Thinking back to our time at the Orton Museum, I remember what Dale said near the end of our tour: “We’re in the Holocene right now, as far as I’m concerned. I just don’t think that we’re so important that we’re deserving of having a geologic epoch named after ourselves.” Among all the ironies of the Anthropocene this is probably the one that sticks out most to me. The idea that we, a literal blip when scaled to Earth history, assert that we must be included in stratigraphic periodization (even if true) is remarkably self-important. For all the ways in which we might understand that climate change can’t be reversed and we are responsible for our own impending extinction, the most important thing for us not our attitudes toward the planet, but our attitudes to ourselves–we are still the agents, we are significant regardless of time scale.

I think what makes Virginia Woolf’s Orlando “worth [re-] reading” (Menely and Oak Taylor, 20) is the way the book is the way it is able to really push how a fictional biography can be imagined–the book is remarkably able to act as a novel, biography and an imagined register of deep human time.

It’s still worth noting that Woolf doesn’t consider how anthropocenic her view of the relationship between nature to human is. Early on, the position of human ownership of nature is established: “The heath was theirs and the forest; the pheasant and the deer, the fox, the badger, and the butterfly” (Woolf, 19). And much like many modernist novels, nature acts as a space of negotiation for human interiority and grounding point for security (i.e. the oak tree).

But Woolf, even if not entirely aware/concerned of certain dynamics that shape climate change, still manages to do something that’s essential when informing our notions of the current age: Woolf reimagines what is worth documenting and re/unimagines the event. Things that are normally defining events that shape one’s identity, such as the birth of her child or her engagement to Shel, literally occupy single sentences in the book; events that normally shape entire narratives get registered as “blips” in the narrative of Orlando’s life.

For Orlando, more attention is paid to things like “the damp” (Woolf, 227), something that lingers long after the initial rain that comes; the suggestion that what really becomes worth documenting is what unfolds after what is conventionally thought of as “the event.” This is where I think, at least in part, it becomes easy to re-metabolize Orlando as a work of climatic modernist literature: the living histories of events are often felt most in the ways they absolutely define/condition everyday life in the aftermath: the moment where Orlando becomes a woman becomes less significant than all the ways it reconfigures her life/identity.

In this way, I think reading Orlando reminded me that even though the moment humans discover that fossil fuels is important, it’s not as important than the ways in which that discovery reshapes nature, agency and power. In fact, I think at least somewhat, the discovery of fossil fuels is important because it shaped those afterlives. It’s not so much the discovery of oil that we need to alter our attitudes toward–it’s the way we choose to engage with the realities that unfolded from that event that’s important. The Anthropocene isn’t merely a geological epoch. It’s the “damp” from a living history of human extraction and environmental degradation, ever-present and formative to shaping our lives whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Til next time,

Paul

After these first couple weeks, my mind hasn’t been able to resist making connections to last spring’s material. Many of the urgent questions from last semester’s class on climate literature resurface in Tobias Menely and Jessie Oak Taylor’s Reading Anthropocene. We spent a lot of our time trying to process how to “successfully” write Anthropocenic literature/communicate the necessity to confront climate change: how do you get people to accept irreconcilable change/damage? How do you assign responsibility for that damage? Can the novel, a medium historically rooted in meditations of human interiority, possibly address a period where humans have begun to lose their agency? How do you “write” the Anthropocene?

As suggested by Menely and Oak Taylor, critical Anthropocenic work can be done simply by revisiting the way we read already established literature: “reading metabolizes the remnants of absent life into new forms” (Menely and Oak Taylor, 20). I feel like I really buy into this idea… while simultaneously feeling like it doesn’t lend much more clarity than the time I spent wrestling with Sunlight Pilgrims, the Great Derangement, or the Sixth Extinction (works that actively acknowledge and attempt to either imagine or address the consequences of the Anthropocene) in the spring. I’m not necessarily daunted by this uncertainty (I honestly don’t know that literature has the capacity to “reign in” nature like it does in describing modernity); Menely and Oak Taylor actually make it clear that they are wholly unconcerned with producing a “single method or practice” (14).

But in a way I feel like this article generated a new sense of hope for literary engagement with the Anthropocene. As interesting and potentially useful as the “cli-fi” that we read last spring might have been, time and again it felt like it was so hard to separate the novel from its modern modes of expression; the possibility of imagining a new artistic “climate period” felt impossible. Now I feel like perhaps that separation isn’t entirely necessary (or even productive)–retrospective critical analysis might excavate new understandings from writers who weren’t even immediately concerned/aware of the emerging geological epoch. Menely and Oak Taylor elucidate that the capacity for literature to constructively engage with the Anthropocene hasn’t been lost; re-configuring our conventions and revisiting what’s already been written has the potential to re-purpose the conditions of the past to inform both our current and future imaginaries.

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Something I think I need to be mindful of is knowing what information makes the Anthropocene more legible? Menely and Oak Taylor remind us that “we can’t read everything” (20). I’m interested to see how my ability to read the Anthropocene improves not only as we cover texts in this course, but as I continually engage with material from other academic disciplines (economics, black studies, reading imperialism)–what happens when all these things converge (because I know they definitely do) and how does that process further inform the history and unfolding of the Anthropocene?

Til next time,

Paul