David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth is one of those books you want to read over a glass of whiskey. Or a bottle. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but he sure does annotate everything. Which makes for a cogent and terrifying read about the most important topic to everyone in the world. While the writing gets a little too clever for itself and trips over its own toes on occasion, it is one of those bestsellers that deserves to be.
The first two parts are largely based on his article of the same name for New York magazine, fleshed out with statistics and points (and endnotes) that couldn’t be included in the space of an article. But the real value-added, for my money, is the section “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” which deals with cultural, ethical, philosophical and social considerations. Like literature, for instance. Wallace-Wells sees the uptick in dystopian speculative fiction as a palliative, expressing a “hope that the end of days remains ‘fantasy’” (143-4), or even an escapist pleasure. The various flavors of climate apocalypse on offer provide means of “sublimation and diversion,” of catharsis, or of projecting guilt onto someone other than oneself. But the larger issue, for him, is “climate existentialism” – that is, the extent to which the alteration of the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, and the physical shifts and movements it precipitates, will change every facet of life. Climate fiction (whether literary or cinematic) may disappear entirely because climate change will be “too large and too obvious even for Hollywood” (145). Wallace-Wells explains, in his typically cut-the-bullshit style: “You can tell stories ‘about’ climate change while it still seems a marginal feature of human life, or an overwhelming feature of lives marginal to your own. But at three degrees [Celsius] of warming, or four, hardly anyone will be able to feel insulated from its impacts – or want to watch it on-screen as they watch it out their windows” (145). Indeed, he speculates, climate change “may cease to be a story and become, instead, an all-encompassing setting.” There are several impediments to narrativizing climate change, according to W-W. First . . . OMG – it is sooooooooo depressing! No believable happy ending and uplift. Secondly, conventional novels tend “to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate” (147). Where’s the protagonist? “[C]ollective action is, dramatically, a snore.” Likewise, who’s the bad guy? The petrochemical giants? Well, “transportation and industry make up less than 40 percent of global emissions” (148); so, that’s at least 40% of a bad guy. Who else? The reader? In sum, W-W seems to see narrative as failing under the weight of something so pervasive and . . . well, global. If narrative fails to capture the enormity and diffuseness of climate crisis, what does? I’ve been reading poet Terrance Hayes’ book of essays To Float in the Space Between. In it, he writes of the difference between narrative and lyric poem: “Lyric time is a crisis of narrative – story spiraling out of control. It makes the structure of desire revolutionary – with that word’s dual connotations of subversiveness and circularity” (61). This statement, it seems to me, might point towards lyric poetry, of all the literary arts, as being in a particularly good historical position to deal with climate chaos. Feedback effects are circular and revolutionary – they spiral out of control. And a crisis of narrative is precisely what climate crisis represents – “story spiraling out of control.” Such a crisis could also prompt narrative poetry with circular, implied, elided, fragmented, or eliminated narrative: all have been part of the fairly recent toolkit of poets. So perhaps poetry (or something not unlike it) is the ideal vehicle for experiencing the disruption of our collective narratives (of progress, of safety, of life). Literature pancaked and scrambled and ready for breakfast as soon as you are ready to wake up and smell the (unaffordable) coffee. In any event, clearly a shift in the nature of life that has not occurred in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years will force us to rethink what it means to write – and what it means to be a human being.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |