Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction 9781138304680, 9780203729861

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Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of novels that respond to the environmental issues we currently face. Among these, Louise Squire defines environmental crisis fiction as concerned with a range of environmental issues and with the human subject as a catalyst for these issues. She argues that this fiction is characterised by a thematic use of ‘death’, through which it explores a ‘crisis’ of both environment and self. Squire refers to this emergent thematic device as ‘death-facing ecology’. This device enables this fiction to engage with a range of theoretical ideas and with popular notions of death and the human condition as cultural phenomena of the modern West. In doing so, this fiction invites its readers to consider how humanity might begin to respond to the crisis. Louise Squire researches in contemporary literature and ecocriticism. She works at the University of Portsmouth and is Assistant Editor for Ecozon@. Her publications include (co-editor) Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture; a chapter in Extending Ecocritcism, ed. by Peter Barry and William Welstead; and an article in The Oxford Literary Review.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

35 Approaches to Teaching the Work of Edwidge Danticat Edited by Celucien L. Joseph, Suchismita Banerjee, Marvin Hobson, and Danny Hoey 36 Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction Literature Beyond Fordism Roberto del Valle Alcalá 37 Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties Matthew T. Pifer 38 Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English Art of Crisis Wojciech Drąg 39 Patrick McGrath and His Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan 40 The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Deindustrialisation, Demonisation, Resistance Phil O’Brien 41 Reading Contingency The Accident in Contemporary Fiction David Wylot 42 Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction Louise Squire For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction Louise Squire

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Louise Squire to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-30468-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-72986-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Bert

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Thoughts Towards an Ecology of Death-Facing 1 1 A Crisis of Environment, a Crisis in Thought 24 2 Death-Denial, Death-Facing 57 3 Impasse, Paradox 90 4 Discursive Death, Material Death 123 Conclusion: Imageries of the Future 154 Index

163

Acknowledgements

I first must thank family members and friends for their patience, especially Mum and Ron, Charlotte, Vicki and Jan, Jessica, Jamila, Jake and Silvie, also Diana, as I have worked on this book alongside other commitments. There. It is done now. Special thanks go to Laurie, who would have been pleased and to whom I raise a glass. I also thank friends in Hampshire and Wales, especially Jo O and Mark for always being there, Andy for editing one chapter so well that I dare not give him another, Belinda and family for movie wisdom and other enlightenments, Carol and Paul for warm encouragement, and Dr Julie May for helping to get things processed: mostly me. I thank Samantha Hurn (University of Exeter) for her kindness and wisdom and Adeline Johns-Putra (University of Surrey) for her exemplary training and insight. I also thank Hannes Bergthaller (National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan) and Cate Sandilands (York University, ­Toronto) for valuable discussions that helped me to clarify and develop my ideas. Parts of this book are published in earlier forms. Chapter 3 in particular replicates/reworks parts of, and expands on, an article previously published in The Oxford Literary Review, issue 34, no. 2 (2012). The issue was edited by Timothy Clark (Durham University), to whom I extend thanks. Some of the key ideas in this book are also conveyed in summary form in a chapter in Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, a collection edited by Peter Barry (Aberystwyth University) and William Welstead, to whom I also extend thanks, and published by Manchester University Press in 2017. I am deeply grateful to the Edinburgh University Press’ The Oxford Literary Review, and to Matthew Frost at Manchester University Press for permissions for reuse in this book. Finally, I wish to thank a brilliant team: Penny, Miriam, Giordana and Ryan. You know who you are.

Introduction Thoughts Towards an Ecology of Death-Facing

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have elicited mainstream recognition that disruption to environmental conditions due to human activities is – and has been – occurring in myriad ways, from climate change to a major biodiversity loss. The present epoch has, accordingly, been defined as the Anthropocene, an era in which the Earth’s systems and geologies are being altered as a direct result of human activity.1 The roots of this situation, however, are difficult to define. For some, the environmental crisis may be unforeseen and therefore largely inadvertent: There we were, Homo sapiens, variously getting on with living, only to find that our success (or that of the first-world nations) has been impacting on our planetary home. For others, our approaches to living are at fault and even discredit us as a species: In utilising the planet as a resource to our own ends, we have failed to value its flora and fauna, its systems and geologies; only when their disruption looks set to impact upon us, have we begun to take note. The above contrasting views, while generalised on my part, arise because conceptions of life, of course, also widely differ. Nonetheless, the question of what lies, ultimately or variously, behind our impacts upon the planet speaks in some sense to how we might respond to the circumstances we face. It is now clear that carbon pollution accelerates climate change, deforestation diminishes species diversity and accelerates carbon levels, the use of agrichemicals harms insect populations and may not be that good for human beings either, the throwaway society generates plastic pollution and results in a land-fill crisis, and so on, all of which have detrimental impact on humans and nonhumans alike. But what is at the root of these issues? Are they economic? Are they the outcome of expanding populations? Do they reveal a wrong-headedness of sorts, and, if so, at what point in history did it arise? Underlying these questions is that of how we understand ourselves as a species: In what ways have we viewed our collective place in this complex world, and might such views now need revising? The fiction discussed in this book is broadly concerned with such questions. Interrogating the human condition, variously defined, it explores how we arrived at a point of environmental crisis and how the characteristics of this arrival might inform our potential responses to this crisis.

2 Introduction Discussions in this book revolve around a strand of fiction that explores such questions through a thematic use of death. Specifically, these novels depict a notion of ‘death-facing’ as both reconstructive and ecological. Correspondingly, they depict a Western history of ‘death-denial’ as the root cause of environmental crisis. Death-denial is a familiar concept, having appeared widely and variously in the work of psychoanalysts, poststructuralists, historians and other scholars across the late twentieth century. But how might we understand death-­facing? As is often the case when discussing discourses of death, a single answer will not do. Indeed, death-facing may prove to be as multifaceted as death-denial. In this book, I investigate a selection of environmental crisis novels by British and North American writers, whose characters and storylines represent ecological expediency through a thematic use of death-facing in various ways. Death-facing appears as a form of death-salience whereby, as humans, we actively recognise that we are beings whose material lives are finite like those of any living being (other than a certain kind of jellyfish). Humanity is portrayed as, potentially, ecologically enhanced by our acceptance of our own mortal state – an idea this fiction also interrogates and, to an extent, undermines. I refer to this thematic idea as death-facing ecology. 2 This introductory chapter gives an overview of death-facing ecology and its appearance in fiction. It also provides some context for its emergence, surveys some theoretical aspects and comments on its place in environmental literary criticism. Subsequent chapters offer readings of a selection of contemporary environmental crisis novels, with the aim of demonstrating the scope of death-facing ecology as a literary device in the narratives of this fiction, as well as the characteristics of its appearance in a strand of fiction.

A Brief Overview of Death-Facing Ecology Death is a potent narrative device, not least because of its conceptual complexities. As the antithesis to life, death escapes our living grasp. We can witness the deaths of others, but not our own death – at least, in any sense we can go on to talk about. 3 Philosophies of death often view death as a kind of absence – an absence that facilitates discourse (and, potentially, dogma): Where no knowledge is possible, all possibilities arise. The philosophy of Epicurus regards death as nothing to be afraid of, since one no longer exists, in death, to experience it.4 Martin Heidegger, who takes this further in seeking to define a pre-theoretical conception of death, questions the very ‘is’ of death (what ‘is’ death?). 5 Or, as Joshua Schuster puts it, ‘dying reveals itself not as “is” but as is not’.6 Yet death is also often seen as a gateway to some other realm or adventure, since, while recognising material death and the processes of decay, humanity has been less convinced that our material reality

Introduction  3 fully defines us. What if some intrinsic part of us exceeds death? What if this ‘soul’, if we so call it, goes to heaven, or to hell, or re-­materialises in a different form on earth? One need not speak long about death before one arrives at various ‘what ifs’, which in turn result in conjecture. Indeed, death’s inscrutability has given rise, throughout history, to countless ideologies and systems of belief. Underlying culture, death gives rise to cultures.7 Hence that burial sites are of such interest to anthropologists and archaeologists, who scour them for insights into cultures of the past and present. Beliefs about death shape the lives of the living, and even modern secularism’s view that death is simply the end – or, as it is often put, ‘you only live once’ – has ramifications for the ways in which we live. For all its cultural contingency, death remains a constant material prospect in our lives. It is overcome only in the temporary sense of a life prolonged. Whatever one’s views, death remains a reality that each encounters at some point. The crux of the problem, for the novels discussed in this book, is that as a history of human exceptionalism within Western thought meets the secularisation of the modern West, the idea of humanity as somehow exceeding death seems only to reappear in new guises. In throwing off religion and views of the afterlife, notions of immortality recur in a material guise: perhaps we can outdo death by pickling our brains in a jar, or by freezing our bodies until technology has the means to revive them; perhaps, through our innate ingenuity, we can learn to live forever. Novels that employ the theme of death-facing ecology often link human exceptionalism with a broader critique of ‘progress’. In philosophy, progress is the idea that humanity ‘has improved over the course of history and will continue to improve’.8 Although one might not routinely associate it with death-denial, progress evolved in the nineteenth century, in part, as a quest for freedom from such ‘constraints of the natural world’ as hunger, sickness and death; this was in contrast to the Romantics in the same period, who (broadly speaking) sought freedom ‘from the constraints of civilisation’ 9. Maurice Cranston refers to these two freedoms as progressive freedom and romantic freedom,10 also pointing to the way the term ‘freedom’ supports quite contrasting positions. The stances these two freedoms evoke retain some influence in contemporary debates, whereby some see environmental crisis as best addressed through technological advancements (Progressive), whereas for others the solution lies in closer connections with nature (Romantic). While progress has clearly achieved much for humanity, its projects have often relied on the (mis)use of natural resources. Where facets of progress also culminate in the consumer cultures of the contemporary world, based on a model of economic growth, progress can be said to play a role in the advent of environmental crisis. Accordingly, the historical denial of death, where it

4 Introduction underpins the quest for progress, backfires inadvertently in the present as human well-being is placed under threat – or potentially so. Denied death, rebounds. As death-denial gives rise to a crisis of environment, returning death to us, the constructive and indeed the reconstructive response, as depicted in these novels, appears as a reversal of death-denial: Death-facing makes its entry as an ecological mode. The acknowledgement of human mortality, placing Homo sapiens on a par with other living beings, emerges as restorative of sustainable relations with the nonhuman world. This seems to reflect a parallel death-facing impulse in the contemporary world where death, seen as having been in some sense denied, now returns to daily consciousness. The ‘death cafes’, for example, springing up around the United Kingdom and the ‘death-positive movement’ of America aim to encourage more openness about death. The fiction I discuss both inherits and helps shape this changing relationship with death as it depicts a contemporary shift from death-denial to death-facing. The shift this fiction depicts also discloses links with contemporary theory, particularly those theories that counter or reach beyond poststructuralism. This may be conscious on the part of its authors or may reflect the influence of these theories on contemporary thought. Either way, these theories are helpful (as is poststructuralism) for unravelling the difficulties posed by the philosophies of dualism.11 A major influence on the history of Western thought, dualism is often seen as partially culpable for the ‘environmentally unfriendly’ practices of the modern West.12 Progress is dualistic if it views humans as fundamentally distinct from nonhumans or as exempt from natural processes of decay. The human/nature dualism also plays out in a technology/nature binary. ­A lthough dualism has lingered long in Western thought, much subsequent theory either complicates or debunks it. As such, these theories play a role in this fiction’s explorations of the question of humanity’s response to the environmental crisis. This narrative exploration of contemporary thought allows this fiction to speak on the contemporary challenge of a crisis of the environment while exploring its conundrums. Is progress the source of the problem, or is it the solution? Does the issue lie elsewhere altogether? Is the drive to overcome death, as seen in the machinations of progress, a departure from our naturalness, or is such railing against death natural in itself? Similarly, when death’s finality is rendered impotent, such as in the belief that our spirit, invincible, in some sense lives on, is this a break from the natural or is it instinct intellectualised? Such questions interplay with this fiction’s integration of death-facing ecology as a thematic device. Their significance lies in this fiction’s interrogation of the human subject and the possibilities for our response: To forestall the crisis, must we become less like ourselves, or more like ourselves? This question underlies my analysis of the fiction discussed in the course of this book.

Introduction  5

Environmental Crisis in Contemporary Fiction Having pursued the quest for progress, constructing a modern world that alleviates the hardships of earlier centuries (at least for some), this now appears to have incurred costs to the planet that may be ­untenable – not just on ethical or aesthetic grounds, but because its capacity to sustain humanity is compromised. This situation has become so pressing that, at the time of writing, school children internationally have begun abandoning their classrooms to protest on the street. Yet the call for urgent action remains clouded by other issues of the day. Set against a backdrop of rising right-wing populism, accelerating nationalisms and the emergence of a post-truth politics, the UK media is dominated by the dilemmas of Brexit, with environmental standards likely to be placed at risk if Britain leaves the European Union as planned. While 2016 saw unprecedented steps in the ratifying of the Paris Agreement, binding nations together in a global commitment to holding back temperature rise to within 2% Celsius of pre-industrial levels,13 the Agreement remains vulnerable to deficiencies, such as participants falling short of targets, and to challenges, such as the US declaration in 2017 to withdraw from the deal. Linked to this is a longstanding divergence in thought over the ­seriousness of environmental issues and the degree of action required. With roots stretching back into the nineteenth century, environmentalism has evolved as a broad movement with a plethora of standpoints from dark to light green and from deep to shallow. Arguing that contemporary environmentalism is diluted by the tendency to assume that environmental issues can be managed ‘without fundamental changes to present values or patterns of production and consumption’, Andrew Dobson employs the standpoint of ecologism, which, he says, demands radical change both in ‘our relationship with the nonhuman world’ and in ‘our mode of social and political life’ if we are to achieve something of a ‘sustainable and fulfilling existence’.14 This upholds a deep ecological ethos while emphasising its more practical political and social dimensions. Thus, Dobson can argue for radical change from a standpoint he describes as ‘hard-headed’ rather than ‘Romantic’.15 This is potentially more palatable to the socio-political mainstream than earlier forms of radical environmentalism, which, appearing across the late twentieth century, were rejected by the mainstream for decades. Those early pioneers, who to an extent may have inherited Romantic traits from nineteenth-­century environmentalists, were largely dismissed as tree-hugging back-to-the-landers.16 Yet they also laid the foundation for the eventual recognition of environmental issues, as well as helping shape debates and creating a foothold for radical action. At the other end from Dobson, shallow and light green environmentalists promote a business-as-usual approach, upholding the status quo and protecting

6 Introduction the interests of large corporations. While recent years have seen an upsurge in green consumerism, signalling an increase in popular concern for the natural world, today’s mainstream approach remains primarily light green. It is perhaps the sense of a rift between these two ­standpoints – that a radical rethink is needed, on the one hand, and that present systems can be adapted for the job, on the other – that prompts increasing number of writers to contribute to today’s expanding range of fictional explorations of the environmental crisis. So, how do I define ‘crisis’ in ‘environmental crisis’, and why do I refer to environmental crisis fiction and not climate change fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, as the burgeoning body of environmental fiction is increasingly described? Climate change these days is legitimate news, having been ignored or contested for years. ‘Climate’ identifies environmental elements whose instabilities appear to impact most directly upon us, such as changing weather patterns and rising temperatures and sea levels. Conversely, issues such as biodiversity loss and land degradation continue to lack potency in terms of driving change, although concern for them is growing. The political mainstream emphasis on climate change appears to have bearing on the reception of environmental fiction as it enters the literary landscape, leading to the use of the term ‘cli-fi’.17 Yet, while the number of novelists writing about climate change is increasing, climate change is often just one aspect of the crisis about which they write. Moreover, as Rebecca Evans argues, cli-fi is not so much ‘a coherent genre’ as a ‘literary preoccupation with climate futures that draws from a wide range of popular genres’.18 It is therefore worth paying close attention to the strands of environmental fiction emerging today. While some novels, such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), take climate change as a key concern and therefore can be aptly described as climate change fiction, others, such as the three books of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), tackle a broader set of environmental concerns, which may include climate change yet not revolve around it. Indeed, Margaret Atwood has herself remarked: ‘I  think calling it climate change is rather limiting’.19 Many of these novels, I propose, are more helpfully considered as addressing the notion of ‘crisis’ itself. I refer to these novels, for the purposes of this book, as environmental crisis fiction. Even so, a focus on climate change has added fruitfully to the development of ecocriticism. Whereas early ecocritics tended to treat nature as a pristine category, assuming – problematically – a separation between humanity and the natural world, scholars have more recently been moving the field beyond the binary traps inherent to its subject matter. Feminist studies, queer studies, poststructuralism, new materialism, speculative realism and other modes of thought have contributed to deepening and extending the treatment of environmental literature in the humanities. The re-inscription of ‘nature’ as a discursive category

Introduction  7 gives rise to the consideration that humanity and all its baggage is natural too, annulling nature’s meanings and shifting the terms of the debates. We have become accustomed to the scare quotes that ‘nature’ often now carries, even as the field remains divided over its value as a term. Rejecting the term ‘nature’, do we risk failing to define that which needs our protection? Or, defining it, do we risk eliciting well-meaning responses that lack critical self-examination? Such are the politics of ecocriticism. Having more poetic immediacy, ‘climate change’ is perhaps less easily severed from the experiential subject. It is depicted in fiction in terms of its power to impact upon human life, concerning us directly, whereas ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ can appear to be ‘over there’ – in the collapse of bee colonies, the destruction of forests and the loss of habitat for bonobo monkeys. The tendency to objectify ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ brings them, as concepts, into a semantic entanglement, which the term ‘climate change’ more easily escapes. While singling out climate change as an issue for humanity might be deemed anthropocentric, one might argue that humans are more likely to respond to that which seems to affect us most. Indeed, the political emphasis on climate change has culminated, to date, in the Paris Agreement, a landmark achievement. The literary critical emphasis on climate change facilitates a broader analysis, less easily fettered by the Romantic notions that ‘nature’ has tended to attract. Moving away from the politics of protectionism allows a more considered focus on literary praxis – a key development in environmental criticism. This is not to reduce attention to the environmental messages conveyed in climate change fiction, but rather, to place emphasis on interrogating the text in ways that allow it to speak for itself on such matters. The advantages of focusing on climate change notwithstanding, reducing the environmental crisis to a single issue (climate change), whether in mainstream politics or in the bundling together of environmental fiction under one category, poses certain risks. In politics, failing to grasp the intricate complexities and disparate scales of the crisis risks not addressing the crisis in full, potentially at cost to humanity, not to mention other of the Earth’s inhabitants. Reports released in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) describe land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change as ‘three different faces of the same central challenge’; while Chairman of IPBES, Robert Watson, is reported as stating: ‘We cannot afford to tackle any one of these three threats in isolation – they each deserve the highest policy priority and must be addressed together’. 20 This raises for literary criticism the importance of taking care to consider fiction in ways that appropriately represent its subject matter to the reader. Certainly, in politics as in fiction, ‘climate change’ signifies not just the changing climate but also its effects – global warming, melting

8 Introduction ice caps, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns – as well as the impacts of these on humans and nonhumans; it also evokes consideration of anthropogenic causes, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, and has implications for biodiversity. Nonetheless, a semantic difficulty arises in its use as a catch-all term, giving prominence to one issue among many. Indeed, biodiversity loss, to take one example, has a variety of human-­ driven causes, ranging from intensive farming to acts of mindless destruction. Similarly, summarising the IPBES report, the UNESCO website states that ‘Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change’.21 The falling bee population is case in point. As plant pollinators, their loss due to chemical use affects many species, not least ourselves. Robin McKie, reporting in The Guardian, states that ‘Seventy of the 100 crop species that provide 90% of food worldwide are pollinated by bees’.22 Since environmental fiction often represents a range of environmental issues, it seems problematic to bundle it together as climate change fiction. One task, therefore, for literary criticism is to explore ways to help further define and offer insight into this emergent body of contemporary environmental fiction. This is one underpinning aim of discussions in this book.

High Theory and Ecocriticism Another issue of note for discussions in this book is the link between death-denial – to which death-facing ecology is a response – and the legacies of high theory. The death-denial of the modern West of course has connotations across much poststructuralist thought, as seen for example in the works of Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as in other critical arenas. This legacy is perhaps not lost on the authors of fiction discussed in this book, many of whom are established and mature literary writers. They write in a ‘post-theory’ era using the human tool of writing to explore that which lies beyond both human and text. Death-denial is seen most strikingly in Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘hyperreal’. This reference to the media-based reality of a culture that has lost its material footing is rooted in what he refers to as a Western ‘de-­ socialisation’ of death, a relationship that he contrasts with non-Western examples. 23 We might consider this aspect of his work as anthropological, since in talking about death he is not talking about death directly so much as cultural shapes and forms. He writes: Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life as value, and time as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our

Introduction  9 phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation. 24 Foucault’s work structures death-denial in a broadly similar way. In his biopolitical genealogy of the modern West, he presents the idea of the emergence of ‘life’ into history, which he explains in terms of a historical (and Western) reformulation of power. This new power is sustained, not by the threat of death upon others, but, by upholding life and only indirectly allowing to die. Stuart Murray describes this ‘important shift from classical biopower to modern biopolitics’ as follows: Classical biopower is summed up as the sovereign decision ‘to take life or let live’, whereas modern biopolitics is conceived as ‘the power to “make” live and “let” die’. The decision to kill or let live is replaced with a productive biopolitics that is twofold, that ‘makes live’ and ‘lets die.’ … deaths are never ‘caused’ as such; officially, they are merely ‘allowed’, a passive event, collateral damage. 25 This shift from ‘letting live’ to ‘making live’ also alters the way death is regarded, since ‘valorising’ life places death on a plane of avoidance, or as Foucault describes it, we see ‘the famous gradual disqualification of death’. 26 Foucault refers to the resultant ‘letting die’ as a ‘thanatopolitics’. 27 This ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ offers one means to consider the contemporary environmental crisis. As Murray explains, the idea that in order ‘that “we” may live, live well and live fully, “they” must die’ distinguishes between ‘the virtuous citizen’ and ‘the other excluded as bare life, disposable life’. 28 This depicts a biopolitics of the powerful in relation to the disenfranchised and illustrates, for example, the way death-denial might be said to give rise to such matters as the global increase in ghetto living Slavoj Žižek describes as a consequence of globalising capitalism. 29 If we extend our notion of the death of other to include that of the nonhuman, we arrive at an identification of environmental crisis as thanatopolitical. It is here, on a Foucauldian approach, that a connection appears between the emergence of environmental crisis and humanity’s refusal to face death, whereby our living relies upon an exclusion of the nonhuman as ‘disposable life’. Accordingly, on this view, the recognition of one’s collective mortal state (death-facing) potentially retracts monopolies over life’s primacy by one group (say, the affluent capitalist West), releasing other groups (say, the nonhuman) from the effects of this monopoly. Death-denial is not only, of course, a feature of poststructuralist thought. As a phenomenon of mid to late twentieth-century thought, it appears in various arenas. It is perhaps most often thought of in connection

10 Introduction with psychoanalysis30 and appears in the work of historians – both of which influenced the works of poststructuralist thinkers. Writing in the late twentieth century, death-historian Philippe Ariès describes conceptions of death as changing over time. He identifies a series of shifts, from death as a household event in the mediaeval era to death that is omnipresent in the nineteenth century, and then death that emerges as shocking and unnameable in the twentieth century. Ariès writes: The old attitude in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe, offers too marked a contrast to ours, where death is so frightful that we dare not utter its name. This is why I have called this household sort of death ‘tamed death’. I do not mean that death that had once been wild and that it had ceased to be so. I mean, on the contrary, that today it has become wild.31 This perhaps unexpected distinction between mediaeval death as tamed and twentieth-century death as wild seems to reflect the coterminous idea that humankind has become separated from nature. Hence, Ariès’ notion of a ‘wild’ death becomes another symptom of our alienation from nature, an idea that also feeds into a contemporary, antimodernist rejection of progress. More recent scholarship also considers the phenomenon of death-denial, turning to its literary as well as its cultural expressions. Alan Warren Friedman also traces a historical path to arrive at a late-twentieth-century denial of death. Writing more recently than Ariès, he goes on to show how death has since regained cultural and literary currency through postmodern fiction and AIDS narratives.32 This links the appearance of death-facing ecology in contemporary fiction to a broader shift in the contemporary world, one that reclaims death in cultural and literary form. One aim of this book is to identify death-facing ecology as both countering and yet in some ways extending poststructuralist thought, marking high theory’s demise while retaining some of its insights. Ecocritics have tended to see poststructuralism as unsuitable for the study of ‘environment’ in literature. This dismissal corresponds broadly with the post-theory era of literary scholarship. A major concern has to do with the way text creates a perceived circularity of thought, and thus its enclosure. The ‘real’, in this case the physical world and our operating within it, is always disjunctive, so that all explanations, accordingly, are constructs. Representations of ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’ in literary form are thereby somehow undermined. This raises the difficulty that, if no real world can be defined, if it is always a construct, then how can one argue for its defence? A brief anecdote about Foucault provides a convenient means to consider this problem of a circularity of thought and its subsequent enclosure. Foucault was not interested in nature, as is demonstrated in a story told

Introduction  11 by a colleague of his, Jacqueline Verdeaux, who accompanied him on a car trip through the Italian Alps. She recalled that ‘whenever she showed him some magnificent landscape – a lake sparkling in the sunlight – he made a great show of walking off toward the road, saying “my back is turned to it”’.33 Foucault appears to resist gazing upon nature where such gazing upon effectively constructs ‘nature’ as an idea. Glen Love views ‘[t]eaching and studying literature without reference to the natural conditions of the world and the basic ecological principles that underlie all life’ as ‘increasingly short-sighted, incongruous’.34 Love’s response to this is to recommend ‘eco-consciousness’ over ‘ego-consciousness’, whereby writing and critique begin from an acknowledgement of the nonhuman, permitting the presence of ‘the natural’ in literary form.35 Yet, in Dana Phillips’ view, the ‘nature-as-culturally-constructed’ claim does not necessarily amount to the solipsism so often attributed to it.36 As Phillips observes, Many theorists would take the position that ‘the ego’ is effectively dead as an object of critical interest because of the manifold ways in which ‘the subject’ … is defined, but also delimited and undercut, by the forces of history and by cultural assumptions.37 Hence, ‘ego-consciousness’ – or the solipsistic ruling out of the existence of the world beyond our reckoning of it – ‘would seem’, says Phillips, ‘to be the least of the dangers posed by contemporary criticism and theory’.38 Viewed this way, Foucault’s act of turning his back on the vistas of nature is no solipsist denial of the natural world. Rather, he might be seen to deny the conceptual baggage that shapes ‘nature’ as an idea. Various other scholars have similarly rejected Romantic notions of ‘nature’, and its conceptual difficulties are broadly accepted. While poststructuralism decentres the subject based on its historical contingency, posthumanism decentres it based on its ego, exceptionalism and hubris. This levelling of the human subject to an equivalence with all life is a key feature of much new materialist thought. Such decentring sits uncomfortably alongside a call for the subject to act in response to the environmental crisis, since such action may require capacities that this subject’s decentring has (with good reason) undermined. A contrasting view suggests that humans ought in any case now refrain from further acting (and even from further existing), since human action is what led to the crisis in the first place. At the far extreme of this is the Gaia Liberation Front, a (tongue in cheek) population awareness group/suicide cult, whose slogan is ‘save the planet, kill yourself’. Somewhat ironically, given the topic of discussion, the group met its own demise since ‘it didn’t catch on’.39 Nonetheless, within the context of this existential human dilemma, the image of Foucault’s turned back seems to provide an additional anecdotal moment whereby the human subject must now

12 Introduction turn to confront its relationship with its planetary home. This turning and confronting is, in effect, the shift towards an ecology of death-facing as discussed in this book. The denial by the ‘regarding figure’ of the (real) landscape of its emergence is also evocative of, although it differs to, the poststructuralist extraction of ‘the text’ from its embeddedness in supposed metaphysical realms of truth, notably seen in Derrida’s famous claim: ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’.40 This claim, that ‘there is no outside-text’, is similarly problematic for ecocritics (especially if translated as ‘there is nothing outside the text’), since it seems to deny the existence of any external referent, returning us to the problem of solipsism. Foucault’s anecdotal refusal now reappears as a refusal that ecocritics sometimes counter quite literally by taking students out on rambles into the countryside. The self-reflexivity of high theory, as encapsulated in Derrida’s statement, does clearly date poststructuralism as an exemplar of the linguistic turn that infiltrated philosophy and the humanities across the late twentieth century. Nonetheless, a concern with language and the text also recurs at a time of environmental crisis, as is apparent in the fiction considered in this book. The tendency to see Derrida’s claim as solipsistic is discussed by Joseph G. Kronick, who reminds us of Rodolphe Gasché’s point that, rather than ‘denying altogether’ the external referent, the phrase il n’y a pas de hors-texte ‘points to the structural impossibility of the text fulfilling itself either in some extra-textual referent or in some internal identity with which it could coincide’.41 Cary Wolfe, whose posthumanism is discussed in Chapter 4, takes this further by suggesting that Derrida’s deconstruction also gestures towards the reconstructive.42 This points to an impulse that seeks to free itself from asphyxiation by high theory, yet which extends its innovations into the contemporary scene. Hence, in contrast to some eco-mimemic practices today, the idea that text does not directly represent reality is sustained, but neither is reality denied. While the two planes of Derridean and Foucauldian are generally seen as distinct, since the novels I discuss reflect both cultural and linguistic abstractions of death-denial, the ways these two planes coincide is worth further remark. In effect, they form different categories of resistance to the same sorts of metaphysical assumptions, as found in Western thought, that go back as far as Plato and others. Where Plato saw ‘truth’ as lying in a world of forms (the location of which is assumedly unworldly), subsequent traditions of Western thought have located truth somewhere – on an inside – effectively stabilising the very notions of meaning or truth.43 Where Foucault resists this by displacing the human subject from its reliance on truth, relocating it in history as a product of the workings of power and politics, Derrida unfastens writing from its reliance on assumptions of an interior truth, redistributing meaning – along with its complexities – into the interplay of signs. Hence, although the two conceptual planes are distinct as strands of poststructuralist

Introduction  13 thought, they nonetheless possess a degree of commonality reflective of the broader concerns of Continental thought. It is in relation to these two broader categories that the starting points for the contemporary material turn emerge. Indeed, a number of scholars continue to explore poststructuralism’s possibilities at a time of environmental crisis.44 Verena Andermatt Conley goes so far as to suggest that poststructuralism was inherently ecological at its outset, but that this was lost in the course of its development; thus, by working back through theory’s canon, she argues, it may be we who discover poststructuralism’s ecological potential.45 The identification of a death-facing ecology acknowledges such a line of thought since it finds a correspondence with theory’s shift from linguistic to material concerns. It is due to this correspondence, I will argue, that environmental crisis fiction is able to convey a sense of impasse regarding the question of how humanity might respond to the crisis it faces.

Death-Facing Ecology While death-denial forms a backdrop to discussions, the key topic of interest in this book is death-facing as it appears in environmental crisis fiction. The turn towards facing death enacts a response to environmental crisis, countering historical alienations from death and nature and related theoretical difficulties. If by valorising human life we have let die the nonhuman other (or some of its parts),46 then – according to the logic of death-facing ecology – a turn to death-facing reverses the conditions that wrought environmental crisis. Eco-philosopher Val Plumwood, commenting on the human exceptionalism that shapes Western practices of self and death, proposes reconsidering death ‘as a nurturing, material continuity/reunion with ecological others’.47 Her proposal echoes the death-facing impulse that infuses the narratives of environmental crisis fiction, since it views death not as merely an end to be forestalled at all cost but as an event that contributes ecologically to life and living. This locates death-facing as an ethical impulse on ecological grounds. Yet it might also be seen as a form of self-protection, because the advent of the crisis signals the rebound upon us of the death that we have refused. As Claire Colebrook puts it, in a dialogue exploring the Anthropocene as a doomsday device, ‘the very act of our “intentionality” or “mastery,” in developing the technē of life enhancement, has “the tragic quality of coming back to destroy us”’.48 Now that the world’s capacity to sustain us appears threatened, we begin to recognise the value of self-limit. The turn to death-facing in this sense appears less a project of ethics than one of survival. It is by acknowledging death’s role that the survival of our species now appears possible. Here, again, we see the link between a contemporary impulse towards death-facing and a posthumanist decentring of the human subject, giving rise to the idea of the

14 Introduction world as existing with but also without us – an idea Greg Garrard describes as a form of ‘disanthropy’.49 Even so, since one can only adopt a stance or belief – one can only face anything – in life, then death-­facing, perhaps paradoxically, remains a stance of the living. While the view that one might live better or more comfortably by first coming to terms with death has a varied history going back to the times of the ancients, the advent of environmental crisis produces the prospect of actual death. Causes made through human action create effects in terms of planetary well-being, which manifest physically in the contemporary world. It becomes apparent – as vast swathes of rainforests and other biospheric regions are destroyed, and as so many species go extinct – that repercussions for planetary conditions also put human survival at risk. Facing death in actuality is of course a different matter to that of philosophically accepting one’s own mortal state. At a time of environmental crisis, the prospect of material death appears to be what prompts the call to accept one’s own mortality as a means to reverse the outcomes of a history of death-denial; such is the idea that environmental crisis fiction conveys. A cultural emphasis on coming to terms with death also variously appears as a cultural progression in the contemporary world, perhaps for many reasons, and perhaps regardless of the environmental crisis, but nonetheless it unfolds in concert with the advent of this crisis and as a feature of its fiction. The material facet of death-facing ecology has various connotations with the notion of limit. Humans are, of course, limited by death as a material end. The neo-Malthusian conception of limit also has a corporeal dimension, since it is concerned mainly with curbing population growth to ensure that agricultural capacity is not exceeded. Another kind of limit is that assumed in Dobson’s ecologism, which proposes that runaway lifestyle habits, fuelled by neoliberalist notions of human rights and freedoms, or more particularly, the political structures that support and rely upon them, must be curbed. 50 Death-facing ecology, in these instances, refers to adopting a stance within life that might limit the abuse of natural resources, enabling the nonhuman to flourish. The idea of limit might also be used to define the human subject as fallible and as exceeded by the material or external world. This returns us to the commonalities between death-facing ecology and contemporary forms of theorising such as posthumanism, new materialism and speculative realism. Where death-facing ecology is a response to the (real) advent of environmental crisis and its manifestations, these include more than just its damages. There is also the irreversibility of these, such as that of lost species and lost ecosystems, even if recovery in new forms might be facilitated51; the impossibility of turning back the clock, since the present cannot entirely be undone; and the way these events, as signifiers for our possible demise, give rise to unprecedented effects.

Introduction  15 Timothy Morton describes these effects with his notion of hyperobjects, by which he means things ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ such as the biosphere, the solar system, global capitalism and products like Styrofoam that endure far into the future. 52 Existing on vast scales, the full material realities of hyperobjects exceed our perception. Claire Colebrook describes the Anthropocene era as ‘a threshold at which all “our” concepts of horizon, milieu, ethos and polity are voided’; this indicates, she suggests, that ‘our dwelling is no longer inhabitation’; nor do we ‘partake in an organic interdependence or ecology’. 53 Facing death at this time might be understood as a means to regain a sense of wholeness now found in giving rather than taking, in letting go rather than holding on, even if based on a need to piece together the possibility of a future. Catriona Sandilands offers some thoughtful points and some warnings in relation to a contemporary mourning of the loss of nature and the ways we might respond. Concerned about the capitalist impulse to commodify this loss as spectacle and move on, Sandilands uses the term melancholia to suggest how we might experience the ‘world of wounds’ as an ‘ethical stance that resists, rather than fostering, fetish’, therefore allowing ourselves to be personally changed by loss. Thus, she says, ‘melancholia is a form of preservation of life – a life, unlike the one offered for sale in ecotourist spectacle, that is already gone, but whose ghost propels a changed understanding of the present’. 54 This aptly describes death-facing as a grounded engagement with the loss of nature, one that recognises the implications of this loss for all life on Earth, humans included, and one that takes action to address this loss. To brush off this loss and move on is to overlook the space in which change might be engendered, risking a failure to act on one’s own part and a failure to hold to account those in positions of responsibility. In part for this reason, contemporary forms of theorising such as new materialism and speculative realism play an important role in readings in this book. As discussed below, for all its value – ecological and more – the move towards facing death also raises some difficulties. These have to do with a history of Western thought and the question of text (narrative, story, discourse) – a question central to poststructuralist thought and one inevitably of interest to the writers of environmental crisis fiction. As I intend to demonstrate, entirely shaking off the innovations of poststructuralism is not a central achievement of environmental crisis fiction – nor may this be its intent. Death-facing as an idea does clearly reach towards the outside of thought, where it not only identifies an ‘­environment’ in crisis but also retains the human in this process. New materialist and speculative thought is invaluable for thinking through the question of the world beyond the human subject, while also accounting for the human and its (our) predilections for story.

16 Introduction

Unsettling Narratives of Death-Facing The contemporary shift towards death-facing not only plays a key role in ecological thinking but also evokes a set of established difficulties. While it reflects a desire for a return to wholeness, it also encounters discourse. As discussions in the course of this book will demonstrate, these difficulties have a value in themselves as far as the challenges of environmental crisis are concerned. Life generates difference; therefore, any single narrative – to include the narrative of any single book, or the narrative of any ecological agenda – is one story among many. The idea of wholeness expands, in the contemporary, to include the world and its parts. It is therefore necessary, if the idea of death-facing is to sustain, to address its complexities. As a shift towards death-facing is depicted, a difficulty arises at this point. What exactly does it mean to face death, given that death itself is inconceivable to the living mind? This question effectively harkens back to high theory and the problem of solipsism, and the concern some ecocritics and others have where the real world becomes impossible to ascertain, and therefore to defend, since everything – it seems – amounts to discourse. At the point of turning to face death (exactly at such a point), discourse arises, since any explanation for death is always a story. One can never express what death is from the perspective of death itself, since in being alive, one has not yet experienced (and, unless Descartes was right that humans are immortal souls, assumedly cannot ‘experience’) death. When poststructuralists refer to death-denial, they do not really deny death, except to say that one cannot readily face it in any sense that can be ultimately explained. Thus, while philosophers have long said that death cannot be represented, it seems that, for poststructuralists, death can only be represented – in stories, in belief systems and in discourses about death’s possibilities. As environmental crisis fiction attempts to identify a response to the environmental crisis, it presents the death-salient human subject as ecological subject. This replaces the human subject of dominant Western, patriarchal and anthropocentric derivation. Thus, we are not here to conquer the natural world, but to find our place within it, to be a part of it, so that in its flourishing we as a species also flourish. Through this ecology of death-facing, this fiction attempts, it seems, to lure the reader out of our discursive lodgings in the hyperreal of Baudrillardian thought, into the landscape of the real world, where we discover forests to be laid bare, the climate to be disrupted and natural beings to be harnessed in servitude of the needs of humans, if not obliterated altogether. The reader is invited to recognise such devastation by recognising our own mortal limits: If we (humans) can be hurt or destroyed, so too can birds, cattle, trees, polar bears, flowers, nettles, oceans, insects, biospheric systems, habitats and so on. These should matter to

Introduction  17 us, because that which separates them and us turns out to be little more than perspective. Moreover, they should matter to us, because if they are harmed, then so are we. Observant readers may have noticed a certain slippage in the above paragraph. It occurs around the point at which the reader is invited to depart from our lodgings in the hyperreal and enter the landscape of the real world. While we may wish to do so, this would in fact involve putting on a pair of boots and putting down our book. Indeed, such a practice has entered literary studies through the activities of those scholars in the environmental humanities. As someone whose childhood was largely spent roaming the landscape, I profess some approval of this practice; it may help to encourage an ecological mind-set – although by no means necessarily; but does it help the literary critic? Perhaps so, but this is less clear. Can one only appreciate the real by going there? Surely books are also real. Indeed, ‘here’ is as real as ‘there’; moreover, books are not just real but ‘natural’ too. Beavers create dams, birds create nests and humans create all sorts of paraphernalia. Where exactly does the distinction lie, were we to insist on one? To consider the same problem from a different angle, if putting down our book removes us from ‘story’, what of the stories we may verbally share about the state of the landscape and our reasons for going there? That humans have mastered the art of construction to the -enth degree does not make us special or different, it just makes us constructors – of things, of ideas and of stories. But all this does help literary criticism after all, since it tells us something about the book we cannot put down – if we want to read its pages. While environmental crisis fiction engages death-facing ecology as a means to undermine that which brings us to the present moment (countering death-denial), depicting a contemporary impulse to reinstate nonhuman flourishing, this fiction at the same time embodies much of that which brings us to the present moment. Like all fiction it participates in market economies, is printed on the substance of trees (or relies on the high-carbon platform of digital media) and employs the human phenomenon of text. This has implications for novels that deal with environmental concerns, since it renders them on some level complicit in the losses they may seek to reinstate. Such a remark may seem contentious, and, indeed, on the face of things, books are hardly the great evil. Nonetheless, fiction (and its archives) is one means by which our social worlds evolve and self-­ define. Thus, literature is intra-active with the death-thinking (and every other kind of thinking) of modernity and postmodernity and continues to shape and define how we conceive our world, each other and our challenges as a species. It therefore contributes to shaping our conceptions of the environmental crisis, which may suggest why environmental crisis fiction is deemed problematic by those who see it as doom-mongering.

18 Introduction As a thematic device, death-facing ecology provides an alternate means by which to read this fiction, undermining any didacticism that we must change our ways or die. It repositions the reader, extracting us from the impulses of death-denial, and prompting the consideration of our mortal lives as just one facet of a complex material world. This executes a posthuman decentring of the human subject. Yet, since one can only face death in life, the ecological possibilities of death-facing remain discursive and therefore contingent. The value of this is the questions it evokes. How might we best respond to this crisis? How might this response be realised? How might we mitigate against further damages? What might a sustainable future look like? These questions require material, real-world responses. Yet although, as a species, we have begun more recently to recognise this need, our sense of what this means is often philosophically, socially and politically conflicted. By reading this strand of fiction in relation to its thematic use of death-facing ecology, we enter the realm of conflicting ideas, and even of paradox, bringing the opportunity to think them through. This aspect of death-facing is usefully considered using Jacques Derrida’s discussions on death as aporia. In his short book, Aporias, 55 Derrida tackles the problem that arises when attempting to address death as such. Recognising that there are many ways of explaining death, he describes these as ‘trespass’, by which he means overstepping a border that is not really there. Whatever we say death is, it will always remain a statement, something we said, since we cannot know death. Derrida goes so far as to challenge Heidegger’s attempt to outline a pre-­ theoretical conception of death, since, as he states, our minds are always contaminated by our thoughts, our histories and our understandings of life. One cannot ‘get behind’ life to discover an essence of death. Derrida’s discussions on death as aporia, and its implications for fiction, are considered mainly in Chapter 3 but apply throughout all analyses in a recognition of the way death emits discourse. As humanity encounters a crisis of environment brought about by our own activities, it is perhaps inevitable that conflicting responses will emerge. The crisis can be denied or acknowledged, as can our part in it as a species. In differing degrees, it may lead us to question who we are, and the ways in which we go about living upon this incredible and beautiful planet. Given so many possibilities, a key value of death-facing ecology, as a literary device, is that it signals a site of underlying paradox, allowing this fiction’s nuances to be drawn out and explored. *** These various aspects of the theme of death-facing ecology are illustrated and discussed, in chapters to follow, through the analysis of a selection of contemporary novels.

Introduction  19 Chapter 1 illustrates the way death-facing ecology signals a crisis of environment that is also a crisis in thought. I explore this in readings of the three books of the MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), by the Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood. Almost two decades ago, environmental philosopher Val Plumwood linked the environmental crisis with flawed and, specifically, dualistic thinking on the part of Western thought. She referred to this as the ‘ecological crisis of reason’.56 My discussions on the MaddAddam trilogy trace Atwood’s depictions of flawed thinking as leading to the crisis, and of this thinking as undermined by this crisis, leading to a crisis in thought. Atwood’s trilogy homes in on the human ‘imagination’ as a site of crisis and as a site of both possibility and warning. This chapter incorporates ideas from Judith Butler and Timothy Morton to make sense of the trilogy’s explorations of the human subject. In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler describes our willingness to become undone in relation to others as constituting our ‘chance of becoming human’.57 Expanding on thoughts of these ‘others’, I add Morton’s definition of the ‘ecological thought’, whereby he describes how we have come to be interpellated by the nonhuman world.58 Atwood’s trilogy culminates in a depiction of a posthuman figure that is both death-facing and ecological, but which she unsettles with a question about writing. In Chapter 2, I illustrate the pivotal shift from death-denial to death-facing in a reading of The Stone Gods (2007) by British writer Jeanette Winterson. Winterson’s narrative similarly depicts the posthuman as an ecological and death-facing figure. It contrasts this with a death-denying transhumanism. I explore the way the narrative slips – in this novel – in and out of differing definitions of the human subject. While it seems to recommend a death-facing posthumanism as holding the possibility for ecological viability, it also interweaves humanist ideas at times. The novel appears to test out what of being human we should keep and what we should abandon in forging a new sense ourselves. Yet it also depicts humanity as repeatedly failing to enact such changes, instead endlessly repeating our mistakes. I relate the ideas in The Stone Gods to discussions on posthumanism by Karen Barad and Cary Wolfe. From Barad’s work, I apply a performative posthumanism to one of the key protagonists, Spike, and from Wolfe’s I bring in his sense of a radical passivity, in the posthuman, which helps consider a hesitation in the narrative over the ways in which posthumanism is performed. Chapter 3 delves into the difficulties that inhere in the idea of death-facing. While signalling an ecological impulse, death-facing also generates a sense of impasse and even paradox, since to face death is to face the unimaginable. In this chapter, I analyse two novels by American authors. A brief reading of Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against Tomorrow (2013) explores its depictions of death-facing as paradoxical. This is then followed with a more extensive reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The

20 Introduction Road (2006). McCarthy takes the reader as far into death-facing as it seems possible, in fiction, to do, effectively tipping the reader into death’s aporia. I apply Derrida’s discussions on ‘death as aporia’ in reading both these novels to illustrate the way death-facing encounters paradox. This creates the opportunity to consider what this means for environmental crisis fiction, as well as for humans who may be living and dying at a time of environmental crisis. Chapter 4 builds on previous chapters to illustrate the value of death-facing ecology as both a discursive and a material device (since death is both discursive and material). In this chapter, I analyse The Hungry Tide (2004) by Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh is an American writer; however, he was born in Calcutta and retains strong ties with India. His fiction is markedly postcolonial. The Hungry Tide provides a valuable opportunity to explore the importance of recognising that death is always both discursive and material. In this chapter I bring in some thoughts from the emergent field of speculative realism. The work of Quentin Meillassoux demonstrates the possibility of acknowledging the outside of thought, while that of Martin Hägglund points to the importance of recognising death as being an aspect of all lives, not only at the point of their deaths. This shifts attention to the real matter of everyday life and living for all. In my conclusion, I offer a summary and reflections on what all this may say about literature that explores the contemporary environmental crisis and the theme of death-facing ecology; I then look at how it helps shape our thoughts about who or what we are today, and the ways we might respond to the challenges of the environmental crisis.

Notes 1 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. 2 I have previously given an overview and discussion of this theme. See L ­ ouise Squire, ‘“I Am Not Afraid to Die”: Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction and the Post-Theory Era’, in Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, edited by P ­ eter Barry and William Welstead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 14–29. 3 Derrida identifies this distinction between witnessing death and death as such, which – with Heidegger – he describes as ‘the possibility of an impossibility’. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 4 David Konstan explains: Death, Epicurus insists, is nothing to us, since while we exist, our death is not, and when our death occurs, we do not exist (LM 124–25); but if one is frightened by the empty name of death, the fear will persist since we must all eventually die. This fear is one source of perturbation (tarakhê), and is a worse curse than physical pain itself; the absence of such

Introduction  21 fear is ataraxy, lack of perturbation, and ataraxy, together with freedom from physical pain, is one way of specifying the goal of life, for Epicurus. David Konstan, ‘Epicurus’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 10 January 2005; substantive revision published 16 April 2018, n.p. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ epicurus/ (last accessed 27 August 2019). 5 He states: ‘death is in every case mine, in so far as it “is” at all’; Martin Heidegger, ‘Selections of Being and Time,’ in Existentialism: Basic Writings, edited by Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1995). 6 Joshua Schuster, ‘Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida’, Other Voices: The E-Journal of Cultural Criticism, 1, no. 1 (1997): np. 7 Derrida, Aporias, 43. 8 Margaret Meek Lange, ‘Progress’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011); available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/progress/ (last ­accessed 27 August 2019). 9 In establishing this, Cranston refers to Lord Acton and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, respectively, indicating a partial representation of their views. Maurice Cranston, Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 6. 10 Ibid. Cranston’s aim is to note the way ‘freedom’, as a concept, has contingent meanings. Cranston’s romantic and progressive freedoms helpfully encapsulate a sense of the differing emphases in nineteenth-century thought, as well as the way certain uses of signs (such as ‘freedom’) may give rise paradox. I assume no specific historical claims. 11 The idea that humans and nature are distinct is dualist in character. Dualism has a long history, but in contemporary thought is associated primarily with René Déscartes, who, in the seventeenth century, reinforced notions of the mind and body as distinct substances. 12 See, for example, discussions in Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001). Countless other works, within the field environmental philosophy and elsewhere, explore similar or related points. 13 ‘The Paris Agreement’, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; available at: http://unfccc.int/paris_agreement/items/9485.php (last ­accessed 17 July 2019). 14 Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, Fourth Edition (London: ­Routledge, 2007), 2–3. 15 Ibid., 7. 16 Timothy Morton argues that we are still within the Romantic period today. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 27. 17 The term Cli-Fi is promoted by journalist, Dan Bloom. See: www.cli-fi.net/. 18 Rebecca Evans, ‘Fantastic Futures? Cli-fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4, Nos. 2–3, Environmental Futurity (2017): 94–110, 95. 19 She continues, ‘I would rather call it the everything change because when people think climate change, they think maybe it’s going to rain more or something like that’. Margaret Atwood, ‘An Interview with Margaret Atwood’, Slate, 6 February 2015; available at: https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/ margaret-atwood-interview-the-author-speaks-on-hope-­s cience-and-thefuture.html (last accessed 25 August 2019).

22 Introduction 20 Chelsea Harvey, ‘Climate Change Is Becoming a Top Threat to Biodiversity: Warming Rivals Habitat Loss and Land Degradation as a Threat to Global Wildlife’, E&E News (28 March 2018); available at: www.­ scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-is-becoming-a-top-threat-tobiodiversity/ (last accessed 14 July 2019). 21 UNESCO, ‘Worsening land degradation impacts 3.2 billion people worldwide’ (26 March 2018); available at: https://en.unesco.org/news/­worseningland-degradation-impacts-32-billion-people-worldwide (last accessed 14 July 2019). 22 Robin McKie, ‘Where Have All Our Insects Gone?’ The Guardian online, Sunday 17 June 2018. Available at: www.theguardian.com/­environment/ 2018/jun/17/where-have-insects-gone-climate-change-­p opulation-decline (last a­ ccessed 14 July 2019). 2 3 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (New York: Sage, 1993), 130. 24 Ibid. 25 Stuart J. Murray, ‘Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben a Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 203–207, 204. References to Foucault are from: Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975–1976, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241. 26 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, 247. 27 Michel Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 160. 28 Murray, ‘Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben’, 205. 29 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Nature and Its Discontents’, SubStance 117, 37.3 (2008): 37–72, 40. 30 Notably the works of Sigmund Freud. Also see Becker, The Denial of Death. 31 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, translated by Patricia M. Ranum (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 13–14. 32 Alan Warren Friedman, Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 33 Éric Darier, ‘Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction’, in Discourses of the Environment, edited by Éric Darier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 6. 34 Glen A. Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology and the Environment (London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 18. 35 Glen A. Love, ‘Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism’, in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 232. 36 Dana Phillips, ‘Ecocriticism, Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology’, New Literary History 30, no. 3 Ecocriticism (1999): 577–602, 578–80. 37 Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 136. 38 Phillips, 136–137. 39 Simon Davis, VICE, Post Mortem, 23 October 2015, ‘“Save the Planet, Kill Yourself”: The Contentious History of the Church of Euthanasia’. The Church of Euthanasia; available at: www.churchofeuthanasia.org/press/ vice.html (last accessed 1 April 2018). 40 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.

Introduction  23 41 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 281, cited in Joseph C. Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 59 (emphasis added). 42 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 43 For discussion on Plato’s world of forms, see ‘Plato’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 20 March 2004; substantive revision published 1 August 2017; available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ (last accessed 25 June 2019). 4 4 Among these we could list Morton and Wolfe; also Timothy Clark, ‘Towards a Deconstructive Environmental Criticism’, Oxford Literary Review (2010): 46–64; Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Ecocriticism, Genre, and Climate Change: Reading the Utopian Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy’, English Studies 91, no. 7 (2010): 744–760; Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Serpil Oppermann, ‘Ecoriticism’s Theoretical Discontents’, Mosaic 44, no. 2 (2011): 153–169. 45 Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 10. 46 C.f. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, 247. 47 Val Plumwood, ‘Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death’, Environmental Values 17 (2008): 323–30, 325. 48 Claire Colebrook, personal communication; Cary Wolfe and Claire Colebrook, ‘Is the Anthropocene a Doomsday Device?’ 12 January 2013, The Anthropocene Project, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (YouTube, 23 January 2013); available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLTCzth8H1M (last accessed 28 December 2018). 49 See Greg Garrard, ‘Worlds without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy’, SubStance 127, 41, no. 1 (2012): 40–60. 50 Dobson, Green Political Thought, 2–13. 51 Whether nature can be reconstructed is a topic of debate among environmental philosophers. See, Robert Elliot, ‘Faking Nature’, in Environmental Ethics, edited by Robert Elliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), or Eric Katz, ‘The Big Lie: Human Restorations of Nature’, in The Ethics of the Environment, edited by Andrew Brennan, IRLP (London: Dartmouth Publishing, 1995). 52 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2, 99, 130–135. 53 Claire Colebrook, ‘Not Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Change Is Not Really Human’, Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 185–209, 188. 54 Catriona Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies’, in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-­ Sandilands, Bruce Erickson and Eric Gable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 333, 334. Emphasis in original. 55 Derrida, Aporias. See especially pages 24, 36, & 79. 56 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Abington: Routledge, 2001). 57 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 136. 58 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 135.

1 A Crisis of Environment, a Crisis in Thought

The crisis of environment is plain to see for those who care to look. Indeed, its visibility now extends to an array of media forms and appears among the contemporary discourses of current affairs. Having become an acknowledged issue, albeit one still often overlooked or contested, the crisis traverses media networks to deliver images of plastic washed up on distant beaches, dying coral reefs, felled rainforests, disappearing wildlife and more into our living rooms via TV screens. Indeed, it seems that the modern West is now a consumer of environmental crisis. If we choose to, we can also respond actively as consumers, purchasing eco-friendly products and even eco-friendly holidays. However, we should also note that, as Robert Fletcher observes, ‘engagement with the Anthropocene becomes the latest in a series of spatio-temporal “fixes” that the tourism industry provides to the capitalist system in general’.1 Catriona Sandilands expands thoughts to the consequences of this, whereby commodified nature becomes ‘a fantasy, a fetish that can be bought to extend the reach of capital rather than prompt a criticism of the relationships that produced the loss in the first place’. 2 While increased awareness may be an important step, the idea that we can consume our way out of the crisis undermines the need for more radical and political change. At the same time, the environmental crisis is depicted as deeply personal. The plastic washed up on beaches is our plastic. The pollution in the oceans is our pollution. The palm oil, for which rainforests are felled and forest dwellers such as orang-utans lose their habitats and lives, sits in products on our shelves and in our stomachs. In this anthropogeny of environmental crisis, we play a double role as both consumers of the effects and consumers who have caused the crisis. This double role is underpinned by a further doubling, whereby the crisis is both an outcome of the forces of death-denial, and one that may, potentially, threaten our demise as a species. This complex interrelationship between the environmental crisis and the human subject creates an unprecedented effect, undermining this subject’s viability and giving rise to a crisis in thought. Accordingly, environmental crisis fiction is often concerned with a set of questions about the human subject. Whatever our achievements, these now appear undermined by the harms caused in achieving them.

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  25 What, then, does it mean to be human? What lies behind those actions that have led to this crisis? Are the narratives of humanism still viable? The contemporary divergence in thought, between the belief that radical change is needed and that a business-as-usual approach to the crisis is sufficient, is thus reframed as a socio-ontological dilemma, revolving around a need to determine the root cause of the problems we face. While environmental crisis and climate change fiction might often be concerned with such questions, an underlying interrogation of the nature of being human is a consistent feature of fiction that integrates the theme of death-facing ecology. Novels often set up this interrogation by foreshortening ecological and/or societal collapse into the narrative present. By presenting their (human) characters with this prospect of collapse, they create a narrative space in which to conduct a study of human capacities, exploring how we might respond to the crisis based on identifying those traits that gave rise to it in the first place. The environmental crisis thus appears as a catalyst by which to re-examine ourselves in search of some underlying sense of what we are or are not, and what we ought now to become. This suggests, as far as this fiction goes, that a legitimate response to environmental crisis is unimaginable unless recourse is first made to redefining the state of being human. This ‘being human’ may include the collective and political body of the human, or the personal and individual body – both of which this fiction variously considers. This crisis over who or what we are occurs because the crisis of the material world in some sense stops us in our tracks. This does not (so far) amount to the more literal stop that some (myself included) see as needed: a stop that would halt those systemic practices giving rise to the crisis in favour of a radical shift towards more ecologically viable ways of dwelling. Rather, this stop, as portrayed in this fiction, is often conceptual. The environmental crisis effectively places the death-­denying (individual and/or collective) subject under erasure, as this subject’s pursuit of progress and human exceptionalism metaphorically hits a brick wall. This phenomenon produces a crisis in thought as this subject’s capacities, ideologies, politics and living practices are called into question. The human subject of Western derivation was, of course, in distinct trouble well before the advent of environmental crisis, by which I mean, more properly, the advent of our recognition of it. The emergence of poststructuralist thought within a Cold War era, following on from earlier twentieth-century atrocities, had already – with good reason – ­u ndermined this subject in a variety of ways. The emergence of environmental crisis now places this already unravelling subject in a state of ontological meltdown as we are confronted, not just as Westerners but as a species collective (since the crisis is global), with the outcomes for us of our own anthropogenic effects on planetary systems and

26  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought life-forms. The  means to undo these rebounding effects accordingly seems predicated upon our own undoing, however we may interpret such a thought. In envisaging the collapse of the death-denying subject, environmental crisis fiction sets up an interrogation. ‘Where did we go wrong?’ it seems to ask. At what point in the history of human endeavour did we take a turn that led to the destruction we see today? Was it with the emergence of agriculture and a shift in our relations with landscape from symbiotic to dominant? Was it with the rise of the modern and a gradual disjunction between the self and the world? Is the nineteenth-century shift to mechanistic processes and industrialisation to blame? Is it a result of globalising capitalist politics in the contemporary era? These are not just questions for fiction but questions of our time, responses to which have implications for the ways the human subject conceives the future of its living practices. Are agrarian lifestyles the problem or the solution? Should we resist all forms of technē and find ways of reintegrating ourselves with natural processes? Should we alternatively go forward by building on progress? Is our flawed behaviour natural or unnatural? Is it our nature to destroy (one which must therefore be curtailed) or did modern living wrest us from earlier, more benign forms of living? Are we human or ‘post’ human? To seek to answer these questions is to seek to establish whether we ought now, in responding to the crisis, to become more like ourselves, or less like ourselves. This line of questioning is inherently problematic from a poststructuralist standpoint. Michel Foucault views the subject as always contingent on its own self-constituting discourses within a given historical moment.3 Hence, whether or not we possess such a thing as a ‘natural’ state of being, and, if so, whether or not it might help us to respond with some greater ecological wisdom, can be understood from a Foucauldian perspective as a contemporary discourse, one that assumes ‘natural’ and ‘nature’ to be categories since they produce a further category of ‘unnaturalness’. Such a thought is not lost, it seems, on the authors of this fiction whose narratives often suggest a postmodern self-consciousness with regard to the discursive function of text. Moreover, they seem actively to evoke what Foucault describes as a ‘new pole’ of philosophy, appearing from the end of the eighteenth century, in which more traditional philosophical questions such as ‘What is the world?’, ‘What is man?’, ‘What is truth?’ and ‘What is knowledge?’ give way to another kind of questioning, more like: ‘What are we in our actuality?’ or ‘What are we today?’4 In evoking this question of what we are today, this fiction demonstrates an interest in the contingency of the subject, yet, despite its postmodern leanings, also grapples with a conflicting impulse to determine some kind of ‘real’ nature of the human subject. This impulse to pin down ‘who we are’, even while recognising the difficulties of doing so, is perhaps understandable given the enormity of the environmental

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  27 crisis and the extent of its material manifestations (biodiversity loss, climate change, etc.). As such, this fiction might be said to grapple with the gap between literature and the real world, as it expresses a contemporary need to offer a concrete response. In this chapter, I consider fiction’s dual depiction of crisis, a crisis of environment and a crisis of thought, as it plays out in the three books of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. My reading revolves in particular around the trilogy’s explorations of the role and limitations of the human imagination. Historically, the imagination has been broadly viewed as a uniquely human trait – a philosophical stance of which Atwood appears well aware. An expanding body of scholarship in the emergent interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies has more recently done much to update our understandings of commonalities between humans and nonhumans. In the trilogy, Atwood makes good use of the complexities around the imagination as distinguishing us or not from nonhumans, exploring the implications of this with regard to who we are today and our possible responses to the environmental crisis. The MaddAddam trilogy offers an intense, chaotic and often troubling interrogation of what it is to be human at a time of environmental crisis. The three novels draw on many facets of a history of Western thought – from the urbane to the intellectual, including swathes of literary theory and scientific and philosophical discourse – to re-envisage how humans might do things differently. Amid their layers of often heavily satirical social critique, the novels amplify present and possible outcomes of our worst behaviours, yet also consider ways in which we might better succeed as planetary citizens. The trilogy’s integration of the theme of death-facing ecology explores the human subject and its relations to the nonhuman world. If human fear in the face of death lies behind the environmental problems we see today, how might we overcome this fear? For Atwood, this appears as a philosophical question about what, exactly, defines us as human. Are we somehow distinct from the nonhuman world, or are we part of it, erroneously perceiving ourselves as distinct? As subsequent chapters will explore, this begins to touch on a contemporary and post-Kantian question: How far are we trapped, as subjects, in perspective? Meanwhile, Atwood’s trilogy focuses mainly on exploring the ways our (variously defined) ontological status might impact on or inform the human response to environmental crisis. Correspondingly, in this chapter, I trace the ways the trilogy variously repositions the animal in relation to the human, and explore the questions to which this repositioning gives rise. Important among these is a question about naturalness and the role of the human imagination. When scientist Crake, in the first novel Oryx and Crake (2003), decides that it is humanity’s ability to see death coming that causes our problematic behaviours, which result in environmental problems, he

28  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought distinguishes us, as does much Western philosophical thought, from the nonhuman, or animal.5 Yet he also renders ambiguous this same question of difference, since he views our imagination (by which we foresee death) as having evolved from the ancient primate brain. This replicates a paradox at the heart of death-facing: Does acceptance of death’s role in life somehow return us to nature, or is death avoidance itself the more natural state? Crake’s subsequent drastic act of wiping out humans and replacing them with his modified eco-hominid, the Crakers, sets up an exploration of the way this ambiguity manifests in our lives and in our socio-political worlds. The disturbing and intriguing activities of Crake are followed through in the trilogy as the novels continue to explore death-facing in different ways. The second novel, The Year of the Flood (2010), provides a counter to Crake’s impeccable utilitarianism with its more liberal approach, based on the idea that the human subject can consciously change its ways.6 This novel depicts the idea that the human imagination, rather than being removed, might instead be reinvested in a death-facing ideal, as illustrated in the eco-cult, the God’s Gardeners. The Gardeners depict a performative approach to death-facing, which is tested out and questioned through the character of Toby. The third novel, MaddAddam (2013), then combines threads from each of the first two novels to depict a posthuman ecotopia of interspecies community and cohabitation, underpinned by a blend of utilitarian and liberal ethics.7 Despite this novel’s heart-warming vision, a question is raised when Toby teaches a young Craker boy to read. Can humans, as a species, fully transform ourselves (from human to posthuman, say), or might it be better to think about this transformation as an open-ended and ongoing process? Atwood’s trilogy brings the problems of the contemporary world – from its excessive consumerisms to its stark inequalities – all down to a question about our status as mortal beings and, in turn, to its ethical implications. In subsequent chapters, I turn attention to the way death-­ facing enacts a shift towards the material but also to the way the discursive tends to reappear. My reading of Atwood’s trilogy anticipates this, as indicated in the third book’s closing pages, when the young Craker boy learns to read. Although the MaddAddam trilogy represents a new direction in ­Atwood’s work, with its focus on environmental crisis, this focus is nonetheless informed by themes that have been prevalent throughout her career. Atwood’s strong affinity with wilderness as an aspect of her homeland, Canada, and her concern with the way ‘incomers’ to the land reject, fear or embrace it, in contrast with indigenous Canadians, have often underlain her broader criticisms of sociocultural issues. The themes of ‘death’ and ‘environment’ or ‘landscape’ are familiar spectres from the larger body of her oeuvre. For example, her short story ‘Death by Landscape’, in which a young girl vanishes, swallowed up by the landscape,

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  29 never to return, combines both themes.8 While the title points to the notion of a death that rebounds on humanity, it has also been described in terms of Atwood’s views on the tendency to overplay landscape (‘nature’) as ‘dangerous place’.9 This divergence reflects the ambiguity that emerges in the trilogy around the question of human fear in the face of death. Also significant in Atwood’s oeuvre is her tendency to refer to the ‘wild’ and the ‘animal’ as lost or sought by the human. The closing pages of her 1979 novel, Surfacing, describe a young woman who goes feral, living in the garden like an animal, rejecting every iota of ‘the human’ and waiting for her fur to grow.10 Like the MaddAddam trilogy, Surfacing is not just about humans and nature. It is a political novel and explores the emergence of a Canadian national identity; however, its interrogations of the human/nonhuman binary play a similar role to that seen in the trilogy. One way it explores this is through language. ‘The animals have no need for speech’, Atwood writes, ‘why talk when you are a word’.11 According to M.T. Clark, this is about the way language possesses ‘autonomy’, thus creating a reality that is ‘inextricably linked both to our destruction and creative survival’.12 It can also be viewed in terms of the ways the phenomenon of language is defined, whereby the discursivity of human language is not the only kind. In the MaddAddam trilogy, language is recovered from a metaphysics that sees humans as qualitatively different to nonhumans. The MaddAddam trilogy also inherits Atwood’s fluid but chaotic postmodern stylistics. Rich in intertextual and especially philosophical references, its narratives convey a heady mix of earnestness and satire, challenging the reader to untangle ideas. The third book entices the reader into a false sense of security in its depiction of socio-ecological harmony. While the posthuman subject of this hope-filled vision does seem to outdo the alternative subject ontologies explored, the sense of hope produced by this last novel’s depiction of cooperation and community is undermined by the warnings its narratives also enfold. Critics often hone in on the trilogy’s satirising of consumer capitalism and its portrayals of a stark social divide. Oryx and Crake depicts a scientific elite supported by corporations driving excessive consumerism, and a corrupt, pleasure-seeking underclass that conceals further layers of poverty and environmental degradation. J. Brookes Bouson explores this through a ‘trope of corporate cannibalism’.13 Nonetheless, Gerry Canavan reads the first two novels as opening up a ‘space for imagining a post-capitalist future’, and Roman Bartosch describes them as envisaging a ‘postnatural world’, dissolving dualist thinking.14 Crake is often negatively viewed. Danette DiMarco views him as the classic instrumentalist, and for Bouson, he represents the dangers of unregulated genetic experimentation in science.15 Yet, Hannes Bergthaller, noting his ‘terrifying perspicacity’, asserts that we should not dismiss him too easily.16

30  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought Of these readings, Bergthaller’s is perhaps closest to mine, or at least informs elements of it. While few readings take up the question of death-facing or even death, Bergthaller notes references to ‘humanity’s frailties’, which might include the way death-fear sits at the root of our self-conceptualising as mortals.17 Bergthaller also considers the novels’ deliberations over the human imagination, which he relates to ‘the foundational assumption of ecocriticism’: that ‘the roots of the ecological crisis are to be found in a failure of the imagination’.18 Bergthaller is concerned that this is sometimes taken to mean that our imagination should be reapplied to an understanding of our kinship with the natural world, yet this kinship, he observes, is ‘already there’; he sees Atwood as revising such thinking: The imagination requires us instead to see ‘something that is, in an important sense, not there’ – which is that the ‘behavioural patterns that lead to environmental destruction are not in any way “unnatural” [but are] lodged in “the ancient primate brain”’ (OC, 305).19 Here, it is not so much the foundational assumption of ecocriticism that Bergthaller questions, but a tendency to romanticise the relation of the human to the natural world. To say that humans must reunite with nature is to view our behaviours as constituting a separation in the first place. Indeed, the call for death-facing may also assume such a separation; hence, my reading complements Bergthaller’s by investigating not just contemporary death-facing but the difficulties it poses. The main theorists I draw upon in this chapter are Judith Butler, whose performative subject builds on the historicism of Foucault, and Timothy Morton, who theorises the ways our encounters with the nonhuman impact aesthetically on our self-conceptualising and our engagement with the world. Although arising from within very different paradigms, Butler’s and Morton’s work shares a sense of us (humans) being interpellated by the world of our arrival. A key distinction between them is that Butler’s thinking operates within a domain of the (decentred) human, whereas Morton’s includes, and indeed emphasises, that of the nonhuman (although he nominally resists the posthuman). My aim in working with these two thinkers in this chapter is not to attempt to synthesise them. Rather, I seek to show not only the way poststructuralist theorising gives way to an ecological theorising but also the way the poststructuralist subject is interpellated by ecological theory. Here, an already decentred poststructuralist subject is challenged by appearances of the nonhuman and the real as materialising agential categories at a time of environmental crisis. In Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Butler proposes that it is through the often violent relationality between self and the world that we become moral and responsible beings and thus human. 20 In making such a claim, she directly counters common complaints that the subject of poststructuralist and particularly Foucauldian thought has no

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  31 room for the grounding of an ethics of responsibility.21 Butler incorporates ideas from a range of theorists, notably Theodore Adorno, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Laplanche, to illustrate ways we might see this incoherence or inhumanness as being, instead, precisely that which enables a grounding for ethics. On a Foucauldian view, we are always caught up in norms that condition our emergence as we respond to the interpellation of other, leaving us always to some extent opaque to ourselves; yet, Butler argues, qua Adorno, our humanness not only therefore contains our inhumanness but also comes about because of it. 22 As she works towards this position, Butler draws together a rich set of ideas on the ways we address the demands of the world by giving an account of who we are. For example, she discusses the process of narration, noting that ‘the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms’; yet, she again suggests that rather than denying the subjective ground for ethics, this ‘dispossession’ of the I becomes its condition for emergence. 23 She justifies this in part by building on Foucault’s later work on the ethical subject. Foucault, as Butler discusses, sees our relation to a conditioning ‘norm’ or ‘regime of truth’ as also being a relation to ourselves; he sees this in turn as setting the stage ‘for the subject’s self-crafting’.24 Butler seems inclined to work with Foucault on this; however, her main concern – and the point upon which she builds – is that Foucault leaves insufficient room for the ‘you’, or ‘other’. She states: ‘What he does not say is that sometimes calling into question the regime of truth by which my own truth is established is motivated by the desire to recognize another or be recognized by one’.25 Thus, it is precisely at the point when we are called upon to account for who we are to another – for Butler – that we enter into negotiation with the conditions of our emergence, thereby entering the grounds of ethics. In bringing forward her ethical subject, Butler incorporates a combination of a Levinasian ethics and Adorno’s discussions on a ‘violence’ of arrival. From Adorno, she takes the idea that our arrival into being incurs a kind of ‘violence’ upon the self, saying that the way ‘we respond to injury may offer a chance to elaborate an ethical perspective and even become human’. 26 From Levinas she applies the idea that one’s ethical relation to other is preontological, which leads her to clarify the meaning of responsibility; it is not, she states, that ‘I’ or ‘we’ bring this violence upon ourselves and thus must ‘account for it by recourse to our deeds’;27 rather, it delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away … which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy. 28

32  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought Thus, Butler explains, although we are not responsible for this violence, it nonetheless grounds our responsibility by creating the conditions under which responsibility is assumed. She concludes her delineation of the ethical subject by emphasising, again, that we ‘become human’ through our responses to the world: ‘We must recognise’, she states, ‘that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human’. 29 Morton is concerned with a different set of violences, namely those effectuated by humans upon the nonhuman world, as well as those incurred where our acts of harm to other accumulate to pose a risk, in turn, to ourselves. He is concerned, like Butler, with the violence of an interpellation by other, whereby that other is beyond our capacity to comprehend; however, in Morton’s work, this other is a nonhuman other, and risks include those risks created and not created by ourselves. ­Morton’s ethics might therefore be considered more in terms of aesthetics, his work being a version of object-oriented ontology, which originates in the work of Graham Harman.30 The notion of violence explored by Butler seems best considered in relation to objects Morton describes as ‘hyperobjects’ – objects too vast or persistent in temporal-spatial terms for us to fully perceive them; objects which are there, yet remain partially or profoundly withdrawn from our perception.31 The significance of Morton’s notion of hyperobjects, for this chapter, has to do with the ways in which they impact on human thought. Such an impact is described in Morton’s term ‘the ecological thought’, which expresses the way a new awareness of the nonhuman world, in all its intimacy and vastness, is taking position in our minds. The ‘ecological thought’, according to Morton, ‘hugely expands our ideas of time and space’, forcing us to ‘invent ways of being together that don’t depend on self-interest’; this ‘ecological thought’ is ‘elicited’ by ‘other beings’ that ‘summon it from us and force us to confront it’.32 So, where Butler brings to our attention a ‘you’, whom we seek to address in our accounting for ourselves, in Morton’s work this becomes a nonhuman ‘you’. It is the ‘you’ of other, and the ‘you’ of the hyperobject. Humanity, at a time of environmental crisis, also discovers itself to be a participant of what Morton calls ‘the mesh’ – an entanglement of pretty much everything, from all living and non-living entities to all experiences and events. ‘The mesh’ signifies, Morton states, that ‘nothing is complete in itself’.33 This means that as humanity seeks to ‘account’ for itself at a time of environmental crisis, it is forced to examine and re-orientate its own ontological (and mortal) status, as it assimilates its new engagement with ‘the ecological thought’. Morton’s work is an example of a prevalent mood in much recent speculative and environmental theory. It is a time when the problem of the human undergoes an interpellation by the exterior and physical

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  33 world as a new category, effectively overwriting prior conceptions of human subjecthood. This problem of ‘the world’ also becomes a question about the real, a point to which I return, in the course of the book, in relation to different theorists. Such a question seeks to establish how we might speak of or understand that which is beyond our perception. How can we know, in epistemological terms, the existence of that other that effectively escapes our comprehension? We have enough difficulty grasping other human minds, never mind the life-world of the nonhuman. Morton applies the term ‘strange strangers’ to refer to those entities that are not (and are) us, thereby circumventing our habit of making things appear familiar or known to us by a naming process (‘mouse’, ‘animal’, etc.).34 Yet, as with Butler, Morton sustains a sense of the human, as well as that which it is not. Discussions in this chapter will include consideration of how far the ontological human subject is represented, in the MaddAddam trilogy, as distinct or not from the nonhuman.

Oryx and Crake The first of the trilogy’s three novels, Oryx and Crake, tells the story of boyhood friends, Jimmy and Glenn, who grow up in the enclosed, high-security worlds of the scientific compounds. Glenn, of high, autistic intelligence, becomes scientist Crake who destroys humanity to replace it with his eco-hominids, the Crakers; while hapless, arts-loving Jimmy outlives him as Snowman, the unwitting caretaker to the Crakers. The novel opens with Snowman, a traumatised figure who has taken to living in the trees amid the ruins of Crake’s post-apocalyptic world. As the novel proceeds, it intersperses its main storyline of Snowman and the Crakers’ adaptation to this world with layers of extensive analepsis, introducing the reader to Jimmy and Glenn and their friendship, up to the point of Crake’s act of devastation/(re)creation. In this section, I consider how this novel sets up the initial stages of a contrast between Crake’s route to re-taming death and that of Toby and the God’s Gardeners in the second novel. The novel achieves this by initiating two main strands of philosophical enquiry through the characters of Crake and Snowman. Crake instigates a largely scientific and materialist perspective but pre-empts an approaching new materialism, which I relate in this section to Morton’s notion of ‘the ecological thought’. Snowman instigates a related but distinct performative route, which he fails to fulfil, but which is picked up again later in the character of Toby. I also discuss this novel’s corresponding explorations of the ways we might reunite the human, in ontological terms, with the animal of its own origin. My discussions focus on the way the various developing philosophical ideas in the novel revolve around a concern with longheld distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Later in the trilogy, these distinctions become heavily blurred; however, at this stage, they

34  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought are under close scrutiny. Overall, this novel sets up and explores elements of philosophical enquiry that function to reconsider the ontological human subject at a time of environmental crisis. These initial ideas are then developed or revised as the trilogy heads towards a culminating speculative posthumanism in the third novel, MaddAddam. Indeed, the (philosophical) difficulties that arise in this first novel become the fuel for such a development. The first novel, Oryx and Crake, asks tough questions about where the human race is headed in a world increasingly dominated by the corporations of a globalising capitalism. In the backdrop scenes of Jimmy and Glenn’s boyhood, the extremes of social stratification are fed by unregulated corporate monopolisation of the advancements of high-end science. In luxurious compounds built by biotech companies, the boys are immunised from the Pleeblands, where the masses live lives of corruption and danger, although they remain vulnerable to its pervading presence on the web. While Jimmy alternately frets about or engages with all that he encounters, Crake draws attention to the global extremes of human poverty and environmental degradation that lie behind this polarised scene. The reality of life in such extremes is represented in the storyline of Oryx, whom the boys first encounter as one among many young Asian child-actors in the online porn movies they watch. Later, Crake employs her to work with his Crakers, and while both he and Jimmy become competitively obsessed with Oryx, she introduces a layer of reality and humanness to the novel that neither of the boys seems able to fully grasp. She also gradually fades from the novel, depicting how easily real matters are overlooked. In this narrative portrayal of a dangerously imbalanced world, the theme of death-facing ecology is tied to Crake’s assessment of the problems he sees. ‘Men can imagine their own deaths’, he explains to Jimmy. ‘They can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn’t behave like that’ (OC, 139). For Crake, this ‘fear in the face of death’ leads to overpopulation and, correspondingly, he says – ‘as we’ve seen in spades’ – ‘to environmental degradation and poor nutrition’ (OC, 345). Crake’s position is important in the novel for a number of reasons. First, he flags up, therefore also placing under scrutiny, the populationist argument that the planet can only support so many people and that overuse of resources in one corner relies on depletion of resources – and thus on harms to other lives – in another. Second, in relating this to a problem of the human imagination, he brings to the table a question about the ontological human subject, which revolves, for Crake, around our biological make up. This leads to him taking a biogenetic route to death-facing, which might be seen as purely instrumentalist on his part. However, one might alternatively view this as part of the novel’s explorations of biological science and Darwinism in relation to emergent materialisms. Third, Crake provides

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  35 a view on the situation that is non-sentimentalised. His utilitarian position is augmented by his Asperger’s profile, hinted at in his character traits: his aloofness, his tendency to focus intently on high achievements within narrow formats (endlessly playing the online game Extinctathon, and winning nine times out of ten), his exceptional intelligence, his always wearing the same black T-shirt. Furthermore, the Watson-Crick Institute, which he attends after graduating from high school, is known by the students as Asperger’s U, these students also being described as ‘[d]emi-autistic, genetically speaking’ and as having ‘single-­track, tunnel vision minds’ (OC, 228). The implications of Crake’s Asperger’s profile become apparent when one considers that Asperger’s and Autism are sometimes associated with a lack of imagination.35 Correspondingly, Crake hones in on the human imagination as the cause of human suffering and environmental degradation, since it results in our fear of death, or, as he also puts it, ‘the human condition’ (OC, 355). It seems significant, in reading Crake, that he himself lacks the fearbased emotions around death that he identifies as problematic. The outcome of this, in Crake’s storyline, is twofold. First, due to his pragmatic approach he is able, as a teenager – somewhat chillingly – to watch his own mother’s death with fascination rather than distress. This is contrasted in the novel with Jimmy’s profound grief at the death of his mother, creating an image of Crake as being, in many ways, disturbingly inhuman. The second outcome is Crake’s decision to manufacture his own death along with that of the rest of humankind, which, while it hardly alleviates the horror of his genocide, nonetheless places his ethics on an equitable plane, depicting a utilitarian emphasis on the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Indeed, his vision extends to the future lives of humans – or at least humanoids – and nonhumans of all kinds, of flora and fauna, far into the future. Therefore, although the sheer brutality of Crake’s act undermines it on any ethic that begins with the well-being of the (human) individual, it nonetheless aligns him with an ecological ethic that is utilitarian in character. Crake’s project, which includes but is not restricted to his destruction of humanity, also has some affinities with posthumanism. Crake’s aim, in wiping out humanity, is to dispose of the human imagination, which he views as having evolved in problematic ways. Crake believes that (a) humans are not going to change their ways and (b) any opportunity for an effective political response lies in the past. Yet his destruction of humanity is not absolute, since he sets up the possibility for a posthuman future. His eco-hominid Crakers are created from the human genome, with the imagination disabled (among other modifications). In developing the Crakers, Crake can therefore be said to envisage a posthuman world in which humans-as-posthumans continue to play a part alongside nonhumans. His ideas of time and space appear vastly expanded, due to his interpellation by the nonhuman world and the prospect of

36  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought (environmental) crisis. Crake’s project in this sense might evoke Morton’s ‘ecological thought’, which, according to Morton, forces us to ‘invent ways of being together that don’t depend on self-interest’.36 Crake clearly does not act from self-interest, since he destroys himself along with humanity. Rather, his actions, if devastating to say the least, are aligned with an ecological vision that outstrips the needs of humans living in the present. This is Crake’s ‘terrifying perspicuity’, to recall Bergthaller.37 Yet only a slight shift in perspective positions Crake’s act of wiping out humanity as misanthropic and ecofascist, calling to mind the view that humanity, on whatever grounds, is a plague or cancer on the planet. Such a stance is not unfamiliar and clearly has currency within some environmentalisms today, particularly those of a deeper green. George Gessert remarks, reading Oryx and Crake, ‘Maybe we deserve to go extinct. Maybe we want to. We are our own worst enemies’.38 A similar sentiment appears in Attwood’s 1996 novel, Life Before Man, when palaeontologist Lesje wonders: ‘Does she care whether the human race survives or not? She doesn’t know. The dinosaurs didn’t survive and it wasn’t the end of the world. In her bleaker moments … she feels the human race has it coming’.39 As Canavan remarks, reading Crake this way can lead one to view the novel as ‘a deeply conservative and cynical anti-utopia’, one that ‘endorses Crake’s naïve, scientistic reduction of all human institutions to evolutionary hard-wiring’, and makes it impossible to resolve the environmental crisis.40 Canavan suggests that Crake and his Crakers should therefore be read as offering allegorised rather than literal solutions. However, even if, as Crake sees it, we are hardwired to self-destruct, the novel’s temporal aspect should also be accounted for; the shrinking window of possibility in which effective change might occur has, in the trilogy, already shrunk, despite it being set, as Canavan puts it, only ‘twenty minutes’ into the future.41 As Crake sees it, things have already gone far too far. Politics have collapsed and corporations have taken over. Hence, his ‘rewiring’ of humanity might be understood as an extreme response based on a reduction, not of his thinking, but of possibility itself. Crake’s thinking, as he designs the Crakers, focuses on halting the excesses of human behaviours based on the assumption that our fear in the face of death drives a problematic desire for immortality. Crake links this quite specifically to the human imagination, which, in The Year of the Flood, he ties to grammar as an evolutionary human feature: Glenn [aka Crake] used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, ‘I’ll be dead,’ you’ve said the word I. And so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar. (YF, 377)

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  37 Crake also attributes God to the past tense, since the past, being infinite, conjures up a profound sense of the unknown in the human mind. Both God and immortality are therefore, in Crake’s view, ideas that arise because of grammar, which he ascribes to biological causes on the basis that language evolved through the FoxP2 Gene (YF, 377). As seen throughout the trilogy, a heady mix of philosophy and science is at work here, providing the reader with food for thought on the human condition. These take Crake’s thinking beyond the instrumentality of science, identifying him as something more like a contemporary thought experiment. Indeed, the narrative around Crake discloses shades of genetics, linguistics, poststructuralism, Malthusianism and more, which together prompt the reader to ponder how, as a species, we got to this point and what the possibilities might be to redress the environmental crisis we consequently face. Crake’s conception of immortality has further implications in the narrative. His cover project is the BlyssPluss pill, which he claims offers protection from sexually transmitted diseases, unlimited enhancement of libido and the prolonging of youth. This pill is supposedly intended to sterilise its unsuspecting user as a means to lower population levels. When it goes to market, it turns out to contain instead the lethal virus with which Crake wipes out most of humanity. His real project, it transpires, is not the pill with its promises for eternal youth, but the Crakers, whom Crake designs to replace humanity. Despite programming them to drop dead at the age of thirty, Crake describes the Crakers as immortal. Crake explains to Jimmy: ‘Immortality is a concept. If you take “mortality” as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then “immortality” is the absence of such fear’ (OC, 356).42 Thus, in rendering the Crakers immortal, Crake also, ostensibly, reinstates the animal in the human. No longer living in fear of death, no longer mortal, the Crakers live peacefully in the unconstructed and nonhuman world. The Crakers are depicted in Oryx and Crake (less so in MaddAddam) with a humour that often amounts to absurdity. They have UV-resistant skins, live outdoors, have polyandrous breeding cycles and are herbivores whose main diet takes advantage of a virulent shrub. They also feature oddities ranging from feline purring to waggling blue penises, and some critics, such as Stephen Dunning, find it ‘hard to take them seriously’.43 To read the Crakers literally – as a potential alternative to humanity – is also therefore problematic. Rather, they appear to play a key role in the novel’s explorations of the human subject at a time of environmental crisis, as becomes clearer as the trilogy unfolds. As Rozelle suggests, the Crakers ‘embody genetically what Atwood’s millennial “green” readers might aspire to behaviourally’, since they are inherently eco-friendly.44 Yet Bouson’s reading of them as ‘noble savages’ misses much of what the Crakers offer.45 As Canavan observes, they may function in one sense as a ‘hyperbolic version’ of the ‘fantasy’ that we can turn back the clock and

38  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought somehow undo civilisation, yet it seems more apt to read them in terms of what they say about who we are, and the challenges we face, today.46 Rozelle, for example, sees them as ‘metonymic “floor models”’, exhibiting ‘alternative versions of humanity within millennial contexts, not simply in arrière-garde outrage but in far more unsettling philosophical speculation’.47 It is this context of an ‘unsettling philosophical speculation’ that is of interest in my reading. Here we might see the Crakers, as Canavan suggests, as an allegory of the ‘radical transformation of both society and subjectivity that will be necessary in order to save the planet’.48 Such a transformation is acknowledged in Bergthaller’s description of the Crakers as ‘already domesticated’ or ‘housebroken’.49 That is, the Crakers represent not so much a return to some prior natural state, but an indication of the extent to which we, as humans, need to change our behaviours if we are to reduce our catastrophic impacts on the planet. Bergthaller’s point also, however, leads us back to the question of paradox at the heart of death-thinking. The Crakers are genetically inclined towards death-facing, which both counters, and thereby assumes in the first place, a human/nature binary. I view Crake’s construction of the Crakers as therefore seeking to reinstate the animal in the human. This occurs quite specifically in the attempt to disable the imagination within the human genome. The immortal Crakers become animal in that they no longer envisage death coming and, therefore, have no recourse to associated death-denial behaviours. At the same time, as noted earlier, Crake simultaneously sees our problematic behaviours as (already) originating in the ancient primate brain. This raises questions about human/ nonhuman distinctions and the ways we relate to and understand them. The novel plays around with these distinctions in various ways, such as, through its recurring motif, Alex the Parrot. This reference is to a real-­ life African Grey parrot, Alex, who was renowned for his apparently cognitive, not merely mimetic, use of language.50 His presence in the novel signals the longstanding philosophical debates over the cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, stretching back to Descartes and the Cartesian divide. The assumption that the nonhuman lacks imagination and thus awareness of death is thus placed in question, prompting a reconsideration of narrative events. Alex’s presence effectively positions our difficulties with death and associated behaviours, and the proposed death-facing, as an ontological paradox in terms of how we define ourselves as human. The unsettling of the narrative is further compounded when Crake’s modifications to the Crakers fail to sustain. Led in part by Snowman’s predilection for feeding them absurd origin myths, the ­Crakers’ imaginations begin to develop. They become curious as to where they have come from and start to perform minor rituals. This perhaps suggests that one cannot simply sever the imagination from the human. It also raises a question to do with the persistence of the human in the posthuman, as I consider next in relation to Snowman.

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  39 As critics often note, Snowman (aka Jimmy) represents the arts and humanities, in the trilogy, whereas Crake represents the sciences. I view this distinction in terms of the two characters’ epistemological perspectives on death-facing as an ontological problem. Thus, Crake represents a science-based and materialist approach to death-facing, also reflecting certain new materialist concerns, his perspective exceeding the temporal and spatial scope of the difficulties at hand. Snowman establishes the trilogy’s concerns with words and language, offering a differing view of the human imagination. Snowman is also the initial site for the trilogy’s consideration of the role of the individual subject in relation to its world. I explore this using Butler’s notion of the performative subject. The appearance of a performative element in Snowman, effectively, runs in parallel to the biological materialism of Crake’s thinking. In combination, these serve to illustrate the way Atwood’s trilogy seems to assimilate aspects of poststructuralist and related thought, while at the same time moving towards more recent developments in speculative and new materialisms. In book two, The Year of the Flood, aspects of Snowman’s subjecthood are carried through in the character of Toby, who, as I later discuss, does far more with these than Snowman ever seems to manage. Despite his being viewed as the (humanist) site for change by critics such as DiMarco, Snowman on the whole demonstrates, above all, the unreliability of the human as agent.51 The question of the subject’s performative relation to its world arises in the novel’s opening pages as we first meet Snowman. Crake’s destruction of humanity has effectively halted (mechanistic) time, accentuating Snowman’s plight as devoid of ‘other’, both without and within. Suspended in a world wherein all that he knows has ended, he finds he ‘doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future; sheer vertigo’ (OC, 173). Snowman’s inability to respond to his circumstances is linked to the loss of a human sociocultural context. Despite being surrounded, not just by the ruins of the human world, but by the emerging ‘liminal zones’ of ­biota – as described by Rozelle – which ‘continue to adapt and grow’, even in ‘zero hour’, these are of no interest to Snowman.52 Nor, particularly, are the Crakers who live nearby and with whom he interacts, but only minimally. This break between subject and world is further demonstrated as words lose meaning for him, there being no one to receive them: ‘He wipes his face on a corner of the sheet. “Pointless repinings,” he says out loud’ (OC, 51). Yet Snowman does gradually adapt, and as he does so his subjecthood qualitatively changes. Deprived of a human context, his human behaviours are gradually supplemented with animal characteristics. Running on the beach, he ‘laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion’ (OC, 11). Protecting himself from the now feral experimental hybrids, such as wolvogs and pigoons, he takes sanctuary like a primate in the trees. While, at first, he is isolated and defensive, one day he watches a

40  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought caterpillar letting itself down on a thread and feels a ‘sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy’ (OC, 46). This signals a new recognition of other, redefining the boundaries that previously defined his human self and realigning him with the world of his emergence. Gradually, with no need for genetic modification, Snowman becomes animal. This gradual shift in Snowman’s ontological state appears to draw upon the notion of a subject performativity as seen in the work of Butler and others. From an initial position of isolation in the immediate post-­ apocalyptic moment, a certain pseudo-presence of ‘other’ gradually slides up around him. Often, we read, ‘he feels he has a listener: someone unseen, hidden behind the screen of leaves, watching him slyly’ (OC, 51). This conjuring up of ‘other’ highlights the performative aspect of our being-in-the-world, our existence as being within a world that already contains our arrival. As Butler remarks, ‘It would seem that one is always addressed in one way or another, even if one is abandoned or abused, since the void and the injury hail one in specific ways’.53 Gradually, as Snowman is hailed by this void of apocalypse, he comes to accept it as the other within which he is contained. It seems it is only when he is able to reformulate this other that he is able to re-enter, or arrive at, the present as an in-the-world being: ‘So here it is then’, he observes, ‘the moment, this one, the one he’s supposed to be living in. His head’s on a hard surface, his body’s crammed into a chair, he’s one big spasm. He stretches, yelps with pain’ (OC, 312). This arrival, however, takes Snowman most of the novel to achieve. While the extreme violence of this arrival might evoke sympathy for such a delay, nonetheless it leaves no room for his further development. For most of the novel, he is depicted as lacking in personal autonomy, as illustrated in the aphorism he recalls: ‘Each one of us must tread the path laid out before him’ (OC, 26). For all his love of words and the arts, Snowman primarily consents to a deterministic view of life. In the closing pages, nonetheless, Snowman demonstrates the beginnings of an ethics arising out of the violence of his arrival. A performative episode occurs, setting up a narrative thread that is continued by Toby in book two. On discovering that the Crakers have encountered a band of human survivors, he wonders whether he should teach them about guns, about rape. While their naivety could put them at risk, Snowman wonders what effect such words as ‘war’ and ‘rape’ might have, were they to enter their vocabularies, and thus their lives. Realising the possibilities, Snowman decides that all he will say to the Crakers, before leaving to seek out the strangers, is merely: ‘Crake is watching over you; and Oryx loves you’ (OC, 426). It might be that, in choosing not to prepare them, he has left the Crakers open to danger. On the other hand, he might have forestalled their departure on a journey towards the bleaker aspects of humanity. In engaging with the Crakers’ imaginations in a certain way, he may have done more than Crake towards safeguarding their future as a species. Even so, in the closing pages of the first novel, this future remains uncertain.

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  41

The Year of the Flood The Year of the Flood is simultanial, set within the same temporal frame as the first novel and revolving around the same event, that of Crake’s destruction of humanity and his creation of the Crakers. Yet this novel is written from the alternating perspectives of two God’s Gardeners, Toby and Ren, who have no knowledge of Crake and his immortality project. The Gardeners, a back-to-the-land resistance movement and spiritual group, believe that the ‘Waterless Flood’ (YF, 7) is imminent as God’s punishment for humanity. Hence, when Crake’s lethal virus spreads, they assume that their prediction has materialised. On the whole, the Gardeners survive this Waterless Flood, since, expecting a disaster, they prepare for it in various ways. They are also engrossed in countering the runaway degeneracy of the social world by teaching themselves the importance of accepting death. My interest in this novel is its reconsideration of the human subject in terms of its performative and ethical possibilities. This is tied, again, to language; but rather than being primarily a (philosophical) marker of being human, language in this novel is performative and thus a marker of precognitive functions that shape human subjects as much as being shaped by them. The performative thread is carried over from its starting point in Snowman to extend much further in this novel, resulting in an alternative route to re-taming death, which I discuss mainly in relation to Toby. Where Crake in book one seeks to immobilise death-fear using a technological fix, book two explores the idea that humans can transform themselves through performative acts and practices, thereby developing full recognition of the mortal state of the self. This produces an ethics that differs to, although in some ways justifying, Crake’s utilitarianism. I illustrate this using Butler’s notion of the ethical subject, including her incorporation of the ideas of Foucault and Levinas, among others. The death-facing proposed in this novel is depicted as generating a more ethical stance to living that would reduce human impact on the natural world. Nonetheless, as with Crake’s biological materialist route, this route is also shown to be partial. This second novel’s ethico-performative route to death-facing is demonstrated through the God’s Gardeners and represented mainly in Toby. The Gardeners portray an uncertain mix of seriousness and satire. Their belief system, an odd amalgamation of Judeo-Christianity and Darwinism, often appears as incongruous or absurd, yet may also make a point on Atwood’s part. In an interview, she remarks: If we don’t quite have a religion yet that fits that bill we will soon. By that I mean people are going to have to stop squabbling about religion and science being two polar opposites and come to some kind of accommodation around that or else a lot of crucial time will be wasted.54

42  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought Even so, as the recipients of Atwood’s relentless humour, the Gardeners also clearly satirise elements of normative and religious practise. They see themselves as the paragons of virtue, yet are prone to all the usual human foibles such as arrogance and duplicity, their teachings ranging from the expedient to the illogical and the absurd. They are led by Adam One, who is served by many Eves, demonstrating typical gender bias common to many religious and other groups. Adam One is shown to manipulate followers for their own good (supposedly), while heading a concealed, politically active inner circle. Yet this inner activist group, Maddaddam, also turns out to be the main environmentalist mouthpiece of the trilogy. Moreover, hints in book two suggest that Crake (Glenn) is in some way linked with Maddaddam. Whatever can be said of the Maddaddams, they succeed in toppling runaway corporatism and its hegemonies, and, while most of humanity is wiped out in the process, they almost all – if somewhat implausibly – survive to begin again in the new world of book three. It is in God’s Gardener Toby, however, that the trilogy’s second route to death-facing is portrayed and also interrogated. We are introduced to this role immediately, as The Year of the Flood opens into Toby’s story. On the second page we read: ‘Vultures are our friends, the Gardeners used to teach. They purify the earth. They are God’s necessary dark Angels of bodily dissolution. Imagine how terrible it would be if there were no death!’ (YF, 4). This first encounter with Toby, as with Snowman in book one, takes place in the post-apocalyptic moment, where we find her recalling the Gardeners’ constant mantra: Death is nothing to be afraid of. The Gardeners, as the flashbacks in Toby’s narrative convey, are fond of pointing out the virtues of such creatures as carrion beetles, putrefying bacteria and vultures, whose work is to return flesh to earth as compost. Their belief system, combining Christian and scientific ideologies, attunes to the same point, as expounded, somewhat hilariously, in their daily sermons: Let us pray that if we must sacrifice our own protein so it may circulate among our fellow Species, we will recognize the sacred nature of the transaction. … Should your life be required of you, rest assured that it is required by Life. Let us sing. (YF, 415–16) Toby, we learn from the outset, retains a scepticism about the Gardeners and their teachings, despite having become one of them and absorbed many of their ideas. Toby is also sceptical in character generally, as well as being forthright and resilient. She functions in the narrative to interpret for the reader the value of the Gardeners’ teachings, while filtering out some of their more absurd behaviours and overlooking, in the main, their pious sanctimonies. Thus, through Toby, the

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  43 Gardeners’ performative practices and environmentalist ethics are assimilated for the reader. Toby illustrates the possibility of recognising value in any given spiritual or environmental narrative while avoiding its pitfalls. Accordingly, following the opening reference to the Gardeners’ insistence that ‘it would be terrible if there were no death’, Toby responds immediately by asking herself: ‘Do I still believe this? Everything is different up close’ (YF, 4). The significance of this hesitation is upheld throughout this second book and continues to the end of the third. While death-facing may pose the possibility of a more ecological stance, its material reality is less glamorous than the abstract idea indicates. Indeed, facing death in actuality asks one to face the inconceivable, since one can cannot imagine what it is like to be dead – if one experiences death at all. I explore this difficulty in Chapter 3 in relation to some of Derrida’s work on death. Meanwhile, Toby’s character in The Year of the Flood anticipates some of that discussion. She refuses to allow a glamorising of death and as such engages in a dynamic critique of death-facing, even as the trilogy appears largely to endorse it. At the same time, Toby – more so than any other character in the trilogy – ­embodies the philosophical notion of death-facing, learned from the Gardeners, within her daily living. Death-facing in this second novel is primarily produced through a linguistic performative repetition of death’s importance, as enacted by the Gardeners in their daily sermons and perpetuated in their daily living. This can be considered in relation to Butler’s ethical subject, which incorporates aspects of Foucault’s late work on care of the self. Foucault specifically refers to ‘technologies of the self’, by which he means practices adopted or carried out by a subject as it engages with the given world of its emergence.55 Such technologies, says Foucault, enable subjects to ‘transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’.56 While this indicates a level of agency, the Foucauldian subject responds agentially from a position already given. Building on this, Butler emphasises the ‘other’, or ‘you’, that must therefore interpellate this subject.57 For the Gardeners, this ‘you’ or ‘other’ is their ethical ideal, a death-facing eco-pantheist-scientific other, with which they performatively engage. Their teachings depict the human subject as a participant in a vast whole, and as infinitely valuable yet entirely dispensable. The Gardeners are perpetually interpellated by these ideas through the daily sermons of Adam One and accordingly perform ‘technologies of the self’ in their words, actions and living practices, thereby adopting a living stance of death-facing. Nonetheless, the Gardener’s teachings also display inconsistencies, interrupting this performative process, with varying levels and qualities of human response. As with everything in Atwood’s trilogy, the Gardeners are subject to questioning and critique.

44  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought The Year of the Flood supplements this notion of performative death-facing with a motif of snakes, paralleling the first novel’s use of Alex the Parrot. But while this snake motif is scattered throughout the second novel, one has to look beyond the novel to Atwood’s Snake Poems to discover what snakes denote for Atwood in relation to death-facing. For example, the last three stanzas of her poem ‘Quattrocento’ describe being eaten by a snake. As Branco Gorjup states, the snake ‘holds out the possibility of … the fullness of a life that rejects annihilation from the body and accepts the inevitability of death’. 58 The snake motif in The Year of the Flood can be said to build on this idea. For example, one of many feast days in the God’s Gardener calendar is ‘The Feast of Serpent Wisdom and the importance of instinctive knowing’ (YF, 279). On this feast day, Adam One gives a lengthy sermon about the many meanings of the snake and concludes the most important one to be that: The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is endlessly constructing for itself. For what in us is belief and faith, in the other Creatures is inborn knowledge. (YF, 279) Here, the idea of immediacy poses the possibility of dealing directly with the present moment, rather than supplementing it with additional mental construct. The inborn knowledge of a snake might include its awareness of death, and because it is inborn, the snake has no need to construct ways of dealing with death. One can consider this in relation to Crake’s material disabling of the human imagination and the Gardeners’ parallel repositioning of the imagination through a linguistic performative process. In both cases, the trilogy depicts and explores ways to reduce, disable or overcome the discursive death-dealing characteristic of the human mind, producing a relationship with death that has something like the immediacy of the animal. Since humans are discursive, death-denial needs countering, and in The Year of the Flood, the effect of this is illustrated in the Gardener children, who inherit rather than enact the Gardener teachings and are unconcerned by death. Despite frequently hearing the adults speak about death, about turning to compost and about the ‘Waterless Flood’ they seem to find the whole prospect amusing. “We’re all gonna diiiiie,” they’d say, making dead person faces. “Hey, Ren. Want to do your bit for the Cycle of Life? Lie down in that dumpster, you can be compost.” “Hey, Ren. Want to be a maggot? Lick my cut!” (YF, 71) The Gardener children are also taught their biological place in the natural world, through the repetition of such phrases as ‘Running away

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  45 makes you prey’ (YF, 26) or ‘Nature is our playground’ (YF, 78). These lessons all emphasise performative living, while repositioning the human subject within the wider, natural world. Since the Gardeners are expecting a Waterless Flood, this is not just about instilling an ethic, but preparing the Gardener children for survival. The ethical aspect of performative death-facing is nonetheless significant, since it is constructed as a response to environmental crisis. In delineating her notion of an ethical subject, Butler reaches a principle of ‘responsibility’ through her incorporation of the work of Levinas. 59 This includes an exposition of the role of language, which remains a central theme in this second novel throughout. Discussing the work of Levinas, Robert Eaglestone writes: It is from this understanding of language as the relation to other expressed, not represented, that the ethical importance of language emerges. Language is where and how we are put into question by the other, and drawn to our responsibilities: the ‘calling into question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the other in the face we call language’.60 Butler enlists this notion of the ‘I’ that calls us into question, relating it to Adorno’s discussions on the violence that characterises our ‘arrival’. It is from this that she discerns our ‘opportunity to become human’.61 In any given situation, it is our response that governs the possibility for an ethics to arise. Atwood explores what it means to become human at a time of environmental crisis through the character of Toby, who acts on the responsibilities that draw her as she is interpellated by the Gardeners’ teachings and engages with friends and with socio-environmental concerns. She also constantly struggles with her thoughts and responses; thus, Atwood depicts in Toby a struggle to respond out of which possibility arises. This reading of Toby becomes clearer if placed in comparison with the earlier reading of Snowman. Atwood notably aligns Toby’s circumstances with Snowman’s. Both are described, from the outset of each novel, in relation to their response to the post-apocalyptic moment. Toby, like Snowman, is suspended in time. Snowman’s response to this is one of profound trauma as he considers a past ‘that he can’t regain’, a present ‘that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly’ and a future that is simply ‘sheer vertigo’ (OC, 173). However, when Toby experiences similar, she expresses not so much trauma as plain frustration. She reflects: ‘She can’t live only in the present, like a shrub. But the past is a closed door, and she can’t see any future’ (YF, 114). Immediately, Toby appears less impacted by death-fear at the post-apocalyptic moment than Snowman. Toby also demonstrates the significance of inner struggle to the process of becoming human. She grapples with having survived the flood and undergoes a brief crisis of faith. Why is it she that has survived,

46  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought she wants to know, and not someone ‘more useful biologically’ (YF, 114)? However, Toby quickly decides to deal with this crisis through performative means. She considers taking death mushrooms, but instead demonstrates the value of death-facing to life by eating honey, which doesn’t decay. As Toby recalls, ‘the ancients called it the food of immortality’ (YF, 115). Toby also forces herself to remember the extracting of the honey from the hives as a pleasurable experience, even though it wasn’t, because she wants to affirm the possibility of happiness. By choosing to eat honey, Toby thus consciously ingests the teachings of the Gardeners, using performative means to activate her faith in a hopeful future. While it may seem odd for death-facing to involve the food of immortality and not death mushrooms, Toby’s act can be linked to the description of the death-facing Crakers as immortal. Meanwhile, Snowman, who has recourse neither to the Crakers’ nor to the Gardeners’ route to death-facing, lacks the means to respond to the challenges he faces, other than to take each day as it comes. This distinction between Toby’s inner struggle and Snowman’s passivity is illustrated in the very different aphorisms at work, since the Gardeners teach that ‘You create your own world by your inner attitude’ (YF, 376), whereas Snowman’s viewpoint is deterministic. A further distinction between Toby and Snowman is seen in her full engagement with the nonhuman other. In the post-apocalyptic moment, Toby immediately recognises the liminal zone of emerging biota as the other face of apocalypse, as described by Rozelle.62 At the opening of The Year of the Flood, Toby observes: ‘There still is life’, ‘Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be’ (YF, 3). In contrast, Snowman’s first observations are of the horizon ‘lit now with a rosy, deadly glow’, while birds screech over an ocean with ‘reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks’ (OC, 4). Both descriptions include birds, but Toby sees the birds as birds, noting that life – specifically nonhuman life – is still present, whereas Snowman sees birds as mere parts in the larger image of collapse and decay. Toby’s experiences with the Gardeners have thus enabled her to respond immediately to the violence of the apocalyptic moment with a sense of life and possibility, whereas Snowman sees only ruin. Toby’s response contains an ecological ethic, whereas Snowman’s arrival at a point of ethics takes him far longer to achieve. Nonetheless, the beginnings of an ethical care in Snowman, as depicted in the closing scene of Oryx and Crake, does seem to point to the developments we go on to see in Toby. In The Year of the Flood, this demonstration of a performative death-facing ethic is taken one stage further, effectively rendering ethics as a kind of natural law, a law that – as with any law – might be (and manifestly is) repeatedly and with consequences broken. This can be understood by looking more closely at Butler’s apportioning of responsibility to the ethical subject – an idea she takes from Levinas. The crucial point about responsibility as proposed by Levinas is that it is already

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  47 there, as arrival occurs. Thus, Levinas argues that our ethical relation to other is prior to our relation to self.63 Discussing this aspect of Levinas’ work, Eaglestone explains: each of us is always already responsible for the others who people the world. Their very otherness imposes a duty upon us, before we are able to deny it. … Our unconditional responsibility is not something we take on or a rule by which we agree to be bound: instead it exists before us and we are ‘thrown’ into it without any choice.64 This provides a useful way to view the relationship between death-facing and the mitigation of environmental crisis in The Year of the Flood. It is, on this view, a performative given that simply through being in the world one acquires responsibility for its well-being. Thus, environmental crisis is understood as an outcome of the denial of this responsibility or perhaps a failure to recognise it. We can apply this link between ethics, responsibility and death-facing to an episode late in the second novel. Toby and Ren come across one of their Gardener companions, Oates, who has been slaughtered and hung in a tree. Ren is distraught and, despite their exposure to danger, wants desperately to stop and conduct a burial ceremony. Toby urges her on, refusing to allow such risky behaviour. Toby, we find, is no less distraught, but holds firmly to the point that they need to survive. Within minutes Toby is gathering the limbs of a fallen Mo’hair to cook, putting aside Gardener teachings on veganism, again making survival the overriding concern. All this may seem to render the Gardeners’ teachings dispensable, but I suggest that this might be the point after all. Atwood also sets up an alignment between Oates’ death and that of Laurence Titus Oates of the Scott Expedition, reminding us of his famous words: ‘Let his immortal last words be an inspiration to us on our journey: “I am just going outside and may be some time”’ (YF, 486). This double death of Oates elucidates Levinas’ claim that the ethical relation with other is prior to the ontological relation with self. Lawrence Titus Oates, in ‘going outside’, sacrificed himself to enable the survival of his companions. Sacrifice is of course a tricky idea. On an environmentalist reading, it might mean that the human race should make itself scarce and allow the natural world to recover. Crake’s act is one of sacrifice in this sense, since he destroyed himself along with everyone else. However, where the ethical relation to other is prior to the ontological relation to self, sacrifice might mean, simply, acknowledging a relation of responsibility between one’s self and the world. Hence, this reference, in the novel, to Lawrence Titus Oates positions the life of the self in the wider context of the world within which it dwells. Toby, coming across her slaughtered friend, is of course deeply disturbed by it; nor could she exonerate it in any way. Nonetheless, she acts on a broader recognition of sacrifice that

48  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought hands over to survival. She accepts Oates’ death as sacrifice on these grounds, meaning that any subsequent putting themselves at risk would be a violation of sacrifice. This behaviour, on the part of Toby, directly counters the valorising of life described by Foucault and is thus a form of ethical death-facing.65

MaddAddam MaddAddam is the final book of the trilogy and differs from the first two in that they are simultanial, whereas MaddAddam provides a sequel to both. MaddAddam’s depiction of a posthuman future incorporates elements of each of the first novels. Picking up from the final pages of The Year of the Flood, this final novel develops the story of the Maddaddams, the resistance group at the core of the God’s Gardeners. Toby, with other former Gardener characters, joins forces with the Maddaddams, as do the Crakers, along with a frail and disorientated Snowman. The first part of the novel is devoted mainly to telling the backstory of Zeb, who, as half-brother of Adam One, plays a primary role in Maddaddam activities. The novel evolves into an exploration of the idea of a posthuman future. Toby’s narrative remains central as romance develops between her and Zeb. The Crakers gradually become more human in character, and, with it, more accessible to the reader. Toby even teaches Blackbeard, a young Craker boy, to read. The future is finally inherited by the posthuman as the Maddaddams, Crakers and Pigoons join forces to wipe out the last of the dangerous Pleeblands criminals, the Painballers. However, this ending is complicated by the re-emergence of the recurrent subtext of writing, as Blackbeard sets out to pen ‘the Book of Toby’ (M, 385). In this section, I focus mainly on the way MaddAddam amalgamates the trilogy’s two modes of death-facing and related ontologies, from books one and two, into its vision of a posthuman future. As the Crakers and the former Gardeners join forces, materialist and performative elements of the trilogy’s overall storyline are synthesised to create a new vision of humanity. The novel depicts new possibilities through increasing hybridisations, symbolically represented by impromptu interspecies matings between male Crakers and the female Gardeners, whose menstruation is misinterpreted by the amorous males as a mating signal. This leads to the birth of a new generation of hybrid hominids – children whose stories, at the close of MaddAddam, remain yet to be told. The experimental depictions of death-facing in books one and two, now synthesised, can be understood as underlying narrative events, enfolded into the emerging depiction of a posthuman future. This posthuman future can therefore be read as an evolved depiction of death-facing ecology. Generally speaking, death is mentioned in this novel far less than the first two. It focuses instead on what death means

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  49 for the subject in life, where death has already been faced. One might therefore suggest that, in MaddAddam, Atwood effectively offers a speculative culture building, on a premise that cultures are built upon conceptions of death. MaddAddam might also be thought of as a speculative vision of the effects of causes laid in books one and two. Its posthuman landscape only exists at all because of Crake’s Waterless Flood and is founded on a mix of Crake’s utilitarian and the Gardeners’ performative versions of death-facing. From Crake, the novel inherits a utilitarian ecological imperative, reminiscent of the idea that nature will redress the balance for the good of all life, at the expense of some – described by Dana Phillips as Crake’s ‘radically Darwinian worldview’.66 It also inherits the benevolence of Crake’s Crakers, who, despite their evolving imaginations, remain unencumbered by the psychological complexes of death-fear. From the Gardeners, the novel inherits an ideology based on conscious, performative life-making, whereby one elects to face circumstances with a considered response rather than passively allowing a situation to drift. This provides food for thought at a time of environmental crisis, when the possibilities of taking considered action appear largely to have stalled. These ideological cameos, drawn from Crake, the Crakers and Toby, are also problematised in MaddAddam, as in books one and two. For example, one might prefer not to overlook that the Crakers’ sexual liaisons with former Gardener women are non-consensual. The Crakers may be benevolent, yet they are also naïve and can fail to grasp the situation at hand. By the same token, while Toby’s embodiment of an ecological death-facing ethic facilitates a performative agency that is constructive in the face of destruction, it may also, with slippage, facilitate any agency. Toby, in this last book, for all her strengths, can come across as an isolated figure who at times struggles to connect with others. We might consider Toby and her strengths alongside Ameila Defalco’s assessment of the trilogy as depicting ‘the fantasy of human independence and invulnerability central to neoliberalism and biocapitalism at its devastating endgame’.67 Here, Atwood seems to warn that there is a flipside to everything. Traits such as strength or independence might be tempered by humility in one instance and by arrogance in another. To maintain any ethics, one must constantly grapple with the fluctuations of one’s own mind. While this may be the case, MaddAddam depicts a world in which an emergent posthumanism arises because it is already interpellated by the environmental crisis – a crisis we can understand as hyperobject. Crake, the Crakers, Toby and other characters in this sense represent versions of a response to this crisis. One may elect to choose new behaviours, new ethics, new politics and so on, but, at a time of environmental crisis, no choice is involved. As Defalco proposes, ‘The Waterless Flood achieves, in

50  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought a … terrifying way, a radical “decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates” that Wolfe describes as part of the posthumanist project’.68 Interpellated by the landscape, the human mind, in MaddAddam, is reformed. Yet the novel does not indulge in the utopia of posthuman and ecological harmony that it might seem to depict. One feature of death-facing ecology as a thematic device, as is apparent across readings in this book, is the way it introduces to narratives a healthy layer of critique. As the novel progresses, its emergent posthumanism succeeds in overthrowing a simplistic view of a world in ecological harmony. Thus, as Defalco observes, Pigoons, Crakers, humans, and the hybrid species that will populate the future (if they have not been born already), share an interdependent vulnerability that does not facilitate a simplistic unification, but demands an acknowledgment of affective agencies, however ‘non-harmonious,’ for future survival.69 A new capacity manifests in the characters to act from a death-facing stance while recognising and dismissing layers of human weakness. For example, the Maddaddams often express their displeasure with Crake, denouncing his renegade act of genocide, or complaining about his refusal to collaborate on the design of the Crakers. Clues also emerge that the cult of God’s Gardeners was in some ways a sham. When someone suggests that Adam One would have ‘advocated clemency’ in relation to the Painballers, former Gardener, Amanda, responds, saying: ‘You weren’t there, you don’t know what they did to us. Me and Ren’ (M, 368). Yet the trauma of loss and survival, represented in the trilogy mainly by Snowman, appears not to impact greatly on these citizens of the future. Any looking back is limited to the odd grumble, while the overall mood is one of new collaborations and getting on with world-making. Other narrative episodes support this sense of getting to the ground of things. For example, Toby decides to revise the myths fed by Snowman to the Crakers about Crake, which had painted him as a mysterious but omnipresent God. Her account is not accusatory but, rather, tells it as it is. Crake ‘decided to make the Great Emptiness’, she tells them, because he wanted to clear humans away while there was ‘still an earth’ rather than leaving it until ‘all must die when there are none of these things left’ (M, 291). When the Crakers question this, asking whether humans might have been given a second chance, Toby tells them that humans had ‘already had lots of chances’ (M, 291). In this new posthuman world, dealing with matters from the ground up is repeatedly demonstrated as an effective means to collaborate, and in the trilogy’s closing pages this posthuman future looks set to continue.

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  51 Nonetheless, along with this grounding of an ecological death-­facing ethic, the trilogy’s ongoing question about language remains active, right up to the closing pages of this final novel – at which point it takes prominence. Language has been variously considered in the trilogy, as distinguishing us or not from the nonhuman, as performative, and as concealing, through grammatical functions, the real possibility of death. This difficulty of a tension between the discursive and the material is characteristic of all the novels I examine in this book. In subsequent chapters, I explore this from differing perspectives, establishing links between the idea of a material death-facing turn at a time of environmental crisis and that of language or writing as variously interrupting this turn. In MaddAddam, this difficulty materialises when Toby teaches Blackbeard to write, and, in keeping with the trilogy’s themes, it raises issues to do with ethics and the nonhuman. I devote the remainder of this section to exploring aspects of this development. The tension between the discursive and the material first arises in relation to the question of language and imagination in humans and nonhumans, a question sustained across the three books of the trilogy. The two versions of a reinstatement of the animal in the human, seen first in the Crakers and then in Snowman, offer a sense of the imagination as being not so much a thing as a function or a performance of living. The trilogy seems to suggest that the imagination was never just a human thing. Removing it in the Crakers, Crake ostensibly renders the human animal, yet their imagination later re-emerges. Similarly, Snowman is human or animal in accord with his response to his context. Becoming animal does not obfuscate his humanness, but is simply an aspect of it. In MaddAddam, however, the concept of ‘animal’ is finally transferred to descriptions of humans by other humans: those in the anarchic realm of the Pleeblands who see their enemies as ‘rats in a dump bin’ or ‘scrappy little bantams’ (M, 131), or the Maddaddams who struggle to see the Painballers as ‘people’ (M, 367; emphasis in original). ‘Animal’ and ‘person’ thus become markers of intent rather than signifiers of being, returning us to the question of the imagination and specifically its role in language. This question occupies a subtext layer throughout the final novel. It manifests when Toby first writes Blackbeard’s name on a notepad, suggesting that he shows it to Ren to see whether she will say his name out loud. The young Craker, who is astounded when this works, tells the rest of the Crakers that writing makes words appear in your head, just as the Pigoons can do but without the need to write. This indication that the Crakers and other nonhumans communicate telepathically might be variously read but also has resonance with contemporary efforts to theorise realities external to the human sphere. The world of animal, which Morton calls the ‘strange stranger’,70 rewrites the human subject as we are interpellated by it, depicting our arrival within a new sense of being.

52  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought Nonetheless, the narrative also depicts a sense of precariousness as the young Blackbeard takes over the roles of storytelling and journal-­ keeping from Toby (and previously Snowman). This poses a question about the functions of text and discourse in relation to this novel’s depiction of a posthuman, ecotopian future. It is Toby who alerts the reader to the possible issues with the advent of writing as a cultural practice. What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them? (M, 204) This mirrors Snowman’s anxiety about teaching the Crakers about guns and rape. However, from this point forward the underlying subtext about the dangers of writing begins to be incorporated into the narrative in a particular way. Rather than expounding on the difficulties Toby envisages, it is in the transmission of a legacy from Toby to Blackbeard that this subtext unfolds. As Blackbeard picks up the practice of writing, he activates the possibility of an ongoing iterability and the accumulation of an archive. Toby, meanwhile, relinquishes such endeavours. Despite her misgivings about teaching Blackbeard to write, she feels that she ought to record the events that are occurring for the sake of posterity. However, in this new posthuman world, her desire to do so fades. She makes excuses, such as having no paper, or finding it hard to think about the future rather than the present. But it is not just Toby: She’s noticed others slacking off as well. Standing still for no reason, listening though nobody’s talking. … It’s tempting to drift, as the Crakers seem to. They have no festivals, no calendars, no deadlines. No long term goals. (M, 136) One effect of this blurring between Crakers and humans is to further the sense of hybridisation within a developing posthumanism. The diminishing of ontological boundaries is depicted as a question, rather than a statement, about who we are at a time of environmental crisis. This blurring is anticipated by Bartosch in his reading of the first two novels, when he describes them as envisaging a ‘postnatural world’ in which dualist thinking is ‘dissolved’.71 This postnatural world is now manifesting, and, as Bartosch also anticipates, it becomes another kind of ‘hyperreality’ in which differences ‘do not matter’.72 Bartosch reminds us of Dana Phillips’ view that, in postnatural environments, ‘focus on personal consciousness is misplaced’; Phillips states: ‘Postmodern “experience” is not a psychological category but a collective one, though hardly in the utopian sense’.73 The effect on Toby of her arrival in a posthuman

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  53 world brings forward both a utopian celebration of the collective and a fading of the psychological self. The narrative, however, intercedes in this, since, as Toby fades, increasingly, the Crakers move further into focus. The Crakers effectively reverse the blurring process by bringing not just a different form of logic and engagement with the world but the possibility of a reinstatement of the human psychology of the self as well. The question left hanging, at the end of MaddAddam, is one about death-facing and the function of writing. Near the end of the novel, Toby dies, meaning that Blackbeard must witness her death and the loss it incurs. If human psychology hangs in a dichotomy between death-­ denial and death-facing, the potential for its reinstatement appears when Blackbeard takes over the narration of the novel’s ending. It may be a posthuman world, but its doors are open to whatever defines the writing process. Blackbeard’s name points to the possible piracy of the linguistic process within a posthuman world. That he sets out to inscribe the Book of Toby may suggest that Toby’s initial fears are validated. However, his actions are also guided by Toby, implicating her in the process. While Toby and Blackbeard each embody a version of a death-facing ontology, the performative practice of writing returns as a problematic device that, paradoxically, functions – as Crake said in The Year of the Flood – to conceal death. Any reading of Atwood’s depiction of a posthuman ecotopia therefore must account for her trilogy as both a story about the value of death-facing and a story about the way death-facing is always undermined. *** The three books of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy can be described as a response to the crisis of environment, which, together, portray a crisis of thought in terms of what constitutes humanity. They explore how we might understand ourselves, as a species, and demonstrate possibilities for revising our self-understanding, in order to better respond to the environmental crisis – and, indeed to the many problems and disparities of the contemporary world. In tackling these questions, the trilogy hones in on the human imagination as a site of crisis, a site of possibility and also as a site of warning. The trilogy’s incorporation of the theme of death-facing ecology allows it to do so to a variety of effects, illustrating the scope of this narrative device within environmental crisis fiction. The three novels appear to experiment, whether or not consciously so, with a range of theoretical ideas. Since the advent of poststructuralist thought, the (human) subject has undergone a rigorous appraisal, stripped of engrained discourses of exceptionalism and entitlement. Humans can no longer (necessarily) be described as ‘essentially’ superior to other beings, recognising instead that we have relegated ourselves to such a position within the course of history. That being the case, the

54  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought possibility to rethink ourselves also emerges. Accordingly, the trilogy employs the idea of death-facing to depict ways of being human that might be more ecologically viable. Atwood’s trilogy sketches out several theoretical shapes around this problem. It draws on differing ethical modes – the utilitarianism of Crake and the liberalism of the God’s Gardeners – as a means to explore the possibilities. It also conjures up an ethic reminiscent of Butlerian performativity. Where Butler emphasises the other by whom the subject is interpellated into ‘becoming human’, acquiring ‘responsibility’ in the process,74 at a time of environmental crisis this human is interpellated, rather, by the nonhuman, along the lines of Morton’s ‘ecological thought’. This depicts the way a sense of the material (world) enters the performative subject mode at a time of environmental crisis. By the third book, MaddAddam, a posthuman subject of ecological viability has emerged – presented, not as a fait accompli, but as an ongoing project for all. In the next chapter, I look more closely at the idea of the posthuman subject and consider the parallels between posthumanism and death-facing ecology.

Notes 1 Robert Fletcher, ‘Ecotourism after Nature: Anthropocene Tourism as a New Capitalist “Fix”’, Journal of Sustainable Tourism 27, no. 4 (2019): 522–535, 523. 2 Catriona Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies’, in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-­ Sandilands, Bruce Erickson and Eric Gable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 337. 3 For example, see Patrick Hutton, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 134. 4 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 145–146. 5 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004). 6 Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (London: Virago, 2010). 7 Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 8 Margaret Atwood, ‘Death by Landscape’, in Wilderness Tips, edited by Margaret Atwood (London: Virago, 1992), 109–129. 9 F. Hammill, Canadian Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 64. 10 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Virago, 2001, 1st published 1979), 170–186. 11 Ibid., 175. 12 M. T. Clark, ‘Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing”: Language, Logic and the Art of Fiction’, Modern Language Studies 13, no. 3 (1983): 3–15, 3. 13 J. Brookes Bouson, ‘“We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”: A Return to the Post-Apocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46, no. 9 (2011): 9–26, 9. 14 Gerry Canavan, ‘Hope, but Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’, Lit: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 23, no. 2 (2012): 138–159, 139;

Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought  55

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Roman Bartosch, ‘“Zero Time” and the Apocalypse: Postnatural Survival in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’, in EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction, edited by Roman Bartosch (New York, Rodopi, 2013), 221. Danette DiMarco, ‘Paradice Lost, Paradice Regained: Homo faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake’, Papers on Language and Literature 41, no. 2 (2005): 170–195; Bouson, ‘“We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”’, 9. Hannes Bergthaller, ‘Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the Year of the Flood’, English Studies 91, no. 7 (2010): 728–743, 735, 737. Bergthaller, ‘Housebreaking the Human Animal’, 739. Ibid., 741. Ibid.. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 106, 136. Ibid., 19, 22–26. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 19–26. Ibid., 19, 24. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 85–101. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 136. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing, 2002). Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 135. Ibid., 28–33. The term also implies the radical impossibility of knowing other. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 14–15, 17–19, 38–58. Autism and Asperger’s are commonly defined as involving difficulties with social interaction, social communication and social imagination. This is not to say that people with Autism or Asperger’s lack imagination. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 135. Bergthaller, ‘Housebreaking the Human Animal’, 735. George Gessert, ‘Oryx and Crake’, Leonardo 37, no. 5 (2004): 416–417, 416. Margaret Atwood, Life before Man (New York: Vintage, 1996), 19. Canavan, ‘Hope, but Not for Us’, 151. Ibid., 142. Cf. Wittgenstein: ‘Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit. The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption will not do for us what we have always tried to make it do. Is the riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one?’ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Project Gutenberg’s Tractatus, Logico-Philosophicus ­6.4311–6.4312, translated by C. K. Ogden (ebook, October 22, 1010), 88–89.

56  Crisis of Environment, Crisis in Thought 43 Stephen Dunning, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic’, Canadian Literature 186 (2005), 86–101. 4 4 Lee Rozelle, ‘Liminal Ecologies in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake’, Canadian Literature 206 (2010): 61–72, 69. 45 Bouson, ‘“We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone”’, 17. 46 Canavan, ‘Hope, but Not for Us’, 152. 47 Rozelle, ‘Liminal Ecologies’, 68. 48 Canavan (my emphasis), ‘Hope, but Not for Us’, 152. 49 Bergthaller, ‘Housebreaking the Human Animal’, 734. 50 Alex the Parrot can be Googled! 51 DiMarco, ‘Paradice Lost, Paradice Regained’, 170. 52 Rozelle, ‘Liminal Ecologies’, 61–62. 53 Butler, Giving an Account, 51. 54 Margaret Atwood, in K. Coyne, ‘Interview with Margaret Atwood’, Bookseller 5385 (6 May 2009), 20–21. 55 Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 16–49. 56 Ibid., 18. 57 Butler, Giving an Account, 8, 19, 24. 58 Branko Gorjup, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and Poetics’, in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, edited by C. A. Howells (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 142. 59 Butler, Giving an Account, 83–136. 60 Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 1997), 122. 61 Butler, Giving an Account, 101. 62 Rozelle, Liminal Ecologies, 62, 65. 63 Emmanuel Levinas, in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Philosophers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 57–58. 64 Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism, 137–138. 65 Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collѐge de France, 1975–1976, trans. by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 247. 66 Dana Phillips, ‘Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003–2013)’, in Cli-fi: A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 49–54, 54 67 Amelia Defalco, ‘MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 11, no. 3 (2017): 434. 68 Defalco, ‘MaddAddam, Biocapitalism’, 448 (referring to Cary Wolfe’s discussions on the posthuman; see Chapter 2 in this book). 69 Ibid., 449. 70 Morton, The Ecological Thought, 14–15. 71 Bartosch, ‘“Zero Time” and the Apocalypse’, 221. 72 Ibid., 231. 73 Dana Phillips, ‘Is Nature Necessary?’ The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Sheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 210; also cited in Bartosch, 231. 74 Butler, Giving an Account, 83–136.

2 Death-Denial, Death-Facing

A notable feature of the theme of death-facing ecology, as the first chapter has illustrated, is its synergy with contemporary thought, to include a range of theoretical ideas. Its presence in a given narrative seems to allow thought to shift from those ideas associated with death-denial to those associated, or potentially so, with death-facing – from the high theory movement’s emphasis on language, to an increasing emphasis on the material in contemporary thought. In depicting this shift, these narratives seem also to test and explore its possibilities and limitations. There are various ways to characterise this in theoretical terms, and I demonstrate several across the course of this book. One specific arena of contemporary theory, with which environmental crisis fiction often appears to engage, and with which death-facing ecology seems attuned, is that of posthumanism. As posthumanism is so complex a field, there is no single, unequivocal definition of the posthuman. Moreover, its differing definitions are often in conflict with each other. One can say with a degree of certainty that ‘the posthuman’ refers to the human subject as it might be conceived after humanism. Even then, aspects of the human – inevitably so – and of humanism linger in the concept of the posthuman. Despite, this, and perhaps because of it, posthumanism is a useful concept for reading some environmental crisis fiction, which – as seen with Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy in the previous chapter – often questions inherited conceptions of the human as it explores its capacities to respond to the environmental crisis. At the same time, posthuman subjects are integrated with their (human and nonhuman) world. This is important, since, to say that the roots of the crisis are anthropogenic is not to say that all humans individually are equally culpable; human societies are complex and operate via systems of power. While the posthuman can be variously theorised, its appearance in fiction is more by way of a touchstone for experimentation, producing an array of narrative possibilities that reach beyond human-centric ideals of the subject and its world. Noting the complex interplay of humanism within posthumanism, Cary Wolfe describes posthumanism as coming before humanism in the sense that ‘it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human

58  Death-Denial, Death-Facing being in not just its biological but also its technical world’, yet as coming after humanism in that it ‘names a historical moment in which the decentring of the human by its imbrications in technical [and other] networks is increasingly impossible to ignore’.1 This definition evokes both our inherent (previously overlooked) participation in our technical and biological worlds, hence our capacity to utilise/harm them, and the contemporary realisation that we are entangled in these worlds – a realisation triggered by the effects of our utilising and harming. Wolfe’s definition chimes well with the narrative concerns in the fiction I discuss, since it depicts a contemporary moment of realisation (within the historical-cultural domain of the modern West) that, as a species, we are not exceptional but are one kind among many. I base discussions in this chapter on Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism. I align this definition of posthumanism with death-facing (as ecologically viable, in contrast with death-denial), based on the way posthumanism signals the death of the humanist subject. This is apparent in imageries of the posthuman in environmental crisis fiction, where it satirises human practices and behaviours responsible for the crisis, tests out posthuman subjectivities as a potential means of response to the crisis, and even experiments with posthuman aesthetics as a means to ponder the gaps between humans, texts and the material world that exceeds us. This pondering, within the narratives of environmental crisis fiction, is germane, since human subjectivity or any subjectivity is never clear-cut, especially when considered in relation to its world. Perhaps for this reason, the death of the humanist subject, in both fiction and in theory, is not absolute. This suggests that the subject of humanist thought might possess some helpful as well as problematic aspects, as depicted in the narratives of this fiction. This makes for a rich interrogation of the human subject and its world, as its weaknesses and strengths and its possibilities are explored in fictional form. Another -ism pertinent to this discussion is that of transhumanism, which refers to a condition of transition towards the posthuman (broadly defined) and to a certain kind of future towards which it aspires. I base my understanding of transhumanism, in this chapter, on Cary Wolfe’s conception of transhumanism as ‘an intensification of humanism’, 2 and on Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s statement that, according to the transhumanist vision, humans (via genetic engineering, nanotechnology, etc.) will ‘transform themselves into … “persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual and psychological capacity, self-programming, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals”’.3 Transhumanism’s emphasis on radical life-extension can be considered as a form of death-denial. Thus, imageries of the transhuman can be paralleled with imageries of the posthuman as a means to contrast death-denial and death-facing; at least, such is my appraisal of these contrasting imageries as I discover them in the fiction I analyse.

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  59 This chapter accordingly considers the way death-denial and death-­ facing play out in environmental crisis fiction through imageries of the human, the transhuman and the posthuman. This allows fiction to interrogate the ecology of the subject through established theorisations of these -isms. It is not necessarily the case that this fiction fully settles on the posthuman as its ultimate subject, although it seems to find much of what it seeks in such a figure. The previous chapter illustrated how the posthuman imageries in the third book of Atwood’s trilogy, MaddAddam, provide a site for ongoing interrogation as well as for hope. Indeed, thoughts of the posthuman often turn out to be more about rethinking the human of humanism – perhaps because we are and will remain human. This engenders a sense of reinvesting in the idea of being human while learning something about how to do things ­differently – a venture that fiction is ideally placed to undertake. Roy Scranton encapsulates this sentiment as follows: In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality, and a new relationship to the deep polyglot traditions of human culture that carbon-based capitalism has vitiated through commodification and assimilation. Over and against capitalism, we will need a new way of thinking our collective existence. We need a new vision of who ‘we’ are. We need a new humanism – a newly philosophical humanism, undergirded by renewed attention to the humanities.4 Yet, despite this contemporary quest for a new philosophical humanism, the humanist subject in environmental crisis fiction remains a problematised figure. By tracing this fiction’s uses of humanism, transhumanism, posthumanism (and other -isms), one can analyse the ways in which it variously positions humanity for possible futures, alongside its depictions of humanity’s erroneous ways. In this chapter, I discuss imageries of humanism, transhumanism and posthumanism as they appear in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007).5 Winterson’s novel depicts a world (or worlds) in which humanity is intent on pursuing profit and immortality, regardless of the cost to the nonhuman world. This conjures up a death-denying and transhumanist ideology. Alongside this, the novel evokes an ecology of death-­ facing through the figure of the posthuman, which it interweaves with a question about language. We make sense of death through language, its structures and our related mental processes. Therefore, to extent that life has meaning in relation to death, life is negotiated through linguistic and discursive means. This poses a problem at a time of environmental crisis, when we are forced to see that, within the cultural terms of the

60  Death-Denial, Death-Facing modern West, if not as a species, we have been viewing the world from within our own self-contained bubble. This moment of realisation is the moment of the posthuman, as Winterson depicts. As she demonstrates, the advent of environmental crisis challenges not just poststructuralism but philosophy itself, most recently taking philosophy into the domain of post-philosophy, giving rise to the material and the speculative. In order to delve deeper into Winterson’s depictions of the posthuman and of death-facing, I extend discussions in this chapter with a close consideration of the works of Cary Wolfe and of Karen Barad, both of whom offer detailed examinations of the meanings of the posthuman. Although these two speculative materialist thinkers take rather different approaches, their work also overlaps in certain ways, and comes together to form a useful consideration of the strengths and limitations of the posthuman. This helps us consider the way Winterson’s figure of the posthuman is both elevated and undermined. The Stone Gods explores a key challenge posed by the posthuman: that of how to think beyond the human. The posthuman, as depicted in the novel, redefines the human in relation to entrenched dualistic and anthropocentric modes of thought. It ties this ‘thinking beyond’ to death-facing, which it achieves through characterisation and plot. Utilising a narrative structure of overlapping stories, the novel depicts a mechanistic humanity as failing to address its mistakes and, consequently, repeatedly destroying pristine worlds. Each of the novel’s three main sections is a story in its own right and is also woven into, thus overlapping, the others. The first story depicts a transhumanist deferral of death’s rebound upon humanity. Humanity’s survival in an environmentally depleted world has become untenable but plans to relocate to another planet look set to safeguard the future – at least for now. The threat to humanity, as a result of humanity’s harms to the planet, is thereby avoided, or potentially so. This deferral of death, early in the novel, is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘making live’ rather than ‘letting live’, wherein death is placed on a plane of avoidance.6 This imagery of death-denial forms a backdrop for the novel’s subsequent call for a reengagement with death, which it depicts via an emergent posthumanism. This pivoting from death-denial to death-facing is presented largely through the actions, ideas and interactions of the novel’s two main characters, Billie and Spike (aka Billy and Spikkers in the second story), who I take to represent, loosely, the subject categories of ‘human’ and ‘posthuman’. Spike is a Robo sapiens (advanced artificial life form) who functions as a kind of oracle throughout the novel. Representing and propounding a range of posthumanist ideals, she also contests human exceptionalism in its various forms. Spike is reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s figure of the Cyborg and depicts a performative and quantum posthuman ontology that has echoes of the work of Karen Barad.7 Spike’s posthumanism

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  61 is also gradually and partially interrupted, mainly in relation to language and aspects of human subjectivity. Discovering poetry, she becomes drawn into the intricacies of human emotion, and from thereon becomes increasingly human-like. This development coincides with her election of ‘love’ as the signifier of her posthuman solution. Here, Spike, in her quest to assign death-facing to the human subject, homes in on language and story as an aspect of being human. As the novel goes on, however, love proves an unstable means for the transformations she envisages. This destabilising takes place, however, in the figure of Billie, to whom Spike directs her ‘love’ solution. Narrator, Billie, is the (human) undercover rebel who falls in love with Spike. Although Billie constantly reflects on and takes on much of Spike’s posthuman philosophising, as the novel goes on, she becomes increasingly unable to assume the subjecthood of the decentred posthumanism, which the novel, through Spike, recommends. This is most strongly depicted in the closing pages of the third story, as she withdraws from all networks and steps into death. This death is contrasted with Spike’s own death, which is very much a posthuman death and concludes each of the first two stories.8 Hence, while the novel seems (mainly through Spike) to recommend a posthuman solution, it retracts or abandons this solution in the closing pages. Billie dies, yet her death appears not to fulfil Spike’s posthuman conception of an ecological death-facing. This difficulty seems tied to an ongoing entanglement in the interior human subject and its language processes – a difficulty that the novel, despite its many innovations to the contrary, nonetheless falls back on. In approaching this problem of an emergent yet unstable posthumanism, I pursue two key matters. The first is the way the novel appears to append the problem of human death-denial to ‘trans’ and ‘post’ humanisms, depicting the transhuman as alienated from death and the posthuman as able to face it. The second is the way it appears to then complicate this pattern by leaning back into humanism where it underlies ‘trans’ and ‘post’ humanist modes. This raises a question as to what it is about humanism that leads to its re-emergence in the posthuman. As N. Katherine Hayles notes, the posthuman, ‘like the human’, is a ‘historically specific and contingent term rather than a stable ontology’.9 If the posthuman figure, in The Stone Gods, reconceptualises the human subject at a time of environmental crisis, it seems that a concern with what it means to be human (or humanist) retains some influence at this time of reconceptualisation. One can therefore read The Stone Gods as sifting through the ways we think of ourselves as being human, identifying which of these aspects might be viable in a future ecology and which might be abandoned in favour of a posthuman subjecthood. The tensions between differing categories of being human, in The Stone Gods, might also be symptomatic of concerns in Winterson’s work more generally. As her first environmental novel, The Stone Gods represents a

62  Death-Denial, Death-Facing shift from an established pattern of focus on the interior human subject, towards a focus on the exterior (environment) of that subject’s field. Such a shift may contribute to the tensions that appear between humanist, transhumanist and posthumanist ideals, whereby a posthuman emphasis on the outside of thought appears difficult to sustain in narrative form. Stylistically postmodern, Winterson’s fiction also sustains a glimpse of the modern, which, while adding to the richness of potential for analysis, may suggest possible aspects of the partial deviation, within the late stages of the narrative of The Stone Gods, from the posthumanism it mainly recommends. Thus, as the novel addresses a contemporary concern with human responses to the environmental crisis, prior conceptions of human subjecthood appear at times to vie with emergent possibilities. Yet we could also say that the return to the interiority of the self in the closing pages of The Stone Gods is a reference to Winterson’s oeuvre and all she has so far said about humans and our inner workings. One question of interest to scholars is whether The Stone Gods ultimately takes a positive or negative view of humanity’s capacity to turn things around. Approaches vary, and some focus more on the novel’s typically Wintersonian aspects (love, sexuality, queering, gender and difference), and others on its innovations towards wider (historical, social, political and environmental) concerns. Hope Jennings, although critical of its rejection of the present in favour of a ‘temporally distant (i.e. non-existent) and holistically natural world’, reads the novel as opening up ‘new narratives’ and offering a ‘genuine passage toward beginning again differently’.10 Abigail Rine sees the novel as pessimistic with regard to the chances of our choosing to intervene in our own destructive cycles, yet sees the queered space opened up in the novel’s poetics as transformative.11 Susana Onega associates the novel’s overflowing margins and its rejection of spatiotemporal limits with a Levinasian turn to other, seeing this as reflective of ‘the traumatic character of our contemporary age’.12 She relates the space this opens up to Peter Ouspensky’s ‘doctrine of possibilities’, or the potential to choose a new course of action, via which old forms of repetition literally ‘disappear’.13 For Onega, this is followed through in the closing pages where Billie’s death offers the ‘dream of a new start from the Edenic garden’.14 I also read the novel as pointing to new possibilities, particularly the possibility of a posthuman future, but find this optimism to be undermined by Billie’s death at the close of the novel. I base this on the way Billie’s death is contrasted with the posthumanism of Spike’s deaths. Adeline Johns-Putra also questions such optimism and similarly relates this to the problem of Billie’s death. Johns-Putra draws attention to the way Billie’s death is figured as ‘filial return’ and points to the ramifications of this ‘ultimate act of return’, given that the novel, throughout, associates repetition with ‘a failure of the imagination’.15 What one makes of Billie’s death may therefore have implications for how one reads the novel as a whole.

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  63 To discuss death-facing ecology in relation to posthumanism is to locate it at the intersection between poststructuralist thought and subsequent debates over the real and corresponding questions of the human and nonhuman. It is here that I turn to the performative posthumanism described in Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) and to Wolfe’s more recent What Is Posthumanism? (2012). Wolfe grounds his posthumanism in a conservation of Derrida’s logic of the gramme, which he theorises through second-order systems theory. This has some affinity, as I intend to demonstrate, with the new materialism of Barad; however, Barad replaces a reliance on language with an emphasis on ‘matter’ that ‘matters’.16 Both scholars in their own ways reach towards what Raoni Padui – referring to the aims of Quentin M ­ eillassoux­ – ­describes as a desire to ‘reconnect philosophy to the “great outside” of the inhuman and ultimately contingent world’.17 The struggle to achieve this, in philosophy today, creates what remains something of a collision between poststructuralism’s conceptions of (human) language, and the unthinkable thingness of the world beyond the human. This difficulty feeds into various workings of the posthuman and the related question of what remains of the human in the posthuman.18 In What Is Posthumanism? Wolfe outlines a correspondence between Derrida’s notions of ‘trace’ and ‘iterability’, and Niklas Luhmann’s reading of second-order systems theory.19 Wolfe considers systems theory as a textual form whereby meaning is conferred in ways distinctly exterior to the human mental process, even where the human subject is positioned as such a system. This subject also has a relation with death. Central to the book, Wolfe states, is the key Derridean argument, ‘that iterability “introduces into self-presence from the beginning all the impurity putatively excluded from it,” a “corrupting” and “contaminating” force that “marks the essential and ideal limit of all pure idealization”’. 20 The decentring function of deconstruction, described here, is next approached, in Wolfe’s reading, from the other side (as it were). Wolfe turns his focus to the reconstructive nature of systems theory, which he sees as being gestured towards – although not described as such – in Derrida’s deconstruction. The reconstructive nature of systems theory, Wolfe goes on to emphasise, helps us to see that the ‘disclosure of paradox does not in itself threaten the autopoiesis of social systems’.21 Rather, if we view the iterable events of the ‘trace’ in terms of systems theory, thus enfolding the radical heterogeneity of possibilities, such events function to open up the field of decidability. Or, put more simply, a system responds to the complexity of its environment by creating complexes for selection. And, because Wolfe specifies meaning as existing in ‘the event’, meaning is therefore stated to occur within the ‘continuing actualization of potentialities’.22 A compatibility with Barad’s work appears at this point. Wolfe further points to Luhmann’s claim that ‘humans don’t communicate’. 23 Communication is not some psychic facility of the human mind, Wolfe

64  Death-Denial, Death-Facing argues, nor is it reliant on language; rather, it is ‘communication’ (the event) ‘that communicates’. 24 Such an idea works from but also extends beyond Derrida’s approach, allowing meaning to appear to us, rather than always occurring in us. This further makes it possible to ‘link the complexities of meaning … to their biological, social and historical conditions of emergence and transformation’. 25 Barad’s work has some correspondences with Wolfe’s but arises out of a quite different framework. Her work is extraordinary in scope, theorising, it seems, the whole universe. This also makes it a fruitful source of ideas for readers, writers and critics of books such as The Stone Gods, which similarly takes the (idea of the) whole of reality as its starting point. Barad is trained in theoretical particle physics and in Meeting the Universe Halfway she makes her starting point the work of Niels Bohr, whose quantum model of the atom won him the Nobel Prize. 26 Barad produces from this an ambitious reworking of the ways we understand ourselves and the world. She formulates an ‘agential realist’ ontology, which results in her posthumanist performative account of discursive practices. 27 For Barad, matter matters, and all discursive practices – by which she means ‘specific material (re)configurings of the world through which the determination of boundaries, properties and meanings is differentially enacted’ – are forms of matter in its becoming.28 Barad uses the term ‘intra-action’ (as differentiated from ‘interaction’) to explain agency as ‘an enactment’ rather than ‘something that someone or something has’; hence, ‘distinct agencies do not precede but rather emerge through their intra-action’. 29 She stresses that agencies ‘are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’.30 Crucial to this is her notion of the ‘agential cut’, which is what ‘enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy’.31 Put more simply, it is through specific intra-actions that relata-within-phenomena emerge. Relata, for Barad, do not pre-exist relations.32 Although the distinctions between Wolfe’s work and Barad’s are plain, certain correspondences also arise. Barad’s highly sophisticated account of ‘performative becoming’ seems gestured towards, although not developed, in Wolfe’s work. In particular, Barad’s ‘resolution within the indeterminacy’ – the ‘agential cut’ that is central to Barad’s approach – is comparable to, if more spatially derived than, Wolfe’s description of the ‘event’, which he perceives as external and out of which meaning arises. Wolfe also maintains a textual logic that Barad simply releases into a notion of ‘discursive material practices’, saying that, language ‘has been granted too much power’.33 This problem of how much power is – or ought to be – granted to language remains a major question for environmentalist (and other) theorists today, including Barad and Wolfe, who seek to theorise beyond it. In Wolfe’s case, his theorising beyond nonetheless sustains a textual form. He focuses on a compatibility between

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  65 Derridean conceptions of literature and the nonhuman complexes of second-­order systems theory, in effect assigning to language a role that is not wholly human – this being in any case, arguably, Derrida’s intention too. Hence, while Barad insists that we need to get away from the habit of seeing the universe as grammatically structured, Wolfe’s approach seems to repeat such a habit. Nonetheless, this distinction between Barad and Wolfe begins to blur where one takes Barad as rejecting either naive forms of representationalism or the more extreme interpretations of Derrida’s conception of the text, and where one simultaneously notes the strict exteriority of Wolfe’s thesis. As Dietrich Schwanitz observes, both systems theory and the logic of the gram (or deconstruction) each ‘regard their fundamental operation (i.e., writing or communication, respectively) as an independent process that constitutes the subject rather than lets itself be constituted by it’.34 Hence what Wolfe shows is how the logic of the gram might pattern ‘the event’ through which Barad’s ‘discursive material practices’ move. In the end, Wolfe’s project and that of Barad share some important similarities, gesturing towards each other in sometimes surprisingly intimate ways, despite working from quite different frameworks. Their differing conceptions of language and text are illustrative of the continuing slipperiness of the language problem within a material turn of post-theory generally. Out of this arises the further point that to theorise beyond language is not always to raise a polemic against high theory, since this theorising beyond language occurs within, as well as outside of, poststructuralist thought. The ideas that link Wolfe’s and Barad’s work, along with the theoretical tensions that emerge between them, are also illustrative of aspects of the often-undecided figure of the posthuman. These tensions revolve around such questions as what role language plays for the decentred subject, what implications the reconfiguring of the subject and object has for agency and identity, and what happens at the horizons of our knowing. Such questions sit in a borderland between material and abstract domains – a borderland within which both Wolfe and Barad’s work operates. Wolfe sustains but dehumanises a textual form of communication; Barad, differently, denies such distinctions, saying that her ‘framework for understanding’ the role of ‘the human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices’ moves considerations ‘beyond the well-worn debates that pit constructivism against realism, agency against structure, and idealism against materialism’.35 The resultant de-­ focalising from such polemics is thus achieved in Barad’s work without falling into such traps as what she calls ‘mere intersubjectivity’.36 This leads me to consider a concern emphasised by Timothy Morton: that of the danger of a horizontalising or erasure of differences that threatens to appear in the posthuman. Morton sees the posthuman as ‘all too readily dematerialising the nonhuman’, thus as ‘disastrously’ collapsing

66  Death-Denial, Death-Facing ‘the profound alterity of the strange stranger’.37 In Morton’s view, we can begin to know (or think we know) the unknowable, posing a risk for the posthuman whereby its decentring – which ought to generate an ethical levelling – instead newly endangers the nonhuman.38 New kinships switch from failure to recognise to false recognition. Barad sees her ‘agential separability’ as ‘the ontological condition for objectivity’; thus, objectivity ‘is not sacrificed with the downfall of metaphysical individualism’.39 Rather, ontology is strengthened so that erasure of difference is avoided. Here, the image of the (human) posthuman might legitimately sustain a human ontology, while its decentring from human exceptionalism is at the same time sustained. This condition for the emergence of the object is also seen in the autopoietic systems Wolfe’s theory relies on, for these systems, as Hannes Bergthaller describes them, ‘shut out the overwhelming complexity of the environment so as [to] elaborate … islands of negentropy’.40 The question of how much of this object remains within the decentred posthuman is one of the most pressing questions for posthumanism. It appears too, therefore, as a predicament that characterises its representations. Certainly, it is a question that seems inexorably to infringe upon the possibility of a posthuman solution in The Stone Gods. The posthuman, while reflecting a disavowal of humanism’s arrogance and anthropocentrism, also poses some dangers, even to the point of undermining the very possibilities for philosophising. As humans whose conceptions of the world exist in language, how might we, or, for that matter, might we self-conceptualise where these two identificatory categories, ‘human’ and ‘language’, are placed under erasure? In current scholarship, the need not just to answer but to also move beyond this question underlies the speculative turn in Continental philosophy. Some scholars nonetheless insist on the human as starting point. For example, Morton remarks, with Slavoj Žižek, that, ideally ‘the deconstructive encounter between the human and the nonhuman or inhuman is the human’41; while Claire Colebrook looks towards a ‘highly human inhumanity’, whereby we realise ‘both that there is no guarantee that we will be human and that it is human to forget oneself’.42 Crucially, to make the human the starting point is not necessarily to place the human at the centre (of life, the world, etc.). Bergthaller explains this well, saying that any autopoietic system ‘can only refer to its environment by simultaneously referring to itself’43; in other words, the self is understood as always implicated, but this need not amount to its elevation. The tension between two critical urges – to think the beyond of the human and to think the human in its beyond – is thus one means to understand the human/posthuman tension that increasingly impacts on the narrative of The Stone Gods. If death-facing ecology sits at the point of conceptual rift between poststructuralism’s abstractions and subsequent efforts to conceptualise the real, Barad’s notion of discursive-material practices indicates how death-facing might enable the posthuman to recover the material while

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  67 sustaining its discursivity. Wolfe further refines our understanding of this by designating two deaths in the posthuman, one of which is discursive but no longer human. Discussing what he calls Derrida’s ‘logic of double finitude’, he suggests that, in addition to the material death (mortality) that we share with the nonhuman, the second form of finitude is a ‘not being able’, or a ‘radical passivity’.44 This finitude derives, he says, from ‘the fundamental exteriority and materiality of meaning and communication itself’, which includes ‘any form of semiotic marking and iterability to which both humans and nonhuman animals are subject in a trace structure’.45 Such a structure ‘exceeds and encompasses the human/animal difference’ as well as ‘“the life/death relation” itself’, meaning that this ‘radical passivity’ cannot be erased by any ‘analytic of finitude’ or ‘existential being-toward-death’.46 Thus, it is not just material death or mortality that is shared by human and nonhuman alike, but a finitude that in effect renders all talk of death discursive, while at the same time devolving communication and meaning (discourse) from the interior self. If death-facing in Winterson’s posthuman is viewed both as an acceptance of mortality and as a ‘radical passivity’, then the posthuman solution must contain an acknowledgement that it has no solution as such (all solutions being anthropological and thus discursive). That being the case, this posthuman might declare that it embodies such an acknowledgement as the solution. Or – and this is precisely the tendency we see in Winterson’s and other fictional representations of the posthuman – it may instead retract into its centre, reclaiming the security of humanist discourses. I conceptualise the idea of death-facing ecology this way as I explore the posthuman figure of Spike, who largely escapes dualisms, suggesting something more like the ‘post-dualistic process-ontological’ posthuman of Francesca Ferrando’s discussions.47 With this, Spike also illustrates a non-dualistic death-facing ecology and, at the same time, provides a site to think through the complexities involved in defining the human in its relation to its world as a task of our time, meaning that all definitions remain contingent. The central storyline of The Stone Gods is carried across the novel’s three main parts through the characters of Billie and Spike and their differing incarnations. The overarching story is one of humanity’s repeated destruction of pristine worlds, and the cause and the means to resolution of such failures is explored as an ongoing dialogue between Spike, Billie and the reader. The novel’s ingenuity lies in the way it presents reality as quantum. Since (as Spike tells Billie) ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was’ (105), all that is needed for everything to change is some form of intervention. This is supported by the narrative both structurally, though its overlapping stories, and stylistically, in its poetics, which invite an opening up to the new. Accordingly, the two questions at the heart of the novel are: What form might this intervention take (Spike calls it ‘love’), and why – given that we (humanity) could so easily do so – do we not choose to intervene in our own repeating behaviours?

68  Death-Denial, Death-Facing The three stories that make up the novel each depicts a repetition of this story of humanity’s hubris, and each story ends with a death – that of Spike in the first story, Spikkers in the second and Billie in the third. The first story, Planet Blue, depicts the late stages of human life on Orbus, a technology-driven world presided over by three dominant powers, among which the Central Power (the dominant political West) monopolises control over the planned relocation to Planet Blue. Spike is the Robo sapiens with whom rebel Billie Crusoe falls in love. The second story, Easter Island, offers a retelling of the Easter Island myth, depicting the felling of the last tree on Easter Island by its indigenous population. Spike is recast as the male Spikkers, who intimately befriends Billy when he is marooned on the island. The third story in two parts, Post-3 War and Wreck City, returns to an alternative future on Orbus, where, following a nuclear attack, political collapse and corporate takeover have led to acute social division and violent confrontation. Spike resumes Robo sapiens form and is again placed in intimate connection with a female and human Billie, who is employed by the corporation MORE to teach Spike what it means to be human.

Planet Blue The novel’s initial portrayal of death-denial occurs in Planet Blue, appearing in a narrative space created by the deferral of humanity’s otherwise inevitable demise. Portrayed in this space is a critique of late capitalism on Planet Orbus. The Central Power intends to relocate its citizens to Planet Blue, since all possibilities for human survival will expire in fifty years due to planetary exploitation. This idea that humanity can simply start again on another planet places death on a perpetual plane of avoidance. Planet Blue depicts a corresponding transhumanist drive for perfection and immortality, amounting to a dumbing down the population in the interests of monopolising corporations. The Central Power regulates the well-being of its citizens, and life is all about pleasure and the lure of unending youth and beauty. Bio-enhancements ensure the perfect body, while genetic fixing keeps everyone young. Even happiness is structured into the system, with Enhancement and – if necessary – Enforcement Officers to attend to those for whom happiness does not flourish. Yet, as narrator Billie Crusoe explains, ‘making everyone young and beautiful also made us all bored to death with sex’ (31). Disillusionment has become rife, while the encroaching end of planetary capacities is pressurising the system. Despite having ‘made itself rich’ by ‘polluting the rest of the world’ (37), the Central Power also blames the Eastern Caliphate and SinoMoscow Pact for ongoing planetary degradation, while relying on surveillance to manage its citizens. Depicted here is a dystopian transhumanism, which renders its own desire for perfection and immortality unsustainable, both in relation to internal and external affairs and to the well-being of the planetary home.

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  69 This is of no concern to the Central Power, who, through its associations with MORE has the financial and technological resources to abandon the planet and colonise a new one, so that life (for those who can afford it) may continue. In this section I discuss the way this first story brings Spike’s posthumanism into play alongside this dystopian transhumanism. I also draw attention to the beginnings of a narrative interrogation that explores an unfinished humanism and its relation to the posthuman. In the course of the novel, this lingering humanism eventually comes to undermine, without necessarily opposing, Spike’s posthuman solution. Important to this first story, as to the novel, is an indeterminacy of meanings, where such meanings relate to the ways we conceptualise ourselves as subjects. This is particularly relevant to distinctions and crossovers between transhumanism, posthumanism and humanism. This indeterminacy can be illustrated through a consideration of the problem of freedom. Freedom of course has associations with humanist discourses and the liberal stance. This makes it a key component of transhumanism, where transhumanism is understood as an intensified version of humanism. The transhumanist vision depicted in The Stone Gods includes the supposition that humans can overcome ‘the constraints of the natural world’ (to recall Maurice Cranston).48 Citizens of the Central Power strive to achieve this through various bodily manipulations, even seeking to overcome the ultimate constraint of death, both through the genetic fixing of age and through the planned relocation to another world. In this first story, Planet Blue, however, such a freedom is represented only to be undermined. Citizens become bored with the perfection of youth and the all-important relocation to Planet Blue fails, since the mission to prepare the way accidentally renders the planet inhospitable for centuries to come. The freedom of immortality is thus shown to be a dream that fills the pockets of corporations, rather than fulfilling the lives of citizens. This is contrasted in the novel with a reverse form of freedom, which begins to form a subtext layer of alternative subject positions. Here (again, recalling Cranston), humanity seeks to be freed, not from the constraints of ‘nature’, but from those of ‘civilisation’.49 The presence of this second freedom alongside the first might remind us of Lewis Hinchman’s view, that humanism ‘does not need to denigrate nature and treat it as a sphere of heteronomy in order to validate freedom’; rather a capacity for freedom is what might ‘liberate us’ through both ‘self-­ reflection and political deliberation’ ‘from reification and blind, fate-like processes’.50 If freedom can mean either the capacity to release ourselves from entrenchment in destructive behaviours or the freedom to indulge in them, then ‘freedom’ is a slippery concept and easily misconstrued. A similar slipperiness is apparent in the way Planet Blue blurs the -isms of humanism and transhumanism, before contrasting them with a posthumanist perspective; moreover, it is apparent throughout the novel, as meanings continue to be blurred through to the closing pages.

70  Death-Denial, Death-Facing Accordingly, the interplay of transhumanism and posthumanism is complicated from the outset by a competing humanism and related questions. This is seen in the character of Pink McMurphy. Near the beginning of Planet Blue, she depicts a transhuman imagery as we find her appealing for the right to reverse her age to thirteen because her husband is attracted to young girls. But then she wins a place on the space mission and begins to display some unexpected strengths of character. While a degree of anthropocentrism lingers in her, for example she insists on relating to Spike based on her nonhuman constitution, Pink also begins to emit the kinds of qualities that Hinchman identifies as characteristic of the early environmentalist movement, ‘notions of individuality, dignity, autonomy and self-government’, which he also describes as humanistic.51 Pink’s attitude towards the pristine, nonhuman landscape of Planet Blue gradually becomes less disdainful as she familiarises herself with it. When the mission accidentally destroys the new planet’s biospheric stability, Pink outdoes Billie in her ability to cope emotionally with the foreknowledge of imminent death. This linking of humanist characteristics with death-facing aligns it with a particular understanding of freedom (the freedom to adopt a death-facing stance); moreover, it raises the point that pragmatic death-facing is a feature of secular humanisms too, marking a point of distinction between humanism and its amplification in the figure of the transhuman. This depiction of Pink, thus, invites a question as to whether humanism is the problem or -­centric behaviour more generally. If this episode with Pink raises a question early in the novel about the human in the posthuman, it nonetheless becomes peripheral as the posthuman comes to take centre stage. The transhumanist assumptions on which the Central Power builds its hegemonic forces are quickly overlaid with Spike’s posthumanist philosophising and the boundary-crossing love between Spike and Billie. Built by the Central Power to accompany space missions, at the start of the novel Spike is undergoing an information-­drain prior to being dismantled. Billie is invited to interview her about Planet Blue, and the two of them quickly form an understanding. Robo sapiens are programmed – Spike tells Billie once they have disabled transmission – to evolve. Spike then asks Billie to help her escape. The connection formed between these two at this point is sustained throughout the novel, not only across boundaries of gender and the ontological categories of human and machine, but across Billie and Spike’s different incarnations and, thus, across boundaries of life and death too. The continuity produced in this sustained bond reinforces one of the key principles of Spike’s posthumanism: that of the universe as imprint. ‘You are part of the imprint’, she tells Billie; ‘it imprints you, you imprint it. You cannot separate yourself from the imprint, and you can never forget it. It isn’t a “something”, it is you’ (105). Even death, it seems, does not interrupt this continuity – nor does death apply only to biological

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  71 beings. Among the ship’s crew’s stories about planets trashed and abandoned, one is that of the White Planet, which still exists as ‘a raging death’, a planet that has both ‘been killed’ and yet ‘rages to be dead’ (62). This quantum continuity has no linear existence. It might be thought, rather, in terms of the iterability Wolfe designates to his reconstructive posthumanism, while the inseparability of self and imprint Spike speaks of might remind us of the performative becoming described by Barad, whereby agencies emerge through their intra-action. Illustrated in these refusals of the life/death binary, in the novel’s imagery, is a reference to meaning’s exteriority, demonstrating how the narrative reaches, with the speculative realists, towards the desire to ‘reconnect philosophy to the “great outside” of the inhuman and ultimately contingent world’.52 Spike both expounds and embodies this performative posthumanism, while its emergence alongside the backdrop of a dystopian transhumanism invites the reader to acknowledge the moment, described by Wolfe, at which ‘humanity’s imbrications in networks become impossible to ignore’.53 Spike maintains this discourse of posthuman performativity right through to her death, which she faces with complete equanimity – death being, for her, a form of recycling. Thus, her death is itself another iteration of performative becoming, her life forming an indelible imprint, producing a posthuman death-facing that seems wholly to overlay the death-denial of a more transhumanist mode. Spike proposes that humanity might achieve this posthuman performativity, and thus halt further cycles of destructive behaviour, through her intervention of ‘love’. According to Spike, this is a ‘quantum universe’, which is ‘neither random nor determined’ (75). Thus, if ‘love’ were to enact the ‘resolution within the phenomenon’ (Barad’s ‘agential-cut’), destruction might be replaced with new and reconstructive ways of being. Thus, Spike says to Billie, love ‘is an experiment’: ‘What happens next is always surprising’ (81). Viewed in relation to the problem of death-­ denial, ‘love’ can seem a plausible solution. In the first two stories, it is the strength of Spike’s love – her love for Billie, but also her love for life and the world in all its complexity – that enables her to accept death’s inevitability. If this performative love is what enables a posthuman death-facing, then love must, accordingly, overcome the destruction to which death-­ denial gives rise. Jennings takes such a stance, seeing ‘love’ in The Stone Gods as being that which is ‘capable of resisting the totalizing claims of a society’s internalized death-drive and its repression of difference’.54 Love and death are also, of course, inexorably linked in the human psyche. However, for all that love might seem an enticing solution, it is also problematic. Given love’s unreliability – not to mention the scale of the task love is applied to here – such a solution might appear naive. The novel’s undermining of Spike’s love solution is subtle and incomplete, appearing mainly as a questioning of the -isms by which we understand the ontological human. This questioning first appears through

72  Death-Denial, Death-Facing the character of Pink, who depicts an ability to face death that seems to strengthen the ontological self. Such a death-facing pits humanism against posthumanism as a feature of both. We might liken it to Barad’s idea that ‘agential separability’ is the ‘ontological condition for objectivity’, since Pink’s active and agential acceptance of death more successfully sustains the self as distinct object than does Billie’s more passive death-facing in the novel’s final pages.55 Pink’s strength, which she seems able to draw upon once freed from hegemonic forces and immersed in nature on the pristine Planet Blue, thus seems to set up a challenge to Spike’s posthuman solution. It also raises the possibility that the human is always in some way present, in humanist and in posthumanist subjecthood. Pink also challenges Spike’s posthumanism in philosophical terms, although her success here is limited. This arises in relation to a dialogue between Billie and Spike about the distinctions between humans and machines. Spike has just kissed Billie, and Billie is concerned about the implications of a human/android romance. Spike asks her whether she thinks human life is ‘biology or consciousness?’ saying, ‘You locate yourself in consciousness, and I, too, am a conscious being’ (76). However, when Pink arrives, interrupting the moment of intimacy, she challenges this theoretical levelling. Responding to Billie’s announcement that they are discussing ‘the differences between Robo sapiens and Homo sapiens’, Pink retorts: ‘You think too much…, it’s obvious – cut me and I bleed’ (77). She then adds to this biological claim by saying that Spike, as an android, is unable to feel (human) emotion. Pink thus sets out a classic dualist stance, which Spike takes the opportunity to counter. Spike accordingly lays out a classic posthumanist claim, which is that practices such as genetic modification and bio-enhancement now blur previously held human/nonhuman distinctions. ‘A human being now is not what a human being was even a hundred years ago’, Spike tells her; ‘[s]o what is a human being?’ (77). Spike then comments on the problem of anthropocentrism. ‘There are many kinds of life’, she remarks; ‘Humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind that mattered’ (79). This dialogue weakens Pink’s humanist challenge. She is left depicting the philosophical difficulty faced by a centred (humanist) stance when attempting to allocate such properties as consciousness, rationality and so on, to possible minds and entities beyond the self. As a result, she is unable to consider the human and the nonhuman in comparable terms. While Pink’s thinking rests on longstanding Platonic ideals, Spike stands for the possibility that Pink is wrong, and in doing so locates Pink as representing a hubris that might result in harm to humans or nonhumans, in genocide or ecocide. This foregrounds the ethical significance of posthumanism where it seeks an ontological outside to the emergence of meaning. Following Pink’s philosophical interrogations, Spike’s interest in what it is to be human increases – an interest that develops, it seems, as the

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  73 novel goes on. This movement towards the human raises a complex of issues. While it seems reasonable to assume that the diminishing of difference between human and nonhuman works both ways (an android might become more human, or vice versa), this also points to an erasing of difference – or a horizontalising as Morton puts it.56 However, Spike’s increasing emphasis on the human might alternatively be considered in relation to the point made by Morton and Colebrook: that the human is the necessary starting point for the human. Moreover, to recall Bergthaller, ‘any autopoietic system’ in order to refer to its world does so ‘by simultaneously referring to itself’.57 Since the reader is necessarily human, narrative meaning must engage the human, even if it figures the posthuman. Thus, as an object in the mind of the human reader, Spike demonstrates a difficulty for fictional depictions of the posthuman figure, whereby a human subjecthood is necessary to make sense of the world. Following Pink’s challenge, Spike’s entanglement with the question of human subjecthood increases. In order to experience emotion, particularly what it is to love, Spike learns to read poetry. The effect of this is manifold. On the one hand, it places her in parity with Pink by establishing an interiority of self. This brings the human into the posthuman and blurs the categories of humanism and posthumanism. It also, rather more problematically, defines interiority in terms of (supposedly) human characteristics. On the other hand, Spike’s moving closer to the human effectively and paradoxically (again, as an effect of fictional representation) increases the clarity and success of her depiction as posthuman. Her discovery of emotion, in particular ‘love’, demonstrates her ability to reach beyond herself, to take on meanings that are not her own from that which is external to her subjective experience. This relies on a profoundly posthuman assumption, which is that, as Wolfe (applying Luhmann) puts it, ‘meaning communicates’; that is, the event out of which meaning arises is exterior to the human.58 If it were wholly interior, it would not be derivable outside of the human, and the Cyborg as a creature of meaning would vanish. In this sense, Spike’s portrayal of the performative posthuman is exceptionally drawn, her choice of ‘love’ as intervention aptly symbolising a posthumanist urge that drives contemporary theory – the urge to encounter what Morton describes as ‘the strange stranger’. 59 Spike, then, not only expounds but successfully embodies a means to theorise beyond the human. Nonetheless, her engagement with poetry signals the appearance of a potential difficulty. Spike’s engagement with poetry as a means to experience her ‘love’ intervention is, of course, no innocent method, since it raises questions about the role and function of literature. Not only is there the difficulty of language as a contested means of differentiation between the human and the nonhuman; there is also the question of the relationship between text and the world. Spike’s actions thus set up an interrogation of poststructuralist assumptions, moving her one step towards a site of

74  Death-Denial, Death-Facing conflict, whereby formalisms might run aground as categories of the real appear. Thus, as she depicts the posthuman, Spike also points to some of the tensions and difficulties out of which the idea of the posthuman arises. Her use of poetry in establishing her posthuman solution places this now poetic solution at the vortex of debate, giving way to divisions in thought with regard to literature’s role. She seems thus to both sustain posthuman possibilities and disclose the underlying complexities upon which these possibilities rest. This complicates any examination of the loss of traction that eventually undermines Spike’s posthumanism, since such a loss cannot fully be determined within Spike herself. Her posthuman encounter with (human) language is problematic, if only to the extent that one takes a formal approach to language. At the same time, or therefore, an explanation becomes apparent (on a poststructuralist reading) in relation to the concept of ‘love’. Love’s meaning cannot, of course, be fixed. For Spike, ‘love’ is an expression of her care for the world and its inhabitants; as Johns-Putra notes, her love is also a Cyborg love.60 However, as becomes apparent in the second and third stories, Billie’s expression of ‘love’ is quite different from Spike’s. It exists on a more personal level; consequently, love, for Billie, involves loss and pain as well as joy. In Barad’s and in Wolfe’s work, undecidability translates as the process of an iterative or performative becoming, with language being one more unit in this material-discursive process out of which meaning arises. Love takes many forms, in literature as in life, and so produces many meanings – a point that sustains the poststructuralist insight while reducing its reliance on text. In bringing literature into play, Spike also brings with it the endless possibilities of the human subject and its archive, and perhaps necessarily so, since her intervention is tied to the question of humanity’s hubris in a not-just-human world. This returns us, nonetheless, to the difficulty of how love might provide a sustained response to environmental crisis. It seems that for Spike’s ‘love’ to mean something, it must be viewed within the posthuman frame that she provides. The ‘love’ Spike demonstrates relies on a performative becoming, not just of the self but of the universe in all its fullness; hence, it relies on the ability of the self to embrace not just life but death. Spike comments directly on the problem of human death-denial in Blue Planet, tying it – like love – to poetry. Correlating fear of death with a fear of the void, Spike sees literature as playing a key role in countering such fear. Blue Planet ends with Spike’s death, whereby she gives her life over to love. This love is her love for Billie, since it enables Billie to go on. But it is, at the same time, a love for the world in its becoming. Spike demonstrates this love to Billie, expressing it through her openness to death. Spike equates love with a willingness to give up the self. She also sees life as an imprint and so, for Spike, as the universe is always becoming she participates in this becoming, even in death. Spike sees poetry as

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  75 offering a means by which humans, too, might come to face death, by providing a means to overcome fears of the void. Prior to Spike’s death, at the point when the mission to Planet Blue fails, the ship’s captain, Handsome, in conversation with Spike, laments: ‘Poetry didn’t save us, did it?’ (95). However, Spike replies: ‘Not once but many times.’ Handsome smiled. ‘You think so?’ ‘It was never death you feared: It was emptiness.’ Handsome nodded. ‘That’s because there’s no such thing as empty space. Only humans are empty.’ ‘Not all of them.’ ‘And not all of them are humans’. (95) Here, as Spike makes a distinction between ‘emptiness’ and ‘death’, it follows that she is referring to the human need for meaning, out of which she derives ‘love’ (since it is through poetry that she learns to love). Spike therefore sees literature as negating not just death but emptiness, by creating meaning. The distinction Spike makes here is that the human needs meaning in order to face death. Yet, since Spike too derives meaning from literature, learning what it is to love, it becomes part of her posthuman solution. Thus, she both becomes human and assigns to her posthuman solution the ontological human.

Easter Island The second story, Easter Island, transports the reader, somewhat unexpectedly, out of the future-contemporary concerns of story one and into a cautionary retelling of the Easter Island event. Stylistically, the mood changes from one of linguistic excess to a staid eighteenth-century prose befitting our new narrator, Billy. As the section opens, Captain Cook’s Resolution has landed on Easter Island, and, following a clash between the ship’s crew and the island’s peoples, Billy is separated from his shipmates and his ship sets sail without him. The island is heavily deforested and inhabited by two warring tribes. Billy, who is soon caught up in their confrontations, is shocked to find himself witnessing, first, the felling of the last tree on the island by the dominant group and then the toppling of an enormous stone god as one group seeks to destroy the other’s ‘Mana’. This toppling of ‘stone gods’ thus forms the motif for the novel’s representation of humanity repeating patterns of destruction. Humanity’s repetition of destructive behaviours is presented as a possibility for any human individual or group, of any era or location. The stone gods also represent the focal point of power around which such destruction unfolds. Billie and Spike, recast as Billy and Spikkers, again

76  Death-Denial, Death-Facing provide the narrative means by which these issues are contemplated and an exploration of the capacities of the human to respond. Spikkers, a Friday figure, safeguards Billy and teaches him about the island and its inhabitants, and Billy’s love becomes the encouragement Spikkers needs to carry out his cherished plan to return the island to ecological well-being. Analysis in this section focuses on two elements of the Billy and Spikkers story. The first is the influence Billy’s love has on Spikkers’ actions, and the second is Spikkers’ plan itself, which is to restore the Ariki Mau, leader of one of the island’s two warring tribes. Revered by the islanders, the Ariki Mau is able to ‘fly with the Dead, and bring visions to the Living’ (130). However, the island is currently controlled by the Bird Man, who rules through intimidation, monopolising food sources. This sets up a contrast between death-facing (the Ariki Mau) and death-denial (The Bird Man) as a socio-political concern. Billy’s love for Spikkers also plays a role in supporting his quest to reinstate an ecological death-­ facing. However, Billy’s cynicism as to the chances of Spikkers’ success is proved right when Spikkers meets his death, and the plan fails. Easter Island provides some useful correlations with discussions so far. The stories behind the warring tribes offer metaphorical illustrations of death-facing ecology. Meanwhile, questions about love and death reappear, shifting in a direction that will continue to influence the events of the novel’s final story. Where the posthuman intervention is destabilised in the first story, Planet Blue, the undecidability of love’s meanings now begins to impact on the narrative, in particular where Billy’s experiences of ‘love’ differ to those of Billie Crusoe in Planet Blue. While Billie and Billy are each justifiably cynical about humanity, Billy’s cynicism in part two is placed in tension with his love for Spikkers, whose death he must witness as a result of supporting his plan. Although he is less willing (than Billie) to accept the philanthropic nature of Spikkers’ ‘love’, he nonetheless loves Spikkers in a way that frees Spikkers to tackle his important task. Hence, when unfolding events result in Spikkers’ death, Billy’s experience of ‘love’ becomes that of the tragic loss of his lover, whom he longs to regain. This raises questions about the links between Spike’s love intervention and a corresponding death-facing ecology, which in Easter Island seems overshadowed by a justified cynicism. Certain shifts in the depictions of the two main characters in this section are worth noting, at least in passing, at this point. Following (Robo sapiens) Spike’s increasing engagement with the human in part one, she is now recast as human and also switches gender to become the male Spikkers. Billie retains human form, but is now recast as the male Billy. The love these two characters share now becomes more particularly a human love, although their continuing homosexuality reinstates a boundary-crossing. This mid-novel humanising and re-gendering of the novel’s two main characters seems in some sense to add to the novel’s

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  77 overall diminishing of its posthuman solution, particularly in relation to the ways in which love is conceived. Nonetheless, Spikkers sustains much of Spike’s ecological envisioning, his openness to the bigger picture appearing as recognisably posthuman, while Billy, for all his cynicism, similarly sustains many of Billie’s sentiments – notably in his abhorrence of the destruction he sees on the island; ‘mankind’, he observes, ‘wherever found … cannot keep any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself’ (132). However, we also see in Billy something of a step back from the possibilities of posthuman performativity. Not unlike Snowman in Atwood’s trilogy, Billy projects a self-contained and personal interiority. Despite being acutely aware of the destruction he sees around him, reflecting on it frequently as narrator, he also seems largely passive in relation to it. An exception to this is seen in the generosity of his love for Spikkers; yet this seems only to lead to failure, death and loss. To an extent, Spikkers also represents a reduction in performative possibility. He is caught up in his dreams of a ‘back time’, when the islanders lived only by ‘the word of … the Ariki Mau’, a time when ‘the god MakeMake had filled the island with forests and springs and fishes and birds so that no man could want who could stretch out his hand’ (132). That the Ariki Mau both ‘flies with the dead’ and facilitates ecological abundance clearly correlates death-facing with environmental well-being. Yet his influence notably lies in the past, perhaps reminding us of Philippe Ariès’ descriptions of a ‘tame’ death that has now been replaced by a death that is ‘wild’.61 The Bird Man of the present – who ironically cannot fly – is bent on acquisition and control and destroys the island’s habitat. But every year an annual Egg Race competition is held, via which the leadership of the ‘Bird Man cult’ is decided for the year ahead. Spikkers’ dream, he tells Billy, is to enter this competition and ‘win back for the old gods the rights of the new power’ (134). If he can win on behalf of the Ariki Mau, he explains, then the civil war will end, the ‘trees will grow and the birds will return’ (135). Spikkers’ dream, then, is to overthrow the present hegemonic order in favour of an egalitarian and ecologically favourable form of governance. Spikkers’ difficulty, which he fails to notice but Billy foresees, is that his only route to achieving this is through the mechanisms of a competition that favours those already in power. This replicates the self-perpetuating nature of late corporate capitalism, while placing Spikkers in a position of naivety. A problem thus arises for Spikkers, as for Ariès, which is that life represents struggle (since death is always there) in any era or location; one cannot just swap the present for the past. Nor is it just a matter of winning the Egg Race, since the struggle is with the Egg Race itself. Even so, it is because of Billy’s ‘love’ and encouragement that Spikkers finds the courage to accomplish his long-held dream. This provides an instance of verification of love as intervention, no matter what the

78  Death-Denial, Death-Facing outcome. Complexities, of course, feed into this situation. Although Billy is appalled, like Spikkers, by the plight of the island and its peoples, and by humanity’s capacity to ‘destroy the very thing he needs most’ (125), his support of Spikkers’ plan is principally an expression of his personal love for Spikkers rather than of his care for the world. Nonetheless, had Billy not arrived in Spikkers’ life, Spikkers may not have found conviction he needed to intervene in the situation. Billy’s love thus activates an already latent possibility, suggesting that any form of love retains at least the potential to effect a change in relation to social and ecological devastation. This effectively equates the personal with the political via an intra-­ active process. Barad’s concept of agential intra-action illustrates that, rather than seeing love (that of Billy for Spikkers) as just an emotional force, we might view this love as the event that performs the ‘agential cut’.62 Viewed this way, the ‘event’ of Billy’s love for Spikkers itself performs the ‘resolution within the indeterminacy’,63 which itself is the intervention; whereas the emotional experience – whether of Billy or Spikkers and however it materialises – is the conditional and variable state of those participants as they come together in the world. The distinction is subtle, but (I think) recaptures the meaning that Spike (in the first story) seems to intend: that of an action (event) that arises from a desire for the well-being of other (as opposed to malevolence, self-interest, etc.). The significance of this distinction has already been proposed by Johns-Putra in her article on care ethics, in which she applies a new materialist approach. Johns-Putra defines ‘care’ as ‘a feeling of concern for the wellbeing and needs of others’ and ‘care ethics’ as ‘an ethical position that takes this affective concern as its basis for action’.64 Correspondingly, we might say that Spike uses ‘love’ to derive love as intervention in a quantum world. Johns-Putra argues that ‘care’ is not static (ontic) but ontological, where ontology is defined in terms of Barad’s ‘agential realism’, thereby imparting a ‘radical, dynamic and local quality … to ontology’; care is therefore, Johns-Putra clarifies, ‘not the means by which agency occurs, but is itself agential’.65 On Johns-Putra’s argument, Billy and Spikkers’ love can be understood as agential, rather than simply being the means by which agency occurs. So the event of Billy loving Spikkers changes something; it is a performative intervention that influences and participates in the world in its becoming. Importantly, however – as Johns-Putra says of the care response – this ‘love’ is also always contingent.66 As an ontological unit within the coming together of discursive-material practices, it arises out of, and into, a mesh of possibilities. This way of conceptualising ‘love’ impacts on our understandings of Spike’s intervention. Billy’s love for Spikkers (as ‘agential cut’) is understood as contingent upon such matters as his personality, his feelings and responses, and the many details that make up circumstance and context of this ‘love’. The same applies to Spikkers’

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  79 response to Billy in return. It so happens, in this case, that Billy’s love encourages Spikkers, and he responds in kind. However, our human relations possess many nuances, while ‘love’ may absorb or oppress (and so on), at any point within the momentary emergences of ‘material-­ discursive practices’67 and indeed as an ongoing affect. Love is subject, too, to the spectrum of effects that coincide with it. Billy’s support of Spikkers’ entry in the Egg Race may depict love as an intervention; nonetheless, this intervention operates within an endless multiplicity of possible givens and outcomes, always contributing but never occupying any specific primacy. The poststructuralist explanation of ‘love’ as an unstable category therefore appears to be followed through and built upon – although partially reduced in the process – in new materialist approaches such as Barad’s. A similar follow-through can be seen in the work of Wolfe. Where, in a Derridean reading, undecidability gestures towards the unknowable, in speculative and new materialist approaches it indicates an engagement with a reconstructive autopoiseis and a continuing actualisation of possibilities (Wolfe/Luhmann), or comprises elements of the discursive-material world in its becoming (Barad). Spike’s posthumanist intervention is therefore simultaneously both undermined and productive in terms of the meaning it prescribes. From Billy’s ‘love intervention’ emerges both Spikkers’ success in winning the Egg Race and also his death as an outcome of this success. Spikkers enacts an ecological death-facing, yet Billy is confronted with the tragic loss of his lover and, correspondingly, with his own responses to that loss. The ongoing effects of Spikkers’ success, meanwhile, remain undecidable, or at least contingent, since they emerge from ‘love’ as just one intra-active unit in the world’s continuum of material-discursive becoming. As Easter Island nears its close, Spikkers’ tragic death is increasingly entwined with Billy’s sentiments as narrator and thus also with a reorienting of love in terms of Billy’s more personal love. On the day of the Egg Race, Billy watches the paraphernalia of the event – flags, costumes, and the awaited and celebrated egg – and is at once put into a cynical mood, observing: ‘here, as in every place the world can shew, men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy’ (137). He gazes upon Spikkers, who is preparing to race and, in loving him, already sees his fall. Where Spikkers believes ‘truly’ that, with the return of the Ariki Mau, ‘the trees will grow and the birds will return’, Billy confides that Spikkers’ ‘shining face’ ‘causes me to drop my eyes for fear of hurting his happiness’ (135). Two pages previously, Billy describes a ‘Delft tile’ wrapped in blue cloth, which he finds in the cave he and Spikkers share: On the tile is ‘a picture of a tall house with its door open. A man in a hat waits inside the hall’ (135). Before setting out, Spikkers tells Billy of a dream he has had, in which ‘his father came to him’ (137), giving him the Egg in one hand, and with the other hand taking him to

80  Death-Denial, Death-Facing live in Amsterdam. These premonitory statements not only predict Spikkers’ death but also envisage a return via death’s doorway to the parental home, indicating a corresponding shift in conceptions of death, which reappears in the third story of the novel to inform its ending. The meanings of both love and death become vexed at this point. While these dreams have a spiritual tone, they also align the post-mortal (Spikkers’ imminent death) with the prenatal (his birth), returning life’s end to its beginning. Thus, while the dreams are an indicator of Billy and Spikkers’ shared bond, they also remind us that, in the void beyond death – as before life – there is no subject extant to suffer death.68 Death has no ‘is’, which in effect disqualifies death’s meanings. So, although Spikkers is the champion on the day, collecting the egg laid by the first tern of the season, Spikkers in effect dies because the ‘swaggering oaf’ (137), who is the Bird Man’s proxy in the race, takes the egg off him by force and, in the struggle that ensues, pushes him off the high cliff to fall upon the rocks below. In life, as in politics, fair play cannot be assumed, and there may be no innocent answer to the grip of a power that stifles the landscape, its habitat and its peoples. For Billy, who must live with the loss of Spikkers, his cynical views have been validated, while Spikkers’ death appears rendered meaningless at this point. All that remains, it seems, is a return to the rule of the Bird Man, and Billy’s longing for a lost love, leaving Billy to face living on. The Easter Island story, nonetheless, offers more than a complication of Spike’s love intervention via this bleak excavation of love and death. That Spikkers wins as he collects the egg, despite his ensuing death, is an event that nonetheless enters our understanding as having occurred, producing meaning out of Billy’s love. To this we might add Spike’s insight in the first story, which has relevance to the present Billy’s situation. For Spike, meaning is what humans derive – from literature or from discourse of whatever kind – as a safeguard against the emptiness of death. Survival is not just living with loss but living, and this involves stories. So, Spikkers, who in effect leaps into his own story, becomes the Ariki Mau – an event out of which the reader derives meaning. Billy, facing the irretrievable loss of his lover, is forced to construct his own meanings, but he too achieves them, not least because, in living on, there is no choice but to do so. As Spikkers dies in Billy’s arms, Billy’s narration reads: And he passes through the door. And in the house he must make ready til I have finished my business here and come back to him. A white bird opens its wings. (140) As readers, we retain the story of Spikkers’ death-facing through his becoming the Ariki Mau, but we are aware too of Billy’s venturing into meanings beyond death, where death appears before him in the loss of

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  81 his lover. If the first points to the material, the second points to the discursive. This illustrates language as both separating from and enfolding into meanings in the world’s becoming.

Post 3 War and Wreck City Technically speaking, Post 3 War and Wreck City are two distinct parts, providing four in the novel altogether. However, since they share a running narrative, I treat them as a combined third story. The first part, Post 3 War, provides a backstory for this section’s Billie Crusoe, who, like the first Billie Crusoe, is female and lives on Orbus, although the time and context have changed. The second, Wreck City, continues Billie’s story into its post-Third World War scenario. The storyline follows Billie and Spike – who is a Robo sapiens once more but an incomplete prototype, consisting of nothing but a head – as they trigger a brewing clash between Tech City and Wreck City. In the closing pages, Billie is subsequently shot; however, her narration continues into her death as she comes home to a longed-for maternal love, having been given up as a baby for adoption. Billie’s death thus differs to that of Spike and Spikkers in the first two stories. Despite meeting and in the end embracing death, she seems not to face death in the posthuman sense depicted by Spike. Billie is shot in the back; hence her death occurs as she is fleeing, not facing it. In this section, I explore the narrative events leading up to this differing portrayal of death in the character of Billie. In particular, I consider the way this final iteration of Billie and Spike depicts a slippage between human and posthuman perspectives. Spike starts out as a Robo sapiens and moves towards the human and then the posthuman, whereas Billie increasingly retracts from the world, towards an interiorised self. These sliding portrayals also impact on the differing ways Spike and Billie deal with death, as well as on their differing capacities as subjects-in-a-world. This, in turn, appears as a difficulty for the novel’s ending, depicting the representation of death-facing as again unsettled. In the third story, it quickly becomes apparent that this Billie is less self-assured than Billie of the first. This seems to be an outcome of her formative experiences. In Post 3 War, Billie narrates the extraordinary story of her prenatal relations with her mother, demonstrating a biological love that transcends the events of a life that interrupts it. Billie, as a result, is immersed in a need to piece together a fragmented self, processed via memories foundational to her emergence into the world. She longs for a love that she has never had: ‘Love without thought. Love without conditions. Love without promises. Love without threats. Love without fear. Love without Limits. Love without end’ (146). In this, Billie appears to pursue an accentuated idealisation of love as a result of her loveless childhood. The love Billie longs for, in reaching beyond death,

82  Death-Denial, Death-Facing seems to disavow death’s part in the iterability of life in its becoming, negating death’s presence, and overlooking the way love frames itself primarily within the temporality of life. Billie’s longing for an idealised love goes on to inform, throughout this dual third story – both her inability to be whole without it and her desire to reclaim it. These issues reach their climax in Billie’s death, at which point her narration over-­ determines her death experience. This discursive aspect of her death effectively counters the material element of the posthuman reclamation of death, as envisaged in the death-facing ecology and as proposed by Spike. It also seemingly contributes to the unsatisfactory feel of the novel’s ending. Although Spike, in the third story, retains echoes of the earlier Spike, she differs in accord with this story’s very different set of narrative ideas. In Wreck City, political negligence has resulted in an unforeseen nuclear attack by Iraq on the States. Out of the devastation, MORE, having taken political control of the globe, has designed ‘the world’s first Robo sapiens’ (Spike) to ‘take the planet-sized decisions that humans are so bad at’ (159). It is Billie’s role to train Spike ‘to understand what it means to be human’ (162); for the reader, this often seems the other way around. Spike’s limiting to just a head appears to also limit her capacity for quantum thinking. This echoes the post-Third World War mood of Tech City, wherein no escape to other planets is envisaged. Death, in the form of warfare, has already rebounded upon humanity, and there is no dream of a new start, not even a false one, other than in the possibilities represented by Spike. Spike, whose role is to consider humanity’s future, is linked to a Mainframe computer. Her ability to access and utilise the sum of global data places her in a somewhat formalist position. She relies on Billie to help her process meanings and to act as her arms and her legs. Spike thus depicts a detached intelligence, while her association with Billie foregrounds the notion of embodied consciousness that cannot be limited to the self-contained vessel of the human or any isolated subject. This story poses a distinct set of difficulties. The global situation has reached levels of discord that seem beyond repair, yet our once-activist Billie is now wrapped up with a need for love of an idealised kind, seeking an alternative form of escape in a transcendent love, while Spike is reduced to a disembodied state. As the story progresses, Spike gradually recovers elements of her posthumanism, increasingly striving to process meanings through her intra-active encounters with others. This ‘becoming’ depicts a gradual reinstatement of a performative posthumanism. Yet in the last instance, even so, she retracts from her performative presence when Billie fails to carry forward the posthuman possibilities that have traversed the novel to this point. A potentially generative response to the social and environmental crises is depicted in the anarchic zone of Wreck City, but is not fully

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  83 formulated. Wreck City is where Billie and Spike end up, having set out on an educational walk and stepped, not quite accidentally, out of Tech City’s delineated zone. This step from the constructed to the deconstructed world and into the liminal is indicative of the ‘new narratives’ described in more positive readings of the novel.69 However, Billie is soon torn between the lure of Spike’s willingness to embrace new experiences and the need to return the five-million-dollar robot safely to MORE. When Spike, following an encounter with new-age lesbians, severs her link to the Mainframe, Billie’s concern is with Spike’s loss of ‘objectivity’. She berates Spike: Spike, the future of the planet is uncertain. Human beings aren’t just in a mess, we are a mess. We have made every mistake, justified ourselves and made the same mistakes again and again. It’s as though we’re doomed to repetition. In all of that, we can’t afford our one and only Robo sapiens to go on a personal journey of self-discovery. (216) Spike, objecting that Billie seems to ‘want her to remain a robot forever’, responds: ‘I don’t see how else to begin.’ ‘Begin what exactly?’ [Billie asks her] ‘Begin again’. (216) From the point of her disconnection from the Mainframe, Spike increasingly depicts a performative posthumanism, whereas Billie, from this point, increasingly retreats from such possibilities, turning instead to the metaphysical individualism of humanist discourse. Billie does briefly consider Spike’s posthuman ideas. For example, she wonders whether love might really be ‘a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what will be’ (217). Yet she fails to grasp the way Spike’s love intervention enfolds death in its becoming, as demonstrated in Spike’s death in the previous two stories. Billie instead brushes aside Spike’s new discoveries, overlooking opportunities that may be posed. Her conclusion is that ‘we who are the intervention’ (humanity) just ‘don’t know what we are doing’ (217). She moves further into the liminal as she flees into the contaminated Dead Forest, in which roam the deformed survivors of nuclear war. Yet Billie seems more accurately to be running from death than towards it, as well as from the love intervention offered by Spike. Love, for Billie, becomes the means not to face but to avoid death. Spike and Billie part ways in the final pages, signalling a cessation of posthuman possibility – or at least, leaving such possibility to Billie, who fails to pick up the baton. This can be usefully explored in relation to

84  Death-Denial, Death-Facing Wolfe’s ‘double finitude’. Of the two kinds of death Wolfe’s posthumanism defines, the first is material death, which humans share with nonhumans; the second he refers to as a ‘radical passivity’.70 The first of these can be understood as death-facing in that it amounts to a recognition of the inevitable mortality of the self. Material death-facing is a pragmatic acknowledgement that the human is just another material unit in the becoming of the universe. Such a death-facing is seen in Spike of the first story and Spikkers of the second. Billie’s death in this third story differs because it transcends mortality. The second kind of death, ‘radical passivity’, Wolfe also refers to as ‘not being able’.71 For Wolfe, meaning and communication, viewed in a trace structure, are fundamentally exterior to the human subject, and they exceed both the human/nonhuman distinction and ‘“the life/death relation” itself’; hence, neither an ‘analytic of finitude’ nor an existential being-toward-death (i.e. Heidegger) can erase this passivity.72 More simply put, we are only ever participants in the iterability or becoming of the world. It will always exceed us, with or without us, no matter our attitude towards death. To apply this idea to the third Spike is to recognise the profound passivity that characterises her posthumanism. This Spike is not wholly devoid of the performative death-facing of Spike/Spikkers in the first two stories; rather, this aspect of her retreats from emphasis. This corresponds with the way the second of Wolfe’s ‘deaths’ always exceeds the death-facing of the first. She also increasingly responds to an exteriority of meaning, culminating in her rediscovery of her participation in a quantum and performative universe. This occurs when she deciphers a signal from Planet Blue in an old satellite receiver, a temporally quantum signal set up by the first Spike and transmitted from Planet Blue to Orbus. Yet, although this brings to the story a trace of the first Spike, the present Spike remains largely passive in her interactions, for all her willingness to engage with new possibilities. Her love for Billie, throughout this story, is less engaged than that of the first Spike and Billy. She retains a kind of prudence, her response to Billie being more onlooker than oracle. Hence, when this last Billie persists in pursuing her own longing for a certain kind of love, amid the chaos of erupting conflict, Spike simply steps back from Billie’s story. ‘Billie,’ said Spike, ‘leave me here and go on.’ ‘I’m not leaving you. Go where?’ ‘Find your way home’. (239) Here, Spike detaches herself specifically from the circumstance of Billie’s persistent longing for home. In doing so, she relinquishes all that she has offered in her relations with Billie, within this third story and potentially throughout the novel as a whole. The posthuman solution is

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  85 not lost; it simply has no influence. Humans must, in the end, find their own way home and whether or not they do so is a matter for the human. In the case of Billie, her need to heal the wounds of the past perhaps suggests that as humans we must first address our own failings, healing ourselves, before we can successfully transform the situation of the material world. At this point, the posthuman solution takes form as its own acknowledgement that it has no solution as such, for to have a solution is to stake a claim for an ontological certainty that would disqualify the posthuman from its intent. *** This chapter demonstrates death-facing ecology drawing on links with contemporary thought through the ideas of posthumanism. Because posthumanism incorporates a complex set of ideas, the figure of the posthuman offers writers of environmental crisis fiction a useful means to explore human subjecthood in relation to such a crisis. A key value of the posthuman figure, for this fiction, is its decentring of the human subject alongside a move to acknowledge that which lies beyond the human. This makes it ideally placed to depict and explore death-facing as ecological, since ‘death-facing ecology’ broadly expresses a contemporary impulse, situated in the human subject, to concede to and level with that which exceeds it, to include nonhumans, the biosphere and indeed all that makes up our planetary home. Accordingly, the posthumanism depicted in this chapter seems best described as ecological posthumanism. Posthumanism is also one -ism among several, to include humanism, which it rails against, and transhumanism which it supports or contends, depending upon the strand of theory consulted. That both prefixes post- and trans- attach to humanism – changing its meanings to posthuman and transhuman respectively – designates their intent to contend or qualify humanist ideas. Both terms retain the human within the sign; therefore, one way to understand them is as exploring what it means to be human beyond that which humanism has specified. Posthumanism might also be understood to mean after humanism/the human. This links posthumanism to death-facing ecology as the death of humanism or even the death of the human. Thus, in The Stone Gods, the posthuman appears aligned with death-facing and the transhuman with death-denial; nonetheless, these -isms are not stable but form narrative impressions that at any time can interweave, evolve or fade. It is because of this slipperiness that these -isms offer an ideal means for fiction to explore death-facing ecology, since death-facing, too, is a slippery concept. Indeed, death-facing as an idea can run into serious difficulty, since to be an idea at all it must exist in a living mind, which – ­perhaps it goes without saying – cannot at the same time be dead. I explore this difficulty in the next chapter using Jacques Derrida’s work on death

86  Death-Denial, Death-Facing as aporia. The present chapter, meanwhile, depicts the posthuman as death-facing and ecological, and as facilitating complex explorations of who we are as a species, and of the possibilities for what we might become. Winterson’s The Stone Gods depicts death-facing ecology as a posthuman solution and explores the human in the posthuman. Spike’s depiction of a posthuman ideal recommends it whilst also placing it under scrutiny. She illustrates the ways different -isms are latent in complex and often conflicting ways in our discursive minds. The interplay between Billie and Spike, meanwhile, depicts a contemporary oscillation between humanist and posthumanist ideals. The novel’s sense of irresolution, as Billie withdraws from all networks into a narcissistic death, depicts a failure of the human to grasp the meanings of the p ­ osthuman – perhaps because humans have yet to address the harms we cause to each other. The radical passivity of Spike’s final posthuman portrayal returns the question of humanity’s behaviours to one of choice. We have the opportunity, the novel seems to suggest, to develop an ecological death-­facing stance, yet it is up to us as to whether we do; in a quantum universe, the means to intervene in our own patterns of destruction remains ever before us. Yet, the novel also complicates this idea. Since the mission to Planet Blue fails, the possibility of starting again is also disrupted; that we have a choice might be just a dream after all. Human, Billie, seems unable to take a posthuman stance even in death-facing. The Stone Gods thus presents a posthuman solution; yet, in the end, it depicts its meanings and ideas as transient possibilities while undermining, or perhaps simply disbelieving, the chances of our enacting them.

Notes 1 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xv. 2 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xv (emphasis in original). 3 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, ‘Engaging Transhumanism’, in H+/− Transhumanism and Its Critics, edited by Gregory R. Hansell and William Grassie (Philadelphia, PA: Metanexus, 2011), 24. 4 Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilisation (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2015), 19. 5 Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (London: Penguin, 2007). 6 Stuart J. Murray, ‘Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben a Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 203–207, 204. 7 See Donna Haraway, ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, The Haraway Reader (London: Routledge, 2004); see also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 8 See my overview in Louise Squire, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007)’, in Cli-Fi: A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 211–214.

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  87 9 N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere’, Theory Culture Society 23, no. 7–8 (2006): 159–166, 160. 10 Hope Jennings, ‘“A Repeating World”: Redeeming the Past and Future in the Utopian Dystopia of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, Utopia/Dystopia, Interdisciplinary Humanities 27, no. 2 (2010): 132–146, 133,143. 11 Abigail Rine, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention’, in Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, edited by Ben Davis and Jana Funke (­Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 84, 83. 12 Susana Onega, ‘The Trauma Paradigm and the Ethics of Affect in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, DQR Studies in Literature 48, no. 1 (2011): 265–298, 273. Here, Onega is referring to her citations from: Jean-Michel Ganteau, ‘Rise from the Ground like Feathered Mercury: Baroque Citations in the Fiction of Peter Ackroyd and Jeanette Winterson’, Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics V (2005): 134. 13 This doctrine is Ouspensky’s response to Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return. Onega explains: ‘According to Nietzsche, the fixity of recurrence negates any possibility of real change or evolution, as every individual is destined to relive his or her life over and over again’; but ‘…according to archaic thought, recurrence does not condemn human beings to the endless repetition of the same mistakes. On the contrary, it grants them the possibility of making a new start’. Onega, ‘The Trauma Paradigm’, 279. 14 Onega, ‘The Trauma Paradigm’, 297. 15 Adeline Johns-Putra (2017). ‘The Unsustainable Aesthetics of Sustainability: The Sense of an Ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, in Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, edited by Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham and Louise Squire (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 192. 16 Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs 28, no. 3 Gender and Science: New Issues (2003): 801–831, 803. 17 Raoni Padui, ‘Realism, Anti-Realism, and Materialism’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 2 (2011): 89–101, 90–91. 18 For example, see Neil Badminton, ‘Theorizing Posthumanism’, Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 10–27; or N. Katherine Hayles, ‘The Human in the Posthuman’, Cultural Critique 53, Posthumanism (2003): 134–137. 19 For example, see Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, edited by William Rasch (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Hannes Bergthaller usefully glosses ‘second order’ with a view to establishing its implications: It was first and foremost Heinz von Foerster who drew the radical conclusions which ensued once one accepted not only that such systems did indeed provide the basis for cognitive processes, but that furthermore researchers were only able to observe and describe them because they themselves were constituted in a like manner. Hannes Bergthaller, ‘On Human Involution: Posthumanist Anthropology and the Question of Ecology in the Work of Hans Blumenberg and Niklas Luhmann’, New German Critique 43, no. 2 (2016): 83–104, 96–98. 20 Cary Wolfe, ‘Response to Christopher Peterson, “The Posthumanism to Come”’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16, no. 2 (2011): 189–193, 191. 21 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 27.

88  Death-Denial, Death-Facing 22 Niklas Luhmann, ‘The Paradox of Observing Systems’, in Theories of Distinction, 65, quoted in Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 18. 23 Niklas Luhuman, ‘How Can the Mind Participate in Communication’, in Theories of Distinction, 169, quoted in Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 19. 24 Wolfe (explaining Luhmann; see notes 33 and 32 above), What Is Posthumanism?, 19. 25 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 8. 26 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 138. 27 Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, 810. 28 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 148. 29 Ibid., 178. 30 Ibid., 33 (emphasis in original). 31 Ibid., 140. 32 Ibid., 140. 33 Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity’, 801. 34 Dietrich Schwanitz, ‘Systems Theory According to Niklas Luhmann – Its Environment and Conceptual Strategies’, Cultural Critique 30 (1995), 146, cited by Wolfe in What Is Posthumanism?, 13. 35 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 26. 36 Ibid., 174. 37 Timothy Morton, ‘Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals’, SubStance 117, 37, no. 3 (2008): 73–96, 77–79. 38 Morton, ‘Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals’, 74–66. 39 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 174. 40 Bergthaller, ‘On Human Involution’, 99–101. 41 Slavoj Zizek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, edited by Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 134–190, 159–160, cited in Morton, ‘Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals’, 81. 42 Claire Colebrook ‘Framing the End of the Species: Images without Bodies’, Symploke 21, no. 1–2 (2013): 51–63, 53. 43 Bergthaller, ‘On Human Involution’, 97–99. 4 4 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xxviii. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Francesca Ferrando, ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms Differences and Relations’, Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics and the Arts 8, no. 2 (2013): 26–32. 48 Maurice Cranston, Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 6 (citing Lord Acton, 1907). For discussion, see the Introduction. 49 Cranston, Freedom, 6. 50 Lewis Hinchman, ‘Is Environmentalism a Humanism?’, Environmental Values 13 (2004): 3–29, 16–25. 51 Ibid., 4. 52 Padui, ‘Realism, Anti-Realism, and Materialism’, 90–91. 53 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xv. 54 Jennings, ‘“A repeating world”’, 140. 55 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 175. 56 Morton, ‘Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals’, 77–79. 57 Bergthaller, ‘On Human Involution’, 97–99. 58 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 18–19. 59 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15, 17–19, 38–58.

Death-Denial, Death-Facing  89 60 Johns-Putra, ‘Borrowing the World from Our Children: Gender, Posterity and Wellbeing in the Climate Change Novel’, Plenary lecture. Literature, Ecology and Health Conference, AHRC-funded International Health Humanities Network (University of Nottingham, 30 March 2012). 61 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, translated by Patricia M. Ranum (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 8, 10. 62 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 40. 63 Ibid. 64 Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Environmental Care Ethics: Notes toward a New ­Materialist Critique’, Symploke 21, nos. 1–2 (2013): 125–135, 125. 65 Johns-Putra, ‘Environmental Care Ethics’, 126. 66 Ibid., 131. 67 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 801. 68 Thomas Nagel makes this point but also argues that death is a misfortune because it halts a life that could have continued. Thomas Nagel, ‘Death’, in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 69 Jennings, ‘A Repeating World’, 132–146. 70 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, xxviii. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid.

3 Impasse, Paradox

This chapter turns attention to the way death-facing gives rise to paradox.1 This propensity to paradox allows novels to depict humankind’s ontological status as vexed with regard to the future. This has the effect of highlighting the sense of impasse towards the environmental crisis that has characterised the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. That there is such a crisis is generally a given, in this fiction, although it may not be fully defined for the reader. It is also generally assumed, if not always stated, that humans are in some sense responsible for the advent of this crisis. This fiction, accordingly, depicts a shift towards facing death as an ecologically inclined response or solution to this crisis, and away from death-denial, depicted as its root cause. A difficulty arises at this point. What exactly does it mean to face death, given that death itself is inconceivable to the living mind? This turning to face a death that is inconceivable is a feature of any novel that employs the theme of death-facing ecology. It indicates a turn towards the possibility of an ecological future, yet which is equally inconceivable. Can one imagine such a future? Even if it is possible on an individual level, can we collectively envisage such a future – specifically one upon which we might all agree? This points to a difficulty for environmental crisis fiction, since in asking what it is about humans that has led to the environmental crisis, and what we therefore must change to reverse it, such questioning and answering vastly simplifies a situation of enormous complexity. Hannes Bergthaller argues that the reason for the impasse over the environmental crisis (he refers specifically to climate change) has more to do with the way it exceeds the possibilities of narrative than with ‘a mere lack of moral fervor or emotional urgency’.2 One cannot tell a story that would represent all the issues and their parts, in full, and define an appropriate response. The world, as Bergthaller states, ‘contains a surfeit of features, but lacks inherently binding criteria of relevance’; he continues: The production of narrative meaning is a way of reducing this overwhelming complexity and of making it manageable. It always involves selecting which features of the world are significant to

Impasse, Paradox  91 narrator and narratee – and it is this process which inaugurates a meaningful order that is manifestly social, even if we assume that the elements of which it is composed are nature-culture hybrids of some sort.3 Thus, while it might be objected that signs and meaning are not limited to humans, a point with which Bergthaller agrees, he identifies, nonetheless, a distinction between signs and meanings and narrative or story, the latter being how humans make sense of the world. The questions this strand of fiction asks are in any case troublesome once one considers the pluralities and challenges of worldly reality. That which gave rise to the crisis is multifaceted and ultimately indeterminable. It is also a matter of opinion, and opinions vary. One could simply say ‘humans’, yet humans are entities of a vast reality. While material harms, such as deforestation or the damages caused by commodified food production, are tangible and can therefore be fictionally portrayed, the experiences and thought process – present and historical – that produce them are less readily pinned down. Death-facing ecology, as a thematic device, makes room for this problem since it pivots on an axis of death, retaining cognisance of the linkage between thoughts about life and thoughts about death. If different cultures see death differently, death-facing ecology is just another death-thinking – one based on the possibility of ecological viability for humanity. At the same time, this death-thinking responds to the externality of environmental crisis, not by trying to solve it, but by delineating the human self within the context of the crisis. In doing so, facing death evokes paradox since it emits discourse (one can only ever tell stories about death). Because of this, the novels I discuss in this book seem constantly to wrestle with paradox. While this might lead one to question the expediency of death-facing ecology as a device by which to read environmental crisis fiction, its value is precisely its capacity to allow paradox to be pondered. In Chapter 4, I consider death as being always both discursive and material, a bifurcation that makes possible fiction’s implementation of death-facing ecology to explore the challenges associated with environmental crisis in quite specific ways. In the present chapter I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of death as aporia, by which he means we cannot know death as such,4 to illustrate the way death-facing ecology gives way to paradox, as well as what this can mean for the narratives of environmental crisis fiction. In this chapter I discuss two novels that are notable for the ways they illustrate this aporia of death and its narrative effects, both by American writers: Odds against Tomorrow (2013) by Nathaniel Rich and The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy. My short reading of Rich’s novel identifies the pivotal function of death’s aporia in its narratives. I follow this with an extended reading of McCarthy’s The Road, discussing

92  Impasse, Paradox the way it seems to tip the reader, quite strikingly, into death’s aporia, depicting death-facing ecology as conditioned by layers of paradox. In reading The Road, I look also briefly at another McCarthy work, The Sunset Limited (2006), which helps illustrate death as aporia as it appears in narrative form. Building on Heidegger’s notion of death as the ‘possibility’ of ‘impossibility’, Derrida illustrates the problems of death-facing, helping to conceptualise its contingent nature.5 In Aporias (1997), Derrida responds directly to death historian Philippe Ariès’ suggestion that death has become ‘wild’.6 He acknowledges that death is variously understood across different eras and cultures but objects to Ariès’ unspoken suggestion that one might somehow regain an understanding of death. He relates this to what he sees as a similar problem in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger describes humans as Beings-toward-death, meaning that death in some sense completes us. Heidegger posits this in relation to his subsequently problematic notion of a proper and authentic self. One’s ‘Beinga-whole’, says Heidegger, is correct if ‘care, as Dasein’s basic state, is “connected” with death – the uttermost possibility for that entity’.7 While this very cursory précis inevitably leaves out much of the complexity it relies upon, certain elements of Heidegger’s Being-toward-death that find resistance in Derrida’s work are laid out in provisional form. While Derrida and Heidegger each speak of death as the ‘possibility of an impossibility’, acknowledging death as non-representable (there is no ‘is’ of death), Heidegger conceives death’s mineness as the completion of Dasein, whereas Derrida refuses such authenticating. Derrida wonders whether it is even possible to speak of ‘my death’.8 For Derrida, to say that death is the ‘possibility of impossibility’ is to recognise death as the ultimate aporia; while death is always ‘possible’ (we assume it will happen at some point) it nonetheless remains irreducibly ‘impossible’: We can never understand death as such.9 Derrida therefore resists Heidegger’s attempt to establish a pre-theoretical or existential conception of death, since for Derrida all conceptions of death are irrevocably contaminated by the living mind. We cannot find a place in thought that would be free from the traces of influence that bring us to a given moment in our thinking towards death. Even the attempt to establish a pre-theoretical conception of death discloses a certain intentionality, including that of Heidegger’s notion of the authentic self.10 Nonetheless, Derrida’s disagreement with Heidegger is only partial, since both seek to overcome a metaphysics of presence in the Western tradition, as does Michel Foucault (see the section High Theory and Ecocriticism, in the Introduction to this book, for discussions on how the two planes of Derridean and Foucauldian thought intersect). Derrida’s ‘death as aporia’ provides a useful means to view the difficulties encountered by fiction, as it explores a contemporary and material turn towards death. Death-facing can only evoke death’s possibility; death itself remains irreducibly ‘impossible’.

Impasse, Paradox  93 Derrida takes this further, suggesting that the very idea that we might somehow approach the border of death only serves to illustrate our own habitual thinking of horizons or borders. As Schuster observes, ‘Derrida clearly sees no gain in dissolving or absorbing the impossible, rather he questions whether or not the place of impossibility can be located at all’.11 Derrida, therefore, effectively views all conceptions of death, including that of Heidegger, as anthropological or discursive, because they are steps beyond a border that is not really there. The stories we tell about death, manifesting in our belief systems and cultural practices, are on the one hand inevitable since we recognise death’s ‘possibility’ via the death of the other. On the other hand, death remains impossible; we can never in any conclusive sense say what death ‘is’, and our attempts to do so are therefore a kind of ‘trespass’.12 This has implications for fiction generally, since ‘death as aporia’ encapsulates the heart of deconstructive thought. It marks the point at which our discursive worlds become irreducible while recognising too that, nonetheless, we can and do tell stories of the world as a world, even as this world is conditioned by death. The discursive function of text is thus upheld along with its capacity to represent the real. Where death is understood as always both ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’, text performs both functions; yet these are mutually conditioning, not two separate things, since such raising of borders is just a phenomenon (says Derrida) of our habitual thinking practices.13 The implications for environmental crisis fiction are particularly useful, since the difficulties these novels encounter arise in their attempts to breach the question of the real, as they seek to represent the physical phenomenon of environmental crisis. This appears as an epistemological rupture, in which a re-visioning of notions of the human subject (and its capacity to respond) occurs. We realise that our stories are just stories, yet the manifestations of the real at a time of environmental crisis force us to reconsider ourselves. Discovering that our stories were malign we seek to exit them, yet we find ourselves telling new stories all the same. Environmental crisis novels in this sense navigate, like Russian dolls, from inside the very problem they attempt to figure. The literary thriller, Odds against Tomorrow, is by essayist, journalist and author, Nathaniel Rich.14 Rich has published three novels to date, the other two being The Mayor’s Tongue (2008) and King Zeno (2018). He has also published a nonfiction book charting what we knew about climate change in the 1970s and what we failed to do when we had the chance – the highly acclaimed, Losing Earth: A Recent History (2019). Clearly, Rich is well-versed in environmental issues, yet his novel, Odds against Tomorrow, only partially portrays such issues. It can be described as a post-9/11 novel, since its main focus is on disaster and risk. It also fits the Cli-fi genre, since the disaster it depicts is climate based: A major drought followed by a storm causes devastating flooding affecting

94  Impasse, Paradox New York and surrounding areas. Nonetheless, I include this novel in my analyses of environmental crisis fiction because of its thematic use of death-facing ecology. Specifically, the novel illustrates a crisis in the physical world giving rise to a parallel crisis in thought, unsettling hegemonies of death-denial, yet encountering aporia in a death-facing mode. Death-denial and death-facing are consequently depicted as complex and interchangeable responses to the paradox of death. Rich goes on to pursue the problem of death-denial in King Zeno. Described in its publication blurbs as ‘a historical crime novel and a searching inquiry into man’s dreams of immortality’, King Zeno depicts death-denial as a quest for immortality and a pathway to destruction within the human social world.15 Odds against Tomorrow centres around the idea of death-denial as a pathway to destruction and death-facing as an intervention at a time of environmental crisis. Its narrative psychology is quite different to that of McCarthy’s The Road. Whereas McCarthy’s use of sparse prose and his depiction of nameless characters traversing an already dead world confronts his readers directly with death’s aporia, Rich allows the reader to explore death’s dilemmas through the thought processes of his key protagonist, Mitchell Zukor. The narrative draws Zukor’s meditations on his own obsessive fear of disaster through a series of plot twists, out of which contrasting responses to death’s imminence are portrayed. The effect of this is to create a narrative space in which to ponder differing responses in the face of existential threat such as environmental disaster. The novel’s focus on the question of ‘fear’ in the face of death or disaster is noted by popular reviewers. Lit Lovers describes the novel as ‘a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear’.16 This ‘inquiry’ produces a consideration of the implications of fear and its capacity to drive human behaviours. Thus, Scott Geiger, writing for The Common, sees the novel as asking whether we will be ‘motivated by courage or by fear’ as we adapt to a changing planet?17 This somewhat psychological reading chimes with mine. While the novel’s lack of detailing around environmental issues has been described as a limitation,18 by reading it via its thematic use of death-facing ecology, a different kind of detailing emerges to do with the human psyche and our responses to challenges. As such, the novel pays particular attention to the human psyche and its responses to entanglement in matters of the contemporary world. The novel’s storyline comprises three plot stages. In the first, we are introduced to mathematical genius, Zukor, who is obsessed with disaster, and the New York consulting company he works for, FutureWorld, which indemnifies companies against catastrophes such as terrorist attacks or tornadoes. In this first plot stage, death-denial is contrasted with death-facing through Zukor’s contemplations on his life and career. Disaster then strikes, marking the second plot stage in which

Impasse, Paradox  95 contemplations of the first stage are played out. In the third stage, Zukor’s dominant mode of death-denial is replaced with a mode of death-­facing  – an outcome that is depicted as contingent, illustrating death’s aporia as ever present. Zukor’s activities at FutureWorld symbolise death-denial in that they depict a capitalising impulse driven by a denial of death. At FutureWorld, Zukor calculates the risks of possible scenarios, which are used to alarm companies into taking out a policy that will enable them to avoid being sued for not taking precautions. It is a lucrative business. A contrasting depiction of death-facing is set up through the characterisation of college acquaintance, Elsa Bruner, from whom Zukor receives a string of enigmatic letters. Elsa has Brugada, a heart condition that means she might drop dead at any time. Despite her condition, she sets up a backto-the-land commune in Maine. The novel deals quite directly with its incorporation of death-facing ecology. Thus: Mitchell wanted to know how she defeated, or ignored, the fear of death that would likely come for her soon. And Elsa seemed eager to prove her case to him, that she had figured out how to survive best in a chaotic universe. But why? Why would she care what ­M itchell – a financial consultant who plotted disaster and figured out how to profit from it – thought about her little utopian agricultural experiment. (65) Zukor finds himself constantly dwelling on her refusal to panic in the face of possible death and wonders whether she is trying to tell him something. The novel conjures up a sense of existential dilemma in the face of death, focalised mainly through the character of Zukor and replicating the intensification of impossible death’s possibility at a time of environmental crisis. Zukor’s obsessive fear of death fuels his desire to envisage ever-more drastic worst-case scenarios and ramp up death-fear in others. His capitalising on disaster has connotations of a capitalist growth mind-set as driver of environmental crisis. As his wealth increases, he moves from single room to luxury apartment; yet Elsa’s death-facing begins to affect him. He retains a modest lifestyle and continues to pursue both his obsession with disaster and his puzzlement over Elsa. But all her talk of sowing … etc. seemed to be the manifestation of a larger philosophical strategy. If he could only isolate this strategy, he might be able to use it himself. This was what he was trying to get at in his letters. It wasn’t easy; he couldn’t just ask her How do you overcome your fear of imminent death? Can you teach me? (82)

96  Impasse, Paradox For Elsa, the ‘possibility’ of death is carried as an illness in her body. Death is of course a certainty for everyone. We are aware that we could die at any moment, even if, as Derrida points out, death is ‘impossible’ to know as such. Elsa’s awareness of death’s possibility and its eventual certainty is heightened because of her illness, and one might expect this to result in a heightened death-fear, yet she refuses to pander to fear. Her agrarian lifestyle might be likened to the Epicurean garden, a place where one lives simply, unafraid of death because when death arrives one will no longer be there to experience it.19 Elsa thus carries the novel’s depiction of an ecological death-facing mind-set. Having set up this narrative contrast around the question of death’s impossible possibility, in its second plot stage the novel unsettles this with the advent of disaster. New York suffers extreme flooding, and only Zukor has predicted this disaster. He earns the gratitude of clients who had protected their business interests due to his warnings. In an ironic twist, FutureWorld falls, having failed to indemnify itself against the flood, and Zukor is subsequently acclaimed as a prophet by the media and pursued for his views on various matters. This plot twist signals a narrative shift around the question of human responses to the possibility of impossible death, illustrating how these responses pivot over an underlying aporia of death. Zukor goes in search of Elsa but is unable to find her and assumes her to be dead. Co-worker, Jane, urges Zukor to capitalise on disaster by creating a new company (FutureDays), but Zukor instead turns recluse, leaving the new company in Jane’s hands. He sets up his own off-the-grid lifestyle, as America gets rebuilt, and he is unaware of it; his only contact with the outside world is through Jane, who visits regularly, bringing supplies. Zukor adopts a back-to-theland, and therefore an environmentalist mind-set, replicating Elsa’s: He would avoid nostalgia; forget the past, forget Future World, forget the whole tangled cycle of anxiety and fear and paranoia that got him here. Instead, his teeming energies – or, to be honest, his fanaticism – his fanaticism would be spent in the fields, building-shaping-making-growing-spreading. (209) While Zukor’s embrace of Elsa’s lifestyle symbolises his shift towards death-facing, a parallel twist occurs when Zukor a receives a letter from Elsa via Jane; he is astonished to discover that she is still alive, has abandoned her off-the-grid lifestyle, returned to college and placed herself in the hands of medical services. The postcard reads: ‘by the time you get this, I’ll be a futurist’ (303). Thus, Zukor and Elsa now appear to have exchanged places in terms of their responses to death. This redoubles the plot twist, accentuating the pivotal function of death while illustrating the discursive nature of divergent human responses.

Impasse, Paradox  97 In the novel, death-denial is linked with a capitalist drive towards environmental crisis, and death-facing with a back-to-the-land ecology. And yet the novel also complicates these distinctions, evoking a sense of today’s vexed human response to environmental crisis. Elsa’s embrace of an Epicurean garden lifestyle, in the end, leads her to embrace life and all that would enhance its possibilities, whereas Zukor’s contemplations over death-fear lead him to seek solace in the simple lifestyle awakened in him by Elsa. A further irony arises where this lifestyle is sustained by FutureDays through the supplies Jane brings, hinting at the way closeto-the-land living is a privilege of those who can afford to buy land. As a final twist, Jane takes on the death-denying stance abandoned by Zukor, as she too pursues a capitalist endeavour. These revolving conflicts provide a narrative space for reflection on the human condition and its relevance to the environmental crisis. Indeed, Bergthaller points to the novel’s use of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973), 20 from which it cites: ‘The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we shrink from being fully alive’21 (49–50). Bergthaller relates this to a paradox in the novel, which he describes as a distinction between the idea that ‘efforts to protect life may end up weakening it’, and that ‘exposure to risk can strengthen vitality’.22 He links these distinctions retrospectively to ‘liberal conceptions of subjectivity’ on the one hand, and to ‘the environmentalist tradition of voluntary simplicity’, on the other.23 These observations can be related to Derrida’s discussions on aporia where he refers to the notion of ‘trespass’, since the encounter with death as aporia, although a non-place, and indeed because it is a non-place, gives rise to discourse. In other words, differing responses to death produce differing conceptions of life. The advent of an environmental crisis in the contemporary world is the catalyst for such differentiation. When confronted with one’s possible demise – whether of the self, or of humanity – the urgent need to respond arises. Yet this response is not unified, since thoughts of death give rise to a divergence of discourse. Thus, the sense of paradox to which Bergthaller points raises a divergence between the view that a return to agrarian lifestyles is needed and the business-as-usual response based on continued growth. This dichotomy manifests at a time of environmental crisis because this crisis, occurring in the real world, brings possible death into close proximity. This dichotomy is by no means new, since death is not new, but it intensifies at a time of environmental crisis because its material dimensions demand a material response. Published seven years earlier, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road24 very specifically depicts a material crisis of the environment because the material world it depicts, although we are not told why, is now a dead world, no longer regenerative, incurring the prospect of inevitable starvation for humanity’s remnants. With the exception of a few morels, all nonhuman

98  Impasse, Paradox life is already ended. The novel differs starkly to Odds against Tomorrow in that the material crisis (the dead world) and the psychological crisis are both intensified for the reader, so that the reader feels death in its proximity. McCarthy’s prose is as sparse as his storyline. He provides no relief for the reader from the grim reality of death’s envisaged arrival. As a result, The Road is so intensely bleak as to be almost unreadable at times. The novel describes the journey south of unnamed ‘father’ and ‘son’ as they make their way across the ice-cold landscape of this dead world, hoping to come upon some warmth and sustenance. But on reaching the coast, all they find is more of the same: the death of the world. Even the ocean is ‘not blue’ (230). Near the end of the novel, the father dies, and the son is taken on by strangers. Nonetheless, his future looks grim, since, as the novel itself states, this is a world ‘not to be made right again’ (307). The Road brings death closely into proximity, presencing it in various ways. This demonstrates rather than describes death’s inevitability along with the necessity of facing it, thereby articulating the promise of death’s actuality more powerfully than the other novels examined. It also explores the meaning of human goodness and the possibility of an ethics through its heart-rending dialogues between father and son. Yet, given death’s intimacy in the novel, this seems more an example of the novel’s strategic questioning of the reader than the rendering of redemption that some critics propose. Hence, instead of putting forward another moralistic reading, which would elide the novel’s structural effects, I focus on its sense of death as imminent. This positions the human subject, not as redeemable or not, but as conceptually located within the site of its own existential and, correspondingly, constructed dilemmas. The novel’s two main characters are father and son, each of whom responds differently to death’s imminence. I also identify a third, less obvious character, the boy’s mother and wife of the unnamed man. Her presence is purely spectral, since she commits suicide before the start of the storyline, death being, to her, already the only remaining prospect. Yet her presence pervades the narrative, providing a crucial contrast both to the father’s determination to go on and his eventual death, and to the son’s living on. Together, these three different yet equally agonising narrative responses to death’s imminence make The Road seem less a pronouncement on the question of death’s relation to environmental crisis than a statement of its intractability as a problem for our time. This has the effect of rescinding all discourse with which the novel engages, including the idea of death-facing ecology, even as it simultaneously declares it. The Road is described in an early review as a ‘meditation on death’ in which death ‘comes close’ and ‘feels very real’.25 Its powerful presencing of death has led to it attracting considerable attention. Awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Believer Book

Impasse, Paradox  99 Award in 2006, The Road then took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. In 2010, it was ranked number one on the New York Times’ list of the 100 best American books of the past ten years, and in 2009, it was adapted for film.26 Its popularity reflects not only recognition of the book itself but also its reception by a readership engaged on some level with the problem of death as a question of our time. This question of death and its relation to life is signatory to ­McCarthy’s oeuvre more generally. J. M. Grammer refers to McCarthy as ‘a writer whose authorship is based “upon an intense awareness of impermanence”’, where ‘life is possible only in a continual and more or less cordial dialogue with death’.27 When interviewed in 1992 by The New York Times, McCarthy said that he only cares for writers who ‘deal with issues of life and death’.28 McCarthy also penned his own obituary. In it, he describes, among other things, a childhood memory: that of witnessing a dog ‘beaten to death with a tire-iron by a local rustic’; he writes: and as the child who would become the old man watched the animal’s eyeball stalk and all drip like egg yolk down the cracked skull he thought, One day that will be me, and in the grand design of things he was not far off. 29 This posthumous statement of the author as child-witness to death provides a curious closure that functions, in the Derridean sense, to open McCarthy’s works. In acknowledging his own future death, McCarthy makes reference to ‘the unknowable’, to that which, as Derrida asserts, cannot be understood except via the ‘death of the other in me’.30 Hence, while McCarthy writes about his own (impossible) death, it is we as reader who read of it, meaning that death appears for us through our witnessing of it as the death of another. Simultaneously, through his obituary, McCarthy acknowledges the death that he also fictionally draws, since his oeuvre, most particularly The Road, speaks repeatedly to the imminent ‘possibility’ of ‘impossible’ death. Such a uniting of the author’s acknowledgement of death and the death he (textually) envisages provides a kind of fictional ends of thinking where idea and referent (discursively) meet, giving rise to the appearance of death as textually anticipated. In The Road, death’s impossible possibility is brought forward so that it effectively tips the reader into death’s aporia. The sense, in The Road, that the self is grimly poised at this moment of explaining, being unable to explain, yet having to live with death all the same, poses for its characters a set of questions to do with our responses – religious or secular – to death, and thus to life. Such questions, I propose, are not answered in The Road, or at least any answers are themselves posed as questions. This confronts the reader with the need, at a time of environmental crisis, to reconsider death, yet also points to the impossibility inscribed in

100  Impasse, Paradox all forms of its elucidation. The reader is held, within the narrative of The Road, at the moment where all forms of ‘trespass’ fall away, thus being forced to face imminent yet impossible death. It is this moment out of which the mother, father and son’s differing responses to existential death-facing arise. In depicting this moment of death’s ‘impossibility’, The Road also demonstrates a kind of existential disturbance linked to environmental crisis, out of which is thought the possibility of the demise of the human species. This is usefully considered via Derrida’s work on collective death, in particular his work on the notion of nuclear destruction, of totalising death – the death of everything, especially that of humanity and its archive. The concept of a rebounding death through environmental crisis is not dissimilar to that of nuclear warfare in its totalising effect, the difference being that it results from the loss of nonhuman other and the corresponding breakdown of ecological structures. In The Road, we are not told the cause of the nonhuman world’s demise, effectively honing the message that humanity has no existence without it. In Derrida’s work, whereas individual death, although it is ‘the end of the world each time’, 31 is assimilated by cultural memory and the mourning process, total death or the end of the (human) world leaves no remainder and thus no apparatus (no literature) by which the negotiation of the space of humanity occurs.32 Derrida refers to this as ‘the loss of the archive’, that is, as the ends of our means of thinking as a result of remainderless destruction.33 The immersion into death’s (im)possibilities, seen in The Road, occurs too in McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited.34 This short work, which is constructed and presented in the format of a stage play, is a meditation on meaning (if it exists) in life where death is its counterpart and begins to illustrate Derrida’s death as aporia. The two sole characters in The Sunset Limited – a God-fearing black man with a criminal past, referred to simply as Black, and a cynical white man, a professor who has lost faith in his vocation, referred to as White – are in dialogue, Black having, that morning, prevented White from jumping in front of a train (the Sunset Express). Their dialogue, sustained throughout the whole play, takes place in Black’s flat, and consists of Black trying to persuade White that he might have some reason to live, while White defends the position that he does not. Having expressed a sense of loss that is conceptually modernist and consistent with what Foucault calls the ‘analytic of finitude’ (Joshua Schuster explains this as ‘the end of a certain way of knowing … which is not its fully realized completion or totalizing closure but its undoing and dissolution’), 35 White says to Black: ‘The things I believed in don’t exist anymore. It’s foolish to pretend they do. Western civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now’ (SL, 27).

Impasse, Paradox  101 From this position, White then moves to a dissatisfaction with all constructed meaning, applying this just as readily to Black’s attempts to persuade him with a Christian narrative: Black Suppose I was to tell you that if you could bring yourself to unlatch your hands from around your brother’s throat you could have life everlasting? White There’s no such thing. Everybody dies. Black That aint what he said. He said you could have life everlastin. Life. Have it today. Hold it in your hand. That you could see it. (SL, 78) Here, Black seems to fully accept White’s position: that everybody dies, and there is no life after death. His response is to describe ‘life everlasting’ as being extant within the present. If faith (in God) is an act of the living, and immortality is a phenomenon of the moment that describes it, the meaning of the phrase ‘life everlasting’ is contained entirely within its assumed impact on the present living moment. In Aporias, Derrida expressly resists a claim made by Heidegger: that the privileging of the now is a ‘vulgar’ concept of time, asking whether it might not be, rather, the only concept of time. He then relates this to death, proposing an experience of facing impossible death as being somehow irreducible.36 What Black offers to White seems to touch on the experience that Derrida considers. The Christian narrative, as is well known, founds itself explicitly on the belief in life after death. Yet, as Derrida remarks, ‘Every culture is characterised by its way of apprehending, dealing with, and, one could say, “living” death as trespass’, or the discursive crossing of a border from life into death, when to explain death at all is to enter the realms of the impossible.37 On this view, no religion can prepare one for death per se; it can only prepare one, by way of trespassing death’s border, for life. Such a point is seen to be made by White, just before he leaves Black’s flat in the closing pages, when he will head for the train station to resume his earlier intention, rejecting Black’s attempts to persuade him that life may still be worth living. White argues: Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There’s a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for life. For dreams and illusions and lies. (SL, 138) This nihilistic finale intensifies as the reader witnesses Black’s despair having failed to save White. Black falls to his knees to plead with a God he himself seems deeply uncertain of. What is held up to our attention therefore, while religion is at stake here, seems to be the function of death’s ‘trespass’ in life and the effect on the self of the ontic mode it correspondingly

102  Impasse, Paradox engenders, together with the fragility of such belief. This raises questions, in terms of death-facing, to do with the function of belief in relation to death-fear, and the differences between religious and secular forms of knowing where death is concerned. White’s ‘execution’ of postmodern death, calling to mind in particular ‘the Death of God’, makes unavoidable his own death, whereas Black seems to be suggesting a differing conception of God and belief and its relation to death in the first place.38 The Sunset Limited makes no substantive reference to the physical world nor to any anthropogenic effects of human dwelling. The Road, in contrast, explicitly extends a meditation on death to the interrelation of self and its world, drawing this relation as constitutive by virtue of the tensions it construes where the world itself breaks down. The dead (or virtually so) landscape of The Road depicts the consequences of human actions upon the planet as they might amount to, from which there could be no turning back. Demonstrating death-facing by presencing death in its rebound, thereby illustrating a failure to deal effectively with the self as mortal, The Road seems to subsume the external with the internal, placing the self within its own elegy and giving rise to the metaphysical feel of the novel. The question of death as aporia, as illustrated by The Sunset Limited, is thus raised again in The Road, but differs in the way the inescapable need to apprehend death, whether by secular or religious systems of thought, is made referential to the world at large. This effectively relates fear of death to environmental crisis. The intensity of the narrative in The Road is drawn in the deathliness of the landscape it describes, as well as in the heart-rending dialogues between father and son, and in the father’s apprehension of their situation: his dreams, his memories, his dilemmas with regard to his son and the dangers they face. The father is acutely aware that he is living with a decision he made, the decision to live, to carry on and to ‘carry the fire’ (87), along with his son and because of his son, while the son’s mother, his wife, took the decision to end her life. ‘They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it’, he recalls her saying. ‘You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant’ (58). Along with this burden, this electing to live, all the while knowing that imminent death accompanies their every step, the father must take care, not only of his son, but of his promise to him that they will die together, that he will not send him ‘into the darkness alone’ (265). For this, he must be prepared to kill his own son. Watching the boy sleeping one afternoon, he asks himself: ‘Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?’ (28). The father constantly battles with this heart-wrenching plan, and, of course, when the time does come, finds himself unable to go through with it. However, his promise to his son not to send him into the darkness alone is not compromised at the point of his death, since the boy is delivered unexpectedly into the hands of strangers. Nonetheless, the boy’s future remains unknown and, indeed, unknowable.

Impasse, Paradox  103 The sense of bleakness, amid this depiction of love in the face of bare life, is deepened by the novel’s stark stylistic minimalism, setting a mood of profound austerity, and enhancing the humanity it gives way to. As Lindsey Banco notes, ‘[p]aragraphs are short’, ‘chapter breaks and quotation marks around dialogue are absent’ and ‘punctuation is rare’.39 Banco also notes a specific variation in the application of apostrophes to contractions, these being absent where the contraction is negative, but present where it posits or asserts something. These apostrophes highlight ‘the “I”, the “you”, or the “we”’ in the sentences that contain them.40 For Banco, these affirmative contractions point towards the ‘moral, empathetic, or creative possibilities of human beings’ in contrast to the negative, denuded contractions, which refer to McCarthy’s ‘indifferent’ and ‘blighted’ world. This leads Banco to suggest that the novel, while portraying the ‘utter despair of the modern, existential abyss’, also evokes ‘some of the most important things in McCarthy’s world – ­human agency and assertion – which, if lost, would result in the postapocalyptic landscape he imagines’.41 While this overlooks possible negative aspects of human agency and assertion, it does perhaps describe some of the novel’s intensity. In my reading, the effect Banco notes might be considered instead by viewing the accentuated ‘I’ as referent to ‘life’ (and the ‘death’ it confronts), specifically ‘my life’ in relation to ‘my death’. Such a containing of the existential ‘I’, is held, in the novel, in tension with the ‘life’ and the ‘death’ of other, especially that of the world. In Aporias, Derrida discusses the problem of the ‘mineness’ of death in Heidegger’s thought as a function of the aporia, asking: ‘Is my death possible?’42 In The Road, while human agency and assertion remain inevitably at stake, they are addressed by the ontic ‘I’ being placed primarily at odds with its own ‘life’ and ‘death’ where these are held in the mode of ‘mineness’. That is, for each character, the ‘possibility’ of ‘my (impossible) death’ is drawn to imminence in a moment-to-moment awareness, while the world is already in the state of death. This intensifies the effect of the apostrophised contractions and also points to wider structures at work in the novel, notably the way the father is shaped but also broken by his steadfast endurance in sustaining the ‘I’, out of which his profound love for his son is upheld. As the novel progresses, it is the boy who seems to contest the ‘mineness’ that his father attempts, out of legitimate fears for their survival, to sustain. Born after the death of the world, the boy inherits only his father’s memories of what the world once was. His in some ways naïve desire to encounter other, his extending of an ethic, has been remarked on by some scholars, particularly Christopher Pizzino who reads the novel as offering ‘the possibility of moral and social order outside the father-son relationship’.43 Derrida’s turn towards an otherness of death, in which, as Schuster puts it, ‘I cannot die alone. I can only know of the other’s death such that I die as other’, takes on some of the subject conceptualizing of Emmanuel Levinas.44

104  Impasse, Paradox The relevance to The Road of Levinas’ pre-­ontological ethic has been noted, for example, by Matthew Mullins.45 However, considered in relation to death-facing ecology, the father’s withholding from ‘other’ is a withholding not just from the living or worldly ‘other’ but also, simultaneously, from the ‘other’ that is the death he fears. Hence, one way that death-fear is problematised in the novel is in this highlighting of the father’s fear of ‘the death of the other in me’.46 Where death is eschewed it rebounds, filling the landscape as the reflection of, and more literally the consequence of, the subject’s ontic modes, rendering an appearance of the ecological outcomes of the self’s relations with death. The father, the son and the reader each become ‘witness’ to that which lies beyond the end of the world – witness, as Shelly Rambo puts it, to ‘the impossibility of things “being made right again”’.47 This rebounding of death reveals its ultimate face: that of finality, as the reader is confronted with the bleak notion that the refusal to die is both a legitimate effect of living and, at the same time, untenable – having the effect of compelling the death of the world of other, upon which the self relies. My reading of The Road defines the novel as profoundly elegiac. By bringing death’s possibility into such close proximity with the reader, it appears to enact a funeral of life itself. This is not, of course, a total death, since, as all the novels I discuss demonstrate, such an end is unrepresentable in narrative form. Yet death’s visibility is vastly accentuated where discursive life is reduced, enhancing too the reader’s sense of death as both imagined and real. At the same time, since death is aporetic, this retraction of discourse also emphasises the discursivity of death in terms of life. Accordingly, the novel’s three main characters respond to the arrival of imminent death by facing death in differing ways: by entering death (the mother); by surviving, but only temporarily (the father); and by living on (the son). Whereas the alternate modes of death-facing in Atwood’s trilogy appear to seek to tame death, death in The Road retains a certain ‘wildness’, through its increased narrative visibility.48 This suggests, not so much a failure to tame death, but its untamability. The Road, viewed this way, becomes an elegy for a humanity that has failed to understand that which cannot be fully understood. A brief return to Derrida begins to indicate what this might imply. In his work, which is characterised by an increasing attention to the problem of death, Derrida endeavours to complicate the life/death opposition in his notion of ‘survival’, being ‘not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible’.49 In his last interview, published as Learning to Live Finally (2007), Derrida remarks: Learning to live should mean learning to die, learning to take into account, so as to accept, absolute mortality (that is, without salvation, resurrection, or redemption – neither for oneself nor for the other)… to philosophize is to learn to die.50

Impasse, Paradox  105 But he goes on to say: I believe in this truth without being able to resign myself to it. And less and less so. I have never learned to accept it, to accept death that is. We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve [en sursis].51 Derrida goes on to remind us that our concern should be with life and the living, whether human or nonhuman. We are granted, along with all other living beings, a ‘temporary reprieve’ and, within that, a life worth living is at stake for all. This view of death as irresolvable does not imply his full disagreement with the claim of death-historian Philippe Ariès, that modern world is alienated from death. 52 Indeed, Derrida applies this idea himself in Aporias, noting that ‘the dominant feeling for everyone’ is that death ‘is no longer what it used to be’, adding: ‘who will deny it?’53 At the same time he derides historians such as Ariès for their easy assumption that by knowing death better one might somehow resolve it.54 Death remains, for Derrida, ‘impossible’ no matter that we recognise its ‘possibility’. Derrida’s notion of ‘survival’, by which he complicates the life/death opposition, points, instead, to the need for an ‘intensity’, as he puts it, of life, based on death’s ever-present aporia.55 I consider Derrida’s notion of survival more fully in Chapter 4, in relation to the work of Martin Hägglund, who emphasises death’s ongoing presence in temporal life. Meanwhile, this notion of an intensity of life, where one acknowledges without resolving death’s possibility, arises, in Derrida’s thought, in relation to his concerns for a world ‘more inegalitarian than ever’ and the corresponding need for a life ‘worthy of being lived’ for all.56 It is here that facing death discloses its ethical function in Derrida’s work. On this view, if McCarthy’s death-haunted world, in The Road, echoes a contemporary, real-world acknowledgement of death and even total death as being both ‘possible’ and ‘real’, it also depicts this increased intimacy with death, not as resolving death’s paradoxes, but as intensifying our encounter with its aporetic state, leading to a recognition of the need for survival by all. This narrative gesturing towards an ecological ethic occurs at the same time as its giving way to a plurality of discourse. Accordingly, the three characters of mother, father and son each depict a recognition of the loss of the physical and discursive world, responding to this recognition in differing ways. The mother, in departing life altogether, demonstrates most fully the recognition of possible death and the tragedy of not having recognised it sooner. The father mourns the loss of the world, but his living on in the face of such loss thus produces a narrative of excruciating trauma for the reader, ending in his death. The son lives on as a child of the aftermath, witness to the loss of that which he has never known.

106  Impasse, Paradox

Mother Less consideration tends to be given to the character of the mother or her function in The Road, compared to the father and the son. This is perhaps understandable, since her influence is felt only through analeptic recollections, in the father’s memories of her. She has no direct presence in the narrative, which centres entirely on the story of father and son and their journey south across an annihilated landscape. Even so, her act of suicide, before the story begins, exerts a considerable influence both on our reception of the characters, father and son, and on the plot itself – sparse as it is. As Phillip Snyder remarks, McCarthy ‘haunts’ the novel’s ‘mood and setting with her absence’.57 She is the wife of the man who feels he must go on, while wrestling with his fear that his wife may have been right to turn away from a life that is a living death. She is also the mother of a son born after the unnamed cataclysmic event; it is thus she who acknowledges and enacts the end of all things, giving way to the other that lies beyond it. Where the mother is turned to briefly, in readings, her act of suicide tends to be perceived as a weakness. Lydia Cooper, for example, condemns the mother for having abandoned her son, reading her as ‘an embodiment of the egocentrism and faithlessness that are swiftly killing the planet’. 58 For Cooper, the novel performs a twist on the mythical grail narrative (in which the son abandons the mother), bringing forward the son as the grail, poised as ‘counter to the mother’s nihilistic belief in the pointlessness of human survival’.59 To identify the mother in opposition to the son is to read The Road as insisting on the value of humanity’s survival, underlining humanity’s worth and capacity for transformation. This idea that the novel sees humanity as implicitly valuable is usually based on the son’s innocence, his goodness, his kindness and so on. While one may do well, at a time of environmental crisis, to hold on to a belief in human goodness, the problem with imposing upon texts this desire to make us ‘better persons’ is that it risks underestimating the complexities both of text and of life itself. Although the son’s goodness is unquestionable, the living characters of The Road cannot represent a pure vision of humanity, since humanity, in the novel, has already destroyed its world. The mother’s acknowledgement of total destruction indicates a purity that neither son nor father is able to match by living on. Snyder’s reading gives a degree of credence to the mother’s acknowledgement that the end is the end, viewing her suicide as a demonstration that the self cannot be sustained without its hospitality to other.60 Yet he also cites her as being ‘wrong’ in deciding to die. He subsequently uses the father and son to illustrate hospitality as ‘structuring human existence’.61 He bases this on their constant grappling with the ethical dilemma of how to respond to hungry strangers – the boy’s constant

Impasse, Paradox  107 wish to feed everyone, despite having almost no food himself, and the father’s prioritising of food for his son over food for himself. The effect of this reading, however, is to turn the mother’s act of suicide into a form of self-enclosure. In Snyder’s reading, the mother illustrates little more than a failure to care at all, the only, somewhat insensitively drawn, point in her favour being that she removes herself as burden to father and son.62 What Snyder’s reading omits, it seems, is the consideration of any standpoint from which the mother might be right to acknowledge the other as lost or that death is already all that remains. Yet it is at such a point that a more ecological reading may emerge, since the other with whom father and son negotiate their hospitality are a distinctly human other, while the physical world of The Road – that which embeds the intra-reliance of the self/other within a human/nonhuman realm – is already beyond hospitality’s reach: It has ended, as the mother’s act acknowledges. This, correspondingly, forces the narrative into shapes that cannot legitimately be explained by a promise of redemption or hope for humanity, underscoring in turn the aptness of readings that pay attention to the novel’s temporal structuring, such as Rambo, who reads The Road as giving ‘witness’ to the end, to that which ‘cannot be made right again’.63 How, then, might a Derridean approach bring out the nuances of the mother’s suicide in relation to discussions on death and death-facing? The idea that she simply gives in seems to underestimate the implications implied. Nor need it be construed as an act of nihilistic weakness, since facing death in actuality would require significant strength. Importantly, the mother plays a role in contributing to how death-facing ecology is structured in the novel. The potency of The Road’s presencing of total death, as an outcome of human action, is in part generated by her death. If we are, as Derrida puts it, ‘survivors granted a temporary reprieve’, then the ‘temporary’ measure of this reprieve is brought, in The Road, intimately to hand, intensifying our engagement with the experience of life and living that remains.64 This is first brought to us through the mother’s act of suicide, her opting for death over its omnipresence in life, a release she wants for her husband and son too. In an analeptic glimpse of conversation between mother and father, prior to her death, we are told that: She watched him across the small flame. We used to talk about death, she said. We don’t any more. Why is that? I don’t know. It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about. (58) If we view this fragment as articulating an arrival at death’s (rhetorical) border, we begin to see the potency it carries. The mother’s words, ‘because it’s here’, function to presence death, transporting the reader

108  Impasse, Paradox to the point of unknowing (of ‘impossibility’) out of which death emits discourse, and, as the mother observes, in the world of The Road there is ‘nothing left to talk about’. The effect of this statement is to retract or nullify all ‘trespass’ in relation to death. In this world, where the landscape is ‘barren, silent, godless’ (2), death has come too close to wrap it up in stories. These, in any case, have fallen away, along with the endings of all that was known. What is known is death itself, its possibility now construed as its arrival. The mother, in a few words that haunt the whole text, makes potent for the reader the traumatic context of death’s aporia within which father and son continue on, before retreating into the oblivion of the death she acknowledges. Her suicide functions as an acknowledgement of death as real ‘possibility’, not just for herself but for all. She acknowledges death’s material inevitability as its arrival. Nonetheless, she withdraws only from the immediate transit of the narrative; between the lines of the text her presence is sustained, evoked by the narrator who slides in and out of focalisation through the father, speaking through his memories, while locating him in a landscape in which his dead wife seems to linger: Where the nights are ‘now only slightly less black’, by day ‘the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp’ (32). The sun’s banishment displaces it from view, but in orbit it continues, unhindered. This simile presences the mother, or more particularly her death; as a ‘grieving mother’ she is watching on. The sun, in turn, foregrounds the death with which it is overlaid, a death which enters the spaces between the present and its haunting, the death which, denied, can only return in its fullness, engulfing both landscape and life as it rebounds upon the denier. The effect of the mother’s act of death-facing and subsequent haunting of the text, viewed this way, seems to reinforce Rambo’s view, that The Road confronts the reader, not with tragedy but with trauma.65 This trauma occurs, Rambo suggests, in the way the reader is forced to ‘witness’ what remains.66 By locating the mother’s death-facing in relation to death as aporia, she enacts the ‘possibility’ of that which is also ‘impossible’. She acknowledges death’s necessity, but, for the reader, whose position as reader is necessarily a living one, this remains an acknowledgement of the possibility of impossibility. Her haunting of the text becomes a sign of the aporia of death, since – says Derrida – death can never be understood as such. The mother therefore inflicts death’s aporia upon the reader. This reader experience is then intensified in the father’s refusal of death, despite his being haunted constantly by its real possibility through the figure of his wife, and in the world of his living on. It is not sufficient, then, to say that the mother represents a failure or relinquishing of responsibility. Her act of death-facing expresses a profound love for father and son, whose lives are made untenable by a death that has already arrived. That she acts out of love, and not selfishness,

Impasse, Paradox  109 is made clear in the text, for, in foreseeing the end, her ‘heart’ is ‘ripped out’ of her (59) when her son is born; while her last ‘cold’ ‘gift’ (60) is so because she sees no other way to breach the situation. Accepting death, she demonstrates death’s inevitability for father and son. As Michael Chabon notes, there is therefore a certain ‘intelligibility’ in the figure of the mother and her decision to die.67 She demonstrates with her life the only solution she can see, and by doing so, she depicts the loss of the world, not as her own death, but as the end of the road for humanity. At the same time, her choice is not simply ‘the only sane one’, as Chabon suggests.68 While her death accords with the death of the world, it is complicated by the father and the son’s living on. The mother’s death places death-facing before the reader; yet the storyline is one of continuation in the figure of the father and the boy, as they undertake their journey through and within death’s aporia.

Father Far more has been written about father and son than the mother. It is, after all, the father, with and for his son, who pursues to the extent that he personifies life and hope, which no longer exist in the world that surrounds them. It is the father who infuses the son with the notion that they are ‘carrying the fire’ (87), a phrase that has been variously interpreted, but most often, and most accurately it seems, as indicating the upholding of human goodness. Father and son are ‘the good guys’ (136), who, despite the ghastliness of the situation they are in, refuse to resort to violence or eating babies, steadfastly maintaining civility and a profound mutual care in their hellish day-to-day lives. The father also depicts death’s ‘impossibility’. In an aporia of death, even as the possibility for total death is envisaged, one remains alive in such envisaging; hence, the father is paired with the mother (possible death) in the novel’s depiction of death’s aporia. The father’s insistence that he and the son are ‘carrying the fire’ is also of some interest to our discussions. The father’s demonstration of death’s ‘impossibility’ for the self nonetheless retains death’s ‘possibility’ as a conditioning aspect of his life. This conditioning aspect hovers in the figure of the mother, constantly reminding the reader that (impossible) death remains possible. If ‘fire’ indicates human goodness, it necessarily indicates, too, the possibility of goodness being lost, and even of goodness itself as causing harm. As Chabon also notes, fire is also a key element of destruction in the novel, as seen in the ash-grey of the landscape of a dead world.69 Thus, any reading of the carrying of fire ought to allow for its possible double meanings. Mullins reads The Road, not as post-apocalyptic landscape but as depicting a crisis of modernity through the novel’s figural use of hunger. His reading usefully points to a space in which a re-evaluation of the

110  Impasse, Paradox ethical occurs – one that, rather than reinstating prior humanisms, occurs in between the postmodern and the post-postmodern. This undermines one-dimensional readings of The Road that view it as a Biblical redemption narrative. However, his key assertion – that father and son represent a transcendental ethic presented by the novel as foundational to defining the human – assumes a narrative coherence that seems difficult to verify. He bases this in part on his reading of ‘the fire’ as something ‘passed on from generation to generation, something essential to being human, something that transcends the individual and cannot be extinguished’.70 In describing this fire as ‘essential’ to the human, Mullins reads the novel as defining humankind in such a way to exclude those who are not ‘carrying the fire’, meaning that they are not human – at least as we might commonly understand the word. The violent cults and baby-eaters, for Mullins, represent the ‘instrumentality’ of modernity as defined by Charles Taylor.71 Whereas father and son, in opting to starve rather than eat babies, portray a transcendental humanism that is sought – Mullins suggests – where postmodernism has failed to address modernity’s ills.72 I would argue, however, that The Road’s depiction of an encounter with death’s aporia complicates its otherwise straightforward moralistic rationale. Father and son clearly do pursue life and goodness, even as possible starvation haunts their every moment. They refuse to resort to cannibalism, continuing to treat each other with profound care and tenderness, despite being under constant extremes of trauma. However, as the novel’s portrayal of the more abject aspect of humanity reveals, it is not certain that we will be human, where to be human is to be good (kind, caring, etc.). It is therefore also unclear that such characteristics, even if attained through transcendental means, are viable signifiers of being human; for, if they are, what is to be done with our abject, and seemingly nonhuman, selves? Are our weaknesses not also a part of us? It is necessary, therefore, to examine the doubt, hesitation, and even horror, at work in the life-world of the father if the novel is to be fully examined, thus returning us to a postmodern arena. Central to my reading of the father, in The Road, is the nature of his response to death’s imminence in relation to continuing life. In deciding to go on, to ‘carry the fire’, and, thus, in attempting to link past and future, the father’s choice differs to that of the mother. Yet, as Stefan Skrimshire points out, McCarthy displays ‘no triumphalism in allowing his protagonist to refuse giving up’.73 While the father’s determination to uphold life – both his own and his son’s – suggests a pristine valuing of humanist ideals, he also provides, through his living on, as Rambo observes, a witnessing of the aftermath, a witnessing of that ‘Not to be made right again’ (307).74 The father moves towards no destination; his life is little more than a living death that will permit no sustained resistance. His only focus is the life of his son: the boy’s well-being, which he

Impasse, Paradox  111 cannot enable, and the boy’s future, which he cannot even imagine. The sheer lack of a world in which to drive his care forward, a lack which intensifies the agonal portrayal of his care of his son, is established early in the novel. At a point when he is lying in the dark, awaiting sleep following a conversation about death with his son, the text continues: He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone. (10) Within this narrative description in heavy, clipped sentences of the deathliness of the world in the night-time, two insertions are more directly the father’s: ‘Bedrock, this’ and ‘If only my heart were stone’. In the same way that the mother’s assertion that death is already here conjures death’s aporetic state for the reader, the statement, ‘bedrock this’, serves to emphasise that the father’s world is, in effect, worldless; there is nothing there. Any chance of the father being ‘hailed’ – like Snowman in Oryx and Crake – ‘by the void’, disintegrates before it can occur; whereas Atwood’s post-apocalyptic world is regenerative, McCarthy’s is not.75 Bedrock equals utter baseline. Whatever may have been built upon bedrock, in this novel, is gone for good, at least in any knowable life-world experience. The father might only even begin to identify with his situation if, as he puts it, his ‘heart were stone’. But it is more than an identification of self with world that is at stake here. The poststructuralist conception of the subject as arriving in an already given world, effectively, positions the father in a non-place, meaning that everything he knows and sees has already collapsed in on him. From the point of bedrock, whatever he ­creates – his ongoing, day-to-day, lived experience – can only occur through his concerted effort to build something, which he must do out of nothing but his shattered memories of, say, the meaning of goodness, together with his profound love for his son. Hence, for the reader, the love the father shares with his son is the only real thing remaining. The father’s tenacious effort to establish meaning in life, his ‘carrying the fire’, functions alongside the mother’s belief that no meaning remains, death being all there is. His opting to go on cannot therefore be fully justified by the desire to safeguard his son, since safeguarding the son is the mother’s primary desire too; this is the reason why her heart is ‘ripped out’ (59) of her when he is born. The man’s justification to go on appears, instead, in the meanings he continually constructs; in his encounters with fragments of the past, yet which often crumple to dust as he grasps them. On one occasion he finds a Spanish coin and

112  Impasse, Paradox rushes to show it to his son, driven (we can assume) by its past meanings as artefact. But then he hesitates and instead drops it. In a world where the present step is hunger and the next death, a coin has no meaning at all. For the father, immersed as he is in the ephemerality of constructed meaning, his continuing to ‘carrying the fire’ therefore might be his most significant construction. To ‘carry the fire’, after all, implies a future towards which it is carried – a task that the father persists in, even though the novel assures no such future. In terms of death’s aporia, the fire is the means by which the father continues to uphold death’s ‘impossibility’. Facing life, in The Road, nonetheless runs alongside death’s inevitability. In carrying the fire, father and son traverse a landscape that is no place, that gives nothing and that promises only their deaths. The novel’s portrayal of ‘trauma’ (to recall Rambo) appears in the character of the father in his constant self-interrogation of his own decision to go on.76 His assurances to his son that he will not leave him in life nor in death involve the possibility – should the situation demand it – that he ends the boy’s life himself. His repeated dwelling on this prospect, together with his fear that he will be unable to carry it through, continues a dialogue with his now-long-dead wife, whom he once taught how to self-kill using an obsidian blade. His every waking hour is haunted by her insistence that death has become the only option, her act of suicide and her admonishments for his deciding to go on, opening himself and the boy to dangers that may even be worse than death. Yet, for the man, life continues in the person of his small, frail, ever-­ generous-hearted son. Such recognition reveals the complex aporetic equivalence between the mother’s and the father’s intentions. When the time does come, the father is, of course, wholly unable to carry through with his plan to end the boy’s life. As his own death is imminent, despite the boy’s begging him, ‘Just take me with you. Please’, his reply to his son is, simply, ‘I cant’ (298). This ‘I cant’ forms the crux of my reading of the father in relation to Derrida’s death as aporia, forming a parallel to the mother’s ‘I can’t’ in relation to going forward. As Skrimshire observes, the difference between the father’s choice and his wife’s ‘is one equally weighted, equally uncertain’.77 The father, on the one hand, expresses that he knows she is right. On the other, that he cannot face killing his own son is of course, unquestionably, right too. To assert that these two are equally weighted is not, exactly, to equate their conflicting desires (towards the son’s life or his death), for that is to misunderstand the mother. It is not that she wishes to end the life of her son, but that she acknowledges the appearance of death as inevitable: The ‘possibility’ of ‘impossibility’ is made imminent. The father, conversely, presents the ‘impossibility’ of ‘possible’ death in his living on. He illustrates Derrida’s claim that one can never experience death except through the death of the other ‘in me’, sustaining both the reader’s engagement with death-facing and his own depiction of death’s unavoidable presence in life.78

Impasse, Paradox  113 Death’s unfathomability is perhaps the most useful of Derrida’s points in relation to the character of the father. Derrida insists that our questioning of death cannot protect itself ‘from a hidden bio-anthropo-­ thanato-theological contamination’.79 Our death-facing always contains fragments of thought in relation to our beliefs and understandings about life. Moreover, in addressing death, we participate in discourse, generating stories, enacting a ‘trespass’ that reaches beyond death’s border where, for Derrida, there is no actual border.80 The character of the mother demonstrates this when she says: there is ‘nothing left to talk about’ (58). In a dead world, even stories possess no meaning. The father ‘carries the fire’ and thus lives on in a landscape where all constructed meaning has otherwise fallen. Death’s ‘possibility’ remains, for him, an ‘impossibility’ as long as he carries the fire. When death finally takes him at the end of the novel, the son is left to face death’s ‘impossibility’, with only the fire he is carrying to prevent all meaning falling away.

Son Of the three characters, the boy provides the reader with the frailest and most intense form of living in the face of death’s imminence, even as only he lives on. Acutely vulnerable, the boy is painfully undernourished and constantly afraid. His hopes for long-term survival are uncertain, while his prospects of experiencing a life worth living are contained within his person, having no substance in a world returned to him only as death. Yet he also portrays a distinct sense of newness and purity – a condition that stands out as other to the world as depicted. Very easily, then, the boy might be read as a vision of hope for humanity’s redemption. The fact that he lives on, passed into the hands of strangers, may appear to justify the father’s upholding of life against death’s ‘impossibility’ as an act of faith in the future. It is unsurprising therefore that redemptive readings of the novel arise. Yet a redemptive approach may be too simplistic; the father repeatedly indicates that he has no faith in the future. He is aware that his promises to his son may be meaningless after all. For example, as sleep is evading him in the cold of the night, we find that: He said that everything depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was empty and no substance to it. There was a good chance they would die in the mountains and that would be that. (29) The father, on the one hand, ‘knows’ that his assertion that they will reach the coast is ‘empty’. However, that there was ‘a good chance’ they

114  Impasse, Paradox would die in the mountains evokes the parallel possibility that they may reach the coast, which of course they do. While the second of these may appear to counter the first, it might alternatively be said that the novel, rather, succeeds in sustaining both suppositions, and continues to do so to the final page and beyond. When the father dies and the son lives on, the aporetic dichotomy engendered by the mother and father’s two responses to death is now ended but reappears in their son as a single representative of death’s aporia. The son thus embodies the perspectives of both mother and father, carrying forward the novel’s complex engagement with death. A further aspect of the son’s character now becomes significant, seen from the perspective of Derrida’s work on collective death and the loss of the archive. As several scholars note, the son is born after the unnamed cataclysmic event, and so has no experience of the world as it was before it. This means that he has only the father’s stories and memories by which to envisage what might have been. Whereas the father lives on in the non-place of The Road’s deathly landscape, the son is born into it. His whole life-world, from the moment of his birth, is an exposition of the unknowable. His living on, therefore, takes the reader beyond all capacity to imagine. The boy correspondingly signals the ‘loss of the archive’ (of literature) and thus the appearance of the absolute referent. According to Joseph Kronick, the affinity Derrida uncovers between ‘the rhetoric of nuclear war’ and ‘literature’ lies ‘not in scenarios of mass destruction but in the anticipation of the wholly other’81; this ‘other’, for Derrida, ‘is the only possible invention’, that is ‘without precedent’, this being the ‘absolute referent’ as ‘monstrosity’.82 The implied end of the world in The Road is also that which the son steps towards at the end of the novel. He moves forward into the space beyond precedent, beyond the intimacy of his father’s love, beyond the end to a place where death (the mother), and life (the father), both are ended. While this gives way to a space of other, opening to the possibility of a future, in signalling the loss of the archive it also forecloses all means by which we might conceive it. In moving beyond our conception, it signals, for that matter, our own demise, while making of itself both everything and nothing. Although the boy moves ahead and beyond us, accompanied by benevolent strangers, we can make no valid claims about his future. Whatever he carries or contains or accompanies him, the landscape into which he steps is that of an already dead world. Even so, the son performs the novel’s shift from the question of ‘I’ to that of ‘we’ – although this is problematised in the loss of the world. This shift is envisaged as unachievable by the mother and negated, if also relied upon, by the father. As Pizzino notes, while the man is generally considered to be ‘the novel’s primary evocation of goodness’, insisting on life over death for the boy and teaching him the meaning of goodness,

Impasse, Paradox  115 a further ethic extends beyond the father–son relationship.83 This appears, Pizzino suggests, in the way the son seeks to include everyone they meet in his ethic of care, in contrast to the father who extends it only to the son.84 Nonetheless, rather than pointing as Pizzino suggests to a utopian reading, it may be understood as adding to, thus amplifying, the novel’s aporetic state. The boy’s desire to feed everyone they meet, and the father’s concern that they can barely feed themselves – or, more particularly, that he can barely feed his son – are placed in helpless conflict with each other. The boy’s generosity, while often justifiably celebrated, is in an important sense also naive. He has no means to grasp the ethical dilemmas embedded at the heart of contemporary death-thinking, and which, at the collapse of the archive are undone. This can be seen in an encounter between father, son and a starving man. The father refuses to help the man, and, as they continue on their way, the boy pleads with his father: He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die. He’s going to die anyway. He’s so scared, Papa. The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared. The boy didn’t answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing. You’re not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? He said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one. (277) In my reading, the boy is ‘the one’ who is other to all that is known, to all that can be relied on or prepared for, in contrast to his father, who worries because of all he has known. The son has to worry about everything because his father speaks to him with words from a world that has ended; because he embodies a future that exceeds his father; because, in marking the appearance of the absolute referent, his very existence marks the end of the world. Hence, while he signals pure goodness, he depicts, too, the unfounding of the ethical as no longer possible, based on the failure of all who have gone before him. This does not make an ethic transcendent, as in Mullins’ account; rather, it makes an ethic unattainable where we consign it to the unimaginable. The novel makes no demand for a flight from the realities of a finite world; rather, it places the finitude of the world squarely before us, so that survival depends on an account of the ‘we’ in its immediacy.

116  Impasse, Paradox If the ethical, in The Road, is problematised, this goes too for the various forms it may take, including that of religion. The ephemeral nature of religious practice seems to haunt the novel to striking effect. Made up of promises of a life beyond death in return for adherence to their ethical formulations, religions dissolve to nothing when death arrives in its actuality. As the father seeks to ‘evoke the forms’ (77–78), he interrogates his own faith in God repeatedly, raging at its loss while enlisting the boy to stand in for it. The boy, on the other hand, seems more able to depict this loss of religion in its passing. One day, he is watching the snow fall on the stricken landscape: ‘it’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single grey flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom’ (15). Not only has Christendom expired, but its expiry is embodied in the melting of a single grey snowflake. More than the mourning of its loss, this is an illustration of the transience of discourse and of all ideology. The grey of the snowflake reminds us that it carries a certain contamination and, as noted earlier, in Derrida’s view, contamination occurs in all ‘trespass’, in all crossing of borders in relation to death. The grey of the snowflake’s contamination is also tied, necessarily, to the demise of the physical world, being the dust of its death and decay. The snowflake seems to carry an expression of the existential problem at hand, whereby our failure to face death squarely is bound up with the end of the world. The snowflake, as it melts, performs a deconstructive dissolution of our very sense of being, yet also leaves us, as the boy is left, standing on as ‘witness’ (recalling Rambo) to its demise.85 The novel effectively undermines all metanarrative constructions of life that rely upon death. As religion and meaning fade, the world and humanity are ended too, and it is, again, the boy who is positioned in the novel to observe this. We are told of refugees who, in the early days, not long after the cataclysmic event, peopled the landscape: ‘Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night’ (28). The text continues: ‘The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all’ (ibid.). Here, the boy recognises how totalising death renders all discourse as not having existed at all. Like his mother, he sees the death that lies at the heart of all discourse and must therefore be faced. Despite the father’s insistence on their ‘living on’, the boy keeps his mother close in his thoughts, and on several occasions remarks that he would have liked to go with her. His ‘living on’ is thus constantly placed in tension with his desire to meet death face on, like his mother; hence, the boy represents death as both ‘impossible’ and ‘possible’.

Impasse, Paradox  117 Embodying death’s aporia inherited from father and mother, the boy allows us to envisage the possibility of an impossible utopia, which is not in our experience, albeit in our thinking of it. The boy’s life-world emerges out of and not into death’s rhetorical border, so that he functions as a witness to the possibility of the unimaginable, the other beyond totalising destruction. If, in some sense of the word, he continues to live on, such a continuance nonetheless moves him towards that for which he can only be unprepared; it is the no-place of our minds made absolute. In uniting the ends of the world with the beginnings of the ethical, he refuses both, instead drawing attention to Derrida’s point: If a ‘life worth living’ is ‘at stake’ for all – both human and nonhuman – then the meanings and possibilities of this ‘life worth living’ only exist in ‘life’, in the most intense sense of the word.86 *** In his reading of death as aporia, Derrida resists all existential analysis of death, yet he admits that we cannot help but seek to explain death. When we cease to do so, the world ends for us. In this sense, rather than viewing humanity as a destructive force, McCarthy’s The Road might be understood as being about the way we already think of humanity as a destructive force and the effects of our conceptualising upon our perceptions and subsequent constructions of life. The boy in this sense demonstrates a care that we envisage as being lost to us and which we experience as impossible to locate within the world. The Road, rather than being structured as redemptive, turns us back on ourselves, confronting us with an underlying problem with a death we must inevitably face, yet which we cannot grasp and which can offer no meaning in life – other than that which we create out of living. The Road posits no discursive reasoning about what we have done to cause death’s rebound upon us, nor what it means to face it, but simply brings death upon us as a rebounding force. As Adeline Johns-­ Putra suggests, the novel is more ‘an end-of-times thought experiment’ than ‘a prophecy or warning’; Johns-Putra also reads The Road as therefore facilitating, rather than making, any moral conclusions.87 Whatever form of totalising death we fear, it is now here to be faced. Where death’s rebound is a result of our failure to face death, the mother, in The Road, steps forward to face it. Therefore, although her suicide is, in one sense, an abandonment of life and those living, it is, in another, not just the ‘only sane’ option as Chabon sees it, 88 but an active acknowledgement of the situation as it appears. The mother may well fear death, but she fears more that humanity has already destroyed its world. The boy can be described as ‘living on’, as much because his mother’s death fulfils death’s aporia as because his father perpetuates it.

118  Impasse, Paradox The way this aporia transitions, in The Road, from father and mother to the son, also shifts the ecology of death-facing to a space beyond thought and the world. Hence, although it takes its fullest form in the boy, it does so at a point where its value is already lost. Death-­facing cannot function as pure abstraction. The locating of aporia within the boy therefore demonstrates the futility of our thinking of the ends, whereby we conflate it with our thinking of a future as possibility. He may exemplify an ethic of the kind of scope that enables an assimilation of ecological thinking in the world of the self, yet the novel’s ecological moment exists out of reach – assigned to the past or to a location beyond the ends of the human archive. The novel’s placing of ecological well-being into the non-place of our envisioning seems above all to evoke our failure to re-envision humanity in an ecologically viable way in the present. It illustrates the effect of death’s aporia on ecological thinking, pointing to the complexities of discursive thinking, thus exposing the reader to the aspects of ecological thinking that make it difficult to do. Important to this is a stripping back of discourse to the point of paradox. On the one hand, if all death-facing is discursive – all analyses of death being contaminated by the mind – then no one form of death-­ facing is sustainable in itself. On the other hand, when all discourse is stripped back to a point where – as the mother puts it – ‘there is nothing left to talk about’ (58), then we are faced with a kind of death in the loss of all means by which to know life. The novel therefore asks whether it is possible to live at all without the functioning of our discursive worlds, without story. At the same time, it holds up a demand for an engagement between the discursive and the real, which the mother’s death demonstrates but father and son can only witness.

Notes 1 This chapter builds on, extends and incorporates parts of my article as previously published in The Oxford Literary Review. See Louise Squire, ‘Death and the Anthropocene: Cormac McCarthy’s World of Unliving’, The ­Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 211–228. 2 Hannes Bergthaller, ‘Climate Change and Un-Narratability’, Metaphora 2 (2018): 13. 3 Ibid., 8. 4 See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 5 Heidegger describes death as ‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein’; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Harper & Row, 1962), 294. 6 Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, translated by Patricia M. Ranum (London and Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 13–14. See also discussions in the Introduction to this book. 7 Ibid., 103.

Impasse, Paradox  119 8 Joshua Schuster, ‘Death Reckoning in the Thinking of Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault’, Other Voices: The (e)Journal of Cultural Criticism 1, no. 1 (1997): n.p.; see also Derrida, Aporias, 21. 9 Derrida, Aporias, 36. 10 For Heidegger, Derrida uses Sein und Zeit, 16th ed. (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986), and Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962). See Aporias, 86. 11 Schuster, ‘Death Reckoning’, n.p. See also Derrida, Aporias, 1–42. 12 Schuster discusses this ‘is’ of death in Heidegger’s work. Schuster, ‘Death Reckoning’, n.p. For ‘trespass’ see Derrida, Aporias, 24. 13 Derrida, Aporias, 1–42. 14 Nathaniel Rich, Odds against Tomorrow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girox, 2014). 15 Nathaniel Rich, King Zeno (London: Picador, 2019). 16 Lit Lovers: A Well-Read Online Community (n.d.). Available at: www.­ litlovers.com/reading-guides/9278-odds-against-tomorrow-rich?showall=1 (last accessed 19 August 2019). 17 Scott Geiger, ‘2013 On the Near-Future Novelist: Odds against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich’, The Common: A Modern Sense of Place. Available at: www.thecommononline.org/on-the-near-future-novelist-odds-against-­ tomorrow-by-nathaniel-rich/ (last accessed 15 August 2019). 18 Rick Crownshaw, ‘Climate Change Fiction and the Future of Memory: Speculating on Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against Tomorrow’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4, no. 2–3, Environmental Futurity (2017): 127–146. 19 See David Konstan, ‘Epicurus’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 10 January 2005; substantive revision came out on 16 April 2018, n.p. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/ (last accessed 27 August 2019). 20 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 21 Hannes Bergthaller, ‘Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against Tomorrow (2013)’, in Cli-fi: A Companion, edited by Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 119. 22 Ibid., 122. 23 Ibid. 24 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006). 25 Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Life after Armageddon’, The Observer (Sunday, 26 November 2006); available at: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/26/ fiction.features (last accessed 21 August 2019). 26 George Brosi, ‘Cormac McCarthy: A Rare Literary Life’, Appalachian ­Heritage 39, no. 1 (2011): 11–14, 14. 27 J. M. Grammer, ‘A Thing against Which Time Will Not Prevail: Pastoral and History in Cormac McCarthy’s South’, in Perspectives on Cormac ­McCarthy, edited by Edwin C. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 33. 28 Edwin Turner, ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Issues of Life and Death, Hans Fallada’s Complex Resistance, and Jonathan Lethem’s Bloodless Prose’, Biblioklept (28 November 2009, 2:28 p.m.); available at: http://biblioklept. org/2009/11/28/cormac-mccarthys-issues-of-life-and-death-hans-­falladascomplex-resistance-and-jonathan-lethems-bloodless-prose (last accessed 11 August 2019). 29 Cormac McCarthy, ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Prewritten Obituary’, C ­ orrelated Concepts (9 December 2011); available at: http://correlatedcontents.com/? p=1161 (last accessed 11 August 2019).

120  Impasse, Paradox 30 Derrida, Aporias, 76. 31 Ibid., 75. 32 Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, Diacritics 14, no. 2 Nuclear Criticism (1984): 20–31, 11. 33 In ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, Derrida describes ‘the archive’ as ‘the material basis of memory’ that enables the ‘symbolic work of mourning’ to occur (23). He also describes nuclear war as an event ‘equivalent to the total destruction of the archive’ (28). I consider environmental crisis as event that functions in a similar way in Louise Squire, ‘Death and the Anthropocene: Cormac McCarthy’s World of Unliving’, Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 211–228. 34 Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (­London: Picador, 2012, 1st published Vintage Books, 2006). The Sunset Limited was performed in May and June of 2006 at the Steppenwolf Garage Theatre, Chicago. See Dianne C. Luce, ‘Beyond the Border: Cormac McCarthy in the New Millennium’, The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6 (2008), 6–12. 35 Schuster, ‘Death Reckoning’, n.p.; see also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 340–346. 36 Derrida, Aporias, 14. 37 Ibid., 24. 38 See Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Madman’, in The Gay Science 125, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge, UK: ­Cambridge University Press, 2001). 39 Lindsey Banco, ‘Contractions in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, The Explicator 68, no. 4 (2010): 276. 40 Ibid., 278. 41 Ibid. 42 Derrida, Aporias, 21. 43 Christopher Pizzino, ‘Utopia at Last: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Science Fiction’, Extrapolation 51, no. 3 (2010): 358–375, 359. 4 4 Schuster, ‘Death Reckoning’, n.p. 45 Matthew Mullins, ‘Hunger and the Apocalypse of Modernity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Symplokē 19, no. 1–2 (2011): 75–93. 46 Derrida, Aporias, 76. 47 Shelly L. Rambo, ‘Beyond Redemption? Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road after the End of the World’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 41, no. 2 (2008): 99–120, 114. 48 See discussions in the Introduction to this book, on Philippe Ariès view of modern death as ‘wild’; see also Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, translated by Patricia M. ­Ranum (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974). 49 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 52. See also Jacques ­Derrida, Living on: Border Lines, translated by James Hulbert, Harold Bloom, Paul DeMan, Jacques Derrida and others in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 175–176. 50 Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24–25. 51 Ibid. At this point, Derrida was very ill with cancer, although, despite the book’s title and subject matter, he deflected any attempts by the interviewer to refer to his illness or his future death. 52 Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death.

Impasse, Paradox  121 53 Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 58. 54 This objection is made against Louis-Vincent Thomas and the comparative nature of his Anthropologie de la Mort (Payot, 1975), in which Thomas describes Africa as offering an example of ‘how the problems of death are resolved’ in non-industrialised populations (531). See Derrida, Aporias, 58. 55 Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24–25. 56 Derrida, Aporias, 58. 57 Phillip A. Snyder, ‘Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, ­McCarthy Conference (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 27 April, 2007), n.p. Available at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&https redir=1&article=1005&context=utk_mccarthy (last accessed 2 September 2019). Also published as an article: Phillip A. Snyder, ‘Hospitality in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, The Cormac McCarthy Journal 6, Special Issue: The Road (2008): 69–86. 58 Lydia Cooper, ‘Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative’, Studies in the Novel 43, no. 2 (2011): 218–236, 233. 59 Ibid., 223. 60 Snyder, n.p. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Rambo, ‘Beyond Redemption?’ 101. 64 Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24–25. 65 Rambo, ‘Beyond Redemption?’ 108. 66 Ibid., 101. 67 Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands (San Francisco, CA: Mc Sweeney’s Books), 112–113. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 112, 115. 70 Mullins, ‘Hunger and the Apocalypse of Modernity’, 89. 71 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 72 Mullins, ‘Hunger and the Apocalypse of Modernity’, 91–92. 73 Stefan Skrimshire, ‘“There Is No God and We Are His Prophets”: Deconstructing Redemption in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Journal for Cultural Research 15, no. 1 (2011): 1–14, 12. 74 Rambo, ‘Beyond Redemption?’ 101. 75 See Chapter 1 where I consider the post-apocalyptic void in which Snowman finds himself in relation to Judith Butler’s remark, ‘that one is always addressed in one way or another, even if one is abandoned or abused, since the void and the injury hail one in specific ways’. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 51. 76 Rambo, ‘Beyond Redemption?’ 108. 77 Skrimshire, ‘There Is No God’, 12. 78 Derrida, Aporias, 76. 79 Ibid., 79. See earlier discussions on Heidegger (this chapter). 80 Ibid., 24. 81 Joseph K. Kronick, ‘Writing in the Nuclear Age’, In Derrida and the Future of Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999): 101–141, 105. 82 Ibid., 105. 83 Pizzino, ‘Utopia at Last’, 359. 84 Ibid. 85 Rambo’s use of ‘witness’ is that of Christian redemptive narrative; however, she discusses this alongside Derrida’s notion of survival, or survivre, in his

122  Impasse, Paradox early essay, ‘Living On: Borderlines’, also reappearing in his later works. Rambo, ‘Beyond Redemption?’ 106–107. 86 Derrida, Learning to Live Finally, 24–25, 52. 7 Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘“My Job Is to Take Care of You”: Climate Change, 8 Humanity, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Modern Fiction Studies 62, no. 3 (2016): 519–540, 521. 8 Chabon, ‘Maps and Legends’, 112. 8

4 Discursive Death, Material Death

So far, we have noted that, in exploring a shift from death-denial to death-facing, the fiction discussed in this book by no means shies away from the complexities of death as a concept. Indeed, it harnesses these complexities to differing effects. Accordingly, this fiction may depict death-facing as productive, as destructive or as simply nonviable or even meaningless. It appears as productive when depicted as a posthumanist impulse, signifying the death of the humanist (modern, Western, neoliberalist) subject; it reveals a destructive aspect when depicted as a literal act (the idea that the planet would be better off without us); and it often, eventually, hits a dead end (so to speak), since being alive – even fictionally so – provides no access to death in actuality. Indeed, while any given narrative may venture into a character’s ‘beyond death’ experience, as occurs with the character Billie at the end of Winterston’s The Stone Gods, this seems only to heighten reader awareness of narrative textuality, from which the fictional character has no escape. This broad set of variants may seem to suggest that death-facing ecology is only partially successful as a fictional device. Yet, to the contrary, its capacity to harness death’s complexities is the very grounds for its success. It allows this fiction to explore the viability of the human subject and the possibilities for response in the face of environmental crisis, while at the same time fostering a crucial criticality by keeping the risks of hegemonic discourse in play. As such, while the novels discussed in this book can of course be read in a variety of ways, their use of death-facing ecology links their narratives by infusing them with an invitation to readers to ask questions about ourselves as a species, and about the possibilities and risks of our ongoing actions and behaviours. In this final analysis chapter, I illustrate the way death-facing ecology relies on a conception of death as being always both discursive and material. Death is discursive in the Derridean sense that one can only ever tell stories about death; one can never know death with the living mind. Death is material in the sense that living beings meet their physical demise. Recognising this interplay between discursive and material death provides a means to make sense of death-facing ecology and its differing effects within environmental crisis fiction. Reading with this distinction

124  Discursive Death, Material Death in mind also makes more visible certain nuances in the narratives as they harness the complexities of death and of the notion of death-facing. All the novels discussed in this book, in enfolding death-facing ecology into their narratives, can be said to pivot around the conflicts and paradoxes of death that is both discursive and material. At a time of environmental crisis, the major turn in theory, and the contemporary mood, is one that largely seeks to reconsider the discursive (high theory) with view to accounting more directly for the material (the ecological). Environmental crisis fiction often acknowledges, explores and questions this shift. The novels discussed in this book actively harness this shift or mood in their narratives and, in doing so, demonstrate not just the significance of the material but also the way it never fully escapes the discursive. This conjures up a sense of new materialist thought as building on and retaining traces of poststructuralist thought, rather than turning its back on it entirely. This is by no means to negate the material turn but rather to enrich and deepen possibilities for how we engage with its differing strands in contemporary thought. In this chapter, my central analysis is of the 2005 novel by Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide. In it, the call for the human to face its own mortality on environmentalist grounds is imported, by incoming Piya, into the Sundarbans region in the Bay of Bengal. Here, it is illustrated, death is already immanent in people’s lives. In the precarious tidal ecology of the Sundarbans, also home to the ‘man-eating’ Bengal T ­ iger, a broader environmentalist imperative – read here as the ecology of death-facing – appears as incongruent with the lives of the region’s inhabitants. In one frame, the tiger is endangered and requires safeguarding, and in another, it kills and is killed; in one frame, humans must save the planet, and in another, humans are grappling with survival. These two frames appear equally weighted, equally valid as living experience, while revealing differing politics of power. The layer of critique this paradox brings to the narrative is supported in the novel by its thematic use of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923). Several of the elegies challenge the reader to consider death’s real possibility, yet the final coda switches to a view of death as incomprehensible.1 As the novel repositions death-facing ecology from the ethical to the tragic, it raises a corresponding set of questions about the realms of language, the material world and death’s relation to both – a dual set of concerns that, together, reflect the aporia at the heart of death-facing ecology as discussed in the previous chapter. Most notably, the novel places a strong emphasis on the material amid the discursive domain of human language, this being the key point of interest in this chapter. Language, a recurrent theme in all the novels I examine, is both that by which (some) humans have long held themselves to be distinct from the nonhuman world, and the medium by which human discourses, including discourses on death, take form.

Discursive Death, Material Death  125 In Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, Crake claims the concept of immortality to be a consequence of grammar, because one is always alive (as the pronoun ‘I’) inside the sentence in which one considers one’s own death.2 In The Road, a poignant sense of the human as almost denuded by death’s imminence is seen in McCarthy’s limiting of his apostrophe use to first-­person contractions. Conversely, in The Hungry Tide, meaning’s reliance on language is reduced as language gives up some of its linear disposition. Hence, myths are conceived in geological form, while the ‘pinging’ of dolphin ‘echoes’ depicts language as being ‘only a bag of tricks’ (159). Even ‘death’ is communicated mainly through narrative events – in the characters’ acts and experiences more so than by its textual signifier. Death appears in the mood of the tide as it lifts and drowns, in the image of a tiger’s paw-print in the sand. These instances are evocative of new materialist thought, which seeks to explain human language in ecological terms and to reposition agency as a matter for humans and nonhumans alike, and indeed for matter itself. Yet we also read that the mud-banks of the tide-country are ‘shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also rivers of language’ (247), illustrating the novel’s continuing awareness of words as its medium, words that shape the narrative and shape lives. The power of language to shape human conceptions remains a preoccupation in the novel, alongside its materialist interventions, and has implications that Ghosh considers elsewhere; for example, in his essay ‘Wild Fictions’, he discusses ‘the doctrine of nature’s exclusivity’ – an urban desire for pristine environments that proves indifferent to the realities of a region’s indigenous peoples, thereby facilitating bureaucratic abuses of power.3 So, while The Hungry Tide continues to layer and validate different ‘ways of knowing’, as Laura White puts it,4 sustaining a pursuit of the material that is often depicted in Marxist terms and so making death-facing political, it also maintains an interest in language, including poetry, through to its ending. Indeed, despite being the most successful of the novels I examine in terms of presenting a cohesive materialist solution, its ending remains oddly unsatisfying, largely for this reason. My reading of Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide is based on three characters and the differing parts they play in relation to the novel’s distinct materialist explorations. The first of these is Piya, a young American cetologist of Bengali heritage who travels to Ghosh’s fictional Sundarbans island, Lusibari, to study the Irrawaddy (river) dolphin, which she claims she would give up her life to protect. The next is the late Nirmal, husband of Nilima and self-professed Marxist and lover of poetry; Nirmal’s notebook, left to his nephew Kanai, provides a history of human settlement in the Sundarbans and also the novel’s thematic engagement with Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The third character I discuss is local fisherman, Fokir, who is employed as a guide on Piya’s dolphin survey. Fokir protects Piya

126  Discursive Death, Material Death from death on several occasions, on the last occasion at the cost of his own life. These characters, between them, carry the novel’s engagement with a theme of death-facing ecology. Piya demonstrates its cultural delimitations; Nirmal illustrates its material-discursive tensions through his dual interest in Marxism and poetry; and Fokir becomes its embodiment, his intimacy with the landscape enabling him to save Piya while facing his own death. Together, these characters illustrate the novel’s depiction of death-­ facing ecology’s discursive and material aspects. On the one hand, death-facing is a turn towards the material; on the other (from a Derridean standpoint at least), death’s discursivity can never fully be overcome (we cannot escape the ‘bio-anthropo-thanato-theology’ of our own Being-­toward-death5). Hence, as a thematic device, death-facing ecology depicts the material turn as railing against the discursive while never entirely overthrowing it – a problem exacerbated by its appearance in novelistic form. The Hungry Tide’s success is due in part to its exploration of this phenomenon. Its narrative emphasis on the material is effective in bringing alive a sense of real lives and living practices – human and nonhuman – as inseverable from environmentalist concerns. The material rupture this ‘making visible’ produces nonetheless insists on the contingent nature of discourse. Yet, rather than undermine the material, the novel seems thereby to demonstrate, vitally, how a continuing discursivity – not necessarily of high theory proportions but as a facet of material being out of which discourse arises – underpins materiality by maintaining cognisance of the political and the ethical. Foucault’s biopolitics provides a useful initial means to frame this. While generally considered a poststructuralist thinker, not that he labelled himself as such, the thanatopolitical space his biopolitics opens up creates the opportunity to draw on more recent ideas from an emergent strand of materialist thought: speculative realism. As such, the transnational context of the narrative, in The Hungry Tide, facilitates an illustration of what occurs when an ecology of death-facing is translated across differentiated cultural spaces, as made tangible (or potentially so) by a contingent biopolitics, as this chapter will illustrate. By bringing in the speculative materialists at this point, the material content of death-facing ecology is made available for scrutiny in a way that the poststructuralists, including Foucault, only gesture towards. To this end, my central analysis of The Hungry Tide draws on the work of two speculative materialists: Quentin Meillassoux, whose After Finitude (2010) has driven much recent speculative theory, and Martin Hägglund, who disagrees with Meillassoux about the implications of a materialist ontology, specifically in relation to the question of death.6 While Meillassoux seeks to make thinkable the radical outside of thought, Hägglund repositions death within the material life of thought itself. My aim in bringing in these theorists is to make two observations.

Discursive Death, Material Death  127 The first is the way The Hungry Tide, like all the novels I discuss, illustrates a contemporary impulse to break out of post-Kantian thought towards a new apprehension of the world as real. The second is that, of the novels discussed in this book, it offers the most successful depiction of material and ecological death-facing, not by escaping the discursive but by paying a more radical heed to it in the first place. Amitav Ghosh is the author of a number of fiction and nonfiction works. The Hungry Tide, awarded the 2004 Crossword Book Prize, is his sixth novel. Born in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and educated in Delhi, Ghosh gained a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford University, and has taught at a number of academic institutions in India and in the United States. He currently lives in New York.7 Ghosh’s fiction is politically and historically engaged and revolves around such issues as the hegemonies of colonialism and neo-colonialism and the ‘porosity of cultural boundaries’, issues that reflect his anthropological interests.8 He also homes in on the individual. As Nayar Pramod puts it, ‘Ghosh is interested in the ways in which the violence of history, geography and politics alters lives’.9 He is also vocal on environmental issues and has more recently published The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a nonfiction book that explores the ways literature, history and politics have potentially diverted us from acknowledging the significance of climate change and related environmental issues. The Hungry Tide interweaves Ghosh’s postcolonial interests, his focus on the individual and his environmental concerns. These are linked through the novel’s depiction of discourses that collide as they cross material boundaries. Readings often frame the novel’s material rupture in terms of its emphasis on the local and a certain intimacy between the human, the landscape and its ecology. Sociocultural readings tend to explore this in terms of the local and the global, whereas ecocritical readings notice the novel’s interweaving of nonhuman narratives. Thus, Pablo Mukherjee sees the novel as illustrating how local ecologies come to be overlooked by ‘idealist notions of universal progress’, such as Piya’s ‘environmentalism’ or Nirmal’s ‘would-be Marxism’, and Rajender Kaur finds a response to this in the novel’s ‘cautiously… ecotopian vision’ based on an integration of the local and the global;10 whereas, Divya Anand reads the novel as prioritising the biocentric, depicted in the agency of water, which, in the novel, has the power to transform both the landscape and in turn the social order.11 Malcolm Sen shows how the novel actively illustrates these differing stances, suggesting that it creates ‘a hybrid interdependence’ of anthropocentrism and biocentrism.12 In my reading, the novel’s layering of discourses, underpinned by its use of death-facing ecology, produces a narrative space in which the issues of power that arise between them are illustrated and explored. This relation between death-facing and discourse can be illustrated by drawing on Foucault’s biopolitics. In a Foucauldian biopolitics, death-denial

128  Discursive Death, Material Death can be said to have hegemonic tendencies. This is because his ­emphasis on ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ as characteristic of the modern mode of power, replacing a classic sovereign mode of ‘letting live’ and ‘making die’, produces a transition whereby life enters history, placing death on a plane of avoidance.13 Stuart J. Murray draws attention to the way these deaths ‘are never ‘‘caused’’ as such; officially, they are merely ‘‘allowed,’’ a passive event, collateral damage. But biopolitical logic requires them’.14 The Hungry Tide evokes a biopolitics of Western hegemony through Piya and in its broader tracing of India’s colonial past within the history of its present. A biopolitical structure is also apparent in its engagement with contemporary discourses that bring the nonhuman into the frame of consideration. The thematic use of death-facing as a response to environmental crisis draws attention to the way human life has been valorised where the nonhuman realm has been let die. By placing this environmental biopolitics in conflict with a transnational biopolitics, The Hungry Tide succeeds in illustrating the way Western environmentalisms may manifest as neo-colonialisms. The novel appears to explore the gap between those for whom death is placed on a plane of avoidance and those, effectively, who are ‘let die’ (human or nonhuman). In emphasising the capacity of non-linguistic events to communicate and impact upon life’s processes, the novel brings into focus lives and meanings that are otherwise hidden. At the same time, it keeps in play the power of language, illustrating that what we choose to say, and how we say it, ‘matters’ (to recall Karen Barad15). This interplay of the discursive and the material is usefully explored using the works of Hägglund and Meillassoux. Meillassoux’s After Finitude represents a bold and rigorous intervention in the fideism (reliance on faith) of post-Kantian thought.16 Meillassoux seeks to establish that it is possible for thought to have knowledge of that which it cannot directly access. This is not just to suppose that that which lies outside our perception – what Meillassoux calls the ‘in itself’ – has the possibility to exist (faith), but to know it.17 This imperative to reconcile thought and the absolute is intended to overcome what he refers to as correlationism, summarised by Peter Hallward as the idea that ‘we cannot think any reality independently of thought itself’.18 Meillassoux’s route to achieving this involves a complex set of stages including a ‘mathematization of the world’, derived in part from a rethinking of the Galilean-Copernican revolution.19 But it is the role that Meillassoux’s conception of time plays in this, to which I now turn, that brings him into conflict with Hägglund in relation to the question of death-facing. The point of reference around which Meillassoux builds his argument is the problem of ancestrality and what he calls the ‘arche-fossil’.20 The idea of the arche-fossil refers to the kinds of empirical evidences of the material world that are discernible via the tools of science, and yet which exist(ed) entirely outside of our capacity to witness (and thus

Discursive Death, Material Death  129 know) them. An example he gives is the light from a star, which indicates the residue of an existence vastly external to the spatiotemporal frame of the present. 21 Another example might be the existence of the present world billions of years before the emergence of human (or any form of) life. Meillassoux states: ‘To think ancestrality is to think a world without thought’.22 Meillassoux breaks down (at length) our difficulties with grasping this into conceptual components, thereby illustrating his non-correlative means to acknowledge ‘that which is prior to givenness in its entirety’. 23 The result is what he calls ‘speculative’ thinking; this being ‘every type of thinking that claims to be able to access some form of absolute’, as differentiated from metaphysics which, he says, claims to do the same but ‘through the principle of sufficient reason’. 24 This begins to look problematic, in Hägglund’s view among others, in its reliance on an idea that Meillassoux calls ‘hyper-Chaos’. As Adrian Johnson (somewhat disparagingly) explains, Meillassoux asserts: the existence of a specific ultimate real as underlying material reality: a time of discontinuous points of instantaneity which, at any point, could, in a gratuitous, lawless, and reasonless manner ungoverned by anything … scramble and reorder ex nihilo the cause-andeffect patterns of the physical universe in any way whatsoever and entirely without constraints imposed by past states of affairs both actual and possible/potential. 25 Meillassoux’s own account of ‘hyper-Chaos’ extends upon David Hume’s claim that human reason can neither account for, nor comprehend, all possible worldly eventualities.26 Meillassoux states: Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing. 27 In making this leap from finitude to ontology, Meillassoux effectively rewrites Hume’s proposal that ultimate causes are ‘totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’, 28 so that it is no longer not just that possible effects are endless and unknowable, but, as Hallward puts it, they ‘might emerge on the basis of no causes at all’. 29 Hägglund critiques this aspect of Meillassoux’s work from a materialist perspective. His concern is with the idea that anything is possible whereby even the succession of time might end and go backwards, making possible the emergence of the divine – which (he says) Meillassoux himself envisages – and the resurrection of the dead.30 Hägglund thus sees Meillassoux’s theory as being based on a human hope

130  Discursive Death, Material Death for immortality.31 Alain Badiou, although mostly supportive of Meillassoux’s work – Meillassoux being his student – expresses a similar concern, suggesting that a ‘political weakness’ occurs in the ‘lack of proper engagement with the present’.32 According to Badiou, for Meillassoux ‘the future will decide and perhaps the dead will make the final judgment’; whereas, for Badiou, the question ought rather to be: ‘how is the Real of the present deployed for the future’.33 Hägglund’s ‘radical atheism’ takes a firmer hold of the principle of the succession of time. Objecting to Meillassoux’s use of the ‘wholly other’, Hägglund suggests that Meillassoux has misinterpreted Derrida, whose concept of alterity, he says, is ‘indissociable from the condition of temporality that exposes every instance to destruction’; hence, for Derrida, the ‘wholly other’ (tout autre) ‘does not refer to the positive infinity of the divine but to the radical finitude of every other’. 34 Reality’s subjection to the ‘violent passage of time’, says Hägglund, is thus ‘absolutely irreducible’.35 Hägglund’s point, based on a Derridean notion of survivre, is that death is always already a part of life. It is not that we first live and then die, but that life already contains its own eventual death; thus, as Derrida puts it, life is a ‘temporary reprieve’. 36 All this leads to a claim by Hägglund that is of particular interest in this book. Not only is immortality not a possibility, he argues, it is also not desirable; for the desire for immortality is itself, he suggests, ‘motivated by a desire for mortal survival that precedes it and contradicts it from within’; hence, even our desire for immortality is a function of survival.37 This distinction has certain political implications, which Hägglund draws out based on his principle of the arche-materiality of time. This idea, he explains, differs to Meillassoux’s speculative logic whereby the temporal is privileged over the spatial. For Hägglund, time is contingent on a spatial materiality. Hence, where Meillassoux may speculate on a potential ‘peaceful state of being’, where time’s ‘pure virtuality’ has the capacity to ‘make anything happen’, Hägglund argues that there can be ‘no line of flight from the exigencies of the natural world and its … demands’.38 Nor would such a flight be desirable. He states: The radical atheist argument is not simply that such a peaceful state of being is impossible to actualize, as if it were a desirable, albeit unattainable end. Rather, the logic of radical atheism challenges the very idea that it is desirable to overcome violence and spectrality. A completely reconciled life – which would not be haunted by any ghosts – would be nothing but complete death, since it would eliminate every trace of survival.39 Hägglund argues that this interpretation of desire is invaluable for the analysis of social struggle from a materialist perspective. Rather than dismissing disagreements fought on the grounds of, say, religious ideals,

Discursive Death, Material Death  131 all competing positions in situations of conflict can be understood as efforts for survival. This may not tell us who is right, he adds; rather, it asks us to look more closely at the material situation. Radical atheism in this way recalls us, he says, ‘to the material base of time, desire and politics’.40 The value of this for the present chapter is its envisaging of death-­ facing as a politico-material engagement with the world. While attention is drawn in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide to the tragic impositions of hegemonic forces, it is also drawn, along with this, to multiple ways of knowing. On Hägglund’s view, these represent various modes of survival and the material existences of people within the discourses they deploy. In this chapter, this differentiation between an acknowledgement of death as contained within life and the Meillassouxian claim that we can know a world without thought is explored in relation to the novel’s concern with the discursive in the material. As the novel moves the reader to engage with material spaces, it keeps in play the power of story. In the closing pages, the novel seems almost to relinquish the sense of the material that it has worked so hard to depict, giving way instead to a sense of closure that is also unconvincing. I consider in this chapter whether this is inevitable, or whether, following its successful deployment of a range of discourses, the novel ends up somehow disengaging with death, and with the corresponding political struggle described by Hägglund, thereby arriving at a ‘state of peacefulness’ more like that depicted as ‘possible’ by Meillassoux.41 The novel’s storyline centres on human and nonhuman inhabitancy in India’s Sundarbans – a tidal mangrove forest region in the Bay of Bengal. It is a place where islands are repeatedly submerged and reformed and storms batter the region. Having a rich biodiversity, the Sundarbans today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a reserve for the Bengal Tiger. Various islands of the region have been intermittently inhabited by local populations who find themselves at constant risk of attack by tigers, among other animals. Lusibari, the novel’s fictional island, is located in the Sundarbans. The novel is about the region’s wildlife and tidal ecology. It is also about its peoples and their lives. Moreover, it is about the conflict that can emerge between local inhabitants and wider efforts to protect the natural world. The novel incorporates two events from India’s history. The first involves Scottish businessman Daniel Hamilton, a historical figure who in the early twentieth century purchased thousands of Sundarbans acres in which to develop his dream of the ideal community, inviting settlers to take up his offer of free land and cooperative living.42 Nirmal’s notebook describes his and Nilima’s shock when, on arriving in Lusibari in the 1970s, they encounter the profound destitution of the island’s inhabitants. Difficulties with farming, due to land-reclamation measures having fallen into disrepair since Hamilton’s death, mean that people are

132  Discursive Death, Material Death turning to the forest for food, where they often fall prey to the tigers. In the narrative present, twenty years later, the islanders are benefitted by the Badabon Trust, an NGO set up by Nirmal and Nilima to provide such facilities as a local hospital. Even so, Nilima tells Piya, deaths caused by tigers remain frequent, far exceeding government figures. The second historical event the novel incorporates is the Morichjhãpi massacre of 1979,43 which occurred after the settling of a Sundarbans island by tens of thousands of Hindu Bengali refugees, displaced in the break-up of East and West Pakistan. Having set up their communities in tiger conservation territory, the settlers were ordered to leave by the Left Front government, from whom they had expected support. When they refused to move, officials were sent in and the settlers besieged and then killed. Ghosh’s depiction of this event, in The Hungry Tide, has served to draw public attention to an otherwise little-known tragedy, exposing the risks that inhere in the global expansion of environmentalist movements, in this case arising through international pressures on the Indian Government to safeguard the Bengal Tiger. This situation is an example of how ‘the idea’ of ‘pristine nature’ on the ‘verge of destruction’, as Catriona Sandilands observes, can become ‘a violent rationale for the dispossession of peoples and livelihoods’.44 The novel’s fictional depiction of these two historical events – Daniel Hamilton’s purchase of thousands of Sundarbans acres, and the Morichjhãpi massacre – provides a platform for its explorations of the broader issues, out of which conflicts between humans and nonhumans can arise. While the novel’s socio-political context is complex and broadly drawn, its main storyline is rather more straightforward. In the narrative present, Piya and Kanai arrive simultaneously in Lusibari. Piya has travelled based on her plans to study the rare Irrawaddy dolphin. Kanai, a middle-aged translator from Delhi, has made the journey – somewhat reluctantly, as he sees Lusibari as backward and uncivilised – in response to his aunt’s (Nilima’s) invitation to collect his late uncle Nirmal’s notebook, which was left to him but has only now been found after twenty years. Throughout the novel, Kanai reads the notebook in sections and his feelings for Piya grow. Piya, however, is more drawn to the fisherman Fokir with his intimate knowledge of the Sundarbans landscape – a knowledge not appreciated by his wife, who regrets his lack of ambition. It is as Fokir is working as a guide for Piya’s dolphin survey that a violent storm occurs and he dies saving her. The three characters of Piya, Nirmal and Fokir each bring to bear an aspect of the novel’s broader socio-political context in which death-­ facing ecology is explored. The combination of the three characterisations enables the novel to deliver a complex admonition about the dangers of overlooking the material aspect of death-facing, even as it illustrates the role of the discourse as an inexorable phenomenon of the human in its world.

Discursive Death, Material Death  133

Piya If a preparedness to face death is an ecological stance that responds to environmental crisis, it is Piya, in the first instance, who embodies it. Yet, as she imports this turn towards death into Lusibari it appears as incongruent, since death is already faced there on a day-to-day basis. In this section I explore the novel’s juxtaposition of Piya’s stated willingness to sacrifice herself for the Irrawaddy with the slaughter of refugees at Morichjhãpi, which was carried out on the grounds of saving the Bengal Tiger. I also consider Piya’s constant reflections on the function and limits of language, which occur alongside the novel’s gradual overwriting of her discursive understanding of death-facing with its material counterpart. Piya nearly loses her life in the Sundarbans on several occasions, which has the effect of gradually converting her death-facing mode into one of survival. That Piya represents a death-facing ecology becomes apparent late in the novel in relation to a particular incident – her witnessing of an attack on a tiger, which is trapped, speared in the eye and then burned alive, having wandered into a village. Clearly this depiction of a revenge killing is intended as distressing and provocative in terms of the issues it raises. The scene is followed by an intense dialogue between Piya and Kanai, in which Piya expresses her horror, both at the killing of the tiger and at the way this killing appears as an everyday act for those involved. She is particularly distressed at Fokir’s claim (translated for her by Kanai) that tigers come into villages because they ‘want to die’ (295). Kanai tells her that Fokir is not ‘some grass-roots ecologist’; he then points out that people have had to ‘learn to take such killings in their stride’ (297), reminding Piya of the larger picture and of her own complicity in the event: “… it was people like you,” said Kanai, “who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard for the human costs. And I’m complicit because people like me – Indians of my class that is – have chosen to hide these costs, basically in order to curry favour with their Western patrons.” (301) The conversation then moves onto another level, explicitly referencing death-facing ecology via Piya’s response to Kanai. Her insistence that humans should not be valued more than other species sharing the same habitat is first countered by Kanai’s remarking: ‘that’s all very well but it’s not you who’s paying the price in lost lives’ (301). However, Piya then claims that she would give her own life if she thought that to do so would ‘make the rivers safe again for the Irrawaddy dolphin’ (301). The articulation of this sentiment alongside the clash between human

134  Discursive Death, Material Death and tiger that has just occurred very much problematises death-facing, highlighting the negligibility of difference between ‘I am prepared to die to save the nonhuman’ and ‘you must die to save the nonhuman’ – as depicted in the Morichjhãpi incident. While Piya’s character, linked to the Morichjhãpi incident, represents the dangers of discourses in transit and the risk of epistemic violence, she also stands as a site of personal (although in some ways limited) transformation, the trajectory for which has its starting point in her deep green ethics and continues via her ongoing enquiry into the problem of language. Throughout the novel, Piya’s character traces a question to do with what we can know, and whether this ‘what we can know’ relies on language (concluding that it does not). Early on in the novel she remembers being summoned, as a young girl, by her mother, who died when Piya was young, and finds it strange that she cannot recall the sounds of the words (‘were they in English or Bengali?’ [94]) but can remember their meaning and intent. Piya carries this line of questioning over, first to the dolphins, and then to Fokir, neither of whose language she can speak or understand. Yet Piya perceives these two situations differently. She is fascinated by dolphin communication, by ‘the idea that to “see” was also to “speak” to others of your kind, where simply to exist was to communicate’ (159), but, for the most part, she experiences an ‘immeasurable distance’ between herself and Fokir, putting her inability to know what he is thinking down, not to their lack of a shared language, but to her sense that ‘human beings [come] equipped, as a species, with the means of shutting each other out’ (159). Human language, in comparison to dolphin communication, Piya concludes, is just a ‘bag of tricks’ that fools you into ‘believing that you could see through the eyes of another being’ (159). Piya’s stance at this point, her emphasis on nonverbal and nonhuman communication, seems strongly ecocentric and carries elements of the posthuman. It indicates an open-mindedness where Piya seems willing to acknowledge the existence of a real beyond her capacity to perceive it. At the same time, Piya’s views are positioned in the novel as discursively located, as operating from within a culturally and temporally contingent, deep green environmentalist – and also death-facing – paradigm. What she sees, knows and believes is thus placed in question as it is carried into a differing context. This dual representation of Piya, along with her potential for transformation, can be viewed as illustrative of the problematic relationship between environmentalist discourse and the idea of truth or the real, whereby the very claim that environmental crisis is real is contained within discourse all the same. Environmentalisms can be said to necessarily rely on an assumption that a real exists regardless of humanity, even as it includes us – a real without which, furthermore, we would have no being. The challenge of the real (the potential consequences of

Discursive Death, Material Death  135 global warming, say) is what incentivises environmentalisms in the first place. Yet, being prepared to acknowledge that environmentalisms are also discursive ideas is important, since as The Hungry Tide suggests, this makes them vulnerable not only to attack but also to error and misuse. Partly through Piya, The Hungry Tide actively explores this problem of how to engage with the real aspect of the environmental crisis, alongside its discourses and the risks these involve. Meillassoux’s use of a mathematisation in his quest to reconcile ‘thought’ and ‘the absolute’ provides a starting point for considering these issues raised by Piya. Meillassoux turns to mathematics as a route to depicting possible realities that fall outside the scope of human interpretability: that which is mathematically describable must imply a possible reality. As Fabio Gironi states, this mathematisation: opens up a completely new view of the universe, revealing a ‘glacial world’ organised according to a set of indifferent coordinates whose zero point is no longer the human being, operating an irreversible laceration between thought and the world.45 The value of this potentially posthumanist theorisation for environmentalisms is evident; it also fits Piya’s sense that a real beyond her perception exists. A difficulty emerges, however, in that Meillassoux’s mathematisation is also what leads to his idea of hyper-Chaos, mathematics ­being – for Meillassoux – both the language of contingency and the only metaphysical necessity. For Gironi, the problem here, although in the end he defends Meillassoux, is a reliance on the arbitrariness of mathematics.46 Hägglund’s objection, in contrast, is that contingency itself requires time and space in which to operate, and, for Hägglund, from a materialist perspective, time is a spatial unfolding of death (hence, he views life as survival). Hägglund therefore objects to Meillassoux’s assumption that even time itself may collapse within the (mathematical) possibilities of his contingent world, since contingency is itself temporally generated in the first place.47 In The Hungry Tide, it is not enough that Piya possesses a willingness to face death, based on her discursively formed ideas about what might exist beyond her awareness. Rather than leave things at a Meillassouxian, mathematically driven theorising that ‘anything might be possible’, which according to Badiou is to abandon the political, and which in the novel results in tragedy, Piya is forced by the narrative to encounter death, and thus time and contingency, directly. Where the novel’s turn to the material is often described by critics in terms of Piya’s involvement with landscape and community, here I consider such a materialisation specifically in terms of her death-facing. Piya faces death on several occasions and each time she survives. The first occasion occurs when, arriving in the region of Lusibari via a hired

136  Discursive Death, Material Death launch, she falls overboard into the silted swamp. Fokir, who at this point is a stranger, jumps overboard to save her, not only pulling her from the water but resuscitating her by sucking the silt from her lungs. Thus, from the very moment of arrival in Lusibari, Piya encounters what it means to face death in actuality, as survival, rather than as an ethical position on environmentalist grounds. A day or two later, a second death-facing incident occurs. Piya is now on Fokir’s smaller fishing boat, having escaped the hands of the corrupt launch owners. As she leans over the side to lower her depth-sounder into the water, Fokir unexpectedly leaps over, pulling her back from the water and away from the jaws of a crocodile the size of the boat. These two occasions together, the near-drowning and the crocodile attack, traumatise Piya so that she is caused to reflect on the real possibility of death. Later, safe in her room in the house of Kanai’s aunt, Nilima, Piya sinks back into a chair and, recalling events, starts to engage with death-fear as a physical experience: She saw once again the wrenching, twisting motion of the reptile’s head as its jaws closed over the spot where her wrist had been… She imagined the tug that would have pulled her below the surface and the momentary release before the jaws closed again, around her midsection, pulling her into those swift, eerily glowing depths where the sunlight had no orientation and there was neither up nor down. She remembered her panic falling from the launch, and it made her think if the numbing horror that would accompany the awareness that you were imprisoned in a grasp from which there was no escape. (194) Piya’s reflection on her experiences is central to her increasing material engagement with life. This gradually aligns her more closely with Hägglund’s notion of material time, which envisages life as always already containing death, not just as an idea, but as an aspect of its material becoming or survival. In between these two death-facing events, Piya also witnesses a ceremony conducted by Fokir at the shrine of Bon Bibi on the island of Garjontola, her involvement with which places her in symbolic relation with the region’s mythology. The legend of Bon Bibi is an articulation of the Lusibarians’ conception of death, in which the Irrawaddy dolphin plays a role. According to this legend, by calling upon the goddess Bon Bibi – a syncretic figure who reflects the geology and history of the region by bringing together Islamic and Hindu mythology – one might enlist protection from Dokkhin Rai, the demon king who has power over life and who often takes the form of a tiger.48 The dolphins or ‘shusuk’ (235) who frequent the shores at Garjontola, meanwhile, are viewed as the messengers of Bon Bibi. Thus, in studying the dolphins, Piya is unwittingly engaged with the survival aspect of the legend. Piya watches the

Discursive Death, Material Death  137 ceremony with interest but little comprehension. As they subsequently leave the island, Fokir points to a tiger footprint in the sand, by which he means that a tiger has been close but has not harmed them. While neither Piya nor the reader is able, at this point, to fully comprehend Fokir’s meaning, the novel goes on to gradually disclose more about the legend. Where Hägglund’s ‘radical atheism’ proposes viewing religious practices (and culture generally) as forms of survival, rather than being dismissive of their contents, the narrative’s gradual unfolding of the Bob Bibi legend also seems to reflect such a view. It appears to emphasise the legend’s function more so than its content. Mid-way through the novel, in an excerpt from Nirmal’s notebook, Nirmal is taken to Garjontola by a friend, Horen; with them is Fokir as a young boy. As Horen rows towards the shore, he asks Nirmal whether he can ‘feel the fear’, saying ‘it’s the fear that protects you; it’s what keeps you alive. Without it the danger doubles’ (244). At the shrine on the island, Horen then recites a mantra, which tells the story of Duhkey, the boy who is abandoned on the island to be eaten by the ‘tiger-demon, Dokkhin Rai’, but who calls upon and is rescued by Bon Bibi (246). In the later stages of the novel, a second, related event occurs. Fokir abandons Kanai on the island, not to die but to ‘be judged’ (327). Before abandoning him, Fokir asks him if he can ‘feel the fear’ (322). When Kanai says he cannot, Fokir first tries to taunt him into fearing, and then runs off, forcing him to face the danger alone. The Bon Bibi legend is thus depicted as engendering a deliberate drawing forth and facing of fear via self-exposure to danger. Death-­ facing, then, for the Sundarbans inhabitants, is depicted as a means to withstand, or to acknowledge, death’s real possibility. Piya is correspondingly made to face death one more time in the novel, this last event having the deepest impact on her, since, although she survives, it is at the cost of Fokir’s life. The Sundarbans region is prone to cyclones, and it is only because Piya and her crew, including Fokir, are out on a dolphin survey that they do not receive the warning of the impending storm. Hence, when the launch crew realise the danger (seeing many vessels heading inland), and after waiting as long as they can, they head inland without Piya and Fokir. When Fokir eventually realises the danger, he takes Piya onto a nearby island, strapping them both to the branches of a tree. As the storm rages, it is only the protection of Fokir’s body pinned behind hers that enables Piya to survive. Fokir’s death is a tragic bonding that ostensibly imprints all he has represented for Piya, physically, onto her. By the time she realises he is dead, he seems to have become part of her. For Piya, a key outcome of this episode is that she directly encounters an ethical dilemma that haunts environmentalisms, which is that the pursuit of one set of egalitarian actions can inadvertently cause harm elsewhere. Fokir’s life ends up becoming subsumed in and consumed by Piya’s own desire to study the Irrawaddy dolphin. Piya’s subsequent guilt, however, is not necessarily a rejection – by the novel – of

138  Discursive Death, Material Death environmentalisms; rather, it seems to suggest that personal, social and environmental agendas are inter-reliant and must be mutually considered. If the novel forms a meditation on the idea that human and other lives inevitably fall to the hunger of the tide, the episode of Fokir’s death seems to indicate that this tide is also, at times, the tide of human will. A further outcome for Piya, meanwhile, is a closing of the immeasurable distance between herself and Fokir. Piya’s direct and tragic witnessing of Fokir’s death, regardless of her part in it, completes her encounter with the meaning of death-facing, and correspondingly completes the transformation that her character undergoes. At the same time, the physical imprinting upon Piya of material death also draws attention to the aporia of death that lies at the heart of death-facing, constantly problematising it. Here, a material facing of death opens rather than closes a binary logic, where the personal trace towards the material, as is enacted in death-facing, is always, too, a response to a collective experience of death. Hence, while Piya’s role in the novel’s ending might be read as central to its conclusions, it might alternatively be read as central just to one strand of the storyline. After Fokir’s death, Piya leaves Lusibari, only to return having raised the necessary funds to set up a longer-term dolphin project. As often noted in readings, this ‘returning’ Piya actively enlists the support and involvement of the local people, not wanting to place ‘the burden of conservation on those who can least afford it’ (397). This illustration, via Piya, of the importance of considering and engaging with the local context is a key statement in the novel – one that is reflected in other of Ghosh’s works. Piya’s transformation can be viewed in relation to Hägglund’s claim that death is already a part of life, and not just the event that ends it; hence, it is not immortality that we crave but survival.49 Piya’s actions point towards a corresponding emphasis on real on-the-ground politics that engage fully with the situation at hand. Yet, despite the novel’s bringing to earth (so to speak) of one of its two main elites, its ending seems to lose grip of this engagement with broader issues. Piya’s individual response seems hardly to touch such overarching concerns as the blindness of globalising enterprises and the related consequences of Western hegemonies, even if she points to the importance of engaging with local contexts. It seems that to explore this we must look beyond Piya. I next examine Nirmal’s characterisation as tied up in his dual interest in Marxism and poetry, through which I hope to draw out some complexities that begin to complicate our conceptions of Piya’s death-facing.

Nirmal Nirmal’s character plays a secondary but important role in The Hungry Tide. As with the boy’s mother in The Road, his death occurs prior to the narrative present, in his case twenty or so years prior. Beyond a couple of

Discursive Death, Material Death  139 short, initial, analeptic sections, we learn about Nirmal through a combination of his notebook and the recollections of his wife and nephew. Since Nirmal speaks to the narrative present through his notebook, his characterisation forms distinct discursive layer in the text. While this ultimately highlights the textuality of any characterisation, it more specifically emphasises Nirmal’s role in the novel’s tandem questioning of textuality and materialism, which he fulfils through his dual interest in poetry and Marxism. Nirmal’s notebook provides the novel’s references to Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The Elegies are about death, its imminence and about meaning itself. They speak of human awareness of death as part of living in a natural world, within which all things decay. Yet they conclude with what Torsten Pettersson describes as a sense of ‘puzzlement rather than positive insights’.50 Because their poetic exploration of a material engagement with death is conveyed through Nirmal, I examine the Elegies within my analysis of his characterisation. Nonetheless, they function as a motif that interweaves the novel as a whole. In exploring Nirmal’s character, I pay particular attention to his interest in poetry, since his reflections on the Elegies supplements the novel’s meditations on death. I also explore the way Nirmal acts as focaliser for the novel’s various representations of the real, such as the geographical real of the landscape, or the lives of the settlers at Morichjhãpi. His descriptions have a strong influence on the storyline, despite, or perhaps due to, the textual emphasis of their framing. The novel’s brief opening chapter depicts Kanai reading a short piece by his uncle Nirmal while travelling by train to Lusibari. Describing the Sundarbans, the piece draws on imageries of beauty and death and depicts the frailty of humans and the resilience of the natural world. Nirmal writes: At no moment can human beings have any doubt of the terrain’s hostility to their presence, of its cunning or resourcefulness, of its determination to destroy or expel them. Every year dozens of people perish in the embrace of that dense foliage, killed by tigers, snakes and crocodiles. (8) This depiction of the Sundarbans as untamed and perhaps untameable illustrates how the novel’s biocentrism, observed by some critics, is initially constructed via Nirmal’s writings.51 Such biocentrism is conveyed too, although differently, via Fokir, who it turns out, as I later discuss, is closely associated with Nirmal as child. Throughout the novel, Nirmal’s writings continue to depict the shapes and formations of the landscape and of human engagement with it, always emphasising the material and the real, through the use of poetic language.

140  Discursive Death, Material Death This first encounter for the reader with the Sundarbans is next complemented by Nirmal’s first reference to Rilke, whom he refers to thereafter as, simply, ‘The Poet’. He writes: ‘For as with Rilke’s catkins hanging from the hazel and the spring rain upon the dark earth, when we behold the lowering tide we, who have always thought of joy as rising … feel the emotion that almost amazes us when a happy thing falls. (8) Here, Nirmal makes reference to the final coda at the end of the Tenth (last) Elegy, which, in the poem, marks its closure by reiterating its opening point that death is a question mark for humanity. Kelly S. Walsh views Rilke’s poem as ‘offering itself as proof that art cannot transcend death’ and also as insisting ‘that mourning be without closure’. 52 This first engagement with ‘the Poet’ thus evokes a sense of death’s impossibility within the opening pages of the novel, also making links to the human in relation to the natural or nonhuman world as being always conditioned by death. In the novel, this conveys a sense of the way death’s possibility evokes our human vulnerability to the material nature of our own existence. It is through Nirmal’s fascination with ‘the Poet’ that this vulnerability is addressed, in the novel, in poetic form. This initial poetic insistence on human vulnerability sets the tone for Nirmal’s ongoing exploration of a material/poetic dichotomy, which is remarked on by Kanai, when he and Piya are discussing his uncle out on the launch. Piya asks him about the notebook, and Kanai begins to explain Nirmal’s involvement at Morichjhãpi, which is a central focus of the notebook. According to Kanai, Nilima, who actively discouraged Nirmal’s involvement with the Morichjhãpi settlers, would say that Nirmal could not ‘let go of the idea of revolution’ (282). For Kanai, however, Nirmal was ‘possessed more by words than by politics’. ‘There are people who live through poetry’, says Kanai, ‘and he was one of them’ (282). Piya, immediately picking up on this, remarks on this ‘odd combination’ of ‘poetry and Marxism’ (282), leading Kanai to attempt to further explain his uncle. He was non-materialistic, on the one hand, Kanai explains, but on the other he saw himself as a ‘historical materialist’; ‘He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them together, somehow they did become stories – of a kind’ (283). Providing an example of the novel’s layering of ideas, Nirmal’s ­notebook is also the medium by which he explores the very questions the notebook itself represents. An example of this is seen when, in the n ­ otebook, he asks: ‘What do myths and geology have in common?’ (180) – a question Nirmal envisages he will put to the children at Morichjhãpi, should he

Discursive Death, Material Death  141 be appointed (as he hopes) as schoolmaster there. He proceeds to draw parallels between the discursivity of myths and the ‘strangeness’ (to use Timothy Morton’s sense of the word) of the nonhuman realm:53 … Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are – heavenly deities on one hand, and on the other, the titanic stirrings of the earth itself – both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us… And then, of course there is the scale of time – yugas and epochs, Kaliyuga and the Quaternary. And yet – mind this! – in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story. (180) Nirmal next considers how the features of the landscape, a river, for example, can become the inspiration for mythmaking, even if the myth, in turn, might never fully grasp its subject. The lesson he sees here (for the children he imagines) is encapsulated, as usual, via ‘the Poet’, which, in Nirmal’s paraphrased version reads: ‘“To sing about someone you love is one thing; but, oh, / the blood’s hidden guilty river god is something else”’ (182). This disjunction between the real and the discursive is one that Nirmal captures repeatedly via narrative as well as poetic means. For example, again in his notebook, he describes an occasion when, out on a boat, he is reading a story to Horen about a priest caught in a storm. When Horen interjects with a claim that storms are the work of Dokkhin Rai, Nirmal writes: ‘I grew impatient and said, “Horen!” A storm is an atmospheric disturbance: it has neither intention nor motive’ (147). Yet Nirmal’s frustration at a naive adherence to the stories with which we explain our world belies his own engagement with discursive patterns. The character of Nirmal thus functions to challenge our conceptions of the role of language in relation to the world, the disjunction he discerns remaining poetic, even as it also indicates or designates the real. Correspondingly, Nirmal’s depiction of aesthetic gaps between the ideological and the material also works the other way around, producing a reflective space that emphasises a Romantic engagement of the self with the natural. This is often apparent in his depiction of environmental concerns, when, on several occasions, he invites the reader to consider the landscape or the natural world either as more powerful than humanity or as vulnerable to human presence. He also relates changing perceptions of the nonhuman world to minds that change, notably through a growing awareness of mortality: Age teaches you to recognize the signs of death. You do not see them suddenly; you become aware of them very slowly over a period of many, many years. Now it was as if I could see those signs everywhere, not just in myself, but in this place that I had lived in for

142  Discursive Death, Material Death almost thirty years. The birds were vanishing, the fish were dwindling and from day to day the land was being reclaimed by the sea. (215) Here, it is Nirmal’s own condition (aging) that enables him to perceive death, suggesting an effect reminiscent of the correlationism Meillassoux seeks to address. However, this increasing death-awareness might alternatively return us to Hägglund’s notion of survival. For Hägglund, it is when we acknowledge survival as being integral, not just to human lives but to the temporal material becoming of the world, thus to all things – as Nirmal does here – that we acknowledge the real beyond human thought. That being the case, Nirmal represents not just the problem of a post-Kantian subjectivity, or of correlationism as Meillassoux defines and understands it, but also the way a contemporary (re)turn to death-thinking challenges this difficulty. Nirmal’s role in the novel can be viewed as generating awareness of the refugee massacre at Morichjhãpi, and as thereby giving a voice to the subaltern54; yet his grappling with the discursive and the real might suggest that the central cog in Nirmal’s writings is not the Morichjhãpi incident, despite its importance to the novel as a whole, but ‘the words of the Poet’. Nirmal is engaged with a depiction of human alienation from death that amounts to a difficulty with fully inhabiting the world and, correspondingly, with the question of how this difficulty might be surmounted. The Elegies repeatedly depict a sense of our human alienation from the real aspect of the natural world. In the Tenth Elegy this alienation is drawn to focus as a characteristic of the modern West, whose citizens are distracted with the lures of modern living; yet, hidden behind this paraphernalia, the poem suggests, the reality of death is there all the same. Nirmal seems to convey these two aspects, in his notebook, in order to articulate the tension that appears between them. He functions as a focaliser for instances of the real in the novel, such as the landscape, its geology and disappearing creatures, or the lives of the settlers at Morichjhãpi. His words pay close attention to material detail, the effect of which is to reduce the sense of alienation. Yet, as Nirmal’s notebook brings to narrative attention a set of real-world problems, he retains a textuality that is in contrast with the immediacy of characters of the narrative present, such as Piya and Kanai, who are significantly more ‘real’ for the reader. These layers of reality and textuality turn the narrative back to the question of death-facing as the site of ongoing difficulty. With this tension noted, I turn to consider more closely Nirmal’s depiction of the Morichjhãpi massacre, which, as a historical episode, carries considerable potency in the novel as well as being specifically tied, not to facing death per se, but to a consideration of death-facing as an idea. Although being an observer of the real, Nirmal also illustrates death’s aporetic contingency in his own discursivity. When Nirmal first visits

Discursive Death, Material Death  143 the settlers at Morichjhãpi, he is overjoyed (we learn from his notebook) by what he sees as a grassroots proletariat victory in the making, devoid of the need for ideological theorising. Describing it as an ‘astonishing spectacle, as though an entire civilisation had suddenly sprouted in the mud’, he gives a detailed, past perfect account of activities underway, such as ‘a pottery had been founded’ (191). Nirmal then reflects on his own poetic process, as usual in accord with the ideas of ‘the Poet’. How better can we praise the world but by doing what the Poet would have us do: by speaking of potters and ropemakers. (193) Nirmal’s encounter with the Morichjhãpi settlers also awakens his longheld socialist inclinations. He is excited by the settlers’ campaign to counter government opposition to their presence, and by their enlisting of the support of Kolkata intelligentsia to raise public awareness of their plight. He is profoundly moved that he should ‘live to see’ this ‘experiment’, which has been ‘imagined not by those with learning and power, but by those without’ (171). In Nirmal’s eyes, the Morichjhãpi settlement is a utopia, a ‘place of true freedom for the country’s most oppressed’ (191). Here, Nirmal’s enthused response to the Morichjhãpi settlement can be seen to emphasise both a close narrative engagement with the material function of survival for the settlers in the Sundarbans landscape and his own socialist convictions. Layers of complexity begin to materialise, however, as a contrast is drawn between Nirmal’s strong urge to support the settlement and his wife, Nilima’s, refusal to do so. As their opposing positions are explored and clarified, Nirmal’s response to the Morichjhãpi settlers is overlaid for the reader with an additional consideration of the grounds upon which Nilima’s position stands. Nirmal’s anger at the government’s directive to disallow the settlement begins to appear complicated by an element of naivety, on his part, as he cannot fathom such a response, given (as he points out to Nilima) that only sixty years earlier Hamilton was permitted to develop the settlement at Lusibari. He also cannot understand the failure of his old Marxist friends in Calcutta (as it was then) to support the settlers at Morichjhãpi. Yet Nilima reminds him that people and situations change over time. She sees Nirmal’s faith in the greater cause and people who might uphold it as misguided and foolish. Her concern is also with facts on the ground, which are that she could lose hard-earned governmental support of her Trust, should she support the Morichjhãpi settlers, the consequences for the inhabitants of Lusibari being potentially devastating. She warns Nirmal not to continue with his support of the settlers at Morichjhãpi, but Nirmal does so in secret. The outcome for Nirmal and Nilima is a breakdown of marital trust and friendship, followed by Nirmal’s loss of mental stability, and his death.

144  Discursive Death, Material Death This collapse is significant in terms of the complexities to which attention is drawn. As far as the characterisation of Nirmal is concerned, this is not so much a critique of his Marxism – Ghosh himself has been referred to as a ‘disillusioned Marxist’, which to an extent Nirmal ­replicates – as a comment on his indulgence in levels of ideological theorising that he considers himself to be free from.55 Nilima highlights this by accusing Nirmal of not being practical. ‘To build something is not the same as dreaming of it’, she tells him. ‘Building is always a matter of well-chosen compromises’ (214). It is Nilima, we read, whose hard work generated the success of the Badabon Trust, with no practical help from Nirmal, for all his ideological theorising. As Terri Tomsky points out, Nirmal’s interest in the unfolding of events at Morichjhãpi is energised by his ‘nostalgic attachment’ to the ‘the idea of revolutions’, meaning that he might be accused of overlooking the refugees’ more fundamental need, which is simply for land upon which to live, as Nilima points out to him.56 Nirmal’s fascination with the settlement is also, later in the novel, partially explained by the extent of his poetic infatuation with Fokir’s mother, Kusum, one of the Morichjhãpi settlers. We might, nonetheless, view this portrayal of Nirmal as a depiction of the challenges that confront social change. It is, after all, Nirmal who narrates the novel’s fictionalising of the Morichjhãpi incident, a fictionalising that in real terms has functioned to bring the event out of obscurity, illustrating how narrative can exceed its own containment in a novel. Tomsky, seemingly acknowledging the context and outcomes of the novel’s publication, views Nirmal as ‘a solitary figure’ who ‘challenges the silencing of history’, a view that – historical matters aside – might reposition the naivety produced around Nirmal’s characterisation as simply that which accompanies his refusal to comply with the historical norm, whereby even his old Marxist friends betray the Morichjhãpi refugees.57 Highlighted from this perspective is the way the pressures of the real often defeat ideological endeavour. Accordingly, Mukherjee reads the characterisation of Nilima as demonstrating the ‘pragmatism of the liberal elite’ who ‘cannot envisage any meaningful devolution of power’.58 Through this shift in perspective, the functioning of dominant discourses also becomes evident, turning Nirmal indeed into a solitary figure of opposition. These alternative perspectives on Nirmal’s characterisation, as he engages with the Morichjhãpi affair, perhaps, though, best serve to reinforce the ongoing question mark he places in the narrative. His depiction of the mind’s discursive engagement with the material illustrates this engagement as either problematic or essential, depending on where one stands; however, his pursuit of the discursive plays an important role in making visible the layers of complexity that might otherwise be concealed or overlooked. This effect is most strikingly drawn at the point where the novel’s account of the Morichjhãpi incident brings Piya’s death-facing imperative into juxtaposition with the environmentalist imperative to save the Bengal Tiger. Within the narrative build-up to the massacre, Fokir’s mother,

Discursive Death, Material Death  145 Kusum, explains the message that is being given to the settlers by the government officials: … the worst part was not the hunger or thirst. It was to sit here, helpless, and listen to the policemen making their announcements… ‘This island has to be saved for its trees, it has to be saved for its animals, it is a part of a forest reserve, it belongs to a project to save tigers, which is paid for by people around the world.’ Every day, sitting here, with hunger gnawing in our bellies, we would listen to these words, over and over again. Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? …. (261–262) Here, the idea that safeguarding the nonhuman world relies on human preparedness to face death is turned on its head, as death-facing is transferred from the first to second person. From this point on, Nirmal’s focalising of the event increasingly takes prominence, providing an enhanced narrative engagement with material detail that is emphasised by Nirmal’s increasing need, on the one hand, to capture the situation in writing, and the failure, on the other, of his writing, signified by his pen running out of ink and then his pencil being reduced to a stub. A shift is thus implied, whereby the moment-to-moment material details of the situation are deemed to take over. Meanwhile Nirmal’s own witnessing hones in on an increased attention to the discursive moment, leaving the socio-­ political and historical complexities at work behind such scenario – the complexities of India’s past at work in the actions of its present government, or the increasing awareness of ecological compromise that drives globalising environmentalist movements – to fall into the background. This departure from the real, at this stage in the narrative, seems only to amplify the novel’s portrayal of the effects of hegemonic discourse at work, drawing attention to the way vanishing context gives way to nonrepresentational spaces. Where Hägglund calls for attention to material details based on an underlying desire for survival, it is the complexes of such hidden spaces, as brought to attention by the novel’s layering of the discursive and the material, to which he might be said to refer.

Fokir If the characterisation of Nirmal has, above all, demonstrated the complex relationship between our discursive engagement with the world and its events, Fokir depicts a loss of representation that appears only recoverable in a materialist mode. Whereas Nirmal’s voice is discursive as he speaks from an archive of the past, Fokir’s voice, since he does not speak the language of the novel at all, is excluded, at least from the narrative present. Fokir is often thus viewed as a subaltern figure, his relative (narrative) silence, together with his illiteracy and simple lifestyle, being

146  Discursive Death, Material Death symbolic of his greater subaltern silence. Fokir nonetheless plays a primary role in demonstrating a materialist death-facing to Piya and Kanai, the novel’s two main elites. In repositioning death-facing as ecological, he draws attention to a gap that appears between romanticised ideas of ecological harmony, and the real matter of living and dying within the challenging, ecologically diverse, environment of the Sundarbans. If death-facing ecology is intended to mean – as it does for the Gardeners in Atwood’s trilogy – participating in natural cycles or enabling nature in its becoming, then these ‘cycles’ and this ‘becoming’ turn out not to be harmonious states (qua Meillassoux), but continuing forms of survival. If death structures time and space, then life is haunted by death; it is our knowing this – for Hägglund, and as demonstrated by Fokir – that is the starting point for all that is yet to be done. In this section I explore Fokir’s role in depicting a return to material death as he saves Piya on three occasions, the last at the cost of his own life. With this, I consider, too, Fokir’s general reception as an idealised figure with transformative functions. While Fokir’s death, at the end of the novel, tends to provide a key component of this idealising, in my reading I consider this death, primarily as signalling the reality that death-facing poses: that death is, in material terms, a real possibility. Fokir’s own understanding of death as a force in life is instilled in him initially by Nirmal, followed soon after by his own mother’s death at Morichjhãpi. Although our first encounter with Fokir occurs in the narrative present, at the point when he saves Piya from drowning, his backstory is gradually mapped out for us, bringing our earliest chronological encounter with him to a meeting with retired schoolteacher, Nirmal. Fokir, a boy of five, is delivered temporarily into Nirmal’s hands while his mother seeks support, unsuccessfully, from Nilima for the settlers at Morichjhãpi. Within this short visit, in a chapter that forms an excerpt from Nirmal’s notebook, entitled ‘Storms’, Nirmal conveys a powerful and devastating lesson to the boy. Nirmal takes Fokir onto the roof and asks him what he can see. The boy’s answer is: ‘I see the bādh, Saar’ (202). Although his initial intention is to encourage the boy’s skills of observation, Nirmal proceeds to also instil in the boy a sense of human vulnerability to the immense power of landscape. The bādh is the embankment built by the tide-lands settlers to keep sea waters from flooding their lands. Nirmal urges the boy to consider its weaknesses, emphasising not just the way humans take control of the landscape, but the way this landscape may so easily take back this control: … See how frail it is, how fragile. Look at the waters that flow past it and how limitless they are, how patient, how quietly they bide their time. Just to look at it is to know why the waters must prevail, later if not sooner …. (205)

Discursive Death, Material Death  147 Nirmal then asks the boy to look for signs of damage to the bādh, explaining each sign with an historic example of a devastating storm. He also asks Fokir to ‘listen’, drawing his attention to the sound of the ‘multitudes of crabs’ burrowing into the bādh’s foundations (206). The sense conveyed, here, that sooner or later the natural world will outdo and outlive the schemes of humanity, is one that runs consistently throughout the novel, from the past through to the present, illustrating death-facing not as a Romantic composting of the self, but simply as an acknowledgement of the way things naturally are – lands can be swamped; husbands can be killed; lives can be ruined. Nirmal concludes Fokir’s lesson by asking the boy to whom one might turn when the bādh finally gives way. When Fokir cannot think of an answer, Nirmal, drifting back into poetics, responds: Who indeed, Fokir? Neither angels nor men will hear us, and as for the animals, they won’t hear us either. (206) When Fokir asks ‘Why not, Saar?’ Nirmal continues, quoting from Rilke’s First Elegy: ‘Because, of what the Poet says, Fokir, because the animals “already know by instinct we’re not comfortably at home in our translated world”.’ (206) In this rooftop discussion, Nirmal has thus instilled in the young Fokir both the idea that humanity is frail and cannot be relied upon and a materialist view that human constructions – whether of the bādh or of meaning – have no real lasting traction in the wider nonhuman world. In the narrative present, fisherman Fokir lives by catching crabs, a trade he also teaches his son, Tutul. His humble occupation is both derided by his wife, who finds her husband’s lack of ambition and his illiteracy frustrating, and romanticised by Piya who sees him as marvellously at one with the natural world. The simplicity of Fokir’s lifestyle is commented on in most readings of the novel; for example, Victor Li describes Fokir’s understanding of the world as ‘instinctive, natural and mystical’, in contrast with the ‘literate, modern rationality’ represented by Nirmal, Kanai and Piya.59 While the novel does make such a contrast, one might suggest that this contrast is also interwoven with a good deal of narrative complexity. For a start, Fokir’s supposed simplicity is also simply an effect of his narrative silence, a language barrier leading his presence in the novel to appear as disengaged. Fokir’s silence is nonetheless important in the way it amplifies his material presence, forcing attention onto his actions and allowing the novel to emphasise the gap between perception, on the

148  Discursive Death, Material Death one hand, and interpretation, on the other. Once one adds certain observations, such as the way Fokir prefers, as Mukherjee notes, to stay away from human settlements, spending ‘as much time as he can on the rivers’, and the way that he ‘feels out of place everywhere’ (as his wife explains to Kanai) (133), a more complex picture of Fokir emerges.60 Fokir’s experiences among the refugees at Morichjhãpi, culminating in his mother’s rape and murder by government officials, clearly do identify him as a subaltern figure. After all, as Kaur notes, Fokir and his community ‘reflect the suffering underside of global collaborative networks’.61 Fokir only survives because Horen, friend of Nirmal and relative of Kusum and the boy, removes him from the island by boat, the day before the massacre occurs. Yet Fokir’s boyhood exchanges with Nirmal also add to, thereby altering, this subaltern identity. A poetic (although not a Romantic) form of non-anthropocentric agency seems embedded in Fokir’s character, affecting his relationship with the very question of survival, in turn posing an inverted challenge to dominant discourses: It is the globalising West, it turns out, that needs to relearn death-facing. Meanwhile, Fokir’s lessons with Nirmal about the necessary frailty of humans and the ‘monstrous appetite of the crabs and the tides, the winds and the storms’ (206), combined with his real experiences of loss (his mother) and his witnessing of events at Morichjhãpi, might well result in his becoming something of a loner who fishes for crabs and avoids the constructions of humanity, simply as a part of his own survival process. Whatever our reading of Fokir, a key feature of his characterisation is his dramatic death at the end of the novel as he straps himself behind Piya in the branches of a tree, losing his life as he protects her from the storm. In readings that view Fokir as a subaltern figure, this presents a specific set of significances. Having lost his life protecting Piya, Fokir is able to ‘live on’ in Lusibari, partly because Piya’s GIS survives the storm and preserves a record of all their trips in the waterways, and partly because she decides to name her dolphin project after him. Li reflects on Gayatri Spivak’s well-known claim that ‘subalterns are defaced, even as they are disclosed’62 and discusses the way the subaltern ‘has to die in order to serve as an irreducible idea’.63 Arguing that death, rather than allowing a colonising of subaltern space, instead ‘safeguards subaltern secrecy, singularity, and space’, Li sees Fokir’s death as leading to ‘a form of regeneration’.64 This places emphasis on the formal narrative response to the subaltern figure, tied specifically to the death event. In the case of The Hungry Tide, this event is simultaneously – and fi ­ guratively – tied to Piya’s transformation, which has little to do with Fokir and everything to do with what she feels she has learned from him, including her sense of guilt at his death. While Li is right that Fokir’s singularity is preserved as irreducible in his death, and while Piya’s transformation has significance in itself, it seems that there be more to say about the novel’s somewhat unsatisfactory ending.

Discursive Death, Material Death  149 If one considers Fokir in relation to the theme of death-facing ecology then his death – like that of the mother in The Road – can be viewed, not as a sacrifice to be idealised, but as a material enacting of death-­ facing. Thus, rather than read the novel in terms of Piya’s albeit laudable decision in the closing pages to involve the locals in her environmentalist project, Fokir’s death might remind us, simply, that death is always there, meaning that there is no easy solution to the questions the novel poses. Thus, as Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin point out, for example, the question remains as to how the Bengal Tiger might be safeguarded without overwriting the real lives of people.65 One might just as well ask how the lives of people can be safeguarded without overwriting the real lives of Bengal Tigers. Understanding Fokir does not require us to naively appropriate his subaltern space with the false presumption that we can explain him. It is enough, working from Hägglund’s materialism, to view his life, as any other, in terms of his desire for survival. The value of acknowledging death’s material reality is that the egalitarian question of the desire for survival all round emerges as a political difficulty. It is this difficulty, furthermore, that in the end must be faced. The capturing of Fokir’s knowledge in Piya’s GIS, conversely, which symbolically places him in the stars to shine down as a ‘pure referent’, seems above all to be a reminder of the limits of our constructed world. Even understanding that the function of such imagery is to inspire resolution is not, in itself, to enact any such resolution. Hence, what Li refers to as ‘the messiness and ambiguity of struggle’, which he points out is avoided by the logic of sacrifice and the ‘reassurance of an aestheticized political ideal’, can be reopened where Fokir is read, as in Hägglund’s understanding of the term, simply as a survivor.66 *** Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide implements the theme of death-facing by exploring its material aspect as a means to engage with the struggles of actual lives. Death’s real possibility is one face of Derrida’s aporia, as discussed in relation to McCarthy’s The Road. The attention The Road draws to an anthropology of death-thinking illustrates why ecological thinking is difficult to do. This difficulty is apparent in all the novels I examine in this book. Ghosh’s novel, however, turns our attention more distinctly to its material potentiality, delineating a closer engagement with the challenges of the real. As illustrated, The Hungry Tide explores this material potentiality through the characters of Piya, Nirmal and Fokir. Piya illustrates that, since death is discursive (anthropological), while the impulse to face death may alleviate temporal and cultural contingencies, it may also reveal them. Piya, as a result of this, repeatedly faces death until its material possibility instils in her a recognition of the struggle for survival for all.

150  Discursive Death, Material Death Nirmal provides an unresolved and unresolvable meditation on the tension between the discursive and the material, taking a poetic route as a means to explore the interchanges between the two. It is Fokir, though, whose death, I have suggested, more clearly depicts a distinction between death’s discursive and material aspects – at least potentially so. Where we remain, as does Piya, witness to Fokir’s death as a temporal event, we limit our engagement to the discursive – Fokir died because he saved the life of Piya in a storm. However, if we view Fokir’s life as an ongoing struggle with ever-present death, thus viewing his life’s meaning, like that of all lives, as one of survival, we are able at least to acknowledge the reality of the struggle that lies both within and beyond us. Of course, this does not take us beyond Derrida’s ‘hidden bio-­ anthropo-thanato-theological contamination’,67 which would remind us of the contingency of all readings; nonetheless, it illustrates the impact of the theme of death-facing ecology on the narrative. This instance of Fokir’s death is perhaps the point at which the novel best illustrates the difference between Meillassoux’s speculative realism and Hägglund’s atheist materialism. It is also apparent in the way the novel repeatedly confronts Piya with death’s real possibility, causing her to adjust her discursive views to align with her material experiences. The novel, throughout, invites the reader to acknowledge the reality of material struggle, to which Hägglund, via his focus on survival, seeks to give traction. It is often Nirmal who makes visible the material through his emphasis on attention to detail, especially in relation to events at Morichjhãpi as juxtaposed with Piya’s death-facing. Yet Nirmal also highlights the discursive nature of any attempt to explain death. The novel’s ending might therefore appear as a complete breakdown of this carefully crafted depiction of death’s aporia. As Fokir dies, the novel’s sense of struggle seems to vanish, leaving the reader with Piya’s somewhat bland, if laudable, resolution, based in part on her idealising of Fokir. Among various readings of this, Tomsky’s suggestion, that the ‘flawed’ utopian ending is a conscious sign of the return of the author and a ‘necessary reminder of the story’s textuality’, seems the closest to mine.68 Fokir’s death viewed as utopian, or in Li’s terms as idealised, seems to call up the ‘peacefulness’ depicted in Meillassoux’s work, the opening to other through which he envisages a temporal-contingent ‘anything is possible’ idea. It takes a certain leap, then, to revisit this other in terms of the struggle Hägglund proposes, whereby by implication the political struggle is rendered apparent. Even then, this relies on the discourse that precedes and shapes our knowing of it.

Notes 1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, translated by Martyn Crucefix (­London: Enitharmon Press, 2011). 2 See Chapter 1 in this book, Oryx and Crake.

Discursive Death, Material Death  151 3 Amitav Ghosh, ‘Wild Fictions’, Outlook.india.com (22 December 2008); available at: www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?239276-1 (last accessed 2 September 2019). 4 Laura A. White, ‘Novel Vision: Seeing the Sunderbans through Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20, no. 3 (2013): 513–531, 522. 5 As Derrida, in his critique of Heidegger, puts it. Derrida, Aporias, 79; also see Chapter 3, page 92. 6 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, translated by Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Martin Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux’, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 114–129. 7 J. E. Luebering, ‘Amitav Ghosh’, Encyclopaedia Britannica; available at: www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1537377/Amitav-Ghosh (last a­ ccessed 2 September 2019). 8 Robert Dixon, ‘Travelling in the West: The Writing of Amitav Ghosh’, in Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, edited by Tabish Kahair (Delhi: ­Permanent Black, 2003), 10. 9 Nayar Pramod, ‘Preface’, in Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction, edited by John C. Howley (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2005), 9. 10 Pablo Mukherjee, ‘Surfing the Second Waves: Amitav Ghosh’s Tide Country’, New Formations 59 (2006): 144–157, 151; Rajender Kaur, ‘Home Is Where the Oracella Are’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 14, no. 1 (2007): 137–138. 11 Divya Anand, ‘Words on Water: Nature and Agency in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 34, no. 1 (2008): 21–44, 24. 12 Malcolm Sen, ‘Spatial Justice: The Ecological Imperative and Postcolonial Development’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 4 (2009): 365–377, 368. 13 See Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241–247. See also discussions in the Introduction to this book, in the section High Theory and Ecocriticism. 14 Stuart J. Murray, ‘Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben a Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 203–207, 204. See also discussions in the Introduction to this book, in the section: High Theory and Ecocriticism. 15 See Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Gender and Science: New Issues, Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831, 803. 16 Kant’s transcendental philosophy saw knowledge of the absolute as unattainable, and thus placed faith in its stead. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 29. 17 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 1. 18 Ibid., 128; Peter Hallward, ‘Anything Is Possible’, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re. press, 2011), 135. Meillassoux himself defines the correlationist as one who believes that ‘we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 38. 19 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 116.

152  Discursive Death, Material Death 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4

45 46 47 48 49

Ibid., 10; see also 143. Ibid., 10. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 28. Ibid., 20 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 34. Adrian Johnson, ‘Hume’s Revenge: Á Dieu, Meillassoux’, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 97. Hallward usefully summarises Hume: ‘Hume argued that pure reasoning a priori cannot suffice to prove that a given effect must always and necessarily follow from a given cause. There is no reason why one and the same cause should not give rise to “a hundred different events”’; see Hallward, ‘Anything Is Possible’, 131. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. From Hume’s Enquiry, 45, cited by Hallward from Meillassoux’s own citation of Hume (After Finitude, 91). Hallward, ‘Anything Is Possible’, 131–132. Martin Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux’, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 116. Here, Hägglund refers to Meillassoux, ‘Spectral Dilemma’, Collapse 4 (2008): 269. Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 116. Alain Badiou, ‘Interview: Alain Badiou and Ben Woodard’, in The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 20. Ibid. Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 115–116. Ibid. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2–25. Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 116. Ibid., 129. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. According to Amitav Ghosh, his ‘father’s “middle-elder-brother” […] was the last manager of the Hamilton estate in Gosaba’. See Amitav Ghosh website http://amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=141 (last accessed 27 May 2014). For a useful overview and discussion, see: Lisa Fletcher, ‘Reading the Postcolonial Island in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’, Island Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2011): 3–16. Catriona Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies’, in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-­ Sandilands, Bruce Erickson and Eric Gable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 337. Fabio Gironi, ‘Meillassoux’s Speculative Philosophy of Science: Contingency and Mathematics’, Pli 22 (2011): 25–60, 34; Gironi cites Meillassoux, After Finitude, 115. Ibid., 39–40. Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 129. Kaur, ‘Home Is Where the Oracella Are’, 135. Hägglund, ‘Radical Atheist Materialism’, 116.

Discursive Death, Material Death  153 50 Torsten Pettersson, ‘Internalization and Death: A Reinterpretation of Rilke’s “Duineser Elegien”’, The Modern Language Review 94, no. 3 (1999): 731–743, 732. 51 Sen, ‘Spatial Justice’, 368. 52 Kelly S. Walsh, ‘The Unbearable Openness of Death: Elegies of Rilke and Woolf’, Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 4 (2009): 1–21, 1. 53 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15, 17–19, 38–50. See also discussions in Chapter 1, page 48. 54 Nishi Pulugurtha, ‘Refugees, Settlers, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’, in Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, edited by Lorenz Volkmann, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers and Katrin Thomson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 84. 55 Robbie B. H. Goh, ‘The Return of the Scientist: Essential Knowledge and Global Tribalism in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and The Calcutta Chromosome’, in Narrating Race: Asia, (Trans)Nationalism, Social Change, edited by Robbie B. H. Goh (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 57. 56 Terri Tomsky, ‘Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44, no. 1 (2009): 53–65, 59. 57 Tomsky, ‘Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing’, 58–59. 58 Mukherjee, ‘Surfing the Second Waves’, 151. 59 Victor Li, ‘Necroidealism, or the Subaltern’s Sacrificial Death’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 3 (2009): ­275–292, 288. 60 Mukherjee, ‘Surfing the Second Waves’, 150. 61 Kaur, ‘Home Is Where the Oracella Are’, 136. 62 Here, Li cites from and discusses Gayatri Spivak’s, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 310; Li, ‘Necroidealism’, 278. 63 Li, ‘Necroidealism’, 276. 64 Ibid., 291. 65 Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010), 188. 66 Li, ‘Necroidealism’, 275. 67 Ibid., 79. 68 Tomsky, ‘Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing’, 63–64.

Conclusion Imageries of the Future

‘The future is not what it used to be’, as the King Blues lyrics state. Where we may once have envisioned the world to be a place of bounty and the future an arena in which to play out our desires, humanity now faces the prospect of leaving to our children a depleted world. This was not inevitable, since a window for change was opened by early environmentalists in the late twentieth century. While they may have been easy to dismiss as tree-huggers, they nonetheless helped to lay foundations for the recognition of the situation now coming to fuller force, almost two decades into the twenty-first century. It is the children themselves, whose futures are at stake, who are more recently having some success in holding politicians to account, by striking from their classrooms. Throughout this period, writers have been expressing their concerns by exploring the situation in narrative form. Fiction across the long contemporary is being shaped by and is helping to shape the ways in which we think about our relations with the planet and the nonhuman world. This includes a whole range of fictional forms and approaches. The novels I have chosen to consider in this book all have in common the theme of ‘death-facing ecology’, which I identify as an emergent theme in contemporary British and North American environmental crisis fiction. With its apocalyptic scenarios and depictions of a flawed humanity, environmental crisis fiction has tended to be seen by some as simply doom-mongering. Indeed, read uncritically, this fiction’s thematic use of ‘death’ points to a simple didactic warning: Humans (or some of us) must change our ways or meet our demise. Such harnessing of mortal fears can be considered unhelpful in terms of eliciting change.1 Yet, as has been emphasised throughout, in this book, death is no simple concept. I have argued that it is not so much death that is the threat as death-­ denial, which, in this fiction, gives rise to a crisis that potentially signals humanity’s demise. Accordingly, this fiction harnesses death-­facing as a means by which to explore the ways humanity might respond to this threat. Countering narratives of death-denial, it considers possibilities for a reconstructive and ecological response. I have aimed to indicate, across the course of this book, death-­facing ecology’s scope as a thematic device. Its rich possibilities have been

Conclusion  155 shown to be a result of several matters. One is, simply, that ‘death’ itself, as a concept, already gives much to the narratives of fiction. Indeed, ‘death’ has long been a common theme in literature of all kinds. Since death conditions life, how could it be otherwise? A related matter is the way death, at a time of environmental crisis, becomes an externally entangled affair. One is no longer dealing just with the interior question of the death of the self but also with the death of the world (figuratively speaking) – a death that rebounds upon the self. This scenario brings into play a history of thought in relation to self and world. It also unsettles this same body of thought, since the causes of the ‘death of the world’ lie in the actions of the (collective) self, upon whom this death rebounds. This veritable knot of ideas further signals a psychic entanglement of human thought with what has long been defined as ‘nature’ and objectified as ‘over there’, but of which we now turn out to be a part. This binary collapse evokes ideas in environmental philosophy from which some of the authors, notably Margaret Atwood, draw, as well as speculative and material theory and the subject theorising of posthumanism, as readings across the novels discussed have shown. In addition to the above matters, death-facing correlates with death-denial, since both pivot over an axis of death. One can allow oneself to be defined by a fear of death, or one can contemplate and come to terms with it; one can be driven by a desire to outdo death, or one can accept and maybe even embrace one’s mortal limits. This correlation creates the possibility for paradox, which, underpinning the narratives of this fiction, facilitates its explorations of the challenges faced at a time of environmental crisis, as well as the sense of impasse to which it tends to give rise. This is seen especially in Chapter 3, in which I draw on Derrida’s work on death as aporia as a means to illustrate how this paradox arises. As noted in the Introduction to this book, the concept of death-denial has an extensive catalogue in the history of thought, appearing in the domains of history, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism and more. The fiction analysed in this book sees death-denial as the root cause of environmental crisis, expressed as the domination of the natural world by the modern West, or as scientific pursuits that benefit humans to the detriment of the planet. This understanding of death-denial is depicted directly in some novels. For example, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy depicts a divided society in which corporate and scientific elitism conceal an underbelly of poverty and corruption. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, similarly, depicts a self-serving Central Power that sustains itself by decimating the planet and dumbing down its citizens by occupying them with a quest for eternal youth. In other novels, death-denial is more subtle, although with the effect being more intense. For example, the father, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, depicts death-­denial in simply continuing to pursue life, because he does so in an

156 Conclusion already dead world, in contrast to the mother who faces death directly. Neither is depicted as ‘right’, however, due to the narrative presence of the son who symbolises a future that seems unlikely to be fulfilled. In countering death-denial, the theme of death-facing ecology might be aligned broadly with an anti-modernist rejection of corporate capitalism. It inherently opposes growth as a means by which to alleviate issues such as poverty and ecological destruction, since to face death is to acknowledge limit. It thus evokes an ecologist framework, as described by Andrew Dobson, 2 whereby radical change is needed, in contrast to the business-as-usual approach that, at the time of writing, continues to hold sway across systems of power in Britain and North America. Having established or in some sense evoked this stance, this fiction then sets about exploring what it might take for such change to be enacted, envisaging what eco-philosopher Val Plumwood – although not necessarily in relation to fiction – refers to as ‘the (re)situating of the human in ecological terms’.3 This exploration of an ecological and death-facing subject produces a reconstructive endeavour, in the narratives of this fiction, that is fruitful to explore. One aim of this book has been to demonstrate the way death-facing ecology as a thematic device brings forward the nuances of this endeavour. Readings in this book depict this strand of fiction as interrogating (aspects of) a history of Western thought on the human subject, as they consider how the subject might be resituated in the present. One difficulty for this task is that, as the ‘environment’ (of environmental crisis) emerges as a category of thought, the gap between the present situation and its resolution appears too vast to mentally accommodate in terms of action. Timothy Clark points to the ‘derangements of scale’ that occur, whereby, ‘a sentence about the possible collapse of civilization can end, no less solemnly, with the injunction never to fill the kettle more than necessary when making tea’, or, a ‘motorist buying a slightly less destructive make of car is now “saving the planet”’.4 By depicting humanity’s possible demise due to our impacts on the planet, these novels place the reader in the kind of impossible situation to which Clark refers. The ‘message’ that death is an ecological good, which certainly some will appreciate, also places the reader in an impossible situation if read literally, since it can seem to demand their/our voluntary demise. While these novels, therefore, in some ways set up a problematic dynamic for the reader, they also create a space in which to think about who we are, where we are going, where the challenges lie and what it might take to address them. A key aim in my discussions on death-facing ecology as a thematic device has been to illustrate the way this device draws into closer proximity the details of this exploration. For example, it contributes to the way the novels engage the reader with the question, ‘What are we today?’, 5 thereby opening up an exploration of our (possible) fears and self-doubts, the ways we might

Conclusion  157 reconceive our understandings of ourselves at this time and how we might think about the broader political scene and the lack of rigorous response. The emergence of environmental crisis, as both a material event and a new category in thought, creates a new problem for the human, whose subjective ‘I’ was already undermined by poststructuralists across the late twentieth century. A cumulative sense of our necessary self-erasure is placed into newly accentuated conflict with the demand for our efforts to change, requiring our agency, insight and other such capacities. How might we at once both reinforce and delete ourselves? Such seems to be one question – and not just in fiction – at a time of environmental crisis. For the already decentred subject, this additional and existential dilemma arrives as both a personal and a political question. On the one hand, the individual is necessarily implicated, since death is always ‘possible’ for the self – as any philosopher, or anyone at all, would assumedly agree. On the other hand, the individual is subject to the political context into which death-facing also falls; indeed, death-facing in some ways gestures towards or even relies on it. Michel Foucault, who denies that death-denial is a result of some (then) ‘new anxiety’ that ‘makes death unbearable for our society’, sees death instead as ‘power’s limit’.6 This emphasises the patterns of power to which the body-politic is subject. As such, the tension – common to contemporary discourses of ­environmentalism – between an emphasis on an individual response to the crisis and an emphasis on a collective or political response is at also least gestured towards in the concept of death’s aporia, since death’s aporia emits discourse, pointing to the way the individual is always juxtaposed with, and to differing extents engenders, hegemonic forms. Among the novels studied, this is best portrayed in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, which applies death-facing in terms of hegemonies, illustrating how environmentalism can become a kind of neo-­colonialism. While the other novels examined place more, although not entire, emphasis on the internality of the human subject, Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide explores more fully the way the internal subject, with their thoughts about death, can be caught up in the realm of discourse. Thus, Piya views herself as ecologically aware, yet overlooks the realities of the lives of others. The narrative of The Hungry Tide is of particular interest to this book for precisely this reason. In my reading, Martin Hägglund’s exposition of Derrida’s thoughts on death turns out to be particularly fruitful, extending as it does into the realms of speculative thought. Thus, Hägglund frames death-facing in terms of a death that conditions living, not just for the self, but for all life. It is not that we await death, but that death is already an aspect of who we are. On this view, death-facing ecology indicates a (personal) recognition of death that resides within all life, in contrast to a personal recognition of one’s own possible death. This renders death-facing ecological since it offers

158 Conclusion an egalitarian acknowledgment of all lives. For Piya, the novel shows, what matters is not to idealise death-facing in imagery of oneself, perhaps appearing as something of an ecological hero, but rather to experience the death’s real possibility for the self and for all. Hägglund takes this point further still in his recent work, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (2019).7 In this book, he remarks that ‘If you are aiming for eternal life, finite life does not matter for its own sake but serves as a vehicle to attain salvation’. 8 He continues, saying that the ‘environmental crisis can be taken seriously only from the standpoint of secular faith’.9 He bases this on the idea that, by viewing ourselves as finite (rather than as part of some larger scheme, in the religious sense), we are better able to recognise the importance of the flourishing of the world around us. Effectively, Hägglund encapsulates the spirit and intent of death-facing ecology as I also define and experience it, both personally and as I find it to be deployed in fictional form. Hägglund’s commentary, here, also chimes well with that of Catriona Sandilands, cited in the Introduction to this book (Death-Facing ­E cology). She refers to the term melancholia as suggesting how we might experience the ‘world of wounds’ as an ‘ethical stance that resists, rather than fostering, fetish’, therefore ‘allowing ourselves to be personally changed by loss’.10 For Hägglund, the point is not to ‘embrace’ loss, or pain, or death, as this would be ‘just another version of the religious ideal of being absolved from vulnerability’.11 Rather, he, too, emphasises death-facing as a kind of mourning, a suffering that marks us, leading us to ‘care about one another’; for Hägglund, action also matters, not ‘waiting for a timeless future’, since ‘our time is all we have’.12 A note of caution is worth making, here, on the idea of caring for each other – whether for each other as human beings, or for all life on Earth. Adeline Johns-Putra interrogates the question of a care ethics in relation to environmental and new materialist thought, as I discuss in C ­ hapter 2 (Easter Island) in relation to Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.13 Johns-Putra sets out by arguing that care ‘is not the means by which agency occurs; it is itself agential’.14 This suggests, perhaps not dissimilarly to Hägglund on death, that care is a condition within the subject, but not something that can be projected as an ‘over there’. At the same time, Johns-Putra insists that care is always ‘contingent’.15 One cannot therefore simply announce that everyone ‘should care’ about the environmental crisis and expect this to engender change. If they do not care, they do not; thus, insisting that they should is likely to be unproductive. In the same way, reading environmental crisis fiction as a didactic warning that might enlist this ‘should’ in the reader, turning it to action, also appears naïve on Johns-Putra’s reading. Indeed, I have argued, with regard to the strand of fiction discussed in this book, that for all its imageries of death, rather than performing a didactic warning, hanging the

Conclusion  159 sword of Damocles over us, it offers an exploration of possibilities, the discovery of which can be enhanced by observing a narrative use of the theme of death-facing ecology, as I hope to have demonstrated. These discussions might remind us that thinking about humans and the environmental crisis is a complex affair. Is ‘the problem’ without or within, and what might this mean in terms of the possibilities for a response to the crisis? An intriguing aspect of death-facing ecology is the way it interacts with this problem of a self and a world. Accordingly, this fiction pursues a quest for the real that is signalled in its emphasis on death-facing. The shift from death-denial to death-facing replicates a parallel theoretical shift whereby a concern with language is overtaken by a new concern with the material. The empirical denotation of ‘knowledge’ is thus newly challenged and emphasised at a time of environmental crisis (Is climate-change real?). Poststructuralist, and other, thought has suggested that we become egalitarian by acknowledging our own finitude, an idea that sustains in the figure of the ecological and death-facing posthuman. Ludwig Wittgenstein puts this well when discussing the possibility of thought beyond the human. Rather than say, he suggests, that animals do not talk and therefore they do not think, we should simply say that they do not talk.16 Yet, this finitude is now, itself, further complicated. It is perhaps our drive to know – the ‘will to knowledge’ as Foucault puts it – that has led to the discovery of our impacts on the planet. Yet discovering the advent of pollution or climate change seems to differ qualitatively from discovering a person to (supposedly) fit a category by virtue of assigning it to them (such as ‘mad’ or ‘homosexual’).17 There is a certain ‘thereness’ about the material world that defies any significance to our presence and confounds our capacity to define or name it. The quest to describe this phenomenon drives such theorists as Quentin Meillassoux, and perhaps, too, the novelists whose works are discussed in this book. While Derrida might reasonably say that such describing is always contaminated by the describer, one might equally say – with Karen Barad, with Judith Butler or with Timothy Morton – that such describing is in itself also contaminated, thus interpellated, by the thingness that is ‘there’. To encounter the crisis of environment in its various aspects is to encounter the real beyond the self and effectively beyond (albeit implicated by) the discursive power structures of humans. Even climate change deniers must agree that species are diminishing, lands are being deforested and oceans are being polluted, whether or not they assign to it any importance. These events exist both beyond us and because of us simultaneously. The aesthetic shift encountered in the life-world of the subject, as ‘the environment’ takes categorical form, seems to underlie much of theory’s more recent developments, also provoking any number of questions, complexities and contradictions.

160 Conclusion The novels examined all pertain to a similar twenty-first-century contemporary moment, while being variously in dialogue with the ideas of such thinkers as Foucault, Butler, Derrida and various others, both discussed and not discussed. What distinguishes such thinkers, in relation to my investigation, is their differing relatedness to (a) death, and to (b) the emergent category of ‘environment’ (the world, the object). In Chapter 1, I considered the way Margaret Atwood’s satirical trilogy, in exploring possibilities for a post-capitalist world, revolves around a poststructuralist concern with agency and ethics. What can the decentred subject do and how? But also, what are the new demands on agency for the subject in an environmental crisis world? The shifting aesthetics of the subject are described in Morton’s concept, ‘the ecological thought’.18 Where Butler responds to a problem of agency and ethics in Foucault’s work, Morton illustrates how the call of the hyperobject in the subject-field newly interpellates the subject in the contemporary moment. Thus, death-facing in Atwood’s trilogy can be considered in terms of Morton’s ‘turning to the object’.19 Nonetheless, the question about the role and function of language, which intervenes in the closing pages of Atwood’s trilogy, seems to recur, intervening each time, in one way or another, in each of the novels examined. This indicates the way a turn to the material always retains some reliance on discursive practices. This is as inevitable for the human as it is for literature and especially for fiction. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, discussed in Chapter 2, appears to raise a question as to how much of the human and our discursive practices we want to let go, and how much to keep; this is matched with a question about how much it is our inner fallibilities that themselves need addressing. In Chapter 3, I applied Derrida’s death as aporia to illustrate the way a material death-facing always does reinstate the discursive, which we can also think of as the anthropological. Within the novels discussed in this chapter, this aporia appears to give rise to some kind of state of psychological trauma when faced with the material world as it manifests a state of crisis. Yet Derrida’s final refocusing to ‘life’ (as survival)20 is re-translated in Chapter 4, where I find Martin Hägglund’s thoughts on death particularly helpful in terms of the theme of death-facing ecology. This is because of his emphasis on survival as egalitarian, based on a view of death as conditioning all life. In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh adeptly demonstrates that, even if we are always discursive, and even if we have language and poetry, ever shaping the ways in which we encounter the material world, we are also material beings whose own deaths condition us. Therefore, as The Hungry Tide depicts, allowing ourselves to be marked by death, opening up to our vulnerabilities in this world, is also a means by which we might recognise that vulnerability in the world around us. It is here that the hidden or the overlooked might become visible, bringing

Conclusion  161 politics to ground level and challenging those movements, of any kind, that relate mainly to themselves, whether as capitalist ventures or as well-­meaning heroes. Overall, the novels appear both to assume and to interrogate the assumptions of an antimodernist stance. The authors, all of whom have lived through the late twentieth century with its socio-political moods and concerns, seem on the whole to incorporate some of the lessons of poststructuralism, even as they observe and engage with the emergent body of contemporary thought that pushes beyond it. Of course, maturity in years also increases the possibilities of contemplating one’s own mortality. Thus, their novels replicate the way death-facing involves a recognition of the subject’s relative insignificance in relation to the larger temporal or spatial picture, as well as its commonality with it. A striking feature, accordingly, of all the novels, is the way they grapple with the problem of the material world, whose degradation has become apparent. Atwood explores the ways in which we might become, like Toby or the Crakers, more cognisant of, and more integrated with, the world around us; Winterson’s narrative opens up to new posthuman possibilities; Nathanial Rich points to what it might mean to live offgrid, abandoning a capitalist impulse; McCarthy places the reader firmly within the site of a dead world, inviting us to mourn; and Ghosh brings the landscape to speak to us, even if with words that might equally be our own. Indeed, the role and function of language, in the encounter with the material, remains a concern in each of the novels. In depicting death-facing as a means for the subject to respond efficaciously to its world, the question of humans and language continues to undermine. This is perhaps a problem that fiction must always have with death. It can only ever figure death as discursive, as trespass. 21 Thus, any fictional depiction of the death-facing human is always already in retreat from its own meanings. The value of this, of course, is that it allows us the opportunity, as reader, to create some of our own.

Notes 1 Andrew Dobson, for example, remarks that delivering messages of ‘impending catastrophe’ (by whatever means) is not necessarily the way to ‘induce social change’; Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, Fourth Edition (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–4, 103. See also Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 24; Louise Squire, ‘Death and the Anthropocene: Cormac McCarthy’s World of Unliving’, The Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 211–228, 212; and others. 2 Ibid. 3 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Abington: Routledge, 2002), 8. 4 Timothy Clark, ‘Derangements of Scale’, in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, volume 1, edited by Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor,

162 Conclusion MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012); available at: https://quod.lib.umich. edu/o/ohp/10539563.0001.001/1:8/--telemorphosis-theory-in-the-era-ofclimate-change-vol-1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext (last accessed 1 September 2019). 5 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145–146. See discussions in the Introduction to this book. 6 According to Foucault, ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “private”’; see Michel Foucault, ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, edited by Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 261. 7 Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (London: ­Profile Books, 2019). 8 Ibid., 9. 9 Ibid. 10 Catriona Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies’, in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-­ Sandilands, Bruce Erickson and Eric Gable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 333, 334. Emphasis in original. 11 Hägglund, This Life, 369. 12 Ibid. 13 Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘Environmental Care Ethics: Notes toward a New Materialist Critique’, Symploke 21, no. 1–2 (2013): 125–135. See also discussions in Chapter 2 of this book. 14 Ibid., 126. 15 Ibid., 131. 16 Wittgenstein is here discussing ‘language games’, whereby our knowledge is formed of our interactions that include but are not limited to language. He states: ‘It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: “they do not think, and that is why they do not talk.” But – they simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language – if we except the most primitive forms of language. – ­Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing’. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 25, Third Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 17 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Know, volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1998). 18 See Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 135. 19 Morton, Hyperobjects, 22, 174. 20 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. An Interview with Jean Birnbaum, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 24–25, 52. 21 Derrida, Aporias, 24.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Adorno, Theodore 31, 45 agency 43, 78, 103, 125, 148, 157, 160; and care ethics 158; nonhuman 50, 127; performative 49, 64, 71; posthuman 65 Alex the Parrot 38, 44 America, North America: death positive movement 4; in fiction 96, 125, 156; in politics 5; writers 2, 19, 20, 91, 99, 154 Anand, Divya 127 Andermatt Conley, Verena 13 animal: in Atwood 28, 29, 37–9, 40, 44, 50, 51; in Ghosh 131, 145, 147; and humans 27–9, 67; as other 33, 159, 162n16; Studies 27 Anthropocene 1, 13, 15, 24 anthropocentrism 7, 16, 60, 66; fictional 70, 72, 127, 148 anthropogenic 8, 25, 57, 102 antimodernist 10, 161 Ariès, Philippe, 10, 77, 92, 105 Atwood, Margaret: as author 6, 19, 29, 30, 49, 155, 161; ‘Death By Landscape’ 28; Life Before Man 36; Maddaddam 28, 34, 37, 48–53, 54; Maddaddam trilogy 27–9, 33, 48, 53, 57, 155; Oryx and Crake 27, 29, 33–40, 46, 111; Quattrocentro 44; Surfacing 29; Year of the Flood 28, 36, 39, 41–8, 53, 125 autism (autistic, Asperger’s) 35, 55n35 Badiou, Alain 130, 135 Banco, Lindsey 103 Barad, Karen: intra-action 78; matter 63, 64; performative posthumanism 19, 60, 71, 72, 74, 79, 159; links with Wolfe 65–6

Bartosch, Roman 29, 52 Baudrillard, Jean 8, 16 Becker, Ernest 97 Bergthaller, Hannes: on Atwood 29, 30, 36; on autopoietic systems 66, 73, 87n19; on climate change impasse 90, 91; on Nathaniel Rich 97 binary 4, 6, 29, 38, 71, 138, 155; see also Descartes Bohr, Niels 64 Bouson, J Brooks 29, 37 British 2, 19, 154 business-as-usual 5, 25, 97, 156 Butler, Judith: becoming human 19, 30, 32, 33; giving an account 19, 31; performativity 39–43, 54; ethic 45–6, 159–60 Canada 19, 28, 29 Canavan, Gerry 29, 36–8 Capitalism: and biopolitics 9; fictional 29, 34, 68, 77, 95, 97, 160–1; as hubris 15, 24, 26, 59, 156; as hyperobject 15; see also neoliberalism Cartesian see Descartes, René Chabon, Michael 109, 117 Clark, Timothy 23n44, 156 climate change fiction, cli-fi 6–8, 25, 93 Colebrook, Claire 13, 15, 66, 73 Cooper, Lydia 106 contemporary theory see theory Cranston, Maurice 3, 69 Culture 3, 8, 49, 59, 91, 92, 101, 137; nature-culture 91 cyborg see Haraway, Donna Darwinism 34, 41, 49 death as wild see Ariès, Philippe

164 Index death cafes 4 deconstruction 12, 63, 65, 66, 93, 116 Defalco, Ameila 49, 50 Derrida, Jacques: Aporias 18, 20; and Cary Wolfe 63, 64, 67; death as such 18, 20n3, 91, 96, 108; death of other 99, 103, 112; Learning to Live Finally 104; and Martin Hägglund 130, 157; on Martin Heidegger 18, 92, 103, 113; on nuclear destruction 100, 101, 114; as poststructuralist 8, 12, 65, 160; on ‘survival’ 104, 105, 107, 117, 121n85, 160; on ‘trespass’ 93, 97, 101, 113, 116, 117 Descartes, René 16, 38; see also dualism DiMarco, Danette 29, 39 Dobson, Andrew 5, 14, 156 doctrine of possibilities see Ouspensky, Peter dualism 4, 21n11, 67; see also binary; Descartes Duino Elegies (1923) see Rilke, Rainer Maria Dunning, Stephen 37 Easter Island myth 68, 75 Eaglestone, Robert 45, 47 Ecocriticism: and high theory 8, 10, 12, 16; politics of 7, 30; treatment of eco-lit 6, 127 ecologism see Dobson, Andrew environmentalism: fictional Atwood 36, 42, 43, 47, 70, 96; debates and variants 5, 36, 64, 97, 128, 157; Ghosh 124, 126–8, 134–8, 144, 145, 149; as movement 5, 70, 132, 154; see also ecologism environmental issues: bee populations 7, 8; biodiversity loss 1, 7, 8, 14, 16, 24, 27, 131; climate change 6–8, 16, 27, 90, 93, 127, 159; deforestation 1, 8, 14, 16, 24, 91, 159; land degradation 6–8; pollution 1, 24, 159; species extinctions 8, 14, 16 Epicurus 2, 20n4, 96, 97 Evans, Rebecca 6 exceptionalism, human 3, 11, 13, 25, 53, 60, 66 Ferrando, Francesca 67 Fletcher, Robert 24

Foucault, Michel: biopolitics 9, 126–8; death-denial and thanatopolitics 9, 48, 60, 126, 159; ethical subject 31, 160; finitude 100; historicism 26, 30, 31; and nature 10–12; poststructuralism 8, 12, 92, 126, 160; ‘technologies of the self’ 43; will to knowledge 159 Gasché, Rodolphe 12 Gaia Liberation Front 11 Garrard, Greg 14 Geiger, Scott, The Common 94 Gessert, George 36 Ghosh, Amitav: as author 20, 125, 127, 132, 138, 144, 161; The Great Derangement 127; The Hungry Tide 20, 124–50, 160, 161; ‘Wild Fictions’ 125 Gironi, Fabio 135 Grammer, J. M. 99 Hägglund, Martin: on death and time 20, 105, 126–8, 130, 135–6, 138, 146, 157, 160; on environmental crisis 158; on materiality 128, 129, 135–6, 145; his radical atheism 130, 137; on survival 130, 131, 138, 142, 145, 149, 150 Hallward, Peter 128, 129, 152n26 Hamilton, Daniel 131, 132, 143, 152n42 Haraway, Donna 60, 86n7 Harman, Graham 32 Hayles, N. Katherine 61, 87n18 Heidegger, Martin 2, 18, 84, 92, 93, 101, 103 Hinchman, Lewis 69, 70 Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin 149 humanism: and death-facing 58, 61, 70, 72, 85; Hinchman on 69; narratives of 19, 39, 59, 62, 69, 70; new humanism 59; and posthumanism 57–9, 61, 67, 73, 83, 85, 86, 123; in The Road 110; and transhumanism 58, 59, 69, 70 Hume, David 129, 152n26 hyperobjects see Morton, Timothy immortality: and death-denial 94; in MaddAddam trilogy 36, 37, 41, 43, 46, 55n42, 125; in philosophy

Index  165 9, 101, 130, 138; secularist 3; and transhumanism 59, 68, 69 IPBES (Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) 7, 8 Jennings, Hope 62, 71 Johnson, Adrian 129 Johns-Putra, Adeline 23n44, 62, 74, 78, 117, 158 Kant, post-Kantian 27, 127, 128, 142 Kaur, Rajender 127, 148 Kingsolver, Barbara, Flight Behaviour 6 Kronick, Joseph G 12, 114 Laplanche, Jean 31 Levinas, Emmanuel 31, 41, 45–7, 103, 104 Lit Lovers 94 Li, Victor 147–9 Love, Glen 11 Luhmann, Niklas 73, 79, 87n19 Marxism 126, 127, 138–40, 144 McCarthy, Cormac: as author 98, 99, 161, 125; The Road 19–20, 91–118, 125, 149, 155; The Sunset Limited 92, 100, 102 Meillassoux, Quentin: After Finitude 126, 128–31; ancestrality 128, 129; correlationism 128, 142, 151n18; hyper-Chaos 129; mathematics 128, 135; outside of thought 20, 63, 126, 159; state of peacefulness 130, 131, 146, 150 Morichjhãpi massacre 132–4, 139–46, 148; see also Sundarbans Morton, Timothy: ecological thought 19, 32, 36, 54, 159–60; hyperobjects 15, 32; the mesh 32; and nonhumans (strange strangers) 30, 32, 33, 51, 65–6, 73, 141; Romantics 21n16 Mukherjee, Pablo 127, 144, 148 Mullins, Matthew 104, 109, 110, 115 Murray, Stuart 9, 128; see also Foucault, biopolitics new materialism 6, 11, 14, 15, 33, 39, 78, 125; atheist materialism 149, 150; biological materialism 34, 39,

41; and care ethics 158; historical materialism 140; materialism 33, 39, 48, 65, 126, 129, 130, 135, 147; as narrative 125, 139, 145, 146; and poststructuralism 124; and reconstruction 79 neoliberalism 14, 49, 123; see also capitalism Oates, Lawrence Titus 47 object-oriented ontology see Graham Harman Onega, Susana 62 Ouspensky, Peter 62, 87n13 Padui, Raoni 63 Paris Agreement (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) 5, 7 Pettersson, Torsten 139 Phillips, Dana 11, 49, 52 philosophy: aesthetics 32, 58, 160; Continental 13, 66; environmental 155; epistemology 33, 39, 93; instrumentalism 29, 34, 37; of language, linguistic turn 12; metaphysics 29, 92, 129; narrative theme 37, 71; ‘new pole’ of (Foucault) 26; Plato 12; postphilosophy 60, 63; solipsism 11, 12, 16; utilitarianism 28, 35, 41, 49, 54 Pizzino, Christopher 103, 114, 115 Plumwood, Val 13, 19, 156 poststructuralism 6, 8–13, 15, 25, 26, 65; and death-denial 155; in fiction 37, 39, 53, 73–4, 79, 111, 160, 161; shift to ecological thought 4, 30, 60, 63, 124, 126, 159 Pramod, Nayar 127 progress 3–5, 10, 25, 26, 127; progressive freedom 3 reconstructive 2, 4, 12, 63, 71, 79, 154, 156 religion: and death 8–9, 99, 101, 102; demise of (ephemerality) 3, 116, 158; and environment 41; problems of 42; as survival 130, 137 Rich, Nathaniel: as author 94; Odds Against Tomorrow 91, 93 Rilke, Rainer Maria 124, 125, 139, 140, 147 Rine, Abigail 62

166 Index Romantic 5, 7, 11, 21n16, 141, 147, 148; romantic freedom 3, 21n10 Rozelle, Lee 37–9, 46 Sandilands, Catriona 15, 24, 132, 158 Schuster, Joshua 2, 93, 100, 103 Schwanitz, Dietrich 65 Second Order Systems Theory 63, 65, 87n19 Sen, Malcolm 127 Skrimshire, Stefan 110, 112 Snyder, Phillip 106 speculative realism 6, 14, 15, 20, 32, 39, 60, 71, 150; links with poststructuralism 126 Spivak, Gayatri 148 Sundarbans (Bay of Bengal): and death-facing 124, 133, 137; ecology of 124, 131, 137, 139, 146; historical community 131, 132; Lusibari (fictional island) 125, 131, 132, 139, 140, 143; site of humannonhuman conflict 131, 132; as World Heritage Site 131; see also Morichjhãpi massacre theory: contemporary 4, 57, 66, 73; environmental 32; high 8–13, 16, 57, 65, 126; literary 27; poststructuralist 30; post 65; speculative 126, 155; systems 63, 65; turn 124

Tiffin, Helen see Huggan, Graham Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava 58 Tomsky, Terri 144, 150 transhumanism 19, 58, 59, 69, 70, 85; dystopian 68, 69, 71 UNESCO 8, 131 Verdeaux, Jacqueline 11 Walsh, Kelly S. 140 Warren Friedman, Alan 10 West, modern 3, 4, 9, 24, 58, 60; death-denial in 8, 155; as represented in fiction 68, 128, 142, 148 Western thought (history of) 3, 4, 12, 15, 19, 27, 156 White, Laura 125 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 55n42, 159, 162n16 Winterson, Jeanette: as author 19, 59–62, 67, 161; The Stone Gods 19, 59–62, 66–86, 155, 158, 160 Wolfe, Cary: links with Derrida 12, 63; links with Karen Barad 64–5, 79; posthumanism 50, 57, 58, 60, 66, 71, 73; ‘radical passivity’ 19, 67, 84; What Is Posthumanism? 63 Žižek, Slavoj 9, 66