Abstract
Since 2017, Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series (edited by Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge) has published no fewer than 18 titles on topics ranging from ‘nerd ecology’ and ‘ecospectrality’ to climate scepticism and the cultural history of fuel. This is one of the leading edges of ecocriticism, which has transformed itself in recent years from a neo-Romantic defence of nature writing to a more sophisticated, self-aware and increasingly materialist mode of critical discourse. Sometimes adventurously inter-disciplinary, ecocriticism remains primarily a mode of literary-critical analysis, but the scope of its attention to various kinds of literary texts and literary histories has expanded well beyond canonical figures such as Wordsworth and Thoreau. A pronounced focus on the cultural implications of climate crisis has also led to a wide range of productive engagements with research in the sciences, social sciences and philosophy.
Astrid Bracke’s and Matthew Griffiths’s new books in the series are each concerned to explore the ways in which literary texts might contribute to our ability to imagine and comprehend the implications of climate crisis, while also acknowledging the limits of representation and human understanding. Bracke’s focus is upon 21st-century British novels, and her methodology synthesises elements of ecocriticism and narratology, examining four key narratives concerning climate crisis in a dozen selected texts: tales of environmental collapse, versions of pastoral, stories of urban nature and accounts of polar expeditions. Her core argument is simple, if perhaps a bit vague: 21st-century British novels both reflect a general ‘cultural awareness’ of climate crisis and also seek to ‘renegotiate the stories we tell about it’ (p. 135). At base, this amounts to little more than a restatement of the fundamental dialectic of tradition and innovation that informs all literary production. However, Bracke’s local discussions of her four key narratives are typically more detailed and suggestive. For instance, she makes a very useful distinction between ‘apocalyptic narratives’ and narratives of ‘environmental collapse’ (p. 24) and goes on to show that the latter tend to feature a metafictional commentary on the erosion of language in contexts of climate crisis (p. 42). There is also a fascinating analysis of the thematic and symbolic significance of food in urban novels, where Bracke argues persuasively that phenomena such as farmers’ markets mediate the human characters’ relationship to (or alienation from) the natural world in ways that are highly dependent on class position and socioeconomic status (p. 96). Even the rather over-familiar topic of pastoral is enlivened by a discussion of ‘pastoral traces’ (p. 69), which undermine the distinctions between city and country, retreat and return; and in her chapter on polar narratives, Bracke astutely notes the unexpected commonalities that persist between imperialist projects of conquest and contemporary quests in search of true wilderness.
One of the more insistent critical claims made by Bracke is that ecocriticism cannot confine its attention to ‘nature writing’ or even to writing that explicitly concerns itself with climate crisis. The scale and implications of anthropogenic climate change make any such limitation at best short-sighted and at worst a mode of reading that is (unwittingly) complicit with climate denial. Matthew Griffiths makes a similar point when he advocates a ‘pervasive and connective’ critical practice that is capable of identifying the effects and consequences of climate change in texts that appear to be about other topics and concerns altogether (pp. 15–16). His case in point is modernist poetry, conceived very broadly as formally innovative poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries. Modernist aesthetics, Griffiths argues, is particularly well-suited to the task of articulating the ‘complexities and nuances with which climate change confronts us’ because its formal experimentalism can convey the radically ‘entangled’ relationships between natural and cultural agencies (p. 10). Moreover, because of its aesthetic self-consciousness, modernist poetry calls the reader’s attention to the limits of representation, acknowledging the impossibility of containing or wholly comprehending climate change and foregrounding the ‘discrepancy between nature as conceived and as phenomena’ (p. 32). These core arguments are illustrated and worked out in some keenly-perceptive close readings of canonical and lesser-known modernist texts, including T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), David Jones’s The Anathémata (1952) and Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966). Griffiths’s arguments concerning the value of modernist aesthetics to a poetics of climate change seem to me convincing, though they are sometimes premised upon a rather stark binary opposition between ‘innovative’ modernist writing and ‘nostalgic’ Romantic traditions. There is also a slight tendency in his analyses to flatten out the significant differences between the various modernist texts he considers in order to identify a cluster of shared characteristics and formal resources.
Where Bracke seeks to expand the critical resources of ecocriticism by recourse to narratological concepts, Griffiths’s methodology is closely aligned with materialist ecocriticism and Latour’s actor–network theory. Bracke writes of ‘climate crisis’, whereas Griffiths is concerned with ‘climate change’; though both largely eschew the currently fashionable term ‘Anthropocene’. Bracke’s focus is upon contemporary fiction, whereas Griffiths makes a case for a re-reading of modernist poetry. What both books share, however, is a conviction that literary texts can play an important role in helping us to rethink our relationships to the nonhuman world and thereby recognise the extent of our implication in climate processes that exceed our capacity to control or comprehend them.
