not to a specific locale, but to an experience of an atmosphere, filtered through the unreliable perception of one of the novel’s focalisers. The truncated, almost repetitious sentences support the story’s phenomenological approach to place, as they evoke space themselves: words

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

have been carefully removed from these short sentences and thus open up the very gaps Leonard is talking about. Furthermore, there is a natural pause after each of them, forcing the reader to experience the space in between the sentences. The motif of the unspeakable thus gives the reader room to think about and fill in the gaps in the text. In auratic moments such as these, Burnside subverts his narrator’s insistence on the impossibility of putting atmospheric experiences into words. While all of Leonard’s actions channel into a horrible and unresolved death inside the plant, his dangerous wanderings into unknown and liminal spaces at the edge of his familiar hometown allow us to explore Burnside’s idea of the “continuum of being” (Burnside 1997: 212) without having to lose our sense of self. To the contrary, we are asked to actively use our individual affective and creative capacities as human beings to define the blurry edges of the novel’s uncanny idea of a global interconnectedness. The function of language to structure both perception and surroundings fails in Leonard’s numinous experiences of reality and weakens an anthropocentric view on the world. The fragmented reality as reinforced by the novel’s nonlinear structure as well as the unreliable narrations of bodily and mentally sick focalisers deny the reader to come to a definite, unambiguous mapping of the fictional landscape. Instead, the reader is compelled to experience Leonard’s unsettling sense of having “a story all disjointed and out of sequence” (Glister 222). Like the characters, the reader is left “alone in the blackness” (216) and forced to tap in the dark of the novel’s oppressive and polluted literary atmospheres. Neither self nor place are absolute and fixed within moments of dark atmospheric exposure, which is why Glister allows the reader to re-enact the characters’ sensual and bodily exposure to an instable and thus uncanny world. This instability is of course supported by the novel’s larger Gothic subtext of a ravaged and uninhabitable environment, which slowly dies from toxic emissions. At the same time, it resonates with the depiction of fragile bodies and minds. In a reality where nothing is certain and the human body more and more merges with the toxic substances in the environment, the concept of the autonomous self can hardly be maintained. In Glister, visions of doppelgänger participate in unsettling

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long-standing Western assumptions about the boundaries between the human body and the more-than-human world. In his drug-induced trips, Leonard feels like he has been “split in two” (131), like the world around him. Thus, he enacts inter-subjective explorations of his embodied hybridity, which, according to Sarah Whatmore, may “disturb the habits that reiterate the cumulative fault-lines between human/subjects and non-human/objects” (2002: 161). Leonard repeatedly begins to see a strangely familiar boy, who he describes as a “me/not me” (131). While his first vision of an othered version of himself already leads to a dissolution of his sense of self and creates an uncanny notion of embodied permeability, his second and last encounter with his double takes on an even more terrifying quality: it is his dying self he sees, literally split up and “badly cut” with “dark blood dripping from his face and hands” (254). These visions of the othered self unclose a gap between the internal and the external, thus asking the reader what it means to live – and become – in a post-natural reality where human beings are as much inside as outside of themselves. Burnside’s Glister does not give an answer to this question. Rather it draws on a strong sense of ambivalence, reinforced both in its open ending and its spatialisation of language and affect. The reader, who finds themselves exposed to their limited perspective as well as to the porous boundaries of both the human body and anthropogenic notions of place, is forced to shift between an almost terrifying multiplicity of possible interpretations of a strangely familiar reality. Within this confusing textual environment, the reader is prompted to question their own perspective on and perception of the narration of a post-industrial town that could just as well exist in their lived environment. It is in this respect that Glister actively tries to involve the reader in an affective and embodied experience of atmospheric re(lation)ality. What may follow from this is an uncanny sense of interconnectedness or, to put it in the words of the novel’s main focaliser, a “mild sense of discomfort” (249) in the face of both the obvious and invisible consequences of a long-standing fantasy of human exceptionalism.

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

3.1.2

“Clustering out like fungi”: Liminal Modes of Being  in Marrow Island

Engaging with the limits of the physical and conceptional borders between the self and the environment through notions of becoming in and with transitional and toxic zones, Glister explores the “inbetween as the place where true identity, peace, belonging, creativity, redemption and the future manifest” (Hubbell & Ryan 2016: 13). Set at the rural edges of the supposedly safe and clean environment of an archipelago in Washington as well as the forests of Oregon, Alexis M. Smith’s Marrow Island (2016), too, negotiates the generative and destructive potential of threshold experiences of people who become more and more defined along with their contaminated surroundings. Written by the Portland-based author Smith, who was born and raised in Washington State before moving to Oregon, Marrow Island, has been heavily influenced by autobiographical information, not unlike Burnside’s Glister. Other than Glister, however, Smith’s novel approaches the intersections between ecosystemic and metabolic cycles in a less violent way: in focussing less on processes of bodily disruption than on forms of transspecies conviviality, Marrow Island presents the reader with a hopeful, yet deeply uncanny vision of atmospheric re(lation)ality in contemporary crisis-ridden environments. Moving back and forth between personal traumas and fictional environment-related events as happened on Marrow and Orwell Island in 1993 as well as in 2014 and the female main protagonist’s Thoreauvian lifestyle in the woods of Oregon in 2016, the novel explores large-scale cycles of death and rebirth through a microscopic investigation of our connections to our past, present, and future as well as to the bodies, matters, and environments that we find ourselves enmeshed with. Taking the utopian mycromediation project of a community of deep-ecologists based on the poisoned ground of a small island in the American Northwest as a background for the tragic journey of a woman who seeks to make peace with her crisis-ridden past, Marrow Island evokes questions of the fragility of earthly existence and the way we survive in the face of destruction and loss.

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Depicting explorations of geographical, bodily and atmospheric contact zones, Smith’s novel contributes to the production of a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality by bringing mutual relations between geographical, bodily and atmospheric contact zones into view. I argue that by evoking corporeal modes of communication between human and more-than-human beings and surroundings, Marrow Island imagines atmospheric modes of being in and becoming with the world. My reading of Marrow Island will demonstrate how this novel works through uncanny notions of and experiences with “intercorporeality” (Fuchs 2016: 200) or what I discuss under the idea of embodied permeability.6 This kind of response-ability is not only described to happen between human and more-than-human bodies in the novel but is even more so enacted in the creative dialogue between reader and text. This, so I will conclude, is how Marrow Island contributes to the realisation of an uncanny relational poetics; a narrative approach to the writing and reading of our atmospheric implications in the world that, as I have argued in Chapter 2, is needed to think the future of our planet. It has been twenty years since the fictional 1993 “May Day Quake” shook the Canadian and North American west coast and caused a fire in the local refinery on Marrow Island, a disaster that unleashed oil dispersants into the soil and ground water and forced hundreds of people to settle down on the US mainland. Among them is the unsuccessful journalist Lucie Bowen, who, after all these years, decides upon moving back to her deserted childhood home on Orwell Island to face her troublesome past and find inspiration for a story that could eventually save her career. Within this strange and yet familiar environment, Lucie 6

Fuchs defines intercorporeality as “a pre-reflective intertwining of lived and living bodies, in which my own is affected by the other’s body as much as his by mine, leading to an embodied communication” (2016: 200). While Fuchs uses intercorporeality to describe the dynamism of affective responses between human beings, I will apply a new material lens to it and read it in light of transspecies entanglements. Since the corporeal in particular relates to the human body, I finally propose the concept of embodied permeability to account for the transcorporeal and affective exchanges between human and more-thanhuman bodies.

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

ponders “[w]here to begin” (MI 240). She finally answers this rhetorical question by starting her story right from the end of what turns out to be a rather disturbing journey through a mysterious coastal landscape where the boundaries of land and sea, past and present, and environmental idealism and fanatism collide and flow into each other. Just as Glister, Smith’s novel plays out within a complex of border spaces. Bearing a strong resemblance to the US American San Juan Islands, the fictional islands presented in Marrow Island, which are described to be located somewhere in-between Canada and North America, seem like a country of their own. Both separated from and connected with the mainland by the waterways, the islanders seem to belong more to the sea than to the USA. “The locals set the scene and the mood, like the cast of characters in a Melville novel” (MI 26), Lucie reveals when she takes a walk down Orwell’s main street just to be reminded of the islanders’ relaxed pace of life.7 That the people there seem to live in tune with the ebb and flow of the sea’s waves only distracts from the dark fact that the story is really placed within human-caused ecotones. Frederic Clements was one of the first to use the term ecotone to describe the concept of an environmental edge where “the limits of certain representative facies and principal species” (1905: 186) meet and blend into each other. Within this unique transitional space, which occurs for instance at the boundary between the forest and the grassland or the water and the land, organisms from adjacent ecosystems converge, collaborate, morph and flow into each other. Consequently, the ecotone is not only where increased biodiversity happens, but also a space that marks an uncanny revelation about the porousness and 7

Besides the obvious intertextual reference to Herman Melville’s characterdriven storylines of novels such as Moby Dick (1851) or his semi-fictional travelogues Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and Mardi (1849), which all rework voyages to different islands and deal with disturbing encounters with native tribes in one way or another, one easily recognises Smith’s inspiration drawn from another writer: George Orwell. Just like Orwell did on the Scottish island Jura shortly before he began writing his masterpiece 1984 (1949), Smith’s main protagonist, too, seeks retreat to a remote and abandoned island in the hope of finding the peace and quiet needed to write her next article.

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vulnerability of material and immaterial borders (cf. Hubbell & Ryan 2016: 2). When an ecotone is created by human disturbance, e.g. by the construction of roads, or the extension of industrial sites, the fragility of ecosystemic boundaries and ecological relationships becomes particularly clear. Disturbances caused by anthropogenic-induced shifts in climate or changes in topography require creative responses of the ecological systems and biotic communities bound by the ecotone and may, in extreme cases, even lead to a total dissolution of the ecotone in question (cf. Gosz 1991: 15). In both Glister and Marrow Island, anthropogenic restructuring of the landscape has emptied into a habitat destruction that continues to affect the health of human and more-than-human communities. While we stumble over strange and mutant creatures in Burnside’s poison wood, we find damaged soil and altered fungal species in Smith’s disrupted island idyll. And while pollution has led to cancerous growth in the bodies of the protagonists of both novels, it is in Marrow Island only that the sickness of both land and people is tackled actively. During Lucie’s exploration of her hometown, she suddenly arrives at a “place where asphalt appeared out of nowhere” (MI 21). At the “site of an aborted housing development” (ibid.) Lucie is faced with an environment which represents an anthropogenic ecotone in twofold ways: it is a transitional, suburban space that has been constructed for commerce and housing as well as an area that, as we learn, is divided by a huge crevice, the result of an earthquake which is after all connected to the repercussions of anthropogenic environmental change. Within this derelict and ambivalent space, red alders have taken root despite the “logging and fires and other disruptions” (21) of the last few decades. Thus, they appear as the “swift and adaptable species” (ibid.) that one might expect to find in transitional zones such as those presented in the novel. Besides alders, Lucie encounters a range of other plants and mycelia reclaiming their place all over the islands, even in the wasted and highly contaminated area of the “ArPac Refinery” (7) on Marrow Island. Upon receiving a letter of her childhood friend and first lover Katie, who moved back to Marrow Island years ago and ever since has been

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

part of the secret and semi-legal “Marrow Colony” (xi), Lucie sets out to see for herself whether the once uninhabitable island is as transformed and remediated as Katie wants her to believe. At first sight, nothing much seems to have changed since Lucie left the islands after the “Marrow ArPac disaster” (34) killed her father and tore her family apart. The destroyed refinery with its “charred, weathered cement of the remaining walls and smokestacks” still invokes in her the idea of a monument to “something violent and manmade” (61). Similar to Leonard’s recollections of the Innertown, Lucie’s memories of Marrow Island conjure a dark image of a dystopian war zone. What she remembers of the postdisaster Marrow is the horrible scene of […] more dead shorebirds than I had ever seen, cast among the jagged hulls of small boats, rope and fishing gear, fish and crabs trapped and suffocated or starved in the mesh. We had pulled our shirts over our noses to filter the air, thick with sea rot and animal rot, mixed with the eye-glazing fumes of the chemical dispersants they had eventually used on the oil slicks around Marrow. Everything had an oily gloss, a sheen like a puddle in a gas station parking lot. (35) The closer the boat is bringing Lucie to the island, however, the more she realises how dozens of plants are now “taking root in the cracks, in the dust” (61) of the destroyed refinery. Pristine nature is no longer available in the post-industrial landscape of Marrow, but where the totality of toxic matter paralyses people and leaves little hope for the sick environment and community to heal in Glister, it is what inspires environmental action in Marrow Island. Just as the vegetation slowly reclaims its place in the abandoned town, Lucie discovers that Marrow Colony’s small community of apostate nuns and eco-activists has set out to reinhabit and remediate the poisoned ground of the island. Arriving at one of the cottages of the Colony, Lucie sees people passing “on the worn path between this house and the fields, the woods” and describes how they “carried tools of various sorts, buckets” (68) and even chickens. Bearing a strong resemblance to American Western narrative, this scene is soaked with settler-colonial imaginary and evokes an idyllic and pastoral way of life. The Colony invests much of its energy in main-

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taining a self-sustaining and anti-capitalist community, thus ensuring a life in communal oneness with the more-than-human environment. As much as Lucie wants to feel relief in this “serene, prosaic” (66) environment, she is troubled by the dark secrets that lurk behind this idyllic façade. She cannot block out the refinery, which constantly reappears in her field of vision. Throughout the novel, it emerges from behind the trees, “like a dead old growth” (74) and “a beast” (97) and reminds her of the contaminated ground. The colony’s efforts to revive the patches of the island by planting different sorts of mushrooms leaves her alarmed as she is convinced that “[a]s long as the rest of the island was still sick, the Colony was sick” (90). Much to Lucie’s astonishment, the Colony’s mycoremediation project has indeed led to a composted soil free of toxins in parts of the island. The longer she stays on the island, however, the more Lucie is reassured of her concerns about the lethal consequences of the Colony’s exposure to cancer-causing chemicals. Marrow Island “would always be a graveyard” (164), Lucie claims shortly before she witnesses a strange burial ritual on a mushroomstrewn stretch of land that turns out to be an illegal burying ground for dozens of deceased people and still-borns of the Colony. Indeed, many gave their lives for the sake of the island, and most of the female colonists remaining are affected by advanced ovarian cancer. While Lucie becomes more and more anxious and paranoid about the invisible and “smallest particles of heavy metals in the soil, in the water, for decades, for generations” (127-128), experiencing health scares and the uncertainties that come along with living in a contaminated environment has fuelled the colonists’ will to deal with and make happen processes of growth and transition. Instead of an “illness community”, which according to Lisa Lynch is a community “made up of individuals who share their symptoms” and which “can supply neither cure nor solace” (2002: 218), Marrow Colony represents a collective that cultivates both, fungal decomposers and an acceptance of death and decay. In Marrow Island, death gives the colonists no reason to mourn indeed. The colony’s leader and former nun Sister J. claims that as a “part of life”, death offers the possibility “to return to the earth, to continue to be part of the island, not pumped full of chemicals and artificially pre-

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

served” (MI 175). If the plant and the experience of illness is what connects the people with each other in Glister, the community presented in Marrow Island is held together by a fungal network with its generative as well as destructive potential. Treating the sick environment as well as their living and dead bodies with mushrooms enables them to practice what Timothy Myles termed “decompiculture”, that is “an inevitable and essential process of human symbiosis with the pre-existing organisms which in nature close the biogeochemical carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur cycles” (2003: Web).8 Just as in Glister then, Smith’s protagonists find themselves caught in retelling and reliving “the refrain build, destroy, repeat” (MI x, emphasis orig.), which becomes kind of a credo in the crisis ridden reality of the environment of Marrow Island and its inhabitants. While Burnside’s main focaliser tries to find his way out of this never-ending cycle in a violent self-annihilation, Smith’s novel presents the reader with a more utopian impulse: even if premature death may be the ultimate price one has to pay for living and breathing in a polluted environment, there is hope for surviving even the most severe environmental and personal traumas. Instead of personal sacrifice and self-regulation, Marrow Island explores the idea of a community built around the experience of “growth and decay” (233) and thus negotiates the idea of what Callicott refers to as a “positive (love and care), not negative (self-sacrifice and cold, rational duty) motivation for responding to the challenge of climate change via incentivized collective (not voluntary individual) action” (Callicott 2017: 84). The whole story revolves around making visible different experiences of in-betweenness to bring relations between human and more8

That such a morbid engagement with the inevitability of human death and the challenges that our current burial or cremation customs may pose on global environmental health is by far no mere fiction is demonstrated, for instance, by the recent “Death Positive Movement”, a movement of people breaking with death denialism and thus pointing at a quite repressed aspect of ecological reality. Born out of this movement is also the “Infinity Burial Suit”, a biodegradable body bag which replaces conventional coffins by using mycelia that decompose the deceased body, neutralise toxins and deliver nutrients to the soil (cf. Coeio 2016: Web).

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than-human agencies into view. The fight against cancerous growth in the ground, bodies and global economy is what connects the colonists as they become gradually transformed by their shared and toxic material webs and habitats. What cannot be seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted is dangerous, but it is also “the gift that”, as Sister J. explains during one of the Colony’s burial rituals, “allows us to sleep at night, to dream, to love each other, to sow and reap, and to build, […] to bear the burdens, the losses” (MI 144). In Marrow Island, permeable zones of contact between human beings and the environment are experienced “to be thrilling as well as alienating, uncomfortable as well as dynamic” (Hubbell & Ryan 2016: 14), which is why the novel explores various forms of mutual relationality with the environment and other beings. In this context, the skin as a semi-permeable layer that is neither fluid nor solid, neither open nor closed can be seen as a master metaphor of what Nancy Tuana termed “viscous porosity” (2008: 198). It is a zone of transmission, a fleshy ecotone if you want, that enables us to experience the “interactions between things through which subjects are constituted out of relationality” (188). Thus, the viscous porosity of human bodies suggests a nonlinear and highly dynamic conception of being as a constant process of becoming, wherein the body is disrupted by and mingles with more-than-human matter. In Smith’s novel, skin is what allows the protagonists to relate to others and the environment. Lucie, for instance, constantly tries to absorb and memorise the smells, tastes, and sounds of people and environments by forcing sensory impressions “all the way down into [her] cells” (MI 42). Thus, Lucie claims at a later point in the novel that she can […] smell the water before I see it. Water lifts all the smells around. The mist rises; the vapors carry particles of resin and pollen and fungi spores. […] I close my eyes and inhale, trying to feel the course of the vapors through my body, the whole invisible forest in my sinuses, my lungs, my blood. Everything right down my cells and further: to the mitochondria, the tiniest lungs, where respiration continues after the death of the brain, the heart. The last breaths of the cells happen there, as the body decays, releasing all that stored energy at last.

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

Hot sacks of cells, our bodies, like compost heaps, streaming with everything we take in, unsure of how to let go. (46) Training her “cellular consciousness” (45) like this, she hopes to become more lucid to her surroundings and avoid falling prey to the possible dangers that she suspects in the wilderness. At the same time, she is concerned with getting her own smells into the air, intermingling with her environment through her sweat, her hormones, and her chemical perfume in order to familiarise the animals with her alien presence. Like mycelium that “communicates directly with the soul of every living thing that touches it” (47), Lucie, too works toward the creation of a bodily transfer between herself and the environment. What seems to be more important to her than a cellular interaction with her surroundings, however, is to establish a corporeal and highly affective mode of human-environment communication founded in a sense of vulnerability. If it is through affective involvement that we reach out to the world, then embodiment becomes “the medium of our concrete presence and participation in the world” (Böhme 2002b: 13). Accordingly, it is in a form of what Böhme calls “corporeal sensing”, as demonstrated by the main protagonist of Marrow Island, that we “experience the fact that we are never fully in command of ourselves, that we are constituted by that which we as an ego are not” (Böhme 2002b: 13). As much as Lucie tries to control her movements and choices in the forest to prove her independence of and sovereignty over the environment, she is drawn in by the sensory impressions of her surroundings. Instead of giving clear descriptions of what she is perceiving with her senses, Lucie evokes diffuse moments of lived presence, thus shifting the attention from the object of perception to the process of perception itself. Given that the narrative gives insight into spaces or spheres of experience that do not draw on the perception with the five senses, Hermann Schmitz’ already discussed concept of the felt body comes again into view. Endowed with a “peculiar spatiality and dynamism” (Schmitz 2011: 253), the felt body is a “space of experienced presence” (255). Exposing our body to the environment makes us vulnerable indeed, but the sensual experience as a body is the only way, according

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to Schmitz, to affectively participate in the world. In order to maintain our wellbeing, however, finding balance between knowing one’s boundaries and being open to our surroundings seems to be necessary. Lucie embodies this conflict as she constantly shifts between states of isolation and integration on a social as well as between states of tension and relaxation on an emotional level. In her ambivalent role as an investigative journalist on the one hand and a close friend of the illegal community on the other, she represents a dangerous mediator between the outside world and the Colony. As much as she is included in the prayers, mediations and, ultimately, illegal funeral rites of the Colony, and as much as Lucie in her liminal role as a bisexual woman at some point admits that being on Marrow and around Katie does make her “feel something” (MI 164, emphasis orig.), she refuses to become part of the Colony’s pantheistic cult of nature, life, and death. By physically moving back and forth between the mainland and the islands, Lucie re-enacts a conflicting movement between outside and inside that is also characteristic of the “intertwinement of tendencies towards contraction and expansion” of the vital drive (Schmitz 2011: 249). This dialogical character of the felt body, Schmitz argues, becomes apparent in impulses such as “fright, fear, pain, hunger, thirst, lust, vigour, disgust, tiredness and generally all affective involvement with emotions” (253). When Lucie, for instance, is deliberately poisoned by a mushroom cocktail because her friend Katie fears that she will write an article about the dark secrets of Marrow Colony, she experiences the dynamics of contraction and expansion in manifold ways. As soon as the poisonous drink hits her stomach, she finds herself in pain and describes how she “could feel the movement of the organ, its machinations” (MI 188). In this moment, a feeling of contraction prevails as Lucie is trapped inside her aching body. Still, she feels the need to escape her body and it is the feeling of nausea which ultimately makes her “want to move” (188) and temporarily releases her from this hopeless situation. In her intoxicated state, she suddenly claims to feel “like I was sailing, my arms out skimming the top of the grass like it was water” (189). A state of expansion settles in and, just like Leonard in Glister, Lucie starts to “feel everything the island felt” (MI 189). Lucie’s

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odyssey through what she calls a “timeless fog” (192) is dominated by immediate and pre-reflective perceptions of indistinct noises, shapes, and presences. Her disrupted notion of place, time, and identity adds to the impression that she is trapped in and cannot escape the present moment: I lay down near the doors, where there was some light, on a soft pile of dirt and bark, thinking, This is where the bark lives […]. I felt the storm pass over for hours, or minutes. A steady rain began. Time moved in and out like a telescope. (MI 191) However undirected her multisensory exposure to her surroundings appears in this passage, logical thoughts do find their way into her consciousness. Her reflections on her embodied experience of weather help her to establish a sense of relative location, thus helping her to balance the polarities of the primitive and the unfolding present. As a “modified form of the space of lived experience” (Böhme 2011: 164, my translation), i.e. as a physical atmosphere, however, weather lacks temporality. This is the reason why Lucie manages to make sense of her location through ingressive experiences of contraction and expansion but fails to orientate herself in the temporal present. What is giving her direction in this moment of disorientation besides the weather is the sea. While she mistakes the sun for “a fire, set back against a wall” (MI 193) and the moon for a “deranged glowing orb in the sky” (194), it is the sound and sight of water and waves that she can make out quite lucidly. “As long as I kept the sea to my left, I would come to the Colony eventually” (191), she concludes, and follows the “the sound of the ocean” (194) until she is finally rescued by Carey, a ranger on Marrow Island and her future boyfriend. The corporeal sensing enacted by Lucy in moments of disorientation allows Smith to capture an ambiguous experience that invites us to negotiate the uncanniness of existing in and as part of atmospheric relations. Like Glister, Marrow Island is strewn with evocations of halfconscious states of being as we find them for instance in moments of drunkenness, dreaming, or meditation. Although Smith’s novel can hardly be categorised as a Gothic text, it stages tensions between loss

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and memory or, in other words, between absence and presence. In her deranged condition, Lucie is unable to make sense of her surroundings and presents the reader with a confusing collection of sensory impressions of the nothingness that seems to surround her. The only thing threatening her in this situation is her inability to make out the dangers that may hide in the dark and diffuse coastal environment, and so her narration evokes gaps about what is really going on in the fictional space of the novel. The reader needs to concretise Iser’s “gaps” (1972: 288), i.e. that which the text leaves indeterminate, but as the perspective through which they can explore the fictional space is distorted, they are left with a sense of uncertainty about how the story proceeds and, eventually, may develop a more general uncertainty about their own interpretation. This tension evoked by the interplay between ambiguous descriptions of the environment, conventional signifiers of the Gothic (e.g. transgression of boundaries on a bodily and/or psychological level) and readerly actualisation gives rise to the toxic atmospheres and Atmosfears discussed in these novels. In the case of both Glister and Marrow Island, these atmospheres are what haunt the protagonists and the reader in the end. While the passages in Smith’s novel about Lucie’s temporary state of intoxication vividly explore a horrific case of bodily possession in which the person affected is faced with limited autonomy, a feeling of fractured temporality, and an inability to differentiate between what is real and what is hallucinated, the novel also presents the reader with other forms of being haunted by what is absent, by what has been lost. In this context, Lucie’s personal trauma of both having lost her father in an environment-related disaster and almost having died herself on Marrow Island is what controls her actions and decisions in her remaining adult life. Without intending to read for an oedipal conflict that a psychoanalytical interpretation would probably suspect behind Lucie’s difficult relationship with her mother and her affection for her father, the Freudian logic of repression still proves useful to explore the uncanny potential of Smith’s novel: ravaged by unprocessed experiences of crisis, Lucie’s perception of the world is overshadowed by a hypersensitivity for envi-

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ronment-related risks. “What was repressed thus returns to haunt our heroes with the vivid immediacy of the original moment” Steven Bruhm argues, and indeed, Lucie’s personal history appears “as mixed up, reversed, and caught in a simultaneity of past-present-future” (2002: 267). History repeats itself when Lucie realises that “I’m still in trouble for taking off and almost dying on the same island that killed my father” (MI 41). After her near-death experience on Marrow Island, everything only ever seems to happen at once for Lucie. Having moved back to the mainland and living a solitary life together with Carey in a cabin in the Malheur National Forest, she goes back and forth in her memories of what happened to her father, Katie, and herself. If weather is what “disturbs transmissions all the time” (197), it is Lucie’s unresolved fear of loss that interferes with her emotional relationships with other people. This disruption is also reproduced by the text itself: as she is having sex with Carey, her recollections of the past appear on the page, separated from the main narrative thread only by indentions. Additionally, the whole novel is scattered into section breaks, which alternate between Lucie’s past experiences on the islands and her present life with Carey in the Oregon woods. Such a fragmentary structure disrupts the flow of the text and immediately affects the reading process with the evocation of an atmosphere of delusion. According to Bruhm, trauma is what destroys “the ability to apply principles of coherence and analytical understanding to one’s life events” (2002: 269), and so the anachronistic narration of events both within and between the chapters work toward capturing the sense of trauma experienced by the main protagonist. Adding to this, the novel provides the reader with an identification figure who shuts herself off from society after a series of personal catastrophes. Throughout the novel, Lucy seeks peace and quiet in remote and rural towns and islands. She even decides to spend almost all her days at the fire lookout in the Malheur National Forest after having returned from the hospital. Although she fears being alone in the forest, surrounded by all the ambiguous sounds and noises, she finds weird pleasure in recognising her mortality and her permeability as a fleshy, leaky and fluid being:

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My first night alone at the lookout I am terrified, sleepless, listening to the sounds of a cougar prowling the deck. Maybe my period is coming. Thinking of the old wives’ tales about menstruation and wild animals, how the smell of blood draws the carnivores. I imagine there’s a niche market of erotica based on this superstition. A woman alone in the wilderness: so vulnerable, so delicious; she goes mad, consorting with the beasts. (MI 200) At the heart of Lucie’s feelings lies an experience of the ecogrotesque, which according to Matthew Wynn Sivils describes the “horrid realization of the self as a dying fragment that will eventually become re-assimilated into the nutrient flow of the amoral microorganism of the natural environment” (2010: 30). As the novel at times reduces human protagonists to their materiality as compostable beings, it challenges the conventional view of the environment as a resilient place somewhere outside of ourselves and offers in its place an uncanny notion of the material, fluid relationality between human bodies and the morethan-human world. In Marrow Island this immediate and intimate relational feeling is expressed not only in Lucie’s establishment of a corporeal mode of communication with the environment, but also with animals. While she seldomly tries to empathise with other human beings, she regularly wonders how she smells to “female mosquitos” (MI 45) or “what kind of meal I sound like to the lynx” (48). Her fear of dying and being eaten is what makes her recognise her embodied permeability, but instead of regarding the animals as hostile and dangerous opponents, Lucie’s response to her experienced vulnerability is grounded in a less ecophobic understanding of the more-than-human world. The longer she stays in the woods, the more she recognises a mutual responsiveness between her and the animals as well as the environment, and so she does not identify herself with the helplessly exposed woman of her above-cited short tale. Instead, she explores her creatural condition not only as a living being, but also as an “embodied being-in-relation” (Ohrem 2017: 46). In this context, a notion of openness or what Dominik Ohrem refers to as “world-openness” comes to the forefront as it “allows for more affirma-

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tive imaginings of embodied interspecies relationality and for a more conscious recognition of the ways in which it permeates ‘human’ lives and societies” (69). When Lucie hits an elk with her car on her desperate search for Katie at the end of the novel, the reader is faced with a scene which shifts the focus from a negative connotation of vulnerability as a mode of exposure to Ohrem’s idea of vulnerability as an openness through which the body “finds itself existentially and self-constitutively positioned toward an address from elsewhere, from other embodied, worldly beings” (70): There’s a gash in her side, giant ribs protruding. One of her front legs is broken and bent beneath her. She’s nodding her head and breathing heavily, like she’s in labour. I breath along with her, approaching slowly. Her large eye tracks me, and she makes a high mewling sound. […] She could cave my chest, plow open my ribs like I did hers. I kneel behind her head, and she stops calling to her calf, sensing me there. But she becomes very still. She’s paralyzed by terror, by instinct, in the presence of an animal more dangerous than she. […] I run my hand down the back of her neck where the brown-gray fur curves down her chest. Her waning pulse reaches my palm. My hands are slick with blood. I lie down next to her, resting my head on her, my ear below hers, the wild smell of her so strong I can taste it, like iron and wood and shit, on my tongue, in the back of my throat. I’m breathing with her, still. (MI 239-240) Although the graphic description of the elk’s horribly injured and split up body allows for a discussion of vulnerability in terms of an violent exposure of more-than-human beings to human destruction, I want to divert attention away from the motif of bodily suffering and instead focus on the scene’s investment in evoking moments of “intercorporeality and interaffectivity” (Fuchs 2016: 195, emphasis orig.) across species boundaries. What is central to the interaction between Lucie and the elk is an intuitive empathic understanding enabled by sensory impressions of the other’s presence. In their face-to-face encounter, Lucie and the elk participate in a shared affective space in which they are mutually affected by each other’s sensations and bodily expressions. As this

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scene shows, it is in the moment of mutual recognition through the gaze that this moment of affective sensing reaches a peak: when the elk’s “large eye” (MI 239) tracks Lucie, she feels the animal’s paralysing terror, not because she can read the elk’s facial expression, or because she knows how an elk feels, but rather because she imagines herself as the dangerous animal that she seems to be in the eyes of the animal. Affected by the elk’s fear, she immediately reacts by trying to comfort the animal. She reaches out to the elk, extends her own body into the body of the elk before, moments later, the dying animal “quivers” and “reverberates” (241) in reaction to Lucie’s embrace. In this moment of bodily resonance, or what Fuchs refers to as “interaffectivity”, lived bodies “expand and ‘incorporate’ the perceived body of the other” (2016: 198, emphasis orig.). The affective interaction or “mutual incorporation” (Fuchs 2016: 199, emphasis orig.) as well as the skin-to-skin contact and transmission between Lucie and the elk ties in with the novel’s theme of embodied permeability and experienced in-betweenness and allows for a realisation of a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality through the reader. As the scene is narrated from the perspective of Lucie, the reader is not only encouraged to realise how Lucie sees herself in the eyes of the animal in the process of reading, but is faced with a moment of relationality in which they have to explore the narrative environment through the focalising other. More than an invitation to make sense of Lucie and the elk’s inner and outer views at each other by reconstructing their mutual, visual recognition, this focalisation technique engenders an inter-bodily resonance between the text and the reader, thus realising the diegetically presented notion of relationality in the moment of readerly reception. As the example of Marrow Island shows, literature has the capacity to make us imagine our relational existence as permeable and responsive worldly beings. While literary gaze moments as those presented for instance between Lucie and the elk demonstrate maybe most vividly how “true relationality is established extradiegetically through the creation of a punctum in the act of readerly realization” (Bartosch 2017b: 227, emphasis orig.), literary examples of more holistic, corporeal modes of communication between human bodies, more-than-human beings and

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atmospheric phenomena also allow for what Bartosch calls “relational readings” (2017b: 223). As Smith’s novel shows, embodied permeability can be experienced on different levels and in different context: in terms of a bodily exposure to polluted environments and natural hallucinogens, in narrations of in-betweenness on a social, sexual, psychological, and topographical level, or in corporeal modes of communication with more-than-human agencies. In this context, Lucie’s disoriented wanderings through the wilderness take on an uncanny quality, not only because they offer an insight into the confusing depths of Lucie’s consciousness, or reinforce a sense of vulnerable openness, but also because they allow the reader to explore surprising modes of communication with and relation to uniquely other and yet not so different more-thanhuman presences. Although Marrow Island sharply brings into focus the seemingly thin line between environmental conscience and fanatism as it presents the reader with both a “disrupted pastoral” (Buell 2001: 37) and what Lucie herself calls a “failed utopia” (MI xi), it ends on a more hopeful note than Burnside’s Glister: finding herself in the midst of a severe forest fire after her car accident, Lucie does not give herself up to the all-embracing flames but fights for her survival as she starts running for her life. Rather than her future, it seems like the ghosts of her past are going up in flames when she closes the novel with claiming to see the “ashes falling like rain” (242). Even if it remains open whether or not Lucie dies at the end of the novel, Marrow Island is what LeMenager calls a “story to live by” (2017: 226). As it explores individual survival, collective resilience, and interaffective and intercorporeal relationships of care in the face of environmental change, it offers an alternative language for narrating crisis in the twenty-first century.

3.2

Making Sense of Embodied Permeability

As my reading of Glister and Marrow Island has shown, the question that we need to ask today is not that human and more-than-human beings inhabit a shared environment, but rather how we narrate our entangle-

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ment in a post-natural, posthuman sphere somewhere in-between conceptions of the animal, the human, and the environment. Since hardly anything signifies the collapsing boundaries between culture and ‘nature’ more than a decomposing and yet strangely alive body, it comes as no surprise that twenty-first century ecological versions of the literary uncanny more often apply the theme of “learning to die” (Scranton 2015; LeMenager 2017) to remind readers of their existence as embodied and atmospherically embedded beings. However, it makes a difference whether what I have called embodied permeability is narrated in terms of a negative experience of violent exposure to hostile nature or explored through a more posthumanist lens. In Glister and Marrow Island, the experience of fragile embodiment is considered in both its dystopian and utopian dimensions: while it poses the threat of a violent transformation or even annihilation of what we call the human self, it is also imagined to be offering the opportunity to remember our lived relationality as composed and decomposable, earthly beings. Literary writings which focus on the various zones and spheres of contact between human and more-than-human beings in post-industrial contexts not only stage the pressing problem of dirty interrelatedness of planetary life, but also think the human at once as more and less of an exceptional, ontological entity. Thus, I would argue that these novels discard human-centred conceptions of sensemaking in favour of more creatural modes of thinking. At the same time, they offer critical views on esoteric fantasies of holistic oneness. Even if boundaries are not definite and we cannot, following Whitehead, “define where a body begins and where external nature ends” (1968 [1938]: 21), trying to transgress boundaries on a physical level is dangerous and violent, as both Lucie’s and Leonard’s (near-)death-experiences demonstrate. Rather than disembodied transcendence, however, the novels suggest a corporeal and affective mode of engagement with the more-than-human world to be a more promising form of blurring the boundaries of the human. After all, exploring the limits of human agency does not only seem to be essential for survival, but also for understanding what it means to transform – and be transformed by – the more-than-human world.

3. Being Polluted in the Global Garb-Age

As my reading of Glister and Marrow Island has pointed out, the literary creation of notions of embodied permeability involves a spatialisation of language and affect that is realised in the reading process. More than through narratives of polluted bodies and environments, embodied states of in-betweenness are explored through corporeal experiences of uncanny atmospheres on both the diegetic and the extradiegetic levels in these novels. In order to achieve an uncanny effect, Glister and Marrow Island confront the reader with textual ambivalences and tensions as created through descriptions of their focalisers’ corporeal sensing of strangely familiar spaces, presences, and beings as well as through the fragmentary and yet cyclical structures of their books. Drawn into literary moments of ambivalence like this, the reader becomes witness to the limits of their readerly and, I would like to add, human agency. While I neither can nor want to make an unambiguous point about the actual ethical impact of these two novels on readers, I propose that the uncanny, textual environments of novels such as Glister and Marrow Island prompt the reader to engage with and respond to questions and experiences of atmospheric re(lation)ality.

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4. Reading Matters, Material Readings Traces of Agency in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy

4.1

Weird Terroirs and Other Terrors

To invoke a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality is to negotiate the tensions laid bare and addressed by imaginaries of our atmospheric implications in the more-than-human world. It is to encounter and engage with the conflicts and the uncanny relational aesthetics arising out of literary translations of a very specific, non-ecophobic variation of Atmosfears. Chapter 3 has pointed out in how far ways of narrating our fragile embodiment in the face of polluted environments and toxic transferences contribute to a literary rendering of a sense of the fuzzy and permeable boundaries between the (human) body and the (morethan-human) environment. With regard to the works of ecofiction discussed in the preceding chapter, I have already touched upon the observation that the writing about the ambivalence of the physical and conceptional borders usually drawn to demarcate culture from ‘nature’ goes hand in hand with a spatialisation of language and affect, condensing in a more general sense of an uncanny ambivalence inherent in the writing of these texts. By forcing us to engage creatively with the voids and thresholds opening up as a result of our encounters with notions of ambivalence on both the level of their content and form, I have argued that novels such as Glister and Marrow Island not only present us with, but even more so involve us in explorations of corporeal and af-

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fective modes of engagement with expressive forces of agency beyond the human. This chapter will elaborate on the serendipitous ways of making sense of the world that are narratively addressed by speculative works of ecofiction. Shifting the focus from the ‘dark and dirty’ tropes used to frame an uncanny relational aesthetics (cf. Sullivan 2014: 84) to the interpretative engagement with the immanent elusiveness of literary affect, Chapter 4 will essentially turn to the question of the value of our ways of reading in a climatically changing world: why is it important that we shift attention to the way matters, including human and more-than-human beings, ‘read’ the world, and why does reading matter after all? As it will become clear, the interrogation of the role of embodied modes of reading for making sense of the atmospheric world is inextricably bound together with questions of cultural and scientific representations or readings of atmospheric conditions. However intuitive our sensing of the world, Hulme rightly points out that “there is no unmediated access to the human experience of climate and its changes” (2016: 93-94).1 The fact that human beings tend to semiotically construct or model the more-than-human world in order to make sense of it does not mean that there is no more to planetary reality than what human beings make of it cognitively, linguistically, and scientifically. To the contrary, and as argued by material ecocriticism in particular, our material-discursive making and remaking of ecological communities is

1

This view is congruent with the new materialist view on reality: as Barad shows by drawing on quantum physics in her Meeting the Universe (2007), we can only ever gain access to one specific version of phenomena, depending on what she calls our “the apparatus” (19) of investigation. This is because phenomena do not pre-exist but are always already intra-actively produced. Thus, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ understanding of anything but rather variations or fluctuations of phenomena, taking shape always in mutual response between already entangled agencies (cf. 2007: 33). Mediated forms of information, in this sense, “are not mere static arrangements in the world, but rather […] dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (2003: 816, emphasis orig.).

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

what connects us to a world similarly equipped with an expressive or narrative agency. Such an agential take on the construction of reality relativises the role of human signs and signification processes. At the same time, it is always already tied up with a weird perspective at and from the “outside-that-is-inside-too” (Bennett 2010: 120); that is, a relational view of life expressed in the notion that “[w]e do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because ‘we’ are of the world” (Barad 2003: 829, emphasis orig.). In other words, and speaking with Barad, practices of knowing could also be understood as “intra-active” performances of growth of meaning that play a constitutive role in the materialisation of human as well as more-than-human bodies. As such they “cannot be fully claimed as human practices” (ibid.). The binary construction of passive nature ‘out there’ and the active, sense-making subject ‘in here’, i.e. in human culture, is disrupted by what Barad has coined as an agential realist understanding of ecological reality. Just as our relation to the world cannot be described in terms of an external perspective on the realities that we seek to understand, it neither comes to be expressed in the idealist idea of “absolute interiority” (Barad 2003: 824). ‘Rather, we find ourselves in a condition of what Barad calls “‘exteriority within’” (803), which means that we make sense of the world precisely in our being “of the world in its differential becoming” (818). This queering of objectivity and subjectivity, of outside and inside, is also an important strategy used in weird and eerie works of fiction: “they allow us”, Mark Fisher argues, “to see the inside from the perspective of the outside” (2016: 10). Although the beginnings of weird writing can be traced back to as early as 1880, the genre of the Weird came to be defined only later. As already suggested in Chapter 2, it was with the publication of Lovecraft’s literary writings and his famous Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) in the first half of the twentieth century that the Weird claimed critical and international attention (cf. Joshi 2003 [1990]: 1). The Weird, as a genre, is written into a heightened awareness of the strange, irrational, and unknowable qualities of a world which exceeds our capacity to explore and model it through scientific measurements. Similar to the view on more-than-human life taken in a material eco-

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critical framework, Weird fiction prompts readers to conceive of morethan-human beings and the environment as articulate agencies operating outside and despite of human processes of signification and perception. In the Old Weird, which Noys and Murphy date between 1880 and 1940 (2016: 11), the tendency to estrange the spatio-temporal reality as an animated outside that can nevertheless irrupt into and interfere with our familiar world has more often led to literary imaginations of alien presences and topographies that exceed our ability to rationalise and represent them (cf. Fisher 2016: 61). Lovecraft’s evocation of weird creatures and even weirder environments in stories such as his “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) is certainly inscribed into this tradition of presenting us with the “limited and limiting spatial and temporal capacities of our brains” (Tabas 2015: 8). Rather than inducing a sense of “wrongness” (cf. Fisher 2016: 15) by depicting hybrid and wholly other beings and topographies that lie beyond the everyday, however, more recent productions in the field of Weird writing work towards engendering a “new sensibility of welcoming the alien and the monstrous as sites of affirmation and becoming” (Noys & Murphy 2016: 125). While Weird fiction written after World War II had already tended to blend Lovecraftian cosmic horror with more contemporaneous storylines known from fantasy writing, thus creating what would ever since run under the label of Science Fiction, the exploration of the numinous, unknown, and transgressive in the Weird tales of the 1960s and thereafter similarly ventured into previously unknown terrain (cf. VanderMeer & VanderMeer 2011: xviii). Driven by posthumanist philosophy and an increasing awareness of the ecological crisis, the New Weird of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century replaced the shock of that which is out-of-place and time with an unsettling experience of the alien-within, thus engaging more openly with both the frightening limitations and possibilities of human imagination and agency. In doing so, the Weird stories of authors such as Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja, and, more recently, China Miéville, K. J. Bishop, and Jeff VanderMeer apply an uncanny approach to the writing of agency that takes into consideration both the strangeness of the

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

more-than-human forces that surround and act upon us, and our own inherent strangeness as trans-corporal materialisations. The New Weird, however, does not represent a sentimental exploration of the dynamics of our entanglement in a complex, ecological reality. Rather than striving for a resolution of the ambivalence of our immersion in an environment which is both more than and a part of us, the New Weird appreciates the inaccessibility of the more-than-human world (cf. VanderMeer & Vandermeer 2011: xvii). Therefore, it eschews a reductionist modelling and mapping of fictional worlds in favour of a sensitivity for embodied and affective modes of exploration of the complexity of human and more-than-human relationships. Weirdness, in the New Weird, thus derives not so much from the Old Weird’s sublime horrors of alien presences and cosmic transcendence. Rather, it thrives on a profound sense of disorientation and destabilisation engendered by the subgenre’s preference of working through our inevitable immersion into the material world (cf. Wheeler 2006: 87). What this type of fiction does, in other words, is to undermine our presuppositions and certainties about a reality in which “things just aren’t the way they used to be, something has gone wrong” (Canavan & Hageman 2016: 10, emphasis orig.). This is maybe one of the reasons why the sense of uncertainty produced by the earth’s changing climate resonates so prominently with more current works of the New Weird genre. In Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014b) our implication in a sheerly ineffable topography is shown to affect a scientific community’s objectivity-driven attempts at imposing human logic on a mysterious territory called Area X.2 The trilogy, also simply referred to as Area X, brings together three volumes – Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance – all published in 2014 and written by the US American author, editor, publisher and three-time World fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer. Inspired by his annual hikes through the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in North Florida and the remote, transitional, and endangered ecosystems that he encountered there (cf. VanderMeer 2014a: Web), VanderMeer set out to write about his impression that 2

I will refer to the Southern Reach Trilogy in the following as SR.

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[o]ur environment contains much that’s invisible to our senses that permeates the landscape  – that actually permeates us as well. Microbial life, parasites, creatures in symbiosis, things that live in the air. Plants, too, are communicating one to another and insects through pheromones. There are latticeworks and cathedrals of conversation that we’re unable to “hear.” We have fairly primitive sensory data coming in on all of this, and this means we misunderstand our environment from the moment we’re born. If we sometimes feel a prickle on the edge of our senses it may be that some part of our reptile brain is experiencing a ghost of an echo of the complexity that truly surrounds us. (VanderMeer 2014d: Web) Indeed, his “thoughts about nature – and how if we’re going to set ourselves apart from it, as if we’re not hip-deep in it” (VanderMeer 2014a: Web) have influenced much of his writing before and after the international success of his Southern Reach Trilogy.3 His unique mode of writing which he has himself referred to as “Weird Nature” writing (ibid.) and which has given him the nickname of “The Weird Thoreau” (cf. Rothman 2015: Web) ties in with the New Weird movement’s “subver[sion] of romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy” combined with an acute “aware[ness] of the modern world, even if in disguise” (VanderMeer 2008: xvi). His trademark style of imagining “the mundane traces of the uncanny” (VanderMeer 2014d: Web) in the morethan-human world is central in the Southern Reach Trilogy, which is why the trilogy invites multiple points of entry to discuss how contemporary speculative ecofiction turns to the atmospheric and its uncanny relational implications in an age of climate crisis.

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Strange and uncanny imaginaries of the more-than-human world have been explored extensively by VanderMeer in his oevre, reaching from works as diverse as his short story collection City of Saints and Madmen (2001) to his more recent novels Borne (2017), The Strange Bird (2017), Dead Astronauts (2019) and A Peculiar Peril (2020). Even his first two novels – Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009) – are reminiscent of an early version of his Weird Nature writing style that would attract a wider audience with his Southern Reach Trilogy.

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

Like the cut off, abandoned regions depicted in Marrow Island and Glister, VanderMeer’s Weird version of a small patch of land somewhere in a fictional US American coastal area has similarly been transformed into an almost uninhabitable environment. Ever since an “ill-defined Event” (SR 62) created a nearly invisible, “flickering” (154) border around the spacious area of a small coastal village thirty years ago, thus isolating it from the rest of the world as we know it, a governmental research facility called the “Southern Reach” has been sending out scientific experts into this area to demystify the strange happenings occurring within and around its bounds. As it turns out, however, the last eleven expeditions returned with more questions than answers about the true nature of Area X, that is, if they made it back home at all. The few interviews with those individuals that somehow managed to cross the border and re-enter earthly reality revealed little to nothing about what happened to them in Area X, except that their blank expressions, flat words and “dreamlike demeanor” (24) suggested that they must have experienced an unexplainable personality change. As we learn at a later point in the trilogy, the explanation for their strange, apathetic behaviour is less to be found in a traumatic experience than in the fact that the scientists are indeed not the persons they used to be before entering Area X: they are carbon copies created by a monstrous creature, which ultimately seems to be the driving force behind Area X’s ability to read and transform human beings into something else entirely. Most of the members of the last expeditions, however, were never really seen outside of Area X again. Instead, they adapted to their weird environment and became estranged from their former selves until they reached a bodily condition that is far more unsettling than the returnees’ state of “death that would not mean being dead” (24). Neither losing all of their human features such as human cells, eyes, or stature, nor being clearly identifiable as anything human, they transformed into animal-looking creatures and other hybrid, otherworldly presences, or they “sunk into the natural landscape of the coast” (63), like the disintegrating village in which much of the plot evolves. The Southern Reach naturally tries to hide the terrifying details about Area X’s inner machinations from the general public. For fear of spreading

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panic among the local population, they invented the story about “a localized environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental military research” (62), thus contributing not only to the myth that is Area X, but also to their frantic attempt to find a rational explanation for the formation of this “topographical anomaly” (191). While it becomes increasingly clear that Area X is irreducible to any story told about and name given to it, the Southern Reach still engages in representational practices to make it knowable, meaningful, and controllable. One of the most striking examples of their apparent need to model the environment is expressed in their attempt to mediate and access Area X through processes of cognitive and geographic mapping. While Area X is anything but clearly separated from the rest of the world, the Southern Reach indulges in the illusion of a fixed and impervious border surrounding it; a border that is, after all, “invisible to the naked eye” (SR 7). Only the building of the Southern Reach facility itself, placed in such a way as to face what is imagined to be an entrance into Area X, suggests the existence of a border at all (cf. Robertson 2018: 114). This, in turn, reinforces the anthropogenically constructed nature of borders, zones, and territories in general. According to Tabas, “what scientists do to create order is to impose limits” (2015: 11), and so it may come as no surprise that the mapping and modelling of Area X becomes of prime interest to this research institute. According to William Hugel, we can identify different forms of maps and mapping practices used and applied by the scientists of the Southern Reach to navigate through Area X’s uncharted terrain. One of the first examples of a mapping device we encounter in the trilogy is “the figure of the map in a literal sense” (Hugel 2015: Web). The expedition team we follow in Annihilation, the trilogy’s first volume, is equipped with a physical map providing them with a two-dimensional and tentative projection of Area X. While readers are provided with a copy of this map in a promotional booklet of the trilogy, it becomes increasingly clear that not all the places and structures we encounter in the trilogy have been documented in it. The map appears to be functioning as a “form of misdirection” (SR 44) rather than as a source of guidance for both the scientists in Area X and us as readers of the

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

book. Another form of map can be identified in the measurements taken by the expedition team. Throughout Annihilation, the four female explorers try to construct a “cognitive map” (Hugel 2015: Web) of Area X by collecting and evaluating environmental and biological data. When they discover an architecture as yet uncovered by their physical map, one of the expedition members gives expression to how the practice of mapmaking conveys a sense of security and control over the environment, claiming that “the entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it” (SR 6). The extent to which the marks left by human activity on the environment have altered our planetary reality is well documented and is expressed, for instance, in vivid metaphors such as those of humanity’s ecological footprint. Although ongoing processes such as global warming indicate that forms of environmental modelling or what Timo Maran calls “semiotization of matter” (2014: 141) must not necessarily have positive effects for planetary co-existence, they still serve as an important tool for “the making of generalizations and predictions” (148) in scientific research.4 The scientists of VanderMeer’s trilogy, too, engage in a storying of the more-than-human world that aims at representing Area X’s complexity in an explanatory framework. In other words, what is expressed in their intention to decipher and appropriate Area X’s strangeness and to assign it a place in familiar, scientific taxonomies is nothing less than a highly anthropocentric endeavour. What happens if representationalism and the production of scientific knowledge becomes more important than the processes or matters being mediated, has been clearly demonstrated by Karen Barad. In her critique of cultural constructivism and its “representationalist belief in the power of

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The risks that Maran associates with human modelling activities lie in the ways in which they always seem to inscribe and enforce culture-specific imprints and “codes” on the material world in general, and on the matter being “semiotized” in particular (cf. 2014: 151). This, Maran suggests, reduces the material world to the human gaze on it and possibly “impedes matter’s own ability to initiate natural signs and to afford (sensu Gibson) semiotic processes” (152).

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words to mirror preexisting phenomena” (Barad 2003: 802), she points out that the overemphasis on the role of language and discourse in the construction of our understanding of reality has led to a view on morethan-human matter “as passive and immutable” (801) and, thus, in need to be interpreted and spoken for to become meaningful at all. VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy makes it clear that the weird environment explored by the Southern Reach cannot be understood in such a way, as it resists being modelled by conventional forms of knowledge practices. If anything, human beings themselves appear as blank slates that can be rewritten, like the nameless expedition members, who are being controlled and manipulated not only by the capitalist force that is the Southern Reach, but even more so by the agential capacity of Area X. However autonomous Area X appears, it remains not unaffected by human intruders – the defence reactions triggered in the vegetation to attune and assimilate human beings to the weird surroundings or “the faint outline of a human-made path” (SR 525) in Area X’s topography being only two of many examples for this. Its fauna and flora indeed respond to the presence of expedition members, thus participating in a mutual “material-semiotic exchange” (Haraway 2008: 206) between human and more-than-human bodies and matters. Seen from this point of view, the Southern Reach Trilogy depicts a creative dialogue between Area X and the Southern Reach, or, in other words, between the morethan-human and human world, reading and trying to make sense of each other’s boundaries in order to evolve. Area X, with its ability to reproduce more complex forms of life such as the mysterious, half-human and half-alien creature called the “Crawler” challenges notions of human exceptionalism and puts our familiar modes of thinking about agency and creativity into question. The following chapter will develop such a Weird perspective towards creative processes of meaning-making and world-building. The novels of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy appear to me as an interesting point of departure into this analysis, as they all work through modes of reading for signs of more-than-human agency. In this chapter, I will analyse more closely how the trilogy weirds the dualisms of mind and body, objectivity and subjectivity by way of exploring

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

environmental and atmospheric traces that point towards our irrational and thus creatural existence. Since disembodied practices of objective knowledge production are shown to be deficient, I will argue that VanderMeer’s ambivalent, open-ended, and literally weird writing requires of us to apply a form of wittern [German for scenting, sensing] to his texts. It is in that way that the trilogy involves us in a literary search for traces of atmospheric agency and our intimate relationship with them. In this context, the way in which Weird literature in particular experiments with reinforcing the tension between ingression and discrepancy (cf. Böhme 2001: 46-50) or, put more simply, between similarity and difference (cf. Attridge 2017 [2004]: 42-46) becomes important for my interrogation of the uncanny relational poetics expressed in more speculative works of contemporary ecofiction. In the first part of my analysis, I will look more generally at the way in which both the biosemiotic insight into the universal creative imperative encompassing all living things and the new materialist sensitivity for the uncanny entanglement of human and more-than-human matter has inspired literary responses to our apparent creatureliness. VanderMeer’s radical re-imagining of human life in the face of the more-thanhuman world’s expressiveness in his Southern Reach Trilogy is a case in point, as it provides an imaginative space in which the transformative potential of material-semiotic activities can be explored, both on the content level and in the reading act. Just like the members of past expeditions have been driven by their need to read and make sense of the signs that they perceived in Area X, I will in a second step argue that the reader, too, is confronted with the quite challenging task to decipher and understand the Weird writing of VanderMeer in his Southern Reach Trilogy. Through my investigation of the protagonists’ experiences with the limits and possibilities of linguistic signification as well as through a more nuanced analysis of the trilogy’s formal composition, I will comment on the extent to which the Southern Reach Trilogy offers readers itself an experience of both the shortcomings and promises of verbal language for imagining planetary future.

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4.2

Traces of Atmospheric Agency

Saul Evans, one of the main and certainly most mysterious characters of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, is in deep trouble: after he has been stung into his thumb by a “shifting spiral of light” (376) on the forgotten coast near a small, rural village, the former lighthouse keeper finds himself mysteriously trapped inside a strange underground structure. That “[b]odies could be beacons” (399) is nothing new to Saul, who, having worked as a priest before moving into the lighthouse, has been preaching this credo to others and himself for years. Literally turning into a living, fleshy brightness that has to live inside a tunnel, however, is a new experience for him indeed. While it is never revealed why and how exactly Saul moved into the tunnel, or what is later called a tower, it becomes quite clear that his strange encounter with a “glinting thing” (SR 376) on the beach must have triggered not only his transformation into an incomprehensible, “sluglike monster” (117) of light and sound, but also the formation of the tunnel and the expansion of the weird ecosystem of Area X. As it is suggested in Acceptance, the final instalment of the trilogy, Saul must have somehow become a kind of living portal for whatever forces eventually came to inhabit the coastal territory of Area X. More than that, his body is used to give verbal expression to Area X’s creative agency: his final destiny as a creature that is later labelled the “Crawler” is to write quite mystical, almost poetic sounding words and phrases on the walls of the tunnel/tower. Instead of using pen and ink, however, Saul uses biomass to create a never-ending moss graffiti meant to trick human beings into descending deeper and deeper underground until they arrive at the tunnel’s/tower’s base: a place of both arrival and departure, that is, where the creature that is Saul waits for and ultimately reads, copies, and transforms anyone who dares to follow his trail. As we learn in Annihlilation, the first part of the trilogy, Saul’s written message indeed seems to have been catching many peoples’ attention in the past, including those sent into Area X by the Southern Reach. One of them is the narrator of Annihilation, a woman who introduces herself to the reader as “the biologist” (3) and of whom we learn that

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

she has joined the twelfth and final expedition of the Southern Reach. When she is contaminated with fungal spores upon trying to interpret the “living words” (32) colonising the wall, she experiences the transformative and utterly uncanny agency of Area X firsthand. While she can identify the words and syntax as such, she becomes increasingly unsure about whether she is “looking at a language, per se” (33). The further her fungal infection advances and the closer she gets to Saul or what she simply refers to as the “Crawler”, the more she realises that the words represent a creative, biocommunicative process feeding “into the reproductive cycle of the Tower or the Crawler” (61). In order to evolve, it seems, Area X needs to negotiate and, eventually, rewrite other beings’ life stories. The biologist, continuously attending and responding to the organic words both bodily and affectively, becomes not only witness to but is involved in Area X’s word and world-building activity. Shortly before she is violently atomised and replicated by the Crawler, she experiences how she is drawn into a bodily, material dialogue with her weird surroundings: I did not feel as if I were a person but simply a receiving station for a series of overwhelming transmissions. […] Give back to that which gave you, came the thought, not knowing what I might be feeding, or what it meant for the collection of cells and thoughts that comprised me. (114, emphasis orig.) Here, the biologist’s relational existence as a “response-able” (Haraway 2008: 71) system organised by sign processes is strongly emphasised, leading to a decentring of the anthropocentric concept of what it means to be alive. Thus, the notion of human exceptionalism is challenged in two respects: focussing on the material composition of the human body on the one hand, and on the communicative activity of Area X on the other, this paragraph brings to mind the storied and creatural condition shared between human and more-than-human beings. As I have been arguing in Chapter 3, the human being is not and can never be an autonomous, closed off entity but must be understood in terms of its dynamic entanglement in relations of mutual responsiveness. As such, it appears as a continuous identity, constantly in the process of becoming

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in and with the world. This world, however, is not a passive substrate but is, too, composed of and manifests itself as “a collection of cells” (SR 114); a living mattering of creative activity that is, featuring semiotic processes. While the communicative processes as performed for instance on the cellular level of living things go mostly unnoticed in our everyday lives, the biologist of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy witnesses the semiotic agency of the more-than-human world firsthand. “Apparently, I was words [the Crawler] could understand” (120), she realises only moments before she is deconstructed and re-interpreted in such a way that she evolves into something radically different while still maintaining parts of her previous life story. Instead of being able to decipher Area X’s environmental signs and stimuli, the biologist is the one being read and rewritten. In taking an agential view on the morethan-human world, the Southern Reach Trilogy weirds what it means to communicate and interpret. If we exist in relations of mutual responsiveness, our semiotic competence as walking-talking beings appears to be only one of many other creative forms of expressiveness in the world. A similar argument is made in the rising field of bio- and ecosemiotics. Born out of resistance to attribute silence and passivity to morethan-human beings, contemporary eco-philosophical debates surrounding the material-semiotic expressiveness of organic as well as non-organic systems argue for a re-evaluation of concepts like agency and narrativity. As corporeal agencies that continually interact with their surroundings, be it through bodily contact, sensual perception, or verbal and non-verbal communication, human beings are both embodied and “enworlded” (Wheeler 2006: 15). We are not only receptive to more-than-human matters and bodies, affects and atmospheres, but also responsive to a world that is as articulate, creative and interpretative as we are (although to a different degree); a living world with which our species shares “a natural feeling for form” (Wheeler 2017:

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

88, emphasis orig.).5 According to Wendy Wheeler, one of the leading figures in the field of biosemiotics, the semiotic architecture which scaffolds the future, in culture and in nature, must build upon an essentially non-conscious and poetic intelligence in nature – no matter how liminal. To put things another way, nature itself is ‘poetic’. Poetic meaning does not obey a linear logic, but emerges from a recursive growth of pattern and metaphor which results in the development of rhythms and themes. […] Poetry is nature in us humans; when we are being creative, we recognise this aesthetic aspect. (2016: 87, emphasis orig.) With poetry, Wheeler does not mean the different artistic ways of describing things or actions in verse-writing. Rather, her understanding of poetry is in line with Bate’s concept of “ecopoetry”, which he defines “not [as] a description of dwelling with the earth, not [as] a disengaged thinking about it, but [as] an experiencing of it” (Bate 2001 [2000]: 42). As such, Wheeler’s ‘poetry of nature’ functions as an acknowledgement of the performative, indeed narrative agency of the more-thanhuman world. The biosemiotic insight that more-than-human agencies are in fact capable of storying, however pre- or non-linguistic and nonconscious their signification processes might be compared to human modes of articulation, discloses the fact that making sense and meaning is far from being a human privilege. A re-conceptualisation of the human as one “semiotic creature” (Hoffmeyer 2008: 309) amongst many others may not sit well within definitions of human exceptionalism grounded on the emphasis on human abstract conceptional thought and discourse as the crown of creation but putting “human culture back in the evolutionary nature where it belongs” (Wheeler 2016: 18) is necessary if we are to find a new language to grasp the relational becoming across species divides. This is not to say that human language is not unique and powerful – to the contrary: adding to our ability as humans 5

This is very much in line with Spinoza’s metaphysical naturalism, which holds that all “individuals”, whether human or not, are animate “though in different degrees” (1994 [1677]: 124).

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to respond and relate to other bodies and surroundings through intercorporeal modes of non-verbal communication, human speech grants us what Jesper Hoffmeyer calls a higher “semiotic freedom” (2008: 187) compared to, say, a Paramecium, whose interpretative acts are seemingly limited to and take the form of fleeing reactions in response to environmental stimuli. However complex, our human-specific capability for abstraction is only the latest evolutionary development within a wider context of semiotic forms of signification and communication encompassing all living systems. Together with the smallest cells of our bodily systems, which continuously read and interpret our DNA to form our bodies and behaviours (cf. Hoffmeyer 2008: 131), as well as with other perceptive, responsive, and adaptive biological organisms, that is, all animals, plants and fungi, we are organised within a relational sphere of inter- and intra-species sign relations. In this communicative bio- or rather semiosphere, organisms reciprocally regulate and evolve with each other via interpretative activities, a process that Hoffmeyer calls “semethic interaction” (2008: 189, emphasis orig.). Rather than as pre-existing and genetically pre-programmed organisms, living things are understood to be enworlded to the extent that they are capable to affect and change each other precisely through their semiotic and communicative relations. Signification thus appears as an ability that can no longer be used to demarcate human from morethan-human beings. It becomes itself an expression of the proximity of all living things, an affinity that is grounded not only on the discovery of the evolutionary origin of human culture and language in nature, but also on the acknowledgement of the world as “a self-made, self-unfolding poetry” (Wheeler 2017: 88). Such a material-semiotic view on the narrative dimension of morethan-human life asks for a re-evaluation of the category of poiesis, which under the light of biosemiotics appears as form of “natural play” both within and beyond the human sphere (Hoffmeyer 2008: 197, emphasis orig).6 Agency, seen from this point of view, is an embodied and 6

The noun poiesis (from Greek ποίησις: creation, production) refers to an activity in which something is crafted and brought into existence and is more often used

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

highly creative responsiveness to “the world in its ongoing articulation” (Barad 2007: 149), and thus takes the form of a non-anthropocentric mode of expressiveness that has been theorised as narrative agency in the field of material ecocriticism (cf. Chapter 2). Although material ecocriticism not only explores the articulateness of the morethan-human on a very elemental and evolutionary level, but also how material stories come to expression in cultural practices such as writing and storytelling (cf. Iovino 2015: 82), it is driven by a posthumanist ethics. Similar to other approaches in the new materialisms and recent bio-, eco- and zoosemiotic approaches, material ecocriticism, too, wants to find an answer to the question of how we can perceive the narrative dimensions of planetary reality in order to engender ways of experiencing our embodied relationality as enworlded beings. In this context, the practice of reading becomes particularly important for an exploration of the expressive materiality of the more-thanhuman. However, this requires a rethinking of the reading subject as someone who not just makes sense of linguistic signs, but who translates material agency by letting matter speak for itself through the human body. According to Bruno Latour, who in his Politics of Nature (2004) turns to the “complex mechanism for giving worlds the capacity to write or to speak” (66, emphasis orig.), expressiveness comes into being in the dialogue between human and more-than-human actors. What follows from this is a redefinition of the concepts of telling and reading, which in light of new materialist theory appear as ambiguous categories used to describe the ability of world-building and meaning-making shared between human and more-than-human beings. Recognising that there

in the context of aesthetic production to describe the making of art. In literary studies the term has been picked up by eco-minded writers and philosophers such as Jonathan Bate to address the performative rather than representational dimension of poetic language: poetry always is poiesis, Bate argues, because it allows us to embody or “‘present’ the experience of dwelling” (2001 [2000]: 42). Biosemiotics follows up on this understanding of poetry as poiesis, but instead of focussing on literary language, this subdiscipline explores the semiotic expressiveness of the more-than-human world.

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are “onto-tale[s]” (Bennett 2010: 117) emerging out of the flow of information between matters, environments, and bodies does indeed imply that there must be an interpretative capacity at work in ecological systems and organisms; a shared reading activity that provides the basis for all forms of evolutionary, bodily, and cultural becoming.7 Just as readers of a given literary text weave rhythms, patterns, clues, and our personal dispositions into an atmospheric reading experience, we as readers of our own corporeal embeddedness in the world need to be open to and engage with the world’s textuality in order to evolve and develop our life story (cf. Wheeler 2014a: 77). This lifelong need for responding to and making sense of the world around us is what we share with other living things, which brings us back again to a transspecies way of thinking the human and the more-than-human as “creature[s] of poiesis, constantly on the lookout for signs” (Wheeler 2014b: 385). Reading, as argued in Chapter 2, is but a relational, affective mode of engaging with environments and atmospheres, both on a textual and formal level. Going one step further by taking an ecophenomenological perspective on the intercorporeal and affective dimension of reading processes allows for a more non-anthropocentric understanding of reading as a “constant alert animal activity” (Wheeler 2014b: 385). Not unlike any other organisms, the human being, too, must be understood as a “living assemblage of corporal dispositions and relations which

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Bennett originally used the term “onto-story” (2010: 4) or “onto-tale” (117) to describe what she earlier called a certain “world picture” (2005: 135). In the Western hemisphere in particular, Bennett claims that the onto-story is usually passed on from generation to generation implies in how far “human forms of communication, human modes of intelligence and creativity and human structures of order are given such pride and place that the centrality of humanity appears, not as a powerful tradition, but as an inevitability” (2005: 135). Against this, Bennett opposes a radically different onto-tale, one which “highlight[s] the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other” (2010: 4). I use her term here somewhat differently, applying it to give expression to the individual life-stories always evolving in and through mutual interrelationships between two or more beings.

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

both register and orient our senses of the world” (Whatmore 2002: 154). Such a notion of the human as a creatural reader of atmospheric traces is central to ecophenomenology. According to David Wood, ecophenomenology pursues “the relationalities of worldly engagement, both human and those of other creatures” (2001: 80) by shifting the focus from discourse-centred to embodied and thus shared ways of experiencing and responding to the world. I propose that one possible form of such a creatural mode of responsiveness can be identified in the embodied practice of wittern, which I understand as a more-than-human form of reading atmospheric traces. On the most basic level, wittern involves an instinctive mode of perceiving one’s surroundings, a corporeal sensing which enables all living beings to feel out and attune to the environmental conditions which they face. Being capable of such a sensuous activity and thus endowed with what in German is called Gespür [intuition], organisms register environmental phenomena and atmospheric deviations that may indeed remain invisible for human eyes to see.8 It is in this process of noticing and trying to make sense of environmental cues that the living being participates in the making of what Jakob von Uexküll famously termed its Umwelt. In other words, what drives processes of adaption and evolution is the creative ability to respond to notions of alterity abound in the more-than-human world. While Uexküll’s (1909) narrow focus on the rather limited place- and world-making abilities of animals and his static view of the harmonious and stable relationships between animals and their environments have come under attack for failing to take into consideration global processes of interconnection and ecological change (cf. Tønnessen 2009; Tsing 2015: 156), his Umwelt theory paved

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Since the visual is the dominant sense of the human, I am perfectly aware of the fact that the concepts of visibility and invisibility are of course problematic when trying to describe how the world – and atmospheres – are perceived by different and differing living things. For things to be invisible might only be a problem for human beings, whereas for a dog, for instance, it would rather be a problem if there were nothing to smell.

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the way for reflections on embodied experiences of sense- and placemaking within and beyond the human sphere. In this context, the multisensorial experience of weather and the way in which this experience affects human and more-than-human beings in their making sense of their surroundings is a fine example of a very specific form of wittern. We cannot perceive weather as such, but only in embodied experiences of spatial and temporal manifestations of climate. Weather requires corporeal experiences to come to matter in the present moment, and yet it possesses a material agency that resists any attempts at reducing it to an object of perception. A look at how the weather shapes and produces places, lives, and identities shows that it leaves indeed more than just sensory impressions on the earthly matters it encounters. According to Tim Ingold, we “dwell within a weatherworld in which every being is destined to combine wind, rain, sunshine, and earth in the continuation of its own existence” (2007: 20). This, in turn, means that apart from wittern and incorporating atmospheric matters, clues, signs, and traces, we become verwittert or “weathered” through the world we inhabit. To put it as Mike Hulme did, [i]t is not just inanimate entities such as trees and buildings that become weathered through physical and chemical processes of change and decay. People and places also ‘weather’ with time. Their personal identities, social practices, material technologies and cultural memories become shaped by the atmosphere until, gradually and imperceptibly, these people and places embody the weather to which they are exposed – they become weathered. Yet this is not a passive surrender to the physical forces of the atmosphere; I am more than a direct function of the weather I experience. I may not be able to change the physical weather in my outdoor atmosphere, but I can change how I imagine the weather and, within limits, how I choose to live with it. (2016: 58, emphasis orig.) Such a take on weather as an agential materiality that signifies as much as it is signified by bodies and environments raises questions about who is storying or “[…] speaking and with what authority” (Latour 2004: 69). Thus, it queers anthropocentric connotations of articulateness and

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

presents in its place alternative ways of thinking the agency or “subjectivity of the story weaver” (van Dooren & Rose 2012: 13). To illustrate this point, let us take another look at VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. In Area X, human beings, too, become storied by and gradually acclimate themselves to their immediate surroundings, including the weather. However, the shaping of their identities takes on a highly uncanny quality: anyone who sets foot in Area X is sooner or later penetrated by its weird and alien environment and becomes both duplicated and transformed into a hybrid being. The only one who seems to have figured out that Area X’s impact on the molecules in the human body is much stronger than previously believed is Whitby, a scientist working for the Southern Reach, who ultimately turns out to be a doppelgänger of his former self. In Authority, the second volume of the trilogy, he reveals one of his many theories about Area X to the current director of the Southern Reach, claiming that the region’s “terroir” (217) somehow seems to be connected to a process of “[s]low death by invasion from an alternate earth” (216). In its original meaning, the term terroir, from French terre, refers to a demarcated area or territory established for and shaped by a colonising force, that is, human population. As it is already implied by the name it has been given, Area X is indeed such a demarcated area, but instead of being colonised and exploited by human beings, it functions itself as a sovereign force, subverting a coastal stretch of land as much as it is invading the Southern Reach and anything and anyone that lies within and beyond its border (cf. Carroll 2016: 80). In doing so, it turns human colonising endeavours upside down: the more-than-human world colonises human beings. In his conversation with Control, however, Whitby is drawing on a different notion of terroir, commonly used in the context of winegrowing. As he explains, terroir means “the specific characteristics of a place – the geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage” (217). Regarding the alien ecosphere of Area X, one can only imagine how the “sum of the effects of [this] localized environment” (217) would become reflected in the vines grown there, not to mention the effect that Area X’s terroir is likely to have on other plants and the vegetation.

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What Whitby suggests, in other words, is that Area X’s weird environment must inevitably have a weird effect on all living beings that live in it, altering their identities beyond recognition. The biologist, who claims that her “sole gift or talent […] was that places could impress themselves upon me” (72-73), is a case in point, for she is more and more shaped by and becomes part of Area X. So is Whitby and all the other people working at the Southern Reach, who are shown to become increasingly disfigured by the alien environment they wanted to explore in the first place. Indeed, the forms of life created in and by Area X are radically different from those we are used to in the world outside of the trilogy. Places and animals seem to be more “watchful” (15) there, even sentient, so that alternative modes of thinking about agency are required to make any sense of them at all. Clinging to rational thought and applying what Derek Attridge calls a mode of “mechanical reading” (2017 [2004]: 113) when trying to make sense of the communicative and creative agency of Area X might as well throw us in an existential crisis, like the biologist.9 At one point of the novel she recounts a story about how sometimes it takes only something as mundane as a starfish to shatter our belief in human knowledge about reality: But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all – about nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place in taxonomy – catalogued, studied, and described – irreducible down to

9

According to Attridge, “mechanical reading” describes the “conversion of typographic marks or phonetic sequences into conceptual structures, following the conventions of lexicography, syntax, genre, implicature, relevance, and so on” (2017 [2004]: 113). As an act of “decod[ing] the textual string with the necessary objectivity and accuracy” (ibid.), it is a kind of textual skimming or scanning that is distinct from a “creative reading” which, following Attridge, succeeds in making the reader register and affectively response to “the singularity and inventiveness of the work” (ibid.).

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

any of that. And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth. (SR 117) She makes a similar disorientating experience when encountering the Crawler, whose alien existence turns out to be well beyond human ability to fathom fully. “What can you do when your five senses are not enough?” (118), she asks, before accepting Area X’s irreducibility as such. This is as ethical as a response to whatever strikes one as alien or other can be, and although the biologist does not reveal much personal details about herself and likewise refuses to get to know the other three female expedition members, her narration in what turns out to be her field journal makes obvious just how much she identifies with this ethos of response-ability and responsibility in her job as an environmental biologist. “All of my hobbies were bound up in my work. I lived for the work, and I thrilled with the power of that focus but it was also deeply personal” (72), she admits before going on about her difficulties to engage in social activities and connect emotionally to other people, including her husband, a medic who volunteered for the eleventh expedition and died of cancer shortly after he returned from Area X. As much as she is acquainted with the dynamics and function of ecosystemic relationships, it becomes increasingly clear that she lacks the interest to adapt to human habitats, longing instead to be absorbed in her sustained, attentive observations of the uncanny depths of biodiversity. Aware as she is about the extent to which her “eccentric” (71) research methods and her need to interact with more-than-human matter have estranged her from her husband and human society, she finally gives the reader a glimpse of the kind of person she believes to be: But fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. (72)

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Indeed, her “guardedness” and her “need to be alone” (52) as well as her “ability to focus on one thing for any length of time” (29) make her a natural-born scientist and observer, giving the impression that she is a perfect fit for a scientific community which according to Evelyn Fox Keller is driven by the imperative of objectivity (cf. 1985: 7). Given her affect-laden description of her almost erotic relationship to the morethan-human environment, however, she is not the “credible, objective witness” (SR 37) and thus the kind of scientist that she claims to have been trained to be. An anecdote about how it came that she wanted to become a biologist reveals that she is endowed with a peculiar sensitivity and empathy for her surroundings ever since she was a child. By contemplating on her inborn ability to lose herself “in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude” (71), a skill that only further improved during her studies at college, the biologist puts her identification with a practice of science in which “hard” facts are prioritised over “soft” skills to ensure rational, reliable and quantifiable research outcomes more and more into question (Keller 1985: 77). Her scepticism about her colleagues’ “faith in measurements” (SR 13) is congruent with Keller’s insight that the scientist is “not the purely dispassionate observer he idealizes, but a sentient being for whom the very ambition for objectivity carries with it a wealth of subjective meanings” (1985: 96). The biologist, driven as she is by a deep-seated “desire for the truth” (SR 7), embodies Keller’s idea of a “dynamically objective” scientist, a figure which “employs a form of attention to the natural world that is like one’s ideal attention to the human world” (1985: 117). This “ideal attention” certainly includes a certain response-ability to more-than-human life. The biologist’s affinity to ecosystems at first indeed resembles a “form of love” (ibid.) that is usually reserved for romantic human-human relationships, so that any of her attempts at separating and distancing herself both physically and emotionally from the environment to meet the ideal of scientific objectivity is destined to fail. With no one left to stop her from dedicating all her time and energy to environmental research, the biologist gives in to her need to go into Area X in order to become fully taken up not only by her profession as a biologist, but also by the “rich-

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

ness of Area X’s biosphere” (SR 21) for which she feels such reverence – at least until her survival instinct urges her to fight the violent transformation enforced on her by the weird environment. Instead of reproducing Western science’s impersonal, disembodied “search for translation, convertibility, mobility of meanings, and universality” (Haraway 1988: 580) by reducing and thus objectifying the biologist to and as a mere stereotype, VanderMeer introduces the reader to the possibility of a more interactionist and embodied, still scientific way of making sense of the world. The micro-attention the biologist pays to Area X’s flora and fauna in her at times lengthy and emotionally charged nature descriptions shows that, unlike the other expedition members, she adds an intrinsic value to more-than-human life. While her colleagues, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a surveyor, concentrate on “mapping” (SR 9), “adding detail and nuance” (20) to, and “reporting” (ibid.) on the environment and their findings, the biologist muses on the overwhelming biodiversity of Area X: For my part, I spent an hour observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog on the back of a broad, thick leaf and another hour following the path of an iridescent black damselfly that should not have been found at sea level. The rest of the time, I spent up a pine tree, binoculars focused on the coast and the lighthouse. I liked climbing. I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are. (20) Compared to the dirty, polluted places that are explored in Glister and Marrow Island, the environment inside Area X resembles the pure and untouched kind of ‘nature’ right out of Thoreau’s Walden (1854), indeed. That the air inside Area X is less harmful to the human organism is only apparently so since this alien environment violently invades human bodies through fungal spores. And although the biologist had to make this disturbing experience herself, she ignores the changes already happening in her mind and body. To distract herself, she chooses at first

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to participate in her colleagues’ disaffected practices of analysing, examining, documenting, and tagging the environmental peculiarities of Area X in order to not become “estranged from the expedition and its purpose” (23) – that is, until more and more uncanny encounters make her realise that clinging to the separation between observer and observed, subject and object, mind and nature, makes no sense in the weird ecosystem of Area X any longer. The first discovery that marks the beginning of a slowly advancing disintegration of the biologist’s mindset and that leads to a gradual loss of her “faith in measurements” (13) is that of an uncharted underground structure placed within one of the many ecotonal zones of Area X. Even before descending into the tunnel, or what the biologist insists to be referred to as a tower, its “ambiguous” (5) architectural and mineral composition renders the scientists’ measurement devices useless. First irrational thoughts colonise the biologist’s mind and find expression in her vague, animist language when she describes the tunnel/tower as “a kind of presence” that “manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us” (6). This shift in narration from clear and nuanced nature descriptions to weird impressions of an apparently agential morethan-human environment parallels the shifting environmental conditions with which the biologist is confronted during her journey from a quite ordinary into a uniquely weird environment. While she tries to find “entirely rational biological theories” (12) for an already unsettling encounter with a strangely sentient boar on her way from the border to the base camp, she increasingly shies away from applying rational thought to what she observes the deeper she advances into the heart of Area X. What she and her colleagues find in the tunnel, indeed escapes human understanding and asks for a re-evaluation of the methods and instruments scientists use to make sense of the more-thanhuman world. Down there, they are confronted with English words made of living, organic material growing on the walls, connected with each other only to form sentences that seem to express a mystical and yet incomprehensible message. Still driven by the impulse of making sense of what she thinks Area X is trying to tell them, she attempts to read this word- and world-building “miniature ecosystem” just to be-

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

come contaminated by “a tiny spray of golden spores” (17) a few seconds later. Nothing stays the same after this disturbing encounter – neither her worldview based on science and reason nor her bodily condition. When she realises that Area X is playing on her already existing inability to keep distance to her research objects in order to make her more sensitive for her surroundings, it is already too late for her to return to the life she led before applying for the twelfth expedition. Gradually transforming into both an alien, flamelike force of nature and what the reader re-encounters as her human doppelgänger named “Ghost Bird” in Authority and Acceptance, the biologist is drawn into a deeper engagement with the environment of which she becomes a vital part in the long run. Not only does she suddenly recognise the tunnel’s vitality as a breathing, communicating organism, but she also becomes increasingly aware of the weird sentience of Area X and the animal-like beings living in it. Standing in the rain back at the base camp she confesses that I saw each drop fall as a perfect, faceted liquid diamond, refracting light even in the gloom, and I could smell the sea and picture the roiling waves. The wind was like something alive; it entered every pore of me and it, too, had a smell, carrying with it the earthiness of the marsh reeds. I had tried to ignore the change in the confined space of the tower, but my senses still seemed too acute, too sharp. […] Even the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like something physical. I can’t even say it was a sinister presence. (51) With this change of perception in the biologist apparently comes a change of perspective on human agency in an environment that shapes as much as it is shaped by human presence. The biologist recognises that the “truth” of a living world cannot simply “be revealed by microscopes” (33) and that it requires more intuitive and affective practices of sense-making to scientifically approach the more-than-human at all. The “hidden meaning in the natural world […] could be activated only by the eye of the beholder” (24), the biologist claims, and so she gradually adopts the methods of what she herself calls a “detective” (41)

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rather than those of a biologist. Searching or, rather, wittern for “tracks” and “traces” (ibid.) inside rather than analysing organic samples of the tunnel, which, by the time, has annihilated the anthropologist, helps the biologist form an image in her mind about whatever “biological imperative” (61) is driving Area X. What she does, in other words, is to explore the expressiveness of more-than-human matter with her body in order to be able to generate meaning out of the ambiguous messages and activities of Area X. Thus, she engages in a relational and creative process of reading and storying the environment that has much more in common with a certain serendipity than it has with a disaffected, objective search for rationalisable and quantifiable data. In the next subchapter I will elaborate on the extent to which the biologist’s chance and curiosity-driven research experience parallels the affective and creative processes at work in the experience of literary reading, but for now suffice it to say that she obviously resists obtaining a disembodied “view from above, from nowhere” (Haraway 1988: 589), and instead gives in to a sensitivity for the ambiguities of the weird reality of Area X. She also resists inscribing knowledge on the environment by reading human signs into it, and rather reads for more-than-human traces of agency with all her senses. No longer interested in producing rational knowledge about an environment that is too complex and too sophisticated for humans to understand, the biologist uses her body as a research tool for exploring the transformative power of Area X, thus practicing what Haraway calls “embodied objectivity” (588). It is by involving her feelings, personal experiences, and bodily sensations in her scientific perspective that she believes to grow more attuned to morethan-human “messages” (SR 481). Instead of explaining away Area X’s staging of agency and articulateness by applying scientific modes of interpretation to it, the biologist registers and affirms its otherness through a responsive engagement with it. Such a “response-ability” (Haraway 2008: 71) to the articulateness of the more-than-human is, at its core, a form of attentiveness to the other that we ourselves are: an uncanny notion that, as I have been arguing throughout this book, is central to the experience of the atmospheric re(lation)ality. Responding to the “suggestive scrawls and traces”

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

(Abram 1996: 95) of the more-than-human involves acting accordingly to what I have elsewhere called the “creative imperative” shared across all living beings, and, therefore, points towards our creatural existence as meaning-making systems: As responsive systems that are positioned towards an equally responsive world, our creatureliness is grounded precisely in our state of openness to material-semiotic agency, involving us in an openended process of becoming-in-relation. […] Thus, individuation becomes a performance of the poietic energy of life, the living entity an anticipation of the semiotic activity abroad in the world. (Dederichs 2021b, 236) Meaning-making, in this context, is more than just an individual, sensual and cognitive processing of environmental information, but appears as a dynamic and communicative process of establishing relations which, in turn, bring forth meaning. In other words, making sense together with and as part of the world is a performance of our atmospheric re(lation)ality. This shift in emphasis on the role of embodied and affective aspects of human modes of meaning-making can also be seen in feminist science studies and its recent offshoots in the field of material ecocriticism. In her seminal essay “Situated Knowledges” (1988), Haraway calls for a renewed understanding of scientific objectivity as “positioned rationality” (590), arguing that it is only by “coming to terms with the agency of the ‘objects’ studied” (592) and our locational or embodied positioning to them that we can come to an understanding of the material-semiotic capacity and constitution of all life: Accounts of a ‘real’ world do not, then, depend on a logic of ‘discovery’ but on a power-charged social relation of ‘conversation’. The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favour of a master decoder. The codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read. The world is not raw material for humanization; […] Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for some unsettling possibilities […]. (593)

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In the Southern Reach Trilogy, these unsettling possibilities take the form of a reversal of an anthropocentric worldview: human beings, not more-than-human beings and environments, appear as underdeveloped, primitive, and in need of being tamed and controlled. As much as the novel celebrates how human agency becomes decentred in a weird reality in which human beings are assimilated to and, ultimately, turned over by the environment, it nonetheless maintains a certain tension between moments of human attachment and detachment from the more-than-human world. While the biologist is indeed open to the performativity and ambiguities of Area X’s ineffable ecosystems and grows accustomed to the idea of becoming transformed, the “remnants of the scientist in [her]” (SR 95) still try to keep critical distance to the environment. In that she keeps at the same time open and distanced to the otherness of Area X, she truly embodies a Weird version of the “ecological detective”, a literary figure which according to Sara Crosby has its origin in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and is endowed with “special capacity for empathy, careful observation, particular of the relations between things, and deployment of scientific/esthetic [sic!] knowledge” (2014: 520). All of these characteristics are found in the biologist, who chooses the method of applying an “affected perspective” (Despret 2013: 56) to the environment and of “fad[ing] into the landscape” (SR 76) in order to speculate on the intentions of the mysterious forces at work in Area X, even if these speculations turn out to be “incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless” (127). As Wheeler notes in her The Whole Creature (2006), “[t]he more we give ourselves over to an apparent serendipity, the closer (paradoxically to modern theories of knowledge) we come to real discovery” (90), even if this discovery is only the realisation that our human “instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivation selfish” (SR 127). The biologist’s futile readings of the ambiguous clues and traces that have been intentionally left to the expedition members on the surface of Area X’s landscape indeed demonstrate the limitations of human agency. However, VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy does not give up on the importance of “rational and deeply human” (Crosby 2014: 523) ways of sense-making, for it is also through curiosity, imagination, and creation

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

that we can attend to the traces and meanings of the more-than-human world and actualise the relational poetics which we are part of. It is for this reason that the biologist, merging more and more with her environment, resists letting go of parts of her human identity and continues to respond to Area X’s agency not only through participatory engagement, but also through specifically human way of storytelling until the very end. However problematic human modes of storying the environment have been proven in the past and the present, the eco-ethical potential of world-building practices as performed for instance in the context of writing and reading literature is frequently highlighted in ecocritical theory. As the example of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy shows, the potential as well as the shortcomings of familiar ways of making sense of the environment seem to be more self-reflectively discussed in contemporary ecofiction.

4.3

Atmospheric Agency of Literary Traces

My analysis has so far looked at how the Southern Reach Trilogy spells out serendipitous ways of making sense of the world. With regard to its formal composition, however, it seems that the trilogy not only stages, but even more so involves the reader in a creative quest of grappling with uncanny notions of ambivalence. As much as the concept of sensemaking is connected to a deeply human, cognitive competence, biosemiotic theory demonstrates that creative processes of meaning-making and world-building are performed by human and more-than-human beings alike. While we have seen that semiotic expressiveness can take on many different forms, what seems to be shared by all living beings is a certain alertness and responsiveness to the surrounding world and other beings that, so I have argued, resembles a form of wittern. As an embodied practice that translates the felt body’s sensing of situational and environmental cues into corporeal stirrings, wittern is more than an intuition of that which is latent or invisible (cf. Meyer-Sickendiek 2011: 216). It is what, through engaging a living being in a dialogue with

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its surroundings, brings that which is absent into existence in the being’s immediate lifeworld. In the context of human perception, this can be, for instance, the affective agency of an atmosphere, whether physical, social, or aesthetic. In any case, what comes into existence is only ever a contextual and individual configuration of an absent presence or what Derrida has defined as a “trace” (1997 [1967]: 47). Following his argumentation, the trace points beyond itself and is “the differance which opens appearance [l’apparaître] and signification” (Derrida 1997 [1967]: 65, emphasis orig.). In other words, the trace is “[t]he other brought into being” through what Attridge calls “hints of as yet unexplored possibilities” (2017 [2004]: 34). Just like the trace is there and yet not there, and uncannily points to something other than itself, literary language, too, cannot be reduced to an original meaning or intention. As it always hints to what is not necessarily written on the page, that is, to “the other”, it invites us to explore different potential meaning effects that are created in the moment of reception and may change not only over time, but also over context. These meaning effects are not only explored by us but, vice versa, affect us and thus could also be said to ‘weather’ us. This is the reason why different readers will always interpret the same text differently, and even a single reader’s interpretation of a text will never be self-identical and predictable, however familiar the reader is with the text. If it was not for this “force of novelty” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 125) engendered and experienced in the act of reading, there would be no point in reading a book twice. Consequently, the “play of differences” (Derrida 1997 [1967]: 109) resulting from the gaps and traces in a text is central to “[t]he singularity of the literary work” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 96). According to Attridge, this singularity is attached to the extent to which a text allows for encounters with notions of alterity or otherness and, thus, arises precisely from an absence of any fixed “essence of the work” (ibid.). However, this does neither mean that a text can be interpreted randomly nor that each text will succeed in offering the reader any particular notion of otherness, regardless of how “some sense of strangeness, mystery, or unfathomability is involved in every encounter with the literary” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 109). As argued in Chapter 2, a

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

text is equipped with a certain aesthetic architecture which determines both the formal inventiveness of a literary work and, at least to some extent, which literary atmospheres are likely to co-emerge in the process of reception. Reading is important in this context, as it is only in the “act-event” (152) of apprehending or tracking textual traces of otherness that this singularity can be experienced. This means that reading must not necessarily be understood as an interpretative process of decoding signs and obtaining information but rather as a motor for creating moments of attachment and detachment between perceiver and perceived which, ultimately, fuels attentiveness and responsiveness to traces of otherness. Rather than manifesting as an entity or an object, it follows that this otherness is a textually reinforced notion of alterity brought into existence in moments of “openness of the [reader’s] mind to what it has not yet grasped” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 31). In that it resists familiar modes of understanding “of a certain group and for a certain time” (38), this other always already is an expression of a relation – or a relating – between me, as the same, and that which, in its uniqueness, is heterogeneous to me and interrupts my sameness. If I succeed in responding adequately to the otherness and singularity of the other, it is the other in its relating to me – always in a specific time and place – to which I am responding, in creatively changing myself and perhaps a little of the world as well. (45, emphasis orig.) In view of what was said about processes of environmental adaption and evolutionary change in the context of biosemiotics, i.e. that they are dependent on living matter’s openness and creative responsiveness to other life forms, it appears that “the encounter between similarity and difference” (Wheeler 2006: 133) also plays a crucial role and is repeated in the act of reading literature. When reading a book, the reader, too creates something new through responding to notions of otherness and engages in a process of meaning-making and world-building which is not dissimilar to that performed by living matter on a biological and evolutionary level. Reading literature, to put it differently, can be understood as a form of actualisation or staging of the relational poet-

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ics which is constitutive of ecological reality and earthly life. As Wendy Wheeler reminds us, [t]he biosemiotic turn will, hopefully, take us beyond that limitation into the “more-than-human world” where we understand not only that the natural world is perfused with signs, meanings and purposes which are material and which evolve, but also that it is in the human use of signs in poetic language, wherever it is found, that this mythic understanding has often best been preserved. (2011: 279) In reading literature, we become involved in a literary search for traces and clues and are invited to experience and respond to ambiguities and otherness, which may destabilise our pre-existing modes of thinking (cf. Attridge 2017 [2004]: 33). It may come as no surprise that speculative works affiliated to the Weird, works, that is, to which experiences with the inaccessible, irreducible and monstrous are so central in their plots, are maybe most successful in laying trails of and offering encounters with uncanny otherness. In the context of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, this otherness is inscribed into and can be traced by readers on multiple layers. On the most basic level, VanderMeer’s imagination of the inaccessible and invisible force inhabiting Area X as well as the hybrid creatures it has created functions as an incarnation of what we might call otherness or the trilogy’s weirdness. One of the creatures that demonstrates maybe most clearly that the weird logics applied in Area X are particularly challenging to be brought into accordance with the reader’s familiar modes of comprehending planetary reality is the Crawler. It is through the eyes of the biologist that the reader is introduced to the ambiguous and incomprehensible state of existence of this ever-changing figure, which literally seems to “mock [our] ability to comprehend it” (SR 117). Overwhelmed by the sensual impressions given to her by the Crawler such as its multicoloured and multi-shaped appearance and the “unearthly noise” (117) made by it, the biologist gives a confusing and truly ambiguous description of its physical appearance, thus giving expression to her inability to approach the creature in terms of rational thought:

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. […] Then it became an overwhelming hugeness in my battered vision, seeming to rise and keep rising as it leapt toward me. The shape spread until it was even where it was not, or should not have been. It seemed now more like a kind of obstacle or wall or thick closed door blocking the stairs. Not a wall of light – gold blue, green, existing in some other spectrum – but a wall of flesh that resembled light, with sharp, curving elements within it and textures like ice when it has frozen from flowing water. (117, emphasis orig.) However rich this compressed, almost breathless sounding numeration of the Crawler’s ontological peculiarities is, it tells the reader almost nothing at all about what it looks like. Every sentence presents us with a new noun meant to represent the creature in a single word. What is striking is that the description quoted above seems to zoom into and out of the Crawler’s physical appearance, thus presenting it as a presence constantly fluctuating between embodied and disembodied states of being. The closer the biologist observes the Crawler, the stranger it becomes, and the more do her figural descriptions give way to abstract and figurative conceptualisations. The Crawler is less than a concrete figure or monster but still more than an abstract shape, colour or texture. Literally “floating” (SR 117) in between these categories, it demonstrates what Tabas identifies as the “strange tension between the mimetic and the barred articulation of the weird real” (2015: 10). This tension becomes also apparent when regarding the name applied to the creature, which also remains rather suggestive. While the term Crawler indeed gives the impression that it must be a flexible being constantly on the move – crawlers usually describe many-legged beings such as spiders, caterpillars or what Haraway summarises as “[a]ll the tentacular stringy ones” (2016: 32) – it yet fails to do justice to the creature’s dynamically evolving existence. Consequently, the Crawler remains a riddle, and as such leaves room

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for any number of associations and significations or what in German is sometimes referred to as X-Beliebigkeit, that is, arbitrariness. The same kind of arbitrariness is also written into Area X, whose name not only already hints at a “notion of erasure” (Tabas 2015: 10), but even more so indicates a gap, an unknown quality beyond description which nonetheless makes this territory stand out. What is extraordinary or singular about Area X is nothing less than its uncanny otherness, “contained in no one place or figure” (SR 552). According to Benjamin Robertson, Area X “is what already exists here around us, affecting us while remaining imperceptible to and unaffected by us” (2018: 115). Surprisingly enough, this leads Robertson to the questionable conclusion that Area X cannot be uncanny, as to him, otherness or “difference is never conditioned by an underlying sameness” (117). As much as I agree with Robertson’s reading of Area X as an “unacknowledged and unknowledgeable presence” (116), I disagree with his argument that the horror of Area X does not stem from its uncanny otherness. Just as Area X “is not an invasive force from a spatial outside or a temporal afterward” (115), a fact that Robertson points out himself, its otherness cannot be understood to come from nowhere. Rather, it arises from a relation and tension between difference and sameness, pointing towards what is outside of the familiar in a specific culture and under specific circumstances. In this context, it is noteworthy to look once again at Attridge, who demonstrates that “[t]o be ‘other’ is necessarily to be ‘other than’ or ‘other to.’ […] There is no ‘absolute other’ (or ‘Other’) if this means a wholly transcendent other, unrelated to any empirical particularity” (2017 [2004]: 39). If Area X “is there already without being detectable” and “affects us because it is us” (Robertson 2018: 125), this necessarily means that it is a configuration of alterity in relation to a specific human culture and, consequently, by definition an embodiment of the uncanny. Area X’s uncanniness is expressed in its continuous shifting in between the categories of presence/absence and similarity/difference. In that Area X is a space where “[t]here is nothing but border” and yet [t]here is no border” (SR 362), its presence seems to resemble that of an atmosphere: as already demonstrated in Chapter 2, Schmitz de-

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

fines atmospheres as phenomena “without borders, disseminated and yet without place that is, not localizable” (cited in Böhme 1992a: 119). While Area X’s present absence is irreducible to scientific data, it can indeed be intuited and storied, both by the trilogy’s protagonists as well as by readers themselves. In the trilogy’s diegesis, this is demonstrated for instance when the biologist finds a pile of journals inside the abandoned lighthouse on the forgotten coast, left there by previous expedition members. Reading through one of the journal keepers’ strange field observations of a thistle, she at one point admits that [s]ome types of omissions made my mind itch as much as more explicit offerings […] After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine. (SR 75) Area X’s otherness leaves room for speculation and imagination and becomes a rich source of uncanny experiences from which to formulate stories. Anyone entering Area X is soon to be exposed to the many present absences and forces inhabiting this alien terrain, leaving behind “omissions” in the perplexed minds of the human explorers indeed. To create some kind of coherent explanation about what is happening in Area X, the explorers as much as we as readers need to attend to and accept the ambivalence inscribed into this weird environment. In this context, the negotiation of notions of similarity and difference plays as much a role in the weird reality of the protagonists as it does in moments of readerly reception of the trilogy. As already mentioned above, The Southern Reach Trilogy requires of the reader a certain openness to difference when it comes to the narration of topographies and creatures that challenge while at the same time engage familiar strategies of making sense of literary texts. Alongside the protagonists, the reader gets roped into a space tuned in a way that is most likely to destabilise “the field of the same” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 33), only that

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this space is an aesthetic, literary one opposed to the spatio-temporal area encountered in the narrative. What at first appears to be a reality not so dissimilar from ours, a reality, that is, to which the biologist and her colleagues more or less readily become attuned, turns out to be an alien dimension indeed. It is a sense of discrepancy experienced when confronted with Area X, both for the protagonists and the reader, who equally struggle to categorise and make sense of its otherness. In that Area X can hardly be brought into accordance with our rational capacity as human beings and thus “interrupts my sameness” (Attridge 2017 [2004]: 45), it forces both protagonists and the reader to affirm its difference through experiences of ingression and discrepancy (cf. Böhme 2001: 46-50). What follows from VanderMeer’s technique of holding the tension between ingression as an experience of sameness and discrepancy, that is, what strikes me as different or other, is a teasing of our readerly imagination. This effect is strengthened when regarding the function of each novel of the trilogy. While Annihilation clearly serves the function to immerse the reader in and attune them to Area X’s weird and yet beautiful wilderness – the first-person narrative as well as the chapter titles of this novel only further reinforce this notion – Authority provides the reader with a look onto Area X from the outside, as it is written in the third-person point of view. Acceptance ultimately alternates between first- and third-person narrative, thus zooming in and out not only of different timelines, but also different character experiences in and with Area X. However privileged the position of the reader might appear, as they are granted access to various insights about Area X and can identify things that many of the protagonists cannot, this does not help the reader to come to a final sense of resolution about the secrets behind the weird reality depicted in the trilogy. Rather than mediating concrete images and ideas, VanderMeer’s Weird and suggestive writing invites multiple interpretations and imaginings. It opens up an affective space in which encounters with otherness and ambiguities are much more important than their appropriation and logical resolution. Therefore, his writing may be said to live on reinforcing what Attridge calls “a memory suffused by the qualities

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

of my experience of [a specific sequence of words]” (2017 [2004]: 157). In the case of The Southern Reach Trilogy, this memory surely is connected to the sense of dislocation and disorientation reinforced through both words that seem to fail to describe the things and beings encountered in the trilogy and the trilogy’s experimental and fragmentary structure. Whereas the reader witnesses a fairly chronological progression of events in Annihilation and Authority, the latter being a successor to the former to the extent that its story starts six weeks after the three returnees from the twelfth expedition have been brought to the Southern Reach for interrogation, both novels are streaked with time jumps and delays. In Annihilation, for instance, we are presented with the written accounts of the biologist’s experiences within Area X, which happened not only moments, but even years before the journal gets into the hands of the Southern Reach’s new director. As we learn in “the biologist’s last will and testament” (464) introduced towards the end of Acceptance, the biologist has already become something else by the time we read her field journal, which is thus really a ‘ghost’ journal allowing us glimpses of the present and the past. Indeed, temporal dimensions as we know them are collapsed in and by the novel. Another example for this is how time seems to move faster in Area X, so fast that what is perceived as only six weeks by the people in the Southern Reach really turns out to be years in Area X. In addition to this breach in narrated time, Authority confronts the reader with quite literal breaches on the mind of its main protagonist and interim director of the Southern Reach, John “Control” Rodriguez, who finds out that he has been subjected to hypnotic suggestions. The driving forces behind the Southern Reach, one of which is his mother, justify the use of such unconventional and rather dubious methods, claiming that it is “in the subject’s absolute best interest” (289) and for reasons of self-protection from Area X that they decided to condition their employees and expedition teams when it is really their need for authority that drove them in the first place. The physical and psychological side-effects of these mind games soon become rather dramatic for Control, who grows more and more paranoid and finally confesses in a conversation with his mother that he has “got missing

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hours, maybe a missing day” (291). His delirium becomes tangible for the reader, not only because the narration is occasionally disrupted by mysterious (day)dreams of “endless falling into the bay, into the maw of leviathans” (224), as blank as the reoccurring chapter number “000” with which the chapters about these dreams are explicitly prefaced twice, but even more so because it is mirrored in the overall structure of Authority: divided into four parts titled “Incantations”, “Rites”, “Hauntings” and “Afterlife”, the novel consists of twenty-five chapters numbered from “000” to “023”, followed by the second last Chapter “00X” and closing with the unnumbered last part in “Afterlife”. While the four parts progress chronologically, we are soon confronted with the aforementioned time jumps and breaks in the narrative, manifesting not only in the disruption caused by the reappearance of Chapter “000” and the lack of Chapter “019”, but even more so in the discontinuous recounting of events as experienced by Control. The second part “Rites”, for instance, opens with Chapter “005: the first breach” (187), presenting the reader with how first irrational thoughts colonise Control’s mind and lead him to suspect that Area X is not as closed off as the Southern Reach wants people to believe. In the next four chapters, however, we are not confronted with a second or third breach in Control’s mind, but instead are given a tour through the different corridors and departments of the Southern Reach, being as labyrinthine and obscure as the scientific theories to which Control is introduced in his first few days in his new position as the interim director. It is only in chapters “010: fourth breach” (222), “011: sixth breach” (227) and “015: seventh breach” (245) that Control’s gradually progressing mental disintegration is explicitly narrated again, with the discontinuous enumeration already suggesting that he seems to suffer from memory loss. The impression that things get murky at the Southern Reach as the narration evolves is further reinforced by another formal aspect of the novel: the four parts of Authority are separated from each other with blank pages coloured in different shades of grey, reaching from a very light, almost white tone in “Incantations” to an almost black one in “Afterlife”. Like the colour range, Control’s mood, too, becomes darker and darker, and so does the general situation of

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

the Southern Reach, which becomes increasingly infiltrated by Area X until it is swallowed whole. A similar way of structuring chapters and separating parts from each other is used in VanderMeer’s Acceptance, a multiple character novel which brings together different narrative threads started in both Annihilation and Authority. Whereas the trilogy’s first two volumes work more or less alone and, due to their consistent use of one particular character’s point of view, can be read independently from each other, Acceptance does not follow this logic and presupposes at least some context to make any sense at all. It is written from the points of view of several characters introduced in the first two novels. In doing so, it collapses not only different narrative perspectives, but even more so the categories of past, present, and future. In contrast to Authority, Acceptance starts with an almost black page (360), which then turns into a mid-grey in “Part I: Range Light” (365), “Part II: Fixed Light” (465) and “Part III: Occulting Light” (485) only to become blackened again in the last, relatively short Chapter “000X: The Director” (588), which is thus staged as a part in its own right. This circular structure is repeated in and by the novel in manifold ways. On a macrolevel, this becomes maybe most obvious when regarding the numbering of the chapters of the three parts in which this novel is divided. Whereas the chapters of Part I and III are numbered from “000X” to “0028” and return to “000X” at the end, thus re-enacting a cyclic movement as well as creating the illusion of a chronological continuation of the plot narrated in the trilogy’s first two volumes, Part II reverts to the same chapter numbering as used in Annihilation. At closer inspection, the reason for this is rather obvious and simply explained, since Part II really is “the biologist’s last will and testament” (464). Thus, it picks up where Annihilation left off and puts the reader back in narrated time. This jumping back and forth in time cannot only be observed in between the two parts, but also in between the single chapters of Part I and Part III. Alternating between the perspectives of the lighthouse keeper, Ghost Bird, the director, and Control, there is a rhythmic pattern and a circular structure reaching beyond the novel: the end of Acceptance is the beginning of the twelfth expedition depicted in

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Annihilation, only that it is written from the point of view of the director this time, who turns out to be the expedition’s psychologist. In VanderMeer’s trilogy, everything is truly connected to everything else. Yet trying to piece together the textually and formally reinforced clues that we find in each of the three novels and that make us revise our predictions made on the basis of our reading thus far is challenging, to say the least. The Southern Reach Trilogy is “not this A to B to C bunch of reveals” (Vandermeer 2014e: Web), as VanderMeer has put it himself in an interview. Rather, it is a set of self-contained and yet unclosed narratives, continuously exploring, continuing and destabilising each other. Through its nonlinearity, The Southern Reach Trilogy fails to give orientation and instead functions as some sort of Area X itself: an uncanny space, that is, which somehow resists being modelled and mapped and through which the reader has to navigate despite all that. The effect of this disorientation may indeed be frustration to those readers who prefer plot reveals over ambiguity and open-endedness. At the same time, not being able to think and represent Area X and the mysteries behind it in familiar frameworks may feel very rewarding to others. In any case, what VanderMeer’s writing engenders is not a sense of closure or revelation but an experience of dissonance, which might as well feel revelatory in its own right. It is in this respect that The Southern Reach Trilogy queers our familiar ways of making sense of reality, with making sense meaning not interpretation but an affective experience as reinforced through VanderMeer’s Weird writing. Thus, sense making must be understood quite literally: following David Abram, “to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber […]” (Abram 1996: 265, emphasis orig.). The Southern Reach Trilogy does precisely that, pressing the reader to respond creatively to the phantasmagoria that it projects and that is. In other words, the trilogy’s engendering of uncanny effects and affects is its meaning, precisely because the experience of the difficulty of imagining that which resists signification, of realising that the world is far stranger and complex than we would like to believe might tell us something about ourselves and the precarious time we live in right now. In an age we sometimes call the Anthropocene, we struggle with environment

4. Reading Matters, Material Readings

related phenomena that exceed our ken, and yet we still have to arrive at a point where we do not turn away from the great unknown that these phenomena represent; where we face that science and objective thinking will take us only so far. If the Southern Reach Trilogy demonstrates anything, it surely is looking not only for, but even more so after the Other, the repressed. It does so by involving readers in a staging of the uncanny that holds the possibility for cultivating an openness and creative responsiveness towards what strikes them as other. Such an openness to notions of otherness might as well be of use beyond the world of fiction. We always get to decide how to engage with what disrupts our familiar ways of thinking and acting; and we must not forget that the way we choose to respond to difference is not unimportant and determines how stories – including life stories – evolve. Cultivating a “responsible response” (Attridge 2017 [2014]: 174) to the other, regardless of whether this other is a creature or the environment, becomes important here because it is through this response that we render visible what otherwise would remain invisible and thus not worth attending to or caring about within a specific culture. Weird literature such as VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy can help foster a sense of curiosity for what may appear as forever inaccessible and yet worth the effort of being imagined and responded to. With reference to his own writing, VanderMeer points out how [h]ere, in what is actually our infancy of understanding the world – this era in which we think we are older than we are – it is cathartic to seek out and tell stories that do not seek to reconcile the illogical, the contradictory, and often instinctual way in which human beings perceive the world, but instead accentuate these elements as a way of showing us as we truly are. Unruly. Unruled. Superstitious. Absurd. Subject to a thousand destabilizing fears and hopes. (VanderMeer 2014c: Web) Stories that interfere with our familiar ways of acting in and making sense of the more-than-human world may cause discomfort and disorientation. However, it is in providing experiences of the tension between similarity and difference that novels such as those of The Southern Reach Trilogy inherit a transformative potential. Instead of presenting

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readers with an all too familiar post-apocalyptic world, they force them to navigate through a fictional environment which is both threatening and under threat, just like planet earth in our times of climate crisis. VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy in particular forces us to continuously reconsider what we think we know to be true, thus leaving open the possibility of a re-orientation within a reality that seems to be almost too confusing. However, reconfiguring the ways in which we think about and relate to the environment might be just what we need in these precarious times.

5. Going Glocal Spatial Dissonance and The Multiscalar  Experience of Ambient Literature

5.1

Glocal Points of Access

To address the “various threads of geostory” (Latour 2014: 16) unfolding in our immediate lifeworld, threads that because of their ephemeral, atmospheric, or even virtual character remain curiously absent for the eyes to see or the ears to hear, we have seen that some writers of ecofiction are relying heavily on the creation of uncanny affects in and through their works. In the preceding chapters, I have looked at more or less conventional literary novels and their potential of cultivating in readers a ‘response-ability’ to notions of ambivalence and uncertainties in order to explore the turn to the atmospheric and its uncanny and relational aesthetics in speculative works of contemporary ecofiction. So far, I have pointed out the ways in which the conceptional blanks and gaps inherent in Anthropocenic and atmospheric imaginary are put to productive use in such works: they are explored and staged with regard to the tensions or Atmosfears resulting from the narrative engagement with our affective and relational being in the world. We have seen how differently such Atmosfears are translated in contemporary works of ecofiction, ranging from ecophobic imaginations to less apocalyptic and more Weird narratives of naturalcultural interrelations. I have turned to the latter mode of narrating climate crisis in my case studies. The reason for this lies in the ways in which works such as Glister,

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Marrow Island, and The Southern Reach Trilogy reflect on and break with simplistic dualisms such as subject/object, nature/culture, local/global, good/evil etc. by involving us in an aesthetic negotiation of what it means to be implicated in a complex and agential surrounding world that exists beyond human comprehension. Whether it is the notion of ambivalence manifesting in liminal spaces or alien otherness, what is central in the works discussed so far is a switching between the categories of the familiar and the strange. By creating a situated literary experience in which moments of ingression or immersion are kept in tension with those of distraction or discrepancy, the novels I have discussed thus far all seem to rework experiences of what Paula Levine calls “spatial dissonance” (Levine 2014: 149). Closely connected to the concept of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of disharmony occurring when a person’s beliefs, values, or emotions are inconsistent with their behaviour or contradicted by new information (cf. Festinger 1957: 12-13), spatial dissonance is created in “environments in which one spatially experiences uncanny contradictions” (Levine 2014: 149). Such could be the case if, according to Levine, new information on the histories or stories of a familiar area “stands in conflict with the local and personal experiences of that space” (144). More than ever before, our situated experience of the places we live in is shaped by the grand narrative of climate change, the latter challenging the ways in which the local and the global are set in relation to one another. While the geographies at hand always already carry the traces of global flows, what lies in the distance is no more than one click – or flight – away. As a consequence, “the dissonances created by the spatial layering of a distant place onto a local space” (Levine 2014: 144) have become increasingly tangible in a globally connected world as ours – or so one might think. It may come as no surprise, then, that narrative forms other than the literary novel too have engaged with the challenges and affordances of the tensions coming with our atmospheric implications in an interconnected and climatically changing world in recent years. Among them certainly is a very specific form of storytelling that is more often called

5. Going Glocal

(mobile) locative narrative: that is, a transmedia mode of storytelling using GPS or other location-aware technologies and requir[ing] specific apparatuses (cues, links, or referents) to bridge the digitally and physically mediated story spaces formed by digital media and the environment, and in doing so, blur[ring] the line between storyworld and the physical world and affect[ing] the immersive nature of the story thus mediated. (Ritchie 2014: 55) As I will show in this chapter and with regard to one particular variation of mobile-locative narrative that has only recently become known under the label of Ambient Literature, such unconventional forms of literary writing provide a particularly productive means to negotiate the multiple and contradictory contexts and scales that we live in and think at in the Anthropocene age. This is certainly because locative narrative involves us in different contexts of experience: set simultaneously in cyberspace, the physical environment of the reader and in a specific story world, locative narrative “breaks architectures of linearity, completion, specific architecture as one moves in open architecture space” (Hight 2010: 319). In doing so, it deals with and works through the multilayered nature of the environmental, societal, and cultural contexts in which we are set in our global economy. Given that developing an awareness for the entanglements of local environmental catastrophes with larger global processes and trends is one of the central challenges facing humanity today, such transmedia forms of storytelling become all the more important. Developers and writers in the field of locative narrative have recognised the potential of locative technology to narrate the contemporary planetary experience by foregrounding the ambivalent connections between binarisms such as the local and global, now and then, familiar and strange in and through their works. To illustrate how exactly locative narratives can capture and engender the Anthropocene experience of collapsing scales and thus contribute to a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality, I will turn to Duncan

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Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark By Then (2017),1 one of three pieces of Ambient Literature that have resulted from the two-year collaboration between the UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University, the University of Birmingham and a group of renowned writers and composers in the field of pervasive or ubiquitous media and digital fiction. I will engage with the ways in which IMHBDBT creates interactive and performative spaces in which readers get the chance to experience the tensions that characterise life in the Anthropocene. Told jointly through a smartphone app and a physical book, Speakman’s story about the subtle changes of planetary environments and communities compels readers not only to enter narrated places in Latvia, Tunisia, and Louisiana but also to literally move through both cyberspace and the real, urban environment right at their doorstep. Since it relies heavily on the interplay between the moving reader, the ambience of their local environment, and aesthetically reinforced atmospheres of narrated locales, I will explore in how far IMHBDBT enables a very specific kind of atmospheric experience: that is, a discovery of “the stories to be read and written around us” (Hayler 2016: Web) on multiple scales and in multiple pasts, presents and imagined futures, which may then challenge or enhance the reader’s embodied experience of place with haunting stories from a distance, both geographically and temporally (cf. Abba 2016: Web). In this context, I will focus on the extent to which locative narrative moves across and even disrupts scales of time and place and creates the kind of dissonant experience mentioned above. This will help me to argue in how far the interactive, dialogic, and open-ended dynamic of works such as Speakman’s IMHBDBT captures precisely the uncanny and relational poetics of reading that we might want to consider more seriously if we are to grapple how we are entangled in ubiquitous and complex systems. In doing so, I propose that experimental literary forms such as IMHBDBT appear as yet another promising starting point for the analysis of how contemporary ecofiction brings to mind the ambivalent and indeed relational position in which we find ourselves today maybe even more than ever before. 1

In the following referred to as IMHBDBT.

5. Going Glocal

The concept of “glocalization”, first introduced by Roland Robertson in 1995, is a clear response to the shifting scales with which we are confronted as members of global economies. It captures a sense of the planetary dimension of local processes, thus bringing to mind that […] what is local is in large degree constructed on a trans- or superlocal basis. In other words, much of the promotion of locality is in fact done from above or outside. Much of what is often declared to be local is in fact the local expressed in terms of generalized recipes of locality. (Robertson 1995: 27-28) How such a relational perspective towards geological space and time is translated into narrative form can be seen in the works of literature discussed in the previous chapters. In these novels, the familiar is rendered strange by thinking seemingly contradictory scales such as here and there, local and global together. In Burnside’s Glister, it is a derelict chemical park located at the fringes of an equally abandoned British town which inspires the creation of the myth of an eternal landscape overlapping with the quite mundane spaces in which the story about the mysterious disappearance of five teenage boys unfolds. Similarly, the story of Smith’s Marrow Island is staged in ambivalent spaces – the mostly abandoned and poisoned grounds of a semi-fictional archipelago in the Pacific Northwest and the Washington mainland – that exist separated from and yet are uncannily connected to each other because of an oil spill. Most strikingly, however, a sense of spatial dissonance emerges in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy: here the reader encounters Area X, an otherworldly, multi-dimensional space overlapping and interfering with a coastal American territory. In occupying the threshold between our world and a strangely familiar one, I have argued that Area X destabilises what we ought to know about planetary reality and the rules we apply to it. What is striking is that in all of these novels, experiences of displacement are not connected to the protagonists’ forced migration from their contaminated homelands to unfamiliar places. Rather, large-scale processes of habitat transformation as they are connected to climate change are framed in local sites and shown to directly affect the ‘homes’ – and bodies –

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of protagonists. What delivers an uncanny affect, in this sense, is the defamiliarisation of familiar and everyday situations and surroundings and, more specifically, a sudden recognition of the actual influence of hard-to-grasp forces on individual agency. One does not have to live in rural, ecotonal areas heavily affected by land degradation, toxic pesticides and/or climate-change related environmental risks, however, to experience the fundamental and precarious enmeshment of humans and the environment in the Anthropocene. In fact, the urban environment represents a similarly ambivalent space through which we can engage with the tensions that arise from our atmospheric embeddedness in a globally connected world. As much as the “histories that make multispecies livability possible” (Gan et al. 2017: 5) may be concealed in increasingly urbanised environments, they still can be tracked; and as paradoxical as it seems, it is the city, a space where the tension between what is perceived as ‘nature and culture’ is most tangible, that gives us every reason to search for the atmospheric in its urban terrain. And yet, place-oriented movements such as deep ecology and bioregionalism,2,3 which, as Ursula Heise points out in her Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), are deeply anchored in American environmentalism, tend to draw heavily on “the (usually male) individual’s 2

3

Rather a mindset popularised by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1989) than a movement in the narrower sense, deep ecology is one of the more ecocentric and “radical forms of environmentalism”, which, according to Garrard, “identifies the dualistic separation of humans from nature promoted by Western philosophy and culture as the origin of environmental crisis, and demands a return to a monistic, primal identification of humans and the ecosphere” (2004: 21). Since the 1970s, the bioregional movement has yielded a wide range of different ideals and efforts, ranging from theoretical approaches to rethinking region-scale environments in terms of ecosystemic instead of political and national territories to a more “political and cultural practice that manifests as an environmental ethic in the day-to-day activities of ordinary residents” (Lynch, Glotfelty & Armbruster 2012: 3). However, what is shared by all bioregionalists is their use of place-centred discourse to “address matters of pressing environmental concern through a politics derived from a local sense of place” (2).

5. Going Glocal

encounter with and physical immersion in the landscape, typically envisioned as wild rather than rural or urban” (Heise 2008: 29). Without wanting to delve any deeper into the history and specifics of American environmental discourse, I find it crucial to have a look at how a ‘sense of place’ has dominated environmental ethics and writing in the past and the present. This will help us to better understand the objections that more recent ‘large-scale approaches’ to ecological issues are raising against thinking planetary interconnectedness mostly in terms of localising rhetoric and imagery. Voices that raise concern over the negative consequences of human modification and commodification of nature are as old as the industrial processes that have provoked and accelerated the environmental crisis that we find ourselves in today. Perhaps the most persistent critique of the ever-growing techno-optimism of the past couple of centuries is that it has deprived what in this context is nostalgically understood to be pristine, precapitalist “Nature” (cf. Jameson 1991: 34) of its own value. In this debate it is more often voiced in how far industrialisation and modernisation have functioned as the springboards for modern Western societies. That “[p]lace-attachment tends to thin out as territory expands” (Buell 2005: 68) is at least a prominent concern uttered by a great deal of environmentalists and environmental critics, as Lawrence Buell demonstrates for instance in his The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). As a consequence, there has been a tendency in early environmental and ecocritical thinking, and in the related fields of environmental anthropology and human and cultural geography in particular, to lament the loss of a sensibility for localities, landscapes, and ecosystems. The study of topophilia,4 a term which Yi-Fu Tuan famously defined as “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Tuan 1974: 4), became of particular interest in this context, as researchers such as Tuan suggested

4

The term topophilia, meaning ‘love of place’, was first used by the EnglishAmerican poet W.H. Auden in his introduction for John Betjeman’s Slick but not Streamlined (1947). While Tuan has not been the first nor the last to have taken up the term ever since, his redefinition of topophilia would ultimately have a lasting effect on the term’s denotation.

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that environmental citizenship hinges to a large part on the “affection” emerging out of our “intimate” interaction with and perception of locales (100).5 At the same time, concepts such as “deterritorialization”, referring to “the detachment of social and cultural practices from their ties to place” triggered by globalisation and modernisation processes (Heise 2008: 51), emerged and have not seldomly been used to blame global forces and networks to be spoiling peoples’ modes of belonging to certain locales.6 Running counter to anthropocentric, capitalist efforts aiming at multiplying local modernisation process on a global scale, place-oriented environmentalist perspectives have been refocussing attention to the intrinsic value of the more-than-human environment at hand. This is done in particular by emphasising “a sense of place as a basic prerequisite for environmental awareness and activism” (Heise 2008: 33). Only if we find a way to physically immerse ourselves in and learn how to “know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and those of our own invention” (Abram 1996: x), deep ecologists such as David Abram claim rather empathically, can we become rooted again in our environment and obtain a more responsible position towards it. However, and since we cannot ignore the global nature of environmental crisis, more recent work done on environmental justice, including Heise (2008), bring place-based ecophenomenological perspectives in fruitful tension with questions of planet-wide social ecologies of injustice. In a time in 5

6

A similar call for cultivating environmental values through developing a feeling for place is made, for instance, by the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, who explores how to revitalise what she emphatically calls the “Arts of Noticing” (2015: 17) in her multispecies ethnography on the picking and trade of matsutake mushrooms. However, Lowenhaupt Tsing already applies a more planetary approach to environmental citizenship than Tuan, as she ultimately acknowledges that we need to “turn attention to the nonscalable” as well (38). Although “deterritorialization” is most often associated with A Thousand Plateaus (1987 [1977]) by Deleuze & Guattari, I find Heise’s (2008) definition of this concept from a more sociological perspective most compelling and comprehensible.

5. Going Glocal

which the consequences of climate change pervade the everyday life of each and every region on earth, local and global modes of belonging cannot be discussed independently from each other, indeed. Neither an ‘erotics of place’ nor a totalising view of globality will bring us any closer to resolve the ethical challenges that “deterritorialization poses for the environmental imagination” (Heise 2008: 10). Rather, and to address the shifting scales within which individuals act in our globally connected world, we always need to think the one with and through the other. As Heise points out, imaginations and effects of the global do not necessarily conflict with environmentalist perspectives. To the contrary, by foregrounding “how cultural practices become detached from place” and “[…] imbricated in […] larger networks” (2008: 55), the very kind of global connectivity impacting processes of deterritorialisation can also be regarded to be very enriching for contemporary environmentalism, precisely because it conveys a “sense of planet” (ibid.). Since environmental citizenship, which is one of the ideals of environmental ethics, is not defined in terms of regional or national boundaries but envisions all human beings as being part of a larger, planetary community, attempts at cultivating local environmental awareness may indeed raise suspicion and encounter resistance in environmental criticism and beyond. This is particular the case in a time in which nationalist political parties are on the rise again across Europe and the US, nurtured as they are by decontextualised notions of the local as a site of cultural history and identity. And with regard to the fact that even research in ecocriticism is not free of conservative and nationalist rhetoric (cf. Garrard 2020), Heise is right when she claims that “[f]rom tracing one’s own roots in a particular locale and defending it against despoliation, it is sometimes but a small step to a class-based or even racially tinged politics of exclusion” (2008: 47). With this in mind, practicing and communicating scale-sensitive modes of awareness that think the local always in relation to the global and vice versa, that negotiate how abstract, hard-to-grasp forces are inextricably linked with what can be experienced in the immediate present, becomes of more and more importance in a truly transnational environmental framework. But how are we to do this without falling

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back into either putting an overemphasis on an ethics of proximity or applying a totalising, detached “view from above, from nowhere” (Haraway 1988: 589)? And what help is literary language in bringing together seemingly contradictory scales to reinforce an uncanny sense of atmospheric re(lation)ality? As we will see in the next subchapter, it is the specific affective affordances of literary language combined with the immersive as well as disruptive experiences provided by locative technologies that has been put to productive use in narrative projects such as those of Ambient Literature.

5.2

Ambient Literature and the Storying in and of Spacetime

Providing readers with an in-app experience of a mixture of storydriven audio recordings, soundscapes, and location-aware technology on the one hand and a “collection of dispersed maps” (IMHBDBT 1) and semi-fictional field notes printed in a physical book on the other, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark By Then opens unlike most literary texts dealing with the irresolvable tensions and environmentrelated changes accompanying life in the Anthropocene. It is only after readers have put on headphones, downloaded and started a smartphone app, and confirmed that they can hear the ominous score playing on their devices already that they are asked to open the physical book and read the introduction of this collaborative mobile-locative narrative. What they are given on the first pages is the narrator’s reflection on an overwhelming feeling of unease that most of us might be familiar with when confronted with the fast-paced nature of global network society: I have a collection of maps on my bookshelf. Each one a token from a place I travelled through at some point in my life. […] My collection is not complete though. There are places I have no document of, save for maybe a photograph or a train ticket. When I try to fill these gaps with an online map I become conscious of how temporary the world on my screen is, the border lines and roads being constantly updated by

5. Going Glocal

digital surveyors. It is not the same world I walked through. It makes me aware that the streets I live on undergo a constant gradual change. One that I often fail to notice, and then one day I am shocked by what is missing. (7) What is voiced here is the impossibility to grasp the ‘global environment’ without considering one’s subjective, localised perspective. The conceptual gaps resulting from the irresolvable tensions between phenomenological experience of life in place and the translocal, supra-individual dimension of imaginaries of the global can hardly be filled with data abstractions. Rather, it seems that the global can only be grasped in relation to individual agency and, thus, requires affective responses and individual perspectivation to be envisioned at all. The need for this kind of “world-imagining from below” (Wenzel 2014: 20) has already been identified in environmental and postcolonial discourse in the past twenty years. The turn to planetarity in particular presents a valuable addition and counter-paradigm to the abstract, totalising universalism inherent to existing imaginaries of the global. Challenging the usefulness of the concept of the globe to account for the relational dynamics as well as structures of inequality within and across economic and ecological systems, the planetary view as famously proposed by Spivak opposes a more anti-capitalist notion of transnational interconnectedness. Compared to globalisation, which according to Spivak “is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” (2003: 72), planetarity figures an alterity that cannot be as easily mapped, or, resonating the colonial imagery coming with the objectification of the earth into a solid, measurable globe (cf. Ingold 2002 [2000]: 212), appropriated by a human collectivity. Resisting clear visuality, the planet becomes a “the signifier of the uncanny” (Spivak 2003: 74), thereby opening up new avenues for thinking earthly life in terms of difference-in-relation instead of a homogenous soup. As Spivak writes in her Death of a Discipline (2003), [i]f we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains

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us as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. (73) Accordingly, the planetary expresses an abstract conglomerate of localised lifeworlds or, as Ingold has it, “spheres” (2002 [2000]: 216). It is “from an experiential centre from within [the world]” (215) – that is within spheres – that life is lived, which is why the kind of externality of the human perceiver as implied by the image of the world as globe appears problematic from a new materialist understanding of the (intra-)relationality of human and more-than-human life. While I still find that global imaginary proves useful to explore the networked nature of an increasingly digitalised world, I fully agree with approaches that caution us to mistake the kind of “borderlessness” associated with the globe (cf. Wenzel 2014: 21) for an unproblematic concept to think ecological entanglement. Instead of abandoning the global for a planetary view towards the environment, however, my aim here is to point out the ways in which the simultaneity between local and global modes of attachment may facilitate a reading across scales that, speaking with Ingold, allows for a “dialectic interplay between engagement and detachment, between human being’s involvement in the world and their separation from it” (2002 [2000]: 216). This uneasy movement of being pulled into and out of spheres of engagement with an increasingly multilayered world is paradigmatic of life in the Anthropocene. At the same time, it is enacted in the context of uncanny atmospheric reading experiences and, as I will show, invites reflections on our current ways of relating to the world. Speakman’s IMHBDBT surely invites readers to move across scales and contexts and accounts for the diversity of lived experiences of Anthropocenic complexities. Instead of providing readers with digital and printed maps of pre-selected locales, this work asks them to plot individual routes and create their own “memory map” of where they are with the help of both GPS signals and a book (cf. Dovey & Speakman

5. Going Glocal

2018: 47). IMHBDBT explores modes of writing and reading “the complex entanglements and timescales of climate change” (Dovey & Speakman 2018: 40). Using pervasive technology, it challenges traditional definitions of literature and storytelling. While it is the only one of the Ambient Literature project’s three commissioned works that locates itself explicitly within the context of ecocritical practice and Anthropocenic art forms (cf. 38), IMHBDBT ties in with the new approach to locative reading and writing pursued by Ambient Literature. Other than most literary projects in the field of locative narrative, Ambient Literature is not so much concerned with engaging readers in a digging into the history and atmospheres of specific locales. Indeed, the overemphasis on the dynamics of what Jeremy Hight coined “Narrative Archeology” (2010: 328) has dominated much of the writing of and research in locative narrative in the past decades. Site-specific projects such as the interactive L.A. audio walk 34 North 118 West (2002), the Bristol-based 1831 RIOT! (2004), or the mobile narrative [murmur] (2007) staged in Toronto have been introducing GPS technology and mobile media to narrative storytelling years ago to allow participants to explore and co-author the local histories and atmospheric architectures of cities worldwide. That the solitary stroll in particular has become a preferred way of staging an aesthetic engagement between the reader, the environment and its historical and atmospheric richness in all of these projects might come as no surprise, given the prevalence of psychogeographical tropes in arts and literature since the middle of the 20th century. Well before contemporary writers and composers recognised the fruitful connection between walking and locative storytelling, cultural, artistic, and literary movements of the 20th century have made use of performative processes of spatial production to recall the (hi)stories inscribed into urban environments. As Merlin Coverley illustrates in The Art of Wandering (2012), it was the Dada Movement in Paris of the 1920s that practised flânerie as a way of reclaiming the urban space from which the pedestrian had been rather violently expelled in the modern, automobile city. Intending to take the indulgence in the banality of the city to its extreme, the Dadaist excursions planned by the writer An-

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dré Breton in particular “[u]pgrad[ed] the role of the flâneur from disinterested observer to participant in an aesthetic experiment” (Coverley 2012: 184). Rather than the spectacle of crowded, social spaces as provided by (post-)modern consumer culture, it was the aesthetic experience of overlooked, mundane spots and quarters which have no sentimental or historical value attached to them by the tourist industry that took the Dadaists to the streets of Paris. Similarly, the Surrealist movement following shortly thereafter picked up on the kind of urban strolling that would later inspire and influence many contemporary forms of locative storytelling. Exercising what Breton defined in his “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924) as a “[p]sychic automatism in its pure state”, the group integrated sessions of automatic writing into their random strolls through central France by which they hoped “to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought” (2005 [1924]: 729). What resulted from their explorations of dreamlike realities hiding underneath the banal territories of everyday urban life were, among other things, Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), two surrealist works of literature which according to Coverley “are the closest we have yet to come to what has been described as the psychogeographical novel” (2010: 73). Indeed, both novels’ treatment of the affective effects of specific localities on their aimlessly strolling main protagonists’ desires and drives reflects a psychic engagement with the built environment and its varying atmospheric architectures. Set in the neglected and rather abandoned zones of Paris as well as in the liminal spaces of the city streets, it is the affective and historical signature of this very specific metropolis that is used as a background to explore the unknown, unexpected, marvellous, and maybe even repressed aspects of an otherwise familiar urban topography. With clear reference to Freudian psychoanalysis, encountering the unconscious and searching for traces of the uncanny within the everyday became of central importance to both surrealist strolling and writing. As with Dadaism and Surrealism, the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists emerging under the regime of Guy Debord in the late 1950s, engaged in a kind of systematic reading of the

5. Going Glocal

genius loci of urban spaces to reframe the experience of the modern city. Today, the Situationists’ documentation of personal narratives about urban space in alternative city maps is better known as psychogeography, which Debord has famously defined as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (2006a [1955]: 8). While psychogeography’s almost archaeological mission of revealing and mapping “the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres” (Debord 2006a [1955]: 10) may have gone out of fashion, the Ambient Literature Project (2016-2018), a research collaboration funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK), testifies that there still is an interest in exploring the material history of our cities through adding location-specific information to urban environments. Ambient Literature is no exception here, as it, too, uses GPS technology to tag locations in the reader’s surroundings. In the case of IMHBDBT, Amy Spencer, herself member of the research team behind the Ambient Literature Project, explains that […] the reader is asked to seek out types of locations in their own environment, such as a place where people live, evidence of a physical barrier and of the natural world, and once in these environments it offers them sounds and stories from remote but related situations. At each location, the reader is invited to make connections and, in the process, create a map of both where they are physically located and of the places that may not exist in the future. (2018: 151) However close IMHBDBT is to other forms of locative narrative in terms of the computing technologies being used, it differs from them in several important points. Firstly, it does not seem to aim at producing spatial knowledge through having readers explore the specifics of preselected urban locales, though the immersive, situated literary experience plays an important role in this aesthetic performance. Secondly, it does not seem to engage the reader in a semi-fictional narrative for the sake of promoting any ‘new’ format of electronic, experimental storytelling. Rather, it refocuses on the literary aspects of locative narra-

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tive, thus pointing to the blind spots of a genre which has defined itself over the years as “a literature of action, of movement, of moment and of place, not (so far) about ‘style’ or other semantic/aesthetic/point of entry roadblocks” (Hight 2010: 321). Given that ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) has become an integral part of daily life in the 21st century, it is about time that experiments such as the Ambient Literature Project finally have returned to questions of the aesthetic rather than sociological or media specific affordances of mobile storytelling.7 A look at the project’s “A Manifesto for Ambient Literature” (Abba 2017; Marcinkwoski & Hayler 2017) testifies this renewed interest in the aesthetic, affective, and relational aspects of mobile writing and reading performances. This fragmentary manifesto captures exactly that notion of the ambivalence that works of Ambient Literature try to evoke in readers. “Whatever Ambient Literature is, it has porous borders”, Tom Abba indicates in his foreword (2017: Web), and so it may not come as a surprise that the definition given of this form of writing is rather hazy and “resists a clear reading” (ibid.). Ambient Literature is loosely referred to as a “cluster of literary and (generalized) technological practices” that […] reinscribe the occurrence of literary experience according to a spectral logic of an unbounded textuality across an errant lattice of both existent and non-existent materiality. With this, audiences’ sensory apparatuses are remediated toward an ambiguity that reconstitutes the present moment of a re-factored world or, perhaps, more accurately, the present moment of a re-factored worlding, or even worldliness. (Marcinkowski & Hayler 2017: Web, emphasis orig.) While the manifesto’s authors do not go into detail about the facets of this “ambiguity”, we can approach what is meant here by looking more

7

Ubiquitous or pervasive forms of computing are “postdesktop” technologies which “weave themselves into everyday life. These media are seemingly everywhere but often become so incorporated into our actions that we rarely notice them” (Sample 2014: 68). Such technologies use mobile or wireless networks to share digital content with potential users. For a discussion of the uses of ubiquitous computing in locative narrative, see Farman (2012).

5. Going Glocal

closely at the aesthetic effects that Ambient Literature seeks to achieve: it is a kind of writing that blends contradictory scales of time and place, thereby operating on the temporal and spatial experience of readers. Before I move on with a more nuanced discussion of how this multiscalarity is staged in Speakman’s IMHBDBT, let me point out some of the implications of the uncanny Anthropocenic experience of spatiotemporal simultaneity for a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality. As already touched upon at the beginning of this chapter, global flows of communication and information shape the situated relationships that exist between individuals and their surroundings today. As a consequence, complex contexts are produced within which we encounter different, even contradictory scales of time and place simultaneously. Digital technologies and the World Wide Web have further complexified the infrastructures through which we have to navigate on a daily basis. They involve us in networks that are more than of a social or global nature, but truly ubiquitous or, for that matter, ambient. Ubiquitous forms of computing that “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (Weiser 1991: 94) in particular have contributed to the contemporary experience of being constantly embedded in a variety of physical as well as in virtual environments, be it in private or public spheres of interaction. Unlike virtual reality systems, which immerse users into simulated environments, ubicomp “adds information that is directly related to the user’s immediate physical space” (Manovich 2006: 225). It is more than just a technological gimmick, but to the contrary has a quite larger impact on the daily life of people than one might think. Whether in the navigation systems and rear-view cameras of our cars, the facial recognition software on our smartphones, or interactive games and real-time translation apps, ubicomp is literally all around us. By enhancing the environments through which we move and in that we exist “with dynamically changing information” (Manovich 2006: 220), ubiquitous computing interferes with our experience of the world and produces a kind of third space, usually referred to as augmented reality. And since this reality is integrated so deeply into our phenomenal experience of embodied space, it cannot be as easily separated from material reality (cf. Far-

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man 2012: 36).8 Rather, the augmented reality as produced by ubicomp adds another dimension to our experience of spacetime and reinforces a sense of the “multiplicity” (38) of contexts within which we are entangled in the 21st century. Indeed, ubicomp’s uncanny responsiveness to human presence and the ways in which it pervades our embodied interactions in and with space illustrates the relational character of global network society. But even beyond notions of connectedness between human beings and virtual technologies does it point to a more general sense of relationality that is usually envisioned in the context of ecological dynamics. As ubicomp “mimic[s] the holistic web that connects all components of the world”, Susan Kozel argues, it truly brings to mind the curious ways in which “we all are networked on subtle and not so subtle levels” (2013: 339). In doing so, it gestures towards the complex dynamics that challenge our understanding of the world today – that is, the collapsing of spatial and temporal scales in radically changing environments. It is no wonder then that projects such as the Ambient Literature Project experiment with ubiquitous communication and information networks to produce embodied, personal encounters with increasingly abstract spatialities and temporalities in which human experience is grounded. In doing so, they engage readers with the chronic contemporary “experience of multiplicity” (Farman 2012: 38). More than making productive use of the trope of the network to allegorise notions of ecological belonging and “translate cosmopolitanism as a vision of the global into narrative form” (Heise 2008: 70), Ambient Literature is the form that situates readers in the wider contexts that (re)shape human life today. By using both ubiquitous computing and the affective agency 8

In his The Virtual (2003), Rob Shields makes a case against the common distinction between reality and virtuality, arguing that “[t]he virtual is always real, even if it is a memory or a past event, but it is not actualized in the present except via specific human interventions” (39). Rather than the real, he proposes the “concrete” to be a better contrast to the virtual because it opposes a notion of embodied materiality against that of “ideally real” as implied by the virtual (29).

5. Going Glocal

of literary atmospheres, it invites readers to enrich unique places with their own imagination. It allows for an augmentation of physical space with and through the affective encounter between “the reader, a generalized sense of context, technological platforms, and the wider informational contexts made possible by networked communication” (Marcinkowski 2016: Web). This makes it quite clear that the literariness invoked by Ambient Literature is more than an aesthetic experience made possible by a closed circular movement between the parts and the whole of a (usually printed) text. Rather, it is the result of the mutual responsiveness between humans, narrative texts, virtual technologies, and the physical environment in which the reading performance is taking place. Marcinkowski points to the challenge Ambient Literature poses on theories of literary interpretation that define the specific agency engendered by literature primarily in terms of either author-, text-, content- or reader-centred approaches: What ambient literature proposes is that the hermeneutic movement of textual interpretation occurs not only as a hermeneutics internal to the text itself, nor in just the hermeneutics of experience of the reader and the alterity of the proposition of the text, but as a movement within the ambient conditions of the attention of the reading or experiencing subject. (Marcinkowski 2016: Web) Exploring literary processes in computer-based media, Jörgen Schäfer comes to a similar conclusion, proposing that we need to shift attention away from a hermeneutics of linguistic sign processes towards one of “embodied language and ‘body language’” (2010: 37). Electronic literature in general and locative narrative in particular introduce complex “chains of translations” (40) in which agency is distributed “between human and non-human actors, the transcriptivity of language and the ‘artificial intelligence’ of computers, the bodily experience of recipients and the mental representations and, last but not least, the literariness of these processes to each other” (58). Again, it is in the feedback, the relationalities between these variables that something like literary agency is described to be constituted, only that in the case of locative narra-

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tive readers are “invited to physically interact directly with the sign processes, to promptly ‘continue writing’ or to fill ‘gaps’ which they themselves continue to create” (Schäfer 2010: 50, emphasis orig.). Indeed, it cannot be denied that the performative and interactive character of coscripting or co-narrating the course of mobile locative stories prompts a particular embodied experience of the simultaneity of the multiple layers of context and meaning attached to material space. As readers have to negotiate between the expectations raised by the content on their devices and the experience of the environments around them, they become entangled in an aesthetic realisation of the tensions and contradictions that “haunt” anthropogenic landscapes (cf. Gan et al. 2017: 2). However productive locative narratives are in providing readers with more practical ways to retrace the multiple pasts, presents and futures written into their lived environments, it seems to me that the specific literariness of this format is associated with something else – that is, an aesthetic and affective engagement with notions of ambivalence and the atmospheric rather than with site-specific, historical and geospatial context. Not unlike more traditional forms of literary writing, mobile locative narratives engage the reader in a dialogical relationship with textual dynamics within a spatiotemporal context. Enabling notions of spacetime tuned in a way that either correlate with or deviate from the reader’s personal expectations towards and experiences with atmospheric reality, locative narratives, too, invite readers to synchronise the at times contradictory atmospheric information they receive. In other words, and as already voiced in the previous chapter, they involve them in a dialectic movement between experiences of ingression or immersion and discrepancy or distraction (cf. Schmidt 2013: 180; Böhme 2001: 46). On the one hand, the person who is walking-reading works such as IMHBDBT is in immediate contact with the local environment and engages in a co-authoring of varying ambiences that influence their sense of place. In doing so, what is ‘here’ and ‘now’ becomes the locus of attention, so that the walking-reading subject is placed in the spatial and temporal present. On the other hand, the reader’s local experience is embedded in wider informational, spatio-temporal, and literary networks and contexts.

5. Going Glocal

Thus, the atmospheric re(lation)ality experienced from a first-person perspective or in a “‘first-scale’ dimension” (Bartosch 2015: 86) is necessarily set in tension with supra-individual dimensions of space, time, and, as it were, atmosphere.

5.3

Where to Read from Here: Duncan Speakman’s  It Must Have Been Dark By Then

Picking up on the ambivalence of naturecultures and thus of humanmade environments, Speakman’s IMHBDBT is one of the most compelling works of the Ambient Literature Project to engage readers with the tensions that arise from our atmospheric embeddedness in an interconnected world. As a renowned composer, sound artist, and co-founder of the British arts collective Circumstance (2010-2018), Speakman has tried to find novel ways of creating singular reading experiences. Combining mobile, location-sensitive audio installations and walks with narrative storytelling throughout the past decade, he has been commissioning hybrid forms of printed/digital literature such as These Pages Fall Like Ash (2013) well before working with literary researchers, (sound) producers, and app and software designers of the Ambient Literature Project in 2017. What is new, however, is the decisive ecocritical perspective taken in his recent experiments, with IMHBDBT certainly being his most elaborative narrative of Anthropocenic experience to date. Written in collaboration with the Belgian artist Tineke de Meyer and first launched at the Ambient Literature Symposium in Bristol in May 2017, IMHBDBT is a mixed media performance that directs readers’ attention to three different locations on three different continents already forced to cope with the severe impacts of climate change on local communities and environments. The work carefully avoids mentioning or referring to the human impact on the environment, for it has been only after the production process that Speakman and the producers as well as artists involved in the creation of IMHBDBT realised that they had created “a new kind of eco-critical artwork” (Speakman & Dovey 2018: 35). The fragmented narration in the printed book serves as “a reflec-

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tive travel diary, documenting journeys made by the artist” (34) through the different countries and border zones encountered in the course of the story. Nonetheless, the sites visited by the author in preparation of IMHBDBT carry with them notions of environment-related change. Throughout the ten chapters in the printed book, we get to know, for instance, the depopulated and snowbound towns and regions around the Latvian capital of Riga, currently facing one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in the EU. It is, among others, the story of Marcis, a twenty-eight-year-old electrical engineer having only recently returned from his studies in Riga to his hometown Jēkabpils, that the reader is asked to engage with while en route. “This generation is leaving” (IMHBDBT 19), the narrator reminds us on what turns out to be a semi-transparent page inside the physical book, thus only further reinforcing the sense of emptiness that Speakman and his team must have experienced while recording the aural material playing all the while on the reader’s mobile device. In a similar vein, the fragmentary chapters about literally deserted Tunisian regions, being gradually eroded by sandstorms, deal with habitat loss and a more general “notion of disappearance” (IMHBDBT 35). The reader has to resist reading the short, illustrated chapters of the black-covered book in one sitting – a fact that is also mentioned in Speakman’s letter of instruction coming with each copy. While having their own dramaturgy and working well as one literary experience, the printed chapters of IMHBDBT are meant to be read one at a time at different, in-app generated geofences in the reader’s immediate surroundings. Other than is the case with most mobile locative narratives, the audio content accompanying the approximately eighty-minute lasting walking-reading experience is not anchored in the places where it has been originally recorded. Instead, the ambient sounds, musical scores and bits and pieces of the female instruction voice (Tineke de Meyer), which loosely structure this kind of individual mapping of stories of living through the effects of changing environments, are unlocked as soon as one enters or leaves randomly geotagged areas. This means that readers can start their individual journey along uniquely generated routes wherever and whenever they want, though they are instructed to do

5. Going Glocal

much of the kind of serendipitous, literary scavenger hunt outside and, if possible, in an urban environment. It is in this respect that IMHBDBT provides an experience open to everyone in possession of a smartphone, headphones, and the printed book.9 Leaving aside the practical implications of this very limited and yet location-independent access to IMHBDBT, the relative openness regarding the place and time that readers can experience the story’s narrative threads has obvious advantages when it comes to addressing the multilayered and multiconnected nature of our Anthropocenic present. Just as with Speakman’s work, the collapse of habitats and Cartesian coordinates as facilitated by the ubiquitous overlapping of distant and local temporalities and spatialities is happening and can possibly be experienced anywhere and anytime (cf. Levine 2014: 144). The ways in which IMHBDBT brings together the lived experiences and stories of seemingly unrelated places and lays them over the material, local surroundings of the reading subject capture a sense of living in and as part of complex, large-scale systems. We might not know the pain of having to surrender our homes and neighbourhoods due to sandstorms or inevitably rising tides, as the people actually do that live in the Sahara or along the Bayou Lafourche and that we get to know in the printed text of IMHBDBT. But the subtle or not so subtle impact of larger global developments on local geographies may not go unnoticed even in places safest from environment-related disasters. “Between yesterday and today I wonder how much has already changed on the map of my phone” (IMHBDBT 13), the narrator of the book ponders in Chapter One. Shortly thereafter, De Meyer’s calm voice sets in again through the headphones, instructing us to go find “some place that people live in” (audio) and read Chapter Two once there. Resonating with the theme of demographic change introduced in this chapter, her voice finally reassures us that

9

Since only a limited number of copies were printed and distributed, I once again would like to express my deepest gratitude to Duncan Speakman for sending me a copy of the book and giving me access to the audio script as well as to the individual recordings.

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“buildings seem so solid but our cities are always in flux, some structures come and go like the tide” (audio). There we are, standing in front of a housing in the middle of a familiar or even strange town or city preferably far away from the Latvian village that Chapter Two is staged in, walking, as the voice has it, “a map of relationships, between here and somewhere else, between you and another” (audio). The kind of connectivity as established by the paths we make and cross with others along our journeys through different and differing environments is indeed rendered particularly fruitful in IMHBDBT. And so is the connection between walking and modes of reading and storytelling. IMHBDBT invites readers to become part of the life stories that are being read and written on the move and with the help of the book and their mobile devices. A look at how the activity of walking is being treated in the field of aesthetic theory and practice reveals that it is more often than not understood to establish and facilitate an affective engagement between the walking person and the surrounding world. In his Ambient Commons (2013), Malcolm McCullough describes for instance the extent to which walking seems to offer a way to reclaim a sense of place as it “provides more embodiment, more opportunity for effortless fascination, and better engagement than looking or sitting” (McCullough 2013: 84). It is on foot and confronted with the built environment, he claims, that a sensibility to surroundings and their “ambient information” can be formed so that we learn “to read the world in itself” (242) again. Tim Ingold even goes one step further, arguing that “perception is fundamentally about movement” (2011: 11, emphasis orig.). Walking is here understood to be itself a way of knowing because it allows one to retrace paths through the world and to relate others’ histories of moving from place to place to one’s own. Accordingly, it is through “locomotion, not cognition” (46) that we come to know environments and our place within them. With such a performative understanding of spatial knowledge production comes a processual thinking of what it means to be in the world, not unlike the one given voice to in new materialist theory: the human being is essentially what Ingold calls a “wayfarer”, perceiving as much as producing paths of movement along which landscapes are storied and

5. Going Glocal

life is lived (12). The places of the world are not perceived as fixed surfaces, waiting to be mapped. Rather they are understood to be “knot[s] of stories” (154) of occurrences of the present and the past, continuously being weaved by those who move along and, in turn, become moved by others and their own “lines of wayfaring” (149). Within this “meshwork” (149, emphasis orig.) in which phenomena, things, landscapes and beings perpetually become with and story one another (cf. 160) there is but movement and relationality. Rather than through linearity, the lived present resulting from these lively encounters is characterised by simultaneity and continuity. This is why attending to relations, and not locales or fixed points, becomes paramount if one is to analyse the situated embodied experience of living in and as part of complex, largescale systems. In the case of IMHBDBT, the interface design of the interactive map through which we have to navigate our individual journey further reinforces this idea of living in a meshwork. Instead of a standard Google map, we see a stripped-down version of what looks like a grid known from conventional geographic projections of latitude and longitude lines on our screen. There are no roads or other significant landmarks forming reference points for orientation. The only thing marking the places we are in and that we are supposed to walk to are grey circles and a blue dot, with the latter always indicating our current position. Within this virtual and paradoxically uncharted territory laid over the landscape in which the walking-reading is taking place, we become both part of the narrative and narrators ourselves. Making our ways from circle to circle and chapter to chapter, we are positioned somewhere in-between the ambiguous topography visualised on our screen, the aural architectures generated by the app, the foreign locations narrated in the printed text, and the ambience of our physical surroundings. Together, this wild mix of narrative elements and sensory stimuli may lead to unexpected aesthetic effects over which the author(s) of this piece have only limited control. This points to another kind of openness that is characteristic for IMHBDBT and that appears to be particularly productive with regard to creating an uncanny atmospheric reading experience: the openness regarding the direction – and ending – that the

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story may take in response to a reader that interacts with the ambivalence inscribed into the narrative. As I have shown with regard to the novels discussed in the preceding chapters, an increasing number of writers of ecofiction have rediscovered the destabilising and transformative potential of literary encounters with thresholds and notions of in-betweenness. Strange topographies or unexpected ambiences that blend in with our familiar, everyday environments play an important role in all of the works discussed so far. In VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, for instance, the search for traces of uncanny atmospheric and material agency is central to the plot development, as is the aesthetic experience of textual gaps and ambivalences. In the trilogy, the text is itself a strange and uncanny topography through which the reader has to navigate. The reader is compelled to construct a mental overview of the dazzling mysteries that lie beneath – or rather in-between – the textual surfaces of the literary text. Rather than a linear journey that ends with the reader arriving at the resolution of a story’s conflict, I have argued that the creative performance of reading becomes that of an open-ended drifting through textual structures and themes. It is in this regard that the literary text operates on the reader’s imagination and expectations and finally engenders a sense of dissonance reflecting the uncanniness of the places and creatures encountered in the story. The journey is the reward, just as it is “[t]he path, and not the place, [that] is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming” (Ingold 2011: 12). A similar approach is applied in Duncan Speakman’s IMHBDBT, though the embodied nature of aesthetic experience is taken more seriously here. In addition to literary architectures and their atmospheric cues, readers are compelled to work their way through all kinds of other “scapes” (cf. Appadurai 2005 [1996]: 33), too, whether generated by the app (soundscapes, cyberscapes) or found in the surrounding world (landscapes, streetscapes, cityscapes etc.).10 Where other mobile 10

Although Appadurai does not include soundscapes, cyberscapes, streetscapes and cityscapes in his analysis, these landscapes can also be understood in terms of what he calls “imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are consti-

5. Going Glocal

locative projects seem to privilege sight and sound, IMHBDBT thrives on a more holistic, truly embodied and affective experience of the latent ambiences underpinning mundane environments. Halfway through the book, for instance, we are sent on a search for water, regardless of it being in plain sight or hidden from us beneath the ground, accessible only via the drain covers in the pavement. It is a kind of ambient drifting that is put into practice in this serendipitous exploration of the watery flows and networks that interconnect our towns and cities. Just as with the psychogeographical method of dérive, in which participants ideally “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord 2006b [1958]: 62), the chance-driven stroll as performed in the context of IMHBDBT is supposed to channel spontaneous, maybe even unexpected sentiments, thus strongly emphasising the auratic experience of diffuse presence effects. The foreboding ambient music playing in response to the book’s chapters and narrative threads adds to this impression and further builds up tension. Once we have marked a place on our device where we have found (an idea of) floating water and been asked to turn to the story of sinking neighbourhoods in Louisiana in Chapter tuted by the historically situated imaginations of per sons and groups spread around the globe” (2005 [1996]: 33, emphasis orig.). According to Appadurai, our ways of living in a globally connected world necessitates that we think of landscapes in terms of such imagined worlds or multiple “-scapes”, with “[t]he suffix -scape allow[ing] us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize inter national capital as deeply as they do international clothing styles. These terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival set of landscapes, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes offer” (ibid., emphasis orig.).

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Five, the ominous score coming out of our headphones gives way to recorded sounds matching the action and contexts presented in the book’s chapter: cars heading down a road along the canal Bayou Lafourche, chattering voices and chirping crickets of what must have been recorded at a town somewhere between Golden Meadow and Leeville, and, finally, underwater sounds, with the latter setting in as it becomes clear that the coastal area that Chapter Five is set in is on the brink of being swallowed by the gradually rising sea-level of the Gulf of Mexico. Where the preceding chapters mostly deal with the issue of ghost towns with regard to long-term demographic trends, Chapter Five approaches the shrinking or disappearing of populations and generations from a different, yet not entirely unrelated angle. As oceans warm, coastal communities such as those in Louisiana are expected to be hit by more and more intense tropical storms and hurricanes in the foreseeable future, not to speak of the more frequent floods resulting from relative sea-level rise that force whole towns to relocate permanently. We are introduced to Raymond and his mother Sylvia in the printed text, living in stilt houses only a few miles away from Port Fourchon. Having just received a letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it becomes clear that the two live in a small community that is probably situated outside of Louisiana’s coastal protection system. Where trees once dominated the landscape some decades ago, all that is left today “are tall grasses and water” (IMHBDBT 43), Raymond remembers as he is recalling his childhood memories. It will not be long until they will have to give up their houses in an area that is already vulnerable to storm surges. In the meantime, the illustrated vector map of the southernmost part of Louisiana printed on each of the five pages next to the narrative text in Chapter Five gradually disappears behind a grey waterline, rising further up with each page that we turn until the whole map is tinged in grey by the end of the chapter. All of this happens in a reading environment that probably has little if anything in common with the aural as well as narrated landscapes evoked in IMHBDBT. Where the soundtrack carefully matches the dif-

5. Going Glocal

ferent storylines and themes presented in the book, there is an inconsistency between what we hear and read and what we perceive in our immediate surroundings. In fact, there seems to be an overlapping of the notions of here/there and now/then that reinforces the tension or dissonance between embodied space and the stories and technologies augmenting our experience of that space, almost unnoticeably so (cf. Levine 2014: 144). What Flintham fittingly refers to as a “doubling” effect – a disquieting experience of aurally invoked presences that are curiously detached from any material source in the reader’s field of vision (cf. 2018: 60) – captures a sense of the uncanny merging of dualistic binaries and seemingly dichotomous scales. With regard to the ways in which the boundaries between presence and absence or actual and fictional world are collapsing throughout IMHBDBT, such a doubling plays an important role in this work, indeed. As much as the soundscapes generated by the app support what is told in the narrative text, IMHBDBT is far from being an immersive experience – at least if we understand immersion in terms of a spatial containment and not, as Marco Caracciolo suggests, as a form of entanglement (2020: 11). In the case of IMHBDBT we are always already in a position in which we experience the collapse of different contextual reference points. Although Speakman’s work, not unlike other locative narrative projects, does not quite follow the logics of linear narration, it does not immerse us into a virtual environment that cannot be distinguished from our own. Nor is it interactive in a sense that it turns us into authors and allows us to create our own, individual story paths. Rather, and as is the case with literary novels, IMHBDBT provides readers a given narrative architectural design that allows for differing, and not different, reading experiences. It absorbs us into individual “mental images” of narratively reinforced realities (cf. Iser 1980 [1978]: 137). As argued in Chapter 2 of this book and with regard to Iser’s take on reception aesthetics, these images are different from our own readerly reality, indeed. But instead of truly immersing us into another world or context, they produce a certain tension between what is encountered in the text and what is made of it by the reader: this creative tension, so I have proposed, is nothing less than the affective agency of liter-

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ary atmospheres. And it is out of the question that IMHBDBT certainly stimulates us to negotiate conflicting contexts and realities: the various places, narratives and sounds we are presented with in the course of this audio walk cannot be brought into accordance with each other, and yet we are tasked with synchronising what we hear and read with what we know and see. As much as we are entangled with the augmented reality as produced by the ubiquitous computing technology of the IMHBDBT-app, we are simultaneously inside and outside of the narrative text with which we are engaging imaginatively and affectively. Our reading environment is indeed aesthetically transformed or augmented by IMHBDBT, but not in a way that allows for a cinematic, “aesthetic appropriation of urban space” (Bull 2013: 155). Since the audio played and the stories told hardly correspond to the urban environment that we are placed in, there can be no question of an aesthetically pleasing experience that immerses us into any particular world. Rather, our attention shifts back and forth from the work to the world and we are forced to re-establish links between stories and audio tracks from a distance and our situated and embodied experience-in-place-and-time. Accordingly, readers may be led “to be more open to the world around them, to read their experience as a form of performance, unsure themselves of the boundaries between the work and the physical environment” (Spencer 2018: 152). It is this movement between the poles of being dragged into and out of Speakman’s work that allows for a relational experience that is more than immersion in the sense of a physical relocation into and out of narrative space, but “a recognition of narrative’s participation in networks of human-nonhuman interaction” (Caracciolo 2020: 16). Thus, an “experience of immersion as affective entanglement with story” (22) is facilitated by this interactive form of literature. What is essential to the aesthetic experience provided by IMHBDBT is this notion of being out of sync while, at the same time, Speakman’s work goes a long way to synchronise “incommensurable scales” (Chakrabarty 2012: 1). Making what seems foreign and distant something that is already happening all around us in our immediate present, the work brings that which is latent to our attention and forces us to draw connections between what appears, on the face of it, to be un-

5. Going Glocal

connected with each other. This means that IMHBDBT produces an encounter with the strangely familiar, which is why I argue that it, too, provides readers an uncanny atmospheric reading experience. Where the spectacle of the labyrinthine, sheer unknowable cityscape serves as a source of mystery and sublimity once associated with “wild” nature in many works of Gothic fiction as well as in psychogeographic writing and practice, IMHBDBT mobilises a confusing experience of the multitude of contexts that we are entangled with. It presents “an aesthetics driven by the wandering attention of the reader, toward and then away from the material of the piece itself” (Marcinkowski 2017: Web) as well as the different situational contexts in which the reading performance is taking place. Again, what is at stake here and what also plays an important role in the other works discussed in the previous chapters is an experience of getting lost in unfamiliar geospaces or unexpected ambiences blending in with our familiar, everyday environments. Even more so, however, works such as IMHBDBT highlight the value of the tension between the familiar and the strange, between me and what strikes me as other, as mirrored in the work’s narrative movement between temporal and spatial proximity and distance. This tension is also reproduced in the binary division of the book into two parts, both of which interlock with each other through stories of loss and disappearance from different and remote locations. The first part of IMHBDBT (Chapter One to Ten) enacts an outward journey into the unknown. As we walk a randomly generated route through the streets of a city or town of our choice, each chapter of the fragmentary narration presents us with sequences of events set either “Somewhere” (Chapter One) or in Latvia (Chapter Two, Three and Eight), Tunisia (Chapter Four, Six and Seven), and Louisiana (Chaper Five and Ten). Rather than a chronological narration, IMHBDBT is a mix of three narrative threads that take shape over the course of the story. Thus, IMHBDBT really is a collection of “dispersed maps” (IMHBDBT 1), confronting us with a complex meshwork of disparate and yet related stories always already affecting one another. It is only in Chapter Nine – tellingly called “Roads” – that the three different storylines set either in Northern Europe, the Middle East and the Deep South of the US cross

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each other’s paths, though the central motif of borders, edges, and barriers that pervades and interconnects all of them. We are supposed to read Chapter Nine right after we have been instructed by the voice to “find some kind of junction” (audio). As with the roads or other architectural structures that meet at this locale in our reading environment, the coordinates of Latvia, Tunisia, and Louisiana collapse in Chapter Nine. Where one paragraph recalls another detail from the snowbound and lost places at the edge of the Gulf of Riga near the border of Russia, the next deals with the concrete levee wall marking another border along the Mississippi River, only to lead over to a few final paragraphs set on the sandy carriageways at the Tunisian coast of the Gulf of Gabes. In that way, the paragraphs “stretch[] out in a straight line ahead of us” (IMHBDBT 69), just like the roads that we and the narrator follow on our journey through different towns and continents. In the midst of this confusing convergence of different plot threads, we are finally supposed to “make a conscious decision about which route to take” to “find the edge of our map” (audio). In line with the general theme of going astray presented in Chapter Nine, the voice encourages us to “work against [our] natural instinct” (audio). Like our narrator in the printed book, we are compelled to consider “leaving the main road” (IMHBDBT 70) for an unconventional, harder and maybe even stonier or sandier path. Not surprisingly but still oddly enough, we are sent on another search at last, this time for “some kind of barrier” (audio), ultimately marking the edge of our map and the end of the book and Part One. The last of the ten chapters awaits us at this point blocking our way. We are taken back to Louisiana one more time in Chapter Ten of the book, to a huge levee construction simply referred to as “the wall” (IMHBDBT 79) at the north-eastern end of Lafitte, New Orleans. Like so many other places in the world, including the ones visited by the author at the edge of the Sahara and the Gulf of Riga, Lafitte is “definitely gone within 50 years, not worth saving” (ibid.). In this notable scene, IMHBDBT offers for the first time an explicit “eco-critical mode of attention” (Speakman & Dovey 2018: 38). Written in italics, the words caution us, among other things, that “mother nature is going to take over no matter what” (IMHBDBT 79).

5. Going Glocal

With this notion of impermanency and the image of gradually shifting borders and edges, some of which we have drawn ourselves, we are sent on our return journey. As we have finished reading the book, Part Two of IMHBDBT sets in and we are tasked to retrace our steps to wherever our individual route began. As we re-enter the previously stored geofences, the layering of different stories reaches its climax. With each step that we are getting closer to our individual starting point, sounds and conversations from the distant places that we got to know in Part One blend into each other and compete with our “mental images or concepts that [we] experienced while reading in each location” (Speakman & Dovey 2018: 51). Having reached the beginning that is the end of our exploration the virtual map that we have created with the help of our mobile device is deleted from the software, leaving us only with our personal memory of our walking-reading experience. What only an hour ago started out as a voyage into the unimaginable and strange, now appears as a retreat back into a familiar environment and onto a familiar path. The outward journey gives way to an inward journey, making us once again see our surrounding in a new light. In that way, the walking-reading as enacted in the context of works such as IMHBDBT truly must be regarded as a relational practice. On the one hand, this piece of Ambient Literature confronts readers with ambivalent, open-ended textual environments through which they have to navigate, not unlike the ones given in more conventional works of ecofiction as discussed in this book. On the other hand, it invites participants to pay attention to the atmospheric information that influences our everyday experience of the surrounding world, thus cultivating a situated awareness of the mutual responsiveness between human and more-than-human presences. IMHBDBT reveals the uncanny entanglement of human embodiment and the more-than-human world, which finds it expression in the literal and/or affective traces that the reader and the (semi-fictional) environments are leaving in one another. As regards the multiscalarity staged in IMHBDBT, I fully subscribe to Speakman and Dovey’s argument that this work offers “a subjective experience of different timescales” (2018: 33). It produces a simultaneity of temporal scales and one’s embodied, lived experience of these scales

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by bringing into tension narration time, narrated time and mediated time. This shifting of attention to timescales that exist well beyond one’s individual perspective, they argue, invites a reflection on the larger natural and cultural contexts in which human life is implicated (cf. Speakman & Dovey 2018: 45). At the same time, what they call an “anthropocenic affect” (33) is the result of multiple tensions and ambivalences that permeate Anthropocene imaginary and that are brought into fruitful interplay in IMHBDBT. Setting the human-centred perspective on temporal structures in relation to geological deep time is only one way to give expression to the scalar complexity of the world today. In the case of climate change there is always a latent “friction” at play between different frames of attention on this abstract phenomenon (cf. Bartosch 2019: 2) – think, for instance, of the discontinuity between embodied experiences of local weather events and the abstract visuality of planetary processes such as global warming. If we limit our interpretative frame to a bird’s eye view on planetary processes, we run the risk of blocking out the national-cultural, regional, and individual implications of environmental change. Likewise, we might miss out on addressing transnational responsibilities and interdependencies if we stick to our smallscale, human perspective. Rather than prioritising one perspective over the other, an increasing number of researchers in the environmental humanities thus plead for analytical approaches that account for movements across scales of attention (Chakrabarty 2012; Clark 2012; Tsing 2015; Bartosch 2019). What Bartosch calls the “scaling of perspectives” is one of the promising imaginative strategies that acknowledges the productiveness of “perspectival and epistemological flexibility” (2019: 6) for tackling the conceptual challenges of current spatiotemporal and material interrelationships. In the context of literature and literary pedagogy in particular, it can help make palpable our entanglement with a variety of scales, thus allowing for a (de)contextualisation of localised perspectives within larger-than-life frameworks. Accordingly, this is how [l]iterary experience and a reflection on scales can inform and educate readers as they learn that scaling is another way of following the

5. Going Glocal

hermeneutic circle in more transculturally ecological ways – not as a fusion of horizons but as an entanglement with alterity in transcultural ways. (Bartosch 2019: 41) It seems to me that Speakman’s IMHBDBT provides precisely such a framework for staging Anthropocenic complexities. As it presents incommensurable scales within one and the same literary context, it opens up new avenues for thinking planetary life in terms of relationalities and not, as it were, binary categories and dimensions. The way in which this work provides a very compromised experience of close and distant readings of related environmental processes makes this very clear: what in fact has been a journey of about 3000 kilometres across different, crisis-ridden locales is only a short distance walk in our direct reading environment (cf. Speakman & Dovey 2018: 49). We are not distant observers of the processes of gradual deterioration presented in the text, as we would be if we were to apply a global, detached view onto earth’s changing climate. Instead, “[t]he scales of time and space that so often make it difficult to understand climate change are brought into sudden and startling focus” (53). Activating content on multiple channels, IMHBDBT demonstrates impressively that what is happening elsewhere is, at least to some extent, already happening all around us. In a dissonant harmony, then, the work implicates us into an experience of atmospheric re(lation)ality and brings personal concerns and ecological aporias into contact with each other. As with the other works of speculative ecofiction discussed in this book, it is the tension between what is close, corporeal, and familiar and what strikes us as different because of its spatiotemporal or ontological otherness that is enacted in IMHBDBT. Since the journey undertaken in the context of this walking-reading experience differs from reader to reader, Speakman’s work accounts for a plurality of perspectives well beyond the content of the book. To meet the challenges of scale, it seems that we need to engage with uncanny contradictions – and what if not literary reading could be more useful to make us negotiate ambiguities that cannot easily be resolved? IMHBDBT embraces this notion of reading as a playful engagement with thresholds and un-

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certainties. Throughout the experience we are asked to go search for locales that cannot easily be accessed, to find our way, as the voice has it, “around […] physical obstructions” (audio). The borders and edges that we encounter in our reading environment resurface in the printed text, both content-wise and metaphorically. Speakman’s work is not only a story about shifting borders and boundaries in a gradually changing planetary environment, but itself an ambiguous literary space, accessible only via an interpretative detour on the side of the reader. Spencer comes to a similar conclusion, claiming that [t]he reader’s inability to access certain areas of location, as part of a situated narrative, serve [sic] as a metaphor. In It Must Have Been Dark By Then, readers experience a work about physical global borders while experiencing borders in front of them. They experience the thresholds of the text and environments both physically and metaphorically. This experience transmits meaning to the reader through paratextual elements designed by Speakman but not fully under his control. From them, the reader is able to read the context of the work beyond the narrative. (2018: 154) To make sense of the work, the reader must shift back and forth between a complex layering of literary atmospheres and “the very real ambience of your local environment’s ever-present stories of history and human action” (Hayler 2016: Web). The “multi scalar modes of attention” (Speakman & Dovey 2018: 53) thus produced lay bare the networked nature of the systems that we inhabit. At the same time, they may evoke unsettling presence effects, the latter recovering “repressed knowledges that register the presence and agency of nonhuman matter in the world” (White 2020: 3). In works of Ambient Literature, the affective agency of atmospheres that comes into play in the moment of readerly actualisation of the ambiguous verbal and situational contexts further decentres human subjectivity. As literary atmospheres operate in-between reader, text and world, they continually transgress boundaries, only to draw the reader into an ongoing and open-ended dialogue with literary abstractions of scalar interdependencies. This means that the reader, too, occupies a

5. Going Glocal

threshold from where they have to negotiate the tensions between the material and the virtual, presence and absence, the familiar and the strange. It is in this liminal position that more flexible modes of engagement with the impalpable, relational dynamics that affect us may be cultivated and fostered. “There is always something happening somewhere else and there are fault lines, fissures hidden by apparent sheen” (audio), the voice tells us at last – and it is in the best of ecocriticism’s interest that literary fiction will continue to remind us of the multiscalar reality we always already live in.

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6. Conclusion Atmospheric Disturbances in Turbulent Times

How is one to conclude a book on phenomena so elusive that they escape any mode of representation in favour of demonstrating the very possibility of ontological indeterminacy? What can be said to pinpoint the nature of atmospheres without deconstructing the state of ambivalence that characterises them in the first place? Wouldn’t rendering them present not already put into question the scalar multiplicities that are implied by the existence of these volatile presences/absences? That is, can we clearly and unambiguously explain away the indeterminacy of these affective forcefields, once and for all? The answer to this last question is as ambivalent as the nature of atmospheres: we cannot really, and I suggest that this is not even necessary. The thing with aesthetic atmospheres in general and literary atmospheres in particular is that they thrive on a condition of indeterminacy that allows them to be open to different and differing readers. What is more, since they do not exist prior to any reception process and come into existence only in the moment of readerly realisation, literary atmospheres are always already “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” (Barad 2012: 7). If it was not for this relative ambiguity and unpredictability of literary atmospheres, reading literature would be a tedious thing to do. Imagine every possible reader having the same aesthetic experience while reading a given book. In this case, we could as well give up on literary criticism and education altogether. Fortunately, literature and literary atmospheres do not follow this logic.

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The aim of this book has been to provide theoretical ground for ecocritical discussions on the role of literary atmospheres in making tangible the uncanny interrelatedness of matter and text, reader and world. In this context, I emphasised the productivity of notions of ambivalence and in-betweenness for bringing humans into relation with the unrepresentable challenges posed on us by climate change. As literary atmospheres can only ever be conceptualised in relation to readers, texts, and environments, they make a challenging case for a new understanding of agency that centres neither on readers or writers nor on texts or surroundings alone, thereby opening up new avenues for ecocritical research on the ethical and affective affordances of literature. Atmospheres’ dynamic, transpersonal, and diffuse nature indeed “slides across or simply envelops the assembled elements, eliding the difference between subject and object since it opens a porous relation between them” (Uhlin 2018: 281). As affective fields rather than material embodiments, they foreground not ideas of measurable agencies, but the complex relations that connect us to the more-than-human world (cf. Kwek & Seyfert 2017: 39). Thus, atmospheres become phenomena through which we can read our fundamental entanglement with the world and provide numerous points of friction for ecocritical analysis. This book has taken the tensions embodied and affected by atmospheres more literally and approached them in terms of the uncanny aesthetic effects that atmospheric reading experiences may produce. I have introduced the concept of atmospheric re(lation)ality to account for the destabilising and yet transformative potential of uncanny atmospheric encounters in the Anthropocene age. This Gothic reading connects in each chapter to a specific dimension of the unsettling double movement that is enacted by atmospheric (con)figurations and that is approached by each of the literary works discussed in this book. In Burnside’s Glister and Smith’s Marrow Island, atmospheric re(lation)ality is explored with regard to the inseparability of bodily and toxic matters, both of human and more-than-human nature. The same accounts for The Southern Reach Trilogy, although VanderMeer’s fiction strongly emphasises the play between ontological difference and similarity that gives expression to the uncanny relational poetics inscribed into atmo-

6. Conclusion

spheric encounters. Finally, It Must Have Been Dark By Then is dealing with the overwhelming multiplicities of atmospheric relations by having readers experience disruptions of scale or what one could call the “dis/jointedness of time and space” (Barad 2010: 240). In that way, my readings of selected works of contemporary Anglophone ecofiction as well as of more experimental forms of locative storytelling have pointed to the manifold ways in which literary encounters with the atmospheric may subvert binaries and unsettle anthropocentric notions of agency and identity. At the same time, the works I have analysed all echo a new materialist ethics that proves particularly fruitful for a discussion on the role of fiction, and the promises and limits of readerly activity in particular, for rethinking the concept of agency in the 21st century. Before we move on to speculate on the potential effects of the nonlinear, unheroic, and nontragic type of ecofiction that I have presented throughout this book, let us return once again to this new materialist ethics, in particular with regard to Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism. Turning to quantum theory, Barad offers a new materialist and realist account of how “matter comes to matter” (2003: 823, emphasis orig.), thus bridging physics and posthuman philosophy to construct her relational ontology that argues for “the primacy of relations over relata” (Barad 2007: 389). According to Barad, the physical world is not made up of particular and predictable arrangements of things, objects, entities, or particles that exist individually from and interact with each other in spacetime. Contra Newtonian determinism and Cartesian epistemology, her agential realism understands reality as an ongoing dynamism, a worlding rather than a world, emerging from an “iterative materialization” of phenomena that are “forever being reenfolded and reformed” (2007: 177). Within this ongoing mattering of possibilities and relations, “ontology is not a matter of givenness” (Barad 2017: 110). In other words, there is no room for static, self-contained agencies in Barad’s agential world view precisely because everything that exists is simultaneously the cause and effect of the relations it emerges through. Thus, agency – whether human or not – can be understood as the mutual constitution or “intra-action” of already entangled agencies and “not something

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that someone or something has” (Barad 2007: 178, original emphasis). Nothing precedes their interactions, and it is in this nothingness that Barad identifies a state of “in/determinacy” that captures a sense of the “radical openness, [the] infinity of possibilities, [that] is at the core of mattering” (2012: 16). In physics, this nothingness or void has been discussed widely, in particular with regard to the question of what it has to do with and can tell us about the state of the universe before all matter formed. As Barad demonstrates in her Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Niels Bohr’s objection that nothing exists before it is measured and that we can only ever gain access to phenomena as they are enacted in scientific experiments and observations shook the very foundations of Newtonian physics, and with it the hitherto unbroken belief in representationalism (the independently determinate existence of words and things), the metaphysics of individualism (that the world is composed of individual entities with individually determinate boundaries and properties), and the intrinsic separability of knower and known (that measurements reveal the preexisting values of the proper ties of independently existing objects as separate from the measuring agencies). (Barad 2007: 107) Drawing on the paradox of the wave-particle duality, which describes that an electron can take on the shape of either a wave or particle, depending on the “apparatus” being used to observe it (cf. Barad 2007: 19), Bohr proposed a quantum understanding of matter. To be more precise, he argued for the indeterminacy of the boundaries or properties of things in the absence of someone observing them (cf. Barad 2007: 160). It is only via and within “phenomena”, i.e. “the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed” (33) or what Barad later redefined as “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (ibid., emphasis orig.), that we can start to think the building ‘blocks’ of reality. The question as to what was before there was anything thus is superfluous: as Stephen Hawking has put it in an interview released but a few weeks before his death, “[t]here is nothing south of the South Pole, so there was nothing around before the Big Bang” (StarTalk 2018:

6. Conclusion

15:55) – nothing but a play of possibilities or “the indeterminate vibrations of the vacuum or zero-energy state” (Barad 2012: 11), one might add. At least until we have not answered the lingering question of what was before all relations formed in our universe, this means that we cannot simply say that there is something in the void, as much as we cannot say that nothing is going on there. The reason why I have decided to pick up on Barad’s agential realist take on agency and physical reality here is because it tells us important things about the nature of nothingness and can thus be helpful for my understanding of the essence of literary atmospheres. According to agential realism, nothingness is neither empty space nor “absence, but the infinite plentitude of openness” (Barad 2012: 16). Just because we are as yet unable to represent this infinity, this does not mean that there is no more to material reality than what meets the eye. Spacetime, for instance, is not a localised entity or a fixed essence that we could observe from any outside position, and yet it does exist or, rather, is performed as an unending dynamism among mutually entangled subatomic matters. With spacetime, as with forms of mattering more generally, this means that there is indeed “no fixed essence or substance simply there for the measuring” (Barad 2010: 254), but only relationalities or what Barad calls “things-in-phenomena” (2007: 140). Transferred to what we have said about literary atmospheres, this agential understanding of reality implies that we cannot observe or represent the agency of one or more atmospheres, but only approach these elusive phenomena with regard to the relationalities that they both are and enact. Although literary atmospheres are primarily a matter of the imagination and seem to lack a subatomic dimension, they are “phenomenal” in a sense that they, too, “are intra-actively produced in the making of phenomena” and thus never “exist as determinate givens, as universals, outside of phenomena” (Barad 2010: 261). Like the quantum vacuum fluctuations that physicians speak of when theorising the temporary disturbances in and of ‘empty’ space that may have caused the formation of the universe, literary atmospheres embody a state of virtuality: “the indeterminacy of being/nonbeing, a ghostly non/existence” (Barad 2012: 12, emphasis orig.).

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Literary atmospheres are not simply floating in the air, waiting to be experienced, but always a matter of entanglements, that is, they only ever come into being through human intra-actions with “the appropriate apparatus”, e.g. a literary text (Barad 2010: 255). No intra-action with literature, no literary atmospheres. With no clearly definable core or substance that composes them in the first place, this means that literary atmospheres resist being broken down into discrete units. They always mark a threshold, an uncanny double movement that points simultaneously towards and away from any particular agency, thus unsettling binary thinking and instead bringing to mind that [i]ndeterminacy is not a state of being but a dynamic through which that which has been constitutively excluded re-turns. The arrivant. That which is determinate (e.g. intelligible) is materially haunted by – infused with – that which is constitutively excluded (remains indeterminate, e.g., unintelligible). […] In/determinacy is an always already opening up-to-come. In/determinacy is the surprise, the interruption, by the stranger (within) re-turning unannounced. (Barad 2014: 178, emphasis orig.) Affect theory has long since understood the value of notions of in-betweenness and indeterminacy to address and “focus on the details of the interactions between humans and nonhumans, rather than on a particular agency” (Kwek & Seyfert 2017: 39). As a resonance between or “life-glue” that holds together different bodies and beings (cf. Massumi 2002: 220), affect has more often been defined in terms of its inherent relationality. Deriving neither from any particular body, idea, or image but emerging “in the capacities to act and be acted upon” (Seigworth & Gregg 2010: 1), affect is a matter of transindividual and even transspecies communication and response-ability (cf. Kwek & Seyfert 2017: 38). This is why affect is, at its heart, always an ethical response and the proof of what Seigworth & Gregg call “a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (2012: 1). Literary atmospheres provide an interesting starting point for making explicit the very inbetweenness of affect because they represent crystallization points of

6. Conclusion

the relational, “unqualified” intensities (cf. Massumi 2002: 27-28) enacted in and through encounters between matter and meaning, reader and text. They function as “narrative affects” that according to Houser “reveal the ecological systems within which we are enmeshed to be more than biological processes; they are conterminous with our own bodies and call out for aesthetic and ethical response” (2014: 30). In Chapter 3 we have seen how literary texts prompt us to engage with and respond to the Atmosfears and uncanny experiences associated with living on a damaged planet by turning to Burnside’s and Smith’s recent novelistic engagements with toxicity and pollution. Both Glister and Marrow Island deal with trans-corporeal exchanges of toxic matters between human and more-than-human bodies and offer interesting perspectives on our increasingly “dirty” entanglement with the world (cf. Sullivan 2014). The theme of embodied permeability and the idea of mutual responsiveness between bodily matters identified in this chapter also resonates in my reading of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. As I have argued in Chapter 4, readerly encounters with notions of narrative ambivalence and ontological as well as environmental weirdness, too, produce a creative tension or relation between self and other, between what seems familiar and similar to me and what strange and different. The atmospheric traces provided by literature, so I have argued, involve the reader in a literary search for and experience of relationality and demonstrate the very limitations of readerly and human agency. In this sense, literary atmospheres indeed reinforce an affective “arrival or irruption of which is expressed in a global qualitative change in the dynamic of the interaction [here: between reader and text], to sometimes striking effect” (Massumi 2002: 227). It is the experience of disorientation and a feeling of dissonance created by works such as Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance as well as the various and at times dark imaginations of liminality, hybridity, and in-betweenness as depicted in Glister and Marrow Island that is central to the uncanny relational poetics inscribed into atmospheric encounters. Instead of explaining away the diffuseness of literary atmospheres by providing a taxonomy of their uncanny nature, this book has therefore approached them through the reading of their fundamental indeterminacy. In this

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context, I have been considering the notion of ambivalence not an obstacle to be overcome, but rather a viable way of dealing with literature, affect, and climate change in ecocritical analysis. I have begun this book with a turn to the volatile, almost ghostly nature of climate change. Indeed, and given its ontological indeterminacy, climate change appears as a more-than-human force that cannot possibly be represented in any figure or figuration. We cannot feel or point to climate change. Rather, “[e]nvironmental crisis registers as an atmospheric shift where a restorative or life-sustaining atmosphere turns suffocating and draining” (Uhlin 2018: 282). Other than is the case with haunting spectres that we know from horror and speculative fiction, this means that climate change can only ever be experienced indirectly and through expressions of its causes and effects. In other words, the nonlocality of climate change requires that we approach its evidence by attending to the connections and terms that are making its existence possible. This of course brings us to ourselves again: according to Ghosh, […] the events set in motion by global warming have a more intimate connection with humans than did the climatic phenomena of the past – this is because we all have contributed in some measure, great or small, to their making. They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms. (2016: 32) This is what the “environmental uncanny” is about: not a return of Gaia stalking humanity, but the faint recognition of “the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman” (Ghosh 2016: 33). It is about creating Atmosfears that disturb long standing Western conceptions of agency. The notion of atmospheric disturbance offers a vivid and accessible way to illustrate the dynamics of and effects offered by the environmental uncanny. Defined as “[a]ny interruption of a state of equilibrium of the atmosphere” (American Meteorological Society 2012: Web), the meteorological phenomenon of atmospheric disturbance can be understood as a sudden change that may cause abrupt turbulences in the pressure and flow of streams of air. Anyone who ever had to cope with

6. Conclusion

a bumpy flight probably knows what being tossed out of control by atmospheric disturbances feels like. Literary texts can have a similar impact on us, though they may not affect us as violently as the physical frictions between air masses. While reading a literary text, we are confronted with a wide array of narrative cues and impressions that all contribute to designing certain atmospheric architectures that are left to the reader to be actualised in the event of reading. Given the different thoughts, moods, contextual knowledges, and associations with which different readers approach one and the same text, this means that a text can never be described in terms of one specific atmosphere (hence the plural form). And even though a particular atmosphere might indeed dominate the individual reading process, we are rather to shift through changing atmospheres while reading. These shifting atmospheres must not necessarily correlate with each other and may even stand in stark contrast to individual dispositions or readerly expectations towards the text. To read fiction, to put it in other words, is to become “weathered” by aesthetic configurations of the atmospheric and thus to experience “our literal inextricability from that [here: the Other] toward which we are called to respond” (Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014: 563). In that we are continuously asked to negotiate the tensions between notions of familiarity and strangeness, literary texts can involve us in a play of continuity and discontinuity, thereby creating immersive as well as disruptive experiences that allow us to reconsider how we are always embedded in atmospheric interrelationships. It is in this respect that the works of contemporary ecofiction discussed in this book may be said to occupy an important role in the modelling of the dynamism of material reality and our being and becoming therein (cf. Barad 2010: 248). If we truly are “to reduce the distance between the enormity of climate change and the immediacy of our own flesh”, as Neimanis & Loewen Walker suggest, we ultimately need to “hone a sensibility of ourselves as weather bodies in thick time” (2014: 559). This includes becoming more sensitive to the scalar complexities of the Anthropocene age. We have discovered how contemporary ecofiction can invite readers to move across different scales of space and time to make explicit

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our multiscalar entanglements in present contexts in Chapter 5. Speakman’s hybrid form of printed literature and mobile locative storytelling layers notions of here and there, now and then, local place and planetary space, creating atmospheres of reading that drag us in and out of the narratives about distant places on the one hand, and the local environment in that we are reading his It Must Have Been Dark By Then work on the other. The result is a dissonant experience of multi-layered presence effects that force us to negotiate the tensions and relationalities between small- and large-scale dimensions of human existence. The example of Ambient Literature as discussed in the last chapter hints at the fact that climate change requires novel ways of reading and writing the horrors of climate change, which is why new, transcultural and transmedia modes of storytelling are needed today maybe even more than ever before. In this context, Ghosh has already made it clear that […] if it is the case that the […] way the Anthropocene resists literary fiction lies ultimately in its resistance to language itself, then it would seem to follow that new, hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again, as it has many times before. (2016: 84) Interactive and hybrid digital works such as It Must Have Been Dark By Then testify that narratives about climate change are shifting indeed. They also force ecocritical research to take seriously forms of writing that re-interrogate, rework and experiment with the form of the realist novel and its privileged status in the canon of writing about the environment. While experimental and speculative modes of writing our troubled relationship with the more-than-human world are by far not a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century, first and second wave ecocriticism has tended to exclude genres such as mystery, horror, Weird and science fiction from their literary analyses in the past.1 One explanation for this is to be found in the fact that the “environmental dimension of 1

See Chapter 2 for my analysis of how the trope of Gothic nature has its beginnings in the long 19th century. On the literary evolution of the Ecogothic, see also Keetley & Sivils 2018.

6. Conclusion

literary texts” (Buell 1995:14) has for a long time been discussed with regard to realist modes of writing the environment. Speculative fiction with its tendency to deal “impactfully with our lost sense of the real, and with our failure to relate to the natural world” (Womack 2019: 18) has in this context not seldomly been overlooked as ‘ungreen’ precisely because it does not seem to portray nature as it is, or rather the image of nature that some ecocritics like to preserve.2 And even today, one could sometimes get the impression that speculative modes of writing the environment are dealt with rather cautiously in ecocritical research. The large corpus of what Trexler has famously interrogated as and categorised under the label of “Anthropocene Fictions” (2015), for instance, demonstrates impressively that the ecocritical canon is still rather filled with literary novels that address climate change more directly and/or that use imaginaries of disasters to present us with more or less likely scenarios of a planet in crisis. Other attempts at defining the contemporary genre of environmental fiction such as Mehnert’s Climate Change Fictions (2016) move in a similar direction, highlighting the usefulness of more dystopian as well as realist modes of writing as we find them in risk novels and works of scientific realism to make us deal with the topic of climate change. Although both Trexler and Mehnert admit that a great deal of contemporary fiction illustrates in how far “hybridized forms of the novel (i.e. a blending of genre fiction and novel, quasi-documentaries, start and stop narratives) are employed and seemingly most suitable to deal with the representational challenges that climate change poses” (Mehnert 2016: 41), their analytical focus remains on more traditional literary novels that are “directly concerned with an anthropogenic greenhouse effect“ (Trexler 2015: 8).3 This of course does not explicitly exclude speculative fiction from the 2

3

Lawrence Buell (1995) and Jonathan Bate (1996), who have been under attack for their idealistic belief in what Timothy Morton later referred to as “ecomimesis”, might be the most famous representatives of first wave ecocriticism’s romantic conceptions of nature and wilderness. In a similar fashion, Trexler admits towards the end of his book that “the most interesting fiction and criticism about the politics of climate change will dwell in the speculative future” (2015: 236). However, his case studies are heavily dom-

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Anthropocenic literary genre that both try to define. But given the fact that speculative writing more often than not departs from depicting reality in terms of mimetic narratives, I suspect that the number of speculative works dealing with climate change without ever mentioning the term outweighs that of ‘climate fictions’ that put representations and fears of this phenomenon front and centre. This is not to say that speculative modes of writing are more suitable to narrate the environmental crisis nor that “novels that directly investigate the politics of climate change” (Trexler 2015: 121) do not play an important role in making explicit the consequences and pitfalls of human action. As Mehnert points out, texts explicitly dealing with climate change can “give[] insight into the ethical and socio-political ramifications of this unparalleled environmental crisis” (224). Such works can offer a valuable commentary on the socio-political state of our present indeed, as they explore “how risk materializes and affects society” (Mehnert 2016: 4) and thus rework creatively the potential dangers of human mastery of the more-than-human world. While it is not and has not been my aim to define the genre of ecofiction and climate fiction, I would like to argue for a more inclusive understanding of fiction dealing with the challenges, possibilities, pitfalls, fears and hopes that climate change poses on us; one that breaks with looking only at literary novels with a thematic focus on environment-related disasters and risks in favour of exploring the affective potential of any form of literature to engage us with the irresolvable ambiguities and tensions that characterise the Anthropocene present. Risk narrative is ultimately not all that contemporary ecofiction has to offer, even if the sheer number of realist novels might suggest otherwise. New fields of ecocritical research such as the ecogothic demonstrate that speculative ecofiction and works of experimental, transmedia storytelling are just as useful vehicles to convey engaging narratives about the dark state of the planet and the complexity and strangeness

inated by disaster fiction and suspense novels, scientific realism, satire, political thrillers and hard science fiction or what he labels “eco-nomic novels” (201).

6. Conclusion

of pressing issues such as climate change. Through their defamiliarisation of ecological reality and the Western concept of human individuality, more ambiguous and weird stories of environment-related change bring into view “the uncanny nature of nature [that] abounds in the Anthropocene” (Gan et al. 2017: 8, emphasis orig.) and thereby provide a critical comment on the subtle and not so subtle intersections between human action and embodiment and environmental forces. And while the field of darker hued environmental writing is as wide and diverse as ecofiction as such, collections of speculative eco-short stories such as the recently published Invite to Eternity (2019) seem to account for the fact that “[w]e need narrative strategies that will force us to look into the hidden corners, the spaces in-between where no one wants to look” (Womack 2019: 17). The literary and sometimes experimental examples discussed in this book all introduce us to such narrative strategies in one way or another. Approaching climate change with narrative forms as diverse as the mystery novel (Glister & Marrow Island), Weird fiction (The Southern Reach Trilogy), and mobile locative storytelling (It Must Have Been Dark By Then), these texts demonstrate that an increasing number of writers are probing the limits of the genre of ecofiction as well as of the literary canon more broadly. In doing so, they belie the illusion of a consistent, static mode of storying life or what Ursula K. LeGuin has fittingly referred to as “the killer story”, i.e. the shape of narrative as “that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead)” (1996 [1989]: 152, emphasis orig.). While a fair amount of works of what I have discussed under the label of ecohorror such as those of Michael Crichton might indeed follow the logics of a linear, tragic, masculine, and heroic narrative, just as many works resist narrowing down their focus on man-made conflict alone. Resonating with LeGuin’s feminist understanding of fictional writing that she gives in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1989), my readings of selected texts have made a case for the openness of ecofiction, too, as a “carrier bag […] full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions” (1996 [1989]: 153).

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Far away from your typical and linear end-of-the-world novel, it seems to me that the appeal of the works discussed in the different chapters of this book lies in the ways in which they make us deal with ambiguities, ambivalences, and notions of liminality. There is no clear resolution waiting for the reader at the end of each of these works, no hero or heroine solving the problem of environment-related change, and certainly no grand and sublime spectacle of a disastrous catastrophe bringing cosmic justice to a world ruptured by human capitalism. Rather, these works make us move across multiple scales to involve us in an ongoing, open-ended process of establishing affective relations between body, world and text, regardless of whether they do so in the form of written prose or by using new reading technologies. It is out of the question that hybrid and highly digitalised literary forms such as Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark By Then introduce new and very specific aesthetic potentials to literary writing more generally and the canon of ecofiction in particular. Locative narratives provide interactive sites of communication between reader, textual and visual elements on the page and screen, mobile devices, and the physical environment in which the reading activity is taking place.4 In doing so, they invite readers to establish atmospheric relations between the concrete present and virtual reality, or, in other words, between local modes of embodiment and “real but intangible objects that underpin and produce material places and social spaces” (Park, Davidson & Shields 2011: 6). By drawing us in space set in-between our local reading environments and the translocal, storied environments mediated in and through ubiquitous computing technologies and printed texts, works such as those of the Ambient Literature Project demonstrate maybe most impressively how literature today can allow for particular embodied engagements with the “virtuality of affect and of the capacities and affordances of objects and environments” (Park et al. 2011: 7). It is no wonder, then, that the new genre of Ambient Literature seems to be exemplary for the very 4

Thus, locative narratives may also be described as “emergent stories”, that is stories “[taking] shape dynamically as a result of the interaction between the user and the system” (Ryan 2007: 269).

6. Conclusion

ephemeral, multiscalar, and hence atmospheric experiences provided by experimental works of ecofiction such as It Must Have Been Dark By Then. Far more important than the genre or form, it seems to me, however, that the appeal of the works discussed in this book lies in the affective affordances that they may provide to potential readers, regardless of their ultimate atmospheric effect on them. I wholeheartedly agree with Massumi, who argues in his Parables for The Virtual (2002) that [i]f all emergent form brings its fringe of virtuality with it, then no particular medium of expression has a monopoly on the virtual. Every medium, however “low” technologically, really produces its own virtuality (yes, even painting). “Digital art” is in no way synonymous with “virtual reality”. What matters is the “how” of the expression, not the “what” of the medium, and especially not the simple abstractness of the elements that the medium allows to be combined. (175) I do not claim that the works analysed in this book must necessarily cause specific Atmosfears in us. I do, however, claim that their inherent ambiguity and open-endedness as well as their play with at times unconventional approaches to writing the Anthropocene and climate change position us in a space of uncertainty, an in-between space from where our uncanny embeddedness in and embodiment of atmospheric relations may become tangible. It is in this respect that these works also point to a more general ambivalence characteristic for naturalcultural relationships in the 21st century. Again, it was not my intention to propose a particularly suitable corpus of ecofiction that is more useful to address the challenges posed on us by climate change. Rather, what I hope to have made clear with my case studies is that there seems to be a (re)turn to the atmospheric in contemporary ecofiction, and with it a rediscovery of possible aesthetic, affective and embodied ways of approaching volatile phenomena such as climate change. Modes of writing that require of us to respond to narrative ambiguities und our uncanny entanglement with the more-than-human world, that make us deal with Atmosfears without presenting us with apocalyptic and ecophobic representations of

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menacing ‘nature’, represent exciting new ways of addressing the horrors of climate change. And by reimagining how we are embedded in atmospheric intra-relationships, such works also introduce new possibilities to the canon of ecofiction more generally and ecocritical research in particular. The project of Ambient Literature shows, for instance, in how far forms of collective and distributed agency as I have theorised them with regard to the affective agency of literary atmospheres are no longer a figment of the imagination, but in fact have already begun to reshape the practice and understanding of literary writing in the present and the future. In allowing for particularly embodied engagements with the complex, intangible and increasingly virtual flows that shape planetary reality both within and beyond the realms of literary fiction, such hybrid digital literary formats open up new avenues for thinking our implication in atmospheric, or, in this context, ubiquitous relationalities (webs, networks etc.). In what recently has been called the “Ecological Digital Humanities” (Cohen & LeMenager 2016), my insights into the aesthetics and ethics of literary encounters with the atmospheric could, for instance, lead to questions on the role of other volatile phenomena such as data swarms, virtual clouds, or algorithms in addressing the entanglements of human and more-than-human beings in an age of climate crisis. The challenges that climate change poses will not dissolve into thin air, and neither reading nor theorising about literary atmospheres will patch the actual hole in our ozone layer (cf. Soper 1995: 151). But if this crisis really involves one “of the imagination” in that it “depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it” (Buell 1995: 2), then we had better not underestimated literary writing and the role that its aesthetic and affective affordances might play in this search. Turbulent times are ahead of us indeed – until then, we might as well be stirred by literature to renegotiate our own implications in the atmospheric conditions that shape us as much as we are shaping them.

7. Bibliography

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