Close Reading the Anthropocene

Helena Feder, Helena Feder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading poetry and prose, images and art, literary and critical theory, science and cultural studies, Close Reading the Anthropocene explores the question of meaning, its importance and immanent potential for loss, in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Both close reading and scientific ecology prioritize slowing down and looking around to apprehend similarities and differences, to recognize and value interconnections. Here "close" suggests careful attention to both the reading subject and read "object." Moving between places, rocks, plants, animals, atmosphere, and eclipses, this interdisciplinary edited collection grounds the complex relations between text and world in the environmental humanities.

The volume's wide-ranging chapters are critical, often polemical, engagements with the question of the Anthropocene and the changing conversation around reading, interpretation, and textuality. They exemplify a range of work from across the globe and will be of great interest to scholars and students of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and literary studies.

1
INHABITING WORDS, INHABITING WORLDS

A case for pragmatist close reading

Amelia Marini

I woke one night to the sound of antlers. The clacking near the window – was it the settling of the house? A mouse in the wall? – grew more distinct as I rose. The sound was unknown; it came from outside and I opened the window to hear it better. Behind the house is a corridor of open land, frequented by deer. Not much was visible, but I could hear hooves in the grass, the rumble of animal breath, and the sound that had brought me out of sleep: antlers striking other antlers. This could only be sparring, the contact tentative rather than violent, like a child with rhythm sticks. It lasted no longer than five minutes. Our lives are full of sound, more than is good for us, and little of it enchants – little of it sings – as do antlers in the night.

This essay is not about the California mule deer, but it cannot do without their song. I worry that we only attend to the song of things or compose our own songs about them once they are gone. Song becomes elegiac – a way of memorializing the things we have lost. As it is, we have lost a great deal, and stand to lose more. The title of this volume bears reference to this period of loss, the Anthropocene, a controversial but still widely used name for the era of human-caused catastrophe in which we find ourselves. However, as Donna Haraway cautions in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, the names we bestow upon this moment exert influence on the way we think about what we have done, what we can do, and who, beyond the human, might be involved. “Anthropocene,” Haraway dissents, promotes a framework for the future – for solutions and action – that is not different in essence from the limited thinking that got us into the “trouble.” Names are stories, she suggests, and the story that comes with Anthropocene does not inspire the kinds of the new, expansive, and inclusive narratives that we need in order to move beyond the partial tools that can no longer serve us (47). Nor does it, with its ties to capitalism, help us to return to the narratives of Indigenous peoples and cultures: those native to this land whose stories and songs about the earth offer richer frameworks for relational living than those offered by the Anthropocene.

This essay is based upon the premise that climate wisdom might indeed be a matter of learning to inhabit words and the worlds we compose with them. Within the Anthropocene, we’ve forgotten that songs and stories, in addition to eulogizing, have long been used to call forms of life into being. “Wise men,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things” (23). When so much of the visible world seems to be rotting away – forests, sea ice, vast populations of animals – our rotting words, words that do not convince, describe, or enchant, may seem of secondary, rather than primary, concern. We forget that seeing and saying are looped processes: we do not only say what we see, we also tend to see the concepts we’ve learned to say. In the pages that follow, I will argue that the study of literature, particularly through the skill of close reading, offers a practice of creative attentiveness instrumental to the creation of livable futures on a “damaged planet” (Tsing M2). Close reading, as I will discuss, is more than a practice of decoding and demystifying literary ambiguities. Rather, it teaches us to better understand the connection between seeing and saying and presents an opportunity to inhabit texts in individual and personally resonant ways that require intersubjective imagining and relational thinking: the very skills that we must learn in order to live well upon this planet. In particular, this essay develops the concept of a “pragmatist” close reading – one inspired by the writings of the American philosopher, William James – as an essential tool for breaking down the habits of language and of thought that prevent us from realizing better narratives, and more livable futures.

My thoughts on the language of climate and the climate of language came into focus in the winter of 2018, with a composition course I taught at California Polytechnic State University called “The Rhetoric of Climate Change.” Up to this point, I would not have called myself a nature lover and no one could have described me as any kind of outdoorswoman. However, the previous summer and fall I had found myself, for the first time, neck deep in articles, essays, and books about climate devastation. I read with appetite and agony. Strangely, a shift occurred. My body began to delight in sights and sounds I had previously taken for granted: the green smell of a tomato plant, the vibrational hovering of a territorial hummingbird, and the thickness of new spring growth on an oak tree. I sat for hours outside, examining the leaves of sage plants. In short, I began to see the natural world in my neighborhood with new vividness. The experience made me wonder if I could offer similar sensory awakenings to my students, or to other people who, like me, felt themselves on the periphery of the natural world. Could I induce sight, connection, and pleasure through the study of climate language? With this in mind, I planned the course.

I approached our first meeting with candor. I’m not an environmental scientist; I’m a scholar of literature and language. The seminar, designed so that I could teach responsibly, would attend to the ways that language shapes our understanding of and response to global climate crisis. Over that academic quarter, we explored the rhetoric of climate crisis as it is used by economists, environmental and political scientists, activists, spokespersons for industries such as agriculture and tech, liberal and conservative politicians, Indigenous leaders and thinkers, and literary writers. On the whole, the course was well-received by my students who engaged the material with generosity and insight.

However, one afternoon right before I went in to teach, a colleague stopped by my office. He asked how the class was going, and we talked for a few minutes before he sighed and said something along the lines of, “Yes, with everything one reads about climate change denial and global warming, it makes studying and teaching literature feel pretty useless.” I’m sure I must have smiled and shrugged, letting the remark pass, but I thought about it for several days afterwards. I understood that the gesture was intended to be sympathetic, but the idea rankled. Especially on a warming planet, I did not feel that studying literature was a useless undertaking … but it was difficult to say why. Why study literature in an age of mass-extinction? Why study literature as coral reefs bleach, glaciers recede, and global emissions continue to increase? These are not new questions. They are simply the latest iteration of charges often leveled against the humanities’ relevance. The difference is the implication that it is a moral failing to choose to study literature or philosophy, instead of merely an economic one. And, while the economic myth that English majors are unemployable needs no further debunking, it seems to me that we could spend a bit more time thinking through how the planet might actually benefit from having more students of literature, more students of story and song.

In fact, it may be very useful to begin to conceive of climate change denial as primarily a problem for the humanities. One of the more interesting findings of the climate course was that denial is not a problem of information. Among the first things the class read were numerous studies that show that there is almost no correlation between increased information about climate change and increased belief in its reality. Levels of climate change denial are not reduced by simply making climate data more widely available, or by creating more opportunities for education. Nor are rates of denial altered by more targeted “branding.” Studies suggest that more persuasive messaging aimed at climate deniers – for example, studies that stress the need to move to renewable energy sources in order to increase national security, or to become more self-reliant – also fails to mitigate denial. Ultimately, the reason for this comes down to the increasing political polarization of the last 20 years. One study even suggests that ideological allegiance to partisan politics is currently so powerful that it prevails over all other factors. Individuals will vote the party line despite any and all evidence to the contrary, even if they find that evidence personally concerning or compelling (Dunlap 16).

Here, however, an interesting exception emerges. Despite the obstacle to climate action posed by party loyalty, one factor seems to demonstrate a modest ability to transform denial into conviction: personal experience of environmental changes. Rather than accepting information presented by others, farmers who watch their growing seasons shift well beyond the normal range, firemen who have felt the intensity of the last years’ fires out west, divers and fishermen who can tell that our aquatic ecosystems are not well, begin to profess a greater belief that what we’re experiencing is more than climate variability. Of course, to speak of a “personal experience” of climate change is to misunderstand the scale at which climate is measured. The environmental events that we experience on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis are weather events, not climate events. However, when sufficient data accrues to suggest that extreme weather seems to be becoming a normal, frequent occurrence, scientists can begin to measure it – and make predictions – within the greater context of global climate. And, on our end, the personal experience of change, of these yearly fires, floods, and droughts, begins to make us wonder, as human civilizations have always wondered in the face of great loss, if we haven’t done something wrong.

In her memoir, Thus Spoke the Plant, the plant biologist Monica Gagliano blames “faulty thinking” that must be revised in order to allay the destruction (101). In particular, she faults the kind of thinking that, within the professional sciences, has maintained a mechanistic and anthropocentric perspective of the nonhuman world that originates in Aristotelian classification. “By defining insensitivity as the key criterion to differentiate plants from animals,” she writes, “… the Aristotelian story had, in effect, transformed plants into objects – a spurious idea that still sanctions the human right to use (and abuse) plants and that exempts us from any sense of the responsibility or respect toward them as living beings” (105). Though Gagliano’s critique is primarily aimed at scientific institutions and the narrow forms of knowing that constitute their methods, it’s easy to see objectification reflected within our culture at large, especially as it shapes American consumer practices. As Bill McKibben suggests in the opening of his book-length argument against economic growth, “For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch…. It is no wonder and no accident that they dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities” (1). As McKibben argues, our cultural devotion to measuring individual success in terms of accruing ownership and wealth – the belief that we are only worth what we can buy – is not only devastating for our planet which is plundered to produce all those things and becomes a wasteland of all we cast off, but also leads to despair. Materially, Americans have more than they’ve ever had before, and have never reported greater levels of anxiety and unhappiness (38).

If we’re to take Gagliano’s critique seriously, it becomes clear that we will need new methods for thinking through the crisis that confront us, methods that decenter “profit” and “progress” from our narratives and refuse to reduce the living world to a machine or a set of “resources.” As a corrective to unimaginative and objectivistic thinking, the practice of literary studies can offer a great deal. The task of literature, to return to Emerson’s Nature, is to fasten language to life, and life to language. One model of this might look like the project undertaken by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris called The Lost Words, a beautifully illustrated book of acrostic “counter-spells” comprised of nature words that have been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. The OJD, an abridged children’s dictionary facing pressure to add more technologically relevant words such as “broadband” and “chatroom,” made room for these additions by dropping other presumably less relevant words, a disproportionate number of which pertain to the natural world like “kingfisher” and “fern.” MacFarlane and Morris’s project attempts to save these words, and the creatures they name, from erasure. One response to the project expresses the urgency of the work particularly well:

If we are to imagine the complex solutions that our continued existence on Earth demands, we cannot conceive of the environment as a green-brown blur, of nebulous and inarticulable importance…. Perhaps, in the face of leaders who respond to environmental catastrophe by gutting environmental protections, a vocabulary of enchantment and love, as opposed to anger and fear, is something to heed. A vocabulary that helps us identify, with clarity and spark and wonder, what we hold dear and what we thus need to fight for.

(Sharma)

A related project is undertaken by Counter-Desecrations: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, a collaborative collection of reimagined definitions that help us to “question, break-open, and reorganize thinking” (12). Both projects suggest that it’s difficult to save something we do not know intimately, and it’s difficult to know a thing intimately without naming it, perhaps over and over, in millions of different ways. Each of these names helps us to see the world as the complex, infinitely faceted entity that it is. A favorite passage from William James’s Pragmatism lists the varying names of a certain constellation: “Charles’s Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper. None of the names will be false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable” (597). James calls our new names for old things “additions” and suggests that to add to the world in this way is a primary function of the human being. “The great question is,” James suggests, “does [the world], with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy?” (598). The living, agential world, as it exists in reciprocity with human beings, requires a living, hence literary, language: a language capable of interpretation, flexibility, openness, and change.

Ours, after all, is not the only discipline to name things. Taxonomy depends upon the classification of organisms into named branches. But the study of literature is the only discipline in which the mystery and ambiguity of naming a thing is as celebrated a function of language as is elucidation or demarcation. In literature, things are named in order that we might know the truth of their mystery more deeply. If literary language can be said to illuminate, it does so only in a flickering half-light. Recall the butterfly in the preface to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. Rather than “impaling” its subject “with an iron rod, or rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly – thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude” literary language depends upon “a far more subtle process” (352), one that involves the reader in the complex ambiguities of meaning-making.

This “involvement” in ambiguity is the antidote that literary studies offers to a world made sick by consumer practices. Literary experiences are differentiated from the act of reading for information or for entertainment in that they are not situations of passive consumption. So often the act of reading amounts only to a polite and complacent “keeping up with culture” – even if the works themselves are extraordinary (Lorentzen). We finish a work, and it moves through us, leaving no trace. Literary experiences, on the other hand, mark us. They are sites of relationship-building in which we use language to entangle ourselves more deeply in the shared human labor of connection and questioning, of thinking and expression. Works of writing become literary when they are treated, actively, as literature. This requires the reader to meet the text with energy and ideas – to engage it – in order to participate in the meaning of the text. Sometimes literary encounters are pleasurable, other times not; we know that the act of struggling or wrestling with a challenging text often provides more illumination than those instances when we feel ourselves entirely at home in the work. However, whether or not she enjoys reading a work, the reader bears some responsibility for the literary meaning that emerges from a text; she is implicated in it. As science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin writes,

Science describes accurately from outside; poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates; poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the language of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless ‘information’ that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

(Tsing M16)

To return to the finding of my class, our encounters with information – with external material, data, “the text” – are not sufficient to prompt the kinds of ...