Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality 9783111141497, 9783111142562, 9783111142739

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Marco Caracciolo Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality

Ecocriticism Unbound

Edited by Jason Groves and Heather I. Sullivan Editorial Board: Margarita Carretero Gonzalez, Ursula Heise, Reinhard Henning, Serenella Iovino, Erin James, Stephanie Posthumus, Jesse Oak Taylor, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Jennifer Wenzel

Volume 1

Marco Caracciolo

Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality

ISBN 978-3-11-114149-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-114256-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-114273-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934173 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: tiero/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments The spectrum of materiality alluded to by this book’s title has to do with the breadth and complexity of the notion of the material – and with how contemporary narrative in various media is able to tease out and productively probe this range of divergent understandings. But the spectrum is also, etymologically at least, a ghostly presence, and indeed the tension between the concreteness of the material and the elusiveness of the concept of materiality is one of my main concerns here. Likewise, the book you are holding in your hand or reading on a screen is a fully material object, but it is haunted by a number of ghostly – and overwhelmingly benign – presences that have animated its writing. First, my thanks to Eric Morel for his thoughtful reading of the manuscript and for offering such insightful comments, many of which will continue to guide my work going forward. I am also grateful to an anonymous reader for De Gruyter for the perceptive reading of the manuscript and encouraging feedback. While they haven’t read this book in its entirety (yet!), my colleagues at Ghent University have unceasingly inspired and challenged my thinking on materiality over the last six years. They include the members of the NARMESH project (Susannah Crockford, Kristin Ferebee, Shannon Lambert, Heidi Toivonen, and Gry Ulstein) and its afterlives (Simona Adinolfi, Ciarán Kavanagh, Jonas Vanhove, and Hongri Wang). Many colleagues in the Department of Literary Studies – Lars Bernaerts, Riccardo Barontini, Stef Craps, Mahlu Mertens, Ida Olsen, and River Ramuglia among others – have enriched this conversation. Beyond Ghent, Marco Bernini, Ben De Bruyn, Jon Hegglund, Karin Kukkonen, Erin James, Dan Newman, Merja Polvinen, David Rodriguez, Marie-Laure Ryan, Pieter Vermeulen, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and numerous other members of the International Society for the Study of Narrative have engaged with my ideas with extraordinary generosity and insight. This being a COVID-era book, I presented chapter drafts at (mostly online) events organized by Shang Biwu, Marta Puxan Oliva and Neus Rotger, Jessica and Marc Maufort, as well as Stefanie Müller and Simone Knewitz. I learned a great deal from their questions and from those raised by the other participants. I am also indebted to Myrto Aspioti at De Gruyter and to the editors of “Ecocriticism Unbound,” Jason Groves and Heather Sullivan, for supporting this project even before the official launch of the series. I completed this book in Apulia while on a writing retreat with Wibke Schniedermann, my partner, and Catherine Gilbert, both of whom appeared completely unperturbed by the book’s subject matter – and, somehow, I am grateful for that, too. Thanks also go to Chris Chan, Jasper Schelstraete, and Andy Stucki for the many fun hours spent playing survival video games (including some of those featured in chapter 6). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-202

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While working on this book I received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 714166; NARMESH). I am grateful to the ERC and also to Ghent University for helping me materialize this project. Chapters 2 and 4 are based on two previously published essays: Caracciolo, Marco. “Object-Oriented Plotting and Nonhuman Realities in DeLillo’s Underworld and Iñárritu’s Babel.” Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology. Ed. Erin James and Eric Morel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 45–64. Reprinted with permission. Caracciolo, Marco. “From the Museum of Civilisation to the Octopus Museum: Curating the Anthropocene in Contemporary Literature.” Textual Practice 36.9 (2022): 1413–1434. © Taylor & Francis, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1900378.

Contents Acknowledgments Table of Figures 1

2

3

V IX

Introduction 1 1.1 The State of Things and the Spectrum of Materiality 1.2 Focus on Narrative Negotiation 11 1.3 Overview of Chapters 17

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Object-Oriented Plotting 23 2.1 Plot and Modes of Causation 26 2.2 Material Anchors and Nonlinear Temporality 28 2.3 Uncertainty, Hybridity, Chance: Nonhuman Causal Histories 2.4 A Feel for the Network 34 The Ethics of Materiality in the Multimodal Novel 41 3.1 Nonhuman-Oriented Gaps 45 3.2 Violence and Insight in Tree of Codes and Darkness 3.3 Collecting Absence in Lost Children Archive 56

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Curating the Anthropocene Museum 65 4.1 A Tale of Two Tropes 70 4.2 “The Human Body Joining within Itself Everything with Everything”: Flights 74 4.3 “I Didn’t Think We Wrote Much Poetry Anymore”: The Octopus Museum 78

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The Fetish, the Grotesque, and the Castaway 85 5.1 Three Forces at Play in Castaway Narratives 89 5.2 Package Cams and Aha Moments 92 5.3 Grotesque Instrumentality 98

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Materializing Survival Games 105 6.1 Ecology of Video Games 108 6.2 Different Worlds of Survival 111 6.3 Abstraction and Renewability in Crafting Systems 113 6.4 Beyond the Big Fortress: Building and Dynamic Environments 118 6.5 Environmental Storytelling and the Framing of Materiality 120

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Contents

The Office Weird 127 7.1 Weird Atmospheres and Nonhuman Materialities 7.2 Rotting Honey and a Secret Drawer 133 7.3 Weaponizing Materiality 140

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Mind among Material Ruins 149 8.1 Narrative Space and Materiality: More than a Backdrop 151 8.2 The Ruins Between Nostalgia and Materiality 155 8.3 “Inverted Crusoeism” and “Neuronic Odyssey” in The Drowned World 158 8.4 “Architecture and Oceans Were Muddled Together”: Piranesi’s House 163

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Infrastructure and Collectivity in Video Games 171 9.1 Infrastructure between Form and Materiality 173 9.2 From Competition to Cooperation in Multiplayer Games 176 9.3 Infrastructural Connection and Boredom in Death Stranding 179 9.4 Enchanted Cloth and Silent Companions in Journey 184

10 Epilogue: Embracing the Spectrum Works Cited Index

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Table of Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15 Figure 16

A visualization of the spectrum of materiality. Author’s creation 9 Yussef aiming his rifle at a tourist bus in Babel (2006) 30 Die-cut holes in Tree of Codes (Foer 2010) 49 Two pages showing erasures, from Darkness (Morrison 2011) 53 Polaroid photograph of an Apache cemetery, from Lost Children Archive (Luiselli 2019) 61 Chuck Noland contemplates a porta-potty door in Cast Away (2000) 86 “Package cam” in Cast Away (2000) 94 Manny becomes a line thrower in Swiss Army Man (2016) 99 Abundant flotsam in Raft (Redbeet Interactive 2018) 115 Old Man’s Beard lichen hanging from a tree in The Long Dark (Hinterland Studio 2014) 117 Fortifications in The Forest (Endnight Games 2014) 119 A “Case File” entry in Control (Remedy Entertainment 2019) 143 Jesse’s telekinetic “Launch” power in Control (Remedy Entertainment 2019) Barren landscape in Death Stranding (Kojima Productions 2019) 181 Geometrical wall paintings showing the world’s backstory in Journey (thatgamecompany 2012) 186 A collapsed bridge with fabric walkways in Journey (thatgamecompany 2012)

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186

1 Introduction In the medieval Upper Town of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, a museum displays objects such as an old hairdryer, a packet of gastritis tablets, a black dildo, and “a drawing of us made by a stranger.” It is the “Museum of Broken Relationships,” and it was founded in 2006 by two local artists, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić. Since then, the museum has become a global brand, with a branch in LA (which suspended operations in 2017) and a number of temporary exhibitions organized around the world. The concept is simple: the objects in the collection point to the end of a relationship (usually, but not always, a romantic one); they are accompanied by a short caption with the story of the breakup and the object’s role in it. Here is, for instance, the text accompanying an espresso machine from Paris, dated “too long, last 20 years of the past century”: For a long time he loved the coffee I made for him using the espresso machine he gave me. For a long time he loved me. And then, one day, he no longer loved the coffee I made for him using the espresso machine he gave me. And then, one day, he no longer loved me and left. And so I took the espresso machine he gave me that made the coffee he loved and I put it in the basement so I don’t have to look at it anymore . . . But every time I come down to the basement, there it is.1

This simple story is based on the triangulation of the narrator, the “he,” and the coffee machine on display. Initially, the narrator and the coffee machine (or rather the coffee it produces) are on the receiving end of “his” love. We can speculate that the narrator is also in love with the other character, but we don’t know for sure. Love doesn’t come from within (the narrator’s feelings) but from someone else, and it is mediated by the exchange of a material thing. As Marcel Mauss argued in his seminal essay on The Gift, “the unreciprocated gift still [i.e., in modern times] makes the person who has accepted it inferior” (2002, 83). Here, the narrator’s inferiority is tied to a basic parallelism: both the narrator and the machine are reduced to an object of desire. The events that follow – the lover loses interest in both the coffee and the narrator – only reinforce that parallelism. When the relationship ends (again, as a result of “his” initiative), the coffee machine is left behind, a painful reminder of the breakup staring at the narrator whenever they (the gender is unspecified) visit the basement. The main theme of the collection is that objects survive human relationships; they even survive

 This caption is taken from https://brokenships.com/explore/espresso-machine. See also Vištica and Grubišić (2017) for more on the Museum of Broken Relationships and a sample of the objects and narratives on display there. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-001

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human beings when their intersubjective ties are broken by death. But objects also serve as a problematic model for human relationships, when love becomes a unidirectional projection of desire, something to be exchanged like a physical thing and eventually abandoned – “dumped,” one could say, with a recognizably material metaphor. The material presence of the things on display at this Museum of Broken Relationships becomes the site of nostalgic attachment and various other forms of affective investment, which are here externalized, staged for a self-consciously global audience (the Museum’s website contains an interactive map with the object’s provenance; all of the Earth’s inhabited continents are represented). Through their wit and brevity, the narratives that accompany these objects shape the audience’s emotional meaning-making: they guide their interpretation by invoking a wide gamut of symbolic values (from sexual attraction to care, from old grudges to bittersweet memories of one’s first love). This book is also about contemporary narrative as a practice involved in the negotiation of the meaning of material things. My focus is on imaginative, fictional narrative as can be found in literary novels, short stories, films, and video games. This marks a first departure from the (presumably) factual narratives that accompany the collection of the Museum of Broken Relationships, although the difference between factual and fictional stories is never clear-cut: as the field of narrative theory (also known as “narratology”) is increasingly recognizing, fictionality is a strategy at work in narratives that can be otherwise construed as factual; and, conversely, quintessentially fictional stories are always embedded in and entangled with the world of everyday interaction.2 More importantly for my purposes, the narratives I will foreground in the book negotiate the materiality of things in profoundly different ways from the vast majority of stories told at the Museum of Broken Relationships. Instead of mapping objects onto human intersubjectivity and thus using the material as symbolic commentary on (and counterpoint to) the fragility of relationships, the stories I engage with gesture beyond the domain of human interaction: they highlight the way in which materiality eludes human apprehension and resists the kind of symbolic projections that are on display at the Museum. The narrative negotiation of materiality thus hints at the limit of human cognition and affect; it challenges an anthropocentric way of apprehending the world.

 For more on fictionality in factual communication, see Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh (2015); on real-world relevance as a driving factor in audiences’ engagement with fiction, see Gibson (2007) and Walsh (2007).

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Things, from that anthropocentric perspective, are merely helpful gear or “Zeug,” in the German of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time: “A useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to . . .’ The different kinds of ‘in order to’ such as serviceability, helpfulness, usability, handiness, constitute a totality of useful things” (1996, 64). While the usefulness of Heidegger’s notorious hammer is straightforward (it is a tool for building), it may seem strange to apply the label of “useful thing” to the coffee machine abandoned in the basement. Its use is, evidently, not a practical one; yet, by becoming the focus of the narrator’s nostalgia, the coffee machine can be said to fulfill an important psychological role. It is a tool for the symbolic and affective evaluation of the world, which is also a form of building for animals like us. What Graham Harman (2002, 19) refers to as the “equipmental” perspective on things in his reading of Heidegger’s philosophy isn’t limited to practical function, but extends to the domain of symbolic interaction. In fact, as we will see, the symbolic value of things tends to be at the center of narrative negotiations of materiality. Insofar as the values involved are human values, an equipmental understanding of material objects is fundamentally anthropocentric. This book is concerned with how narrative, and contemporary narrative more specifically, can disrupt – however partially and temporarily – this straightforward reading of things as implicated in anthropocentric dichotomies between subject and object, animate and inanimate, sentient and unfeeling. These dichotomies are quintessentially Western and involved in the very grammar of Western languages, as argued by linguist Andrew Goatly (1996) in a seminal essay. This doesn’t mean that all Western thinkers buy into dualism or anthropocentrism, of course. But it does mean that philosophers – and everyone socialized into a Western mindset – have to make a conscious effort to distance themselves from the default view of things as inert and equipmental. Non-Western philosophy, including Indigenous thinking, can play a major part in this project of unsettling a dualistic reading of materiality. Indeed, the Western understanding of things as passive and inert is diametrically opposed to how Indigenous cultures have tended to conceive of materiality. As Kim TallBear explains, “indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives” (2015, 234). Even philosophers working within a Western context are beginning to consider the materiality of things as something that transcends human agency; they ask whether materiality can be accessed without human cognition leaving its trace on the things themselves.3

 Unfortunately, however, few of the contemporary thinkers involved in a reconsideration of materiality (including those providing inspiration for this book) build on Indigenous epistemologies explicitly; see Clary-Lemon (2019) for more on the importance of turning to non-Western perspectives on the material.

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Quentin Meillassoux (2008) uses the phrases “the absolute” and the “great outdoors” to refer to this materiality unsullied by the human mind. Can philosophical speculation ever reach this great outdoors? That is a hotly debated problem in philosophy, but – as far as this book’s focus goes – narrative faces an even more arduous task than philosophy when it attempts to do away with human cognition. As a practice grounded in everyday experience, storytelling is deeply bound up with the human form: whenever we narrate something, we can’t help but imagine a human interlocutor, existing within human-scale time and space, experiencing events that make sense to us, human animals. This may come as a disappointment to those of my readers who hope that narrative may be able to afford direct insight into things in themselves, whatever that means. In the words of narrative theorist Monika Fludernik, narrative has an “anthropomorphic bias” (1996, 13): even when it reaches toward nonhuman materiality, it tends to transform the material into something recognizable, humanly useful or relevant. We cannot narrate the “life” of the coffee machine lying around in the basement without symbolic meanings sneaking in along multiple routes – perhaps less blatantly than in the stories told at the Museum of Broken Relationships, but no less significantly. What narrative can do is stop readers in their tracks, disrupting or temporarily delaying the projection of anthropocentric value, so that in these moments – before human assumptions come rushing in, as they inevitably do sooner or later – we may get a sense of materiality uncoupled from the human. I am influenced here by Ridvan Askin’s argument that “only poetic evocation can hope to pierce the limits of representation in order to give us a glimpse of the unrepresentable absolute, the limitless great outdoors as intuited in the aesthetic experiences nature affords” (2022, 204). It is worth stressing that such challenges to the anthropocentric use of things are rare in narrative: they require strategies that swim against the powerful current of Fludernik’s anthropomorphic bias. Not all narratives attempt to do this; even fewer succeed. But those that do bring readers face to face with the multiple meanings of materiality (including meanings that trouble an anthropocentric understanding of things) deserve attention. Developing this kind of attention and illustrating it through a series of case studies are this book’s main tasks. My discussion so far has been too linear, however, to do justice to the complexity of material things in narrative. Recent work in philosophy – and its applications to literary and narrative analysis – offer a far more nuanced depiction of “things” than suggested by the simple opposition I set up here between equipmental or symbolic value and things in themselves. In the next section, I attempt to sketch a fuller picture of the “state of things” in contemporary thinking. I do so by developing the concept of what I call the “spectrum of materiality,” which is a visualization of the diverse meanings that things can take on as they circulate in both contemporary

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philosophy and narrative. I then turn to the concept, which I have used informally so far, of narrative negotiation and ground it in current debates on narrative form and the nonhuman. I argue that the narrative negotiation of materiality is an operation that can potentially (that is, given the right type of narrative and the right audience) reveal the richness of the spectrum. Finally, I offer an overview of the book’s chapters, which are organized around spatial figures that explore different levels and configurations of materiality.

1.1 The State of Things and the Spectrum of Materiality “Between materiality and matter,” writes Bruno Latour (2017, 70), “it seems that we are going to have to choose.” Latour is one of the most influential thinkers within the field of what Richard Grusin has called the “nonhuman turn,” an umbrella term for a set of philosophical approaches – including Latour’s (2005) own actor-network theory – that attempt to unsettle the “human” within the humanities. The “choice” articulated by Latour is between two divergent and irreconcilable perspective on the material world, the former of which (materiality) is widely embraced by thinkers working within the nonhuman turn (despite some significant differences, as we will see). In a nutshell, “matter” evokes the standard way of thinking about the material in Western culture, and in post-Cartesian modernity in particular: as something lifeless, inert, passive, and inherently available. It is because matter is “at hand” (“zuhanden”), in Heideggerian language, that it can be utilized and invested with symbolic meaning. It is worth noting that the scope of the idea of “utilization” is enormous here: it refers to the extraction of raw resources from the Earth, their reshaping into tools through human labor (from a prehistoric hand axe to a laser cutter), and the application of these tools to the nonhuman world to collect more resources. The idea of matter as inherently supple and transformable involves, in essence, a metaphysical warrant to affirm the superiority of the Western (and largely white, male, able-bodied, heteronormative) subject over the nonhuman world. By contrast, materiality refers to matter as something that resists, at least partially, human control and utilization – and this is where we run into the complexities of the notion of materiality. Jane Bennett (2010), for instance, talks about “thingpower” or the “vibrancy” of materiality, as an expression of its capacity to influence human societies. Bennett is one of the best-known advocates of a strand of nonhuman-oriented thinking known as New Materialism (see Coole and Frost 2010). Her examples come from a variety of domains: trash, food, metal, and stem cells – all of which are seemingly “inert” objects that nevertheless take on a material and even political agency of their own, challenging anthropocentric assumptions. Drawing

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inspiration from Latour’s work as well as affect theory, Bennett argues that this insight into nonhuman efficacy “offers an alternative to the object as a way of encountering the nonhuman world” (2010, xvii). The emphasis lies on the relationality of objects – that is, how they are embedded within assemblages (to use a Latourian term) that involve human as well as nonhuman participants. In the case of food, for instance, the link between diet and mood suggests that the stuff we ingest has considerable effects on how we feel and who we are. Nonhuman materiality shapes human subjectivity from the inside through the fundamentally relational gesture of eating food. Work by Karen Barad (2007) and Stacy Alaimo (2010) also supports that relational view of thing-power as a form of efficacy emerging from the interaction – Barad (2007, x) prefers the term “intra-action” – between human subjectivity and nonhuman materiality. Affectively, contemplating this relationality elicits what Bennett first characterizes as “a nameless awareness” (2010, 4) of the agential power of things. However, that awareness takes on more clear-cut affective qualities in the course of Bennett’s discussion: it is a form of ecstatic marvel at the efficacy of the nonhuman world, which is arguably the default affective stance of New Materialism across the board. Other nonhuman-oriented thinkers, however, oppose both that focus on humannonhuman entanglement and wonder as the main affect structuring philosophical engagements with materiality. For philosophers including the already mentioned Harman (2002; 2018) and Meillassoux (2008), materiality is by definition something that refrains from relation. That is one of the premises of object-oriented ontology (OOO): objects are fundamentally inaccessible in their “interiority.”4 For Harman, horror or “weird” narrative in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre provides philosophers with a way of imagining the “permanent strangeness of objects” (2008, 6). There is a significant tension between Bennett’s thinking, which does assign a degree of autonomy to objects but ends up focusing on their wondrous inclusion in morethan-human assemblages, and the more radical (and weird) unknowability of things that forms the premise of Harman’s philosophy. Materiality thus comes to occupy an ambiguous position between relationality and the impossibility of cognitive apprehension, with affect (as in New Materialist wonder or object-oriented weirdness) serving as the bridge between the human mind and the nonhuman. New Materialism and object-oriented ontology have also attracted a good deal of criticism, however, which will also be helpful as we attempt to come to grips with the complexity of the concept. Tim Ingold (2007) laments that the abstraction

 Steven Shaviro (2014) even puts a panpsychist spin on this idea, arguing that consciousness is pervasive in nature and constitutes a fundamental (but humanly inaccessible) property of inanimate matter.

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of the word “materiality” has led, ironically, to scarce attention being paid to physical materials – the stuff things are made of, and their unique properties – in fields like anthropology and archeology. In his words: “I can touch the rock, whether of a cave wall or of the ground underfoot, and can thereby gain a feel for what rock is like as a material. But I cannot touch the materiality of the rock. The surface of materiality, in short, is an illusion. We cannot touch it because it is not there” (Ingold 2007, 7). High-level philosophical discussions of materiality such as those pursued by Bennett and Harman thus give short shrift to the physicality of the world around us, and how it affords certain interactions and denies others. Ingold (2007, 4) also asks about the relation between human embodiment and materiality: human subjectivity is frequently opposed to the raw matter of the nonhuman world, but where does the matter of our own body, which is deeply bound up with subjective experience, fit into the picture? An equally provocative challenge comes from Andreas Malm’s (2018) writings on the ecological crisis. The New Materialists’ extension of agency to the nonhuman looks rather harmless in theoretical terms; but what happens when we start considering the ethical ramifications of the human-nonhuman assemblages foregrounded by Bennett? “If matter has agency in new materialism, . . . it is because everything and anything can be said to have it,” explains Malm (2018, 44). Applying this kind of thinking to the climate crisis collapses differences between the societies that are directly responsible for the crisis (largely, in the Global North), the societies that are most vulnerable to its consequences (in the Global South), and societies that have already been decimated by colonial processes originating in the West (Indigenous communities). The material world hangs in the balance. If all of these entities are caught in a more-than-human assemblage, it becomes exceedingly difficult to assign moral responsibility: from a New Materialist standpoint, agency is distributed across the system, inhering in both human and nonhuman actants. Put bluntly (and no doubt simplistically): if the plastic bag I throw into the ocean has an agency comparable to my own, do I need to worry about the consequences of my action or can I limit myself to taking in the wondrous “thing-power” of plastic? In other words, the ontology of New Materialism runs the risk of spreading agency too thin, discouraging political action: “The only sensible thing to do now is to put a stop to the extension of agency,” Malm (2018, 54) concludes. Materiality thus becomes a contested notion, problematically linked to both the physicality of the world and of our bodies and to the defining sociopolitical crisis of the present. Considering how these theories of materiality have been received in recent work in literary studies complicates this picture even further. Scholars such as Maurizia Boscagli (2014) and Sarah Wasserman (2020) acknowledge the significance of New Materialism but criticize what they perceive as its theoretical excesses.

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Boscagli’s response recalls the objections articulated by Malm: “we cannot afford to contemplate the fluidity of matter as spectators, without recognizing its uneven effects” (2014, 24). This “unevenness” evokes the political responsibilities of capitalism and globalization in the face of the ecological crisis, which is a crisis brought about by the proliferation of “stuff” that challenges everyday conceptions of the object. Influentially, Timothy Morton (2013) has introduced the concept of “hyperobject” to explain how the materials produced by advanced capitalist economies far transcend the spatio-temporal scale of individual human life, and even of human societies: not only will the plastic bag I am about to discard almost certainly survive me, but it may end up in a garbage patch half a world away from my location; it is derived from hydrocarbons whose formation required millions of years of geological history. In short, thinking about anthropogenic impact on the environment requires embracing spatio-temporal expanses that are not typically associated with the notion of a human artifact. Yet my complicity in plastic pollution (and that of the governments and corporations that run the globalized world) should be carefully distinguished from the plastic bag’s hyperobject-like powers. Like Boscagli, Wasserman argues that “object-oriented ontology, thing theory, and other discourses seeking to decenter the human in favor of the material world stress notions of relationality but often overlook the distinct and differential character of the entities in given relations” (2020, 9). For Boscagli and Wasserman, the solution to this impasse lies in embracing a historical perspective on materiality, whereby New Materialist insights are counterbalanced by earlier forms of materialism, via Walter Benjamin (in Boscagli’s work) and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (in Wasserman’s). This theoretical cross-fertilization qualifies the relationality of things affirmed by thinkers like Bennett. It shifts the focus away from affects like wonder (or Graham’s weirdness), toward a fuller recognition of objects “as nodes in densely webbed networks of historical, political, and environmental forces” (Wasserman 2020, 15) – in other words, a recognition of human culture and politics as key factors in defining “thingness” and its (mis)uses. In that respect, both scholars are following in the footsteps of Bill Brown’s (2001) seminal “thing theory.” Despite some of Brown’s early pronouncements on the “sensuous presence” and “magic” (2001, 5) of things, which may recall New Materialist positions, his thing theory has tended to eschew metaphysics in favor of cultural inquiry attentive to things’ involvement in capitalist practices – but also, crucially, to things’ capacity to elude or challenge such practices. As Brown explains in Other Things (2015), thingness emerges in the interstice of the subject-object distinction. Collectively, things refer to “some underorganized material field or some unorganized amalgam or mass; a field of sensations before they are organized into discrete objects” (2015, 22). This inchoate “stuff” is deeply subversive: it chafes against the

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commodifying or objectifying tendencies of capitalist modernity, as Brown’s close readings demonstrate in dialogue with a variety of cultural artifacts. Brown’s visualization of thingness (2015, 21) captures another opposition in addition to the subject vs. object dichotomy I have already mentioned: it presents “things” as caught between transcendence (the inaccessibility of materiality, as Harman discusses it) and sensuous, relational presence. This is a useful starting point for my own “spectrum of materiality,” which specifies Brown’s diagram by taking into account the multiple perspectives on thingness I have surveyed so far (see Figure 1). The central dimension of my spectrum – the horizontal axis – is the distinction between matter as inert and passive and materiality as inherently efficacious. The vertical axis, corresponding roughly to Brown’s transcendent vs. sensuous polarity, is the distinction between foregrounding the autonomy and human inaccessibility of the material world and affirming its relationality. The latter perspective on things favors their entanglement in more-than-human assemblages, through embodied interactions but also implication in the historical processes (capitalism, globalization, commodification, etc.) highlighted by Boscagli and Wasserman. The relational approach can also bring out the moral and political asymmetries of human-nonhuman entanglement – how moral responsibility vis-à-vis the crises of the present, as Malm reminds us, should rest entirely within the human domain. Determinate

Passive (matter) Physical

Relational

Things

Inaccessible

Abstract

Vibrant (materiality) Uncertain

Figure 1: A visualization of the spectrum of materiality. Author’s creation.

Finally, my two diagonal axes capture some of the other hesitations and ambiguities of thingness. Materiality hovers between the abstraction of symbolic meaning and physical texture, as discussed by Ingold: when it becomes a screen for anthropocentric values, its sensuous qualities are elided. Likewise, things can appear clear-cut, completely determined in both spatial and conceptual terms (reflecting Brown’s category of the “object”), or they can be surrounded by uncertainty and mystery. The qualities represented in the upper half of the diagram (determinate, relational, and abstract) tend to go hand in hand in discussions on materiality, and the same is true for the lower half (physical, inaccessible, uncertain). But other combinations are possible, and in fact it is not uncommon to stress both the relational properties of matter and how it falls through the cracks of human

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comprehension, creating uncertainty. To some extent, this pairing of relationality and uncertainty is active in Brown’s thing theory, too.5 This is, of course, only a partial survey of the conceptual and affective tensions that underlie contemporary thinking on materiality, but I hope it goes some way toward showing the complexities of the concept, which the spectrum I include here seeks to visualize. How can narrative engage with this nuanced, ambiguous, even paradoxical notion? That is the central question that this book sets out to address through case studies drawn from contemporary fictional narrative in various media. Before proceeding, it is important to forestall two possible misunderstandings of my argument. First, saying that narrative can negotiate the multiple meanings of materiality is not the same as arguing that all narratives are invested in this reappraisal of the material: on the contrary, it is only a subset of narratives that are thematically engaged in this project, and as we will see they tend to be formally and conceptually innovative (but not necessarily elitist or overtly experimental). Second, I am not claiming that even the most sophisticated narratives can solve the philosophical quandary of whether, for instance, “thingness” is inherently relational or impervious to human understanding. That is a question for philosophy, not one that can be definitively addressed by story. Rather, what narrative – and particularly, for my purposes, fictional narrative – can do is weigh the disparate and frequently conflicting meanings of materiality and embed them in concrete contexts of everyday interaction. As narrative engages with materiality, it can reveal particular aspects of the spectrum and explore their relevance in light of broader cultural practices, historical processes, and ethical evaluations. That is the kind of back-and-forth between culture and conceptual thinking that my case studies reveal, and that – as this book argues – constitutes narrative’s principal contribution to the debate on materiality.6 Before further bringing into focus that contribution, it will be helpful to flesh out the idea of “narrative negotiation” and position it (and this book as a whole) vis-à-vis current trends in narrative theory.

 Uncertainty is the central focus of Caracciolo (2022a), to which I refer for further discussion of this dimension of the climate crisis and how narrative can negotiate it.  This view of fictional narrative is consistent with John Gibson’s argument, in Fiction and the Weave of Life, that literature “explores the real by tracing the link between the conceptual and the cultural” (2007, 11).

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1.2 Focus on Narrative Negotiation Narrative theory, also known as narratology, is not an academic field known for its love of historical context. When narratology emerged in the 1960s – the term was introduced by Tzvetan Todorov (1969) – it was part of a broader wave of scholarly work inspired by structuralist thinking. The main model was Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1959) structural linguistics, which – formulated in the first decade of the twentieth century – abstracted from the messy particularities of language use to study the abstract system of language. Narratology, as first conceptualized by Todorov, Roland Barthes (1975), and Gérard Genette (1980), among others, aimed to uncover the constraints and possibilities that underlie storytelling, which was thought of as an abstract and largely decontextualized system, on the basis of an analogy with Saussure’s language. The form of narrative was the primary focus of narratological work, and it included textual devices such as the sequencing of actions and events (plot), various types of narrators, characterization, and so on. Form was mostly understood in opposition to the ethical, political, and cultural concerns that started defining other areas of literary inquiry from the 1980s. Yet that narrow conception of form has faced considerable challenges in what David Herman (1997) labeled “postclassical narratology,” which followed the heyday of structuralism. Narrative theorists including Herman himself opened up narrative form to the intricacies of human psychology, as part of a movement known as “cognitive narratology” (see Bernaerts et al. 2013). Meanwhile, other scholars put culture and ideology on the map of narrative theory by foregrounding the interaction between formal choices and particular historical contexts. That is the premise of a rich strand of “contextualist narratology” (Sommer 2007; Nünning 2009) that has, over the last two decades, contended with gender (Page 2003), postcolonial issues (Dwivedi, Nielsen, and Walsh 2018), and environmental questions (E. James 2015). In Ansgar Nünning’s words, “It is the attempt to . . . cross the border between textual formalism and historical contextualism, and to close the gap between narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis that is the motivating and driving force behind the project of a contextualist narratology” (2009, 52). Narratology may not be known for its love of context, then, but it has made serious efforts to overthrow that assumption (which reflects its structuralist past) in its postclassical phase. It is within this contextualist movement that the concept of narrative negotiation has received a particularly robust theorization, in dialogue with Stephen Greenblatt’s (1988) New Historicist account of literary negotiation. For Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014, 29–30), narrative negotiation is a fundamentally evaluative and interpretive gesture: narrative negotiates the values circulating in a culture by offering a certain perspective on these values, by prioritizing certain values

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1 Introduction

over others, and so on. In turn, the act of interpreting a narrative also involves a negotiation of values as the interpreter’s historical background and individual predispositions interact with the values that are foregrounded by the story. Also working within the contextualist paradigm, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck (2009; 2017) have refined Korthals Altes’s account of negotiation by grounding it in a theory of the literary field inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) work. In Herman and Vervaeck’s work, the emphasis shifts from the negotiation of values to the broader concept of ideology, which encompasses values and conceptual structures. They argue that narrative elements and templates (such as genres, motifs, rhetorical devices, and so on) circulate in a culture, and that they are bound up with ideological positions and political or ethical concerns. Concrete instances of narrative – individual stories – are always positioned vis-à-vis these culturally circulating elements and the ideological choices they subsume. This work of positioning may involve affirming or questioning existing ideas or combining them in novel ways. In essence, this positioning is what Herman and Vervaeck call “negotiation,” and it is the result of what we can see as the narrative (that is, imaginative and affective) performance of a certain idea or set of ideas. It is important to keep in mind that narrative negotiation is not an argument for a certain ideological view. Narratives intervene in the cultural field in more ambiguous and flexible ways than arguments, and interpretation (as stressed by Korthals Altes) plays a central role in working out – also in the sense of “constructing” – the ideology of a story. Put otherwise: narrative negotiation may outline existing cultural conflicts without resolving them fully. In Herman and Vervaeck’s words, “while we admit that negotiations tend to involve tensions and conflicts, we would like to stress these need not at all be resolved or even tempered in the course of the process” (2017, 619). Irony – a common device in literary narrative (see, e.g., Korthals Altes 2014, Ch. 7) – is perhaps the clearest manifestation of how negotiation may stage conflicting ideological values or positions without attempting to iron out the tension between them. Yet the openendedness of narrative negotiation far transcends particular textual devices (such as ironic strategies). That insight is of central importance for my account of materiality in this book. The spectrum of materiality, as I have discussed it in the previous section, is defined by a series of tensions and disagreements, which are at the heart of the culturally unstable concept of the thing. Therefore, when I say in this book that narrative negotiates materiality, I am suggesting that it evokes the richness of the spectrum and offers a certain perspective on the tensions that traverse it. Instead of resolving these tensions (as philosophy might be expected to do), the stories I discuss turn them into productive instabilities that drive plot and reimagine

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character, spatiality, and other fundamental dimensions of narrative.7 In doing, so, narrative also ends up putting pressure on what Fludernik calls its “anthropomorphic bias.” Negotiating materiality means placing nonhuman-centric ambiguities at the forefront of narrative and tracing them as they enter the sphere of human affects and ethical significance. In the coffee machine story from which I started, for example, the parallel between the machine and the narrator enacts an objectification of the human subject (matter as passive and determinate, in terms of my spectrum). The ending shifts this configuration toward a symbolic reading of the machine’s thingness, seen here as persisting in opposition to the transience of the narrator’s relationship. That is hardly an original negotiation of materiality, but it is a negotiation nonetheless. My case studies will attempt much more sophisticated and self-conscious (and therefore potentially transformative) operations within the spectrum. The importance of narrative form to this negotiation of materiality cannot be overstated. Recent narratology’s investment in the intersection of narrative form and historical context overlaps with arguments advanced by scholars affiliated with New Formalism, particularly Caroline Levine (2015a). I have already discussed this overlap extensively in previous work (e.g., Caracciolo 2021a); suffice it to say here that New Formalism sees any pattern or configuration in culture and society as a matter of “form” broadly construed: far from being the exclusive province of literary expression, form straddles the divide between culture and literary works. For Levine, narrative is the “form that best captures the experience of colliding forms” (2015a, 19); in my readings, these “collisions” between conceptual and ideological forms and the textual forms specific to storytelling (such as plot organization, focalization, and so on) are central to the narrative negotiation of materiality. To return to the coffee machine story, a first form brought into play by the narrative is the parallelism between the machine and the narrator, complicated of course by their triangulation with the “he.” Ideologically, though, it is the subject-object polarity that is evoked by the text, with the narrator – a subject – being forced by the lover into an object position. The turning point of the plot is the lover’s decision to break the triangulation, which however doesn’t disrupt the basic parallelism between the narrator and the coffee machine (and the underlying objectification): both are abandoned, even as the coffee machine’s stubborn presence in the basement turns into a reminder of the relationship’s end. Even in such a short and arguably clichéd story, narrative and evaluative

 The notion of “instability” plays an important role in James Phelan’s account of narrative progression: “we experience the story as involving the synthesis of the pattern of instabilities and the sequence of judgments” (2007, 8–9).

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forms bump into one another and raise larger questions – for instance, about power dynamics in a relationship and the ethics of breakups. The works I focus on in this book offer more sustained and elaborate negotiations of materiality, which largely depends on their status as fictional narratives originating in artistic practices. Most of my examples come from contemporary literature (with J. G. Ballard’s 1962 The Drowned World, discussed in chapter 8, being the least contemporary novel I will examine) and video games. My choice to foreground digital storytelling in the interactive medium of the video game reflects the increasing significance of digital technologies in enabling and enriching thinking about materiality. Culturally, we tend to regard computational devices – and the interactions they afford – as less physical and material than their nondigital counterparts: a Zoom meeting involves “virtual” interaction, as opposed to the embodiedness of an in-person meeting. Likewise, e-books are seen as intangible compared to “physical” books. In reality, of course, digital technologies are no less material than anything else: from the rare minerals used in laptop batteries to the physical infrastructure of the internet, there is nothing truly immaterial about a Zoom call. But that association between the digital and dematerialization shows that computer technologies are inviting us to reconsider, and expand, the meanings of materiality. That is why I am particularly interested in putting prose narrative, whose history is bound up with print technologies, on a continuum with the interactive, algorithmic storytelling that is afforded by computers: both, I argue, offer important (and surprisingly convergent, in many instances) perspectives on the spectrum of materiality. In addition to the novel and video game, I also address film narrative (in chapters 2 and 5), and it is important to note that my examples belong to both experimental literature (for instance, Yedda Morrison’s Darkness) and more popular genres (e.g., survival video games or Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away). Arguably, many of my case studies (for instance, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive) speak to the middlebrow audiences of book clubs and online discussion forums (Rubin 1992). I have tried to cast a wide net on many levels, but my chapters remain limited samples. Nevertheless, I hope they are at least representative of contemporary culture’s engagements with the complexities of thingness, and that they show how such engagements range from popular genres and media to more rarefied forms of artistic expression. Negotiating materiality, as I argued above, is an evaluative operation that involves textual particulars, formal choices, as well as a horizon of culturally shared concerns. Today’s ecological crisis is a central concern that comes to the fore insistently in my chapters, and that also ties in with my earlier work, particularly what I half-jokingly refer to as the “NARMESH trilogy” (Caracciolo 2021a; 2022a; 2022b). “Things” are no mere matter of philosophical speculation today, because the production and consumption of material goods (including, but not limited to, digital

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technologies) drive the capitalist practices that are destabilizing the Earth system, with devastating consequences for human communities and nonhuman species alike.8 “At this juncture in modernity,” writes Boscagli, “stuff is palpably dangerous” (2014, 2). It is of fundamental importance, in times of ecological crisis, to reimagine matter and the ways in which human communities in the affluent West relate to it; Morton’s (2013) idea of hyperobject already goes in that direction. As this book’s close readings seek to show, narratives can play a role in the project of reimagining matter by complicating and nuancing the meanings of the material – for instance, by opposing a human-scale apprehension of things to a view of materiality as mysterious or as vibrantly active. Again, that kind of narrative negotiation shouldn’t be confused with a philosophical argument for thing-power in Bennett’s sense: it is primarily a provocation, an attempt to playfully engage with materiality so as to trouble Western assumptions, but it doesn’t make definitive claims about the nature of thingness. Ultimately, being able to embrace the whole spectrum of materiality may be more beneficial than sticking to any single perspective on the material, and narrative, through the instabilities and tensions it stages, can encourage precisely that kind of flexible, multiperspectival thinking. Instead of rigidly embracing a particular viewpoint on things – whether it is the conventional subject-object dichotomy or marvel at the “vibrancy” of materiality – narrative can invite audiences to shift from one viewpoint to another, contrasting or merging them in ways that are ethically and epistemologically productive. That multiperspectivity is the product of narrative negotiation. This reference to the climate crisis brings me to another strand of postclassical, contextualist narratology that inspires my discussion. It is econarratology, a term introduced by James (2015) to describe scholarship at the intersection of narrative theory and the environmental humanities. Historically, work in ecocriticism has tended to privilege the level of theme and content, focusing on poetry or prose that speak directly to environmental issues such as pollution, species extinction, or climate change (see, e.g., Garrard 2004). By contrast, econarratology asks how narrative form offers specific insight into what James, following Buell (1995), calls the “environmental imagination” – that is, our ways of thinking about and relating to the nonhuman environment. This project involves investigating a broader corpus of narratives that resonate with environmental issues in formal as well as thematic terms, with formal devices supporting and extending the ecological relevance of stories. Examples of these formal strategies include nonhuman narrators or focalizers  This idea is central to contemporary debates on literature and the climate crisis in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism. This is a vast body of work, and here I can only refer to a few seminal contributions – for instance, Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge (2015), Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions (2015), and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016).

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and multilinear plots, such as one finds in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, that highlight the global scale and far-reaching temporal ramifications of the climate crisis.9 Econarratology has become a burgeoning area of formalist research on narrative, and it is also one of the main frameworks for my engagement with the spectrum of materiality.10 Equally relevant is the field of “material ecocriticism,” spearheaded by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (2012; 2014b). Theoretically, material ecocriticism draws inspiration from New Materialist work à la Jane Bennett but seeks to turn that theoretical vocabulary into a methodology for close reading and textual analysis.11 Iovino and Oppermann take New Materialist ideas seriously: “Agency . . . is not to be necessarily and exclusively associated with human beings and with human intentionality, but it is a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter, as part and parcel of its generative dynamism. From this dynamism, reality emerges as an intertwined flux of material and discursive” (2014a, 3). Further, they understand that material agency in narrative terms, claiming that the transformations of matter are in themselves a form of storytelling, possibly through the relational assemblages that humans and nonhuman entities create (Iovino and Oppermann 2014a, 8–9). While I remain sympathetic to material ecocriticism, my own position in this book and elsewhere (Caracciolo 2022b, Ch. 6) is more cautious. Iovino and Opperman’s work – and the work of other ecocritics following in their footsteps – frontloads a particular conception of materiality as relational and vibrant; put otherwise, their approach to literature deliberately takes a stand within the spectrum of materiality. That is a stimulating move, and it does cast fresh light on certain narratives; but it also results – problematically, from my perspective – in a contraction of the spectrum of materiality, a reduction of the free play of the meanings of thingness that constitutes the essence of narrative negotiation. Instead of embracing a particular philosophy of materiality ex ante, I seek to develop a reading strategy that lets narratives themselves stage and play out (that is, negotiate) the tensions of materiality. Obviously, not all narratives resonate with this reading strategy, but those that do – because they address the material thematically and formally – warrant close attention. The close readings, viewings, and playthroughs contained in this book aim to cultivate audiences’ appreciation of the narrative negotiation of

 For more on nonhuman narrators, see Bernaerts et al. (2014). Astrid Bracke (2018, Ch. 1) offers a convincing econarratological reading of Cloud Atlas.  See, e.g., James and Morel (2018; 2020) and the essays collected in these works.  Material ecocriticism has generated a number of insightful readings, see for example Heather Sullivan’s (2012) discussion of “dirt theory” and also the chapters collected in Iovino and Oppermann (2014b).

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thingness – including their ability to detect it in works other than those discussed in the following chapters.

1.3 Overview of Chapters As cognitive linguists have argued in the wake of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) work, spatial relations are fundamental to abstract thinking: we structure concepts by drawing on spatial experience, for instance when we use the image of the path to talk about temporally extended processes (such as a relationship, a career, or life itself). All of our everyday interactions unfold within material environments; the spatial properties of such environments can be projected onto abstract ideas and used to organize them on the basis of an analogy with embodied experience (see Woelert 2011). As my case studies demonstrate, space is highly productive for the negotiation of the abstract concept of materiality. This reflects one of the basic tenets of econarratology – namely, that the space-based imagination serves as a privileged means of encountering the nonhuman and decentering anthropocentric assumptions (see Caracciolo, Marcussen, and Rodriguez 2022). Accordingly, the chapters that follow are organized around a number of spatial figures that illustrate particular configurations of the spectrum of materiality. The term “figure” is intentionally vague: it is meant to straddle the distinction between formal devices in narrative and what one might call its “content” or themes. As such, the concept of figure is comparable to Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) “chronotope,” but it is more flexible and doesn’t imply generalizability beyond the particular examples I will examine in the chapters. Also relevant is Joseph Frank’s (1945) notion of “spatial form,” which refers to the spatial (formal) juxtapositions that, according to Frank, supplanted plot as the main organizing principle of modernist literature. The figures I consider are the following: the network (chapter 2), the gap (chapter 3), the museum (chapter 4), the deserted island (chapter 5), the forest, the open sea, or other “wild” spaces that jeopardize survival (chapter 6), the office (chapter 7), the ruins (chapter 8), and infrastructure (chapter 9). Some of these figures are closer to the abstraction of Frank’s spatial form (particularly the network, the gap, and infrastructure), others are more concrete and reminiscent of the chronotope. What matters, from my perspective, is that all of these figures become sites for the imagination and negotiation of materiality: they align with particular formal choices while bringing in a distinctive set of thematic preoccupations that stage, along different routes, the relationship between human subjectivity and the material world. A fictional museum exhibition, for example, grounds the organization of

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Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum (discussed in chapter 4), a poetry collection that builds on a narrative premise: after the collapse of human civilization, our planet is taken over by octopuses who become the curators of the titular museum (and of the poetic fragments that the book contains). The space of the museum thus becomes a figure for thinking about both the form of the text and the end-of-the-world anxieties it voices. All my chapters are comparative in scope: by revolving around two or more narratives, they show how the same figure leads to different engagements with the spectrum of materiality, depending on text-specific combinations of formal and thematic strategies. The first two chapters are broader in scope than the following ones. They are meant to illustrate two conceptual coordinates that structure my discussions throughout this book, reflecting two different (but convergent) perspectives on narrative form. In chapter 2, it is the conceptual form of the plot that takes center stage, with material objects displacing human intentionality as the focus of narrative progression: I engage with Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Babel as stories whose network-like progression is not tied to an individual human character, but to the material circulation of a nonhuman object (respectively, a baseball and a rifle). This strategy results in the foregrounding of the efficacy of matter as a quasi-autonomous narrative agent. In chapter 3, by contrast, it is the material form of the text itself that interests me. Two of my case studies – Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer and Darkness by Yedda Morrison – foreground the materiality of language by manipulating earlier texts through physical gaps and deletions. A third case study, Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, is a more traditional novel but includes a photographic series marked by visual discontinuities. These multimodal novels raise questions about the materiality of reading but also about the traumas of twentieth-century and contemporary history (colonialism, the Holocaust, migration from the Global South), challenging Malm’s (2018) claim that emphasis on materiality in contemporary philosophy detracts from human responsibility vis-à-vis other humans and the nonhuman world. In chapter 4 I focus on literary engagements with the museum as a space problematically bound up with the Western imagination of nonhuman matter. As an institution grown out of Enlightenment culture, the modern museum tends to foreground the binary dichotomy between the human subject and the curated object, reading the world through a fundamentally anthropocentric grid. My case studies – the experimental novel Flights by Olga Tokarczuk and the already mentioned Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy – resist this conventional way of thinking about museum collections, instead revisiting the pre-Enlightenment model of the cabinet of curiosities. Not driven by taxonomies but by surprising juxtapositions, the museums at the heart of Tokarczuk’s and Shaughnessy’s works present a series

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of textual fragments that renegotiate the boundary between the human and animal life, as well as the materiality of our bodies and that of the inanimate world. A similar form of renegotiation is at play in chapter 5, where the scene shifts from the museum to the deserted island of two contemporary films reimagining the modern myth of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The films in question are Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man. Not unlike the museum, the deserted island is a space where the Western subject (prototypically, Crusoe) affirms mastery over the nonhuman world and its Indigenous inhabitants, reshaping the environment in the image of the society that the castaway has seemingly left behind. Zemeckis and Kwan and Scheinert deploy material objects to complicate that reading of Crusoe’s narrative. In Cast Away, an anthropomorphized volleyball – Wilson – becomes the protagonist’s only companion, which I read through the notion of the “fetish.” The nonhuman agency of this object is ultimately responsible for the castaway’s escape from the island. In Swiss Army Man, by contrast, it is the human frame itself that is objectified as the seemingly dead body of the coprotagonist turns into a multi-purpose tool. The grotesqueness of these narrative operations subverts an instrumentalizing use of matter and the conventional patterns of Western thinking. Chapter 6 contains this book’s first foray into digital narrative in the video game medium. Pursuing the survivalist theme of the previous chapter, I explore three games belonging to the increasingly popular survival genre: The Forest, The Long Dark, and Raft. All of these games are set in a wilderness that creates harsh conditions for survival. The discussion focuses on differences in these games’ mechanics and how they bring into play conflicting notions of materiality, particularly in terms of the crafting and building systems that underlie the games. Adopting Henry Jenkins’s concept of environmental storytelling, I argue that the stories told by these games complicate the stakes of the survival mechanics and thus enable sophisticated engagements with the spectrum of materiality: in Raft, the narrative serves as ironic counterpoint to the seemingly infinite flow of ingame resources; in The Forest, the storytelling nudges the player into uneasy coexistence with the nonhuman; finally, in The Long Dark, it highlights the collective dimension of survival as well as its slow, elegiac qualities. The genre of “weird fiction,” as practiced by contemporary writers such as Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville (among others), has been hailed as one of the most compelling literary responses to the uncertainties of the ecological crisis. In chapter 7, I turn to narratives that locate this weirdness within the familiar space of the office building: one is a novel by VanderMeer, Authority (the second volume of the “Southern Reach” trilogy), the other is Control, a video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and clearly inspired by VanderMeer’s fiction. In both works, the player is cast in the role of the director of a federal agency tasked

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with investigating paranormal events: the mysterious Area X, in Authority, and an invading force known as the Hiss, in Control. The office building and the quotidian objects it contains are infiltrated by these more-than-human entities, opening up possibilities for rethinking matter as inherently uncertain and agential. In this “office weird,” the boundary between reality and fantasy is destabilized through sensory cues (the “rotting honey” smell of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach, the atmospheric color palette of Control) that ask readers and players to meet nonhuman materiality in deeply embodied terms. Control, in particular, uses the interactivity of the game medium to create opportunities for hands-on engagement with this unsettling materiality. Chapter 8 confronts materiality as a concept that straddles the Cartesian binary between the human mind and the physical world. Our minds, as research in the cognitive sciences suggests, are deeply bound up with the makeup of our bodies; but the materiality of the embodied mind coexists uneasily with the materiality of inanimate things. My two case studies in this chapter, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, center on this uneasy relationship. Both are a figuration of a world in ruins, due to climate change (in Ballard) or the violent irruption of another world (in Clarke’s multiverse fiction). These narrative visions of the end of times refuse nostalgia – the affect that has conventionally shaped the Western imagination of the ruins – and instead pursue a more challenging way of thinking about material spaces: human, embodied subjectivity extends itself into the material environment, envisioning a premodern past (in Piranesi) or a posthuman future (in The Drowned World) in which things enter into a seamless dialogue with the mind. My final chapter engages with infrastructure as a concept that helpfully recaps the complexities of the spectrum of materiality. At once pervasive and invisible, abstract and stubbornly material, infrastructure is closely tied to the imagination of human community: it is what brings societies together, but it is also what divides communities on the basis of race, income, class – in a word, privilege. My two case studies are digital games – Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding and thatgamecompany’s Journey – that stage these tensions of infrastructure through a minimalist approach to multiplayer collaboration: in Death Stranding, all of our interactions with other players are asynchronous, wherein in Journey we can occasionally see our fellow players in game space but have no direct way of communicating with them. The result is a defamiliarization of in-game togetherness that resists mainstream gaming culture while offering new perspectives on materiality as the fabric of human interaction. Finally, in the coda, I return briefly to the value of embracing the spectrum of materiality, instead of sticking to a single philosophical perspective on the material

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(be it that of New Materialism or a more skeptical view). It is this kind of multiperspectival thinking that is needed as we face an ecological crisis brought about by the mismanagement of matter at the hands of certain human groups and societies. The formally complex narratives I examine in this book are well positioned to cultivate this more sophisticated imagination of materiality.

2 Object-Oriented Plotting Narrative is a human practice that reflects human beliefs, values, and even the cognitive and physical makeup of our species. As researchers in both narrative theory (D. Herman 2003) and psychology (Mar and Oatley 2008) argue, narrative is geared toward the representation of intersubjective experience – the complex blend of cultural knowledge and cognitive skills that constitutes our engagement with other subjects. But how does narrative handle processes and realities that fall beyond this domain of human action? How does it represent what several theorists refer to as the “nonhuman” (Grusin 2015) – i.e., phenomena that resist reduction to anthropocentric terms and question culturally widespread conceptions of the human? Examples of these phenomena include: the timeline of the universe or the evolution of life of Earth, interactions among subatomic particles, but also socioeconomic or environmental dynamics that destabilize a certain conception of the human subject as dualistically separate from the material world. Such realities take us to the outer limit of narrativity, the place where story borders on other discourse types – for instance, description or scientific explanation. In the field of ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell (e.g., Buell 1995) was among the first to identify this anthropocentric bias of narrative, which led him to focus on nature writing – a genre that lies on the borderline of narrativity, since it combines storytelling and argumentative or philosophical discourse.1 Questions surrounding narrative’s engagement with nonhuman realities are at the center of my recent work. In this book, I focus on the conceptual tensions that surround the material as a notion that disrupts binary thinking and problematizes straightforward attributions of agency to human (or human-like) subjects. As scholars in New Materialism and material ecocriticism (among other fields) have recognized, the material is uniquely powerful: its physical properties limit, but also enable, human interaction, a point that is as true of vast material realities (such as the Earth’s biomes and how they lend themselves to human settlement) as of human-scale things (a stone affords throwing, a tree affords climbing, and so on).2 The material thus shapes human and nonhuman life in ways that recall agency but may also displace an anthropocentric understanding of agency. That is one of the main themes of this book. In this chapter, I explore two case studies

 For more on the genre of nature writing, see Slovic (1992) and Armbruster (2016).  The term “affordance” is derived from James J. Gibson’s (1986) ecological psychology, where it refers to possibilities of interaction with the material world. For discussion and narratological application of Gibson’s theory, see Easterlin (2018). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-002

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that use narrative form itself (and particularly, as we will see, the networked form of plot) as an experimental probe into the spectrum of materiality. The narratives in question are Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld (1999) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Babel (2006). Building on a long narratological tradition (see Kukkonen 2014), I define plot as narrative’s organizing principle. Synthesizing various lines of work in narrative theory, I discuss plot as the fourfold logic – at the same time temporal, causal, thematic, and affective – behind narrative composition. In particular, I will investigate what I call “object-oriented plotting,” or cases in which a material object takes center stage in a narrative and partly pushes plot beyond its anthropocentric comfort zone. The adverb “partly” reflects the tentative nature of this process: object-oriented plots do not (and cannot) completely eradicate the human element in narrative. Yet these narratives are able to evoke a sense of what Timothy Morton (2010, 30) calls “the mesh,” or the constitutive intertwining between human realities and nonhuman processes.3 Such object-oriented plots decenter the human by using, at the level of narrative structure, a stand-in or “material anchor” – to borrow a term introduced by cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins (1995; 2005) – for nonhuman phenomena. In both my case studies, these material anchors are human-made objects that transcend their everyday usage as mere tools and thus elude anthropocentric grasp, serving as a reminder of our embedding in a more-than-human world. In Underworld, the material anchor is a baseball hit into the stands during a famous game between the Giants and the Dodgers in 1951. The baseball ties together the novel’s storylines, signifying the enmeshment of human history and physical realities. A similar role is played in Babel by a rifle, which sets off the plot through the accidental wounding of an American tourist in North Africa. This event will have consequences as far as Mexico and Japan, but it is presented as a mere accident, thus uncoupling the film’s plot from any clear-cut sense of psychological causation. Both of these works can be considered “network narratives” in David Bordwell’s (2008) terminology, since they are multilinear texts that trace a network of interactions unfolding over time between characters who don’t always meet in the fiction’s actuality. Crucially, this network transcends the confines of the human-scale world, implicating material objects that displace the human as the centerpiece of narrative progression. The notion of causality is key to my argument, since – as I explain in the next section – it straddles the divide between the human and the material world. Both my case studies are characterized by a loosening of the connection between

 The concept of the mesh and its formal instantiations in narrative are the main focus of Caracciolo (2021a).

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causation and psychological notions such as agency and intentionality: the plot is driven by epistemological uncertainty (in DeLillo’s Underworld) or chance (in Babel) as a strategy for displacing narrative’s bias toward human interaction. This move, in turn, has ramifications for three other dimensions of plot: it complicates the narratives’ temporality through nonlinear structures, it inflects their overall thematic coherence, and it shapes their affective dynamic. The term “object-oriented plotting” is inspired by the philosophical trend initiated by Graham Harman (2002) under the heading of object-oriented ontology (or OOO), as I have already mentioned in the introduction. I don’t share all of the assumptions that underlie Harman’s philosophy (or closely related work by Morton and Shaviro), but I find appealing its rejection of anthropocentric models, not least because of the important challenge this rejection poses to narrative theory. Material objects, of course, have always played a role in narrative through their symbolic association with wealth and power. In the terminology of A. J. Greimas’s (1976) actantial theory, objects can serve either as (literal) “objects of desire” or as “helpers” in a protagonist’s quest. But standard quest narratives would not be an instance of object-oriented plotting as I define it here, because the sought-for object is subordinated to human intentionality: it constitutes a desire to be fulfilled, or a means toward reaching a certain goal, as in the “hero’s journey” famously theorized by Joseph Campbell (1949). Thus, a plot that revolves around material objects is not necessarily object-oriented. For instance, “it” or object narrators in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature (see Blackwell 2007; Bernaerts et al. 2014, 82–88) mainly serve an ideological or didactic function. Objects in the realist novel contribute to characterization or to authenticating a fictional representation, as Roland Barthes’s (1986) well-known account of the “reality effect” suggests.4 In these and in many other cases throughout literary history, the foregrounding of objects instrumentalizes the nonhuman, and thus subordinates it to the human: these narratives confirm, rather than question, an anthropocentric understanding of the world. On the contrary, a plot is object-oriented when it challenges the subject vs. object dualism that is at the heart of Greimas’s model, revealing instead the breadth of the spectrum of materiality. Uncoupled from human instrumentalization or symbolic domestication, things are presented as a site of uncertainty as well as resistance to anthropocentrism. This narrative negotiation of thingness is

 Barthes’s (1986) main example of reality effect is the barometer of Gustave Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Heart.” The barometer’s resistance to literary analysis (in either symbolic or narrative terms) evokes the way in which material reality itself is “superior or indifferent to any other function” (Barthes 1986, 145). For Barthes, this move primarily contributes to an illusion of realism, with literature evoking the way in which reality itself exceeds cognitive appropriation.

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enabled by the spatial form of the plot, which is that of a network tied to the circulation of a material anchor. As I aim to show in the following pages, the nonpsychological causality that underlies this circulation is a central aspect of what New Materialist theorists including Bennett (2010) and Iovino and Oppermann (2012; 2014a) discuss under the heading of “nonhuman agency.”

2.1 Plot and Modes of Causation Described in broad strokes, plot is narrative’s organizing principle, the set of strategies through which the narrated events and existents are integrated into an emotionally meaningful whole. Plot is a complex notion, though, and a closer look at narratological work on plot – as surveyed by Karin Kukkonen (2014) – reveals that four distinct dimensions feed into narrative organization: temporal relations between events (i.e., what comes before what); causal relations between characters and events (i.e., who performs what action, and for what purpose); thematic coherence (i.e., what the story is about, and what function or “point” it has within a larger communicative act); and affective dynamics (i.e., why the story is interesting and emotionally satisfying). Narrative theorists tend to assign a different weight to these dimensions: for instance, E. M. Forster’s (1955) classic account of plot foregrounds causation, while James Phelan’s (2007) rhetorical approach privileges affective dynamics emerging in the interaction between authors and audiences. Emotion plays an even more significant role in Patrick Colm Hogan’s (2011) “affective narratology.” Here, however, I am less interested in singling out the basic element of plot than in exploring the interrelation between temporality, causation, thematic coherence, and affectivity. I thus build on the assumption that plot is an emergent phenomenon, and that choices at the level of any of these four factors will have implications for the others as well. The anthropocentric bias of narrative examined in the previous section inflects each of these factors. Causality is in a particularly interesting position vis-à-vis this bias. In their treatment of causation (Richardson 1997; Kafalenos 2006), narratologists tend to subsume all cause-effect relations in narrative under a single model or understanding of causality. Emma Kafalenos, for instance, argues that “meaning is an interpretation of the relations between a given action (or happening or situation) and other actions (happenings, situations) in a causal sequence” (2006, 1). In this definition, “action” – which implies agency and intentionality – is used interchangeably with “happening,” which does not imply agency or intentionality. Hence, Kafalenos builds on the assumption that causality is fundamentally the same whether it involves minded agents or nonhuman entities. Hilary Dannenberg (2008, 26–27) complicates this monolithic view of causation by introducing Mark

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Turner’s (1987) distinction between causation as progeneration, causation as action, and causation as necessary and sufficient conditions. The first builds on the biological concept of “lineage,” as if a cause could generate an effect in the way parents generate a child; the second refers to causation as direct, embodied manipulation of objects; the third focuses on the external conditions that make an event possible. This conceptualization is an important step forward, but for the purposes of this chapter it is still not fine-grained enough: what is missing is a clearer distinction between causation that involves an anthropomorphic subject (“psychological causation,” in my terminology), and material or non-psychological causation. Some cause-effect relations logically imply human or anthropomorphic agency and intentionality, whereas others don’t. The former are typically more central to the dynamics of plot, but non-psychological modes of causation can also come into play. As an example, consider the following passage from Don DeLillo’s Underworld: My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore . . . . All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. (1999, 88)

The narrator’s son looks at the plane and conjures up the image of its midair explosion. The gesture of looking implies psychological causation – a relation between a mental state (the child’s destructive impulse) and real-world events (his pointing his eyes at the plane). The notion of action, of which the child’s looking is an example, thus occupies the middle ground between the mental and the physical world: through actions, mental causes turn into observable effects. This much seems uncontroversial. What the passage suggests, however, is that the child’s desire falls flat, and the plane does not explode. That this is unsurprising for the reader shows that another mode of causation underlies our interpretation of this passage: the knowledge that the action performed by the child (looking at the plane) is not sufficient to bring about the desired effect, because this fictional world – which operates under what Brian Richardson (1997, 38) would call a “naturalistic” causal regime – is governed by physical laws similar to those at play in the real world. Such laws are central to our understanding of causal relations among objects and bodies: human agency is subject to the constraints and affordances of the physical world, and it has to take them into account in order to match desired effects and actual consequences. Psychologists use the term “naïve physics” to refer to people’s intuitive understanding of the ways in which the world is likely to “behave” when we interact with it in certain ways (see Proffitt 1999). Clearly, this child’s desire goes against the grain of naïve physics – and its failure is unsurprising because of this.

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We may want to unpack the notion of causation even further. There are many forms of causation that cannot be reduced to the psychological model. For instance, we have causal relations between natural phenomena, like humidity and fog. Further, we have causation in the domain of socio-economic phenomena that emerge from a network of human cultural practices and material conditions (for instance, one can say that malnutrition causes an increase in infant mortality rates). Finally, some causal relations blur the dividing line between human intentionality and physical factors. Consider the case of a plane accident where the pilots didn’t respond appropriately to a system malfunction that would have been relatively harmless in itself. In the Air France 447 crash of June 2009, the autopilot disengaged during cruise because ice crystals clogged the plane’s pitot tubes, leading to inconsistent airspeed measurements. According to the investigators, the pilots’ decisions, and not this temporary malfunction, resulted in an aerodynamic stall and in the fatal impact with the Atlantic Ocean (see P. Smith 2014). Through its complex causal history, the accident exemplifies what Morton (2010) calls “the mesh,” or the interconnection between human action, technology (computerassisted flight), and natural phenomena (the ice crystals) that operate beyond human intentionality. Because of how it extends on both sides of the divide between human and nonhuman realities, causality is an ideal place to start if one wants to theorize object-oriented plotting. Narrative may put pressure on the psychological model of causation, integrating into its workings causal elements that do not involve humanlike agency or intentionality. In turn, this is likely to have reverberations at the level of narrative’s temporal organization, thematic coherence, and affective dynamics. Over the following pages, I examine how this process plays out concretely in my case studies. In the next section, I use the notion of “material anchor” to show how in Underworld and Babel physical objects underpin the plot’s nonlinear temporality. I then turn to how, through these anchors, nonhuman materiality begins emerging in, and affecting, the overall progression of narrative. In the final section, I look at the thematic meanings and affective dynamics generated by object-oriented narrative strategies.

2.2 Material Anchors and Nonlinear Temporality In the wake of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) work, one of the central tenets of cognitive linguistics has been that abstract ideas and relations are typically understood by mapping them onto more concrete objects and events. An interesting example – discussed by Hutchins (2005) – is that of people lining up to order at a café or theater booth. The line uses the customers’ bodies and physical position in

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space to encode an abstract relation of precedence. The action of “lining up for something” is thus the result of the blend between a state of affairs (bodies forming a line) and an abstract ordering principle (who comes before whom). Another way to put this is to say, following Hutchins, that the physical line is a “material anchor” for conceptual structure: it allows us to keep track of abstract relations in a convenient, human-scale way. In narrative, objects can also function as material anchors, making manifest and at the same time “grounding” at the diegetic level the abstract pattern of plot. This strategy is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s (1997) concept of “objective correlative,” except that what is made material is not (or at least not exclusively) an emotional state – as in Eliot’s account – but the overall organization of plot. This kind of narrative signposting becomes particularly important when the plot is uncoupled from a sense of overarching human intentionality, and cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto the progression of characters’ beliefs and desires (a notion central to Marie-Laure Ryan’s [1991] account of plot). In this case, material anchors help readers keep track of the events and their chronology. My case studies are a straightforward example of this use of material anchors. Underworld’s multiple storylines are presented in anti-chronological order: after a prologue set in 1951, the novel moves backward from 1992 (Part 1) to 1951–1952 (Part 6). This temporal arrangement can be seen as a metaphorical journey into the past of Nick Shay, the protagonist: his youth is defined by a criminal act whose exact nature is revealed only at the end of the novel. However, this is only one strand in the plot, and the text consistently undermines a Nick-centered reading by bombarding us with a multiplicity of characters and episodes that have little do with the protagonist’s life trajectory. Further, the novel’s six parts are interspersed with three “Interludes” set in 1951 and entitled Manx Martin 1–3 (I will say more about the function of these interludes below). Babel, on the other hand, is divided into three storylines unfolding in different parts of the world (Morocco, the US-Mexico border, and Japan). Frequent chronological shifts mark the narrative in the form of strategically placed transitions from one setting to another; retrospectively, we understand that these transitions imply a flashback or flashforward. For instance, about eight minutes into the movie, we see a young Moroccan boy, Yussef, fire a rifle at a tourist bus in the desert (see Figure 2). This is only meant as a test shot, since the bus is quite far and both Yussef and his elder brother, Ahmed, are convinced that the rifle has a shorter range. (We find out in a later scene that the bullet does reach the bus, wounding Susan, an American tourist.) After Yussef and Ahmed have fired the rifle, a cut takes us to the interior of a house, where a Mexican nanny is taking care of two children (Susan’s children, we will soon infer). The nanny is talking on the phone with, presumably, the children’s father. That phone conversation

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takes place much later than Susan’s wounding in the film’s chronology, after she has been taken to the hospital: we will see the same scene from the father’s perspective at the end of the movie. The transition from one spatial setting to another is thus accompanied by an unacknowledged temporal shift, a flashforward.

Figure 2: Yussef aiming his rifle at a tourist bus in Babel (2006).

One might expect the presence of various storylines and locales in both Underworld and Babel to complicate readers’ understanding of the overall network traced by the plot.5 I suggest drawing here on Arnaud Schmitt’s (2014) work on multilinear storytelling and the narratological challenges it poses. According to Schmitt, plots may bring together multiple storylines in two ways: through what he calls “knots,” or places where different storylines merge (with previously separate characters coming together in the actuality of the fictional world); and through less specific “connectors,” or clues suggesting the possible convergence between two storylines, even though this convergence may remain a mere “hermeneutical line,” in Schmitt’s terminology (i.e., a readerly hypothesis). In both my case studies there is an overabundance of connectors, but very few knots in the strict sense; even the metaphor of the “storyline” (to which the notion of knot is clearly related) fails to fully capture the plot’s peculiar narrative logic. In Underworld, individual episodes often feature some of the same characters, but it is difficult to establish any sense of clear-cut linearity because of the  See again Bordwell (2008, Ch. 7) for more on network narratives.

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many gaps in the sweeping temporal arc traced by the novel. Babel has more limited temporal scope, but its overall organization is similarly network-like, with the network building on loose connectors rather than diegetic knots. Thus, the individual subplots remain separate: we never see Susan coming home to her children, and the Japanese section is tied to the rest of the film only by a thin thread (one of the characters was the previous owner of the rifle fired by Yussef). The scarcity of knots means that the narrative pattern becomes not just more complex but also more abstract, because it never coheres into one or more salient action sequences that can stitch together the various episodes. Importantly, this process shifts the emphasis from the goal-directedness of psychological causality to a sense of thematic interrelatedness. As Schmitt himself puts it, “connectors generate thematic connection” (2014, 85). This is what happens in both Underworld and Babel – two plots kept together more by the proliferation of thematic echoes than by a stringent teleology. To compensate for this uncoupling of plot from human, goal-oriented actions, both narratives use what we may see as “material anchors” in Hutchins’s sense: a baseball in Underworld, a rifle in Babel. These material objects circulate in the fictional world, passing from one character to another and forming a network of connections (or rather connectors) that help the reader navigate the multiplicity of characters and situations. Just like the physical bodies standing in line signify an abstract relation of precedence, the material history of these objects reflects – and at the same time embodies – the plot’s unifying principle. These material anchors may be human-made objects but, as we will see over the next two sections, they resist being understood as mere tools, pointing instead to the uncertainty, vibrancy, and inaccessibility of things. Hence, we have what I call “object-oriented plotting” when, first, diegetic objects are used as material anchors for plot; and, second, these objects become associated with thematic and affective meanings that negotiate materiality by challenging an anthropocentric understanding of matter.

2.3 Uncertainty, Hybridity, Chance: Nonhuman Causal Histories What kind of objects are the baseball and the rifle? First of all, they are human artifacts invested with emotions and associated with various networks of causation in the psychological sense. In Underworld, the causal structure seems to take the form of a quest narrative. In 1951, the Giants won the National League pennant in a historic baseball game against the Dodgers; however, the ball, hit into the stands before the decisive home run, has vanished. As the game enters collective memory and achieves quasi-mythical status, the missing baseball becomes an

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object of desire for many fans, including the novel’s protagonist Nick Shay. A memorabilia collector, Marvin Laundy, claims to have tracked down the ball in a search described as “hard, fierce, thorough and consuming” (1999, 175). But for all his efforts Marvin doesn’t have definitive evidence that the ball in his possession is the real ball. He explains that he was able to reconstruct the ball’s “line of ownership” up to a man named Charles Wainwright, but “not back to the game itself” (1999, 181). Marvin adds: “I don’t have the last link that I can connect backwards from the Wainwright ball to the ball making contact with Bobby Thomson’s bat” (1999, 181). Despite the uncertainty surrounding the authenticity of Marvin’s ball, Nick decides to buy it for the hefty sum of $34,500. This economic investment reflects the ball’s (causal) power to evoke a sense of personal resonance and even emotional attachment, as Nick himself acknowledges: “I didn’t buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It’s not about Thomson hitting the homer. It’s about Branca making the pitch. It’s all about losing” (1999, 97). Yet, in the novel’s narrative economy, the baseball becomes much more than a site of anthropocentric desire and emotional value. Because the characters cannot establish the ball’s authenticity, the narrative template of the quest fails to capture the full significance of this object: it is as if the ball asserted its “thingness” – its incommensurability with human emotions and desires – through the uncertainty of its line of ownership.6 Toward the end of the novel, Nick thinks: “Sometimes I know exactly why I bought it and other times I don’t” (1999, 809). This paradox is inscribed in the novel’s own narrative structure through the interludes, which focus on Cotter Martin, a child cast by DeLillo in the role of the ball’s first owner. Cotter was at the stadium during the game between the Giants and the Dodgers, and was able to seize the baseball while in the stands. However, the baseball was soon to be confiscated by Cotter’s alcoholic father, who sold it to Charles Wainwright. This is the missing link in Marvin’s reconstruction, and the “proof” of the authenticity of his ball. But neither Marvin nor Nick will ever become privy to what we, as readers, learn from the interludes. Readers will, of course, be aware that this narrative strategy is the result of DeLillo’s intentional choices, but those choices strongly hint at the more-than-human materiality of the ball: by evading the characters’ desire to control its causal history, a material object seems to take over the logic of the narrative itself. This object resists human attempts at knowing or mastering its existence, and yet it governs the novel’s composition: it figures in the prelude (which narrates the 1951 baseball game), in all the interludes, and it is frequently referenced or discussed by the

 For more on uncertainty as a thematic and formal focus of contemporary fiction, see my discussion in Caracciolo (2022a) as well as Ameel and Caracciolo (2021).

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characters elsewhere. Seen from this perspective, the novel engages with the spectrum of materiality by uncoupling narrative progression from goal-oriented directedness and consigning it instead to the vagaries of an unconscious object. Moreover, the baseball is fundamentally hybrid, since it cuts across the boundary between human life and nonhuman processes. In an important episode, we see Nick Shay holding the baseball and inspecting it closely: The ball was a deep sepia, veneered with dirt and turf and generational sweat – it was old, bunged up, it was bashed and tobacco-juiced and stained by natural processes and by the lives behind it, weather-spattered and charactered as a seafront house. And it was smudged green near the Spalding trademark, it was still wearing a small green bruise where it had struck a pillar according to the history that came with it – flaked paint from a bolted column in the left-field stands embedded in the surface of the ball. (1999, 131)

With the material traces inscribed on its surface, the ball embodies a history that is not only human but mineral as well. At the heart of this passage is a productive tension between these poles – a tension perhaps best exemplified by the simile comparing the ball to a “weather-spattered and charactered . . . seafront house.” The analogy between two inanimate objects (the baseball and the house) is expressed through a psychologizing metaphor, that of the “charactered” house – a paradoxical back-and-forth pointing to the constitutive intertwining of human “lives” and “natural processes.” The same idea is reiterated more succinctly at the end of the novel, when Nick describes the baseball as “a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark and bronzed with nearly half a century of earth and sweat and chemical change” (1999, 809). Human sweat stands on the same footing as earth, and both appear tied together by “chemical change” – that is, by underlying material processes. Through its uncertainty and hybridity, the baseball thus evokes a more abstract idea: the enmeshment of the human lifeworld with nonhuman causation. As a material anchor, the baseball introduces notions of uncertainty and hybridity into the plot progression, partly displacing the more familiar logic of human intentionality and teleology that we have come to expect in a novel. Something similar happens with the rifle in Babel – though here it is the idea of chance that comes to the forefront. One of the characters in the Japanese section of the film is the first owner of the weapon; after a hunting trip in Africa, he gives it to his Moroccan guide. The rifle is later sold to a shepherd and ends up in the hands of the man’s two young sons, one of whom accidentally shoots Susan while testing the weapon. Due to Susan’s hospitalization, she and her husband are unable to travel back to the US as they had initially planned. The Mexican nanny in charge of their children is thus forced to take them with her to her son’s wedding in Mexico. This excursion goes awry when, on their way back to the

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States, the nanny is arrested by US border officers as an illegal immigrant. The children narrowly escape death by dehydration during a botched escape attempt. The film’s three geographically distinct subplots thus trace the tragic consequences of a Japanese tourist’s well-meaning gift. The narrative explicitly foregrounds the role of chance in this event sequence: the impression is that nothing happens because the characters wanted it, but because the circumstances conspired as if against any human intentionality. Even Susan’s wounding is framed as an accident, and it is difficult to assign full responsibility to Yussef as he had seemed genuinely convinced that the bullet couldn’t travel as far as the tourist bus. Eventually, that shot will quite literally backfire when Yussef’s brother, Ahmed, is fatally wounded in a shootout with the Moroccan police. In the world of Babel, everything goes wrong for reasons that may be compounded by human negligence (a rifle ending up in the hands of two boys) and misunderstandings (the police mistaking the boys for terrorists), but can ultimately be ascribed only to the sheer chance of the bullet hitting Susan. This device has something in common with the poetics of chance and coincidence explored by Richardson (1997, Ch. 4) and, more recently, Dannenberg (2008, Ch. 4) and Bordwell (2008, Ch. 7). What is specific to Babel, however, is that the coincidence plot fuses two levels of non-psychological causality: the nonhuman mechanics of physical causation – the strict but blind laws governing the bullet’s trajectory – and the network of globalization, which makes it possible for a rifle bought in Japan to alter the lives of people located as far as Morocco and North America (more on this in the next section). Babel’s rifle dovetails with the indeterminate history of DeLillo’s baseball, of course. These objects challenge purely anthropocentric conceptions of both plot and matter: while disrupting the anthropocentric setup of narrative, the network of these objects’ circulation foregrounds materiality as it transcends human agency but also becomes implicated in human events.

2.4 A Feel for the Network We have seen above that plot is a four-dimensional construct, with temporal relations, causality, thematic connectedness, and affective dynamics all contributing to a narrative’s overall organization. My analysis of Underworld and Babel so far has focused on nonlinear temporality and non-psychological causality, but the formal choices implemented by both narratives have clear ramifications in thematic and affective terms as well. Let us start from the thematic level. Both the novel and the film foreground the fictional world’s interconnectedness, but they put this idea to significantly different uses. In Babel, the rifle is a symbol of a globalized reality in which a gift received from a Japanese tourist in North Africa can fire a bullet

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whose consequences are felt as far as Mexico. Neil Narine (2010) investigates this dimension of the narrative, aligning it with a larger trend of “global network” films that attempt to portray, and at the same time critique, the socio-economic interrelatedness of today’s reality: how the West relies on the exploitation of marginal subjects (the Mexican nanny) or on the commodification of developing countries as tourist destinations (the Moroccan desert visited by Susan and her husband). Babel reflects on the consequences of this increasing globalization at the level of individual experience. The reference to Babel shouldn’t go unnoticed: the Biblical tower is a symbol of human hubris but also, crucially, of fragmentation and lack of communication; the film suggests that the dizzying interconnectedness of globalization results, paradoxically, in a sense of personal isolation and trauma (another key word of Narine’s analysis). The Japanese subplot is perhaps the most explicit in this respect: it focuses on Chieko, the deaf daughter of the Japanese man who was the first owner of the rifle. Traumatized by her mother’s suicide, Chieko communicates using sign language and spends most of her time with her deaf friends, being largely ignored by the rest of society: her silence serves as a psychological equivalent to a dysfunctional globalized reality. Following Narine (2010), the fact that an object, the rifle, and not a human agent supplies the plot’s underlying causal logic could be read as a symptom of the objectification and depersonalization brought about by modernity. Seen in this light, the film’s unsettling object-oriented plotting could be reconnected with human – perhaps even humanitarian – concerns. For instance, Rita Barnard argues that in Babel what “enables us to connect the three stories and three social locales is ultimately an intense, overarching affect: a kind of globalization of compassion that arises from a profound sense of human isolation and physical vulnerability” (2009, 9). Barnard is right about the role of affective dynamics in bringing the plot strands together, but the resulting affect is more complex than Barnard’s reference to compassion suggests.7 The viewer is likely to sympathize with the characters, of course. But because the audience is unable to assign blame for the film’s dramatic events, it becomes difficult to rationalize the sense of tragic foreboding that accompanies the viewing. In Babel, as I argued in the previous section, everything seems to go wrong, and for no (human) reason in particular. No amount of compassion can cancel out the dehumanizing power of the plot’s chance-driven logic. This tension is neatly summarized by the last scene, in which Chieko, naked, is embraced by her father on the balcony of their Tokyo apartment. The camera undermines the warmth and affection of this final

 I discuss the relationship between global processes and multilinear plotting in more detail in Caracciolo (2023).

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gesture by zooming out to reveal a cold expanse of night sky and dark skyscrapers towering threateningly over the two characters – an image that foreshadows a profound crisis in human-nonhuman relations. The film thus builds on a complex blend of sympathy and unease at an unspecified threat originating from the world beyond the human. Through the affective structure it generates, Babel’s object-oriented plot can be said to put viewers – or at least willing viewers – in touch with the depersonalizing network of human-nonhuman interactions, of which globalization is an important manifestation. The material agency of the rifle is foregrounded to reveal the ways in which human subjects can in themselves be reduced to commodified objects. In turn, this negotiation of materiality is complicated by the uncertain nonhuman threat that impinges on the Japanese characters in the final scene. Underworld brings to bear on its object-oriented plotting a different, and possibly even richer, understanding of materiality. Nick, the protagonist, works in the waste management business. Early on in the novel he explains that he “traveled to the coastal lowlands of Texas and watched men in moon suits bury drums of dangerous waste in subterranean salt beds many millions of years old, driedout remnants of a Mesozoic ocean. It was a religious conviction in our business that these deposits of rock salt would not leak radiation. Waste is a religious thing” (1999, 88). But Underworld, a novel set for the most part during the Cold War, is also obsessed with nuclear power. In a key passage, Marvin – the memorabilia collector – draws a link between the baseball and the atomic bomb: “they make an atomic bomb, listen to this, they make the radioactive core the exact same size as a baseball” (1999, 172). The baseball, in itself nothing more than the human residue of a recent past, is thus associated with phenomena whose scale far exceeds the human (the “salt beds many millions of years old” in Nick’s remark), or with the physical forces harnessed by the atomic bomb. In this way, the novel participates in what Mark McGurl calls a new “cultural geography” – namely, “a range of theoretical and other initiatives that position culture in a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human self-concern, exposing it to the idea, and maybe even the fact, of its external ontological preconditions, its ground” (2011, 380). This point emerges in a comment made by an online reviewer of Underworld, which I find particularly telling. The anonymous commentator refers to the solid black pages that divide the novel’s parts and remain clearly visible when the book is closed: [DeLillo] has plumbed the depths of a dangerously complex time and an equally convoluted place . . . . This archaeology is our history. It is symbolized by the strata lining the edges of the book. Much as we would read the history of rocks or trees through the lines indelibly

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etched into granite canyons or across sylvan boles, we can only trace our lives, our histories, through the lines we have inscribed, lines that intersect (somewhat arbitrarily) with friends, lovers, enemies, and the random face or fact that emerges, unbidden, at odd yet appropriate moments. (A Customer 1998)

The reviewer draws a parallel between the materiality of the book and the geological strata that line the nonhuman world.8 The baseball summarizes, and inscribes into the novel’s own stratified narrative structure, this nexus between the human and the nonhuman world. As the online reviewer’s comment implies, affect is crucial to the plot’s dynamic. A sense of wonder at the sheer scale of reality runs through DeLillo’s novel, from the prologue’s statement that “[longing] on a large scale is what makes history” (1999, 11) to the “word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city” in the very last paragraph (1999, 827). This is the sublime of hyperconnectivity – a feeling of awe at the density and depth of the connections between human history (the baseball, the protagonist’s past) and material processes (nuclear radiation, the waste left behind by past civilizations). This feeling operates at multiple levels: it infuses the protagonist’s experiences while sustaining the reader’s interest in DeLillo’s handling of such a vast, and multifaceted, narrative material. Object-oriented plotting thus becomes bound up with an affective dynamic: through its narrative strands converging on the baseball, its hybrid causal history, and its symbolic connections with waste and the atomic bomb, Underworld is able to open up emotionally resonant perspectives on the spectrum of materiality, and particularly on the tension between symbolic investment in the material and its resistance to human appropriation. ✶✶✶ Narrative is a human practice, as I have argued multiple times, and as such it is inevitably geared toward human interests and values. Yet storytelling always participates in a broader “cultural ecology” (Zapf 2001): by entering into dialogue with other areas of culture – for instance, scientific knowledge or ethical assumptions – it may engage in a reconceptualization of humanity’s position vis-à-vis physical realities that transcend individual human existence, or even the existence of the human species as such. It is this kind of reconceptualization that this chapter’s case studies perform through formal means. My reading of Underworld and Babel thus introduces one of the main themes of this book: the form of narrative is central to its negotiation of materiality. In both Underworld and Babel, the plot progression is tied to a physical object crisscrossing multiple storylines and replacing, or at least complementing, narrative’s traditional focus on human intentionality and agency. The tension that derives from this formal operation is  I will turn to the artifactual materiality of the book in the next chapter.

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highly productive in terms of both the thematic issues it raises (the network of globalization or the hybrid “mesh” of causality) and the affective dynamics it generates. This attunement between narrative and nonhuman realities is, as everything else in narrative, the result of a complex interplay between textual cues and readers’ interpretive interests and propensities. To some extent, just as narrative is always keyed to human characters and themes, the nonhuman world can never be completely extraneous to it: after all, we live in a world populated by nonhuman animals and objects that are often causally implicated in human endeavors. However, narratives differ in the degree to which they call attention to, and integrate into their own workings, this causal efficacy of nonhuman things. My case studies in this chapter display a high level of attunement to contemporary debates on materiality, but other narratives may be subtler and more ambiguous and still raise analogous questions. Nor is this phenomenon unique to the twentieth century: while various areas of contemporary science highlight the interrelatedness of human and nonhuman phenomena, other historical periods achieve a partly similar effect via dialog with other cultural practices.9 The specific nature of the “object-oriented plotting” I investigated in this chapter shouldn’t escape us. On the one hand, Underworld’s baseball and Babel’s rifle put us in touch with nonhuman materiality through the meanings they take on in the course of the narrative. On the other hand, these objects are prototypical examples of human-scale entities that can be manipulated directly, since they are geared toward the size and sensorimotor skills of the human body. In Underworld, the importance of Nick’s physical handling of the baseball is repeatedly emphasized: it is when manipulating the ball that Nick hits upon the idea of the enmeshment of human and geological history. In his own words: “How the hand works memories out of the baseball that have nothing to do with games of the usual sort” (1999, 132). In Babel this embodied dimension is perhaps less explicitly thematized, but it is still hinted at by the rifle – an object that not only affords bodily interaction but dramatically wounds Susan’s body. The material world is thus presented as deeply interwoven with the materiality of the human body, another theme that will emerge frequently in the next chapters. This foregrounding of physical interaction with the world through material objects confirms intuitions about the centrality of embodied patterns in human meaning-making (Gibbs 2005) – including narrative form (Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2021).

 In Caracciolo (2015a), for example, I observed how the same narrative pattern underlies Italo Calvino’s “posthuman” engagement with the Big Bang (see Iovino 2014) and Dante’s religious cosmology.

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In the case of object-oriented plotting, the involvement of bodily experience – of characters, but also potentially of readers – poses something of a paradox: the same material entity appeals to the makeup of the human body while problematizing the anthropomorphic agency that we tend to associate with embodiment as an existential and cognitive condition. The body is thus used as a vehicle toward our understanding of material realities that in some fundamental way challenge (a certain conception of) human embodiment. This pattern represents one of the many tensions of materiality that take center stage in contemporary narrative.

3 The Ethics of Materiality in the Multimodal Novel The previous chapter has established the circulation of physical objects in narrative as an important means of imagining nonhuman materiality and exploring its significance vis-à-vis human subjectivity and large-scale phenomena such as globalization. The phrase “in narrative” here involves an act of representation, which is both linguistic (or semiotic) and cognitive: a certain physical thing is verbally referenced and embedded within a narrative sequence, which may in turn evoke – via thematic cues – a more abstract notion of materiality. However, as I have argued in the introduction, direct representation is only one side of narrative’s negotiation of materiality, because formal features of narrative play an essential role in shaping the tensions that surround the material world. In the last chapter’s case studies, this formal dimension comes to the fore through the coincidence-driven, nonlinear progression of both Underworld and Babel, whose form helps uncouple certain objects from assumptions of human control over matter. This chapter turns to an alternative way of conceptualizing materiality through narrative practices – one in which an interest in materiality doesn’t emerge exclusively from semiotic representation but also from attention to the material form of the artifact readers (or audience members) are engaging with. It is of course no mystery that, despite the structuralist abstraction of the concept of “text,” the ways in which we encounter narratives are material through and through: texts are always embedded in, and inextricable from, a certain material context. This is true for oral narrative, which is performed by a flesh-and-blood storyteller in a particular material setting, but it also applies to print-based narrative genres such as the novel, albeit less overtly: the material conditions for a novel’s production have enormous impact on narrative form. In Victorian Britain, for instance, the rise of serial publication in periodicals opened up new possibilities for novelistic storytelling, departing from the more traditional “three-decker” format (see S. Eliot 2001). This inseparability of narrative from its material context (of production, in this Victorian example, but also of reception) is one of the fundamental assumptions of New Historicism, and as such it is widely recognized in literary studies. What is perhaps less universally recognized is that the written language which makes up particular narratives is in itself a material medium with distinctive expressive capacities. Craig Dworkin has recently offered an articulation of the materiality of literary language, with a focus on poetry but broad applicability to narrative as well:

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-003

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The materiality of language extends from single glyphs to the ghost of words summoned by the spell of their alphabetic sequences, and from the substrates of their materializations to the inscriptive relays of those various substrates in rhizomatic concatenations, all the way up to their precarious collective archive and extending to the social relations made legible by the sum of that networked materiality and made newly meaningful in particular historical contexts – including the history of language itself. (Dworkin 2020, 186)

Dworkin is here addressing the visual texture of language as it is foregrounded by literary writing – a texture that involves typographical presentation, but also visual and auditory resonances with other linguistic cues that readers acquire through “particular historical contexts.” Literary scholars have started theorizing these material resonances in narrative (particularly the novel) under the heading of “multimodality,” which refers to the joint use of semiotic modes in literary works. Certainly, narrative meaning is primarily produced by way of verbal strategies in the novel, but nonverbal devices (such as the inclusion of illustrations or unconventional typographical choices) can enrich and modulate verbal signification. Not all prose texts deploy nonverbal cues to the same degree, but scholars such as Wolfgang Hallet (2009) and Alison Gibbons (2011) have identified and discussed a multimodal strand of the novel that goes back to Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy and has become increasingly popular in recent times. This rise of the multimodal novel can be understood as a response to digital reading, which is widely seen as promoting a dematerialization of fiction: digital technologies afford a number of interactions – such as increasing text size or changing the layout – that appear to uncouple the text from its physical medium. In reality, of course, computers and e-readers are as material as everything else, but the relative freedom of interaction afforded by software does lead to a backgrounding of materiality in individual and collective consciousness. The multimodal novel resists this backgrounding; as Hallet puts it, “in the age of digitalization and immaterial electronic signs, the multimodal novel reinstalls the physicality and materiality of semiotic practices” (2009, 146). The nonverbal strategies deployed by the multimodal novel perform a variety of functions, which are surveyed by Hallet. Broadly, these functions fall into two camps: they can serve as a form of metafictional commentary on the artificiality of literary narrative, highlighting (by way of disruption) the way in which literary works tend to erase their own materiality. Alternatively, nonverbal cues can point, indexically, to a materiality external to literary style, bearing “witness to the shortcomings of verbal language and narration” (Hallet 2009, 156). Thus, the cover of Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald, features a photograph that plays an important role in the novel’s plot: this strategy doesn’t destabilize mimetic conventions but extends the mimesis (that is, the novel’s storyworld) beyond the verbal layer of the novel.

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Another important function of multimodality in the novel is that of supporting what narrative theorists have traditionally called “consciousness representation” – namely, stylistic strategies that recreate the functioning of characters’ mind. Hallet, Gibbons, and also Torsa Ghosal (2019) offer extensive discussions of the link between consciousness representation and multimodality, particularly unconventional typography.1 Because conscious experience is rich in nonverbal features – visual imagery, for example, and bodily sensations – it is hardly surprising that multimodal novels deploy nonverbal devices to capture these dimensions of consciousness. For instance, Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time focuses on an autistic character-narrator whose extraordinary visual memory is rendered by way of diagrams and other unusual typographical choices. These devices, in Ghosal’s (2019, 278) words, “materialize the cognitive differences of the narrator and protagonist.” What we observe in multimodal novels like Austerlitz or The Curious Incident is a foregrounding of nonverbal materiality in the service of human characters and experiences. In this chapter I turn to works where the heightened materiality of the text puts pressure, much more explicitly than in Austerlitz or The Curious Incident, on narrative’s anthropocentric bias. Put otherwise, I demonstrate how the nonverbal form of multimodal works can speak to the tensions that traverse my spectrum of materiality, bringing out the way in which the material eludes apprehension on the part of human characters (as well as authors and audiences). Far from being used to afford insight into particular mental states, situations, or literary conventions, multimodal strategies are shrouded in an epistemologically and affectively productive uncertainty that points beyond the human. More specifically, multimodality points to the entanglement of cultural notions of materiality and moral responsibility toward other humans and the natural world. However, this pointing gesture is never straightforward. I argue in the following pages that it is through gaps and elisions that the materiality of narrative resonates with nonhuman-oriented thinking. I offer three examples of this resonance. Two are contemporary rewritings of modernist literature based on the strategic erasure of parts of the original works: Tree of Codes (2010), by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is a cut-out version of The Street of Crocodiles (1934), by Polish writer Bruno Schulz; and Darkness (2011), by Yedda Morrison, which builds on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). In different ways, Foer and Morrison implement visual and tactile erasures to evoke the ravages of the Holocaust and Western colonialism, confronting the significance of human violence on both other humans and the nonhuman world. My third example – Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children

 See also Caracciolo (2014a) on punctuation and consciousness representation.

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Archive (2019) – is less experimental in nature but equally suggestive in affective terms: here the gaps do not involve the partial deletion of a source text, but are rather inscribed, as blurry shapes, in the photographs that accompany this multimodal novel. The ambiguity that surrounds these visual distortions extends the plot’s confrontation with issues of migration and trauma, evoking the shaping influence of the nonhuman environment on the protagonists’ vicissitudes. A common objection against New Materialist theories (see introduction) is that extending agency to inanimate matter involves, at least potentially, giving short shrift to human responsibilities vis-à-vis the nonhuman. As Malm (2018, 44) argues, this metaphysical position spreads agency too thin: it risks downplaying the complicity in environmental destruction of Western, industrialized, and wealthy nations, whose all-too-human agency – driven by capitalist and neoliberal greed – is at the root of the current ecological crisis. Mostly, this chapter’s case studies stop short of explicitly assigning agency to the materiality they are staging through their multimodal devices. Nevertheless – and this is why I bring these works together under the rubric of an “ethics of materiality” – they show how historical traumas produced by the West (the Holocaust in Foer’s book, colonialism in Morrison’s, and migration in Luiselli’s) are always bound up with cultural conceptualizations of the material. “Showing” is a key word here: my assumption is that literary works are able to perform and negotiate ethical intuitions by embedding them within imaginary, affectively charged scenarios. The ethical intuitions that emerge from my close readings are informed by philosophers working within the nonhuman turn: in particular, I align my discussion with Deborah Bird Rose’s (2011) “ecological existentialism.” Developed in dialogue with Indigenous knowledge during fieldwork in Australia, Rose’s thinking is based on the idea that “ethical questions within the world of connectivity start with how to appreciate the differences between humankind and others, while at the same time also understanding that we are all interdependent” (2011, 66). This “connectivity ethics” urges us to take responsibility vis-à-vis both a history of human violence (through colonialism and racism) and the nonhuman world. What is the value of a literary performance of this type of ethics? In short, while thinkers like Rose tend to formulate ethical positions conceptually and propositionally, the works under discussion here enact these positions affectively.2 If my argument is on the right track, literature illuminates nonhuman-oriented philosophy and allows us to grasp its ramifications concretely.

 I am building on John Gibson’s (2007, 116) philosophy of literature here, particularly his argument that literature crystallizes and illuminates the ethical values inherent in human action.

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The upshot of this negotiation is that, pace Malm, embracing human-nonhuman entanglement does not necessarily involve collapsing differences between wealthy and underprivileged communities or overlooking the traumas created by Western domination: the devastation wrought on other humans always goes hand in hand with the destruction of nonhuman ecosystems. This, at least, is what this chapter’s case studies show by highlighting ethical gaps and discontinuities through the materiality of the print medium: in different ways, Foer, Morrison, and Luiselli address both limitations in the West’s understanding of nonhuman materiality and its moral obligation to acknowledge the violence it has inflicted (and is still inflicting) on marginalized or impoverished communities. Before expanding on these examples, however, it is important to understand why physical erasures are so effective at exploring the spectrum of materiality. If my previous chapter has discussed the way in which the overall organization of plot can decenter anthropocentric assumptions, this chapter turns to more local strategies that yield insight into both the efficacy and the uncertainty of matter, but also into the ethical consequences of framing things as lifeless and passive. In both chapters, form – understood as plot organization or stylistic and nonverbal patterns – emerges as a central site for negotiating nonhuman materiality. The pairing of these chapters thus helps me establish the close reading methodology I adopt in the rest of the book.

3.1 Nonhuman-Oriented Gaps Gaps and areas of indeterminacies are, of course, a constitutive dimension of fiction and of textuality in general, as we know from the influential reader-response theories formulated by Roman Ingarden (1973) in the 1920s and, roughly half a century later, Wolfgang Iser (1978). “Blanks,” in Iser’s terminology, are the place where the reader’s experience breathes life into a text – or “concretizes” it, as Ingarden put it. Iser and Ingarden were not talking about the physical blanks on the page, but about all that is left unsaid or implicit by the text, and that is nevertheless essential to textual comprehension and interpretation. These blanks of reader-response theory are thus abstract rather than material, but they still suggest that indeterminacy shapes in important ways the experience of reading fiction. Nevertheless, not all areas of indeterminacy are created equal. Some gaps are relatively trivial: the answer to L. C. Knights’s famous question “how many children had Lady Macbeth?” (see Britton 1961) is certainly one of them. Typically, works of fiction don’t spell out many features of the storyworlds they evoke, either because these features are irrelevant to the plot (as in the case of Lady

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Macbeth’s children) or because they can trust readers to supply the missing information on the basis of real-world knowledge.3 Other textual gaps, though, are both more salient in the reader’s experience and significant at the level of plot strategies. Thus, what Meir Sternberg (2001) calls “curiosity” and considers one of the emotional universals of narrative is fundamentally dependent on a gap: the audience’s interest is aroused by something that is left unspecified by the narrator (for instance, who the protagonist’s real parents are or who committed a gruesome murder). This strategic use of gaps in fiction has caught the attention of nonhumanoriented theorists for its capacity to explore the philosophical questions surrounding nonhuman materiality. A case in point is Harman’s (2012) work in the context of object-oriented ontology (see introduction). Harman’s account of H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre centers on the numerous gaps that shape the reader’s experience of Lovecraft’s “weird” fiction.4 Of course, these indeterminacies play into the dread elicited by Lovecraft’s tentacular monsters and convoluted cosmic plots. The horror of these narratives is enhanced by what is left out or erased – perhaps in order to spare the audience from the debilitating insanity that tends to affect Lovecraft’s narrators when they are confronted with cosmic revelations. But these gaps, for Harman, transcend the conventions of the horror genre: they evoke what Harman himself has repeatedly characterized as the inaccessibility and elusiveness of material things, the resistance they put up against human knowledge. Harman writes about Lovecraft: “No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess” (2012, 3). Lovecraft’s “weird realism” (in Harman’s terminology) is also a form of materialism, as discussed by Michel Houellebecq (2006, 32) in another seminal reading of the American writer’s fiction. In Lovecraft’s fiction, indeterminacies and erasures are strategically deployed to chart the spectrum of materiality, particularly as matter becomes uncertain and therefore deeply threatening. However, Lovecraft tends to position these gaps “on the level of literal content,” as Harman (2012, 4) acknowledges: the material form of his works is rarely, if ever, affected by the indeterminacy. Ridvan Askin’s (2022) reading of Summer on the Lakes, an 1843 memoir by American transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller, begins to show how gaps may enter the form of narrative in a philosophically

 Marie-Laure Ryan (1991) theorizes this supplementation of information via what she calls the “principle of minimal departure”: readers tend to assume that the fictional world works analogously to the real world (“minimal departure”), unless the text explicitly mentions otherwise.  I will return to weird fiction and its engagement with nonhuman materiality in chapter 7.

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productive manner.5 Askin draws on Quentin Meillassoux’s (2008) account of the “great outdoors” as a metaphysical space of the “absolute” uncoupled from human cognition, an idea that parallels Harman’s interest in nonhuman inaccessibility (without being completely interchangeable with it).6 For Askin, this great outdoors cannot be represented directly in narrative, not even through the quintessentially Romantic affect of the sublime. Indeed, Askin draws attention to how, in Fuller’s travelogue, a visit to Niagara Falls turns into an anticlimactic experience that emphatically denies the sublime of the landscape. Fuller blames this failure of the sublime on the limits of narrative representation when confronted with nonhuman materiality. Instead, paradoxically, it is what Askin (2022, 210) calls the “disjointedness and digressiveness” of Fuller’s memoir that offers glimpses of the absolute: through these gaps in Fuller’s travelogue, representation is systematically “twisted” and “displaced” in a process reminiscent of the visual technique of anamorphosis (Askin 2022, 215). Indeterminacy is thus not merely a matter of representation (as it generally is in Lovecraft’s horror fiction), but it shapes the meandering form of Fuller’s work, which affords tentative insight beyond human cognition, while more head-on attempts to experience the sublime had failed. The gaps of Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes are a matter of formal strategies, as Askin shows. However, despite the spatial metaphors deployed by Fuller (and developed by Askin’s reading), this formal setup remains tied to the verbal level of the narrative. This chapter’s case studies display gaps that are spatial in a more literal way. They are produced by way of nonverbal (multimodal) strategies which map nonhuman materiality onto the materiality of the text: the physical erasure of words on the page turns the layout into a quasi-pictorial canvas in Foer and Morrison, while distortions are visible in the photographs that close Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. Another important difference is that, unlike the erasures identified by Harman and Askin in Lovecraft and Fuller, the gaps featured in these works do not primarily evoke the “withdrawnness” of nonhuman matter or of the absolute: rather, they highlight human-nonhuman relationality and in particular our ethical responsibilities for the destruction of natural environments, but also for the objectifying violence imposed on certain human subjects or groups. Nevertheless, in line with Askin’s discussion, the works by Foer, Morrison, and Luiselli show that productive engagement with the spectrum of materiality can be tied to formal devices that do not seek to give direct access to the nonhuman. Rather, these devices intimate materiality more obliquely, via the limits and blind spots of Western subjectivity.  See also Askin (2016) for a book-length approach to narrative that focuses on its relevance to a nonhuman-oriented metaphysics.  For further discussion of gaps in weird fiction, with specific emphasis on their formal dimension, see also Caracciolo and Ulstein (2022).

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3.2 Violence and Insight in Tree of Codes and Darkness I mentioned above that the rise of the multimodal novel is frequently understood as an act of resistance against the increasing digitalization of fiction, which dematerializes reading by uncoupling textuality from a particular physical medium and layout. That is also the point of departure for Katherine Hayles’s (2013) discussion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. Hayles argues that Foer’s see-through pages turn the book into a three-dimensional medium that cannot be easily reproduced on the flat surface of a digital screen. This effect depends on the unique cut-out technique with which Foer erased entire sentences from his source text, Schulz’s novella The Street of Crocodiles, leaving only a handful of words per page. For example, a page chosen almost at random reads: “During one of his wanderings, my father stood in the dark, breathing on the waving window curtains, whispering softly: ‘I am not mistaken.’ In the emptiness of evenings, serious and equivocal” (Foer 2010, 47). The sentence continues on the next page. This text is, effectively, a collage of individual words and phrases from the “Tailors’ Dummies” chapter in Celina Wieniewska’s English translation of Schulz’s work (Schulz 1977). The longest unedited portion from Schulz’s text is the phrase “breathing on the waving window curtains,” which in the original refers metaphorically to the “winter night” (1977, 29), not to the narrator’s father. These borrowed words and phrases are separated in Foer’s book by gaps of various lengths, from a couple of words to several lines. They are no mere blank spaces on the page, but actual diecut holes that reveal some of the text on following pages. In fact, the holes on page 47 show text that is physically printed as far as page 59, with the word “abundant” (see Figure 3). The effect of this device is twofold. On the one hand, each page of Foer’s work presents itself as a jumble of unrelated words: the reader must put in some effort to discern the text printed on each individual page in order to arrive at a full sentence like “During one of his wanderings, my father,” and so on. For me at least, this exercise involved lifting each page slightly to make the layers of this palimpsest-like book more easily distinguishable. As the reader manipulates the book, a good deal of care is required by the fragility of these cut-out pages, which Hayles compares to “lace” (2013, 227). On the other hand, the words visible through the book hover around the primary (narrative) meaning of the words printed on the current page, adding emotional nuance (such as the juxtaposition “my father / beautiful” in Figure 3) or announcing themes that will occur much later in the book’s linear progression. The effect of this semantic hovering is reminiscent of what Thierry Groensteen (see, e.g., Groensteen 2007, 111), in the context of comics theory, calls the “general

3.2 Violence and Insight in Tree of Codes and Darkness

Figure 3: Die-cut holes in Tree of Codes (Foer 2010).

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arthrology,” which has to do with the way in which particular panels can enter into a visual dialogue with images that aren’t adjacent to them but rather appear much earlier or later in the comic book.7 The general arthrology is thus an alternative to the sequential progression of narrative (Groensteen’s “restricted arthrology”), and it takes the form of a semantic or thematic network. In a similar way, Foer’s see-through book foregrounds the network of relations between nonadjacent words and forces the reader to go through extra hoops to extrapolate the linear articulation of the narrative. This peculiar structure, which is at the same time conceptual and material, creates unique resistance to digitalization, as Hayles realizes, because it is difficult to remediate the book’s “depth” as well as the experience of leafing through these fragile, and yet thickly layered, pages. As Hayles also notes, Foer’s rewriting of The Street of Crocodiles leaves out a few important characters and motifs that recur in Schulz’s surrealist novella. The narrator’s mother has a much more prominent role than in the original, which revolves around the father’s idiosyncratic philosophy and a number of highly atmospheric yet disturbing locations (including the titular “street of crocodiles”). The metaphysical interests of Schulz’s book are retained, but more emphasis is placed on the young narrator’s own epiphanies and realizations – “moments of being” reminiscent of modernist writing and existentialist philosophy: “I drove small nails into the wall of existence. I have found at last moments,” the narrator remarks in Foer’s book (2010, 128).8 The metaphysical insights experienced by Foer’s narrator also have a more somber side, however. As Foer reminds the reader in the afterword, Schulz – who was Jewish – was killed by a Gestapo officer in his native Drohobycz (present-day Ukraine) during the Nazi occupation in 1941. While there is little overt violence in Tree of Codes, the Holocaust casts a long shadow over the book’s allusively mysterious passages: “The world began to set traps: the taste of food, the patch of sunlight on the floor, the movements of limbs, the acceptance of the experiment of life and submission to it” (2010, 65–66). “Traps” and “submission” read like an ominous reminder of what is to come for Jews like Schulz, a reading that Foer (himself of Eastern European and Jewish descent) spells out in the afterword. Here Foer comments on “Schulz’s lost books, drawings and paintings; those that he would have made had he survived; the millions of other victims, and within them the infinite expressions of infinite thoughts and feelings taking infinite forms” (2010, 138). The holes of Foer’s cut-out technique thus take on new  Groensteen uses the neologism “arthrology” to refer to the way in which something is articulated (from the the Greek “arthron,” articulation; Groensteen 2007, 21).  “Moments of being” is, of course, a phrase borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s writings. See Woolf (1976).

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meaning, they suggest violent erasure (books destroyed or never written) and present the text we are reading, with its bland poetic epiphanies, as a sanitized version of twentieth-century history: the trauma of the Holocaust enters Foer’s work ex negativo – that is, though the portions that have been so prominently and materially left out. At the same time, though, as Foer explains in the coda, the holes in the book recall the Jewish tradition of leaving “small notes of prayer in the cracks of the wall” (2010, 137). These notes, Foer continues, “form a kind of magical, unbound book, conjuring the enormity of the desperation of the world” (2010, 137). Simultaneously evoking traumatic eradication and wishful expectation, the holes are a nonverbal presence-absence that colors the reader’s experience of the narrator’s story, and of its rewriting by Foer. Yet, as the materiality of the book gains tactile and interpretive prominence, it cannot be fully reduced to human meanings and emotions. Already in Schulz’s book, objects play an important role; long descriptions draw attention to the exotic items on display at the “cinnamon shops” (Schulz 1977, 56).9 The mystery that surrounds these objects appears to point beyond ordinary human experience, destabilizing the control of the rational mind. This is where the narrator’s father, with his erratic behavior, serves as a guide to the agential powers of the nonhuman. In one of his monologues, he remarks that “Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation . . . . It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself” (1977, 31). It is hard to think of a more straightforward formulation of New Materialist ideas – this passage could come straight from Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. That insight into the vitality of matter is preserved in Tree of Codes, where the narrator’s father notes, more succinctly than in Schulz’s original (but no less explicitly): “There is no dead matter . . . lifelessness is only a disguise” (2010, 49–50). Could this idea be extended to the cut-out book we are holding in our hand? Surely, the holes reflect Foer’s intentions, his deliberate artistic rewriting of The Street of Crocodiles. But the fragile materiality of this book seems to escape the author’s control through the patterns it creates and the absences it foregrounds. The accumulation of text (visible through the pages) destabilizes the reader’s ability to fully take in the “general arthrology” (in Groensteen’s terminology) of this language – that is, to parse the network of meanings created by juxtapositions as the words on one page come into contact, visually, with words that occur several pages later. Reading the “restricted arthrology” – the linear narrative of Foer’s

 “Cinnamon Shops” is the title of one of the book’s chapters, and also the original Polish title of The Street of Crocodiles.

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protagonist – requires effort and concentration, as I pointed out above: it involves reducing the visual jumble of the book to sequential (and human charactercentric) meaning. The cluttering of words on the page, across several layers of this palimpsest, becomes a stand-in for the vibrant quality of nonhuman materiality, which always exceeds the cognitive frameworks imposed on it by the author and by the book’s audience. Insight into nonhuman materiality thus emerges as the self-conscious physicality of the book encounters an excess of signification, which – created by the unlikely juxtapositions across the pages – the reader cannot hope to fully master or control. “Reality is as thin as paper. Only the small section immediately before us is able to endure” (2010, 92–93), states Foer’s narrator, reminding readers of the material fragility of the book they are reading but also of the thinness of their grasp of reality. Any attempt to bring into focus the real – including the “aliveness” of matter – leaves out significant “sections” of the original, just as Foer’s rewriting condenses Schulz’s novella to barely 4,000 words (Hayles 2013, 227). The material holes in Foer’s book are thus suggestive of the simplifications and reductions of human understanding – simplifications and reductions that pertain to both the traumas of human history and Western thinking about presumably “lifeless” matter. It is a dichotomous understanding of inert matter as opposed to an exclusionary Western subject that has paved the way, historically, for viewing some human groups as disposable. Put otherwise, the instrumentalization of matter and racialized violence against minorities (including Jewish people in Nazi Germany) are closely aligned. Readers of Foer’s book are thus not asked to choose between an interpretation of Tree of Codes focusing on the fascist devastation that pervades the book (despite only becoming explicit in the coda) and one that highlights the materiality of the book and how that materiality eludes human mastery. Both readings are prompted, and yoked together, by Foer’s self-conscious manipulation of the book medium, so that the traumas of human history and assumptions on the passivity of matter are shown to derive from the same objectifying and destructive impulses. Yedda Morrison’s Darkness also uses physical gaps as a commentary on human violence, pointing to both the violence of colonial domination and the devastation wrought upon nonhuman environments. We have seen that Tree of Codes remains legible as a narrative as long as the reader is able to isolate the text on each page from the words appearing on the following pages: like its source text, but in a simplified manner, Tree of Codes focuses on a young narrator’s discoveries about his family and the world. Darkness, by contrast, is a poetic text that tells no recognizable narrative if we abstract it from its source, Joseph Conrad’s modernist novel Heart of Darkness. It is only when read alongside Conrad’s narrative of Marlow’s journey into the Congo that Morrison’s text takes on a degree of narrativity. As Brian McHale puts it, the “interaction between narrative

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and non-narrative organization becomes especially visible whenever textual materials undergo transformation into a different form – for instance, in cases of translation and adaptation” (2010, 27). In the case of Morrison’s Darkness, the adaptation is particularly radical. Morrison took a Signet Classic edition of Heart of Darkness and physically erased the portions that relate to the novel’s characters and events. The few words left on the page point to the natural world (plants, animals, the landscape), or capture patterns of either physical movement or light and darkness. Page 10, for instance, only displays the following words (along with the running head, reduced to “Darkness”): “fresh-water / ebb / run, / river / light / light. / Ocean, / Seas – / earth” (2011, 10; see Figure 4). The rest of the text is hidden under what looks like correction fluid or tape, at least judging from the horizontal streaks that are visibly whiter than the book’s background. If the die-cut holes of Foer’s Tree of Codes suggest machinic precision, Morrison’s physical manipulation of Conrad’s work appears much simpler from a technical standpoint, with irregular shapes and smudges reminiscent of a photocopied document.

Figure 4: Two pages showing erasures, from Darkness (Morrison 2011).

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The artist’s physical action of erasing Conrad’s words is thus visually foregrounded, especially early on in the book, where the reader can easily reconstruct Morrison’s horizontal gestures. The legible presence of the artist’s whiting out clashes with the absence of human characters or actions in the text, which consists in a stream of references to animals and landscapes in motion. In this excerpt, for example, the passage of time is abstracted into a series of vectors and qualities of movement, which seem to consistently deny human presence or even subjectivity: “current / rapid / flickers / crawl / a tree / flash / deep under / surface, / evening / sun / low / daylight – / dusk / dark” (2011, 64). The dynamism of these natural references is accentuated by the material layout of the text, whose density and shape keep changing: the shifting configuration of the words on the page recreates iconically the kinetic and chromatic patterns evoked by Conrad’s descriptions (or rather what is left of it in Morrison’s book). At first glance, Morrison’s depiction of the Congo without humans could almost seem idyllic: “hippo walking, sleeping, / eating, / fishes / lavender / leaves” (2011, 68). Indeed, on her personal website Morrison presents Darkness as a “biocentric” reading of Conrad’s work, “a re-working in which all traces of ‘the human’ are erased.”10 The book is much more complex than that, however, and not just because of the artist’s implied physical presence. For instance, why is the word “heart” so systematically erased (as the running head shows) while the word “bowels” is preserved on page 50, which reads “wilderness / bowels / land”? Is the metaphorical use of “bowels” (as in a comparison between the “wilderness” and “the bowels of the land”) acceptable? And why is “blood” retained on page 111? Ultimately, these questions point to the impossibility of neatly differentiating between human and nonhuman embodiment, and thus of completely eradicating the human from this textual landscape. Despite the radically nonhuman quality of some descriptive passages (such as the “current / rapid / flickers” discussed above), Morrison’s attempts to white out the human are bound to fail – whether through physical traces of the artist’s erasing gesture or the subtle resonances of certain words hinting at the embodiment that humans largely share with nonhuman animals. But the paradoxical nature of Morrison’s operation becomes even more difficult to miss when Darkness is read, as I suggest reading it, as a multimodal commentary on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. According to Jeffrey McCarthy’s ecocritical reading, “Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel dramatizes modernity’s destructive alienation from the natural world against the backdrop of the Congo’s ecological collapse” (2009, 620). It is worth keeping in mind that this ecological collapse – driven by ivory and rubber trade – is indissolubly

 See https://www.yeddamorrison.com/darkness-1.

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linked to the violence of European colonialism in Africa, a violence that Conrad’s novel denounces without resulting in a downright condemnation of racism. I build here on Chinua Achebe’s influential reading of Heart of Darkness, which points to Conrad’s complicities in racist discourse and in the “dehumanization of Africa and Africans” (Achebe 2016, 21). The violence inflicted by Europeans on Africa’s ecosystems goes hand in hand with their dehumanizing treatment of the continent’s inhabitants. Despite the seemingly idyllic qualities of Morrison’s “biocentric” rewriting of Conrad’s work, the erasures visible on the page ultimately point to this traumatic legacy of colonialism. Likewise, the whiting-out gesture performed by Morrison is symbolically linked to European nations’ material and cultural obliteration of African history. Read in this light, the natural patterns captured by Morrison’s poetic rewriting are more significant for what they conceal than for what they display. These descriptions are traversed by horror at the scale of the destruction caused by European colonialism, for instance when the word “ivory” is repeated four times on the same page: “ivory / ivory / earth / ivory. / lake. / river, / ivory / shore, sweeping” (2011, 95). As McCarthy puts it, ivory is “on everyone’s lips in Marlow’s Congo” (2009, 621): its recurring presence in Morrison’s Darkness, even as no human “lips” are referred to, evokes the Europeans’ greed and its destructive consequences. A paradoxical inversion takes place here: by erasing overt human traces from these pages, Morrison hints at the violence of the Europeans’ erasure of both human and nonhuman ways of being in Africa (and elsewhere). The foregrounding of materiality in Morrison’s book thus works against the grain of the affirmation of a biocentric perspective, which is the superficial meaning of this rewriting operation. Far from successfully canceling human presence, the gaps that take center stage in Darkness evoke the moral implication of the West in a disaster that is both humanitarian (for African populations) and ecological. The duality of this highlighting of materiality is strikingly reminiscent of the way in which Foer’s cut-out novel blends human trauma and insight into nonhuman efficacy. Despite the suggestiveness of Morrison’s spatial descriptions, the nonhuman materiality of the African landscape remains mysterious, it hides behind the deletions visible on the page. At the same time, though, the withdrawnness of the nonhuman world does not create a space where a generalized (and complacently sanitized) “human” becomes thinkable beyond the painful particulars of colonial history. Put more simply, Morrison’s self-described biocentric vision doesn’t result in a comforting sense of natural resilience in the face of colonial devastation. On the contrary, the materiality of the book both discloses the autonomy of the nonhuman and underscores the Western reader’s ethical responsibilities toward it, and toward the human societies with which the natural landscape is historically intertwined.

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3.3 Collecting Absence in Lost Children Archive Like Tree of Codes and Darkness, Lost Children Archive is a work that selfconsciously positions itself in literary history: in a “Works Cited” section at the end of the book, the author reconstructs with scholarly flair the “archive that sustains this novel” (2019, 379). Luiselli mentions a range of well-known modernist sources, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Luiselli’s choice of words (“archive”) – not just in the novel’s title but in this passage from the coda – points to the passion for cataloguing that the author shares with the novel’s protagonist and first narrator, a woman in her thirties living in New York City. A sound artist and documentarist, the protagonist is working on a new project reconstructing the lives of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, particularly child migrants. As she collects various notes and reports on child refugees, the protagonist starts “to get lost in the documental labyrinth of my own making . . . . I read and read, long sleepless nights reading about archive fevers, about rebuilding memory in diasporic narratives, about being lost in ‘the ashes’ of the archive” (2019, 23–24). The book presents itself as a multimodal product of “archival fever”: it stages its own materiality through its archival form, which anticipates my discussion of curatorial practices in the “Anthropocene museum” in the next chapter. The chapters are broken into short fragments that read like diary entries, contributions to a growing personal archive of memories and reflections. That archive is also polyphonic: while the first half of the novel is narrated by the female protagonist, her young son takes over in the second half. But perhaps the clearest manifestation of Luiselli’s curatorial approach is contained in seven sections, titled “Box” plus a Roman numeral, that close some of the chapters: in addition to a list of the works referenced in the preceding pages, these sections display a series of photographs, official reports on the death of migrant children in the Arizona desert, annotated maps, and so on. These “Box” sections are also diegetically grounded, because seven storage boxes accompany the protagonist and her family on a road trip from New York City to Arizona. The protagonist’s husband, who is also a sound artist, embarks on a new documentary project, an inventory of sounds inspired by the disappearance of the Apache people. In order to collect these sounds – he calls them “echoes” or “ghosts of Geronimo” – he wants the whole family to drive with him to the region where the last free Native Americans, including Geronimo, lived before surrendering to the US government. Somewhat reluctantly, the narrator accepts, sensing that her husband’s sudden decision to leave New York has major implications for their marriage. She also realizes that driving through New Mexico en route to Arizona could benefit her own documentary project. Her interest in child migration was sparked by the vanishing of the two daughters of a Mexican acquaintance,

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Manuela. While attempting to cross the US border in order to join Manuela in New York City, the two girls are found by Border Patrol and assigned to a detention center in New Mexico, where they mysteriously disappear. Perhaps, the protagonist thinks, traversing the same landscape while driving to Arizona would afford insight into the desperate situation of child migrants like the girls; she might even be able to conduct interviews related to the girls’ disappearance. The family thus leaves New York City with seven storage boxes: four of them containing research materials for the husband’s project, one with the protagonist’s own notes and documents, and one (empty) box for each of the children (a five-yearold girl and a ten-year-old boy). The contents of these boxes are listed and displayed in the numbered “Box” sections that intersperse the chapters. The first half of the novel – narrated by the protagonist – is steeped in anxieties oscillating between the personal and the collective. On a personal level, the protagonist’s marriage appears very much in question: the tensions between the protagonist and her husband are becoming increasingly tangible, and his decision to leave New York City for an extended period probably foreshadows a separation. On a different level, the protagonist’s perception is attuned to the uncertainties of a world that, like her marriage, faces a major existential crisis. The boy has a great deal of questions about his parents’ documentary projects: for whom exactly are they documenting and archiving reality? “For posterity,” answers the mother, adding “for later” as a gloss for the ten-year-old boy. But then she reflects on the frustrating vagueness of that temporal expression: I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. (2019, 103)

The unimaginability of the future is the sign of a larger rupture in the experience of time, which reflects an array of crises including the economic struggles of the Bible Belt states the family is driving through: “The deeper we drive into this land, the more I feel like I’m looking at remains and ruins” (2019, 51).11 Migration itself is, of course, the expression of a global upheaval driven by conflict, inequality, capitalism, and (never named directly in the novel, but certainly relevant to the protagonist’s unease) climate change. The end of the world enters the novel through repeated

 I write about contemporary fiction as a response to these overlapping crises – and the uncertainty they engender – in Caracciolo (2022a).

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quotations from the beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The Road, whose audiobook – despite seeming “a little too rough for the children” (2019, 75) – is played insistently (and of course with more than a hint of authorial irony) every time the car’s sound system is turned on. The impulse of collecting and archiving things is a response to this apocalyptic malaise, but it also underscores the uncertainty of the protagonist’s existential situation in that, as the exchange with her son demonstrates, it remains unclear for whom these archives are meant or what the point of the preservation might be. If time “feels like only an accumulation,” the objects accumulated and enumerated by the characters hold a mirror up to their disorientation: the materiality of these documents, including the materiality of the novel itself, becomes more tangible and poignant because of the failure of systems of values and signification that would be necessary to make sense of the “archive.” Again anticipating my argument in the next chapter, the materiality of the world comes loose from the protagonist’s meaning-making, resonating with the uncertainty that surrounds the family and the unreadability of the future they face. The disorientation voiced by the protagonist in the above-quoted passage becomes more than a metaphor in the second half of the novel. Here the boy, who is also the narrator of this final section, decides to surprise his parents by taking his sister on an adventure in the desert, where the two quickly lose their bearings and have a brush with death from dehydration. The form of the novel here is at its most experimental, particularly in the chapter titled “Echo Canyon,” in which one long sentence weaves in and out of the children’s predicament, linking it – through switches in focalization occurring in mid-sentence – to characters from Elegies for Lost Children, a novel attributed to the fictional Italian author Ella Camposanto. This is, for example, one of the transitions in focalization, from the protagonist’s son to the “lost children” of Camposanto’s Elegies: “I looked through my binoculars and then said yes of course they are, those are the eagles, the same eagles the lost children now see as they walk north into the desert plain, beating muscled wings, threading in and out of black thunderclouds” (2019, 321).12 By disrupting the ontology of the storyworld (and particularly the separation between the two children’s reality and the fiction of Camposanto’s novel), Luiselli’s meandering syntax directly enacts the temporal and existential disorientation that derives from the “absence of future” observed by the protagonist, in the same way as her children’s escapade reenacts the harrowing stories of migration they heard from their mother.

 In the afterword, Luiselli explains that this narrative method was inspired by “Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, wherein the technique of shifting narrative viewpoints via an object moving in the sky was . . . first invented” (2019, 376).

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The children’s adventure also marks a more direct confrontation with the landscape than anywhere else in the novel. The protagonist had previously expressed the wish to listen to “a narrative that may glove itself upon the landscape” (2019, 76) while driving, and McCarthy’s harsh story of postapocalyptic parenthood – The Road – had not made the cut. But as the children become disoriented in the desert, the landscape turns out to be a less than gentle hand for their narrative to enclose, one more reminiscent of McCarthy’s stark survivalism than the protagonist had imagined. The desert has a way of reducing human bodies to inanimate matter, as we read in one of the sections from the Elegies: the migrants’ “few belongings will outlive their corpses . . . : a Bible, a toothbrush, a letter, a picture” (2019, 316) – a description that resonates with one of the photographs from “Box V,” which displays “objects found on migrant trails in the desert” (2019, 250). While these material objects may be collected and catalogued in police reports, the harsh materiality of the desert itself remains ominously elusive: it blends, in both the children’s traumatic experience and the parents’ anguish at their disappearance, with the threatening unreadability of the future. The archiving gesture, as Luiselli’s novel explores it, thus involves a coexistence of two paradoxically divergent stances on materiality. On the one hand, it signals a clinging to the material as a response to looming uncertainty, whereby physical things are shored up against the world’s ruin, to riff on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of Luiselli’s modernist sources. On the other hand, underlying these curatorial practices is the recognition that nonhuman materiality always transcends human classifying or archival impulses, just as the desert threatens to overwhelm and obliterate the protagonist’s children (and the many migrants whose plight they reenact). Put more simply, the novel dwells on the tension between the comforting appropriation of materiality in the face of uncertainty and acknowledgement of the fundamentally uncertain nature of materiality itself. This tension comes to the fore in the following passage, for example: “I suppose that documenting things – through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound recording device – is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world” (2019, 55). The act of documentation involves reaching toward materiality but also recognizing that whatever we accumulate is only impalpable “soot” – a mere trace of an elusive referent. Throughout the novel, the tensions and paradoxes of archiving materiality are probed via the theme of absence. Despite the growing rift in the protagonist’s marriage, she and her husband have one important thing in common: they are both searching after people – the last free Native Americans, missing children – “whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost” (2019, 146). Nor are these isolated absences: on the contrary, absence comes to define the precarity of the family’s existential situation – an “absence of future,” as

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already mentioned. In another significant passage, the narrator describes the world’s “fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure” (2019, 146). These are material erasures, as the language of “debris” and “dust” makes clear, but they are also the product of ideological and physical violence, on Native Americans and on individuals forced to emigrate from their impoverished countries. As in this chapter’s other case studies, the limits of the Western understanding of materiality are directly bound up with exploitative practices directed at human communities (and, certainly, at some communities more than others). The violence of global capitalism is causing the widespread collapse experienced by the protagonist, the painful “erasure” that defines her psychological and moral landscape. The novel oscillates between an auditory and a visual register for capturing these erasures. The protagonist and her husband are sound artists, after all: their experience of the world brims with echoes, auditory traces of absence. In one passage, the protagonist reflects on the differences between sonography and photography: unlike a camera, a microphone, she states, “can sample only fragments and details” (2019, 55). Closer to sound recording than regular photography is perhaps Man Ray’s experimental photographic practice, whereby objects are placed “directly on top of photosensitive paper and then [exposed] to light” (2019, 56). These “rayographs,” the protagonist tells her son, resemble sonography in that they capture “the ghostly traces of objects no longer there, like visual echoes, or like footprints left in the mud by someone who’d passed by long ago” (2019, 56). The photographic series included in the last “Box,” which closes the book, marks another attempt at recreating this strange echo-like absence in a visual medium. These are Polaroid photographs taken by the protagonist’s son, and they are repeatedly referenced in the narrative. The boy complains that the camera “is broken, has a factory error, is probably just a toy camera” (2019, 55). When the protagonist digs up the camera’s instructions, she learns that Polaroid photographs must be kept away from light sources until the chemicals in the film are stable, but placing the pictures between the pages of Camposanto’s Elegies doesn’t fix the issue: the photographs (including those printed at the end of Luiselli’s book) still show overexposed areas and blurry shapes. When the family visits an Apache cemetery with Geronimo’s tomb, for instance, the boy takes a picture of the tombstones. Later, however, he realizes that “the names on the tombstones hadn’t come out at all” (2019, 206): the photograph (see Figure 5) shows a series of blank-looking tombstones, with white patches on the grass surrounding them – afterimages evoking the ghostly presence of more tombstones. In other pictures these erasures consist in white patches or streaks, as in the photograph of a

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Figure 5: Polaroid photograph of an Apache cemetery, from Lost Children Archive (Luiselli 2019).

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freight train scarred by a shaft of light originating from the sky (perhaps the sun?) on top of where the two cars are connected. These visual erasures reinforce the protagonist’s preoccupation with absence while inscribing it into the novel’s multimodal apparatus. As the protagonist puts it in a key passage, the act of documentation can never deliver the fullness of experience but only a “sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, cut out from the moment in which the experience took place” (2019, 102). The visual gaps in the photographs that close the novel demonstrate the inherent gappiness of present-day Western consciousness, riddled as it is with epistemic unknowns and moral blind spots. The theme of absence thus works seamlessly at multiple levels: it is a visible trace of the colonial violence inflicted on the continent’s Indigenous peoples, but it also points to the tragic reshaping of the North American landscape at the hands of capitalism and mass consumerism. Yet, even as they evoke a painful past, these gaps are also the indication of a future that appears radically uncertain in both personal and collective terms. Lastly, and crucially for my argument, the absences that punctuate – thematically and visually – these pages evoke the duality of the protagonist’s negotiation of materiality: how the act of collecting material artifacts both serves as a coping strategy vis-à-vis an unreadable future and underscores the unreadable elusiveness of materiality itself, including the landscape that threatens to upend this family’s life. Luiselli’s work deploys the resources of the polyphonic and multimodal novel to bring these disparate meanings of absence into a fruitful dialogue. ✶✶✶ Foregrounding the materiality of the book medium is a metafictional strategy that can be identified in a number of postmodernist authors, from William Burroughs to Italo Calvino and John Barth.13 The contemporary works I discussed in this chapter use the highlighting of materiality in a fundamentally different way from those postmodernist precedents, however: rather than participating in the playful or satirical disruption of literary conventions, the material gaps that intersperse these books speak to questions of historical responsibility and Western violence toward both certain human communities and the nonhuman world. In dialogue with modernist sources (in all three works, but most prominently in Foer and Morrison) or with the medium of photography (in Luiselli), the foregrounded materiality of print visualizes the blind spots that define the West’s imagination of nonhuman otherness, in the broadest sense of that phrase. Through their affective and ethical ramifications, these absences thus contribute to what Nancy Armstrong (2014) has

 See Patricia Waugh’s (1984) seminal treatment of metafiction, as well as Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987).

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labeled the “affective turn” of contemporary fiction, which involves a reprise of social and political engagement.14 The self-conscious materiality of these works also provides an opportunity for forays into the spectrum of materiality. Through his cut-out method, Foer creates affective and semantic resonances between words (materially juxtaposed by way of page layout) that transcend the author’s or the reader’s control. Morrison’s Darkness erases Conrad’s Heart of Darkness so as to explore the impossibility of shelving the colonial devastation of the African landscape. Luiselli’s blurry photographs point to the ontological instability of a future defined by humanitarian disasters, economic exhaustion, and uncertain relations between human societies and a threatening nonhuman world. These fragmentary and challenging works stage the tensions that define Western notions of materiality. The gap thus proves to be an important site for the narrative negotiation of materiality, one that uses the material form of literary works to evoke the unreadability and inaccessibility of physical things. Contra the commonly voiced objection that New Materialism depoliticizes agency (e.g., Malm 2018), this interrogation of the material doesn’t push away from human responsibility but instead reveals its most tragic shortcomings throughout modern and contemporary history. In the medium of the multimodal novel, the opacity of the nonhuman is yoked together, poignantly and materially, with the brutality of Western practices of colonial, racial, and capitalist domination. None of this is entirely new, of course: scholars in the environmental humanities, including for example Rob Nixon (2011), have repeatedly highlighted the intersection of environmental destruction and the oppression faced by Indigenous communities or societies in the Global South. For her part, Rose (2011) has developed an ethics of connectivity that is attuned to the Western world’s implication in multiple forms of violence. This chapter has underscored literature’s ability to perform this ethical knowledge so as to make its implications graspable in a fully experiential, affective way (unlike philosophy). In the next chapter, the “archive fever” explored by Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive finds another outlet in the space of the museum, whose literary evocation is – I argue – ideally positioned to engage with the spectrum of materiality.

 See also Ameel and Caracciolo (2021) on the differences between postmodernist and contemporary experimentation in fiction.

4 Curating the Anthropocene Museum The plot of Emily St. John Mandel’s postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014) straddles a devastating pandemic known as the Georgia Flu. A famous theater actor named Arthur Leander brings the novel’s vast cast of characters together, post-mortem: all of the main characters are, in one way or another, connected to Arthur. Shortly before a dramatic on-stage death, Arthur gives two issues of the science fiction comic book Dr. Eleven to a young actor, Kirsten. A creation of Arthur’s first wife, Dr. Eleven revolves around a scientist – the titular Dr. Eleven – who ends up stranded on a far-off planet, from where he tries “to forget the sweetness of life on Earth” (Mandel 2014, 105). Indeed, life on Earth loses much of its sweetness after the outbreak causes the collapse of society as we know it in the developed world. Kirsten survives the deadly disease and joins a theatre company, the Traveling Symphony. As Kirsten – now an adult – and her companions roam the waste land that North America has become, the comic book is still with her, a relic of a time that the character barely remembers. Toward the end of the novel, the Symphony joins a group of survivors who have settled down in an abandoned airport. One of the highlights of this Severn City Airport is a “Museum of Civilization” curated by Clark, Arthur’s long-time friend. The collection started, many years before Kirsten’s arrival, with “Clark [placing] his useless iPhone on the top shelf” (2014, 254). As the Severn City Airport community grows, so does the collection: it consists of a large number of objects rendered unusable by the collapse: “impractical shoes, stilettos mostly, beautiful and strange,” car engines, stamps, coins, passports, and so on (2014, 258). Disconnected from the preapocalyptic world that produced them – a world with which the novel’s readers are, unlike Kirsten, closely familiar – these mundane things are subject to what Svetlana Alpers has labeled “museum effect”: “Museums turn cultural materials into art objects. The products of other cultures are made into something that we can look at” (Alpers 1991, 31–32). By entering a museum display, an artifact is uncoupled from its context and becomes caught up in a quintessentially Western dichotomy between subject and object – a dichotomy evoked by the physical distance between the observer and the exhibit. Ultimately, the materiality of the artifact is downplayed as it is understood through the grid of existing cultural assumptions about museums and art. Seen in this light, the Museum of Civilization of Station Eleven represents something of a paradox. By showing iPhones and high-heel shoes in a new and unfamiliar light, it labels them as belonging to “another culture” – the prepandemic one. But on the other hand, the logic of the collection, with its objectification of everyday things, appears to be in continuity with prepandemic culture. As Western civilization https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-004

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collapses, its traces linger in this museum’s objectifying effects. The Museum of Civilization plays a central role in the narrative economy of Mandel’s novel. The plot of Station Eleven is multilinear and forces the reader to juggle different timelines, before and after the pandemic. However, the objects on display at the Museum provide stability; they become “material anchors” (in the sense discussed in chapter 2) for the tension between preapocalyptic and postapocalyptic time on which the novel is founded. The Museum also serves as a spatial hub for the plot, since the Traveling Symphony has been headed there from early on. When the protagonists leave it behind, the plot can end, ambiguously, with a vision of an “awakening world” and “countries on the other side” of the sea (2014, 334). Perhaps most importantly, the Museum’s collection foregrounds an objectified matter that is both severed from utilitarian needs and subservient to human affects: when decontextualized from the practices of consumerism, iPhones and high-heel shoes highlight, nostalgically, what human communities have lost. The novel captures how the Museum’s founder and curator, Clark, “stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required” (2014, 255). Clark’s celebration of “human enterprise” throws into sharper relief the paradox I have already mentioned: even as the pandemic has brought Western modernity to an end, some of its anthropocentric practices continue within the space of the museum.1 The objectification performed by the Severn City Airport collection goes against the grain of contemporary thinking on nonhuman materiality as a site of subversion of ontological hierarchies and binaries that loom large in Western modernity. Mandel’s Museum of Civilization does not afford insight into the “agency” of material things; it erases what Bennett (2010) calls, interchangeably, the “vibrant” quality of matter and its “thing-power,” its capacity to shape reality independently of human intervention. Thus, the Museum of Civilization reaffirms human mastery over material objects, via a nostalgic celebration of technological ingenuity that narrows down engagement with the spectrum of materiality. Yet Mandel is not alone in struggling with nonhuman materiality within the institution of the museum, which has long been associated – in the wake of the Enlightenment – with practices of cataloguing reality and imposing on it an anthropocentric order.2 A case in point are recent curatorial attempts surrounding the

 The museum itself is, after all, “a product of the Western Enlightenment,” as museum scholar Ivan Gaskell (2012, 75) puts it. Also discussing the Museum of Civilization, Pieter Vermeulen echoes this reading of Mandel’s novel: “Station Eleven’s post-pandemic setting serves to strengthen our attachment to the achievements of the modern world” (2020, 153).  This does not imply that all catalogues and taxonomies are anthropocentric, of course. However, in Western archival practices, taxonomic and anthropocentric tendencies have tended to

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“Anthropocene,” a term popularized by Earth scientist Paul Crutzen (2002) for the current geological epoch, which Crutzen defines by pointing to the long-term impact of industrial activities on the planet.3 The Anthropocene, in this sense, becomes synonymous with the ecological crisis humanity is facing – a crisis that, as I have argued in the introduction, calls for a radical rethinking of the meanings of the material. Writing about an exhibition on the Anthropocene at the Deutsches Museum in Munich (2014–2016), Nina Möllers notes that “the quality of uncertainty that surrounds the Anthropocene particularly challenges the traditional perception of museums as agencies and meditators [sic] of knowledge where people can learn how things ‘really are’ and ‘how they work’” (2013, 60). It is hardly a coincidence that Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert Emmett, the editors of a collection titled Future Remains, invoke the premodern cabinet of curiosities, not the Enlightenment museum, as a useful model for their attempt to curate the Anthropocene for posterity. Drawing inspiration from an “Anthropocene Slam” hosted in 2014 by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in collaboration with the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society (Munich) and the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), the editors explain that material objects are uniquely suited to destabilize anthropocentric assumptions (Mitman, Armiero, and Emmett 2018, xi). However, this destabilization requires giving up the rigid objectifying practices of the Enlightenment museum and embracing the fluid metaphysics of the cabinet of curiosities. In the book’s afterword, Libby Robin argues that “museums and artists of the present are returning to cabinets almost like those of the pre-Enlightenment era, as they seek to make sense of the chaotic changes of our present ‘strange times.’ Wunderkammern juxtapose unlikely things” (2018, 205). If the Enlightenment museum aims to reinforce scientific taxonomies, objectifying the material world and depriving it of its “vibrant” quality, the cabinet of curiosities operates by way of surprising parallels that rewrite, at least potentially, the rigid templates of modern Western thinking and invite the audience to confront the spectrum of materiality.

go hand in hand. See Gaskell (2012, 77): “Westerners have distinguished, named, sorted, grouped, gathered, and subsequently deployed many tangible things in order to make knowledge claims about both the things themselves and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them. These activities are the basis of much Western methodical thinking since classical antiquity.”  This description of our geological epoch has ignited extensive debates within both the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences. Many of these debates center on the term itself: whether it should be considered a loose label or enter geology’s official nomenclature, and whether its emphasis on a generalizing “anthropos” doesn’t downplay moral and factual responsibilities that are specific to Western capitalism. See, e.g., Crist (2013).

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The instability that results from these resonances is at the root of the “quality of uncertainty” evoked by Möllers, which reflects one of the main tensions I have identified in the introduction. Such elusive uncertainty concerns, first and foremost, a future that appears illegible and impervious to prediction, with optimistic and pessimistic climate scenarios diverging widely (see Cooper 2010). The uncertainty also reflects the moral tangles of the climate crisis, which is seemingly the product of an abstract, invisible, distributed causality, and yet implicates the daily actions of all individuals in the developed world: no one in particular is responsible for climate change in the sense that they single-handedly “caused” it, and yet we are all implicated in extractive and greenhouse gas-emitting practices (through, for instance, our travel or consumerist habits). Because of this fundamental uncertainty, which is both factual and ethical, the Anthropocene becomes a challenging starting point for an exhibition: the museum has to reinvent itself beyond its long-standing reputation as a “classifying house,” to quote P. J. P. Whitehead’s (1971, 50) apt description of the museum in the post-Enlightenment tradition. More specifically, Möllers argues that rising to Anthropocenic challenges in a museum environment requires a reconsideration of the status of things as the building block of an exhibition. The “traditionally retrospective perspective” of museums has to give way to a more nuanced framing of artifacts as “simultaneously close and remote, present in the here and now while also anchored in the past, and embedded in a global network of things while being charged with personal and local meaning” (2013, 58 and 61). No longer objectified and caught up in Western dichotomies, the museum artifact thus becomes a material anchor for the complexity of the Anthropocene, with its enmeshment of human agency, historically specific responsibilities, and nonhuman materiality (“vibrant matter”).4 As I argue in more detail in Narrating the Mesh (2021a), the interaction of human and nonhuman factors in times of climate crisis is a source of considerable conceptual and ethical complexity, which means (among other things) that the Anthropocene cannot be fully encapsulated by linear, teleological narratives. The complexity of the Anthropocene also brings in a great deal of uncertainty, in that we cannot fully know or predict the consequences of our actions – and we are on thin moral ice when we make decisions that may impact the future of human societies and nonhuman species. The Anthropocene museum as Möllers imagines it serves as a productive space for staging these tensions. My goal in this chapter is to explore contemporary literature that embraces a similarly innovative approach to the museum as an institution. In the next section, I

 As already mentioned in chapter 2, the metaphor of the “mesh” for human-nonhuman interconnection was introduced by Morton (2010).

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start by contrasting the museum with another trope identified by Pieter Vermeulen (2017) in a discussion of Anthropocene fiction, the “future reader” who looks back on the mistakes and planetary impact of present-day societies.5 Both the future reader and the Anthropocene museum illustrate the challenges involved in capturing the climate crisis in literary form. I then turn to two contemporary works that deploy the museum trope effectively: Flights (2007), by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and The Octopus Museum (2019), by American poet Brenda Shaughnessy. These are experimental works that feature a plurality of independent narrative strands (in Flights) or a narrative frame (in The Octopus Museum), while cross-fertilizing story with essayistic and poetic writing, respectively. Both works represent a response to influential arguments on the novel’s inability to come to terms with the spatiotemporal scale and moral intricacies of the climate crisis. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh discusses “the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction” (2016, 9). However, as scholars have noted, Ghosh bases his claims on an unreasonably narrow definition of serious fiction, coinciding largely with the realist novel.6 If we look beyond literary realism, we encounter a variety of forms of writing that engage productively with the climate crisis by drawing on the vocabulary and affective registers of science, weird, or dystopian fiction.7 Tokarczuk’s and Shaughnessy’s works exemplify an alternative way of confronting the Anthropocene through literary form, one based primarily on the cross-fertilization of narrative with nonnarrative genres such as the essay and poetry.8 Tokarczuk and Shaughnessy are not alone in this respect: experimental works by other contemporary writers such as Ben Marcus (e.g., The Age of Wire and String [1995]) and Thalia Field (whose Bird Lovers, Backyard [2010] features a natural history museum) also address the climate crisis via an amalgam of genres that resists novelistic templates. In this way, these writings show that disrupting the linearity of narrative – particularly as the realist novel has practiced it – is instrumental in coming to grips with the complexities of the Anthropocene. It is worth stressing that Mandel’s Station Eleven, from which I took my cue in this chapter, also deploys a significant degree of nonlinearity, through frequent flashbacks to the preapocalyptic period.9 My criticism focuses on the Museum of Civilization and how its nostalgic affect objectifies the nonhuman and affirms

 For a comprehensive survey of Anthropocene fiction, see Trexler (2015).  See, for example, Ursula Heise’s (2018) review of Ghosh’s book.  I will come back to weird fiction in chapter 7.  For more on literary form and the Anthropocene, see Vermeulen (2020) and Caracciolo (2021a).  Importantly, the novel’s multilinear plot tracks a physical object, the Dr. Eleven comic book, which serves as a material anchor for the progression, as discussed in chapter 2.

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anthropocentric hierarchies – a point to which I will return in chapter 8 in discussing a nostalgic space par excellence, the ruins. Other aspects of Mandel’s novel may well work against this celebration of technological society, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter, which engages primarily with the museum as a spatial figure for the negotiation of materiality. As we shall see, Flights and The Octopus Museum appeal to a wider range of affects than the Museum of Civilization in Station Eleven does; they do not objectify museum items but rather reveal their thing-power. In doing so, I argue, these works offer a highly sophisticated account of the tensions and uncertainties that mark the spectrum of materiality in times of climate crisis.

4.1 A Tale of Two Tropes Also contending with contemporary literature’s figurations of the Anthropocene, Pieter Vermeulen (2017) explores a trope that intersects with my discussion of Anthropocene museums: that of the “future reader.” Commenting on Max Brooks’s novel World War Z and The Collapse of Western Civilization, a fictional thought experiment by two historians of science, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Vermeulen argues that both works adopt an “affectively overdetermined posthumous dimension” (2017, 877): they imagine a survivor who looks back on the present and particularly on humanity’s shocking inability to avoid climate catastrophe. This survivor is also a “reader,” of diaries and other textual materials (in World War Z) and of the nonverbal traces left by humanity in the geological record (in The Collapse of Western Civilization). Of course, as Vermeulen also notes, this posthuman narrative by a human figure has a distinctly paradoxical quality, in that humanity is both erased and implicated by the act of storytelling. The Anthropocene museum trope shares the retrospective setup of the future reader: it is a collection of artifacts (which may well include textual artifacts) that provide an affective perspective on human society as we – contemporary literature’s flesh-and-blood readers – know it. Yet the Anthropocene museum differs from the future reader trope in significant ways, which account for the intense formal experimentation of the works I will consider below. First, if the future reader foregrounds and problematizes human subjectivity through the narrator’s anthropomorphic voice, the museum is situated at the crossroads of human subjectivity and nonhuman materiality. As my discussion of the Museum of Broken Relationships in the introduction has highlighted, a museum is a collection of things that may reflect human categories and taxonomies, particularly those of Western modernity, from which the museum developed as an institution. In Station Eleven, this setup is clearly illustrated by the objectification of the collected items, which take on nostalgic value – by

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elevating human ingenuity – as soon as they lose their utilitarian function. But material things can also push in the opposite direction, away from an anthropocentric mindset and toward an insight into the deep entanglement of human cultures and nonhuman realities – an entanglement within which things can display autonomy and efficacy, withdrawing from human cognition. As I mentioned in the introduction, ecocritics Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann have translated New Materialist insights into an approach to literature attuned to “intermingling [human and nonhuman] agencies and forces that persist and change over eons, producing new forms, bodies, and natures” (2014a, 1). Visions of the Anthropocene museum in contemporary literature can deploy and probe objects against the grain of their instrumental function, thus bringing out the more-than-human “forms, bodies, and nature” highlighted by Iovino and Oppermann. The exhibits elude or challenge the curator’s taxonomical principles, revealing new conceptual and affective connections beyond the human-scale world – connections that speak to the vibrant quality or inaccessibility of the material. In this chapter’s case studies, this negotiation of the spectrum of materiality is brought home either by turning the human body into a museum display that is transcorporeally connected to external reality (in Flights) or by treating the physical space of the text as a record of human emotions apprehended through a nonhuman vantage point (in The Octopus Museum). While the latter strategy has a good deal in common with Vermeulen’s future reader trope, Shaughnessy makes clear that the “reader” in question is anything but a human or even anthropomorphic reader, thus complicating the retrospectivity of the museum. Another important difference is that, if the future reader refers to a narrative situation that favors posthuman temporality, the Anthropocene museum has a more marked spatial footprint: within the museum, a particular temporal relationship between the visitor and the collected items is grounded in physical space. However, while traditional ways of thinking about museum collections – indebted to a nineteenth-century episteme – aimed to “fix” the visitor’s spatiotemporal understanding of the exhibits along rigidly taxonomical lines, the challenge of putting together a collection on the Anthropocene (as highlighted by Möllers and the Future Remains volume) has to do with conveying the instability of human-nonhuman relations in times of anthropogenic climate change. Morton’s (2013) already mentioned concept of “hyperobject” is pertinent here. Ubiquitous materials such as plastic will survive us and become physically embedded in the Earth’s landscape, for example in an oceanic garbage patch thousands of miles away from where it was discarded. A simple plastic bottle is thus a hyperobject implicated in spatiotemporal scales that far transcend the manageable, mundane associations of the word “thing.” This strange conflation of the everyday life of human communities and their long-term impact on the planet destabilizes the spatiotemporal setup of the

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museum, calling for new ways of visualizing the entanglement of the individual items on display, the visitor, and the planetary scale. In contemporary literature, the Anthropocene museum trope exposes this entanglement by using the imagined setting of the museum as a canvas to trace more abstract relations in space and time. The following passage about the snow globe on display at Mandel’s Museum of Civilization is exemplary: Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean. (2014, 255)

Adopting a descriptive pace, the passage marks an abrupt shift in space and time from the setting of the Museum of Civilization to the many agents involved in designing and producing this simple object associated with childlike wonder. Mandel displaces that wonder from the object itself to its material history, which straddles continents and pandemic time (because the snowball predates the outbreak). The snowball thus becomes something akin to a hyperobject existing on multiple scales of reality within a globally connected world. As already discussed above, Mandel’s focus remains on the human intentions and actions involved in the snowball’s history: the excerpt only mentions in passing, but does not foreground, the way in which the human-scale world is shaped by things such as “sheets of plastic,” “conveyer belts,” and the transoceanic routes of container ships. But the descriptive passage nevertheless succeeds in connecting the local setting of the Museum of Civilization to the planetary stage of this snowball’s history, via a zooming-out effect. This strategic use of museum space and of the material items embedded within it recalls what video game scholars discuss under the heading of “environmental storytelling” (Jenkins 2004): the player’s interactions with the game environment enrich and extend the plot through letters, audio tapes, and other narratively significant objects.10 While Mandel’s snowball cannot be manipulated directly by readers, the passage succeeds in evoking the way in which material things, including the snowball, branch out into global connections. This is an example of how literary form can employ the space of the museum to stage Anthropocenic relations in a globalized world. However, if Mandel’s Museum of Civilization remains mostly within anthropocentric confines, Tokarczuk’s

 I will return to the topic of environmental storytelling in video games in chapter 6.

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and Shaughnessy’s experiments unsettle the centrality of the human by foregrounding things that are fundamentally elusive, unknowable, and inherently active. The Anthropocene museum trope also creates a tension between narrative and conceptual categories that are not narratively organized. Museum collections are brought together by specific knowledge practices (a natural history museum) or particular value attributions (an art museum) – not, or at least not primarily, by the temporal, causal, and psychological sequentiality of story.11 Thus, writing about museums in American culture, Steven Conn (2000, 21) argues that the “ideal museum builders hoped to achieve was both to impose a stability and order on bodies of knowledge and to produce changes in that knowledge.” That “order” is of a systematic, synchronic nature – not the affective sequencing that comes with story. This synchronic organization is reminiscent of textual forms such as the list or the catalogue, and indeed the work of curating and presenting a museum collection involves a large number of list-like documents (catalogues, archival records, etc.) that are fundamentally non-narrative.12 Writing about species extinction, Ursula Heise (2016, Ch. 2) also opposes the enumerative form of biodiversity databases (such as the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species) to the more centralized, teleological organization of narrative. The database, arguably, inherits the Enlightenment museum’s taxonomic ambitions, but may be traversed by subtle strands of narrative, as Heise shows. As a space of tension between cataloguing and narrativity, the Anthropocene museum promises to disrupt the central role narrative currently plays in literary practices (largely, through the hegemony of the novel – a quintessentially narrative genre – within the contemporary literary landscape). In Mandel’s Station Eleven, that disruption is short-lived and coincides with a descriptive digression reconstructing the history of one of the items on display, the snowball. The challenge to narrative becomes more radical in Tokarczuk’s and Shaughnessy’s works, which are defined by their dialogue with two non-narrative genres, the essay and lyric poetry. Through this dialogue, Tokarczuk and Shaughnessy are able to fully leverage the Anthropocene museum trope toward insight into the unruliness (uncertainty, autonomy, vibrancy) of the material.

 Of course, there are exceptions: history museums display artifacts that point to temporally and causally organized events, so the audience may understand the collection as narrative-like (and the text accompanying the exhibition may even highlight these narrative qualities).  Scholarship on lists in literature and narrative has grown considerably in recent times. See Belknap (2000) and Von Contzen (2018).

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4.2 “The Human Body Joining within Itself Everything with Everything”: Flights “I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest” (Tokarczuk 2018, 9). This line, lifted from the early pages of Flights, captures perfectly the philosophy behind the book’s composition. Flights is not a novel with a clear-cut plotline: rather, the textual focus is in itself a “thing in motion.” This is not to say that story plays no role at all in Tokarczuk’s work: some of the sections pick up where previous ones left off, creating a handful of self-contained narrative arcs. For instance, a number of sections entitled “Kunicki” chronicle the eponymous character’s ordeal when his wife and son disappear, all of a sudden, during a holiday in Croatia. Other fragments are essayistic in tone, the narratorial I fusing with an authorial persona. At first glance, this instability in voice and focus could be said to recreate what William James famously called the “flights and perchings” of consciousness, with the meandering form of the essay channeling the vagaries of a mind perpetually “in motion” (1890, 243). This reference to the philosophy of mind is certainly not irrelevant, given Tokarczuk’s training as a psychologist and considering also that several of the book’s sections develop, with more than a hint of irony, a discipline known as “travel psychology.” Yet the “things in motion” in Tokarczuk’s Flights are not just human subjects. The text invites readers to take the word “thing” in this section’s opening line in a very literal sense. Some of the things that circulate in the book are material artifacts: a short insert titled “Things Not Made by Human Hands” discusses “sarira” (Buddhist) relics that allegedly materialize out of nothing, without human intervention – a rather radical form of nonhuman agency (Tokarczuk 2018, 272–273). Mostly, however, the text foregrounds anatomical “things” that originated in a living human body and acquired autonomy through careful preservation efforts. The book’s obsession with anatomical parts ranges from seventeenth-century Flemish physician Philip Verheyen to the contemporary plastination techniques of the fictional Dr. Blau (the protagonist of another narrative strand in Tokarczuk’s work). Anatomical museums are a constant presence: an appendix, titled “Itinerarium,” lists all the museums mentioned, often in passing, in the text, and they trace an imaginary geography linking Vienna to Philadelphia, Leiden to Saint Petersburg. The human body is thus turned into a museum exhibit, but this is no straightforward objectification of the body, at least if we take the word “objectification” as implying a Cartesian binary of perceiving (human) subject and perceived (inanimate)

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object.13 Rather, the preserved body involves the living subject through an insistent affect of enchantment and mystery – hence the uncertainty that surrounds these anatomical objects: “The body is something absolutely mysterious,” writes Verheyen (2018, 216). Further, the preserved body isn’t monolithic and lifeless but rather retains the patterned complexity and suppleness of the original, as in a scene in which Dr. Blau compares an embalmed cat to a “fragile piece of origami” and notes with surprise that its eyelid “was soft and gave under his finger” (2018, 163). Read in this light, the anatomical exhibitions that punctuate the pages of Flights are more closely reminiscent of the early modern cabinets of curiosities invoked by the editors of Future Remains (Mitman, Armiero, and Emmett 2018) than of nineteenth-century museums. These exhibitions do not impose a top-down, taxonomical order, but rather evoke a Renaissance episteme based on unstable metaphysical correspondences between the nonhuman and the human world.14 Discussing the logic of the early modern Wunderkammer in contradistinction to the post-Enlightenment museum, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill writes that the function of the former “was to enable the interpretation and reinterpretation of the similitudes, made manifest in the collections, which demonstrated how Art and Nature echoed each other” (1992, 13). Tokarczuk’s metaphorical language is the main conduit for these similitudes in Flights. On the one hand, the human body is brought out in the open, turned into a visible landscape. The protagonist of one of the book’s narrative arcs, a Polish biologist based in Australia, watches an in-flight “movie about the fantastic voyage of several brave scientists . . . headed into a patient’s body. She watches the screen without headphones, loves the spectacular photography – settings that resemble the bottom of the ocean, the crimson corridors of blood vessels, the pulse of constricting arteries, and inside these the bellicose lymphocytes like visitors from outer space” (Tokarczuk 2018, 284). This science fiction cliché of the voyage into the human body is revitalized by metaphors that flow in the opposite direction: instead of “scaling up” the microcosm of the human body, they zoom out to portray the planet itself as a macroscopic body of sorts. In another essayistic passage, travelers are presented as “the individual nerve impulses of the world” (2018, 185), as if the displacement of human beings served the same function as synaptic connections in the brain. The geography of the Peloponnese is compared to “the shape of a great maternal hand, not a human one, that is dipping into the water to check if the temperature is right for a bath” (2018, 372). These metaphors

 I will expand on this idea of objectification in the following chapter, where one of my examples – the film Swiss Army Man (Kwan and Scheinert 2016) – enacts a paradoxical objectification of the body in order to disclose its nonhuman materiality.  See Michel Foucault’s seminal discussion in chapter 2 of The Order of Things (1971) for an articulation of this Renaissance worldview.

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and similes work toward stitching together the human body and nonhuman realities that appear distant from the domain of visible bodies, and yet share their deep-rooted, affective materiality: the physical connectivity of movement, the “great maternal hand, not a human one,” caring for its unidentified child.15 Tokarczuk’s metaphorical language thus bridges the gap between the lived, phenomenological body and what Daisy Hildyard (2017) has called the “second body.” An extension of the “carbon footprint” metaphor, Hildyard’s second body captures how our daily actions and decisions have an indirect, but potentially devastating, effect on the global scale, coalescing into a planetary body. However, if our primary body is directly available in experience, the second body tends to remain phenomenologically distant and inaccessible. By exposing the normally invisible interior of the human body through recurrent patterns of metaphors and similes, Tokarczuk connects it to the abstract reality of our planetary impact. Through this interplay of the inner and the outer, the second body acquires experiential substance: we see ourselves as “things in motion” on a planetary body with which our physical bodies are intimately, if secretly, interlinked. It cannot be a coincidence, in this sense, that the biologist who watches the science fiction film is also an environmental activist and that during a mid-flight reverie she envisions how “life on this planet gets developed by some powerful force contained in every atom of organic matter” (Tokarczuk 2018, 293). Yet this material “force” remains uncertain and unknowable, like the preserved body parts through which it finds expression in the book. Central to the metaphorical meshing together of first and second body is a particular trope, which as noted above recurs throughout Flights: the premodern cabinet of curiosity. Through the correspondences it establishes between nonhuman materiality, human artifacts, and the body, the cabinet sidesteps the “classifying house” of modernity and becomes a blueprint for the Anthropocene museum. The cabinet’s logic of corporeal interconnection is clearly articulated by the narrator when she asks: “Maybe there exists some sort of reflection of the great and the small, the human body joining within itself everything with everything – stories and heroes, gods and animals, the order of plants and the harmony of minerals?” (2018, 194). Experiencing the interior of the body (“within itself”) becomes a means of intuiting the linkage (“joining . . . everything with everything”) of cultural practices and nonhuman entities, the divine and the material. That linkage has to do, primarily, with the way in which the displacement of human bodies (including, of course, their embodied imagination) reflects the flux of reality: everything moves in Tokarczuk’s work, and movement becomes the very foundation for materiality

 For more on how metaphorical language can bridge scales of reality, see also Caracciolo (2021a, Ch. 6).

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(recall the “thing in motion” from which I took my cue). The cabinet of curiosities creates a metaphorical traffic in which the human body is transcorporeally extended into the nonhuman world, but the exact nature of their entanglement is shrouded in mystery and clashes with scientific claims to absolute certainty.16 One of the manifestations of this mystery is that, in Flights, the body becomes the site of a paradoxical tension, which mirrors the formal workings of Tokarczuk’s prose and underlies the book’s negotiation of the spectrum of materiality. The body is an element that “joins,” but it is also deeply fragmented and thus requires careful work of preservation. The book itself is divided into a plurality of figures and voices that are “flawed, defective, broken,” like the body itself (2018, 22). Tokarczuk writes in fragments, yet she is also drawn to completeness, like the Flemish scientist Verheyen who, experiencing phantom pain after the loss of his left leg, wonders: “Why do I feel this lack, sense this absence? Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole?” (2018, 219). The “whole” remains out of sight in Flights, at least in the sense of narratively satisfying teleology and closure. And yet, the fragmented form of the book – divided as it is between narrative and essayistic aspirations – manages to channel the gaps of our Anthropocenic reality more effectively than the focused geometry of a novel.17 Like Verheyen, the scientists we encounter experience metaphysical longings that can only be addressed through the observation and preservation of materiality, including – but not limited to – the materiality of the human body. These are, in other words, scientists-curators of an Anthropocene museum that dwells in the disconnect between personal and planetary scales of reality, even as it attempts to bring them together by way of bodily, material resonances.18 Tokarczuk’s experimental language employs literary form to perform a similarly attentive curation of a fragmented, uncertain reality. The breakdown of narrative linearity is essential to that operation.

 “Transcorporeality” is Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) term for phenomena, such as environmental disease, that challenge clear boundaries between the body and the seemingly external world.  See also Caracciolo (2022b, Ch. 4), where I write about the encounter between storytelling and essayistic discourse and its promise vis-à-vis narrative engagements with the ecological crisis.  For more on scalar thinking and the Anthropocene, see Woods (2014).

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4.3 “I Didn’t Think We Wrote Much Poetry Anymore”: The Octopus Museum The curators of Shaughnessy’s titular “octopus museum” are not scientists, at least not in the usual sense of the word. One of the many ironies of Shaughnessy’s collection is that octopuses are not the centerpiece of the exhibit, as the title might suggest at first glance, but its curators. The inspiration of Shaughnessy’s collection is postapocalyptic, and the apocalypse is plainly environmental in origin: the world has been taken over by octopuses, or more accurately by Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords (COO in short), who “came ashore” when their “vast home of millions of years [was] destroyed” (2019, 15), with a clear reference to the devastating impact of human activities on the Earth’s oceans. This postapocalyptic world frames Shaughnessy’s poems – many of them in prose – and evokes a tangible setting and cast of characters, such as the “family on the run” of the volume’s last poem (and other poems including “Nest” and “Blueberries for Cal”). This setup lends The Octopus Museum an unusual degree of narrativity for a poetry collection.19 In the acknowledgments that close the volume, Shaughnessy even refers to Mandel’s Station Eleven as a source of inspiration. Yet, if Mandel’s Museum of Civilization reaffirms a sense of wonder, tinged by nostalgia, at human ingenuity, Shaughnessy’s octopus museum is a much stranger creature. First, the octopus museum is less a physical space than a metaphorical template for thinking about the formal organization and textual materials of the volume. A “Visitor’s Guide to the OM [octopus museum] Exhibits,” which prefaces the poems, doubles as a table of contents. After the introductory poem “Identity & Community (There is No ‘I’ in ‘Sea’),” the Visitor’s Guide announces five “exhibition spaces”: “Gallery of a Dreaming Species,” a “Special Collection” titled “As They Were,” “‘To Serve Man’: Rituals of the Late Anthropocene Colony,” “Found Objects/Lost Subjects: A Retrospective,” and, finally, the “Permanent Collection: Archive of Pre-Existing Conditions” (2019, ix–xi). A note prefixed to this last section spells out what many of the poems had suggested obliquely: while the voices represented throughout the collection are – mostly – human ones, the work of collecting and curating these disparate “exhibits” was carried out by the “Department of Human Studies” of an octopus community or “CephaloOctopodal Pod” (COP). Thus, if Shaughnessy’s Anthropocene museum implicates a “future reader” in Vermeulen’s sense, this reader isn’t aligned with a human mind but with a nonhuman one. Still, the curators hasten to point out in the same note to

 This, of course, assumes a privileged link between poetry and the lyric, which is in some ways a problematic generalization. For more on narrative in poetry, see McHale (2009; 2010).

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“Permanent Collection” that they “worked within [human] language and wielded [human] tools in order to better understand [our species’] mysteries” (2019, 57). The ironic inversion of perspective is inescapable here: octopuses look at humans with the same mix of respect for their intelligence and mystery that we associate with these invertebrates. Where human beings clearly fall short of their “overlords,” however, is in the latter’s strong sense of community: “Individual Octopodes don’t live long (between six months and two years) but as a species we have extensive, meshed, intergenerational memories. Humans live longer but each generation forgets what was previously learned” (2019, 49). This emphasis on collectivity stands in stark contrast to the alienation that emerges from the collection’s first poem, aptly titled “Identity & Community,” which centers on a human I aspiring, but finding herself unable, to join a group of women swimming in the ocean. “They splash away from me – they’re their pod. People are alien” (2019, 3), is the lyric I’s laconic comment. The poem closes with the words: “Don’t try to remember this. Don’t document it” (2019, 3). Yet the octopuses obviously ignore that injunction, because the whole collection represents an attempt to catalogue – tentatively and unsystematically – the anxieties and hesitations of a society approaching a climate tipping point. In that way, the octopuses sever the link between cataloguing and anthropocentrism that has long defined curatorial practices after the Enlightenment. Some of the feelings on display overturn the conventional affective repertoire of postapocalyptic fiction, including Mandel’s nostalgic longing for a preapocalyptic time. In a poem titled “There Was No Before,” Shaughnessy hints at the “black children . . . killed in broad daylight, in parks and streets and in houses and churches and cars” and adds, wryly, “This was Before, and we’re almost certain it is the same now as Before” (2019, 13). The past, which is the book’s readers’ present, turns out to be as apocalyptic as the octopus-dominated “now.” The distinction before pre- and postapocalyptic time collapses, suggesting that the news media’s bias toward spectacular catastrophes (like Mandel’s pandemic) oversimplifies the pace and scope of both social inequalities and environmental devastation, which are already at work in today’s world. Equally revealing are the “Letters from the Elders” in the section “Found Objects/Lost Subjects.” Here Ned Grimley-Groves, who introduces himself as the mayor of a small town in New Hampshire, starts by lamenting: “We thought we were throwing [plastic] ‘away’ until ‘away’ threw itself back at us” (2019, 46). In a later letter, he points out that “most species evolve to live; we devolved to evil.” Yet he goes on to explain that “hope for this earth to go on after we’re gone is the only kind of love left” (2019, 51). The letter concludes:

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That some form of hope can stay, with or without us. And if not, maybe the Octopodes will care to find some form to remember us by. In case that is the case, I am collecting fragments – scraps I find here and there in script or print, among the debris, mostly anonymous ephemera and some poetry, which surprises me. I didn’t think we wrote much poetry anymore. (2019, 51)

That passage provides a key for reading Shaughnessy’s collection. The repetition of the word “form” in the quotation’s first two sentences implies that the patterns of textuality – literary style and genre – might be central to the task of remembering, and being remembered, in Anthropocenic times. The form the character singles out is the fragment, in a self-reflexive commentary on the anonymous “debris” of sensations and emotions collected in this Octopus Museum. The contrast with the Museum of Civilization couldn’t be sharper: while Mandel’s museum offers a nostalgic celebration of Western society, the Octopus Museum diminishes the human by way of humorous modesty (“I didn’t think we wrote much poetry anymore”).20 Only by displaying fragile and uncertain fragments of humanity can the collection draw closer to a hopeful outlook on the future, “with or without us.” Shaughnessy’s success in diminishing humanity is tied to a pointed denial of traditional lyric form, through a plurality of characters and agencies (including, of course, the octopuses’ curation of this collection) that significantly trouble the relationship between the reader and the lyric I. Besides the narrative framing, Shaughnessy’s work, like Tokarczuk’s, is rich in essayistic and satirical echoes, from the endless series of questions in “Queries: How Do We Define People?” to the mock green marketing in “Our Beloved Infinite Crapulence”: “I . . . I love this local company, especially because for every order – and this is so cool – they make a tax-deductible contribution to honor and support the world-famous Pacific Garbage Patch, in your name” (2019, 45). Even the aphorism makes its way into the collection, in a two-line poem titled “Map of Itself”: “The idea of travel. / The very idea” (2019, 39). If the fragments of this Octopus Museum offer a portrayal of contemporary society, it is a deeply uneven picture traversed by multiple rifts and tensions, as the mingling of genres and affective registers suggests. This diversity complicates, and enriches, both the lyric form and the narrative inspiration of the collection. In “Our Family on the Run,” one of the book’s most obviously postapocalyptic poems, the speaker mentions that “If you read the stories, you’re supposed to find abandoned photo albums, suitcases, babies. The useless things cut out by survival’s swift knife. Dead weight, long gone” (2019, 68). The scraps collected in The Octopus Museum are emphatically no survivalist’s material, either. In “stories” (by which Shaughnessy presumably refers to conventional

 I am indebted here to Jon Hegglund’s (2021) discussion of the “partially human.”

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postapocalyptic fictions), there is no room for the rich repertoire of styles and affects we encounter in these pages, no time or patience for irony or a belittled humanity. All of the Octopus Museum’s exhibits would be “dead weight,” and yet – Shaughnessy intimates – their value lies in their ability to capture the strange mixture of despair and vivacity that marks our Anthropocenic times. If Flights revolves around the mysterious uncertainty of the human body – how it disrupts dichotomies between living matter and the inanimate world – The Octopus Museum uses a collage of textual materials to locate precariousness within an affective realm. More specifically, the materiality that comes most forcefully to the fore in Shaughnessy’s work isn’t that of the human body, but the experiential and affective thickness of language itself in its numerous forms and uses (a theme we have already encountered in the previous chapter). A great deal of uncertainty surrounds the choice and juxtaposition of these textual fragments, which reflect the elusive octopus curators’ attempts to “work within [human] language.” In this Octopus Museum, no definite knowledge of our species (or of octopus alterity) is imparted: instead, only unanswerable questions, longings, and grievances are voiced. Mostly, we end up where we started: “people,” not unlike octopuses, “are alien” (2019, 3), as the book’s first poem submits. But even that tenuous conclusion can yield insight into humanity’s affective predicament as we face climate devastation. This unsystematic Anthropocene museum, which shapes the book’s organization from its very title and table of contents, uses the resources of form to offer perspective on the uncertainty that defines our relationship with materiality as the “world-famous Pacific Garbage Patch,” along with many other environmental emergencies, spirals out of control. In that process, language itself takes on more-than-human agency, since the octopus-curated fragments display a mosaic of human emotions without embracing individuality. After all, as Ned Grimley-Groves notes in one of the Letters from the Elders, octopuses are “an ink species. They overwrote us” (2019, 50). The second part of that characterization may not be entirely fair, because humanity does come through in these pages. But it is a diminished humanity, and it is filtered through intense engagement with materiality. ✶✶✶ Throughout this chapter, the Museum of Civilization in Mandel’s Station Eleven has served as a foil to Tokarczuk’s and Shaughnessy’s more experimental engagement with the museum as a space to stage the tensions of materiality in times of climate crisis. The Museum of Civilization elevates technological society by investing its objects with an affective value (primarily, nostalgia) that tends to elide the efficacy of nonhuman things. By contrast, Tokarczuk’s cabinets of curiosities and Shaughnessy’s Octopus Museum present a complex image of human-nonhuman entanglement, one that negotiates the spectrum of materiality much more fully than Mandel’s Museum:

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instead of nostalgically imposing an anthropocentric grid, these museums bring out the productive uncertainty of the material. Tokarczuk explores the materiality of the human body through multiple strands of metaphorical language, which create a sense of enchantment as well as transcorporeal linkage between human life and nonhuman environments. Tokarczuk’s treatment of the body steers clear of objectification: the body is neither turned into an inert object nor held up for aesthetic contemplation; on the contrary, it remains hypnotically vibrant and epistemologically uncertain even after biological death. The preservation activities in which the book’s scientists engage do not aim to “fix” the body into lifeless matter, but to retain its fluidity, which undermines the binaries of Western thinking (particularly subject vs. object, but also animate vs. inanimate, alive vs. dead, etc.). Harking back to the experimentations of the early modern period, these scientists are turned into curators of interconnections that defy conceptual dichotomies between human life and “mere” matter. The cabinet of curiosity thus offers inspiration for an Anthropocene museum in which the exhibits do not reinforce existing structures of knowledge but rather reveal the uncertainties and physical as well as moral entanglements of living in times of altered relationality between the human and the nonhuman. Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker (2014, 559) have argued that “To bring climate change home . . . entails reconfiguring our spatial and temporal relations to the weather-world and cultivating an imaginary where our bodies are makers [sic], transfer points, and sensors of the ‘climate change’ from which we might otherwise feel to distant.” By revisiting a Renaissance episteme of correspondences across the human-nonhuman divide, Tokarczuk takes concrete steps toward this new imaginary of the body. Shaughnessy’s Octopus Museum also seeks to avoid the systematic categories that museum culture inherited from Enlightenment thinking. Thematically, the Anthropocene and climate change loom even larger here than in Tokarczuk’s work: in the postapocalyptic frame, humanity gets its comeuppance for mismanaging the planet when octopuses emerge from the oceans and become the Earth’s dominant species. The things collected in this octopus-curated museum are textual ones: narrative, lyric, and essayistic fragments that document the complicities of contemporary culture as well as the anxieties of a species facing a radically uncertain future. This “debris” of civilization as we know it complicates standard postapocalyptic narratives, with their neat distinction between a time before and a time after the catastrophe, instead exposing the social and political rifts that underlie the climate crisis. The encounter between the human quality of these fragments and the nonhuman perspective brought to bear on them by their curators refracts the Anthropocene – that grand narrative of human mastery – into a multiplicity of

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affects ranging from despair to irony and cautious hope.21 Shaughnessy’s fragments refuse to project a coherent image of humanity, instead probing the many hesitations and moral lapses but also compassionate gestures that define the present moment. Through the octopuses’ nonhuman agency, which is implicated in the curation of these textual objects, humanity comes out faded and diminished, its epistemological pretentions – including the knowledge at the heart of museum institutions – rendered parochial in the face of uncertainty. Both works represent sophisticated negotiations of the spectrum of materiality in contemporary culture: things hover between consumerist impulses, human desires and fantasies of technological control, and forms of nonhuman agency that – as argued by New Materialist theorists – elude human appropriation. The Anthropocene museum trope is well positioned to stage these tensions. Whether it serves as a tool for unsettling anthropocentric assumptions depends, largely, on how it is deployed by individual authors. Tokarczuk’s and Shaughnessy’s formal innovations – particularly the cross-fertilization of narrative, poetry, and essayistic writing – bring about a profound rethinking of museum collections: they present the museum as a space capable of reappraising materiality by blurring ontological boundaries between the human body, its textual productions, and nonhuman entities. A similar form of reappraisal is at work in the examples I discuss in the next chapter, where I transition from the museum to another spatial figure that negotiates the spectrum of materiality, the deserted island. Here, however, the “debris” already foregrounded by Shaughnessy’s collection is primarily nonverbal: as my case studies show, the flotsam discovered by the castaway can be reinvented and transformed in ways that bring out its surprising, quasi-magical agency.

 For more on the proto-narrative dimension of the Anthropocene concept, see Caracciolo (2020b).

5 The Fetish, the Grotesque, and the Castaway In 1659, the year of Robinson Crusoe’s famous fictional shipwreck on an island off the coast of Venezuela, the vast expanse of the Earth’s oceans was still largely devoid of human traces – at least by today’s standards. Surely, shipwrecks had a history as long as that of human navigation, and human artifacts got lost in the oceans regularly. But there were no garbage patches the size of entire countries, no microplastics making their way up the food chain, no nets for marine species to get tangled in and suffocated by.1 If the oceans in 1659 contained as much plastic as they do today, who knows what ingenious uses Crusoe would have found for all the flotsam coming his way. Perhaps his isolation wouldn’t have lasted over twenty years, but only the four years it takes Chuck Noland – the protagonist of Robert Zemeckis’s movie Cast Away (2000) – to escape from his desert island in the Pacific. After his FedEx freight plane crash-lands near the island, Noland (Tom Hanks) becomes a skilled survivor, his body visibly shaped by the demands of the harsh nonhuman landscape. Halfway through the movie, Noland is woken up by a clattering sound originating not too far from his cave; he discovers the plastic door of a porta-potty bearing the inscription “Bakersfield, CA.” Noland contemplates this discarded object for a while (see Figure 6) and realizes it could work as a sail for a raft. With the help of this makeshift sail, he navigates past the powerful waves that surround the island, finding salvation in the form of a cargo ship that rescues him on the brink of death by dehydration. Unlike Crusoe, stuck in a preplastic world, Noland thus owes his life to the durability of a material – plastic – that is now ubiquitous on Earth, and the vast majority of which will survive the planet’s current inhabitants, a hyperobject in Morton’s (2013) terminology (see introduction). Of course, even without plastic, Defoe’s Crusoe is a master of recycling. We read early on in the novel: “I now began to consider, that I might yet get a great many Things out of the Ship, which would be useful to me, and particularly some of the Rigging, and Sails, and such other Things as might come to Land” (Defoe 1994, 40). A long tradition of Defoe criticism (see, e.g., Watt 1957) sees the protagonist of Robinson Crusoe as an embodiment of Western colonialism, with its ruthless instrumentalization of both nonhuman ecosystems and Indigenous individuals such as Friday. For Crusoe, usefulness is the measure of all things, and in the

 The environmental issues raised by the sea are receiving increasing scholarly attention under the heading of “blue humanities.” See, for example, a special issue of Configurations edited by Stacy Alaimo (2019). This chapter’s exploration of contemporary castaway narratives – and of the things that populate them – intersects with many of the themes of the blue humanities. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-005

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Figure 6: Chuck Noland contemplates a porta-potty door in Cast Away (2000).

course of the novel he applies the same instrumental mindset to the physical landscape of the island on which he is stranded, gradually transforming it to resemble the Western world he has left behind. In a reading of Defoe’s novel, Wolfram Schmidgen colorfully describes Crusoe as “a white cargo-cultist whose hopes for salvation through European things overtake every aspect of his life” (2001, 29). If Crusoe is able to survive for decades on the island, it is because he successfully salvages a large number of parts from the ship that brought him there. Converted into tools, these “European things” sustain Crusoe in the first, key stages of his colonization of the island. Seen in this light, the castaway genre – initiated by Daniel Defoe with his 1719 novel, reinterpreted since then by countless narratives in multiple media – stages far more than human castaways.2 The worldview that underpins these “Robinsonades” is overwhelmingly colonialist and anthropocentric, with the castaway embodying an ideal of human self-sufficiency and ability to transform and domesticate the nonhuman world. Yet things play an essential role in the genre. These material objects are in themselves cast away in the literal sense that they have been discarded, because of accidental damage or carelessness or because their condition makes them unsuitable for their intended use.

 For a comprehensive book-length discussion of the castaway genre (or “Robinsonade”) in fiction, see Palmer (2016).

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An insight into nonhuman materiality – as opposed to equipmental thingness – is rarely central to this narrative structure, but it may still emerge occasionally.3 Even in Defoe’s novel, the instrumental perspective on thingness is the site of more hesitations and uneasiness than might be assumed at first. Bringing posthumanist theory to bear on the novel, Sten Pultz Moslund has discussed how Robinson Crusoe, despite its comfortable position within a Western canon that “triumphantly celebrates human exceptionality” (2021, 9), leaves the door open for a more multifaceted understanding of the material. Reading against the grain of the narrator’s instrumentalizing perspective on things, one encounters a great deal of “unresponsive gaps, omissions, and silences in Crusoe’s language” (2021, 16) hinting at a realm of materiality that is both active and uncoupled from human subjectivity. Lynn Festa’s account of Crusoe, while not explicitly grounded in posthumanist theory, ties in closely with Moslund’s reading. Festa draws inspiration from a famous remark by Virginia Woolf, who observed that in Defoe’s novel “there are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face nothing but a large earthenware pot” (1959, 54). Taking seriously Woolf’s analogy between the experience of reading Robinson Crusoe and “a large earthenware pot,” Festa speculates that the novel might offer a “glimpse of our capacity to imagine the world from a place that is not already colonized by subjectivity” (2011, 467) – a place that is allegorized by Woolf’s container, with its solidity and hyperobject-like ability to survive the human. Despite Crusoe’s insistent reduction of things to their utilitarian value, the novel – according to both Moslund and Festa – discloses an understanding of materiality that floats free of anthropocentric, Western assumptions. In both interpretations, it is the materiality of literary language that distances the novel, temporarily and implicitly, from an instrumentalizing view of matter: Moslund argues for an aesthetic, embodied reading of Defoe’s prose, while Festa discusses the role of literary forms (particularly the journal and enumeration) that appear to take on a life of their own, “[prizing] the narrative from Crusoe’s subjective stranglehold” (2011, 466). This non-anthropocentric understanding of things remains largely covert in Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel; it has to be “prized” by critics such as Moslund and Festa from the optimistic survivalism of Crusoe’s narrative. Nonhuman materiality emerges far more distinctly and forcefully in the two twenty-first-century film narratives I discuss in this chapter, both of which can be read as “revisions” of

 As mentioned in the introduction, the term “equipmental” comes from Harman (2002, 19) and refers to a reading of Heidegger’s philosophy that emphasizes the participation of things in human (anthropocentric) projects.

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Defoe’s novel: the already mentioned Cast Away and Swiss Army Man (Kwan and Scheinert 2016).4 Here the modern myth of the castaway is reinterpreted and reshaped by anxieties surrounding humanity’s devastating impact on the planet, primarily through the forces of globalization and climate change that reach and transform even the remotest parts of the world. These film narratives deliberately span and problematize the spectrum of materiality, from passive matter to thing-power, implicating significant questions on the relationship between human embodiment and physical objects: Cast Away projects humanity onto Noland’s nonhuman companion (a volleyball named “Wilson”); by contrast, Swiss Army Man instrumentalizes the dead body of the protagonist’s human companion, Manny. Affectively, this encounter of human embodiment and nonhuman materiality generates humor, with absurdist and grotesque overtones that serve as a probe into the spectrum of materiality. In the following sections, I read such narrative negotiations of materiality in light of three interrelated concepts: the fetish, anthropomorphism, and objectification. The first is an expression of material vitality that arose historically from interactions between Western colonialism and West African culture, nearly three centuries before Defoe created the castaway genre. Anthropomorphism is a projection of human traits onto the nonhuman other; like the fetish, it can strategically blur the boundary between human subjectivity and thingness. Objectification, by contrast, works toward affirming that boundary by excluding certain human groups (e.g., slaves or women) from full-fledged humanity. I argue here that the fetish, anthropomorphism, and objectification are featured in contemporary castaway narratives – to different degrees, of course – as a function of the genre’s engagement with the spectrum of materiality. I will unpack these concepts in the next section. By rediscovering the fetish and anthropomorphization as sites of encounter with thing-power, the two movies complicate the objectifying perspective on thingness that looms so large in Defoe’s novel and in many of its iterations.

 See Palmer’s comment on castaway narratives in the wake of Robinson Crusoe: “Revision involves not simply imitation but rewriting with a fresh eye, very often a skeptical or disenchanted eye . . . . The period from the twentieth century to the present has seen the most radical and challenging revisions [of Defoe’s novel]” (2016, x). The engagement with thingness in Cast Away and Swiss Army Man can be positioned within this history of revisionary retellings of Crusoe’s story.

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5.1 Three Forces at Play in Castaway Narratives Entangled as it is in European colonial history and later in Marxian and psychoanalytic thought, the concept of the fetish is a tough nut to crack.5 William Pietz (1985; 1987) has reconstructed the history of the term in a useful two-part article that will serve as a guide for my discussion. The English word comes from the Latin “facticium,” via the Portuguese term “feitiço.” The basic meaning of “facticium” in Latin denotes something artificial or manufactured, as opposed to a natural thing like a rock. In late antiquity, though, the term became bound up with Christian discourse that associated “facticium” with falseness and idolatry – that is, the worship of factitious gods, which were a fraudulent imitation of the real, Christian God. It is primarily in this religious sense that the term was applied to West African societies by early Portuguese navigators, who made contact with Black communities near the mouth of the Senegal River in the fifteenth century. Pietz explains: “Perhaps the most significant aspect of the religious terminology of the fifteenth-century Portuguese who first sailed to black Africa was the distinction between idolo and feitiço. ‘Idolo’ suggested a freestanding statue representing a spiritual entity (a ‘false god’), while feitiço referred to an object worn about the body which itself embodied an actual power resulting from the correct ritual combination of materials” (1987, 36; italics in the original). Importantly, “fetish” was not the direct translation of a term used by the Africans. It arose as the Europeans attempted to make sense of the West Africans’ religious practices, by applying a word they were familiar with through the Christian tradition. But the semantic profile of this word shifted as a result of the intercultural contact, leading from the Portuguese “feitiço” to the pidgin “fetisso.” This pidgin term was – to quote again Pietz – “a novel word responsive to an unprecedented type of situation” (1985, 6), two vastly different cultures joined in an early colonial relationship. The fetish, from this perspective, is profoundly different from the Christian idol as the representation of a false god. The fetish does not refer to anything outside of itself; its magical powers reside entirely within its materiality: they are an expression of thing-power, in Bennett’s terminology. This focus on autonomous materiality is, for Pietz, an important common denominator of Western theories of the fetish that emerged in the wake of the colonial encounter between the Portuguese and West African communities: “Marxism’s commodity fetish, psychoanalysis’s  The term “fetishism” was coined by French writer Charles de Brosses in the eighteenth century. For a recent reappraisal of that concept and its uses in modern Western thinking, see the collection edited by Morris and Leonard (2017). Particularly relevant in this context is Arjun Appadurai’s “methodological fetishism,” which refers to the tendency in social science to foreground “things-in-motion” and how they “illuminate their human and social context” (1986, 5).

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sexual fetish, and modernism’s fetish as art object all in an essential way involve the object’s untranscended materiality” (1985, 7). One begins to see how discussions surrounding the fetish echo the problematic status of the thing in Western discourse, which oscillates between an objectifying understanding of thingness and an interest in its autonomous powers, as typified by the fetish. Another feature of the fetish – as theorized by Pietz – is relevant here: its link with the human body. Not only is the fetish inherently material, but it is able to influence the materiality of the body on which it is worn: “although cut off from the body, [fetishes] function as its controlling organs at certain moments” (1985, 10). The fetish’s magical powers thus imply a privileged relationship with the body, inverting the Western dichotomy between an empowered subject and a disempowered object: the fetish objectifies the human body by exerting an external, material influence on it.6 The concept of fetish may be productively contrasted with another conceptual operation, that of anthropomorphizing the nonhuman. When we anthropomorphize, we impose human-like embodiment and agency onto nonhuman realities, just as the fetish evokes nonhuman control over human bodies. For philosopher Mike Dacey (2017), anthropomorphism is a basic cognitive gesture that shapes human-animal relationships. It is a feature of “folk psychology,” the toolset we use to make sense of other people’s and – crucially – nonhuman animals’ minds.7 Nor is anthropomorphism limited to living beings: a seminal psychological study by Heider and Simmel (1944) found that participants tend to read anthropomorphically the movement of abstract shapes in an animated film, by ascribing human-like mental states to geometrical figures (a triangle, a circle, etc.).8 Anthropomorphism is thus a cognitivelevel operation that enables human societies to make sense of the material world – both animate and inanimate – as an extension of their own, embodied mind. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to claim that anthropomorphization necessarily involves an affirmation of human centrality. An advocate of the ontological turn in anthropology, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has argued that anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism should be carefully differentiated: discussing the animistic ontology of Indigenous communities in the Amazon, he contends that the “attribution of humanlike consciousness and intentionality (to say nothing of human bodily form and cultural habits) to nonhuman beings has been indiscriminately termed ‘anthropocentrism’ or ‘anthropomorphism.’ However, these two labels can be taken to

 See also Pels (1998, 91): “The fetish foregrounds materiality because it is the most aggressive expression of the social life of things: not merely alive, it is an ‘animated [entity] that can dominate persons.’” The quotation comes from Taussig (1980, 25).  For more on folk psychology, see Ravenscroft (2010).  For further discussion of this study as well as anthropomorphizing metaphors in narrative, see also Caracciolo (2021a, Ch. 7).

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denote radically opposed cosmological perspectives” (2004, 467).9 For Amazonian cultures, anthropomorphizing the natural world means affirming a notion of humanity that should not be equated, as Western commentators tend to do, with the species Homo sapiens. Humanity is an ontological category rather than a biological one, and it is interchangeable with personhood: anthropomorphism involves recognizing that even nonhuman entities (for instance, rivers, trees, or jaguars) should be seen as persons capable of “conscious intentionality and social agency [which] define the position of the subject” (2004, 468). Viveiros de Castro is not alone in uncoupling anthropomorphism from anthropocentrism. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett also emphasizes that the projection of human qualities may help conceptualize thing-power as it operates independently of human subjectivity.10 To adopt a visual metaphor, anthropomorphic ascription does not occlude the alterity of thing-power – how it departs from human agency and intentionality – but throws such differences into sharp relief. Serenella Iovino (2015) talks about “strategic anthropomorphism” for this respectful bridging of the gap between human bodies and nonhuman materiality, also arguing – like Bennett – that this maneuver may support a critique of anthropocentric ideology. Of course, not all forms of anthropomorphism undercut human mastery. As Dacey (2017, 1155) discusses in detail, reading a chimpanzee’s grin anthropomorphically, as a smile, reflects a problematic misunderstanding of nonhuman body language. In a famous NASA picture, Ham (the first chimpanzee to be launched into space) grins to express anxiety, not satisfaction. An anthropomorphic interpretation of the grin doesn’t bring us closer to nonhuman ways of being, but rather imposes a misleading frame of reference. Not all anthropomorphic ascriptions are “strategic” in Iovino’s sense, then, and distinguishing between a flawed appropriation of nonhumanity and a more respectful approach can be complicated. A great deal depends on the context in which anthropomorphism is embedded and the broader conception of humannonhuman relations it implicates: if a particular speaker sees personhood and agency as human prerogatives, then their anthropomorphic ascriptions may be a merely rhetorical device that does not go very far in questioning the exceptionality of the human. A stronger, ontological use of anthropomorphism requires an audience who (like the Amazonian societies discussed by Viveiros de Castro) does not police the boundaries of humanity by limiting it to our species, but sees  Heywood (2017) offers a helpful introduction to the ontological turn.  “We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism – the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature – to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world” (Bennett 2010, xvi).

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natural entities as persons and therefore as human in a non-biological sense. Alternatively, strategic anthropomorphism calls for an audience who is inclined to redraw the boundary between humanity and nonhumanity as Western culture conventionally portrays it. We will see that both my case studies implement concrete formal strategies to cultivate this kind of audience by distancing them from a rigid understanding of the human-nonhuman distinction. To return to my earlier discussion of the fetish, if the materiality of the fetish affirms more-than-human control over the human body, anthropomorphism is a particular way of reading the human into nonhuman materiality that can (in certain situations) bring out its agential, fetishistic powers. While the fetish – as theorized by Pietz – undercuts Western binaries between human subjectivity and the passivity of “matter,” anthropomorphism has a more ambiguous relationship with such binaries. In castaway narratives, as my case studies will detail, the fetish and anthropomorphization enter a tension with another conceptual operation – namely, objectification. A centerpiece of feminist theory, objectification will be used in an extended sense here as the instrumentalization of both the human body and nonhuman matter. As we know from the introduction, when a material thing becomes an object, it is caught up in a dualistic relationship with a controlling human subject. Martha Nussbaum (1995) influentially describes objectification as the debasing depiction of a human being that emphasizes his or her utilitarian value, lack of autonomy, disposability, and inertness. This objectifying approach is deeply bound up with colonialist practices through the commodification of human labor, in slavery and other exploitative colonial relations. In Defoe’s novel, not only is Crusoe obsessed with the utilitarian value of things (including the landscape of the island), but he applies a similarly objectifying logic to his human companion, Friday. By naming Friday, Maximillian Novak argues, “Crusoe assumes possession of him in the same way that Columbus assumed possession of the land by his namings” (1997, 117). Just as the objectification of nonhuman things strips them of their material agency, transforming them into mere human instruments, patriarchal or colonial violence objectifies human bodies, rendering them inert and disposable. This too is a possibility active in the two castaway narratives I examine below, where objectification interacts complexly with both anthropomorphism and the nonhuman agency of the fetish.

5.2 Package Cams and Aha Moments “Lonely people cannot make themselves a world . . . but they can make themselves a mindful gadget, a thoughtful pet, or a god to populate that world” (Epley et al. 2008, 119), write four psychologists in a study of people’s tendency to anthropomorphize

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nonhuman things when ordinary social interaction is disrupted. One of the stimuli in Epley et al.’s experiments was a sequence from Zemeckis’s Cast Away, which features a prominent example of anthropomorphism during extreme social isolation: when the protagonist, Chuck Noland, is stranded on an uninhabited island after a plane crash, he draws a human face on a volleyball, naming it (after the ball’s brand) “Wilson.” At a superficial level, Wilson’s narrative function is to dramatize and diversify the protagonist’s isolation, because Noland frequently addresses the volleyball as a companion and develops an affective relationship with it. Fictional worlds theorist Lubomír Doležel discusses Robinson Crusoe (before Friday’s arrival) as a rare instance of “one-person world”: that is, a fictional world with a single character. Doležel adds that “the one-person world is an artificial and precarious structure” (1998, 37), and the anthropomorphizing inclusion of Wilson in Cast Away demonstrates the difficulty of sustaining this structure for long: giving Noland a nonhuman (but anthropomorphic) companion creates dramatic tension between the two characters in a way that partly alleviates – for Noland and for the audience – the lack of social contacts. To fully understand Wilson’s contribution to Zemeckis’s movie, however, one needs to consider how both the plot and the form of Cast Away outline a larger trajectory of thingness. The global infrastructure of package delivery looms large in the movie: Chuck Noland is a FedEx analyst tasked with troubleshooting delays in the company’s operations. Early on in Cast Away, we see Nolan drill FedEx employees at a facility in Russia to reduce their delivery times. He extracts a clock from a FedEx package that – he says – he has mailed to Russia himself and shows his Russian colleagues what he considers an unacceptable delivery time. Just as Defoe’s Crusoe is a product of the eighteenth-century obsession with the mercantile circulation of goods, Nolan embodies the mindset of a company that is heavily invested in standardizing its practices around the world (the movie has been rightly regarded as a feature-length FedEx commercial). As Schmidgen puts it in his already mentioned reading of Robinson Crusoe, “the early modern circulation of goods [promotes] forms of objectification” (2001, 22), through colonial practices that led Western powers to instrumentalize both the lands they came into contact with and its inhabitants. In Cast Away, the physical circulation of FedEx packages stands in for the forms of objectification typical of a neoliberal global economy, with a US company imposing its time-obsessed mindset in far-flung countries. Visually, the corporate standardization is signaled by the proliferation of identical FedEx boxes, which pop up everywhere in the film, including, as we will see, on the desert island where Nolan is stranded. The boxes erase the materiality of whatever they contain, they are an expression of

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thingness that is diminished and entangled in a vast network of human economic interests.11 The movie’s opening sequence underscores this corporate emphasis on timeliness and circulation that is unimpeded by political or cultural borders, and yet the director’s formal choices subtly begin to undermine the objectifying perspective on things. Noland drives a FedEx truck to a farmhouse in rural Texas, where an artist is at work on a metal sculpture resembling angel wings. The camera first follows Noland from behind, but as soon as he picks up the package prepared by the artist (in a FedEx box) the viewpoint seemingly switches to the package itself (see Figure 7): for a few seconds, we see Noland converse with the artist and then leave the farmhouse from the spatial perspective occupied by the FedEx box. This package looks like any other, except for two red angel wings that have been evidently drawn by the artist herself (because they resemble the metal statue she is welding in her workshop). The next scene shows another FedEx carrier deliver another package (without the angel wings) in snow-covered Russia, with the shot again suggesting the spatial perspective of the box.

Figure 7: “Package cam” in Cast Away (2000).

 The FedEx global delivery network foregrounds the significance of infrastructure in modulating human-nonhuman relations. I will return to the concept of infrastructure in chapter 9.

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This “package cam” sequence works at two levels, evoking two opposed conceptual operations (and paving the way for the third one, Wilson’s fetishization). On the one hand, this opening erases the material content of the boxes, particularly because of the mismatch between the package picked up by Noland in Texas and the one delivered in Russia: we are not following the same box, but rather observing the abstract global network of a company that aspires to minimize the materiality of its services. Indeed, the less customers have to think about the physical whereabouts of the packages and how they make their way to destination, the more the company can pride itself on the efficiency of its global network. The sequence thus captures the abstract objectifying force of globalization, how it strives to eliminate political boundaries and material histories in the name of corporate uniformity. The artist’s hand-drawn wings on the package carried by Noland put up some resistance against this economic dematerialization – a theme that will be picked up again in the very last scene of the movie. Here, however, it is primarily the foregrounded spatial perspective of the package that works against objectification. The sequence implies that even an inanimate object like a FedEx package could have a perspective that is not merely a spatial location, but something like first-person experience. Naturally, this intimation of panpsychism is not spelled out by the film, but its overlap with contemporary theorizations of the nonhuman remains highly suggestive. For instance, Steven Shaviro speculates, building on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, that “all entities have insides as well as outsides, or first-person experiences as well as observable, third-person properties” (2014, 104). For the brief duration of this shot, the package also becomes an experiencing subject in the strong sense, with the angel wings on the Texas package reinforcing the impression of individuality. The forces of corporate instrumentalization and symbolic domestication of the thing thus face a significant challenge as the FedEx box is turned into a character-like entity by cinematic form. Of course, this fleeting anthropomorphization of the package cam would likely go unobserved without the far more blatant anthropomorphization that takes place on the island. After the crash of the FedEx cargo plane (with Noland as the only survivor), a number of packages wash up on the shore of the deserted island. These packages, strewn around Noland’s marooned body, are a visually incongruous intrusion on an island that may be barren and remote, but is clearly not too far from the long reach of globalization. Desperate for food and tools, Noland decides to break with FedEx’s corporate policy not to open any package: in one of these seemingly identical FedEx boxes he finds the volleyball that becomes his companion, Wilson. (Only one package, which displays the angel wings of the Texan artist, remains unopened; I will return to it in my discussion of the movie’s

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ending.) When Noland draws an anthropomorphic face on Wilson, this object goes from being a commodity circulating in a global capitalist system to a subjectified companion. The gesture of turning the ball’s brand name (“Wilson Sporting Goods”) into a proper name is evidently ironic, a subversion of mass production that brings out the unique specificity of this artifact. Insofar as Wilson functions as Noland’s Friday, the objectification of the colonized individual’s body is resisted in favor of the anthropomorphization of a nonhuman thing. As the protagonist’s sidekick, Wilson provides much-needed comic relief and perspective as Noland faces the desperately low odds of survival and rescue. There is more, though: at a number of levels, the narrative aligns Wilson with the fetish – a thing endowed with autonomous agency. Just as the fetish derives its powers from its proximity to the human body, Wilson’s face – painted with Noland’s blood after an accident – is closely tied to the protagonist’s bodily persona. But the film shows on two separate occasions that, despite this embodied connection, Wilson’s efficacy transcends that of its human creator. Shortly after his arrival on the island, Noland struggles to kindle a fire; in fact, it is while he is trying to light tinder for the fire that he injures himself and paints Wilson’s face with his own blood. After patching up the wound, Noland makes another attempt at kindling the fire. The film alternates close-up shots of the tinder and of Noland’s sweaty forehead, in a sequence that looks virtually identical to Noland’s first attempt. This time, however, Wilson is watching from a tree stump, as the viewer is reminded by a strategic shot at the beginning of the second fire-building sequence. Subtly but unmistakably, this shot suggests that the success of Noland’s second attempt has to do with Wilson’s benign presence. The initial depiction of Wilson establishes the volleyball as the perceptual origin of the subsequent images of both Noland and the tinder catching fire: the second fire-building sequence can thus be construed as a point-of-view shot from Wilson’s spatial perspective – a technique analogous to the already discussed “package cam” scene. Not only is Wilson deliberately anthropomorphized by Noland, then, but it is integrated by the movie’s plot and editing as a full-fledged character capable of perceiving the storyworld and shaping the course of the narrative. The theme of Wilson’s influence over Noland’s fate emerges again in the second half of the movie, when – four years after the plane crash – the porta-potty door washes up on the island. We see Noland cautiously approach the plastic object, a spear in his hand, as if this scrap of civilization was a threat. Realizing that the door poses no danger, he collects it, props it up, and squats on the beach to mull over its possible uses. Wilson is clearly visible next to him (see Figure 6). This shot, writes film critic Roger Ebert (2000), is “composed as homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey,” with Noland looking at the vertical porta-potty door just as the perplexed apes in Kubrick’s movie look at the alien monolith. Both the monolith and the porta-potty

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door lead to a sudden burst of insight: that bones can be used as tools in 2001, that the porta-potty could work as a sail in Cast Away. But whereas, in Kubrick’s 2001, magical powers are inherent in the monolith (which is an artifact programmed by an alien civilization to create intelligent life), Noland’s intuition in Cast Away is not mediated by the porta-potty itself but by Wilson’s presence. After the wind topples the porta-potty, Noland frowns in puzzlement and turns to Wilson, who is shown wobbling in the wind in a close-up shot. Noland finally realizes that the light but sturdy plastic makes the door suitable as a sail, turns to Wilson again, and remarks: “This could work!” Just as in the fire-building scene, the editing suggests that Wilson is no mere observer but plays an active role in Noland’s “aha” moment. Through its individualized materiality and more-than-human agency, Wilson thus makes it possible for the protagonist to survive and escape from the island, not only by providing companionship but also by augmenting the human character’s thought processes. The personified volleyball, which is the result of Noland’s deliberate anthropomorphization, functions as fetish that undercuts the corporate objectification of the FedEx packages and opens up a new perspective on materiality. The film’s engagement with materiality, which had been introduced by the package cam and pursued through Wilson’s character, continues until the very ending, though. As I mentioned, Noland does not open one of the packages that appear alongside him on the island – the one with the artist’s angel wings. In the final scene, after his rescue and return to civilization, Noland decides to drive back to the farmstead in Texas to deliver the unopened package. The artist is now living on her own, which strongly hints at the possibility of a romantic relationship with Noland. Yet his future remains undecided, as implied by the final image of the protagonist standing at a crossroads. The openness of the protagonist’s fate is mirrored by the ending’s refusal to reveal the content of the unopened package. If Wilson’s nonhuman agency provides comic relief as the protagonist struggles with extremely isolation, the indeterminacy of the unopened package evokes a different perspective on nonhuman materiality: one in which thingness does not contribute to human plots, as Wilson can be said to do, but rather absconds from them, as suggested by thinkers in object-oriented ontology. This inaccessibility of the thing is another tension that traverses the spectrum of materiality I discussed in the introduction. Ultimately, Wilson’s magical ability to cause “aha moments” and the opacity of the unopened package converge on a sense of mystery that transcends the human objectification of thingness. In that respect, the negotiation of materiality in Cast Away involves a conceptual shift from the anthropocentric forces of corporate greed (active at the beginning of the movie) to engagement with thingpower both in relation to human subjectivity (Wilson as the fetish during Nolan’s

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time on the island) and in contraposition to it (the mysterious package of the ending).

5.3 Grotesque Instrumentality If Noland’s escape from the island is made possible by marine debris, the opening scene of Swiss Army Man displays a similar interest in the litter of modern civilization. A series of shots of plastic garbage floating on the sea preface the movie and ground it in the castaway genre: a milk carton and a yogurt pot drift across the screen, bearing the handwritten words “help me” and “took a boat and got caught in a storm” and thus establishing the movie’s backstory. Trash is pervasive in Swiss Army Man: it is clearly visible on the island on which the protagonist, a young man named Hank (Paul Dano), is stranded and it is strewn across the redwood forest that he traverses on his way back to society. But trash is also a powerful metaphor that underlies the movie’s darkly humorous engagement with human embodiment and mortality. Immediately after the shots of floating garbage, we are taken to a sunlit beach, where Hank is on the point of hanging himself from a rocky outcrop, his face raw with dehydration and sunburn. Hank’s attention is suddenly caught by something washing ashore: it is a human body, ashen, motionless, and clad in a business suit. The befuddled protagonist examines what appears to be the dead body of a character named Manny (Daniel Radcliffe). Disappointed, Hank returns to his suicide attempt, but as soon as the waves touch it the body starts moving jerkily, producing sounds reminiscent of flatulence. This is the beginning of a shocking sequence in which Hank learns to manipulate the cadaver, riding it as an intestinal gas-powered jet ski and steering it with the help of the dead man’s tie. Manny’s seemingly inert body thus takes on supernatural – if comical – powers, enabling Hank to escape from the island and overcome the many challenges of survival in the forest. In a crescendo of absurdity, Manny is used as a boat, a water fountain, a line thrower (see Figure 8) to scale the wall of a steep ravine, and a hunting rifle. Manny doesn’t seem to mind, and as the plot unfolds he forges an intimate friendship with Hank – with the film score strategically, if ironically, emphasizing the affective intensity of their bond in a number of key scenes (including the jet ski sequence, in which Hank successfully leaves the island thanks to Manny-as-boat). The plastic instrumentality of Manny’s body inspires the film’s title, Swiss Army Man, and it is hard to think of a more extravagant objectification of the human – an operation that is made more emotionally salient (and, possibly, controversial) by the anxieties and religious projections that surround mortality.

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Figure 8: Manny becomes a line thrower in Swiss Army Man (2016).

To understand the movie’s objectifying imagination of the human body, however, it is helpful to contextualize it vis-à-vis the long history of the grotesque in artistic representations. Manny resonates with theories of the grotesque at multiple levels. For Noël Carroll, the grotesque works by challenging “our categorical expectations concerning the natural and ontological order” (2003, 298). Manny violates a basic ontological opposition between living and dead things: despite his deathlike complexion and initial immobility, he increasingly engages with the world in a way that suggests animacy and intelligence (he even starts talking, which is how Hank learns his name). Nevertheless, Manny’s physical appearance, body comportment, and speech patterns remain uncannily wooden throughout the movie, complicating the viewers’ ascription of perfectly human-like vitality to the character. Crucially, despite Manny’s puppet-like embodiment, his narrative deviates from precedents such as Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, which focuses on the becoming human of a nonhuman being. Manny’s body is not just manipulated as an instrument by Hank but retains throughout the movie a thing-like quality that grotesquely blurs both the human vs. nonhuman and the animate vs. inanimate distinctions. Manny’s body thus functions as an anthropomorphic fetish: it is close to the human body not in terms of physical proximity but by way of visual similarity, and yet its unique (and comically excessive) material powers are suggestive of nonhuman agency. Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential treatment of the grotesque in Rabelais and His World (1984) centers on “exaggeration” and “hyperbolism,” which are clearly present in the movie’s escalating instrumentalization of Manny’s body. Even more relevant in this context is that, for Bakhtin, grotesque exaggeration is tied to the body and involves two separate elements: first, the “human body becomes a building material. The limits between the body and the world are weakened”

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(1984, 313); second, bodily functions that are conventionally seen as shameful and abject (such as defecation, urination, but also sexuality) become positively connoted (1984, 312). Taken together, these features of grotesque representations evoke what Stacy Alaimo (2010) calls “transcorporeality,” the blurring of boundaries between the physical world and the biological materiality of the body (for instance, through the adverse effects of toxic pollution on public health). Manny’s disjointed corporeality opens itself up to the world through the incongruous use of bodily functions such as flatulence (which powers Manny-as-boat) or regurgitation (which is the mechanism behind Manny-as-water-fountain). As Manny’s body is grotesquely objectified, his human, embodied form blends – visually and functionally – with the external environment. Transcorporeality is also thematically foregrounded by the movie as Manny’s naiveté outlines a defamiliarizing perspective on the body.12 When he comes back to “life,” Manny seems to have forgotten everything about being alive; most strikingly perhaps, he is completely unaware of the social conventions that regulate bodily functions and sexual behavior. The friendship that develops between Manny and Hank is also a Bildungsroman of sorts, with Hank teaching Manny the ABC of social interaction. Nevertheless, Manny’s naiveté pointedly deconstructs social categories that elevate human life as exceptional and therefore as strictly separate from the physical stuff of the world. “What do they do with all the dead people? Do they hide them?”, asks Manny after taking in Hank’s explanation of what being “dead” means. When Hank answers affirmatively, Manny remarks: “So, I’m like trash.” Hank corrects Manny: “You’re like the multi-purpose tool guy. You’re special.” Just as it grotesquely complicates the ontological binary between life and death, Manny’s more-than-human corporeality is shaped by the tension between the disposable matter of waste (including bodily waste) and the handiness of a tool. Manny exists in this ambiguous space of transcorporeality, from which he delivers a number of humorous insights that resonate with Bakhtin’s account of the grotesque, particularly through the positive recuperation of repulsive bodily functions. As Manny tells Hank later in the movie, “maybe we’re all just ugly dying sacks of shit and maybe all it will take is one person to just be okay with that and then the whole world will be dancing, and singing, and farting.” Defecation points to the body’s transcorporeal openness, but also defamiliarizes human mortality by affirming the unexceptional materiality of the body (“dying sacks of shit”) and by inverting the normally abject connotation of basic bodily functions. Throughout the movie, Hank acts as a puppet-master-like interpreter of Manny’s

 See also Caracciolo (2020a, 3–4) for an extended discussion of bodily defamiliarization.

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complex materiality – not just by way of dialogue lines that compare his companion’s body to a multipurpose tool, but also (and primarily) through its physical manipulation. At the same time, though, Manny’s instrumentality is so extravagant that it transcends mere utilitarian or equipmental value (the kind of value foregrounded by Crusoe’s discourse of thingness in Defoe’s novel). While rescuing Hank from suicide and starvation, Manny’s strange embodiment steers the plot away from the generic templates of the castaway narrative (largely upheld by Zemeckis’s movie), with their emphasis on self-sufficiency and survivalism. The paradoxical upshot is that Manny’s more-than-human body takes on autonomous narrative agency despite its extreme instrumentalization. While the anthropomorphized Wilson shapes the plot of Cast Away indirectly, the influence of Manny’s body on the events of Swiss Army Man is larger than (human) life. In the latter movie, anthropomorphization is limited to two sequences in which Hank builds puppets from scrap materials (another significant appearance of trash in the narrative) in order to dramatize scenes from “ordinary” social life, for Manny’s benefit. Here, in a near-perfect conceptual chiasmus, nonhuman things are deliberately anthropomorphized in order to bring out the flamboyant thingness of Manny’s recognizably human body. Indeed, these reenactments of urban living evoke what is perhaps the most important theme in the movie’s exploration of Manny’s corporeality – namely, that of sexuality and romantic love. While Manny doesn’t remember much about the world of the living, he is inexplicably attracted to images of women on the cover of discarded magazines or on Hank’s phone. The scenes staged by Hank with the help of anthropomorphic puppets aim to amplify Manny’s sexual desire: for instance, Hank wants Manny to experience a chance encounter with a young girl on a bus. In this way, the movie uses sexuality as a way of tapping into, and imagining, Manny’s more-than-human agency.13 Manny’s exaggerated erections, well visible through his suit pants, turn him into an adult Pinocchio, with his penis as an outward manifestation of uncanny thing-like vitality (instead of the dishonesty signaled by Pinocchio’s nose). Like his embodiment more generally, Manny’s sexual desire challenges a clear-cut separation between human or animate behavior and thing-power in Bennett’s sense. “Love is bringing me back to life,” observes Manny, but his erections retain an artificial, mechanical quality. In the course of the movie, Hank learns how to arouse Manny’s sexuality in order to facilitate the work of survival. When the two are attacked by a bear, for example, Hank shows Manny a picture of a kissing couple on his phone, which triggers Manny into action, scaring away the animal.

 I write about sexual desire as a bridge between human subjectivity and nonhuman realities in Caracciolo (2021c).

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Sexuality thus serves in Swiss Army Man as a route into vibrant materiality, a way of envisioning the creative and narrative agency of an ontologically counterintuitive being. The irony should be clear: Swiss Army Man pushes the objectification of the human body to a place where, contrary to the dehumanizing use of this rhetorical or political strategy, agency is not denied but productively transposed to more-than-human efficacy. When the human body is instrumentalized to the extreme, its inherent thing-like powers come to the fore, associating the human form with the mysterious materiality of the fetish. The anthropomorphism of a character like Zemeckis’s Wilson is no longer needed when a direct link can be established – via grotesque humor – between human embodiment and thing-power. The subversive fun generated by this narrative trajectory resonates with Nicole Seymour’s (2018) account of “bad environmentalism” – a set of ironic practices in which Western conceptions of the nonhuman environment (as well as the rhetoric of the environmental movement) are questioned by way of transgressive humor. In Swiss Army Man, the subversion has to do with how the generally (and rightfully) condemned instrumentalization of the body is turned on its head: it doesn’t debase the human but rather situates it, transcorporeally, within a world of comically efficacious matter. ✶✶✶ Both Cast Away and Swiss Army Man perform sophisticated operations within the spectrum of materiality, leveraging the three conceptual tools I introduced above: the fetish, anthropomorphism, and objectification. The positioning of the two movies within a rich strand of castaway narratives indebted to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is no coincidence: that genre, as Defoe scholars have argued, foregrounds the material circulation and commodification of things, as well as their utilitarian value. Things are first and foremost a material instrument that enables Crusoe’s survival and support a narrative of human exceptionality and self-sufficiency. The same instrumentalizing logic underlies the castaway’s colonial appropriation of non-Western subjects and of the nonhuman environment – both of which come to be seen as thing-like, as is typical of Western modernity. In the two twenty-first-century reappraisals of this castaway narrative I have examined in this chapter, however, things come to take on radically new meanings. Their materiality is rediscovered as part of a larger critique of contemporary culture’s reckless investment in disposable things – hyperobjects whose devastating impact on the environment is frequently overlooked or swept under the rug. Think about the Great Pacific garbage patch, in which the flotsam circulating in my two case studies (FedEx boxes, plastic packaging) could well have ended: because of its remoteness, this vast accumulation of human debris registers only tangentially

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in the collective consciousness of the West, and yet its effects on nonhuman and human life are severe. In different ways, Cast Away and Swiss Army Man address this blind spot by recovering the emotional and narrative efficacy of discarded things, how they enable and shape human survival in a way that can dangerously spiral out of human control. These contemporary castaway narratives use the fetish and anthropomorphism to resist a purely objectifying perspective on matter. While this process is relatively straightforward in Cast Away (through the personification of Wilson, whose agency is responsible for saving the protagonist), it takes a more roundabout route in Swiss Army Man, where it is the human body itself that is linked to thingpower, via its radical instrumentalization. Both movies turn the castaway genre into a sandbox for experimenting with ontological categories separating, in Western modernity, living beings from disposable things, human societies from the stuff of the nonhuman world. Humor is the vehicle of this negotiation of materiality, courtesy of Wilson’s intuitions and Manny’s shocking convolutions: two fetishes that illustrate the efficacy of things but also their uncomfortable closeness to the vitality of human bodies.

6 Materializing Survival Games After examining the tensions of materiality in two contemporary retellings of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter turns to a popular video game genre that speaks to Crusoesque fantasies of human perseverance in the face of a hostile wilderness. Survival games place the player in the shoes of a lone character whose primary (and, in some cases, only) goal is to resist harsh natural forces and elements. To ensure survival, players have to procure sustenance and build shelter by collecting resources from the surrounding environment, which is typically as vast as it is threatening. In doing so, players reshape the environment through their actions, depleting resources while continuously pushing back the boundaries of the known world to gain access to new resources. In parallel, the player’s knowledge of the game world and the player-controlled character’s ability to tap into its many systems also expand: survival games tend to include sophisticated building and crafting mechanics that allow players to turn the world into a Lego-like playground where everything can be created – provided, of course, that sufficient materials are available. At first blush, these practices would seem to reinforce an instrumentalizing way of thinking about nonhuman matter we have seen at work repeatedly in the previous chapters: the material is something to be shaped at will by human, rational agents engaged in a project of domination (or at least domestication) that has troubling colonial overtones – particularly through the celebration of unbounded exploration in many survival games. However, I will argue in the following pages that survival games can also present a more sophisticated negotiation of the spectrum of materiality: in the players’ interactions with the game, the material emerges as a source of uncertainty, which can be either positively connoted as helpful magic or, negatively, as threat. Either way, this form of materiality resists or at least eludes anthropocentric appropriation – an insight that is embedded in gameplay and framed by the games’ narrative. “Gameplay” (a word I will use frequently in the video game-focused sections of this book) refers to the strategic interactions afforded by the games: the challenges they pose, and the technical way in which they ask players to address those challenges.1 An inevitable reference point for the gameplay of survival games is Minecraft (Mojang Studios 2011), which has had an enormous influence on the genre: with its open-ended structure and flexible approach to both resource collection and building, the freedom of expression offered by Minecraft has become a model for many survival games. Indeed, judging from the timeline of survival games offered

 For a more formal account of gameplay, I refer to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play (2004). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-006

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by Samantha Reid and Steven Downing (2018, 46), it seems clear that Minecraft has paved the way for the survival game revival of 2013–2014, when the gaming landscape saw an increasing number of new releases in this genre. Frequently, these games were – and still are – published in early access: that is, they were made available in a preliminary version to ensure the developing team (typically, a small, independent company) continuous funding. Most of these recent survival games highlight the challenges of staying alive in a wilderness that is far more hostile than Minecraft’s, and where resources are often in short supply. Further – and this is where narrative enters the picture – some survival games include a “story mode” that steers the experience of survival away from the relatively unconstrained gameplay afforded by Minecraft: instead, the story frames the experience of surviving, creating a relatively linear progression for the player to follow while enriching and complicating their interpretation of the game world. Admittedly, not all players will be paying attention to these story elements: survival games are meant to accommodate a variety of gameplay styles, and most are perfectly enjoyable (in an open-ended or “sandbox” mode) without engaging with the narrative at all. Of particular interest in this book is how the narrative, for players who are keeping track of it, encourages a renegotiation of the meanings of materiality that are bound up with the games’ survival mechanics. This, at least, is my reading of the three survival video games that take center stage in this chapter: The Forest (Endnight Games 2014), The Long Dark (Hinterland Studio 2014), and Raft (Redbeet Interactive 2018).2 Matter looms large in these game worlds, where the average player spends hours and hours collecting, managing, and processing physical resources: trees are felled to gather wood, water is purified, numerous types of ore are extracted from mountains, caves, or the bottom of the sea. The resulting matter is then transformed and refined in a long series of steps: as the game progresses, the player is asked to follow increasingly complicated recipes, finding rare materials and combining them to produce ever more advanced and powerful items. If the castaway narratives examined in the previous chapter complicate the Crusoesque myth by bringing out the unruliness of thing-power, survival games appear to take us back to the comforts of an equipmental use of matter (to use again Harman’s terminology), where material things – and indeed the world at large – welcome exploitation unquestioningly. The game of survival thus turns into a computer simulation of

 An important caveat is that, at the time of writing, only the story of The Forest was essentially complete. The final chapter of Raft (with new narrative content) was released in 2022 after the chapter’s completion. The developers of The Long Dark have only released four out of the game’s five planned episodes of “story mode.” Nevertheless, the available narratives offered more than enough material to base my discussion on.

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Crusoe’s project of remaking the natural world in the image of the Western, colonial society he has allegedly left behind. However, a closer look at the three games I mentioned above reveals surprising depths behind this anthropocentric façade. When read in light of the narratives they tell – which foreground catastrophe and the collapse of a human-imposed order – these survival games create affective overtones that stage the tensions of nonhuman materiality. My approach to these games is inspired by Ian Bogost’s (2006) “unit analysis,” which is particularly attuned to gaps in the representational and simulative strategies implemented by video games. As Bogost explains, any computer simulation of a real-world system involves a simplification of the source system: “A simulation is a representation of a source system via a less complex system that informs the user’s understanding of the source system in a subjective way” (2006, 107).3 Crafting a bow in The Forest, for example, requires one stick, one piece of cloth, and rope. This recipe bears a certain resemblance to the real-world process of creating a bow, but it is significantly simplified. While most players will accept the gap between the simulation and the source system as a matter of course, there is considerable payoff – as Bogost shows – from taking such gaps seriously, as part of the way in which video games construct meaning. These gaps call for interpretation, which is also an opportunity for the player-critic’s subjectivity to engage with the game in constructive ways. Bogost captures this interaction between the material affordances of the game (what a simulation allows the player to do) and the player’s subjectivity under the heading of “unit operation.” Simply put, a unit operation is how a game works, not merely in functional terms but also how it works on the player’s construction of meaning. As Bogost writes, “games create complex relations between the player, the work, and the world via unit operations that simultaneously embed material, functional, and discursive modes of representation” (2006, 105). My goal in this chapter is to discuss how the operations afforded by three survival games enter the spectrum of materiality in ways that question the extractive, anthropocentric logic of Crusoesque survival. Unlike Bogost, though, whose game criticism tends to background storytelling (sometimes very vocally; see Bogost 2017), I address the narrative component of survival games as an important site of meaning generation that orients the player’s understanding of these games’ simulation of surviving, crafting, and building. The plot serves as an interpretive framework for the imagination of the nonhuman operationalized by my three examples in this chapter. Crucially, as we will see, these

 The concept of simulation is one of the centerpieces of (video) game studies and has been frequently opposed – especially in the early days of the field – to narrative; see Frasca (2003).

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plots are unashamedly linear, leaving no room for the branching narratives that can be found in other instances of video game storytelling (see Ryan 2006). The narrative’s unidirectional progression counterpoints the open-ended nature of these simulations, which allow players to continue building and expanding their base indefinitely (or at least until their ludic engagement runs out). At one level, the games use the linearity of plot to structure players’ experience and introduce them gradually to increasingly complex simulative mechanics. As I show in this chapter, however, the linearity of these game narratives fulfills a number of other important functions on an interpretive level: it can be read as an ironic commentary on the limitless resources that the game throws at the player (in Raft), it reinforces the uncomfortable closeness to nonhuman forces that is created by the survival mechanics (in The Forest), and it frames the player’s efforts vis-à-vis the struggles of community in a postapocalyptic world (in The Long Dark). These nuances, along with gaps inherent in the games’ simulation of realworld survival, bring into view an understanding of materiality that is uncoupled from human control. Before turning to the games, I will contextualize my reading vis-à-vis recent work in game studies that addresses the ecological dimension of video games in general, including their negotiation of nonhuman materiality.

6.1 Ecology of Video Games That the technologies underlying digital games are material is, of course, an inescapable fact. The computational devices purchased and discarded, in ever increasing amounts, by the Global North have a disproportionate environmental impact in terms of both production and disposal. Obtaining and processing the raw materials to manufacture these devices – for instance, the lithium used in modern-day batteries – can have devastating consequences for ecosystems. At the other end of the life cycle of a technological device, the old smartphones and laptops accumulating in a drawer – a familiar experience for many readers, I suspect – are stubbornly material objects: their materiality is made more salient by the fact that in many countries they cannot be discarded in the same way as regular household waste. Because they contain heavy metals and other polluting or toxic chemicals, batteries and circuit boards require special treatment for disposal. The processing of this electronic waste frequently takes place in developing countries, far from where these items were originally purchased. In Africa especially, a whole economy revolves around the recycling of devices

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discarded by wealthier nations, exposing local populations to significant health risks (see Heacock et al. 2016). Yet, if hardware is defined by its potentially hazardous materiality, software is normally understood to be intangible: words like “virtual” or “cyberspace” signal distance from physical experience. From that perspective, hardware may be material, but it affords access to a world that resists everyday conceptions of materiality. Discussing the presumed dematerialization of software, Paul M. Leonardi concludes that “in the case of digital artifacts, what may matter most about ‘materiality’ is that artifacts and their consequences are created and shaped through interaction” (2010, n. pag.). Put otherwise, software may not have physical substance of its own, but its materiality depends on how it can bring about changes and impact material reality in its interaction with a user. Think about an algorithm recommending what novel I should buy next based on the books I have purchased in the past. The algorithm itself may seem intangible, because its workings escape both my perceptual abilities and my technical knowledge. However, the consequences of my interaction with the algorithm – my discovering a new book and deciding to buy it – are in some important sense material. In effect, what Ed Finn (2017) describes as the technical “magic” of the algorithm – that is, the unpredictability but also the usefulness of its outcomes – may be one of the best illustrations of material (nonhuman) agency in today’s world. Video games are a special kind of software in that they are representational in nature: they evoke a fictional reality, a “game world” distinct from the everyday reality in which the computational hardware is located. Within this game world, a number of representational artifacts (tools, weapons, and so on) extend the player’s ability to interact with his or her surroundings, and these artifacts resemble material things in the real world. The environment itself evokes materiality by affording the player certain interactions and denying others: a mountain can be climbed, but the player-controlled character cannot walk through a brick wall. As a result, materiality is not just the outcome of a certain interaction (as posited by Leonardi), but it becomes an object of representation and simulation. Such technologically mediated materiality entertains a complex relationship with real-world material environments. It is the complexity and creativity of this relationship – which is never merely imitative – that enables the player-critic to engage in the kind of “unit analysis” discussed by Bogost. Environmental concerns may emerge within this engagement; indeed, ecocritical questions are playing an increasingly important role in game studies. Michael Fuchs (2021), for example, asks how certain video games may enable players to experience interspecies relations by immersing them in the body of a nonhuman creature. In what is probably the most comprehensive ecocritical discussion of video games to date, Alenda Chang reads the video game medium as well suited to “dramatize

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and make actionable a variety of ecological entities, processes, and framings” (2019, 145). Her account of game environments is particularly useful in the context of my discussion of materiality in survival games. This interest in material environments surfaces, in particular, in Chang’s chapter on how games may stage ecological “collapse.” She starts by voicing a worry over modern games’ celebration of environmental “destructibility” – that is, the player’s ability to violently reshape the physical surroundings of the action (Chang 2019, 200). While increasing the realism of video game simulation, this feature fosters forms of gameplay that affirm the player’s mastery over – and disregard for – the nonhuman environment. Destructibility goes hand in hand with an extractive approach to the game world, which becomes a mere container for various kinds of materials. This approach is frequently encouraged by the algorithms that underlie world generation in games: key resources tend to “respawn” (that is, reappear after a period of time), effectively creating a sense of limitless materiality or “worlds without end” (Chang 2019, 220). In Chang’s argument, this discussion leads to the condemnation of games that create an antagonistic relationship between the player and the environment (known as PvE games). Instead, Chang writes, “What we truly need are games where the player is in, of, or with the environment” (2019, 201; emphasis in the original). One of such games is Eco (Strange Loop Games 2018), another Minecraft-inspired survival game in which (unlike what happens in Minecraft) resources can be depleted and animal species can be hunted to extinction. The game also features a cataclysmic denouement – a meteor on a collision course with the Earth – that players must avert without compromising the planet’s ecosystems in the process. For Chang, Eco is an example of how video games may foster environmental responsibility instead of catering to destructive or extractive impulses. What Chang doesn’t take into account, however, is the way in which game narrative – in conjunction with certain unit operations such as environmental destructibility – may foreground a particular reading of a game world’s ecological stakes. That is the aspect on which I focus in my discussion of The Forest, The Long Dark, and Raft. I start from an overview of the games’ premise, features, and mechanics, and then turn to two dimensions that, differently across these games, result in productive engagement with the spectrum of materiality: the crafting system (with a focus on Raft and The Long Dark) and playerlandscape relations in The Forest. Finally, I discuss how the plot steers these games’ negotiation of materiality.

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6.2 Different Worlds of Survival While sharing many survival mechanics, the three games I examine evoke profoundly different environments, not just visually but in terms of affect and atmosphere. In The Forest, the player-controlled character (or “avatar,” in gaming parlance) is a passenger on a commercial airliner with his son Timmy; in the game’s first scene, the jet experiences difficulties and crashes on a remote peninsula. Upon recovering consciousness after the crash, the protagonist is seemingly the sole survivor. However, he has reason to believe that Timmy has been taken captive by the peninsula’s mysterious inhabitants. The wilderness that he gradually discovers encompasses the titular forest (with vegetation typical of northern latitudes), a long coastline, a sprawling cave system, and a snow-covered mountain range. The protagonist also realizes that the peninsula is populated by genetically modified monsters, who are far more aggressive at night. The player uses fire, weapons, and fortifications to fend them off, but the mutants become more dangerous – and more diverse in nature – as the protagonist’s attempts to locate his son advance. In the course of this quest, the player learns that the peninsula houses a secret medical lab, in which derailed experimentations have led to the mutant infestation. Responsible for Timmy’s disappearance is one of the scientists, a Victor Frankenstein-like figure who is attempting to revive dead bodies through child sacrifice. Despite the sensationalist narrative (which doesn’t emerge in full before a long final sequence), the game’s best quality is an atmosphere of lingering horror, which is supported in both the forest and the peninsula’s caves by highly effective lighting and sound design. The “story mode” of The Long Dark also begins with a plane crash. The avatar, Will Mackenzie, is a bush pilot; in the game’s first scene, he is approached by his ex-wife (Astrid Greenwood, a medical doctor) and asked to fly her deep into Canada’s interior. Astrid refuses to explain the exact purpose of this mission, but Will reluctantly agrees to take her nevertheless. A mysterious weather event causes Will to lose control of the aircraft mid-flight. When Will comes to amid the wreckage of the plane, Astrid is nowhere to be found: all around him is a frozen wilderness that looks much more homogenous than the setting of The Forest, and makes basic survival far harder. However, there are no supernatural enemies: players must learn to fend off wolves and bears, but a far more significant threat derives from the freezing environment and the scarcity of food. Like The Forest, though, the narrative of The Long Dark displays a quest structure, with Will trying to locate his ex-wife (who becomes the avatar later on in the story). Here, however, the atmosphere is pervaded by mystery rather than horror: the world, already in the throes of economic collapse, is shaken by what appears to be a geomagnetic storm that leads to spectacular auroras at night. This storm, known as

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the “First Flare,” is the cause of both the initial plane crash and widespread disruptions to communication systems – a catastrophic event that the game stages from the distance of Canada’s backcountry.4 The beginning of Raft is far sparser in narrative information than the two other games: after choosing one of the two available avatars, a man and a woman (the difference is merely cosmetic and has no impact on the game), players find themselves on a tiny raft in the middle of the ocean. A near-constant stream of debris – plastic, wood, and palm leaves – allows the player to expand the raft and craft basic navigation instruments (a sail, an anchor, and so on). Players are perpetually (and comically) chased by a shark, who eats away at the raft and forces them to rebuild and expand their vessel without interruption. Soon a number of tropical islands comes into view. On one of them, players discover the blueprint for a radio receiver that allows them to locate a few story-specific islands. Here, much of the world’s backstory is revealed through notes found by the player: a diverse set of characters emerges from these notes, although the player never meets them in actuality. Mostly, these notes tell stories of failed survival in a world devastated by climate change, but their lighthearted tone is in line with the game world’s cartoonish qualities. The settings of The Forest, The Long Dark, and Raft are impressively detailed and vast, but there is a key difference between them: while the world of the first two games was handcrafted by the developers and is thus essentially the same even if the player restarts the game, Raft employs an algorithmic technique known as “procedural generation” to create the islands encountered by players. Concretely, this means that the islands are dynamically generated as the player sails across the game world, a device that allows the developers to introduce the story-specific islands in a fixed sequence. The procedural generation also has important ramifications for the collection of resources, such as scrap metal or metal ore, which can be found in the reefs near the islands: when an island’s resources are depleted, the player can just sail away; as soon as he or she is far enough from the island, another island will spawn, with new resources ready to be collected. This algorithmic system illustrates Chang’s description of a “world without end,” in that there are no material boundaries to the world of Raft: the player can sail in any direction, and thanks to the procedural generation there will always be more islands to explore and more resources to collect.

 See also this statement by Raphael van Lierop, the creative director of The Long Dark, in an interview with PCGamesN: “I wanted to explore not the end of the world, not the urban apocalypse, which we’ve all seen a million times, but what does the end of the world look like from the fringes?” (Zacny 2014).

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The worlds of The Forest and The Long Dark, by contrast, have physical boundaries that cannot be crossed by the player. Nevertheless, these games also implement algorithmic devices that ensure both diversity across playthroughs and a constant stream of resources: in The Forest, there are a number of possible crash sites across the peninsula; in both that game and The Long Dark some items – for instance, wildlife and branches – respawn periodically. However, other items do not respawn: particularly the man-made artifacts collected by the player (such as the suitcases scattered around the plane wreck in The Forest or the canned food found in abandoned houses in The Long Dark) are strictly singleuse. This limitation turns these games into more challenging and constrained environments than the infinite ocean wilderness of Raft, where both man-made and natural resources are generated in a quasi-random way. This difference has important consequences for the games’ crafting mechanics, as we will see in the next section.

6.3 Abstraction and Renewability in Crafting Systems The crafting system in survival games allows players to combine certain resources to craft a range of tools that extend their interactions with the game world, as well as their chances of fighting off foes and procuring food. Crafting systems are simulations that, as Bogost points out, necessarily involve a loss of complexity with respect to the real world: creating a stone axe in video games, for instance, requires no ad-hoc skills, but only certain materials (stone, wood, etc.) as well as basic knowledge of the game’s mechanics (where and how to obtain these materials) and interface. Here I call this loss of complexity “abstraction” – a concept to which I will return in my discussion of infrastructure in chapter 9. Abstraction and realism are inversely correlated: the more abstract a crafting mechanic, the less realistic it will appear. The degree of abstraction differs considerably across the games. In The Forest and The Long Dark, the player can manufacture a wide range of tools and items, but the degree of abstraction remains relatively low. In The Long Dark in particular, the realism of the simulation is underscored by the fact that time is an essential factor in crafting complicated clothing items. To sew a wolfskin coat, for example, which is one of the game’s warmest pieces of clothing, the player needs four wolf pelts that have been cured indoors for seven in-game days (corresponding to a few hours of gameplay). The player can decide to sleep for some of this time, which results in the clock advancing by a few hours, but the scarcity of resources in this game world will encourage the player to use some of this time (especially during the day, when the cold tends to be more forgiving) exploring and

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foraging. Once the pelts are ready, the player must spend fifty in-game hours at a workbench to craft the coat. Although the player can speed up the passage of time while crafting, the avatar’s hunger and thirst meter will also drain faster. The player should thus make sure the protagonist has enough to eat and drink for the time he will spend working on the coat. Because of these long intervals, patience is of the essence in The Long Dark. The player is encouraged to remain constantly aware of the passage of time, including the day-night cycle and the vagaries of the weather. An intensified sense of time becomes an important factor in the game’s crafting mechanics and contributes to the realism of the player’s progression. Experientially, the highlighting of temporal duration is responsible for the game’s distinctively slow, meditative pace.5 In Raft, by contrast, smelting metal ore is the only crafting-related activity that forces players to wait; even then, it is not for more than a couple of minutes. Otherwise, crafting happens instantaneously, at the click of a button, as long as the player has the necessary ingredients. The facility of crafting underscores the enormous abstraction involved in, especially, some of the advanced crafting recipes. A number of items, including the radio receiver, which is essential to the story, require a battery to function. Finding batteries may sound impossibly hard in a depopulated postapocalyptic world where all landmasses are submerged, but in fact a battery may be conveniently crafted using only copper smelted on the raft, what the game calls “scrap” (described as “some old parts from . . . something?”), and plastic retrieved from the ocean. Likewise, a number of relatively sophisticated devices (from binoculars to circuit boards, from a steam engine to automatic sprinklers) can be crafted on the raft, using only the ocean’s flotsam, or materials collected on the islands with makeshift tools. The cartoonish abstraction of the crafting system is of course extended by the procedural nature of the game world. New islands (and materials) will appear as soon as the player sails away from islands whose resources have been used up. The latter islands, in turn, vanish forever after leaving the range of the player’s radar-like receiver. Plainly, this setup resonates with a Crusoesque fantasy of restarting civilization, including advanced technology, from the wreckage of a disastrous event – with the difference that, in Raft, it is society as a whole to have experienced shipwreck, as the notes that come up in the course of the story keep reminding the player. One could certainly read this crafting system as catering to the extractive mindset criticized by Chang (2019, 220) under the rubric of “worlds without end,” but it should be kept in mind that the world of Raft has, technically,

 I write about slow narrative experiences in a range of media, including video games, in Caracciolo (2022b).

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already ended: because the player is not mining pristine resources but collecting waste materials, the game appears to be toying with unrealistic notions of recyclability and sustainability. The very ease of finding resources in Raft – a game in which the player literally sails through an ocean of floating debris (see Figure 9) – hints at a materiality that is magically detached from real-world constraints, and from the violence of capitalist societies’ impact on the planet. In the worldview of Raft, the waste produced by the collapse of advanced civilization can be recycled and transformed, without any loss of resources (or time), into new devices. This ideal of infinite recyclability is so explicit in Raft that it even shaped the game’s development. In early releases of Raft, depleted batteries were single-use and could not be recharged. But the game community insistently asked for a way to recharge batteries, and the developers eventually introduced a “battery charger” (powered by biofuel) in a 2020 update.6

Figure 9: Abundant flotsam in Raft (Redbeet Interactive 2018).

All in all, while it is possible to take Raft to task for the endless renewability of its resources, an alternative (and in my view more effective) interpretive strategy might focus on the game’s humorous qualities and read it as a satirical take on precisely the Crusoesque myth of autonomy that the protagonist appears to embody. The comical abstraction of the crafting system, in other words, serves as a

 See, for instance, this post on the subreddit dedicated to Raft: https://www.reddit.com/r/RaftThe Game/comments/e8f52l/recharging_batteries_request/.

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commentary on the rhetoric of sustainability present-day societies are based on.7 In removing any limit on the cost and feasibility of in-game recycling, Raft exposes the absurdity of the belief that “mere” recycling will be enough to avoid catastrophes like those featured in the game’s narrative (more on this below). The crafting system of The Forest and The Long Dark, on the other hand, carefully polices the realism of the simulation in order to evoke a sense of extremely limited resources in the face of disaster. While almost everything can be fabricated by the player in Raft, the other two games draw a clear distinction between “craftable” and “non-craftable” items, largely in order to reduce the abstraction of the crafting mechanic. In The Forest, for instance, the player can craft a basic bow, but the more powerful “modern bow” can only be found in one of the caves, alongside story-relevant clues such as Timmy’s drawings. Effectively, players start by putting together simple items via crafting, but more advanced tools and weapons can only be recovered as we progress the game’s story. The Long Dark deliberately reverses the direction of this process. At the beginning of the game, the player will spend a long time exploring abandoned buildings and scavenging for food and other supplies. These items, however, do not respawn, forcing players to find alternatives in the natural world. For instance, after sustaining injuries from an animal (such as a wolf or a bear), the player will need to apply an antiseptic to reduce the risk of infection. Initially, antiseptic bottles can be easily collected from the bathrooms of deserted houses; but as these bottles run out, the player can only resort to “old man’s beard wound dressing,” which requires identifying and collecting a specific kind of lichen (“old man’s beard”; see Figure 10). Unlike the man-made antiseptic, this lichen does respawn after a certain time, turning this into a renewable resource. Indeed, becoming a skilled player involves transitioning from scavenging the sparse relics of modern civilization to gathering natural resources that are able to support long-term survival. This combination of single-use and renewable items fulfills multiple functions. First, it reduces the game’s learning curve, in that it is far easier for a newcomer to the game to loot food cans from a shelf than it is to hunt and cook rabbit. Just as importantly, though, the crafting system encourages players to gradually expand their knowledge of the simulated wilderness. After many hours spent playing the game, I realized that my perception of the game world had changed dramatically in the course of gameplay: features of the landscape that seemed to have no special significance early on (such as various types of plants and lichens) were now made salient by my heightened understanding of the

 On this point, see Jem Bendell’s (2018) incisive – if controversial – critique of sustainability discourse.

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Figure 10: Old Man’s Beard lichen hanging from a tree in The Long Dark (Hinterland Studio 2014).

game’s survival mechanics; by contrast, the human-built structures on which my attention focused at the beginning had lost much of their interest. In line with the game’s investment in slow temporality, this diversion of my attention away from ready-made materiality was a gradual process of discovery, which involved multiple setbacks and situations gone awry. The stark survival staged by The Long Dark opposes simple extractivism by systematically preventing players from hoarding crafting materials, as one can do in Raft. Both the slow regeneration of natural resources and the constant threat represented by the weather (particularly at night) complicate the crafting meaningfully and force players to become more resourceful, precisely because material resources (both natural and manmade) are so difficult to come by. The Long Dark thus uses a pointedly slow pace to decenter the player’s assumptions about the availability of matter, which is transformed into materiality as it repeatedly eludes or challenges appropriation and accumulation. As players retrain their experience of the game world by learning more about its simulative systems, the harshness of the environment in which they find themselves offers a glimpse into nonhuman materiality as something that cannot and should not be taken for granted.

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6.4 Beyond the Big Fortress: Building and Dynamic Environments If the crafting system in The Long Dark intensifies the player’s ability to perceive patterns in a natural world that leaves little room for error, The Forest steps up the game of nonhuman materiality by evoking a nonhuman world that dynamically responds to the player’s actions. As I mentioned above, the protagonist of The Forest crash-lands on a peninsula populated by aggressive mutants, which are gradually revealed to be a product of irresponsible medical experimentation gone awry. However, exactly how aggressive the mutants become largely depends on the player’s actions. Like Raft (but unlike The Long Dark), The Forest places considerable emphasis on building in addition to crafting. In Raft, the protagonist starts with a miniature raft, which the player can expand by collecting basic resources (plastic and wood). As the game progresses and the crafting system becomes more intricate, more space is needed to make room for various machines, pots for farming, and even enclosures for domesticated animals. While building is time-consuming and expensive in terms of raw materials, there are essentially no limits to the size of the raft – another instance of the game’s attachment to a fantasy of infinite materiality. In The Forest, by contrast, building shelter always involves a tradeoff between visibility and protection. The mutants are more active at night and tend to be deterred by fire, which encourages the player to build a base as soon as possible (a cabin or shelter is also necessary to save the player’s progress). Because the mutants can and will wake up the protagonist in the middle of the night and break down walls, players are invited to create complex fortifications around the base: the game offers a wide variety of defensive structures and traps to deter the mutants (see Figure 11). Of course, the more players build, the more raw materials they will need, resulting in the deforestation of vast swathes of the peninsula. Crucially, however, the mutants become more active and aggressive as the player’s impact on the landscape deepens: in the first hours of the game the mutants are easily fended off, but as time passes and the player’s base expands, more mutants (and more powerful mutants) will show up. Although one may not realize this at first, this mechanic serves as a ticking clock of sorts, in that the player is expected to advance the game’s story by visiting a number of story locations before the mutants get out of hand and become impossible to control. In my first playthrough, by day 100 or so (in game time), the mutants’ raids were so frequent and deadly that I had to restart the game. That is assuming that the player has decided to keep building and developing the base – which may look like the only way one can play the game, but it isn’t. In fact, an online “beginner’s guide” discusses various gameplay styles and strategies.

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Figure 11: Fortifications in The Forest (Endnight Games 2014).

The survival method I instinctively adopted in my first playthrough is what the guide refers to as the “big fortress” strategy, warning that it “works moderately well but the mutants become more aggressive to this approach.”8 The alternative is what the guide calls a “stealth and hiding” approach, which consists in keeping an extremely low profile throughout gameplay: instead of building a permanent (or, well, semi-permanent, given the mutants’ escalating brutality) shelter, the player can move between a network of small-footprint bases, for instance tree houses or hunting shelters. As the guide explains, adopting an environmental slogan, this “mobile solution relies on ideas of ‘leave no trace’: the mutants can’t hunt down the player if he doesn’t have predictable patterns of movement or doesn’t have one single sleeping spot.” Remarkably, the game deploys the mutants’ aggression to highlight the players’ embedding within a material environment that dynamically responds to their actions. Players are thus invited to reflect on the extractivist assumptions they bring to bear on the game – the notion (which I also unconsciously embraced in my first playthrough) that tougher and more expansive structures will necessarily result in a more desirable game experience, even if this involves altering the nonhuman environment and clearing entire areas for resources. By contrast, the low-profile strategy, which is based on mobility and mimicry with the player’s nonhuman surroundings, leads to a compelling (and arguably more innovative) approach to the  See https://theforest.fandom.com/wiki/The_Forest_Beginner%27s_Guide.

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game’s survival challenge. This does not mean that The Forest cannot be played as a standard survival game, of course, with carefully engineered buildings that are genuinely mutant-proof. But the fact that the game offers an alternative, and even in some sense encourages it, is remarkable given the expectations established by the survival genre. It is also important to keep in mind that this is a horror survival game. Creating physical barriers promises to keep the player safe and the nonhuman at an emotional remove – an approach that backfires as the mutants’ raids intensify. The “stealth and hiding” approach, on the other hand, creates uncomfortable closeness between players and their nonhuman enemies, because the mutants are constantly patrolling (especially at night): without a fortress, chance encounters in the middle of the forest are always a possibility. This mechanic reinforces the game’s investment in a horror atmosphere – but also increases the emotional payoff for the player who is willing to put up with such affective closeness. Through the tug-of-war between the player’s actions and the mutants’ attacks, the game conveys the unruly materiality of the nonhuman landscape, which should be respected rather than dominated. The Forest thus evokes, through the specific means of survival gameplay, something akin to what I will discuss in chapter 8 as the “dialogue” between human subjectivity and nonhuman environments. Dialogue is, of course, a far less belligerent metaphor than the antagonistic relationship of The Forest. Yet that metaphor and the game’s setup converge on the notion of a fundamental reciprocity in human-nonhuman relations. When played stealthily, the material landscape of The Forest is no mere projective screen for the player’s fantasies of colonizing this peninsula and its unsettling inhabitants: it is an antagonist whose agency has to be strategically acknowledged. Nonhuman materiality, in this game, must be kept in check through tactical coexistence. In the final section of the chapter I turn to how this articulation of materiality in The Forest (as well as Raft and The Long Dark) is supported by formal and thematic features of the stories told by these games.

6.5 Environmental Storytelling and the Framing of Materiality The relationship between (video) games and narrative was a contentious topic in the early days of game studies, with scholars divided into two camps: those who foregrounded the continuity between the video game medium and earlier representational media (particularly literature), and those who insisted on their discontinuities. The former (who came to be known in this debate as “narratologists”) saw the narrativity of video games as providing common ground with non-digital media (e.g., Murray 1998), while the latter (who referred to themselves as “ludologists”) argued that strategic mechanics and gameplay always trump narrative in

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video game experiences (see Eskelinen 2001; Frasca 2003). This early debate fizzled out after a few years, leaving unsolved a number of questions on the convergence of storytelling and digital gameplay: how do video games borrow narrative strategies from other media, and how do they innovate on them? Marie-Laure Ryan (2006) and more recently Dan Punday (2019), among others, have offered helpful tools to address that problem, but here I will take my cue from Henry Jenkins’s (2004) discussion of “environmental storytelling,” which he presents as a narrative strategy that is unique to games. Environmental storytelling is also a useful concept to theorize the narrative method embraced by my three case studies. For Jenkins, who builds on earlier work on amusement park design (Carson 2000), video games excel at embedding narrative information in computer-generated spaces. The spatial stories that arise from this embedding privilege “spatial exploration over plot development. [They] are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character’s movement across the map” (Jenkins 2004, 124). Spatial stories can emerge through dialogue with non-player characters (NPCs), notes or recordings scattered across the game world, or non-interactive sequences (“cutscenes”) that start when the player arrives at a certain location. In all these instances, narrative is integrated with game mechanics through a spatial link. The Forest, Raft, and The Long Dark are excellent illustrations of this approach: they place the player within an expansive open world, using specific locations to advance the story. In The Forest, for example, we start inside the wreckage of the plane: the protagonist’s goal, as I mentioned above, is to find his son, Timmy, who has been kidnapped by the mutants. At that point, though, the protagonist’s survival needs take over: the player must build shelter and grasp the game’s basic mechanics before they are in a position to advance the story. Mostly, the first narrative clues are contained in the peninsula’s cave system, but the caves are a dangerous, mutantinfested place and the player needs to gear up considerably (which requires crafting and building) before cave exploration becomes viable. When – and if – that happens, the player discovers a few traces of Timmy’s presence in the caves (drawings he made during his abduction), along with some vague hints pointing to the bottom of the enormous crater or “sinkhole” in the middle of the peninsula. Reaching this sinkhole safely is challenging and requires a number of non-craftable items (a “rebreather,” which allows extended diving, a climbing axe, etc.) hidden at various locations in the game world. Some of these locations also contain notes and recordings that start sketching out – via environmental storytelling – the backstory of the peninsula, but the picture doesn’t come into view fully until the player gets to the bottom of the sinkhole. The player’s successful exploration of the sinkhole triggers a long endgame sequence, which takes them through a hidden medical laboratory and

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faces them with a hard choice: Timmy is dead, but he can be revived by causing another plane crash and kidnapping another child. The details of the plot matter less, for my purposes, than the way in which it is presented: a narrative setup with the plane crash scene, a few hints that are spatially distributed in the caves, and a long narrative “coda” where most of the game’s story is delivered upon reaching a certain location (the sinkhole). The linearity of this ending is unmistakable, particularly because it clashes with the more diffuse style of environmental storytelling in the caves. As a player puts it on Reddit: “the shift in gameplay style is abrupt and jarring. 95% of the game is completely open-world, driven by your instincts to explore, build, fight, and advance. Then this very specific thing happens [the exploration of the sinkhole], and the gameplay becomes rigidly linear, where nearly all of that freedom is taken away. You aren’t even given any indication of this shift before walking into it.”9 This seeming discontinuity in the player’s experience reflects the technical problem of integrating storytelling within an open-world game that places heavy emphasis on combat, building, and crafting. The environmental storytelling is also a solution that accommodates different approaches to gameplay: some players will ignore the narrative elements and focus on the survival mechanics, while other players will attempt to strike a balance between the two, advancing the narrative and their survival skills at the same time. The linearity of the ending also puts a significant spin on the game’s negotiation of materiality, which as we have seen involves a tradeoff between the player’s impact on the environment and the mutants’ assertiveness. The game’s finale, as I mentioned, asks the player to choose between accepting Timmy’s death or reviving him at a high moral cost (because another child has to be sacrificed to bring Timmy back to life). Neither choice is particularly desirable, and the dilemma represents another version of the antagonistic entanglement with the more-than-human that the game’s environment foregrounds: reviving Timmy means tapping into dark forces that elude the protagonist’s grasp, just as the lowprofile approach to gameplay creates troubling closeness between the player and the mutants, given the absence of physical defenses and separation (the “big fortress”). The linearity of the narrative thus underscores the ethically uncertain materiality that is at the center of the player’s interactions with the peninsula. In different ways, the environmental storytelling of Raft and The Long Dark also serves as a comment on how these games engage with nonhuman materiality. In Raft, the player is sent from one story-specific island to another through a series of codes that can be entered in the raft’s receiver for navigation (without

 See https://www.reddit.com/r/TheForest/comments/7rrmr4/the_forest_story/.

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these codes, the islands won’t show up, unlike regular islands for resource collection). After solving a number of spatial puzzles or collecting items from various parts of each island, the player receives the code for the next location. As of June 2021, the game includes five story locations of increasing size, from the radio tower of the beginning (which can be explored in a few minutes) to the floating city of Tangaroa (which requires a far more significant time investment). All of these locations are devoid of human presence; their histories emerge from notes discovered by the player: they involve desperate attempts to restart society in the face of rising sea levels, limited supplies, and unrest. Judging by the fact that all of these locations are deserted, these attempts have failed – a realization that casts considerable doubt on the protagonist’s (and the player’s) own efforts on the raft. Ultimately, the stories told by Raft are intriguing because they clash so spectacularly with the fantasy of infinitely renewable and craftable materiality that underlies the game’s survival mechanics. Also because of the linearity of their presentation, these stories frame the collapse of civilization as an outcome that can be delayed but not avoided, just as the player can decide to ignore the game’s narrative elements but cannot change their order or shape their progression. The gleeful, cartoonish quality of the game (including its investment in materiality) is thus put between brackets by the suggestion that, with its extractive and exploitative practices, modernity contains the seed of its own collapse. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that some of the notes found by the player on Caravan Island (a floating caravan park which is the story’s penultimate stop) reflect a child’s perspective: when read in the context of the game’s stories, the notion of limitless materiality embedded in the crafting system is revealed to be nothing more than a child’s fantasy in a condemned world. The story of The Long Dark builds on a similar atmosphere of widespread collapse: “the patterns of nature have been broken. Interrupted,” remarks one of the game’s non-player characters, Metuselah. But while Raft is set after a catastrophe, The Long Dark explores the slow pace of an unfolding catastrophe, particularly as it is experienced by communities located far from urban centers.10 Unlike The Forest and Raft, The Long Dark features a large cast of characters with whom players interact as the protagonist, Will, searches for Astrid in the frozen wilderness. In episode 3, Astrid herself becomes the player-controlled character. Like Will, she encounters individuals who have been traumatized by a series of catastrophic events (economic decline, a geomagnetic storm, lack of essential supplies, and so on). The focus of these encounters is on the ethics of community and

 Rob Nixon (2011) has written on the slowness of environmental devastation under the rubric of “slow violence,” an influential concept that resonates with my reading of The Long Dark.

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decision-making in desperate times: in episode 3, for example, Astrid investigates the site of a plane crash, rescuing the survivors and searching the victims’ bodies for their ID. The pace of these missions – and of the conversations that punctuate them – underscores the slow temporality of the game’s survival elements, where (as I suggested above) awareness of natural cycles and processes is key. Nonhuman materiality is elusive in The Long Dark, it requires keen perceptual skills and careful planning. In the human domain, too, as the story demonstrates, change only happens gradually and thoughtfully. Ultimately, the story’s foregrounding of community tempers the survivalism of the gameplay, showing that even as disaster unfolds human company is as important – but also as fragile – as our reliance on the natural environment. The linearity of the plot helps steer the survival-based gameplay toward an insight into the value of community, even as it leaves open many questions about the nature and causes of the ongoing collapse: human greed is repeatedly said to be responsible for the catastrophe, yet the spectacular auroras that adorn the night sky point to a more-than-human mystery behind the game’s events. This narrative supports the game’s collected atmosphere and lingering sense of mystery while positioning the player’s slow negotiation of nonhuman materiality within a larger, human context. ✶✶✶ In its approach to materiality in survival games, this chapter has focused on three key dimensions of the genre: the crafting system, which allows players to fabricate items that extend and deepen their interactions with the game world; the building system, through which players reshape the game world by creating new physical structures (which provide shelter and enable more specialized crafting); and the narrative element, which is used by developers to steer the players’ experience and introduce them gradually to the games’ more advanced systems. Not all survival games place the same emphasis on these dimensions: there is no building in The Long Dark, for instance, and other survival games (such as Rust or Icarus) do away with narrative almost completely. Nevertheless, I have argued that storytelling plays an important, if overlooked, role in framing the way in which survival games imagine and negotiate materiality. This does not imply that all players will attach value to the narrative: many will no doubt focus on the survival mechanics and the open-ended fun of building and crafting. Through the distance of representation and computer simulation, these gameplay practices seemingly embrace an instrumentalizing and extractive approach to matter: they embody the “worlds without end” rightly identified as problematic by Chang (2019). This element is particularly evident in Raft, a game that celebrates an unrealistic ideal of sustainability, whereby matter can be eternally collected and transformed into other matter (including advanced technology), without any loss or impact on the environment.

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Yet, when one starts paying attention to the plot of survival games, their narratives appear to significantly qualify and complicate the meanings that emerge from gameplay. Game scholarship, and particularly scholarship inspired by Bogost’s articulation of the interpretive openness of game operations, should be alert to these thematic nuances. When read in the context of the stories of material and social collapse that keep popping up in the game world, the incongruities of Raft’s infinite materiality stand out, and the game’s cartoonish atmosphere takes on new significance: this isn’t disengaged humor, but self-conscious irony leveled at a game simulation in which plastic, copper, and scrap metal can be combined in one click to craft a brand-new battery. In a different way, the narrative of The Forest resonates with the game’s focus on a shifting balance of human-nonhuman relations, with technological progress (evoked by the secret medical lab) raising questions that are at least as chilling as the forest into which players are thrown by the game’s survival mechanics. Finally, the plot of The Long Dark challenges the Crusoesque narrative of “solo” survivalism by positioning the two protagonists’ parallel efforts visà-vis a larger human community and its affective and ethical demands. By deploying gameplay and storytelling in tandem, these digital artifacts negotiate materiality so as to escape the rigid templates of survival in a hostile wilderness, with its undertow of human exceptionalism and mastery. In Raft, as I have argued, the ubiquity of matter, in the form of debris collected by the player, tips over into a fantastical abundance of materiality, as if the player’s raft was magically invulnerable to the cataclysms that have depopulated the rest of the world. The Forest stages materiality through the delicate interplay between the player and the mutants, which creates unsettling closeness while potentially questioning our investment in militarist presence. The Long Dark uses slow pace and focused atmosphere to defamiliarize the player’s perception of a material environment whose surprising depths are gradually revealed in the course of gameplay. In all the chapter’s case studies, the tensions of the spectrum of materiality are embedded within game spaces – an approach that goes hand in hand with the game medium’s tendency toward environmental storytelling, as theorized by Jenkins. The next chapter pursues this interest in how space may challenge assumptions regarding the inertness of matter, but it also shifts the focus from spaces of raw survival to a far more ordinary-seeming place, the office, whose façade of everyday tedium conceals anxieties worthy of The Forest.

7 The Office Weird One of the most memorable objects of the iconic 1990s TV show The X-Files (created by Chris Carter) is a weapon known as “the alien stiletto.” This slick metal knife with a telescopic blade was introduced in season two of the series and appears in many of the episodes that advance the show’s “mythological” arc – where “mythology” is the term used by the creators (and later by the fan community) to distinguish the overarching storyline from the episodic stories told by self-contained installments. The main focus of the show’s mythology is an international conspiracy aimed at concealing knowledge of extraterrestrial life – a conspiracy in which the two protagonists, the FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, soon become entangled. As the mythological plot thickens, the protagonists learn that the alien stiletto is the only weapon that can kill alien bounty hunters, shape-shifting creatures tasked with policing extraterrestrial presence on Earth. The stiletto has attracted a great deal of fan attention over the years. More than two decades after the original series’ finale in 2002, Reddit still teems with posts by X-Files fans showing off their homemade replicas of the alien weapon. In my own experience of watching the show as a teenager, I remember finding the sound of the retractable blade particularly unsettling. It is a pneumatic sound reminiscent of air being released from a gas duster, and its eerie aerial quality clashes with the material solidity of the stiletto. In an interview, the show’s coproducer, Paul Rabwin, revealed that this seemingly otherworldly sound was simply a recording of him breathing on a microphone.1 When uncoupled from the human body and associated with a mysterious artifact, even a sound as mundane as that of exhalation takes on unsettling qualities. This process has been discussed by Viktor Shklovsky (1965) – and many other literary theorists in his wake – under the heading of “defamiliarization.”2 An ordinary element (in this case, the sound of someone breathing) is taken out of context and creatively repositioned so as to stop readers or viewers in their tracks and elicit an affective response of puzzlement and disorientation.3 The objects that I will discuss in this chapter are caught in the same tension of familiarity and blatant alienness. The result of that tension is that materiality becomes

 For more on the alien stiletto and its appearances in the series, see https://x-files.fandom.com/ wiki/Alien_Stiletto.  For more on the history of Shklovsky’s “ostranenie” and its many English translations, see Berlina (2015).  See Miall and Kuiken’s (1994) empirical work on the link between defamiliarization (via stylistic foregrounding) and affect. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-007

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a site of weirdness, a feeling that foregrounds the two poles of vibrancy and uncertainty on my spectrum of materiality. According to Mark Fisher, the weird signals “a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here” (2016, 15; emphasis in the original). Thus, in the case of the alien stiletto in The X-Files, the wrongness derives from the defamiliarizing combination of sensory experience (breathing) and an object presented as ominously nonhuman. That wrongness both renders the sound unrecognizable and enhances the mysterious power of the alien artifact, a conceptual and affective dynamic that evokes a sense of something being off-kilter. As Fisher highlights, the word “weird” also denotes a strand of speculative fiction dating back to the first half of the twentieth century, with seminal work by H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood (among other writers). The X-Files deliberately positions itself within this tradition, cross-pollinating the cosmic conspiracy – a typical motif of the weird genre – with contemporary paranoia and distrust of government institutions. As Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding put it, the “dual slogan of the X-Files – ‘trust no one’ and ‘the truth is out there’ – express the double bind of a system that can be felt but not known but which is, nevertheless, believed to be organized and controlled by ‘the powers that be’” (1999, 294). More often than not, weirdness is how the “system” feels to the investigators who seek to unravel the cover-up, and that weirdness coalesces around material things like the alien stiletto. Equally important in The X-Files and in other conspiratorially minded fictions is the institutional embedding of the weirdness. Mulder and Scully are FBI agents working against the grain of a government agency that appears deeply complicit in suppressing knowledge about extraterrestrial contacts. The FBI is both part of the “system,” as an abstract and sprawling agency, and a physical backdrop to the protagonists’ efforts. Crucial, in that respect, is the office setting of many key scenes – first and foremost, Mulder’s office in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, which stores the titular “X-Files” (that is, unsolved and enigmatic cases). The sensational nature of Mulder and Scully’s investigations clashes with the stiff and bureaucratic atmosphere exuded by the government building: the protagonists, as noted by Charlie Bertsch (1998, 118–119), are not agency “drones” but rather creative players who repeatedly flout procedure and chain of command. In The X-Files, the weirdness is mostly “out there,” in the field, and consistently resists incorporation within the regimented space of the office. The series thus helps me introduce what I call in this chapter the “office weird,” even if it is – ultimately – an imperfect or at least inconsistent example of it. The office weird refers to narrative instances in which the “sense of wrongness” identified by Fisher is embedded within material spaces and objects that are normally associated with the uneventful (and proverbially frustrating) sphere of administrative

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or government work. While centrally concerned with a governmental organization, The X-Files embraces a sensationalist rhetoric that plays down, in most cases, the drab visual language of the office. Instead, this chapter’s case studies maximize that institutional focus: they defamiliarize mundane objects and spatial elements that are typical of the office setting and thus bring out, fantastically, their weirdness. In a sense, then, this interest in the office weird reverses the conceptual operation that underlies the alien stiletto: if the stiletto is a nonhuman artifact whose weirdness is intensified by the familiar, embodied element of human respiration, the office weird takes completely ordinary things and transforms them into mysterious entities endowed with more-than-human powers. These are things steeped in uncertainty. They elude the characters’ attempts to penetrate their mysteries – and this failure, as we will see, is highly productive both narratively and conceptually. The case studies I am referring to are the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, Authority (2014), and the video game Control (Remedy Entertainment 2019). Both offer variations on a secret plot to control a nonhuman, and possibly extraterrestrial, force. In VanderMeer’s novel, a coastal area known as “Area X” becomes the site of inexplicable events that effectively reshape the landscape and erase almost any human presence. A number of expeditions are dispatched to investigate, unsuccessfully, and a government agency (the “Southern Reach”) is created to research the anomalies and manage the information surrounding them. The “weirdness” of Area X is covered up as the result of environmental disaster, while there are clear indications in the trilogy that the anomaly derives from extraterrestrial intelligence. The protagonist of this second volume of VanderMeer’s trilogy is a character nicknamed Control (his real name is John Rodriguez), who is assigned to the Southern Reach to replace the director after her mysterious disappearance. This former director plays an important role in the first and final volumes of the trilogy (Annihilation and Acceptance), whose events largely take place within the enigmatic coastal landscape of Area X. Authority, by distinct contrast, is largely set inside the dull government building of the Southern Reach; most of the novel’s drama derives from the wall of secrecy and reticence experienced by the new director, Control, as he attempts to shed light on the workings of this institution. Remedy Entertainment’s video game Control was clearly inspired by VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” novels; it casts the player in the role of Jesse Faden, who is appointed director of a secret agency known as the “Federal Bureau of Control.” The Bureau’s main task is to investigate paranormal activities, especially objects that start “acting up” and must be contained by the FBC. Faden’s first day at work doesn’t go as expected, however: when she arrives at the FBC’s headquarters, she discovers that the building has been taken over by a mysterious invader known as “the Hiss.” The player is asked to explore this sprawling location and

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defeat hordes of Hiss enemies in order to regain control of the agency, many of whose senior officers have been infiltrated by the Hiss. In different ways, both VanderMeer’s novel and Control revisit themes popularized by 1990s TV series such as The X-Files (or also Twin Peaks); they do so by defamiliarizing material objects and locations within an everyday, workplace setting that takes on disturbing qualities, but that also reveals surprising creative possibilities. This is the office weird that I set out to discuss in this chapter; to fully understand that concept, however, further contextualization of the weird is needed.

7.1 Weird Atmospheres and Nonhuman Materialities As a mode of fiction writing, the weird hovers between the horror, the fantastic, and science fiction. While indebted to nineteenth-century Gothic fiction by (for example) Edgar Allan Poe, the immediate roots of the weird are in an American magazine titled Weird Tales and co-founded in 1923 by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger (see Ashley and Nicholls 2021). In roughly three decades, this “pulp” magazine published fiction by writers such as Robert Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury. Lovecraft’s name looms particularly large in the history of the weird, not only due to the influence of his fictional works, but also because of his role as the first theorist of the weird, in his 1925 essay “Introduction to Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Here Lovecraft aligned the weird with a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces” (Lovecraft 2004, 105). The unknown (and possibly unknowable) emerges as a centerpiece of the weird, along with the equally vague concept of “dread,” which suggests fear in the absence of a clear intentional object (something one is afraid of). Equally important in this passage is the word “atmosphere,” which also evokes elusiveness, as if the source of the weirdness could not be identified. Again, my initial example of the alien stiletto seems apt: its weirdness has to do with the mismatch between the shiny artifact and the pneumatic sound that accompanies it; yet, without knowing the sound’s exact origin it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish what is so incongruous about this association. The weird is thus an atmospheric effect – diffuse but nevertheless strongly perceptible. In a commentary on the quoted passage from Lovecraft’s essay, Roger Luckhurst highlights this reference to “atmosphere”: “because Lovecraft insisted that the weird was an effect of ‘atmosphere’ . . . it was never tied to a fixed typology and continually slipped category” (Luckhurst 2017, 1043). The focus on atmosphere (as opposed to plot or setting) explains, according to Luckhurst, the difficulty of positioning the weird vis-à-vis established genres such as the Gothic or science fiction. Despite its atmospheric “veering” (Luckhurst 2017, 1049) from one genre to another,

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the weird did establish a distinctive genealogy after its humble origins in the pulps. It is customary to distinguish between the “old weird” of early twentieth-century figures such as Lovecraft and the “new weird” linked to contemporary British writer China Miéville and American author Jeff VanderMeer.4 The latter reconstructs the recent history of the weird in the introduction to an anthology (which he co-edited with Ann VanderMeer) on new weird writing. The distinction between old and new weird old also serves the strategic purpose of distancing contemporary authors like VanderMeer from the problematic politics of Lovecraft’s oeuvre, particularly its racism and misogyny. Instead, the work of Miéville and VanderMeer pursues a progressive agenda: it “treats the alien, the hybrid, and the chaotic as subversions of the various normalizations of power and subjectivity” (Noys and Murphy 2016, 125). VanderMeer’s work, in particular, has been widely read in the context of today’s ecological crisis: it speaks to questions of capitalist exploitation of the nonhuman world and ecological collapse. Benjamin Robertson’s book-length study of VanderMeer’s fiction is pertinent here. Robertson positions VanderMeer’s works as a response to contemporary debates on the Anthropocene and the devastating impact of industrialized societies on the Earth’s climate. The central concept in Robertson’s reading of VanderMeer is that of “fantastic materiality” (Robertson 2018, 4), which is a way of thinking about materiality through the fantastical situations and unsettling atmosphere staged by the weird. For Robertson, this notion of materiality is attuned to the insights of New Materialism and challenges Western dichotomies between agency, seen as the exclusive province of the human, and the presumed passivity of matter. Jon Hegglund (2020) writes in a similar vein about “weird realism,” building again on VanderMeer’s work (specifically the novel Annihilation) to discuss the weird’s investment in forms of agency that transcend the human: in the “Southern Reach” trilogy, as Hegglund argues, the physical landscape of Area X becomes a nonhuman character of sorts, and not just metaphorically but by actively taking control of the human characters’ minds (and of the trilogy’s plot). The nonhuman agency of Area X works “through a blending of anthropomorphism and unknowable difference,” as Hegglund (2020, 20) puts it, a combination that aligns VanderMeer’s weird narrative art with the speculations of the New Materialist thinkers discussed in this book’s introduction. But the weird, we should not forget, is an art of atmosphere. That is why the counterintuitive notion of materiality that underlies the new weird cannot be simply identified with a physical location within the storyworld, like Area X. At its best, the weird doesn’t merely represent nonhuman agency, it doesn’t assign it an

 M. John Harrison is typically credited with coining the term “new weird” on a message board in 2003 (see VanderMeer 2007, ix).

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identifiable role or actantial position in the narrative.5 Rather, it turns the disruption of human-nonhuman dichotomies into an atmosphere – that is, an experience of sensory, bodily immersion in a reality that (in the case of weird fiction) strikes us as disturbingly unfamiliar. This experience recalls Tzvetan Todorov’s (1975) structuralist account of the fantastic as a mode that involves a hesitation between realism and the marvelous (i.e., a literary mode that embraces physically impossible events). But while, for Todorov, the fantastic is the result of a binary oscillation between two interpretations (are these happenings real or mere fantasy?), the weird refuses such binaries; instead, its affect floats ambiguously between multiple positions, from cosmic horror to the sublime of natural landscapes to grief at the anthropogenic devastation of ecosystems.6 This affective indeterminacy gives rise to a distinctly weird atmosphere, which pervades the narrative and shapes the audience’s experience in profoundly different ways from the hesitation of the fantastic (despite the similarities between these modes). To develop this point, we can turn to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s discussion of literary atmospheres in Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (2012). Conceptualizing atmosphere through the German term Stimmung, Gumbrecht argues that “‘reading for Stimmung’ always means paying attention to the textual dimension of the forms that envelop us and our bodies as a physical reality – something that can catalyze inner feelings without matters of representation necessarily being involved” (2012, 5). In addition to highlighting the affective and bodily nature of literary atmosphere, Gumbrecht suggests that atmosphere goes beyond “matters of representation.” This point helps me uncouple the weirdness of VanderMeer’s fiction from overtly nonhuman and alien entities such as Area X in the “Southern Reach” trilogy, which are indeed primarily a matter of representation. Instead, I propose focusing on the seemingly all-too-human space of the administrative building in the second volume of the trilogy (most of which does not take place in Area X) to show how weirdness can emerge, atmospherically, where we would least expect it. Within the institutional space of the Southern Reach building, the sense of wrongness identified by Fisher as a central dimension of the weird has a direct affective impact on the reader’s experience, bringing out nonhuman agency while embedding it, mysteriously, within a fully anthropocentric space. More specifically, we will see that the defamiliarization of material, everyday objects and locations (a drawer, a storage room) makes a significant contribution to the atmospheric effects of VanderMeer’s writing. Remedy Entertainment’s Control demonstrates many of the  Of course, this casting of the nonhuman as a narrative agent is in itself noteworthy. For discussion, in addition to Hegglund (2020), see Caracciolo (2021a, 109–110).  I write about the unstable nature of the weird and its resistance to binary thinking in Caracciolo (2019).

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same weird dynamics, but complicates them, as I will argue, through the interactivity that is distinctive of the video game medium: the disruptive uncertainty of material things is not only embedded in narrative situations but performed by the player through the game’s combat mechanics, which center on dynamic interactions with the material surroundings of the player-controlled character.

7.2 Rotting Honey and a Secret Drawer As the second volume of the “Southern Reach” trilogy, Authority serves as a bridge between the more focused plot of Annihilation (which centers on the last expedition into Area X) and the larger canvas of Acceptance, which juggles multiple timelines and narrative voices or perspectives. One of the many perspectives foregrounded by Acceptance is that of Control, the protagonist and focalizing character of Authority, who as I mentioned above joins the Southern Reach as the new director. The second volume’s preoccupation with the procedures of a federal agency thus counterpoints the disturbing alienness of Area X; it also paves the way for the broad scope of the final instalment, in which the motifs of opaque government and nonhuman agency converge. At the start of Authority, the reader is no less a newcomer to the Southern Reach than the recently appointed director, whose nickname ironically signals a lack of control over the institution’s past and present. In case Area X wasn’t mysterious enough in itself, its puzzles are compounded by the reticence of Control’s new coworkers and by the apparent hostility of the assistant director, Grace, who used to work for the former director (now gone missing) and seems to know far more than she lets on. The nonhuman unknowability of Area X is thus complicated by Control’s constant struggles to gain even basic information about the Southern Reach’s activities, in an obvious commentary on the sluggishness and obtuseness of bureaucracy: “There lay between [the former director’s] stewardship and [Control’s] ascension a gap, a valley of time and forms to be filled out, procedures to be followed, the rooting out and hiring of staff” (2014, 4). Theoretically created to solve the mystery of Area X, the Southern Reach ends up exacerbating it, or at least diverting attention from it in the name of administrative procedure. VanderMeer captures this institutional opaqueness through insistent atmospheric cues. Here is the first extended description of the building’s interior, which mirrors Control’s perspective (through internal focalization): “The floor beneath his shoes was grimy, almost sticky. The fluorescent lights above flickered at irregular intervals, and the table and chairs seemed like something out of a high-school cafeteria. He could smell the sour metallic tang of a low-quality cleaning agent, almost like rotting honey” (2014, 20). As I have argued elsewhere (Caracciolo 2021b), the atmospheric

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quality of VanderMeer’s prose stems from its focus on textural patterns, which go beyond the typical visual bias of spatial references in the Western novel (and Western culture more generally).7 Touch requires physical proximity and embodied manipulation that eliminate or at least problematize the distance typical of vision, which involves both physical and conceptual separation. Embracing the concept of texture – which is etymologically related to touch – helps extend that focus on subject-object interactions to other sensory modalities as well as affective experience (see Bora 1997): like touch, paying close attention to textural patterns implicates the perceiving agent in the object of perception.8 Texture enters the above-quoted passage on two levels. First, the griminess and stickiness of the floor convey uncomfortable proximity between Control’s body and the physical space of the Southern Reach. If the flickering lights and cafeteria-like furniture could pass unobserved in an administrative building, the textural quality of the floor disrupts that illusion of normalcy and transparency: instead of serving as a neutral backdrop to professional transactions, physical space demands attention. The surprising stickiness of the floor is of course intensified by the olfactory reference, accompanied by an organic simile (“almost like rotting honey”). Like touch, smell is a proximal sensory mode: humans can perceive smells from up close, but unlike many other animals our olfaction alone is unable to generate a rich, granular image of physical space. Because of its strong and elementary physicality, this “sour metallic tang” is incongruous in a public space that is supposed to be odorless; it evokes, again, unsettling proximity, not only between the character and his surroundings but also between the reader and the storyworld. In fact, one could argue that references to smell are particularly conducive to readerly immersion in that they disrupt the distance of visual and literary representation, pulling the reader into the narrative situation more forcefully than visual references can.9 In this case, that effect is strengthened by the fact that the “rotting honey” smell comes up periodically in VanderMeer’s spatial descriptions, turning into something of an obsession for Control. The fact that the other characters don’t seem to pick up the smell has the double effect of increasing the closeness between the reader and the protagonist and underscoring the impression that Control doesn’t belong in the Southern Reach: all of Control’s coworkers

 For a discussion of the oculocentrism of Western culture, see Jenks (1995) and also Crary (1990) in relation to modernity specifically.  See also Caracciolo (2022b, Ch. 5) for a discussion of the concept of texture and its significance vis-à-vis the imagination of human-nonhuman relations.  I discuss this point in relation to narrative space in Caracciolo (2013).

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appear well adjusted to a spatiality that strikes him as completely, and unpleasantly, incongruous.10 This is, of course, the sense of wrongness that Fisher associates with the weird, and it works atmospherically: it enfolds the protagonist and the reader, providing the Southern Reach building with a unique sense of place whose exact source cannot be pinned down. The space of the office is weirded through the textural cues of VanderMeer’s prose. Nowhere is this sense of incongruity more evident than in Control’s office, however. At the beginning of the novel, Control insists on using the former director’s workspace “despite Grace’s attempts to cordon him off in a glorified broom closet” (2014, 15). The room hasn’t been cleaned up after the former director’s disappearance, and the clutter she left behind is repeatedly described by VanderMeer through geological metaphors: when he sits down at his desk, Control notices “the sediment of various bits of paper pinned and re-pinned until they looked more like oddly delicate yet haphazard art installations” (2014, 16). Much later, he realizes that “photographs had also been buried in the sedimentary layers of the director’s desk” (2014, 174). The sedimentary metaphor hints at the Southern Reach’s tendency to conceal truth under layers of paperwork, but even more crucially it signals participation in what Mark McGurl calls a “new cultural geology,” the desire to situate human activities vis-à-vis “a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human self-concern” (McGurl 2011, 380). In effect, metaphorical language like this rewilds the director’s office, an impression reinforced by the presence of what the narrator describes as “an array of preserved natural ephemera. Dusty and decaying bits of pinecone trailed across the shelves” (2014, 41). Together with the metaphorical language, these descriptive elements defamiliarize this professional space into a sort of wilderness that Control, as the new director, is asked to master. His attempts keep failing, though. Particular resistance comes from two features of the office, which I will discuss in order of increasing incongruity. The first is a door that “opened onto the wall-detritus of an inelegant remodeling” (2014, 41) – where “detritus,” of course, ties in with the sedimentary metaphors for the office. If read in light of a long tradition of magic doors and portals to other dimensions in fantastic and speculative fiction, this door certainly proves anticlimactic. Behind it is only a wall with a rough map of Area X, probably handdrawn by the former director, and a long, rambling sentence the reader has already come across in Annihilation: it is the enigmatic language the characters

 See this exchange between Control and Whitby: “‘Isn’t that cleaning smell a bit strong?’ ‘The smell?’ Whitby’s head whipped around, eyes made huge by the circles around them. ‘The rancid honey smell.’ ‘I don’t smell anything’” (2014, 50).

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find scribbled on the wall of the tunnel in Area X. Noteworthy here is that the words have a peculiar effect on Control, intensifying the already discussed “rotting honey smell” until he feels “physically ill” (2014, 102). The incongruity experienced by Control derives from the fact that the former director felt the need to use her office in such an unorthodox way, crudely writing and drawing on the wall when printed maps of Area X are readily available. There is something slightly unhinged in this feature of the office, as Control realizes, and it confirms the impression that, despite the façade of administrative tedium and anonymity, the Southern Reach is a profoundly destabilizing place. Control himself soon experiences the full force of that destabilization, but to understand the protagonist’s transformation we need to factor in the other incongruous element of the office: a drawer in the former director’s desk is initially “locked” but displays what the narrator characterizes ambiguously as an “earthy quality . . . that hinted at something having rotted inside” (2014, 42) – again, an olfactory reference and a sign of the office’s strange rewilding. When Control manages to open the drawer, he finds – along with notes handwritten by the former director – three things: a plant, which still appears to be living, a dead mouse, and an old-fashioned cellphone. The effect of this material display, remarks the narrator, “was oddly as if the director had been creating a compost pile for the plant. One full of eccentric intel. Or some ridiculous science project: ‘mouse-powered irrigation system for data relay and biosphere maintenance’” (2014, 88). The materiality of these objects straddles the divide between amateurish science and a still life in the tradition of early modern painting. This materiality is also entirely mundane: if the ensemble exudes mystery, it is because of the juxtaposition and secrecy of the drawer’s contents, not because of any visually remarkable quality. When asked about the plant and the mouse, Whitby, a Southern Reach scientist who plays a major role in the novel, tersely remarks: “The terror” (2014, 112) – a phrase that only whets the reader’s curiosity about these objects. In the chapter that follows we learn that Whitby had actually said “terroir,” not “terror,” using a “wine term” that describes “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” (2014, 131). The place Whitby has in mind is, of course, Area X, to which all the objects found in the drawer are related: Control discovers that the former director had secretly crossed the border of Area X, and these items may well be the “samples” (2014, 259) mentioned by her elusive report after her return. Control’s mind keeps going back to these objects, as if they held special significance or contained the key to the mysteries of Area X. He calls

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them “talismans” (2014, 149), implying that they may have magical properties.11 The plant does turn out to be special, since it is – Whitby tells Control – biologically immortal. But other than that, Control cannot fathom the reasons for the former director’s desire to preserve and hide away these objects, or how they might express Area X’s unique “terroir.” Yet the plant, the mouse, and the cellphone surface repeatedly in Authority, and a number of references to these things appear in Acceptance, too. Toward the end of the former, Control even wonders if his attempts to penetrate the mysteries of the Southern Reach hadn’t been derailed by “too much focus on plant-and-mouse” (2014, 318), with a curious contraction of these seemingly disparate objects. The contents of the drawer embody a nonhuman materiality whose agency remains covert despite (or perhaps because of?) Control’s assumption that these things carry special significance, and that they could advance his knowledge of the institution he is supposed to lead – and also of the vaster mystery of Area X. This resistance, of course, ties in with the point often raised by OOO theorists like Harman on the inaccessibility of material entities (see introduction). Authority approaches this dimension of the spectrum of materiality in two steps. First, mundane objects are defamiliarized as Control – and the reader – are teased into assigning them more-than-human agency via the link with Area X. Second, the novel consistently refuses to cash out this agency at the level of narrative progression: if one considers the plot of the trilogy, the contribution of plant, mouse, and cellphone appears extremely limited, if not downright nonexistent. Like Control, the reader, too, may be distracted by “too much focus on plant-and-mouse” (2014, 318) when they expect that this material assemblage will make a direct contribution to the plot. In a sense, this diversionary tactic affirms the specialness of these things – but also uncouples it from narrative control. Instead of being legible in terms of narrative meaning, the material presence of these objects is strictly affective and atmospheric. They offer a vivid reminder that the mystery of Area X has already infiltrated the government agency that was created to contain it: by not fitting into a coherent narrative – whether about the former director or Area X itself – these unreadable objects tinge the bureaucratic space of the Southern Reach with a distinctively weird, and deranged, quality that soon starts weighing on the protagonist’s own mind. An important turning point is an encounter between Control and Whitby in a storage room. On a whim, Control decides to enter the room to see if he can locate the “horrible cleaning product” (2014, 179) responsible for the rotting honey smell. He doesn’t find the cleaning product, but he finds Whitby – seemingly, in a

 Cf. also my discussion of the fetish, a related concept, in chapter 5.

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state of shock. Whitby mumbles an excuse and leaves, enigmatically. Later in the novel, Control decides to return with a flashlight to inspect the room. He finds a trapdoor leading to a hidden room in which “someone had painted a vast phantasmagoria of grotesque monsters with human faces” (2014, 273). Control reflects that, “as surprising and disturbing walls went, [the mural] beat the director’s office by quite a lot. It made his skin prickle with sudden chills” (2014, 275). The bodily response is another atmospheric effect, the result of a diffuse – but jarring – incongruity linked to this grotesque painting in the recesses of an office building. The painter, Control infers, must be Whitby himself, who turns out to be present in the room. He makes himself known by touching Control’s head, his fingers spreading “like a starfish and slowly moved back and forth” (2014, 276). This unsettling scene turns the seemingly harmless scientist into a monstrous figure, a stand-in for the Crawler that haunts the tunnel in Area X (as described in Annihilation). Indeed, VanderMeer’s office weird builds on a number of subtle parallels and resonances between the Southern Reach and Area X itself. The door in the director’s office is a version of Area X’s doorway, the plant and mouse evoke the unruly materiality of its flora and fauna, and Whitby’s unexpected monstrosity serves as “breach, a leak, a door into Area X” (2014, 297), as Control himself verbalizes. These correspondences add to the incongruity experienced by the protagonist, leading to the defamiliarization of the spatiality of the Southern Reach. The defamiliarizing quality of VanderMeer’s spatial descriptions becomes particularly salient at the end of the novel’s third part, in an episode that – again – thematizes sensory experience (smell and touch) and the physicality of the Southern Reach. First, Control realizes he “hadn’t smelled rotting honey the entire day, no matter where he had been” (2014, 289). He is headed for the science division, grasps the handle of a door, but realizes that “there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall. And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand” (2014, 290). Normally a symbol of solidity, the wall gives way and becomes associated with animacy: it is breathing, its texture is troublingly organic (“soft”). The breathing wall suggests a disruption of ontological boundaries, which is the signature – to reiterate Hegglund’s (2020) argument – of weird realism. But there is more: the wall scene evokes the collapse of the institutional façade of the Southern Reach, spelling out what the smell, the secret rooms, and the drawer’s contents had only indirectly hinted at – namely, that the agency’s bureaucratic opaqueness conceals a far more radical mystery, which is an emanation of Area X itself. As I have argued so far, VanderMeer’s office weird is materially encoded in an atmosphere that transforms an ordinary administrative building into a place partaking of the mysteries it is supposed to control. Material spaces and things (like the “talismans” in the director’s locked drawer) become a concrete site for experiencing the weirdness. Simultaneously mundane and mysterious, they fall through the

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cracks of the trilogy’s narrative arc – a failure that only adds to the weirdness they embody. But it is important to realize that, well before the breathing wall episode, that sense of enigmatic nonhuman materiality had already entered Control’s mind through VanderMeer’s metaphorical language. In fact, the already discussed “sedimentary” nature of the office mirrors the stratifications of a mind – the former director’s – severely disrupted by Area X: “The office was still a mess corresponding to the contours of the director’s brain” (2014, 289). The material metaphor for mental processes is anything but an exceptional occurrence; it is a pattern recurring throughout the novel – in many cases, in connection with Control’s own mind.12 Control, the narrator states, “was here to solve a puzzle in some ways, but he felt as if it were beginning to solve him instead” (2014, 197–198). The familiar “puzzle” metaphor is turned upside down: conventionally, the “puzzle” is a material object, toy or game, that metaphorically encapsulates an abstract situation, but here the subject manipulating the puzzle becomes an object, a conceptual move that uncouples agency from the human and instead ascribes it to an inanimate (and yet relatively indeterminate) thing. The breakdown of human agency is, of course, as defamiliarizing for the reader as it is destabilizing for Control. Later, the narrator offers another variation on the same metaphor: Control was “trying to assemble his wits like pieces on a game board” (2014, 236). The disturbing materiality of the objects that surround Control is thus internalized, turning – through metaphorical language – into a psychological force. If we follow VanderMeer’s metaphorical choices, then, we realize that the office weird has started interfering with the protagonist’s mind well before the breathing wall scene. This entanglement of human psychology and nonhuman materiality undermines any lingering illusion that the protagonist may live up to his nickname. This stance is a direct effect of the atmospheric nature of the weird, in that atmosphere – like touch and texture – tends to collapse boundaries between internal (psychological) processes and external (material) entities, as well as between human affect and nonhuman thingness. The result of this dislocation of agency is not the madness commonly experienced by many Lovecraftian narrators, however.13 On the contrary, embracing the uncertainty of the spectrum of materiality is presented as a liberating gesture, a recognition that human cognition has been checkmated. That realization may well be the starting point for the “acceptance” of Area X’s mysteries that is advocated by the final volume of the trilogy. Here Control abandons the bureaucratic framework of  I discuss material metaphors for mental processes and their significance for humannonhuman relations in Caracciolo (2021a, Ch. 6).  See, e.g., Joshi: “An unusually large number of Lovecraft’s characters go mad at some point or other, and many others have madness imputed to them” (1990, 212).

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the Southern Reach in order to join forces with a character named Ghost Bird, who is an emanation of Area X itself. That kind of “collaboration” across the humannonhuman divide, as we will see in the next section, is central to the gameplay of Control.

7.3 Weaponizing Materiality This chapter’s pairing of VanderMeer’s works with the action video game Control by Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment is hardly a surprise. In fact, numerous reviewers and online commentators have highlighted the links between the video game and VanderMeer’s trilogy: from the game’s title, which echoes both the Authority of the second volume of the “Southern Reach” trilogy and the name of its protagonist, to the shadowy government agencies at the heart of both works (the Southern Reach and the Federal Bureau of Control), to the emphasis on unsettling atmosphere in a workplace setting – the parallels between these narratives really are difficult to miss.14 Of course, the video game medium does allow players to experiment with the office weird in a profoundly different, and more hands-on, fashion than VanderMeer’s prose, through the interactive mechanics of digital storytelling. Before we discuss those specificities of the game medium, though, it is useful to address another literary inspiration for Control, which – while less overt and widely known than VanderMeer’s fiction – plays a central role in the video game’s writing. The game centers on a number of “Objects of Power,” everyday things like a phone, a floppy disk, a TV set, or a jukebox that are supposed to have paranormal properties through their connection with an alternate dimension (the “Astral Plane”). The Federal Bureau of Control’s main task is to catalogue and study these objects and contain them in order to prevent disruptions to normal social life. At the start of the game, the FBC is being attacked by a mysterious invader, the Hiss, which has gained access to the FBC’s headquarters by exploiting one of such Objects of Power (the Slide Projector). A number of other Objects of Power are being used by the Hiss to take over the building, a brutalist high rise in New York City known as the “Oldest House.” This is when the protagonist and player-controlled character, Jesse Faden, enters the scene as the FBC’s new director.

 In an interview, for example, Control’s narrative designer Brooke Maggs points to the film adaptation of VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2018) as an important source of inspiration for the video game. See Bailey (2019).

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As Mikael Kasurinen – Control’s game director – has confirmed in an interview (Jackson 2019), the inspiration for these Objects of Power comes from an internet-based creative writing hub centered on the fictional “SCP Foundation” (from “Secure, Contain, Protect”).15 The website contains dozens of curated entries contributed by fans from around the world. All of these entries build on the same basic premise: like the Southern Reach in VanderMeer’s trilogy and the FBC in Control, the SCP Foundation’s main task is to study events and entities that challenge an ordinary, scientific understanding of reality. The similarities with the Bureau in Remedy Entertainment’s game are particularly striking, because the Foundation’s website reads as an archive of (fictional accounts of) paranormal objects, known simply as SCPs. As the website explains, “All anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena requiring Special Containment Procedures are assigned an Object Class.” The classes include “Safe objects” (“anomalies that are easily and safely contained”), Euclid objects (“anomalies that require more resources to contain completely or where containment isn’t always reliable”), Thaumiel objects (which are used to contain other SCPs), as well as a number of “nonstandard” classes. For each of these classes, the website catalogues a wide array of objects, all of them numbered and discussed according to a single template (“Item #,” “Object Class,” “Special Containment Procedures,” and “Description”). Some of these SCP files are accompanied by images of the objects being catalogued, others contain redacted information or cross-references to other SCPs. Here is an example chosen almost at random from the website (from the “Description” section of SCP-5416): “SCP-5416 was a statuette of unknown origin and material composition. An individual holding SCP-5416 in their hand was capable of translocating any object of which they were aware to any location of which they were also aware. The mechanism by which this occurred was not determined before the object’s neutralization; leading theories include thaumaturgical transmission, quantum teleportation, and universal realignment” (SCP Foundation 2021). Contributors to the website are encouraged by the style guide to adopt a “clinical tone” that conveys the unemotional “perspective of an SCP researcher.” With its jargony language and clumsy syntax, the quotation from SCP-5416 is an excellent example of that quasi-scientific distance. A photograph accompanying the entry for SCP-5416 shows it to be a cat statuette that wouldn’t look out of place in a child’s collection. However, the file recontextualizes this ordinary object by positioning it vis-à-vis cosmic time scales: “In the unlikely event that SCP-5416 still exists, its recontainment will not become necessary for approximately five billion

 See http://www.scpwiki.com/.

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years.” Also strongly suggestive of this cosmic reappraisal of a toy is an “interview log” appended to the entry and containing the dialogue between two characters, “Dr. Du” and “Agent Pandev.” The former asks the latter: “How were you going to stop this asteroid with 5416?” The effect is incongruous, perhaps even humorous, and recalls what McGurl (2012) has called the “posthuman comedy,” a literary mode he links to the Lovecraftian weird. While other SCP entries favor darker tones, they all share the defamiliarization of mundane things that we see at work in this description of SCP-5416. In Control, the files and video (or audio) recordings that can be retrieved by the player throughout the Oldest House are reminiscent of the SCP website’s “clinical” and bureaucratic style. The same subtle humor seeps through them, mingled with awe at the cosmic forces that intrude upon and reshape the bureaucratic space of an office building. These entries are collected in the player’s journal under the labels “Research & Records” and “Case Files”; their presentation – which includes technical language, cross-references, and redacted phrases – echoes closely the SCP website. The “Records” help flesh out the game’s setting, but they don’t contribute to the main storyline directly: many players will no doubt ignore them, others will collect and read them systematically, most will fall somewhere between these extremes. The entries listed under “Case Files” (see for example Figure 12) are much more important, since they focus on Objects of Power with which the player must interact in order to advance the game’s plot or acquire gameplay-relevant skills.16 The main storyline of the game sees Jesse regain control over a number of Objects of Power, which help her defeat the Hiss invaders and restore order in the Oldest House. Particularly significant are the Hotline, an old-fashioned landline phone that Jesse uses to contact the former, and recently deceased, director of the FBC, and the Slide Projector, which appears to be the Hiss’s gateway into the Oldest House. “Cleansing” a number of other Objects of Power gives Jesse special “psychic abilities” (such as levitating or telekinetically hurling heavy objects), which greatly enhance her fighting skills. In order to acquire the “evade” power, for instance, Jesse and the player have to free a “Merry-Go Round Horse” Object of Power from the Astral Plane.17

 “Gameplay” here refers to the mechanics of a (video) game and how they shape the player’s interactions with the computer system. See Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s definition: “the formalized interaction that occurs when players follow the rules of a game and experience its system through play” (2004, 303).  The player has to traverse the Astral Plane a number of times in the game. While the Oldest House is a space that looks and feels like a real office building, the Astral Plane is represented as an abstract expanse dominated by geometrical shapes.

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Figure 12: A “Case File” entry in Control (Remedy Entertainment 2019).

While the game’s plot remains relatively linear, the player is free to pursue side missions in various sectors of the Oldest House and even revisit previous locations (thanks to a “clearance level” system that opens up new areas as the plot advances). Combat remains the game’s main focus, along with an emphasis on atmosphere that gives coherence to the player’s experience. The atmospheric cues derive from the thoughtful sound design but especially from the stylized, chromatically uniform visuals. Reinforcing the impression of monotonous office life, most of the game environments build on shades of grey, black, and brown (the desks, office chairs, filing cabinets, etc.). However, subtle chromatic notes lend a unique personality to each of

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the building’s sectors, allowing the player to orient themselves in space by identifying each area’s color palette. These variations in color are often striking and become a visual stand-in for the weird defamiliarization of the workplace setting at the heart of the game. Remedy Entertainment’s game situates mundane objects as the focus of a complex conceptual dynamic: on the one hand, we have the FBC’s attempts to assert bureaucratic and scientific control over these objects, by cataloguing them and containing their paranormal powers; on the other hand, the Hiss is a destabilizing force that seeks to exploit these objects to undermine the FBC and (like Area X in the “Southern Reach” trilogy) infiltrate the world outside of the Oldest House. Jesse finds herself navigating a difficult course between these opposing forces. Eventually, her choices (which of course reflect the player’s actions) distance her from both the FBC’s bureaucratic style and the wanton destruction embodied by the Hiss. Rather than attempting to completely “contain” Objects of Power by insulating them from the world (which has long been the FBC’s scientific approach), Jesse learns how to tap into the spectrum of materiality: by using her special abilities, she brings out the thing-power of office furniture and the other ordinary things that populate her surroundings. A crucial figure in what we may consider Jesse’s Bildungsroman is the Oldest House’s “janitor,” Ahti. Early on in the game, Jesse encounters a strange character who seems to know far more about the FBC than a janitor should. These conversations in the cramped janitor’s office recall the storage room scene in Authority, but while Whitby is revealed to be a monstrous “beacon” of Area X in that scene, Ahti’s presence is far more benign. Indeed, despite having the appearance and diction of a Finnish man wearing a janitorial outfit, Ahti is actually a paranormal entity who helps Jesse on several occasions in the course of the game. The janitorial disguise is not a coincidence, though: to advance her mission and overcome the threat posed by the Hiss, Jesse doesn’t go through the FBC’s usual bureaucratic routes, but must find allies in spaces within the Oldest House that would not normally be frequented by the agency’s director. A significant portion of the game takes place in the “Maintenance” sector of the building, for instance, with Jesse having to “cleanse” (that is, bring under control) “coolant pumps” and “energy converters” – plainly not the director’s job. The janitorial work of maintaining and caring for the building becomes a means of understanding Jesse’s own role as a director who develops an increasing appreciation of the creative powers of the FBC’s office building – an appreciation that opposes both the destructiveness of the Hiss and the bureaucratic style of the Bureau (and the previous director). The incongruity of the encounter with this Finnish-sounding “janitor” is thus an aspect of the office weird staged by the game: saving the Bureau (and the world) from the Hiss involves going against the grain of this agency’s institutional

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structures, by repurposing the physical spaces of the building and their material contents. One of the most striking features of Control is that the standard paraphernalia of an office building (including desks, computers, filing shelves, cafeteria tables, etc.) can be weaponized against the Hiss. This feature is directly embedded in the game’s mechanics: while Control does give the player an upgradable gun (in itself an Object of Power), a far more effective combat tactic is to use Jesse’s telekinetic “Launch” power to hurl office furniture at the Hiss (see Figure 13). Another power (“Shield”) allows Jesse to collect debris from the surrounding space and use it to deflect the Hiss agents’ attacks. The everyday materiality of the office building thus becomes an important weapon in the director’s arsenal. Jane Bennett uses the metaphor of the “dance” to capture the interaction of human and nonhuman agency: “Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other” (2010, 31). Control’s combat illustrates this dance through the way in which the protagonist and the player join forces with the nonhuman, in what is ultimately a collaborative process that straddles the spectrum of materiality by involving elements of both human agency and thing-power.

Figure 13: Jesse’s telekinetic “Launch” power in Control (Remedy Entertainment 2019).

A certain irony is at work here: despite the game’s heavy emphasis on the paranormal agency of special Objects of Power, the gameplay strategically foregrounds material objects that are not special at all, but rather typify the Oldest House’s most ordinary and even tedious side. The player takes advantage of Jesse’s office surroundings creatively in order to fight back the Hiss and advance the protagonist’s quest to regain control of the FBC. Through this playful transformation of the building, Jesse (and, potentially, the player) discovers that material agency is not exclusive to certain paranormal objects that are in themselves predictable elements of genre fiction; rather, mundane things themselves can be productively “weirded,”

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their agency revealed and exploited to Jesse’s advantage. Game scholar T. L. Taylor (2009) uses Bruno Latour’s notion of “assemblage” to theorize the complexities of agency in video games, how it involves the human player, the computer system that is running the game, as well as represented agents within the game world (such as the player-controlled character – also known as avatar – and other non-player characters). In Control, the assemblage crucially involves the physical settings and other office-like elements that serve as a creative extension of the avatar’s actions. The game’s defamiliarization of materiality thus goes far beyond the pre-scripted Objects of Power that represent the focus of the narrative. Indeed, the gameplay asks the player to form a strange assemblage with material things in order to defeat the Hiss, enacting this assemblage through the dance-like dynamics of combat. The player is therefore encouraged to perform the defamiliarization of the mundane that represents the basic principle of the SCP Foundation’s object-oriented writing and of the writing that is found in Control’s own “Research & Records” journal page. An important question, however, is how the weaponization of materiality performed by Jesse differs from the Bureau’s own bureaucratic cataloguing. Uncertainty is central to both responses to materiality. On the one hand, we have the uncertainty of the player’s ludic interactions with the game, which is a crucial element of gameplay, as argued by Greg Costikyan (2013): we don’t know, for example, how a particular combat sequence will end, which gives rise to both the thrill of gameplay and its frustrations (when the player fails repeatedly to defeat a certain enemy). Uncertainty is thus an important driving force in players’ enjoyment of games. On the other hand, the redacted phrases and institutional opacity of the FBC’s files also create uncertainty at the level of the game’s setting. Yet the latter form of uncertainty is seen as a byproduct, an accident of a bureaucratic system that struggles to fully ascertain the nature of the Objects of Power it seeks to control. In the case of Jesse’s interactions with the game world, by contrast, uncertainty becomes a creative force that players wield in their dynamic, assemblage-like engagement with the physical setting of the game.18 In that respect, the weird weaponization of the office setting displayed by Control is different from mere instrumentalization, because it embraces the uncertainties of materiality – through the unpredictable, dynamic structure of gameplay – rather than attempting to shoehorn objects into a bureaucratic grid. Indeed, despite the classificatory systems adopted by the FBC (and also by the SCP website that inspired the game’s writing), Control’s focus on the possibilities inherent in the space of an administrative

 This interest in the transformative potential of uncertainty also underpins my discussion in Caracciolo (2022a).

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building blurs rigid distinctions between “paranormal” Objects of Power and everyday materiality. This conceptual approach, which is built into the game’s mechanics, demonstrates what I said in the introduction about the importance of embracing the spectrum of materiality instead of blindly adopting a single perspective on the material. The game asks players to accept uncertainty by keeping an open mind as to what counts as material efficacy: we are encouraged to value the dance of kinesthetic interactions with the nonhuman (Bennett’s dance) as well as the potentialities that emerge from its refusal to conform to human classification. The atmospheric qualities of the game world contribute to this transformation of a rigidly bureaucratic building into a space of creative more-than-human agency: the sensory “wrongness” of the setting – human shapes are seen hanging from the ceiling, strange colors irradiate the corridors and cubicles – is unsettling but also empowering in that it gives new meaning to the tedium of office work. Jesse’s (and the player’s) reshaping of the Oldest House is thus an act of creative reutilization in which human agency and nonhuman materiality team up, instead of the latter absorbing the former (which is the Hiss’s goal), or the scientific objectivity of the Southern Reach completely containing, and therefore curtailing, nonhuman agency. ✶✶✶ Written when public health measures adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic kept me, along with millions of office workers around the world, away from the workplace, this chapter is traversed by a longing for the office as a space of creative possibility – one in which “productivity” cannot and should not be reduced to the conventional metrics of white-collar labor. The visually and affectively monotonous space of administrative work is transformed by VanderMeer and Remedy Entertainment into a site for encountering the spectrum of materiality: physical objects (the contents of a drawer, the desks and cabinets telekinetically weaponized by Jesse in Control) chastise scientific taxonomies but also become a means of transcending the limitations of the daily grind. In the office weird I have explored here, nonhuman materiality is consistently defamiliarized through a strategic reappraisal of the office setting: the weird is embedded in material things and spaces that resist, through their sensory atmosphere, simple dichotomies between realism and the fantastic or paranormal. The result of this weirding is at the same time disturbing and liberating: disturbing, because the indeterminate agency of things defies bureaucratic and scientific systems and pushes the protagonists (and potentially the readers) out of their comfort zones; liberating, because both Control and Jesse find physical and intellectual energy in this destabilization, which leads them to abandon anthropocentric mastery in favor of strategic coexistence with thing-power. At the end of VanderMeer’s

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Authority, Control decides to leave the Southern Reach and look for the morethan-human character named Ghost Bird, who had herself escaped from the Southern Reach and guides him into Area X. In Remedy Entertainment’s game, Jesse’s newly acquired powers enable her to work together with the vibrant materiality of physical space and thus repel the Hiss invasion. Both narratives tap into the atmospheric sense of wrongness that defines weird fiction, using it to defamiliarize administrative work and discover within it the complexities of the spectrum of materiality. Authority and Control negotiate the spectrum along different routes, which reflect the affordances of prose narrative and of the hybrid medium of video games. In the former, it is by eluding plot progression – and thus resisting narrative encapsulation – that the “plant-and-mouse” assemblage affirms autonomy from the human. In the latter, interactive gameplay allows players to directly experience the defamiliarizing force of the game narrative’s engagement with Objects of Power. Weaponizing material things, as Jesse does, is a profoundly different gesture from capturing them in a subject-object, instrumentalizing dynamic: it involves welcoming their indeterminacies and accepting their challenges to human control. In this respect, the two weird narratives converge on an ironic reading of the protagonist’s name (in Authority) and of the titular Control.

8 Mind among Material Ruins After discussing the space of the administrative office as a sounding board for conflicting conceptions of materiality, this chapter continues to explore the link between spatial reference in narrative and the paradoxes that surround thingness. In the previous chapter, the main tension was between an instrumentalizing or taxonomic approach to matter (which ties in with ordinary bureaucratic or government practices) and a creative collaboration with materiality that accepts its mysteries and its unreadability. Here, it is the equally mysterious relationship between material spaces and the human mind that comes to the fore, producing a shift in the characters’ imagination of physical locations: rather than being an object of psychological projection, space is perceived as an active presence shaping the human characters’ psychology. The particular spatial figure that takes center stage in the chapter is that of a world whose collapse is either imminent or has already taken place. The physical presence or specter of the world in ruins evokes probing questions on the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman materiality. Artistic narrative is well positioned to probe these questions, no doubt because of the long-standing link between storytelling and the constitution of human subjectivity. Before developing my main argument, it will be useful to sample the current philosophical debate on narrative and subjective awareness, because that discussion will help me contextualize the spatial operation at the heart of my case studies. In Consciousness Explained, philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett influentially argued that the self is “an abstraction defined by the myriads of attributions and interpretations . . . that have composed the biography of the living body whose Center of Narrative Gravity it is” (1991, 426–427). For Dennett, the self is an abstract “Center of Narrative Gravity” that serves as a magnet for stories, whose accumulation over time comes to define who we are. These stories include narrativized memories or future-oriented fantasies that encapsulate one’s values and beliefs. Even beyond Dennett’s specific conceptualization of the self as a narrative-based illusion, there is a growing consensus in the philosophy of mind that subjectivity and narrative are deeply interlinked (see, e.g., Hutto 2007). Stories inform the way in which mind is understood in both individual and collective terms: they speak to a background of “metacognitive” questions – that is, questions about the nature of cognition itself – and thus tell us a great deal about how mental processes are conceptualized in a certain culture and historical period. The sophisticated stories contained in literary fiction and other artistic practices frequently comment on the views of the mind that circulate in society and shape individual subjectivity.1  For more on metacognitive questions and literary storytelling, see Caracciolo (2016a). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-008

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But narrative, as this book argues, is also in dialogue with prevailing conceptions of matter, which is seen in Western modernity as the other of the human mind: if mind is active and independent, matter is inert and lifeless, mere physical existence without the spark of sentience, rationality, or free will. Historically, Cartesian dualism played an important role in cementing that binary, but the influence of this mind-matter split can be detected in premodern philosophy as well, for instance in (Neo-)Platonic and Christian notions of an incorporeal soul.2 Even in contemporary, science-infused philosophy, discussions of the “mind-body problem” (see, e.g., Maxwell 2000) or “explanatory gap” (J. Levine 1983) are an echo of that tendency to separate the domain of material things, including human or animal bodies, from the domain of subjectivity and psychology. If there is a “problem” or a “gap,” it is largely because we find it hard to square the methodology of modern science with the irreducibly subjective nature of mind – a point famously articulated by Thomas Nagel in his article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974). Throughout his philosophical career, Nagel has cast doubt on the possibility of reducing mind to the physical properties of things, questioning “the prevailing doctrine . . . that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law” (2012, 10–11). What Nagel does not consider, however, is that the impasse often described as the mind-body problem might be due to a problematically narrow understanding of (embodied) matter. Put bluntly (and no doubt simplistically): if matter is fundamentally inert, then it becomes difficult to grasp how our rich conscious life may emerge from the physicality of our bodies. In an insightful reading of Nagel’s 2012 book, William Connolly has already raised a similar point: as Connolly points out, Nagel “uses the word materialism to cover only those research programs that seek to reduce higher processes to more simple, nonideational ones, evincing no awareness in doing so of the versions of ‘new materialism’ . . . that avoid those very modes of reductionism” (2017, 42). In other words, an unquestioned assumption about the passivity of matter might be at the root of the philosophical tangles in which commentators like Nagel find themselves. Importantly for my purposes here, narrative is no stranger to this notion: if Cartesian binaries have become entrenched in the West, it is in large part because of culturally influential stories that, from Plato’s allegories to the Christian afterlife, have dichotomized subjectivity and material existence. The spectrum of materiality troubles this dichotomy by underscoring the efficacy of matter, at two levels: materiality is relationally

 Of course, many Western philosophers have resisted this dualistic account of the mind, with Spinoza being a particularly prominent example; see Damasio (2005).

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entangled with human mental life, via bodily phenomena or technical devices that participate in cognition, but it can also operate independently of mind (when it eludes or destabilizes human control). At least potentially, then, the staging of materiality in narrative works against the grain of the historical role storytelling has played in constructing Western subjectivity and positioning it in opposition to nonhuman matter (or indeed the matter of human bodies). This tension is especially productive in a narrative genre like the novel, which has been instrumental in the formation of the postEnlightenment, autonomous and rational subject, as my discussion of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe has suggested. In this chapter’s case studies, the particular form of materiality that undercuts a dualistic understanding of subjectivity is that of the physical space in which the characters are embedded, and with which they entertain a fruitful, if unsettling, dialogue. This dialogue makes it impossible to read the setting as a mere screen for human anxieties, particularly, as we will see, apocalyptic feelings evoked by the end of the world (or at least of the world the protagonists are familiar with). Instead, in the course of these narratives, space is revealed to be a powerful influence on the characters’ minds through its physical configuration and material interchanges with their bodies. At first glance, my two case studies, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (2020), may look like a strange match: the former envisions a dystopian world in which most human settlements are swallowed by rising sea levels and is often hailed as a forerunner of climate fiction (Trexler 2015, 87), the latter is a fantasy novel whose protagonist grows up in almost complete isolation in a world that resembles a neoclassical villa. Despite being separated by genre and more than half a century, both works foreground material spaces so as to raise pointed questions on the positioning of the human mind within the spectrum of materiality. Vibrant materiality, in these novels, arises from the encounter of the narrative evocation of mind and spatializing strategies. To further bring into focus that encounter, I turn to recent discussions on narrative space and the environmental imagination.

8.1 Narrative Space and Materiality: More than a Backdrop The last two decades have seen a significant rise of interest in spatiality as a central component of narrative. In his field-defining Story Logic (2002, Ch. 7), David Herman was among the first scholars to develop a systematic account of spatial reference in stories and its effects on readers. Another prominent theorist in this area is Marie-Laure Ryan, who distinguishes between levels of spatialization in narrative and also, in collaborative work with geographers Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, examines the way in which stories can be embedded in real-

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world space (Ryan 2014; Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu 2016). Both Herman and Ryan have offered important tools to categorize spatial reference in narrative and explore the cognitive activities whereby readers map these references onto a comprehensive mental model, also known as “storyworld” – a term introduced by Herman (2002) and widely adopted by narratologists working in his wake. As I will argue in this section, though, current narratological accounts of space in narrative are still to some extent tied to a dualistic understanding of space as a static backdrop to the characters’ actions. Positioned at the intersection of narratology and ecocriticism, Nancy Easterlin’s (2012, Ch. 3; 2018) work has raised a number of important challenges to this view of narrative space as a backdrop or container. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, she argues persuasively that ecocritics should “ground their field in knowledge of evolved human psychology in an effort to understand the species’ relationship with the nonhuman natural world” (2012, 36). Moreover, Easterlin shows how narrative space is a focus of emotional meaning-making (on the part of both characters and readers) that effectively blurs the boundary between the physical setting and the events of the narrative. Easterlin thus begins to articulate an interest in materiality that comes close to my discussion here. Easterlin’s point of departure is that evolutionary thinking raises a radical challenge to binaries such as nature vs. culture and mind vs. body. In her words, “natural selection assumes that mind and behavior are embedded in and shaped by the material and temporal context of evolution, reminding us that human minds and bodies, like all other minds and bodies, are part of the environment” (2012, 105). The physical space that surrounds animals (human or nonhuman) is not a static and inert backdrop, but rather becomes co-constitutive of the animal’s identity through evolutionary and personal history: an organism’s mental and affective life emerges as it adapts dynamically to its physical and social milieu. “Dynamically” is a key word here: as Easterlin argues, embracing an evolutionary account of the mind does not necessarily mean falling into the trap of determinism, as long as one recognizes that adaptation is not a one-way street and that – especially in the case of social animals like us – organism-environment interactions can unfold along multiple routes. This view of the mind is broadly consistent with the philosophical framework of “enactive cognition” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991). Enactivist thinkers hold that cognitive behavior arises from an organism’s “structural coupling” with the physical world, a coupling shaped by evolutionary and social pressures.3

 In Caracciolo (2014b) I bring enactivist theory to bear on readers’ engagement with narrative, staging an encounter between contemporary cognitive narratology and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s (1991) work.

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Concretely, then, mental processes are not ontologically distinct from the physical stuff of the world, but they are involved in it through constant interchanges between cognizers and their material environments. On the one hand, the subject engages with the environment through embodied (and in that sense material) practices that range from the physical manipulation of the world to social activities that also presuppose an experiencing and spatially situated body. On the other hand, the environment shapes the subject by having a concrete influence on the body’s physiological processes: as Harold Fromm writes, the environment “runs right through us in endless waves, and if we were to watch ourselves via some ideal microscopic time-lapse video, we would see water, air, food, microbes, toxins entering our bodies as we shed, excrete, and exhale our processed materials back out” (2009, 95). From the perspective of materiality, then, it is difficult if not impossible to draw a sharp dividing line between the body and the “external” world. Transcorporeality (to use Alaimo’s term, already introduced in chapter 4) is not an exceptional state of embodied matter, but a completely ordinary – and even necessary – condition for living beings who rely on air, water, and other physical substances for biological survival. However, it is important to remember that the influence of the environment on cognition goes far beyond basic biology: material artifacts extend the mind, as argued by Andy Clark and David Chalmers (2010), facilitating a large number of cognitive operations through writing and counting systems. Symbolically, space provides basic structures of signification through the experientially derived metaphors that shape our understanding of time, memory, and many other abstract concepts.4 When we use an embodied metaphor like “love is a journey” (from Lakoff and Johnson 1980), for instance, we are effectively modeling a romantic relationship – which is something relatively intangible and nonlinear – through our experience of linear movement in physical space. The structuration of mental experience reflects, in important ways, the spatial setup of the environment in which human beings evolved as a species, the savannas of East Africa, which is a biome that affords comparatively unobstructed horizontal movement (for discussion, see Orians and Heerwagen 1992). Affective experience plays an important role in the transactions between the embodied mind and the material environment, too, as Easterlin acknowledges. In the domain of spatiality, when the environment is invested with human significance it becomes place, an important concept in human geography (see Tuan 1977): place is, simply put, lived-in space to which one becomes attached through the

 Peter Woelert (2011) offers an excellent discussion of how space structures mental experience, building on cognitive-linguistic work in the tradition of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980).

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ascription of personal and collective meanings. To quote again from Easterlin’s discussion, “memory and experience continually modify the perception and assessment of geographical locations, and the making and remaking of specific spots into places with a cognitive history has been a regular part of the wayfinding, knowledgeseeking mind of humans for millions of years” (2012, 122). This gesture of turning space into place through experience is an aspect of the mind’s material dialogue with its surroundings: just as cognitive processes arise from an animal’s coupling with physical space, this space is reshaped (emotionally and materially) to make room for individually and collectively constructed meanings. The reshaping of the environment, of course, can be more or less destructive, and we know that with modern, industrial, extractive societies it has gotten completely out of hand. But the basic affective impulse of place-making is one of the evolutionary tendencies that drive cognitive behavior in general. Where does this discussion leave us with respect to the evocation of space in narrative practices? Easterlin argues that literature offers a “rich repository of dynamic constructions of nature, place, and environment” (2012, 125; emphasis in the original), and that is a promising assumption for my chapter, too. The reading strategy demonstrated by Easterlin’s work and by similar approaches in narrative theory (e.g., Fludernik and Keen 2014) focuses on the characters’ (and, by proxy, readers’) negotiation of space as a site of emotional and agential significance: put otherwise, spatiality is directly relevant to the emotional evaluations that are embedded in narrative, and to the action sequences that form the backbone of plot itself. As we have seen, a non-dualistic, evolutionary account of spatial experience centers on the constitutive interactions between cognizers and their physical surroundings; spatial reference in narrative has the power to reveal the dynamic and material nature of these transactions. This understanding departs from earlier models – particularly Ryan’s – that tended to present narrative space as a “container for existents [that is, characters] and as location for events” (Ryan 2014). The distinction I am making calls for qualification, however: Ryan’s account of spatiality in narrative does acknowledge the role of emotional evaluations in spatial representation but frontloads the more impersonal and abstract metaphor of containment, with space serving as a backdrop to the actions and events of the plot. By contrast, Easterlin’s work emphasizes the dynamic nature of space- and place-making in narrative, and how deeply interwoven spatial reference can be with the characters’ and the audience’s meaning constructions – an interwovenness that arguably destabilizes the metaphor of containment.5

 For a fuller discussion of narrative space as a focus of embodied meaning-making, see Caracciolo and Kukkonen (2021, Ch. 4).

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Instead of being a lifeless background, narrative space is revealed to be integral part of the action. Naturally, not all narratives foreground the coupling of space and human psychology to the same degree. My two case studies are, as I will argue, narratives that stage the materiality of this coupling and use it as the main conceptual focus for the plot, questioning an ontology that rigidly distinguishes between physical things and mental states. The centerpiece of this questioning is physical space, and not just any space but a space that proves deeply defamiliarizing – for the characters and for the readers. In a sense, then, The Drowned World and Piranesi extend the processes of defamiliarization we have seen at work in the previous chapter: instead of unsettling the experience of specific objects or environments (such as office space), they “make strange” and radically challenge the protagonist’s understanding of a whole world. Before turning to a close reading of that process, I will discuss the space of the ruins as a site of affective place-making central to the Western imagination of the nonhuman. We will see that both novels build on, but also distance themselves from, this imagination of the ruins as they embed the mind within the spectrum of materiality.

8.2 The Ruins Between Nostalgia and Materiality As a physical trace of the passing of time and the collapse of civilizations, the ruin has played an important role in Western culture at least since European humanists “rediscovered” classical antiquity during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance (see Weiss 1988, Ch. 5). This fascination with ruins gained even greater impetus in the eighteenth century, when archeology was taking its first steps as a scientific discipline. An anonymous painting (ca. 1760) shows Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German art historian and one of the founders of modern archeology, reclining on a lawn, a vista of city walls and a circular temple to his left. Behind him is a ruined building, with vegetation visibly growing from cracks in the stone. Roughly at the same time, Italian painter Giovanni Battista Piranesi was working on his Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), a series of etchings that captured the decay but also the allure of Rome’s ancient buildings. Piranesi’s work left a lasting trace on the Western imagination of Italy and fueled the tradition of the Grand Tour, whereby aspiring writers and intellectuals from Northern Europe traveled to Italy – and Rome in particular – to visit the ruins popularized by Piranesi. In the wake of these early modern figurations of Rome, ruins spoke, in different ways, to neoclassicist, romantic, and modern sensibilities. If place, as I have argued above, is spatiality invested with emotional and cultural meanings, the affective place-making that underlies the cultural imagination of the ruins is uniquely complex and stratified. This complexity is encapsulated by Hartmut Böhme’s contention

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that ruins express “a precarious balance between preserved form and collapse, between nature and history, violence and peace, memory and present, grief and longing for release” (Böhme 1989, 287; quoted in Ziolkowski 2016, 265). The downside of these rich affective and cultural investments in the ruins in Western culture has been a marked tendency to dematerialize the remains of the past – that is, to sideline the kind of material dialogue between the cognizer and physical space I have highlighted in the previous section. Instead, the space of the ruined building becomes a screen for the projection of human anxieties, which ultimately reinforce an anthropocentric understanding of time and matter (as opposed to materiality). This dynamic is perhaps best illustrated by the affective response that Andreas Huyssen (2006) has discussed under the heading of “nostalgia for ruins.”6 Already in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humanists from Petrarch to Poggio Bracciolini had looked at the ruins of Rome as “a leading example of the instability of fortune” (Weiss 1988, 64) and a reminder of the glory of Roman institutions, whose return was “the only way to save Rome from its anarchy and desolation” (1988, 39). In the early modern period, this response laid the foundation for a fundamentally nostalgic attitude, which continued shaping the imagination of the ruins well into the twentieth century. On the one hand, the ruins stand in for an irretrievable, idealized past that should be preserved from the ravages of time (an objectifying response reminiscent of the “museum effect” discussed in chapter 4). On the other hand, the ruins serve as a reminder of what Huyssen characterizes as the unfulfilled “promise of an alternative future” (2006, 8) – a future, that is, that brushes aside the difficulties and shock of modernity. The ruins embody the impossibility of projecting into the future the splendors of the past. To quote again from Huyssen’s article, “ruins . . . function as projective screens for modernity’s articulation of asynchronous temporalities and for its fear of and obsession with the passing of time” (2006, 11). This preoccupation with temporality is present in contemporary postapocalyptic novels that, like Mandel’s Station Eleven (see again chapter 4), use physical objects as a focus of nostalgic affects. In the Western imagination of ruins, the nostalgic investment in relics from a lost past is typically accompanied by an adherence to nature vs. culture binaries: nature represents an agent of destruction that encroaches on man-made structures and threatens a society’s attempts to preserve and propagate itself into the future. In 1911, German sociologist Georg Simmel formulated this idea in an essay on “The Ruin”: “The ruin of a building . . . means that where the work of art is dying, other forces and forms, those of nature, have grown” (1958, 380). This kind

 See also Boym (2008) for a comprehensive treatment of nostalgia that touches on the link between this feeling and the imagination of the ruins.

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of reasoning illustrates modern fantasies surrounding the ruin as a space “reclaimed” by natural forces that are seen as categorically separate from, and opposed to, human agency. This point complicates Huyssen’s focus on ruin nostalgia without fundamentally challenging it: the nostalgic affect that pervades the ruins is extended from a glorious human past to an equally idealized “state of nature” whose return is portended as grass sprouts from the remains of the building, a suggestion already present in Winckelmann’s portrait against a classical landscape. Whether we associate the ruins with human or nonhuman temporalities, they appear symbolically implicated in problematic dichotomies between present and past, human societies and relentless natural forces. Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), a nonfiction thought experiment imagining the decay of urban spaces after the sudden vanishing of humanity, echoes this obsession with nature’s ability to reabsorb man-made landscapes within a more-than-human order. In that respect, as David Rodriguez (2021) has argued, Weisman’s book embraces a conventional model of apocalyptic writing, in which the human can be artificially taken out of the equation and nature restored without major repercussions on nonhuman species. Weisman’s scenario thus caters to a fantasy of human separability from the nonhuman world, as if the scientific distance embodied by the narrator’s journalistic voice made it possible to evacuate human responsibilities vis-à-vis a world that, even if humanity were to magically vanish, will never be significantly “without us” for the foreseeable future, due to the long-term ramifications of industrial, capitalist activities. In that respect, Weisman’s book falls into a long history of nostalgic apprehensions of the ruins as a space reclaimed by nature. The common ground for these construals is that the ruins are turned into a mere symbolic and abstract “cipher” (Huyssen 2006, 6), and thus largely deprived of their material efficacy. Either the physical presence of the ruins is displaced by the preoccupation with the fleetingness of human life and society, or it is erased by a brute “natural” force that threatens to completely eliminate the human. Even in the latter instance, the ruins are not primarily seen as a site of more-than -human materiality; rather, they represent the objectified remains of the nature vs. culture split. Put otherwise, the nostalgic affect invested in the ruins prevents insight into the bidirectionality of the interchange between the human mind and the physical world, whereby subjectivity and materiality are caught up in a “structural coupling,” to use again Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s phrase. This coupling is central to enactivist and evolutionary accounts of spatiality, as I have argued in the previous section. In the close readings I will develop in the second half of this chapter, narrative foregrounds the possibility of material dialogue between the physical traces of a crumbling world and the protagonists’ mind. The Drowned World and Piranesi

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converge on the rejection of nostalgia as the dominant affect in the Western imagination of the ruins. Instead, they underscore the impossibility of drawing a sharp line between human subjectivity and the nonhuman world: the environment, as Fromm puts it so suggestively, “runs right through” the protagonists (2009, 95). Space, which is normally thought of as a background for human interactions, moves into the foreground – a process that proves in equal measure bracing and defamiliarizing for the characters and (potentially) for the reader as well. As Timothy Morton writes, “If there is no background and therefore no foreground, then where are we? We orient ourselves according to backgrounds against which we stand out. There is a word for a state without a foreground-background distinction: madness” (2010, 30). The protagonists of both novels experience something akin to madness as they contemplate (the eventuality of) a ruined world. However, instead of retreating into nostalgically dualistic fantasies, they are forced to come to terms with the entanglement of mind within the spectrum of materiality.

8.3 “Inverted Crusoeism” and “Neuronic Odyssey” in The Drowned World Originally published in 1962, The Drowned World, Ballard’s second novel, should be read alongside his essay “Which Way to Inner Space?”, which came out in the same year in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. In the essay, Ballard rails against mainstream science fiction, which he finds far too conventional and unimaginative in its themes and formal devices. Instead, he argues that a more experimental kind of science fiction should turn to “inner space,” by which he means the space of the mind as it is disclosed by the “biological sciences” (1996, 197). He calls for the “elaboration of concepts such as the time zone, deep time and archaeopsychic time” (1996, 198), adding that the proper setting for such literary speculations is not outer space but the Earth, “the only truly alien planet” (1996, 197). The Drowned World takes Ballard’s own advice to heart. The (now eerily familiar) premise of the novel is that a steady rise in global temperatures causes polar ice to melt, submerging most of the inhabited world. Driving the warming in Ballard’s novel, it should be said, is not industrial activity but a cosmic event, a series of solar storms that lead to the thinning of the Earth’s atmosphere. The result is that the Earth’s landscape is unrecognizable: vast cities have been turned into lagoons, and only high rise buildings remain visible and partly accessible. The novel’s protagonist, Dr. Robert Kerans, is a biologist assigned to a sparsely populated area of the lagoon as part of a scientific mission to survey the evolution of plant and animal life after the flooding. One of the unit’s leaders, Lieutenant

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Hardman, goes missing and manages to elude a search party: he is, Kerans concludes, possessed by a “mysterious quest for the south” (1962, 130), where the “south” refers to the vast and deserted region that Kerans’s scientific expedition is exploring; it is opposed to the inhabitable “north” of the Arctic, where the only remaining human settlements are located. The protagonist himself feels the lure of the south, however. When Kerans’s unit is ready to travel back north to what is left of civilization, he chooses to stay behind with two companions, Beatrice Dahl and Dr. Alan Bodkin, in self-imposed isolation that the narrator describes as “inverted Crusoeism – the deliberate marooning of himself without the assistance of a gear-laden carrack wrecked on a convenient reef” (1962, 61–62). At this point a villainous pirate named Strangman enters the scene. Strangman disrupts Kerans’s isolation, subjecting him and his associates to bizarre rituals meant to undermine their sanity. He also starts draining the lagoons in order to amass precious loot from the world before the catastrophe. At the end of novel, Kerans manages to extricate himself from Strangman’s influence and moves further south, “following the sun that pounded in his mind” (1962, 190). The label “inverted Crusoeism,” for Kerans’s decision to retreat from human society, deserves attention. The “inversion” mentioned by the narrator runs much deeper than the fact that Kerans’s withdrawal, unlike Crusoe’s, is deliberate. As I have argued in chapter 5, castaway narratives produced in the wake of Defoe’s novel can stage the problematics of thingness through the creative reuse of waste materials from the civilized world – a form of creativity that, in the two films I discussed, centrally involves a recognition of nonhuman efficacy. Kerans’s own quest, by contrast, emphatically rejects “the assistance of a gear-laden carrack”: in effect, artifacts from the preapocalyptic world play an exceptionally small role in Ballard’s novel. Only Strangman and his fellow pirates display an interest in goods from the past, and they are exclusively driven by greed. Kerans’s complete indifference to “gear,” whether understood in utilitarian or monetary terms, is symptomatic of a larger dismissal of the preflooding past. The novel spells out early on that Kerans “had never felt any interest in [the cities’] contents, and never bothered to identify in which of the cities he was stationed” (1962, 32). Dismissively, he regards “the submerged cities [as] little more than elaborate pedestals” (1962, 32) – mere props for the lagoon life that affords (as I will show later in this section) a unique possibility of dialogue between mind and materiality. The narrator’s tentative explanation for Kerans’s unemotional response is the “absence of personal memories” (1962, 32), since he was born after the flooding, but the protagonist’s disregard for the geography of the drowned world is nevertheless striking. After all, postapocalyptic fiction has since the publication of Ballard’s novel become completely obsessed with iconic visions of urban collapse. Exemplary, in this regard, is the prominence of the Statue of Liberty in Roland Emmerich’s The

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Day after Tomorrow and in countless other disaster movies: here the ruins of the preapocalypse embody the kind of nostalgic response discussed by Huyssen, with the important difference that the nostalgia is not directed at the actual past, but at the present seen from the vantage point of a possible future.7 Nevertheless, Huyssen’s argument still stands that the “ruins . . . function as projective screens for modernity’s articulation of asynchronous temporalities and for its fear of and obsession with the passing of time” (2006, 11). In figurations of disaster that focus on ruined buildings and landmarks, contemporary society is invited to preemptively mourn its own demise. This spectacularized imagination of the future may do well at the box office but ultimately fails to envision an alternative to both present-day society and human control over “nature.”8 Kerans’s lack of interest in the “spectacle of . . . sinking civilizations” (1962, 32) is in this respect quite refreshing. This refusal to engage in nostalgia is not only evoked thematically by the novel, but also conveyed by way of spatial descriptions that relentlessly bring out the defamiliarizing alienness of the landscape surrounding the protagonist. One of Ballard’s recurring stylistic motifs is the transfiguration of the lagoon into a space evocative of a “deep,” evolutionary history predating humankind. This is what Ballard discussed as “archaeopsychic time” in the “Inner Space” essay, a phrase that appears in The Drowned World as well: a remote time in which animal sentience and intelligence developed in response to a primal landscape that resembles the lagoon created by the catastrophe. Consider, for instance, this descriptive passage: “The tree-covered buildings emerging from its rim [of the lagoon] seemed millions of years old, thrown up out of the Earth’s magma by some vast natural cataclysm, embalmed in the gigantic intervals of time that had elapsed during their subsidence” (1962, 60). The lagoon stirs up images of deep time that inflect Kerans’s reading of man-made architecture, which is referenced (the “treecovered buildings”) without being directly described. The lack of detail in the figuration of the buildings is a frequent pattern in Ballard’s style, which consistently underspecifies the ruined city in order to preempt any nostalgic response in the reader. Instead, the differentiation between the man-made and the nonhuman disappears as the buildings are narratively and stylistically submerged by metaphorical language (the buildings as “thrown up” by a cataclysm). The longing for familiarity that drives nostalgic feelings is thus replaced by a deep sense of unfamiliarity, which destabilizes the mind of characters like Hardman and Kerans.

 Stef Craps (2017) has discussed this temporal dynamics, typical of climate fiction, under the heading of “anticipatory memory.”  For discussion of the rhetoric and legacy of disaster films, with particular focus on The Day after Tomorrow, I refer to Alexa Weik von Mossner’s (2017, Ch. 5) insightful discussion.

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If nostalgia for the preapocalyptic glory of Western civilization is clearly undermined by the novel, so is the idea that nature is somehow banishing the human from this “drowned world.” Of course, at a superficial level human traces are disappearing as the man-made, urban landscape blends into the prehistoric world of the lagoon. However, this reading doesn’t consider the attraction exerted by the physical space of the lagoon on Kerans’s mind. Increasingly in the course of the novel, Kerans experiences a mysterious resonance with the space of the lagoon, through bodily sensations and affects rooted in both ontogenetic and phylogenetic development. For instance, “the silt banks [glowed] like luminous gold in the meridian sun, both forbidding and inviting, like the lost but forever beckoning and unattainable shores of the amnionic paradise” (1962, 84). As the human space of the city is transfigured into a prehistoric landscape, the lagoon sends unmistakable signals to Kerans’s mind, in the form of a vague “beckoning” that Kerans perceives without being able to answer it in full (hence the “forbidding” and “unattainable” quality of this call). The “amnionic paradise” refers to the protective environment that encloses the fetus – an image influenced by Ballard’s psychoanalytic readings (see Francis 2011) – but it is clear that the source of the lagoon’s invitation far transcends the individual unconscious: it points to the deep temporality of natural evolution, a perspective from which human psychology is put on a continuum with animal life. The rejection of nostalgia for the ruins of civilization is presented as a step in the process of letting go of human exceptionalism: to heed the call of material space, one needs to first witness the defamiliarization of recognizable urban landscape (as the buildings are absorbed into primeval forests), and then experience the eerie resonance between mind and physical locations. The novel repeatedly captures this resonance by way of parallels between Kerans’s “inner space” – that is, his unsettling and hallucinatory phenomenology – and his material surroundings. Especially at the outset of The Drowned World, the relationship between inner and outer landscape is an oppositional one: “A more important task than mapping the harbours and lagoons of the external landscape was to chart the ghostly deltas and luminous beaches of the submerged neuronic continents” (1962, 58), a metaphorical formulation that spatializes Kerans’s mental experience. But as the protagonist’s “neuronic odyssey” (1962, 198) progresses, mental and material spaces are gradually brought together by embodied sensations, particularly a “pulse” that emerges insistently in the novel’s final chapters: “the archaic sun in his mind beat again continuously with its immense power, its identity merging now with that of the real sun visible behind the rain-clouds” (1962, 183). The lagoon, in other words, becomes a fictional stand-in for the spectrum of materiality itself – and the protagonist’s mind is reabsorbed within it.

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This “merger” clashes with a “Cartesian geography” (to use David Herman’s phrase; see D. Herman 2011) that segregates the metaphorical space of the mind from external, non-metaphorical space. Instead, the physical sensations experienced by Kerans – including the “beat” of the “archaic sun” – work toward bringing his inner space in alignment with the beckoning “real sun.” Ballard’s focus on “inner space,” then, breaks with Cartesian binaries in that it emphasizes the affective continuity between subjective experience and a material world with which animal subjectivity co-developed. In effect, the novel intimates that, with Kerans’s “neuronic odyssey,” readers are witnessing the evolution of psychological life beyond a conventional, humanist understanding of the subject.9 This is, ultimately, the novel’s endpoint as Kerans decides to leave society behind once and for all and instead follows “the sun that pounded in his mind” (1962, 190). With its kinetic depiction of the sun’s effects on Kerans, this ending positions the protagonist within an abstract, alien space that is, simultaneously and seamlessly, a state of matter and a state of mind: “he was alone with these few lifeless objects, like the debris of a vanished continuum” (1962, 191). Note here how Ballard’s language populates this landscape with the ambiguous materiality of “objects” and “debris,” words that could refer to manmade things but also to nonhuman matter. These distinctions become irrelevant as the plot approaches its vanishing point, a posthuman position from which both spatial experience and affect can be articulated only in rarefied, abstract prose. The Drowned World thus substitutes nostalgia for ruins with an indistinct – but radically embodied – affect that leads to the conflation of human subjectivity and the spectrum of materiality. This affect is directly grounded in the spatial setting of a world that, while seemingly in ruins, proves uniquely creative as it converses, and eventually converges, with the protagonist’s subjectivity. A seminal work of postapocalyptic fiction, Ballard’s novel appears far more radical than recent iterations of the genre in that it consistently refuses to both imagine a world without human subjectivity or give in to a nostalgic apprehension of the readers’ present.10 The fantasy of ruins reclaimed by matter (and thus emptied out of mind) is subverted: in the space of lagoon, subjectivity persists even as it undergoes fundamental changes that hint, concurrently, at a prehuman past and a posthuman future. Narrative space moves into the foreground as its materiality, evoked by way of atmospheric descriptions, speaks directly to the protagonist’s

 See, for instance, this passage: “This growing isolation and self-containment . . . reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis” (1962, 24–25).  See also Roger Luckhurst’s convergent reading of Ballard’s early novels (including The Drowned World): “Ballard’s texts . . . strip away the props that would determine a reading of the genre simply in terms of its ‘cosy’ liberations [and] secure identifications” (1997, 39).

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embodied experience. Instead of using the remains of present-day society as a projective screen for anthropocentric anxieties, Ballard’s defamiliarizing account of the lagoon deploys Kerans’s phenomenology to outline the fate of subjectivity once mind is brought back into the biological and material fold of evolution.

8.4 “Architecture and Oceans Were Muddled Together”: Piranesi’s House If the plot of Ballard’s The Drowned World culminates in an image of affective proximity between mind and nonhuman materiality, a similar intimacy with materiality represents the starting point for Clarke’s Piranesi. The novel begins in the form of a diary, with the description of a strange, monumental location that readers will struggle to place vis-à-vis real-world knowledge: “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years. The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great Staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into the distant heights” (2020, 3). The capitalized nouns lend an oldfashioned quality to this prose, deepening the oddity of this beginning and stoking the reader’s curiosity as to the narrator’s identity and whereabouts. Gradually in the course of the first few chapters, the narrator’s situation becomes clearer: he is a young man who lives trapped in a vast house, surrounded by the ocean and populated only by gulls and sea creatures (in the lower, and partly submerged, “drowned halls”). Decorating these corridors are countless statues depicting mythological figures and allegorical scenes – fauns and kings playing chess, an elephant and a woman carrying a beehive. Covered in corals and mussels in the drowned halls or supporting bird nests, these figures are a constant presence in the narrative and contribute to the eeriness of the narrator’s isolation in what could be a neoclassical villa. A “place where architecture and oceans were muddled together” (2020, 107) is the way in which a character later captures the narrator’s world, and it is an apt description of this strange existence within an impossible, or at least deeply unusual, space where man-made and natural elements are fused together. The narrator receives occasional visits from a character whom he calls, laconically, “the Other,” and who in turn refers to the narrator as “Piranesi,” after the Italian painter of ruins and maze-like prisons: “It’s a name associated with labyrinths. You don’t mind, do you? I’ll stop if you don’t like it,” remarks the Other (2020, 163). Little is known about this figure, but he and the narrator appear to be engaged in data collection for an unspecified scientific project. The narrator

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is completely at ease with this situation. The reader, by contrast, is likely to start questioning the Other’s identity and motivations right away. For one thing, the Other is often seen using a “shining device” (e.g., 2020, 23) that the reader will quickly identify as a tablet or laptop – an object that points to the existence of a familiar, modern world outside of the halls inhabited by the protagonist. This impression is confirmed, a few pages later, when the narrator starts listing the objects the Other has given him over the years, which include a “sleeping bag,” “fishing nets made of a synthetic polymer,” and “bottles of multivitamins” (2020, 52), all familiar items that couldn’t possibly have originated from this world of sea and stone. The uncertainty of the spectrum of materiality is thus highlighted: these mundane objects clash with the unusual spatiality of the house; they evoke mystery by suggesting that there is more to the narrator’s reality than the Other lets on. The suspicion grows that the narrator may be the victim of a yet unspecified – but probably malevolent – scheme. The reader’s engagement with the protagonist involves what I have called elsewhere (Caracciolo 2016b, Ch. 2) “ingoing defamiliarization,” in that the novel’s first chapters confront the audience with the gap between their wariness about the narrator’s situation and his unsuspecting, even contented response. The defamiliarization lies in the inversion of expectations: we gather that what is strange and potentially troubling for the reader has been the narrator’s daily routine and “normalcy” for as long as he can remember. This kind of defamiliarization is “ingoing” because it is most pronounced in a narrative’s early stages, while readers are adjusting their expectations to the storyworld.11 When, for example, the narrator has “an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands” (2020, 59), readers will be reminded of the epistemic gap that separates them from Piranesi, complicating and defamiliarizing their relationship with him. However, this divide between the readers and the narrator becomes gradually less significant as a series of events leads Piranesi to also start questioning the reality that he has taken for granted for many years. In one of their encounters, the Other suggests that the labyrinthine surroundings may have had a negative influence on Piranesi’s time perception and memory, because he appears to have forgotten a number of previous conversations between them. At first, Piranesi resists this claim, instead insisting on his mind’s

 According to Ryan’s (1991) “principle of minimal departure” (already mentioned in chapter 3), audiences bring to bear their real-world knowledge on the storyworlds of fiction, unless the narrative implies that the storyworld is subject to different rules than the real world. But of course this process takes time: before the reader’s expectations are fully adjusted to an unusual textual reality, we have ingoing defamiliarization – a response that a novel like Piranesi reinforces through the asymmetry between reader and narrator.

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perfect “fit” with the world of the house: “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly” (2020, 71). As the narrator repeatedly signals, his mind’s integration with the spatiality of the house reflects the formative role that the statues have played in his cognitive development: “In the Ninth Vestibule there is the Statue of a Gardener digging and in the Nineteenth South-Eastern Hall there is a Statue of a different Gardener pruning a Rose Bush. It is from these things that I deduce the idea of a garden. I do not believe this happens by accident. This is how the House places new ideas gently and naturally in the Minds of Men” (2020, 121). I will return to the personification of the house in this passage and elsewhere in the novel; for now, it is worth observing the close connection established here between the process of forming new concepts and the material appearance of these statues. It is because of the tight coupling between his cognition and the house’s spatiality that Piranesi denies the possibility of any lapses in his memory. Like a physical, life-size memory palace, the house acts as the guarantor of the narrator’s mental integrity.12 Yet, as the narrator soon realizes, those gaps the Other had talked about are real. A new figure enters the scene: when Piranesi overhears a conversation between that character and the Other, he learns the latter’s real name, Valentine Ketterley. He looks up this name in the glossary that he himself had compiled and finds an entry that he doesn’t remember ever having written. The mysteries of his existence come into view, gradually bringing the narrator’s perspective in alignment with the reader’s defamiliarized stance: as Piranesi’s illusion of seamless mind-matter integration crumbles, he starts perceiving the strangeness of the world he had until then considered entirely familiar. We discover that Ketterley is the disciple of an anthropologist and occultist named Laurence Arne-Sayles, who had theorized the plurality of worlds and claimed to have rediscovered an ancient ritual to travel from one world to another. Slowly, as Piranesi reads diary entries whose existence he had completely forgotten, the truth starts dawning on him: his real name is Matthew Rose Sorensen, and he is not a native of the house but came to these strange halls from a “different World where, no doubt, different Rules, Circumstances and Conditions applied” (2020, 191). Piranesi realizes being part of a scientific experiment designed by Ketterley, an experiment based on Sorensen’s forcible relocation from the familiar, modern world to this parallel reality. However, throughout the novel Piranesi is unable to fully embrace his former identity: the house has changed him permanently.

 The reference here is to the ancient “method of loci” for memorizing information, famously discussed by Francis Yates (1966), which involved associating ideas with spatial locations in an imaginary “memory palace.”

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It is through quotations from Laurence Arne-Sayles’s publications that the novel offers a key to the “fit” between Piranesi’s mind and the house, which – like Ballard’s lagoon – evokes the spectrum of materiality itself. Arne-Sayles’s account of premodern, prescientific mentality outlines a panpsychic “world . . . constantly speaking to Ancient Man” (2020, 148), where awareness does not correlate with the human mind but is spread out across the material world. Thus, when the ancients “observed the world, the world observed them back. If, for example, they travelled in a boat on a river, then the river was in some way aware of carrying them on its back and had in fact agreed to it” (2020, 147–148). This view of nonhuman materiality is closely reminiscent of the arguments advanced by ecological philosopher David Abram (1997), for whom technological modernity has severed the link between the human mind and the physical world. The latter has been forced into Cartesian dichotomies that effectively uncoupled matter from agency and awareness. We – modern humans – have lost the ability to come under the “spell of the sensuous,” while from a premodern perspective even “boulders and rocks [seemed] to speak their own uncanny languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into silent communication” (1997, 63). This “silent communication” between the material space of the house and Piranesi’s mind is precisely the state of being that the novel explores in the defamiliarizing beginning and articulates later through Arne-Sayles’s observations. “It is my belief that the House itself loves and blesses equally everything that it has created” (2020, 17), explains the narrator, and this is only one of the many instances in which the house is treated as a sentient material agent that engages in constant dialogue with Piranesi’s subjectivity. Indeed, this depiction of the house stands in sharp contrast to the Other’s own remark that the halls are just “endless dreary rooms all the same, full of decaying figures covered with bird shit” (2020, 47). Piranesi resists this construal of space, explaining that, if all “Value” is “wrested from the House,” then “all that remains will be mere scenery” (2020, 60) – where “value” refers to the inherent vibrancy of space, while “scenery” suggests inertness and the backdrop- or container-like conceptualization I discussed above. Exposed to Piranesi’s appreciation of the house’s material agency, readers are given the chance to distance themselves from the Other’s objectifying stance and instead perceive this location as a direct expression of the spectrum of materiality. To use again the terminology I introduced in previous works (Caracciolo 2016b, Ch. 2), this is a process of “outgoing defamiliarization” that bookends the “ingoing defamiliarization” audience members have experienced at the novel’s beginning: potentially, through their defamiliarizing engagement with the protagonist, readers come to a new understanding of the efficacy of material spaces. Space, from this viewpoint, furnishes human subjectivity with material forms

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and configurations that are not a mere projection of human thinking, but its original substance.13 Heightening the urgency of this intimation of material agency in Clarke’s novel is the suggestion that the coupling between the narrator’s mind and the house is coming undone. On the one hand, we have the dynamics of plot, which as I have argued unsettles Piranesi’s comfortable position within the house by revealing his existence to be part of a much larger scheme that includes a reality similar to (what is for the reader) the everyday world. The world in which Piranesi fits seamlessly as the house’s “Child” is thus about to end as he acknowledges the Other’s deceit and the vastness of the world beyond the house. On the other hand, there are echoes at the end of the novel of a catastrophic “flood” that could signify the end of the house as Piranesi – and, by this point, the reader – know it. While the flood doesn’t appear to cause the house’s collapse, the suggestion of a catastrophic denouement remains. Thus, this house may not yet be in ruins (through parts of it are already submerged), but its material dialogue with Piranesi’s subjectivity is threatened on multiple fronts. Yet, even as the protagonist’s child-like innocence is lost at the end of the novel, there is little room for a projection of nostalgic feelings onto the house; rather, this space retains its material allure even after Piranesi’s return to the ordinary world. He declares in the novel’s penultimate diary entry: “In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways” (2020, 243). This suggests that the influence of the house as a material space persists, in Piranesi’s memory, after his physical separation from it. Ultimately, Piranesi rejects the objectifying, dualistic take on space laid out by the Other, its reduction to mere lifeless “scenery.” Instead, the “muddled” but vibrant spatiality of Piranesi’s crumbling world continues nourishing his mental life despite his expanded awareness of reality and of the human mind’s devious schemes. This is also the vibrant understanding of space that Piranesi offers its readers through a sophisticated defamiliarization of the audience’s engagement with the narrator. ✶✶✶ “There’s nothing like a good disaster to get people thinking clever thoughts,” quips the narrator of Julian Barnes’s novel A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1990, 86). Both novels examined in this chapter play with disaster – overtly, in the case

 In certain instances this idea takes on Platonic overtones in Clarke’s novel: “You make it sound as if the Statue was somehow inferior to the thing itself. I do not see that that is the case at all. I would argue that the Statue is superior to the thing itself, the Statue being perfect, eternal and not subject to decay” (2020, 222).

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of Ballard’s postapocalyptic The Drowned World, more implicitly in the case of Clarke’s Piranesi, where the narrator’s reality is destabilized by both internal forces (the flood) and external ones (the revelation that the world is a much larger place than the house in which the titular character has lived for years). As I argued here, the engagement with (the possibility of) disaster in both novels provokes “clever thoughts” on the positioning of human subjectivity within the spectrum of materiality. Instead of the binary division of labor typical of Western thinking – willful human subject, lifeless matter – the two plots foreground what I have described metaphorically as a “dialogue” between the human mind and the nonhuman, where the latter is not just the object of human action but “speaks back” to it (as Piranesi spells out). This notion emerges from recent embodied and evolutionary accounts of mind-space interaction, and it is pursued by both narratives via a fascination with material space, particularly with the physical traces left by a past civilization (Ballard’s flooded buildings) or with the mysterious ruined house in which the protagonist of Piranesi finds himself. The two novels thus situate themselves within a long tradition of Western thinking on the ruins as a space for encountering the past and negotiating the distinction between human societies and the natural forces that encroach on, and reshape, man-made environments. Clarke’s novel even contains a key reference to the Italian painter, Piranesi, whose engravings of ancient Roman architecture had a lasting influence on the Western imagination of ruins. Nevertheless, as I have shown in this chapter, Ballard and Clarke distance themselves and their narratives from the dominant affect surrounding the space of the ruins in Western modernity – namely, nostalgia. As a projection onto the past evoked by the ruins, nostalgia tends to downplay the materiality of space: the ruins are either turned into a symbol of an idealized, and irreversibly lost, civilization, or they are reclaimed by natural processes that are dualistically opposed to the human. Either way, nostalgia reaffirms conventional binaries between human agency and nature seen as a mindless, mechanical force. By refusing a nostalgic engagement with the ruins, The Drowned World and Piranesi explore alternative pathways for experiencing and conceptualizing spatiality. In the former novel, the protagonist’s evident indifference to the traces of modern civilization leads to an increasing appreciation of how the postapocalyptic lagoon both mirrors the prehuman past and contains the seeds of a future in which human subjectivity has evolved into something new and profoundly destabilizing of Western dichotomies. In Piranesi, the recognition of the house’s material agency also outlines a possibility of relating to space that builds on premodern mentality while avoiding the conceptual pitfalls of nostalgia. By staging the protagonists’ nourishing relationship with space, this chapter’s case studies thus explore the structural coupling between (human) subjectivity and the materiality of nonhuman environments; they imagine that the physical

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space of the lagoon or of Piranesi’s house may extend into the characters’ bodies and provide the human mind with new ways of thinking about the world, and about itself. The process is not always devoid of challenges: the protagonists of these novels must overcome significant obstacles as they accept the influence of nonhuman materiality, and the same is true of these novels’ readers, whose expectations are unsettled as they are confronted with profoundly defamiliarizing storyworlds. In Ballard’s case, in particular, we have seen that the novel consistently pre-empts nostalgia for what is, for the novel’s readers, a recognizably modern world. Piranesi, by contrast, asks readers to go through a double process of ingoing and outgoing defamiliarization: first, they engage with a protagonist whose assumptions about the world are fundamentally different from theirs; later, they are encouraged to bring to bear the vision of a house in which “ocean and architecture are muddled together” on their everyday understanding of the material. In The Drowned World and Piranesi, then, human subjectivity is put on a continuum with the physical world “out there,” revealing the spectrum of materiality. Narrative negotiates a path through this spectrum by prompting a conceptual shift from symbolic or nostalgic readings of matter to an investment in the uncertainty and vibrancy of materiality.

9 Infrastructure and Collectivity in Video Games Among the many material things examined in this book through the lens of narrative, infrastructure is at the same time the most conspicuous and the easiest to miss. The word “infrastructure” brings to mind vast objects such as bridges, roads, aqueducts, or the underwater cables that power what we call the internet. These are things writ large: their materiality involves tons of poured concrete and steel cables, all kept in place by sophisticated mathematical calculations of weight, height, length, water pressure, etc. As anthropologist Brian Larkin puts it, infrastructures “are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts [sic] that they are things and also the relation between things” (2013, 329). As a conduit for things (and people) that is in itself a vast thing, infrastructure occupies a peculiar position on the spectrum of materiality discussed in the introduction. It is unmistakably physical, and yet it can enable an abstract form of relationality, by bringing people and goods together in ways that shape, invisibly but no less powerfully, everyday life. In this chapter, I focus on how digital narrative can foreground the tension between the physicality and the abstraction of infrastructure, recasting this tension as a means of reimagining community within and beyond the human. Over the last decade, a sizeable body of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has interrogated the political and cultural dimensions of infrastructure. Nikhil Anand (2012), for example, has studied the politics of water supply in Mumbai, showing that infrastructural projects transform the social fabric of a megalopolis by relegating certain citizens to areas that receive less desirable drinking water (or no water at all). In literary studies, Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins, and Sophia Beal (2015) see infrastructure as a major concern of (post) modernist and contemporary fiction, arguing that literature’s defamiliarizing strategies are particularly well suited to draw the Western reader’s attention to normally invisible infrastructure. Indeed, the reason why infrastructure is so easy to miss despite its large scale is that, when it is working properly, it wants to be taken for granted: with drinking water being so abundant and inexpensive in the Western world, who would stop to think about the technically complicated process that puts clean water in our glasses? Infrastructure thus recedes into the background, its physicality becoming almost unnoticeable. Invisibility is a common theme in discussions of infrastructure, but it only holds true until things start falling apart. In Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, a family spending a vacation in Long Island is struck by an unnamed disaster, which causes a massive power outage and the failure of the cellphone network across the East coast of the United States. The nature of the disaster remains https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-009

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ominously ambiguous throughout the novel. “Does the water not run if the power goes out?” (2020, 151), one of the protagonists worries. I suspect that many readers, like the character, may truly have “no idea” (2020, 151). It is only when infrastructure breaks down that we start realizing how complicated it is, and how dependent on it modern societies are. Because of that dependency, nothing embodies the end of civilization more than images of highways bristling with abandoned cars or collapsed bridges. This imagery is the stuff of postapocalyptic fiction, and it evokes the crumbling of civilization so effectively precisely because infrastructure is the material fabric of developed societies. It is what keeps communities together, arranged in a highly complex but orderly pattern, and it is also what excludes certain groups within these communities (think again about water access in Mumbai or the availability of high-speed internet in underprivileged neighborhoods, etc.). As Rubenstein, Robbins, and Beal note, it is not a coincidence that “public works” is another name for infrastructure.1 More than anything else in modern societies, infrastructural projects evoke the aspirations of collectivity, but also the tensions and rifts that traverse it in social, cultural, religious, and ethnic terms. This chapter positions digital narrative as a privileged means of capturing the shared aspirations and tensions that surround infrastructure. If postapocalyptic fiction uses the crumbling of infrastructure to suggest the collapse of modern civilization, the two video games I focus on – Death Stranding (Kojima Productions 2019) and Journey (thatgamecompany 2012) – reverse that picture: they ask the player to rebuild infrastructure and, in doing so, they reimagine the nature of collectivity in ways that challenge both mainstream gaming culture and anthropocentric assumptions. The management of infrastructure becomes central to the gameplay of these digital narratives (see chapter 6 for a definition of gameplay). Because these are story-driven games, solving the challenges of gameplay also means advancing the plot – and infrastructure is central to that operation. Equally central is collectivity, which both games foreground at two levels: through computer-controlled characters and by adopting a distinctive approach to multiplayer cooperation (that is, cooperation with other players connected via the internet). In Journey, the player’s interaction with fellow players is severely constrained, because no direct verbal communication is possible – a limitation that heightens the affective value and rarefied atmosphere of the game’s locations. In Death Stranding, the presence of other players can only be inferred from the infrastructure they leave behind, so that collaborative behavior becomes the only means of self-expression within the game world. By imposing these limitations, both games resist the competitiveness

 See also Rubenstein (2010), which explores the politics of infrastructure in relation to Irish modernism.

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of mainstream gaming, which (as we will see) can easily slide into toxic and irresponsible behavior. By defamiliarizing the conventional patterns of multiplayer gaming, my two case studies are well positioned to probe the complexities of infrastructure vis-à-vis Western conceptions of collectivity, which are gradually brought into question as the plot advances toward the ending. This shift results in an expansion of collectivity beyond the human – an expansion made possible by a work of infrastructural reconstruction that is both grounded in gameplay and responsible for bridging between the human player, the algorithmic nature of the games, and the nonhuman setting. The fact that my language resorts to an infrastructural metaphor in discussing human-nonhuman relations – “bridging” – reflects the conceptual significance of material infrastructures in imagining more-than-human communities. In the next section, I discuss the tension between abstraction and physicality as part of infrastructure’s complex positioning within the spectrum of materiality; I also explain how foregrounding this tension through digital narrative can problematize the boundary between human societies and the nonhuman world. I then turn to issues of collaboration and community in multiplayer games as a way of setting the stage for my discussion of Death Stranding and Journey, both of which adopt an innovative approach to multiplayer experiences. In the final two sections, I explore the different technical means through which Death Stranding and Journey deploy infrastructural gameplay to complicate and enrich notions of collectivity.

9.1 Infrastructure between Form and Materiality The relationship between video games and infrastructure runs deep. Anyone who has played one of the SimCity video games – the iconic city-building series from 1990s – knows that infrastructure, while largely invisible, is essential to the wellbeing of a city. In SimCity 2000 (Maxis 1993), the game’s isomorphic graphics allows the player to visualize the normally hidden water supply network or the power grid. If water or power are unavailable for too long, a building or area turns into an ominous dark gray, suggesting urban decay. Effectively, the gameplay of SimCity centers on the successful management of various infrastructural systems in order to guarantee the flourishing of the visible city. Planning a new city, or a new neighborhood, requires awareness of how infrastructural constraints shape the layout of the city: how many power plants will be needed to supply a certain area? How badly is a certain neighborhood going to be impacted by a polluting coal-fired plant? Seasoned SimCity players will be familiar with such questions. They will also know that geometrical arrangements are the most effective way of achieving an even distribution of resources across an urban

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area. The planning philosophy of SimCity is based on repetitive variations of residential and commercial areas and an equally geometrical water and power network underlying them.2 Both the visible grid of the city and the largely hidden infrastructure can be expanded modularly across the map, block after block, in regular patterns. This foregrounding of form in a game obsessed with infrastructure is hardly a coincidence: literary scholar Caroline Levine reminds us that “infrastructures . . . are best described as networks. Networks are not repetitive but connective forms; they link separable nodes, including bodies, spaces, machines, and objects” (2015b, 597). Anthropologist Brian Larkin echoes this idea when he argues that paying attention to infrastructure involves “being alive to [its] formal dimension” (2013, 329). Because of its tendency toward geometrical arrangements (in games like SimCity, and in real life), infrastructure calls for an abstract, distanced, and top-down way of thinking, as the disembodied architect of SimCity demonstrates: space is reduced to an empty geometrical array, the streets of the city can never be experienced “on the ground” but only seen from a rigidly isometrical viewpoint. Being “alive” to the abstract, formal nature of infrastructure doesn’t mean downplaying its political and social significance. One of the insights of Levine’s (2015a) brand of New Formalism is that form – including the arrangement of infrastructural elements – has a very real effect on social processes. Again, SimCity illustrates this point nicely: if I place a residential area next to a coal plant, its buildings are never going to develop into high-end homes, because my infrastructural decision – the abstract form of the city I am building – generates inequality between this area and homes further away from the plant. Forms are never merely “formal” in the narrow sense: on the contrary, they configure both society at large and the ways in which cultural artifacts (like novels, films, or video games) engage with social processes. Even if we rule out a narrow, apolitical reading of the formal dimension of infrastructure, the abstraction implicit in infrastructural thinking does work against the grain of its physicality. Recall Larkin’s point that infrastructures have a double nature: “they are things and also the relation between things” (2013, 329). When we conceive of infrastructures as things – and we do so mostly when they don’t work properly – their materiality is unmistakable: indeed, infrastructures are among the largest objects humankind has ever created. When we conceive of infrastructures as relations, though, their materiality falls through the cracks: instead, we perceive infrastructural projects (if we perceive them at all) as affording passage and connection, in a way that at least in part downplays

 For further discussion of SimCity games and urban planning, see Chang (2019, 204).

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their material existence and history. The maps of a subway system or of airline cargo hubs are an example of infrastructural abstraction, and these maps typically contain a number of inaccuracies and idealizations – that is, they don’t fully capture the material reality of infrastructure in its relation with the surrounding space. From this perspective, infrastructure creates abstract linkage between material things or bodies (be they goods or passengers, natural gas or drinking water). This tension between the abstract and the physical is one of the constitutive dimensions of the spectrum of materiality that is brought up by infrastructure, and it complicates the already mentioned idea of the invisibility of infrastructural elements. Even when infrastructure does become visible, we must choose between foregrounding its physicality and the abstract connections it affords. While SimCity plainly favors the latter approach through its disembodied, isometric perspective, the two games I will examine in this chapter place players face to face with the physicality of infrastructure, but without completely erasing its abstract dimension. Of course, we are not always forced to choose between these perspectives: attention to the specifics of materiality need not override awareness of formal patterns. Perceiving both dimensions at the same time is difficult, though: narrative, as I argue in this chapter, may be uniquely able to bring these dimensions together, staging or even reducing the tension between abstraction and physicality and thus inviting audiences to embrace the whole spectrum of materiality. Further complicating this tension is the question whether infrastructural things are conceptualized in anthropocentric terms or uncoupled from human agency. We thus move to the horizontal axis of my spectrum of materiality. Infrastructural objects are by definition man-made, and they have historically played a central role in processes of identity formation and nation building.3 On multiple scales, human communities are formed through the pooling of infrastructure, whether this involves something as basic as a water source or a sprawling network of road, rail, or air connections. Likewise, social divisions within communities are often dictated by inequalities in access to infrastructure. Infrastructure is thus closely aligned with collective identity in human terms. Yet infrastructural projects can rarely afford to ignore the physicality of the terrain they occupy. Only in a video game like SimCity can the landscape be remodeled at the player’s will, as if the Earth were a blank slate available for human exploitation. In reality, the feasibility of infrastructural projects is determined by a myriad of nonhuman factors, from the climate to the presence of mountains or other

 See, for instance, Mukerji (2015) on the significance of infrastructural projects in early modern France.

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natural obstacles. The layout of the nonhuman landscape is in itself patterned: writing about rubber trade in the Amazon, for instance, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn discusses the way in which two “patterns or forms” – namely, “the distribution of rubber throughout the landscape and the distribution of waterways” (2013, 161–162) – shape the network of human commerce. Man-made infrastructures engage in a complex relationship with these nonhuman forms, exploiting them to their advantage but also dramatically altering them (typically, at the expense of nonhuman species and entire ecosystems). Whether we see infrastructure as affording abstract relations or as physical through and through, it remains deeply implicated with the nonhuman. Narrative can defamiliarize an anthropocentric way of thinking about infrastructure and confront audiences with the way in which any human infrastructural project is embedded within a more-than-human environment. In the digital narratives of video games, the interactivity of the game medium and the possibility of multiplayer cooperation offer innovative opportunities for reimagining infrastructure in relation to both the abstract-physical and the passive-active polarities of the spectrum of materiality.

9.2 From Competition to Cooperation in Multiplayer Games Video games are a hybrid cultural form that combines the ludic challenges of computer-mediated gameplay with storytelling. On the one hand, video games ask players to make strategic decisions that depend on their physical coordination skills (such as timing a jump in a platform game like Super Mario) and mastery of various game systems (for instance, collecting resources or building a powerful army in a strategy game). While computer-mediated, these challenges have a great deal in common with conventional games such as chess or tic-tac-toe, as game scholars have argued (Frasca 2003; Salen and Zimmerman 2004). On the other hand, video games are a storytelling medium capable of delivering interactive narratives – that is, narratives that are co-constructed by the game developers and by the players as they engage with the game system. The co-existence of ludic goals and storytelling in games is not always easy: it can lead to either trivial and predictable plots or an engaging narrative in the absence of any significant ludic challenge. In the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, one of the leading scholars of digital narrative, video games are “an art of compromise between narrative and gameplay” (2006, 198). Whether the compromise struck by a game is seen as satisfying depends on both the game developers’ technical implementation and the particular player’s tastes and standards. There is no denying that narrative is tangential to many video game experiences, either because of the player’s lack of interest in the story or because the developers intended it as a mere framing device for ludic challenges. Many games

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do integrate storytelling and gameplay in an emotionally rewarding “compromise,” however. Death Stranding and Journey clearly belong to the latter category: through different means, they use the player’s ludic actions to advance a plot that is not merely accessory to these actions, but a source of engagement and immersion. Thus, Gordon Calleja (2011) has influentially distinguished between multiple dimensions of immersion in games: narrative involvement is one of them, and it bridges the gap between immersion in game spaces (another of Calleja’s dimensions) and affective engagement with games. The plot of Death Stranding, for example, centers on a deliveryman who is tasked with transporting resources from one community to another, in a postapocalyptic America. Despite his initial reluctance, the protagonist – named Sam Porter Bridges – becomes increasingly invested in his mission of “making America whole” (as the game puts it). Sam is the “avatar,” the player-controlled character throughout the game. This quest is a narrative device that draws the player into the game world, increasing his or her spatial immersion and emotional engagement, because our ludic actions have immediate repercussions on the protagonist’s goals (and on the world surrounding him). The narrative thus becomes a catalyst for the player’s interactions: it motivates players by infusing their ludic decisions with a broader meaning. While not all games use story in this way, my case studies belong to a category of story-focused video games that place considerable emphasis on storytelling.4 Another important distinction is between single-player and multiplayer video games. A game is considered single-player when it does not enable multiple players to inhabit the same game world or collaborate during gameplay: the only interaction that matters is between the player and the game system as it was created by the developers. In a multiplayer game, by contrast, the system allows for interactions between various players, whether they are using the same computer hardware or (more commonly) connected through a local network or the internet. These interactions can take many forms, from one-on-one battles (in online shooters or strategy games) to team-based competition against other players or a computer-controlled AI (in “co-op” games such as Left 4 Dead). In some instances, the game world is generated each time the game is started, while other games (massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft are a case in point) make use of a “persistent” game world: players can go offline and then later resume their interactions with the game world (and with other players) where they left off.

 In Caracciolo (2015b), I develop a more detailed account of story-focused games.

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Multiplayer games fall on a continuum that goes from cooperation with to competition against other players. Game scholar Jonas Heide Smith (2007) draws on mathematical game theory to account for the cooperative element of multiplayer experiences. He argues that this cooperation can be conceptualized as the management of collective resources, which can be actual in-game goods (e.g., money or construction materials) or more intangible resources such as combat skills or knowledge of the game’s systems. This pooling of resources, however, is particularly vulnerable to exploitation or (what can be construed as) irresponsible and antisocial behavior. This is the “tragedy of the commons” that Smith identifies in multiplayer gaming, using the phrase popularized by American ecologist Garrett Hardin in the 1960s. Cheating and “grief” – as the harassment of other players is known in the gaming community – are relatively common in multiplayer games, especially those involving large groups of players who remain anonymous or only know each other through in-game interactions. In many multiplayer games, these socially irresponsible behaviors contribute to an antagonistic atmosphere dominated by extremely shallow interactions. Indeed, in a qualitative study of player experiences in a massively multiplayer online game (Team Fortress 2), Jesse Fox, Michael Gilbert, and Wai Yen Tang (2018) have identified six themes underlying players’ accounts of negative social interactions, which range from “skill disparagement” to “toxic masculinity.” These findings are far from suggesting that all multiplayer interactions are marked by negativity, of course. As Celia Pearce documents in Communities of Play (2009), online communities can foster a sense of intimacy and camaraderie, which may persist even after the video game that is home to a particular group closes its doors. Nevertheless, the risk of overly competitive or irresponsible behavior is always present, and indeed constitutes the inspiration for many communities who define themselves in opposition to such behavior, or for initiatives such as “Raising Good Gamers.”5 The peculiar approach to multiplayer experiences adopted by my case studies challenges – explicitly, in the case of Death Stranding – the toxicity that afflicts multiplayer gaming and internet-based interactions more generally (for instance, on social media). Both games work toward a sense of community that is more profound and rewarding than typical internet behavior. They adopt a minimalistic approach to multiplayer experiences: the significant constraints placed on direct interactions make these interactions more emotionally meaningful, distancing them from the frustrating competitiveness highlighted by Fox, Gilbert, and Tang (2018). Crucially, the management of infrastructure plays a central role in this reimagination of

 See https://www.raisinggoodgamers.com/about.

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online community, as we will see. But even as they deepen players’ understanding of both online togetherness and infrastructure as “public works,” the games reject a definition of community predicated exclusively on human agents. Instead, the infrastructural thinking cultivated by both games implicates the nonhuman landscape or other non-anthropomorphic agents – a nonhuman viewpoint that builds on the tension between the physicality and the abstraction of infrastructure.

9.3 Infrastructural Connection and Boredom in Death Stranding Created by noted Japanese designer Hideo Kojima, Death Stranding had been highly anticipated for more than three years when it was released for PlayStation 4 in 2019. It was Kojima’s first project after parting ways with Konami, the entertainment company that had published Kojima’s successful and critically acclaimed Metal Gear series since 1987. The reception of Death Stranding was overall quite positive, but with some more cautious notes: most critics praised the genre-bending gameplay and highly atmospheric setting; other critics – and many players – were frustrated by the game’s slow start, clunky interface, and convoluted plot. As mentioned in the previous section, the game casts the player in the role of Sam Porter Bridges, a courier in an America devastated by the titular “death stranding,” an apocalyptic event. This catastrophe caused monstrous “Beached Things” (referred to as BTs in the game) to appear throughout the country. These BTs originate from a supernatural plane known as “the Beach,” which the game presents as an afterlife of sorts. With the Death Stranding, the Beach trespasses on the world of everyday experience, leading to a cataclysm that forces the survivors to take shelter in the few urban centers left standing. Porters like Sam, the protagonist and playercontrolled character, are tasked with carrying supplies from one city to another – a vital but also extremely dangerous job, which involves sneaking past BTs and fighting off bandits who attempt to steal the porter’s precious cargo. Initially a freelance courier, Sam decides to join an organization known as the United Cities of America (UCA), whose main goal is to restore the union (which had disintegrated in the wake of the Death Stranding). “You can help us reconnect. You can make America whole,” pleads the president of the UCA in an early conversation with Sam. In essence, “making America whole” involves reenacting the United States’ westward expansion: the game starts near the East coast and Sam’s objective is to reach Edge Knot City, on the West coast, where Amelie, his sister, is held captive by a terrorist organization that opposes the project of unifying America. For Sam and the player controlling him, reaching the West coast means two things: traversing a difficult landscape that is made more

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dangerous by the presence of BTs and other enemies and connecting the various cities along the way to the UCA’s internet-like “chiral network” while delivering supplies to these isolated communities. Naturally, infrastructure is essential to this task. The game presents rebuilding the infrastructure of the internet as a crucial step toward overcoming the fragmentation of society caused by catastrophe. As Sam discovers a new city, his first task is to convince them to join the chiral network, which yields advantages to both the community and the player (by unlocking new missions or building materials). The game’s uncritical faith in the unifying power of the internet is, of course, problematic, but there are reasons to believe that this naiveté is deliberate, as we will see shortly. The infrastructure of the internet expands with Sam’s westward movement, but it remains relatively intangible: in a cutscene, Sam is seen connecting a special necklace to the city terminal, which is enough to integrate the city into the chiral network. The materiality of infrastructure is here sidelined, and indeed Sam’s necklace is said to contain a high degree of “chiralium,” a substance from the Beach that appeared on Earth in the wake of the Death Stranding. Just as the Beach is a supernatural domain cut off from the physical world, the necklace – which derives its powers from the Beach – is capable of creating infrastructure without any material effort.6 The chiral network that Sam creates with his travels thus illustrates the abstract dimension of infrastructure, the magic of goods and information flowing – invisibly and as if seamlessly – from one urban center to another. The in-game map, with its neat geometrical lines, captures this formal quality of infrastructural linkage. Yet other infrastructural objects staged by the game are anything but immaterial. Most of the challenges created by the game have to do with negotiating the barren, postapocalyptic landscape. Death Stranding has been compared to the genre of “walking simulators,” games in which the player’s primary (or only) goal is to move through the landscape, with the narrative unfolding in parallel with the player’s travels.7 Unlike most walking simulators, however, Death Stranding makes walking exceptionally difficult, especially early on in the game. The rocky, uneven landscape (see Figure 14) means that the player is constantly adjusting Sam’s pace and adapting it to the physical configuration of his surroundings, especially as the heavy (and valuable) cargo makes his balance precarious. The materiality of the nonhuman landscape is hard to miss – if only because it gives rise to considerable frustration as players find themselves unable to cover as much  This website proved to be an invaluable source of information on the abstruse plot of Kojima’s game: https://deathstranding.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Stranding.  I refer to Kagen (2017) for a comprehensive discussion of the aesthetics of walking simulators and how they resist mainstream gaming culture.

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Figure 14: Barren landscape in Death Stranding (Kojima Productions 2019).

distance as they’d like or are forced to retrieve the scattered cargo after a catastrophic fall. Infrastructure plays a crucial role in facilitating the character’s movements (and the player’s interactions with the game). It involves either building new architectural elements (such as bridges or ziplines) or restoring the ruined highway system. In either case the materiality of these structures is foregrounded, both because they are costly in terms of in-game resources and because they physically reshape the landscape around the player, unlike the chiral network of the internet, which remains invisible. These infrastructural objects are also where the game’s unconventional multiplayer system comes into its own. In Death Stranding, we encounter a large cast of non-player characters (which are controlled by the computer and have been scripted by the developers) but no other player. In that respect, the game is essentially singleplayer in that it doesn’t enable direct interaction with other players. What the game does enable, though, is asynchronous interaction via the infrastructural elements built by the players. Concretely, when a player builds – for instance – a bridge across a treacherous river, this bridge may appear in another player’s game world, greatly facilitating their task of navigating the terrain and completing Sam’s missions. The game clearly distinguishes these “shared” infrastructural elements from the player’s own creations, and their benefit is such that the game becomes significantly more difficult when it is played in an offline mode (that is, without access to the infrastructure built by the community). Through a system of “likes” reminiscent of social media, the player can thank the community for a particularly useful ladder or bridge. Effectively, this thank-you gesture is the only means of communicating with other players in Death Stranding. In a series of interviews, Kojima explicitly framed this asynchronous multiplayer system as a response to the negative behavior seen in many online communities, in

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the world of gaming and social media: “I think enforcing that kind of indirect communication forces people to have a little more empathy for others,” he remarked (Famitsu 2019). As Kojima stresses in the same interview, the “likes” obtained from a particularly well-placed infrastructural element have no direct impact on gameplay: they offer no material benefit other than the moral reward of having made other players’ lives easier. Through these asynchronous interactions, the game encourages a collaborative culture that, as noted by many reviewers, adds significantly to the player’s feeling of belonging to a community. “In Death Stranding’s best moments, the relief and gratitude you can feel toward someone you don’t even know is an unrivaled multiplayer experience,” writes Kallie Plagge (2020) on the Gamespot website. Other players are something like a ghostly presence: never visible directly but readable through the physical, infrastructural traces they leave behind. The impossibility of direct interaction makes the strange presence-absence of other players more poignant and the asynchronous collaborative work more rewarding. Both the difficulty of the terrain and the sharing of infrastructure are essential to this emotional dynamic: if the material world of Death Stranding was more forgiving and movement through it less difficult, there would be no need for a life-saving bridge or rope. Instead, because this is such a challenging walking simulator, players are forced to pool resources in a way that doesn’t benefit them directly but only by encouraging other players to behave in the same responsible manner. Kojima’s unique multiplayer system is thus a particularly clever way of addressing what Smith (2007) describes as video games’ “tragedy of the commons” – that is, the difficulty of building a truly collaborative environment given the anonymity and competitiveness of online gaming. Moreover, the asynchronous multiplayer of Death Stranding encourages players to rethink the visible infrastructure of the game as a shared, public good. The collaborative work that goes into building these structures is material in the sense that it can take a good chunk of the player’s game time: in order to rebuild a highway, for instance, the player needs to collect large amounts of resources, which are available only after completing missions for the cities Sam encounters en route to the West coast. Infrastructural elements are paradoxically what facilitates Sam’s movement and what slows it down (because it takes time to gather the necessary materials), turning the game into a “grind,” to use a quasi-technical gaming term. For that reason, Death Stranding can feel tedious and sluggish: the game is “ponderously slow, particularly in the early chapters, which largely consist of delivering packages over staggering distances,” writes a reviewer on the Verge website (Webster 2019). That is one of the main complaints voiced by players and reviewers, but it can be argued that boredom, in a game so obsessed with infrastructure, is programmatic. “When it’s not exploding, infrastructure is supposed to be boring, practically by definition,” write Rubenstein, Robbins, and Beal

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(2015, 576), who go on to argue that this boredom might be a form of self-defense against the realization that, without infrastructure, the fabric of our society would be torn apart. The “boring” task of rebuilding roads and placing bridges in Death Stranding asks players to confront this realization as they collaborate asynchronously with other players. Through the inherent difficulty of negotiating the barren landscape and the significant time invested in infrastructural works, nonhuman materiality emerges as an important interlocutor for the player throughout the game: managing infrastructure means knowing the physical configuration of the terrain and understanding the ways in which it shapes the human network that Sam is trying to restore. This insight stands in contrast to the intangible nature of the chiral network, and indeed the game can be said to stage, through its mechanics, the tension between abstraction and physicality that traverses the spectrum of materiality. As the narrative unfolds, this tension comes to coincide with the duality of the game experience, divided as it is between the concreteness of crossing the physical landscape and the bizarre, convoluted plot, which feels abstract and surprisingly remote from the game’s interactive components. This duality is illustrated by the fact that Sam’s most consequential gesture in plot terms – connecting the communities to the chiral network – requires no material infrastructure at all, but only the supernatural intervention of the Beach (because chiral crystals themselves come from the Beach). If the game places an emphasis on materiality through the roads and other infrastructural objects built by the community, the fantastical elements of the plot turn infrastructure into something that “just works.” This magic of infrastructure of course recalls the way in which someone in the developed world can tap into myriads of infrastructural systems in the course of a single day without ever paying attention to their material nature, including – importantly – their major impact on nonhuman species and ecosystems. By staging both the intangible and the physical dimension of infrastructure, the game explores the contradictions implicit in the everyday experience of infrastructure and asks the player to face up to those contradictions. This duality has clear repercussions on the game’s understanding of community. Again, we find a number of intriguing paradoxes here. For a plot that is so heavy-handedly invested in “making America whole,” it is significant that the cities and communities visited by Sam within the game world are so undifferentiated. This again speaks to the mind-numbing repetitiousness of Death Stranding, in which basic actions such as delivering cargo have to be carried out countless times, with very little variation also at the level of setting: the “cities” are abstractions, with identical computer terminals and indistinguishable “private rooms” for Sam to rest. One may legitimately wonder what “making America whole”

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even means, given that the various man-built locations we encounter are virtually identical, just as all Starbucks cafés look the same no matter where we are in the world. The corporate tedium of these human spaces clashes with both the spontaneity of the asynchronous multiplayer and the painstaking detail with which the nonhuman landscape is recreated by the game. Outside of the urban centers, no two locations look alike, and their visual and textural differences matter because so much of the game involves crossing difficult terrain. If the game advances a coherent understanding of community, it is not through the rhetoric of national unity or the abstractions of the chiral network – and certainly not through the twisted plot – but rather through the unpredictable interactions with other players. Such interactions do not aim at any sense of “wholeness” but instead remain partial and fleeting, and yet grounded in the materiality of the game world through infrastructural elements. It is perhaps significant that nothing is permanent in the world of Kojima’s game: after the apocalyptic Death Stranding, a mysterious form of precipitation known as “timefall” starts accelerating the decay of everything it comes into contact with, including both human bodies and nonhuman things. Even player-built infrastructures deteriorate over time, and the world itself – as the plot gradually reveals – is subject to an extinction event that can be delayed but not averted. Given this sense of impermanence, the value of “making America whole” through the westward expansion of the chiral network appears increasingly dubious. What remains, instead, is the emotional reward of keeping company with other players through infrastructure, as well as the harsh beauty of the natural terrain. Despite the game’s many frustrating abstractions, it is through these negotiations of materiality that Death Stranding finds a sense of community.

9.4 Enchanted Cloth and Silent Companions in Journey Playing Journey offers some respite from the disjointed and at times confusing experience of Death Stranding, which is my main reason for tackling the games in this order (even though Journey was released seven years before Kojima’s game). In fact, if Death Stranding is rich in long-winded expositions and a multitude of systems that don’t mesh particularly well (perhaps deliberately), Journey is all about minimalist focus. The game contains no language at all; even the instructions on how to use the controller are delivered through visual cues. The protagonist and player-controlled character is a figure clad in a red robe. From the very first scene of the game, it is clear that the character’s main objective is to make their way to a mountain, whose glowing peak is visible on the horizon. The rest of the game unfolds in eight levels, each marked by a unique (and highly atmospheric) color

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palette: from the warmly lit desert of the early levels to the ultramarine of “The Tunnels” to the blinding whiteness of the snowy mountain top. Ruins are scattered throughout this environment, and the architectural inspiration points to the Middle East. Artistically speaking, this is a highly curated and coherent experience that makes excellent use of sparse visual and auditory elements. Within these levels, the gameplay is limited to three actions (again, in contradistinction to the complicated mechanics of Death Stranding): walking, jumping, and chanting. The player can jump only if the protagonist has enough energy, which is displayed by the symbols on their scarf: if there are no symbols, the scarf needs to be replenished before the player can jump again. “Chanting” produces a sound (which matches the game’s soundtrack and the mood of each level) and simultaneously makes a visual symbol appear in front of the character. This gesture is essentially the player’s main way of interacting with certain elements of the game world that advance the story and also increase the protagonist’s energy level. These mechanics define Journey as a platform game that asks the player to skillfully navigate the environment: moving from one area to another typically requires coordination and a well-timed use of chanting to boost the protagonist’s jumps. While not as vast as the open world of Death Stranding, the setting of Journey is both expansive and visually evocative, partly through the strategic use of music and lighting. As the player moves through these spaces, the backstory of this world gradually (and wordlessly) emerges from a number of geometrical wall paintings (see Figure 15 for an example). As in Death Stranding, this story involves the collapse of a civilization, which – we infer – was caused by the automata that still haunt the ruins. To recover this story and reach the top of the mountain, the player has to interact with the architecture and rebuild the collapsed infrastructure, such as the bridge in the game’s second chapter (see Figure 16). However, “rebuilding” the bridge does not involve restoring it to its original state, but rather creating walkways (visible in Figure 16) made of the red carpet-like fabric that can be found everywhere in the game world: this is the fabric of the protagonist’s own cape and scarf, but also of the many flying cloth creatures that populate these ruins. The materiality of the bridge as an infrastructural element is thus foregrounded, and defamiliarized, through an unusual juxtaposition of textures: the heavy stone of the ruined bridge clashes with the more aerial appearance of the carpets, which flutter in the wind and yet afford passage (and thus enable players to advance their journey). Likewise, repeatedly throughout the game the player can chant in the proximity of flying cloth “banners” to change the physical layout of the surrounding buildings, allowing them to progress to the next area. At one level, these devices tie in with Journey’s interest in physical textures, which are rendered in great visual detail and help create the distinctive

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Figure 15: Geometrical wall paintings showing the world’s backstory in Journey (thatgamecompany 2012).

atmosphere of each game location. The infrastructural coexistence of fabric and stone (as in the case of the carpet bridge) is surprising because it runs counter to an everyday understanding of matter, whereby the relative permanence of infrastructure depends on the use of durable materials. Instead, in Journey ruins are “repaired,” buildings are transformed, and infrastructural access is restored through repeated interactions with fabric, a delicate and fleeting substance. Elaine Scarry (2001, Ch. 2) has written about the contrast between solid and gauzy things and how the literary evocation of these different textures can set the reader’s visual imagery in motion: in Journey, we find this contrast visualized

Figure 16: A collapsed bridge with fabric walkways in Journey (thatgamecompany 2012).

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and translated into an interactive environment in which infrastructural things are not so much rebuilt but reenchanted as the player’s actions (including the “chanting” mechanism) fuse them with more delicate textures. If the magic of the chiral network in Death Stranding remains separate from the material infrastructures of gameplay, Journey’s chanting mechanism ensures that a supernatural element is part and parcel of the player’s interactions with the game world. The resulting combinations of cloth and more solid matter lead to an aestheticization of infrastructure that is a powerful reminder of its materiality. A principle of abstraction is also at work in the game, however. First, there is the visual abstraction of many game elements, from the protagonist’s vaguely anthropomorphic (but not quite human) appearance to the simple shapes of the many creatures that inhabit the ruins. (More on these creatures soon.) More strikingly still, the murals that illustrate the world’s backstory, which are unlocked in the course of the protagonist’s journey, make use of bidimensional shapes (see Figure 15) to depict a vast array of interlinked buildings, pillars, and bridges. This is a world of pure infrastructural connection that recalls Italo Calvino’s (1974) enigmatic “invisible cities.” Yet the preapocalyptic appearance of the civilization depicted by the murals contrasts sharply with the ruins explored by the player: in a sense, the protagonist’s task is to deploy the enchanted materiality of cloth (and hence the “vibrant” pole of my spectrum) to make up for the way in which the abstract linkage of infrastructure has broken down in the game world. Perhaps more subtly, abstraction is also what defines the game’s imagination of community, at least if we understand abstraction as increased distance from particularized subjectivity – a zooming out from the notions of individual identity and autonomy that undergird modern Western thinking about the self. Journey, as I mentioned, asks the player to spend time with a large number of cloth creatures, which come in many forms: from larger kite-like “longtails” that guide the player through the desert to smaller “flyers” that gather in flocks and recharge the protagonist’s scarf.8 These are entities that display animate behavior but are made of stuff – fabric – that is seen as inert in the standard ontology of Western modernity. Not only do these cloth creatures challenge dichotomies between animate and inanimate, but through their identical appearance and group behavior they abstract from individual identity; they are undifferentiated, yet their collective actions are clearly deliberate and intelligent: they guide the player through the levels, they point to objects of interest, and so on. Indeed, playing Journey means following these cloth creatures from one area to another and even becoming like them, since

 These creatures are not named in the game, but I draw this terminology from https://journey. fandom.com/wiki/Entities.

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the protagonist’s flying and jumping abilities expand in the course of the game, approximating (without ever matching) the cloth creatures’ limitless flight. The player thus increasingly shares the cloth creatures’ freedom of movement, which is grounded in both nonhuman materiality (the fabric) and collectivity. In this way, Journey expands the player’s understanding of community beyond anthropocentric assumptions.9 Because (as seen above), cloth is what restores infrastructural linkage in the game, the physical spaces explored by the protagonist are in themselves implicated – through visual textures and interactive gameplay – in this enlarged sense of community, which crisscrosses the human vs. nonhuman divide. However, what contributes the most to a radical reimagination of community in Journey is the unique multiplayer system. Unlike the asynchronous multiplayer of Death Stranding, Journey allows the player to travel with a companion in real time – but this multiplayer mode remains elusive and doesn’t allow for direct verbal communication through voice or text chat. Occasionally, in the course of a playthrough the player will encounter another character who looks like the protagonist and wears a similar (red or white) cape. These encounters are not scripted or predictable, and indeed it is possible to complete the game without meeting any companions. When an encounter does happen, the two players may share some of the journey or decide to part ways. The game doesn’t say anything about the identity of this figure, to the point that many players are likely to wonder whether this figure is a player or an AI-controlled character. Only after the end credits does the game show a list of “Companions Met Along the Way,” making clear that these were actual players. Chanting in the vicinity of these companions recharges the protagonist’s scarf, but this is all the game offers in the way of direct interaction. The game community has developed a number of creative ways of sidestepping this constraint and communicating with companions – for instance, by tracing messages in the sand.10 The core experience of playing with a companion remains a wordless one, however: the game favors a quiet mode of togetherness whose main effect, despite some minor gameplay benefits, has to do with atmosphere. As many reviews of the game attest, playing silently alongside a companion intensifies the mood of the levels and adds to the meditative quality of this Journey: for instance, Keza MacDonald (2012) suggests that “Journey’s emotional impact, which is not inconsiderable when playing along [sic], is multiplied exponentially by sharing the experience with a stranger.” Like Death Stranding, Journey places significant

 See also Parham (2016, 222–227) and Chang (2019, 136–137) for two ecocritical readings of Journey that are broadly consistent with my discussion.  See https://journey.fandom.com/wiki/Common_Behaviors.

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constraints on direct interaction in order to make the multiplayer experience more emotionally meaningful and resist the competitive and uncollaborative behavior of large swathes of the gaming community. Of course, this game – like many slow-paced “walking simulators” (see again Kagen 2017) – will appeal to a different kind of player than typical “hardcore” gamers. Despite this self-selection mechanism in the game’s audience, the wordless multiplayer of Journey actively prevents the players from flaunting their affiliation with a particular niche in the world of gaming. The identity of the players we share this journey with is abstracted and even erased, to the point that we may have trouble distinguishing a player from a computer-controlled AI. Because of the ambiguity and mystery that surround companionship in Journey, and because of the foregrounding of nonhuman assemblages (through the cloth creatures), community is evocatively distanced from human subjectivity. The game’s contemplative mood thus builds on the tension between abstraction and physicality that defines, as we have seen, infrastructural things as well as the spectrum of materiality more generally. The materiality of bridges and other infrastructural elements is defamiliarized through striking textural juxtapositions; simultaneously, the visual abstraction of the game world blends into an expanded sense of community that challenges the separation between human players, AI, and the material elements evoked by the game. The infrastructure of Journey connects players by cultivating an imagination of material surfaces (particularly delicate, cloth-like things) and by using nonverbal cues to create a sense of emotional sharing and community in the face of a ruined world. In Journey, civilization cannot be restored after the collapse – a possibility that is central to the plot of Death Stranding – but the ruined world it has left behind offers an opportunity for new forms of collaboration, which involve bottom-up creativity (for example, tracing messages in the sand) and a companionship that is intensified by its silences. ✶✶✶ At first glance, Death Stranding and Journey may look like a strange pairing. The former is a large production led by one of the most recognizable names in the world of video games, Hideo Kojima, while the latter is an independent, arthouse game developed by a small team who had already collaborated on student projects (the games Cloud and Flow). The two games’ narratives are also wide apart: from the cinematic experience and confusing twists of Death Stranding to the rarefied story of Journey, which encourages allegorical readings through its extreme simplicity and emotional focus. Yet both interactive narratives converge on infrastructure as an essential element of the game world, which steers the player’s interaction with the game and is deeply embedded in catastrophic scenarios: completing the

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game involves, essentially, rebuilding infrastructural things after a cataclysm. With that gesture, the player is invited to reimagine community in ways that depart from the anthropocentric understanding of Western modernity – because the nonhuman landscape and material things become actively implicated in infrastructural efforts. This is particularly evident in Journey, in which the player-controlled character must coordinate with cloth creatures – and even, to some extent, become one of them – in order to refashion the game world’s infrastructure. In Death Stranding, too, the difficult terrain becomes a partner of sorts as the player learns how to use infrastructure to negotiate the landscape, but also to accept the inevitable decay of infrastructure at the hands of larger, nonhuman forces acting on the landscape (the “timefall” caused by the metaphysical dimension known as the Beach). The infrastructural imagination of both games builds on the tension between physicality and abstraction that underlies the spectrum of materiality. As recent discussions in the humanities suggest, infrastructure is materiality writ large, yet its pervasiveness can easily recede into the background of everyday experience. When infrastructural elements work as they should, it is tempting to regard them as abstract, intangible links rather than materially grounded ones. This tension between physicality and abstraction is present in my case studies at the level of both representation (the game world) and gameplay: Death Stranding and Journey display physical textures through the highly detailed landscape, but they also adopt strategies that abstract from physicality, by enabling instantaneous “chiral” connections between cities in Death Stranding or via the geometrical murals in Journey (through which the game world’s backstory is delivered). If abstraction and physicality in Death Stranding never fully coalesce, Journey is perhaps more successful in reconciling the tension between these dimensions of infrastructure. More importantly, though, abstraction and physicality underlie the two games’ unique approach to multiplayer, which involves strategic constraints on interaction and communication between players. In Death Stranding, infrastructural elements can be shared but other players remain absent from the game world. In Journey, by contrast, the players can share game space but the interactions between them are extremely limited. These unconventional multiplayer strategies produce an intensification of emotional atmosphere and companionship, resisting the dominant trends in the gaming community (particularly its competitiveness and shallowness). By negotiating materiality through infrastructural gameplay, Death Stranding and Journey create moments of togetherness that are as affectively resonant as they are fleeting, elusive, and mysterious.

10 Epilogue: Embracing the Spectrum The spectrum of materiality is vast and elusive. As a concept at the center of contemporary discussions in nonhuman-oriented theory but also as a lived perceptual experience, the material is profoundly protean: at the same time concrete and abstract, relational and impenetrable, knowable and unknowable, materiality defies easy categorization and indeed destabilizes what is perhaps the most productive binary of Western thinking – that between an active subject and “mere,” lifeless matter. Philosophers and other writers operating in the world of theory (including, but not limited to, New Materialism and thing theory) can endlessly debate and take issue with these conflicting meanings in an attempt to achieve conceptual clarity. For some commentators, as I outlined in this book’s introduction, certain uses of the word materiality obfuscate political responsibilities toward today’s ecological crisis by ascribing a quasi-magical agency to the material world instead of focusing on its devastation at the hands of global capitalism. For other commentators, the obsession with the coverall concept of the material takes away from the actual, physical texture of things, or sidelines the material nature of human and nonhuman embodiment. Those are worthwhile concerns, but as I have argued in this book they are for philosophy, nor for narrative, to address. What narrative can do, rather, is build on the conceptual tensions and contradictions that traverse the spectrum of materiality. Narrative transforms this conceptual space into an affectively and imaginatively rich experience for audiences: within the storyworlds of fiction, films, and video games (among other narrative media), the tensions and contradictions of materiality are embedded in a concrete – if imaginary – context of interaction and interwoven with broader concerns that circulate in contemporary culture. This, as I explained in the introduction, is what I call a “narrative negotiation” of materiality, and my case studies serve as a varied (but no doubt partial) repertoire of possible negotiations. Throughout the book, the focus lay on spatial figures through which storytelling probes the many facets of materiality: the network of object-oriented plotting (chapter 2), the gaps of the multimodal novels (chapter 3), the posthuman museum (chapter 4), the deserted island of Crusoesque fame (chapter 5), hostile wildernesses (chapter 6), the workplace invaded by otherworldly, “weird” forces (chapter 7), a world in ruins (chapter 8), and infrastructural elements such as roads and bridges (chapter 9). Through these spatial frames, materiality is brought into productive tension with definitions of human subjectivity, the possibilities and limitations of human knowledge, as well as notions of anthropocentric mastery and human or morethan-human community. Narrative thus breathes life into materiality, it explores https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-010

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the productivity of the concept but also the shortcomings or blind spots of contemporary theorizations. It goes without saying that not all stories stage materiality, but those that do can offer transformative negotiations. They exist in popular culture as well as in experimental literature, across a wide gamut of media practices (from the novel to film and video games) that interrogate the meanings of the material through their distinctive formal means. My emphasis was on the contemporary: the work of positioning what I said here within a larger, historical perspective remains largely unfinished. Likewise, I have only sporadically gestured toward the significance of non-Western, and particularly Indigenous, perspectives on materiality: much more should be done to bring non-Western thinkers into a dialogue with New Materialism and with the approaches to narrative it has inspired, most notably Iovino and Oppermann’s (2014b) material ecocriticism and James and Morel’s (2020) econarratology. It is also important to keep in mind that there is only so much narrative can do by itself. Ultimately, narrative’s power to (re)negotiate notions of materiality depends on the audience’s receptiveness and also on the context in which reading, viewing, or gameplay take place. To pay attention to the imagination of materiality in narrative, the audience requires certain predispositions and interests, which are further amplified and developed by narratives such as those I examined in this book – an instance of the hermeneutic circle at work. Moreover, certain material contexts will enhance the audience’s receptiveness, as cognitive literary scholar Anežka Kuzmičová (2016) has shown. Take for instance my discussion of the office weird in chapter 7: this reading was inspired by the fact that I wrote the chapter when my campus office, like millions of others around the globe, was off-limits as governments attempted to contain the spread of COVID-19. Instead of addressing the importance of audiences and contexts directly, this book has centered on the agency of narrative form itself, which is – admittedly – only part of the complex equation of narrative impact. I have explored this complexity in previous work, including most recently in qualitative interviews I carried out in collaboration with a psychologist, Heidi Toivonen (Toivonen and Caracciolo 2023). Other scholars, such as Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and colleagues (2020), are addressing the psychological influence of environmental narratives in experimental studies. In general, though, there can be no narrative impact without narrative, and my goal here was to establish narrative’s potential to prompt a rethinking of materiality. It is up to us (teachers and scholars of narrative) to make sure audiences are receptive enough, and the material context sufficiently conducive to a negotiation of the material. The urgency of this rethinking cannot be overstated: particularly through extractivist and capitalist practices that have emerged in conjunction with Western modernity, humanity’s material impact on the planet has caused

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a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Whether it is through rising carbon dioxide emissions or through enormous garbage patches accumulating in the Earth’s oceans, the material world both bears the sign of human mastery and threatens to dramatically destabilize it. Imagining a way past this crisis is an exceedingly challenging task, but it is likely to involve a radical reconfiguration of the notion of inert, raw “matter” as Western modernity has narrowly depicted it. We need to think flexibly about the material, cultivating a multiperspectival appreciation of thingness that has both human and nonhuman interests at heart. We need, in other words, to be able to embrace the spectrum of materiality in its entirety, imaginatively and pragmatically. If what I said in this book is correct, storytelling is uniquely positioned to foster this kind of thinking: by using the tensions of materiality as the catalyst of progression, characterization, and spatial reference, narrative enables predisposed audiences to come to terms with the richness of the material – and with the perils and opportunities of human societies’ involvement in it.

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Index abstraction 17, 28–29, 90 – and infrastructure 174–175 – and materiality 9, 176 – in video games 113 affect 6, 35, 63, 156; see also atmosphere, boredom – and embodiment 132, 153–154 – and narrative 26 affordance 23n2 agency 7, 26; see also anthropomorphism – human vs. nonhuman 3, 23, 44 – in video games 146 Alaimo, Stacy 6, 77n16, 85n1, 100, 153 Alam, Rumaan 171 Alpers, Svetlana 65 Ameel, Lieven 32n6, 63n14 Anthropocene 67–69, 77n18, 83n21; see also climate change anthropocentrism 2–4, 9, 91, 107 anthropomorphism 27, 88, 91–93, 95, 101 – vs. the fetish 92 – of narrative 4 – strategic anthropomorphism (Iovino) 91 archive see collecting Armstrong, Nancy 62 Askin, Ridvan 4, 46–47 atmosphere 130–132, 185–186; see also affect Bakhtin, Mikhail 99 Ballard, J. G. 14, 158–163, 166, 168–169 Barad, Karen 6 Barnard, Rita 35 Barnes, Julian 167 Barthes, Roland 11, 25 Bendell, Jem 116n1 Benjamin, Walter 8 Bennett, Jane 8, 15–16, 51, 91, 145 Bernaerts, Lars 11, 16n9, 25 body see embodiment Bogost, Ian 107, 113 Bordwell, David 30n5, 34 boredom 182–183; see also affect Boscagli, Maurizia 7–8, 15 Bourdieu, Pierre 12

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111142562-012

Bracke, Astrid 16n9 Brown, Bill 8–9 Buell, Lawrence 15, 23 cabinet of curiosities 67; see also collecting, museum Calleja, Gordon 177 Calvino, Italo 38n9, 62, 187 Campbell, Joseph 25 Carter, Chris 127 catastrophe 82, 123, 159–160; see also climate change, postapocalyptic literature, ruins causation 26–28, 68 chance 34, 113, 120 Chang, Alenda 109–110, 114, 174n2, 188n9 Clark, Timothy 15n8 Clarke, Susanna 163–168 climate change 7, 15–16, 68–69, 82; see also Anthropocene, catastrophe collecting 1–2, 31–32, 65–66, 71; see also cabinet of curiosities, museum – in video games 105–106, 112 collectivity 172–173, 176–179, 183, 188 Collodi, Carlo 99 colonialism 7, 52, 63, 89 complexity 6, 68, 192 – and computer simulation 107, 113 – and space 155–156, 173 computer games see video games Connolly, William 150 Conrad, Joseph 43, 52–55 Costikyan, Greg 146 Craps, Stef 160n7 Crutzen, Paul 4 curating see collecting Dannenberg, Hilary 26, 34 defamiliarization 100n12, 127, 164–166; see also weird fiction Defoe, Daniel 85–88, 92, 159 DeLillo, Don 27, 32, 34, 36–37 Dennett, Daniel 149 digital technologies see materiality, video games Doležel, Lubomír 93

208

Index

dualism 3, 25, 150n2, 152 Dworkin, Craig 41–42 Easterlin, Nancy 23n2, 152, 154 ecocriticism 15–16, 23, 152 – material ecocriticism 16, 192 – and video games 109–110 ecological crisis see Anthropocene, climate change Eliot, T. S. 29, 59 embodiment 7, 38–39, 76, 88, 153; see also mind environmental crisis see Anthropocene, climate change environmental storytelling (Jenkins) 72, 121–122 ethics 7, 44–45, 55, 68, 182 fetish 89–90 fiction see novel Finn, Ed 109 Fisher, Mark 128, 135 Fludernik, Monika 4, 13, 154 form 11, 13, 15–17, 41, 70; see also gaps, narrative, New Formalism Forster, E. M. 26 Foucault, Michel 75n14 Frank, Joseph 17 Frasca, Gonzalo 107n3, 121, 176 Fromm, Harold 153, 158 Fuchs, Michael 109 gameplay 105, 120–121; see also video games gaps (in narrative) 45–47, 107 Genette, Gérard 11 Ghosal, Torsa 43 Ghosh, Amitav 15n8, 69 Gibbons, Alison 42 Gibbs, Raymond 38 Gibson, James J. 23n2 Gibson, John 2n2, 10n6, 44n2 global phenomena 34–35, 72, 95 Greenblatt, Stephen 11 Greimas, A. J. 25 Groensteen, Thierry 48, 50n7 grotesque 99–100, 138 Grusin, Richard 5, 23 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 132

Hallet, Wolfgang 42 Harman, Graham 3, 6, 25, 46–47, 87n3, 137 Hayles, Katherine 48, 50, 52 Hegglund, Jon 80n20, 131, 138 Heidegger, Martin 3, 5, 87n3 Heise, Ursula 69n6, 73 Herman, David 11, 23, 151–152, 162 Herman, Luc 12 Hildyard, Daisy 76 Hogan, Patrick Colm 26 Hutchins, Edwin 24, 28–29 hyperobject (Morton) 8, 71–72 Iñárritu, Alejandro González 29–30, 33–36, 38 Indigenous epistemologies 3, 44, 89–90, 192 infrastructure 93–94, 171–172 – tensions of 174–175 Ingold, Tim 6–7 instrumentalization 52, 92, 146; see also objectification Iovino, Serenella 16, 38n9, 71, 91, 192 James, Erin 11, 15–16, 192 Jenkins, Henry 19, 72, 121, 125 Johnson, Mark 17, 28, 153 Kafalenos, Emma 26 Kohn, Eduardo 176 Kojima, Hideo 179–184 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 11–12 Kubrick, Stanley 96–97 Kukkonen, Karin 24, 26, 38, 154n5 Kuzmičová, Anežka 192 Kwan, Daniel 98–103 Lakoff, George 17, 28, 153 Larkin, Brian 171, 174 Latour, Bruno 5–6, 146 Leonardi, Paul M. 109 Levine, Caroline 13, 174 linearity 30–31, 69, 77, 122; see also narrative, nonlinearity, plot Lovecraft, H. P. 46–47, 130–131, 139 Luckhurst, Roger 130, 162n10 Luiselli, Valeria 56–63

Index

Malm, Andreas 7–8, 44–45 Mandel, Emily St. John 65–66, 69–70, 72–73, 78–79, 81 material anchor (Hutchins) 24, 29 material ecocriticism see ecocriticism materiality 5–10, 192; see also hyperobject, material anchor, New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, things, thing theory – and digital technologies 14, 42 – as inaccessible 46–47, 63 – of literary language 41–42, 87 – vs. matter 5 – as relational 6, 150–151 – and thing-power (Bennett) 6, 66, 88, 145 – as uncertain 9–10, 122 Mauss, Marcel 1 McCarthy, Cormac 58–59 McGurl, Mark 36, 135, 142 McHale, Brian 52–53, 62n13, 78n19 Meillassoux, Quentin 4 mesh (Morton) 24, 28, 68 metaphor 47, 75–76, 135, 153 – and mind 139, 162 Miéville, China 131 mind 6–7, 70, 149–151; see also panpsychism – and body 152 – and physical spaces 161–162, 167 Möllers, Nina 67–68 Morel, Eric 16n10, 192 Morrison, Yedda 52–55 Morton, Timothy 8, 15, 24, 28, 68n4 multimodality 42–43 multiplayer see video games museum 1–2, 56, 66–69, 80–81; see also cabinet of curiosities, collecting – museum effect (Alpers) 65, 156 Nagel, Thomas 150 Narine, Neil 35 narrative theory see narratology narrative 10, 16, 23–24, 47n5; see also environmental storytelling, form, linearity, nonlinearity, plot – anthropomorphic bias of 4 – negotiation see negotiation

209

– in video games 120–121 narratology 2, 26, 152; see also structuralism – contextualist narratology 11 – econarratology 15, 17 – postclassical narratology 11 negotiation 11–13, 191–192 network 34–35, 50, 94, 173–174 New Formalism 13, 174; see also form New Materialism 5–7, 23, 63, 150 Nixon, Rob 63, 123n10 nonhuman 5–6, 38, 47, 68, 176; see also posthuman nonlinearity 25, 28–29, 69; see also linearity, network nostalgia 78, 156–157, 168 Novak, Maximillian 92 novel 32n6, 63, 171 – and its limitations vis-à-vis climate change 69 – multimodal 41–43 Nünning, Ansgar 11 Nussbaum, Martha 92 objectification 35, 66, 74–75, 88, 92; see also instrumentalization object-oriented ontology 6, 25, 137 objects see materiality, things Oppermann, Serpil 16, 71, 192 panpsychism 6n4, 95, 166 Phelan, James 2n2, 13n7, 26 Pietz, William 89–90, 92 place see space planetary see global phenomena plot 24–25, 29, 46, 107–108 poetry 41–42, 78 postapocalyptic literature 58, 65, 78–79, 82, 159–160; see also catastrophe, ruins posthuman 38n9, 70, 87, 142, 162 Punday, Dan 121 realism 113, 131, 147; see also novel Robertson, Benjamin 131 Rodriguez, David 17, 157 Rose, Deborah Bird 44, 63 Rubenstein, Michael 171–172, 182–183

210

Index

ruins 155–158, 162, 168, 185–186; see also catastrophe, postapocalyptic literature Ryan, Marie-Laure 29, 46n3, 108, 121, 151–152, 154, 164n11, 176 Safran Foer, Jonathan 48–52 Salen, Katie 105n1, 142n16, 176 Scarry, Elaine 186 Scheinert, Daniel 98–103 Schmitt, Arnaud 30–31 Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew 192 Schulz, Bruno 48, 50–51 Sebald, W. G. 42 Shaughnessy, Brenda 78–83 Shaviro, Steven 6n4, 95 Shklovsky, Viktor 127 simulation (in video games) 107–108 Smith, Jonas Heide 178, 182 Sommer, Roy 11 space 72, 121, 132, 134n9, 149; see also environmental storytelling – as form 17 – in narrative 151–155 – vs. place 154 spectrum of materiality see materiality Sternberg, Meir 46 Sterne, Laurence 42 structuralism 11, 41 subjectivity see mind Sullivan, Heather 16n11 survival (video game genre) 105–107 TallBear, Kim 3 Taylor, T. L. 146 thing theory 8

things 25–26, 59, 74, 85, 87; see also hyperobject, materiality – as equipment or gear (“Zeug”) 3, 87, 106 – in the realist novel 25 Todorov, Tzvetan 11, 132 Toivonen, Heidi 192 Tokarczuk, Olga 74–77, 81–83 Trexler, Adam 15n8, 69n5, 151 Turner, Mark 27 typography 43 uncertainty 9–10, 32–33, 68, 81, 146 VanderMeer, Ann 131 VanderMeer, Jeff 129–140 Vermeulen, Pieter 66n1, 69n8, 70–71 Vervaeck, Bart 12 video games 14, 107; see also gameplay – and ecological issues 108–110 – multiplayer 176–179 – and narrative 120–121 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 90–91 Wasserman, Sarah 8–9 weird fiction 19–20, 47n6, 128, 130; see also defamiliarization – old vs. new 131 Whitehead, Alfred North 95 Woelert, Peter 17, 153n4 Woolf, Virginia 50n8, 58n12, 87 Zapf, Hubert 37 Zemeckis, Robert 92–98 Zimmerman, Eric 105n1, 142n16, 176