New Forms of Environmental Writing

Gleaning and Fragmentation

Timothy C. Baker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350271333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Surveying a wide range of contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir by women writers, this book explores our most pressing environmental concerns and shows how these texts find innovative new ways to respond to our environmental crisis.
Arguing for the centrality of individual encounter and fragmentary form in 21st-century literature, as well as themes of attention, care, and loss, Baker highlights the ways that fragmentary texts can be seen as a mode of resistance. These texts provide new ways to consider the role of individual agency and enmeshment in a more-than-human world.
The author proposes a new model of 'gleaning' to encompass ideas of collection, assemblage, and relinquishment and draws on theoretical perspectives such as ecofeminism, new materialism and posthumanism. Examining works by writers including Sara Baume, Ali Smith, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Bhanu Kapil and Kathleen Jamie, Baker provides important new insights into understanding our planetary predicament.

1

‘Edgeless, Sparking, Alone’: Solitude and attention

Introductory constellation

A woman finds herself alone. Perhaps she is staying in her room, watching television and taking medication, ‘watch[ing] summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds’.¹ Maybe she is travelling, disorientated, stuck in a ‘suppurating suburban hotel to where she herself doesn’t know how to get’.² Either way, she is alone: most of her encounters are meaningless, and most of her gaze is occupied by the corners of a room she does not particularly like. Maybe she will, like the protagonists of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel, respectively, find some way out. At the close of Moshfegh’s novel the narrator is stopped from throwing herself in front of a train, and the world comes alive. She enters Central Park and finds that ‘[t]hings were alive. Life buzzed between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock. Honey locusts and ginkgos aflare in yellows’.³ Then again, two pages later, the novel’s last, it is 9/11, and the final, unexpected and slightly queasy, image of the novel is of someone, beautiful and ‘wide awake’, diving off of the North Tower.⁴ At the end of McBride’s novel the narrator grows weary of her own narration, of ‘relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which, if I’m honest, serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the end of a very long sentence’.⁵ She seems to embrace the present moment, although the reader can only guess the resolution if they have figured out the code by which the protagonist marks her assignations in the lists of cities that fill the text’s pages.

In both novels selfhood is marked by absence and disengagement: the protagonists are unrooted in the world, disconnected from others and themselves, nameless and distracted. As Jhumpa Lahiri writes at the end of Whereabouts, her own account of a woman alone: ‘Because when all is said and done the setting doesn’t matter: the space, the walls, the light. […] These words are my only abode, my only foothold.’⁶ The world of the text is the only world that these characters can fully experience. While they are granted happy endings, of a sort, it is clear that these are not endings at all, but simply changes. All three novels, like those discussed below, can be seen as accounts of individual failure to engage or cope with large-scale questions of planetary or societal transformation. These are not, strictly speaking, stories of environmental encounters or climate change. They do, however, highlight a sense of malaise and disappointment that is an important feature of much contemporary fiction, and in particular of contemporary women’s writing.

Deirdre Heddon, writing in the context of Scottish performance studies, has usefully highlighted the importance of disappointment in the context of climate crises and planetary environmental changes. Too often, she suggests, critics have promulgated ‘an over-determined focus on “ecology” as a modality of affective encountering’, which she terms ‘ecospectation’.⁷ A recurrent focus on embeddedness and integration suggests that all an ecologically minded artwork might need to do is to point towards a relation between humans and the environment, and go no further. Ecological awareness and environmental entanglement, in such cases, can be framed simply as a matter of individual assertion. Heddon is instead interested in what happens when the work does not cohere, or a sense of relation is not fully established. While the texts discussed below – Elin Willows’s Inlands, Helen McClory’s Flesh of the Peach, Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond and Abi Andrews’s The Word for Woman Is Wilderness – are more ecologically focused than Moshfegh’s and McBride’s, they similarly highlight ideas of incoherence and failed relationality. These novels can be read in terms of ecospectation or, more generally, affect defined in terms of encounter.

Offering one of the clearest definitions of affect theory to date, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg stipulate that affect can not only be seen in terms of the rhythms and modality of encounter, but

accumulates across both relatedness and interruptions in relatedness […]. Affect marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters or a world’s belonging to a body of encounters but also, in non-belonging, through all those far sadder (de)compositions of mutual in-compossibilities.⁸

If affect can be seen as the body’s ability both to affect and be affected, Seigworth and Gregg also draw attention to the failure of that affect. The tension between belonging and non-belonging, or between expectation and disappointment, is central to each of these novels. Fragmentary form allows for a focus on rupture and removal as much as incorporation and engagement. The experience of ‘the world’s violent and sad intractability’, in Linda Tym’s words, leads to both negative affect and the apparent loss or flatness of affect.⁹ Rather than stories of ‘nature healing’, where a traumatized or despondent subject achieves some form of clarity through their engagement with the natural world, these fragmentary fictions present feelings of both disassociation and overwhelmedness that often characterize responses to the Anthropocene. The feelings of restlessness, despondency, irritation and fatigue displayed in these novels are closely aligned to what Sianne Ngai calls ‘stuplimity’, or the combination of astonishment and boredom that greets the sublime. Stuplimity, she writes, ‘reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality’: rather than being rewarded with a ‘transcendent feeling’, these protagonists are characterized by their ‘phobic strivings “away from” rather than philic strivings “toward”’.¹⁰ Rather than experience opening up into something transcendent, the protagonists are left only with words, and failures of expressiveness.

Each of these novels exhibits what Heather Houser calls ‘discord’ in her discussion of ecosickness in contemporary American fiction. As Houser explains, ecosickness is not limited to discussions of environmental toxicity, but rather is a ‘pervasive dysfunction’: it simultaneously highlights the co-constitution of the human and more-than-human worlds and the dissolution, both conceptual and material, of ‘the body-environment boundary through sickness’.¹¹ Focusing on ecosickness is thus a way to challenge normative, able-bodied and neurotypical accounts of environmental perception. Houser uses the idea of discord to approach the same feelings of irritation discussed by Ngai. Defining discord as ‘a disturbance between immediate response and experience-shaped evaluation’, she suggests that ‘seeing irritates expectations for the “ideal” appearance and functions of bodies and ecosystems, and this discordant feeling in turn positively irritates understanding of these domains’.¹² Discord and irritation thus become a way to rethink the relation between bodies and environments.

Houser’s account of discord, like Heddon’s discussion of disappointment, is rooted in the early work of Timothy Morton and his formulation of ‘ecology without nature’. As Morton has influentially argued, nature writing, and accounts of ‘Nature’ as an identifiable whole, has tended to present ‘nature as an object “over there” – a pristine wilderness beyond all trace of human contact – [and] re-establishes the very separation it seeks to abolish’.¹³ Nature becomes a sublime object that is placed at a remove, outside of human concerns: nature is a monolithic whole that is defined as everything the human is not. Heddon’s account of disappointment, Ngai’s stuplimity and Houser’s discord all seek to combat this Enlightenment account of a nature at once transcendent and distant, drawing attention to the range of affects that come with any environmental encounter. In focusing on negative affects, they challenge ideas that encounters with nature are fundamentally transformative, and instead demonstrate the complexity of such encounters.

The novels discussed in this chapter each draw attention, in different ways, to this range of affects and emotional responses, including, as in Moshfegh’s and McBride’s novels, the apparent absence or flatness of affect.¹⁴ McClory’s and Baume’s texts, especially, can be seen in terms of Morton’s initial definition of ‘dark ecology’, which he defines ‘not [as] a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic-sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a “goth” assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world’.¹⁵ Recognition of complicity is not an abdication of responsibility: instead, these novels take a cautious response to a broken, or breaking, world, highlighting negative emotions and affects, precisely to demonstrate the centrality of continued engagement with that world. In particular, by emphasizing ideas of solitude and disconnection, they allow for new perspectives on questions of care, attention and engagement with a more-than-human world. Solitude, in each of these novels, allows for the protagonists to interrogate cultural assumptions about the natural world, and to find new ways of placing themselves within their environments, or finding, in Sarah Bernstein’s words, ‘dignity in [their] loneliness’.¹⁶ While the novels discussed in this chapter are more linear than the texts discussed in the remaining chapters, they also reveal how an aesthetic of fragmentation can be aligned with both cultural and individual precarity and anxiety.

The homogeneity of the novels’ protagonists – all are young white women, mostly middle-class, often artists – also deserves consideration, particularly through the lens of ecofeminism. Early ecofeminist accounts are often criticized as binaristic and essentialist, and specific to European conceptions of both gender and nature.¹⁷ In Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, for instance, Susan Griffin frames male desire for knowledge as a form of control, such that ‘because of his knowledge, this land is forever changed’.¹⁸ Women and nature, however, are fundamentally aligned, even sisters, such that the earth ‘reveals stories to me, and these stories are revelations and I am transformed. Each time I go to her I am born like this. Her renewal washes over me endlessly.’¹⁹ Men impose while women discover and, as such, only women have the capacity to be transformed. For modern ecofeminists such as Sherilyn MacGregor, Griffin’s work can be summarized as stipulating ‘women’s unique connections to nature and their possession of “natural” moral goodness’.²⁰ Although written with very different aims, Griffin arguably reiterates the dualistic constructions of woman/man and human/nature that later ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood, among many others, seek to challenge.

In calling to break down the dualism of reason and nature, Plumwood seeks to unpick assumptions about the identification of women with nature, the perceived inferiority of both, and the corresponding association of men with reason and culture. Denise Riley has influentially dated this binary separation to the late seventeenth century, where women ‘became an ambulant Nature’, while nature is coded as particularly feminine.²¹ This dualism, Plumwood argues, leads to an ‘alienated account of human identity in which humans are essentially apart’ from nature, resulting in a ‘failure to commit ourselves to the care of the planet’.²² Instead, she proposes a relational model of selfhood where the flourishing of both nature and non-human others is related to human thriving. Freya Mathews similarly argues for a model of flourishing that ‘requires that we be represented within our culture as selves-within-w...