Dissertation Research + Considering A Recent Seminar on Neo-naturalist Climate Fiction
- Tadhg Kearney
- Mar 27, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: Apr 25, 2024
Originally posted on 27th March 2024. Edited on 25th April 2024.
Back at it again with another blog post. This thing’s been neglected as of late. I think I’ll try and do one more over Easter. But the subject of this post is a recent seminar I attended, one held by Alan Gibbs, a man whose classes form the backbone of my own college education. Which is something I’ve only recognised in hindsight. I’ve come to expect a very high standard from Alan’s classes and this seminar did not disappoint. The topic of the seminar was “Contemporary Naturalist Climate Fiction and Physical Injury,” which drew on some research from his forthcoming book (which I cannot wait to read).
The session began with an overview of American naturalism. This was necessary for me, I hadn’t engaged much with naturalist stories since my undergrad, which at this point, feels simultaneously like yesterday and eighty-two years ago. One aspect I was glad that he brought up was how determinism is represented in American naturalism. He mentions that determinism is a way to excuse characters from morally reprehensible actions, to explain the misuse of power in people in power and the ruling class. This was by far the most interesting aspect of the seminar for me, but I’ll return to this momentarily. The bulk of the rest of the seminar was an outline of a particular resurgence of naturalism in American literature, in particular, how neo-naturalist climate fiction can act as “allegories of apocalypse” in varying contexts.
The texts analysed varied wildly but all of which shared– to some extent– an allegory of the looming climate crisis. One point I’m glad he made, and perhaps interested by Marxist brain a little too much, was the shift away from working class lives (e.g. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair) to representations of the ostensibly middle class. I believe the shift, he characterised, was a desire to wake the complacent from apathy, to relay a message that this crisis will affect everybody, no matter how much it is ignored. I’m not convinced it’s that simple, and perhaps he only brought it up in passing to contextualise his argument, but it’s something I think warrants some further exploration. Not that I have the time currently, but maybe one day.
The texts discussed in the seminar all sounded interesting and I’d like to get around to reading them, perhaps over the summer. Most notably, Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle piqued my interest. This story is set in a California ravaged by flooding and heatwaves and the ever complacent, aspiring influencer protagonist buys a python for aesthetic purposes, to use as an accessory. Inevitably, this goes wrong, and culminates in the python eating a child. As far as metaphors go, it’s fairly on the nose.
But to return to the deterministic aspect of naturalist stories, Alan goes out of his way to mention that this is a more European version of naturalism, and the reason naturalism persists in America is due to the adaptability of it. He mentions this fact in another one of his essays, citing that 19th and 20th century American naturalism was ‘less committed to determinism, a characteristic in sympathy with its openness to the incorporation of other discourses and forms’ but nevertheless, determinism has always ‘been a strong component of the form, even in America’ (Gibbs 3).
This lingering presence of determinism is fascinating to me. To work off a very bare bones definition of determinism, this is a philosophical concept that suggests that all events, including human actions, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. In other words, every event or action is the inevitable result of preceding causes. There are varying notions of determinism within those definitions, but consider this quote from Anton Chigurh from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:
‘I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one is a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning’ (McCarthy 259; Clarke 53).
Naturalism skews towards pessimism. It skews towards determinism. What interests me in this regard is potential responses to this resurgence of naturalism, in particular, responses to those aforementioned topics of pessimism and determinism.
One of my favourite stories happens to be a video-game, Red Dead Redemption 2. I would characterise this as a naturalist story. By virtue of being a video game, the story puts the actions of the game’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan– one of the finest protagonists ever written, I might add– squarely into the hands of the player and it is up to them to choose what kind of man Arthur ultimately ends up becoming. I bring this up because this mode of storytelling emphasises the player’s choice. There is no predetermined outcome in a game with multiple endings. Likewise, the player’s actions have an impact on the surrounding environment and the various NPCs' reaction to Arthur. Following the revelation that Arthur has contracted TB following a rough encounter with a man who owed Arthur’s gang money, Arthur slowly begins to open his eyes to the realities of the inherent violence of his circumstances. One of the most notable encounters is with a nun (as seen below) that is only possible if the player has high honour.
Clarke’s essay continues to be useful here. He argues that ‘postmodernism and naturalism often resist complex psychological exploration of characters; in both, interior views of characters are often thwarted and emotions ambiguous.’ He continues: ‘contemporary literary settings often allow little agency for their characters, and in this sense they duplicate the constricting nature of naturalist settings’ (54). Clarke is discussing literature specifically here, but video games as an answer to this apparent lack of agency is quite interesting. The idea of one man rebelling against his environment rather than capitulating to it is essential in terms of RDR2. This is the very choice that the player is faced with. And it is worth noting that the positive ending comes from the player neglecting stereotypical naturalist tropes. Perhaps the form of the video game uniquely allows this within the naturalist mode of storytelling.
But to return to literature specifically, McCarthy seems to embody this new body of naturalism. Clark, again, is useful here: ‘McCarthy's fiction contains all the features of naturalism…: a preoccupation with determinism and fate; a flat, depthless writing style that focuses on exteriors of characters and rarely provides interior views; constricting and entrapping environments that tend to dwarf and overpower characters; a rejection of the high art/low art division; and an assault on the Enlightenment beliefs of progress, human perfectibility, and the rational subject’ (55). As is the slew of essays I found– Alan’s included– on JSTOR linking McCarthy and new forms of naturalism. This is where Alan’s concept of determinism excusing morally reprehensible behaviour comes in. Lo and behold, he’s only gone and written a whole essay on the subject. Makes my job a lot easier, thanking you. Here, he argues that ‘twenty-first century American naturalism is arguably more committed to determinism than any other manifestation’ (10). He also outlines potential reasons for this development, but let’s just take this as a given and move on to the fun stuff.
The most interesting thing about each author, for me, is that structure runs counter intuitive to each author’s works. Cormac McCarthy’s novels are linear. Meanwhile, Mandel has a tendency to play with linearity. I shall return to this momentarily, but to contextualise this argument, The Glass Hotel opens with the sentence: ‘Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness…’ (3). Station Eleven has multiple different character arcs, spanning across many decades, with any given chapter beginning at any given point, ranging from 20 years before the apocalypse to 20 years after. But it’s never exhausting. Mandel is an expert in voice and focalisation. The reader immediately knows where and when they are situated at any given moment. Sea of Tranquillity is a time travel story, which messes with linearity just by virtue of its genre. Likewise, it is a frame narrative of sorts, structured like so: 1912, 2020, 2203, 2401, 2203, file corruption (same characters as 2020), and then 1918 to follow up with the character in the beginning. Once the frame narrative concludes, there are two further chapters situating the protagonist of the novel across various time periods. Similarly to Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility highlights just how distinguished the various characters’ voices are. Juxtapose the beginning of the first two parts, for instance.
Part One opens:
‘Edwin St. John St. Andrew, eighteen years old, hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic by steamship, eyes narrowed against the wind on the upper deck: he holds the railing with gloved hands, impatient for a glimpse of the unknown, trying to discern something—anything!—beyond sea and sky, but all he sees are shades of endless grey’ (3).
Part Two opens:
‘“I’d like to show you something strange.” The composer, who was famous in an extremely limited, niche kind of way, i.e. in zero danger of being recognised on the street but most people in a couple of smallish artistic subcultures knew his name, was obviously uncomfortable, sweating as he leaned in close to his mic’ (39).
A fairly jarring switch in tone, but it works. Mandel’s mastery as a writer shines through here. However, juxtapose Mandel’s prose and structure to McCarthy’s. The Road has no parts or chapters. Consider differences in grammar. Mandel has an abundance of commas, m-dashes, apostrophes, colons, semi-colons, etc. McCarthy is very light, even avoiding quotation marks.
See this passage, also from No Country for Old Men:
‘Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older…’ (4; original italics).
See how he leaves words unfinished, avoids apostrophes. It works, however. I am a big proponent of the synthesis of form and content. The sparse punctuation, cryptic dialogue of McCarthy synthesises nicely with the rugged content of his novels. Likewise the more structured sentences synthesise fantastically with the structured outline of Mandel’s novels. It is an interesting comparison. But not as interesting as to how each novel’s form intersects with determinism and indeterminism.
Here is where we return to plotting. As established, Mandel’s trademark is non-linearity in her storytelling. Station Eleven and The Road are interesting comparisons. Many sources mention that the former is in constant conversation with the latter, and I’m inclined to agree.
Non-linear story-telling might be more inclined towards determinism. Linear fiction gives the illusion that the future is in flux. Whereas from the first page of Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, we know the dark fate that Vincent will inevitably meet. Here, form seems to negate content and theme, which is fascinating to me. On the surface level, determinism should equal non-linear storytelling and indeterminism should equal linear storytelling. But it is much more nuanced than that. Not knowing the ending doesn’t change the fact that it is determined– remember that aforementioned quote from Chigurh. Likewise, just because we know the ending, it doesn’t mean we can’t choose how we get there. In fact, Mandel takes the reader by surprise. Knowing the ultimate destination of a character means nothing in this case.
But that is also not to say that Mandel’s works are strictly indeterministic. Sea of Tranquility follows Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a time traveller, under the employ of the Time Institute, investigating– to put it simply– a potential breach (or glitch) in the timeline. He is warned repeatedly against changing the timeline. But in the first chance he gets to save somebody’s life, he takes it, changing the timeline slightly. Roberts here is indicative of the purpose of non-linear plotting. He is faced with very real evidence that the simulation hypothesis is real. He is told by the Time Institute that altering the timeline will not change anything on a grand scale. Faced with a crushing notion that he doesn’t have a choice, he makes some anyway, and alters the fates of Edwin and Olive, two other characters in the book.
To illustrate this fact, consider this passage from Sea of Tranquility:
‘“I told her I was going to 1918 as part of the investigation. I was really there to try to save Edwin St. Andrew from dying in an insane asylum.”
“Seriously, Gaspery? Yet another crime?...”
“[...] If you hadn’t changed the timeline… he still would’ve died of the flu, just forty-eight hours later and in an insane asylum. You see how pointless that was?”
“You’re missing the point,” Gaspery said’ (224-5).
Consider now, The Road, which follows a father and son as they journey across a devastated landscape, struggling to survive in a world ravaged by catastrophe. Throughout their journey, the characters confront the harsh realities of survival, including starvation, violence, and the constant threat of death, in a setting characterised by ‘overwhelming environmental determinism’ (Gibbs 13). Meanwhile, the apocalypse plot of Station Eleven is embodied by the phrase: ‘Survival is insufficient.’ This is a marked distinction between them. Here, I recall a comment made by Dr. Ken Rooney in the seminar: “watching the world end is very entertaining” and I’m inclined to agree. It is entertaining. But the messaging is important. The Travelling Symphony also travel across destroyed landscapes, but they do so to go into different towns and perform plays for the inhabitants.
Here, I recall a comment made in an interview about Station Eleven, where Mandel says:
‘We do things like play musical instruments in refugee camps or put on plays in war zones. There was a fashion show in Paris immediately following the second world war. You could call those things frivolous, waste of resources or you could call them essential expressions of what it means to be human. Things that remind us of civilization are the things we value the most’ (5:30).
Here we come to the core differences between Mandel and McCarthy. They offer starkly opposite commentaries on the human condition. Empathy and apathy. Mandel embodies collectivism, rather than McCarthy’s rugged individualism. Mandel embodies hope, McCarthy pessimism. And if I had to choose between these two very different expressions of humankind, I’d choose the kind where there’s even a semblance of hope. Mandel’s literature has been characterised as too broad to fit neatly into a given genre or field, but I believe that all of her novels are linked by a particular aesthetic: shared themes, an unwavering optimism despite crushing circumstances, and a love of art for art’s sake. This will be the beginning point of my dissertation research of her novels.
WORKS CITED
Clarke, Michael Tavel. “The New Naturalism: Cormac McCarthy, Frank Norris, and the Question of Postmodernism.” Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 9, no. 1, 2014, pp. 52–78.
Gibbs, Alan. The Exonerative Deterministic: Uses of Neo-Naturalism in Twenty- First Century American Culture. 2021, cora.ucc.ie/items/c1cc1a98-1797-4c6b-85e5-8012f51f98e0. Accessed 27 Mar. 2024.
Mandel, Emily St. John. Sea of Tranquility. Picador, 2022.
---. Station Eleven. Picador, 2014.
---. The Glass Hotel. Picador, 2020.
McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. Picador, 2005.
---. The Road. Picador, 2006.
IMAGES USED
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All images accessed 25th April 2024.
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