It’s rare for me to feel so sympathetic for a book that I believe is profoundly wrong. Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture has, as its inspiration, a question I have long mulled over myself. In an age of climate change, when the clear and terrifying consequences of future environmental collapse—let alone the consequences that are already here—are barrelling towards us like a starving polar bear hunting the last remaining seal, then why, oh why, is climate change ignored by so many novels and so many films? Granted, there’s no phenomenon in existence that would take centre stage of every narrative, but as a science communicator and an author of climate fiction, the sheer massive indifference to climate in much of contemporary fiction, whatever the medium, is a better example of handwavium than anything that’s ever come out of Star Trek.
That sympathy is experienced as well as observed. When I was shopping round my cli-fi novel The Stone Wētā, one publisher, who admittedly is more on the literary than genre side of things, commented that while they thought it was very well written, they didn’t think people would read stories about climate. The reasoning behind the rejection upset me a lot more than the rejection itself: I’d rather be rejected for bad writing than be rejected because work about climate isn’t worth publishing. There are times one wants to reach through a screen and shake a person, screeching Wake the fuck up! at the top of one’s lungs.
In fairness, The Anthropocene Unconscious is not a response to this gaping absence in culture. Instead, it’s a response to Amitav Ghosh’s response to this gaping absence in culture. Ghosh suggests in The Great Derangement (2016, quoted by Bould) that the people of the future, staggering under the consequences of climate change, will look back on the creative industries of today and “conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight.” Bread and circuses, in other words, to take attention away from rising sea levels and the increasing effects of hurricanes.
Bould’s response to this—and I say this with the greatest of respect and an enormous deal of sympathy—is woefully optimistic at best. (The initial adjective in that sentence was “cracked,” but I wondered if that would be unkind. Let’s stick with “optimistic,” shall we?) The part of it I can agree with, wholeheartedly, is that “significant portions of the ‘science,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘science fiction’ shelves, not to mention all that gussied-up ‘climate fiction’ too fancypants to consider itself sf” absolutely do talk about climate, and they do so consistently. Where his argument goes off the rails for me is the somewhat homeopathic idea that the rest of the “art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness.” Bould argues that “auguries abound” and that Ghosh’s future peoples, perceiving a monumental absence, just “have really poor reading skills.”
The implication being, of course, that so do the rest of us.
Poor reading skills aside, I like to think that I can drag my blighted literacy into the shining light of hard evidence, should it be presented to me, but Bould doesn’t much do that. In fairness, he can’t. Literary criticism doesn’t fit neatly into the hard evidence basket. Bould flat-out admits this, saying that’s “the dice you roll when you hazard criticism: you make judgements for which you can only offer support, never proof” and that his claims may seem “tenuous or elliptical.” Indeed, they do so seem.
I don’t deny that he’s having a lot of fun making them. It’s always good to read academic work that makes no bones about the author having an opinion, and when Bould doesn’t like something he comes right out and says it, often in amusingly bitchy ways. Writing about the Sharknado series, he claims of one character’s transformation into a cyborg that it’s a “brilliant solution” to the inability of the actress to “play anyone even remotely resembling a human being,” while the SyFy channel (and what a dreadful name that is) is a deliberate producer of “rubbish.” There are a few swerves into academic unreadability, but these are rather more limited than they could be. In general the text is lively and entertaining, and part of what makes it so is the use of an extremely broad variety of sources. These range from franchises such as Sharknado and Fast and Furious to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “six-volume, four-thousand-page autobiographical novel My Struggle.” (I think I’d rather watch Sharknado, thanks.)
Because Bould is looking at contemporary creative culture, both popular and otherwise, this gives a bit of a Jackson Pollock effect to the text. Books and films are tossed at the wall, whether they’re art house or rubbish (or both), whether they’re interminable autobiographical slogs or Mansfield Park or Pacific Rim or The God of Small Things. I happen to love the effect of this. I like the broad approach, and I like that the texts aren’t ring-fenced by obscurity or some objective categorisation of worth. Yes, Sharknado is drivel. Go tell it to someone who hasn’t written academically on B-grade horror films. Drivel or not, if someone finds it entertaining or informative to analyse, then I will be the last person to tell them not to.
However, because I enjoy analysing rubbish texts, and because I have a certain facility of language myself (poor reading skills aside), and because I’ve spent a lot of time in grad school, I can tell you that—given ten minutes and, most helpfully, some alcohol—I can convincingly argue about the theme or context of any old thing. Go on, ask me about how horror films stuffed with mutant bears are really explorations of the challenges of wildlife management and the increasingly transgressive boundaries between human and nonhuman organisms in the Anthropocene, with a side of what it means for urban ecology. What I offer in reply may be unrepentant bullshit, but I can make it sound halfway convincing if I want to.
When I read The Anthropocene Unconscious, I’m reading a book written by someone who can also make it sound convincing if he wants to. Not very convincing, but then again I read this sober. Bould’s argument is that those with sufficient reading skills can interpret pretty much any contemporary text as being in some way related to climate change, even those texts written by people who specifically say that they aren’t writing fiction about climate change. According to Bould in the opening paragraphs of chapter 3, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Paul Kingsnorth are all wrong about their own fiction and display “a quite stunning literal-mindedness” in deciding that they aren’t writing about climate change.
This from the author who claims that the differing positions of the don’t-try-this-at-home warning in the credits of Fast and Furious films “concede the gulf between the material and the virtual,” and that the “visibility of the virtual—audiences cannot help but see the implausible irreality of the evermore elaborate action sequences—implies a move away from the excesses of carbon culture.” Fast and Furious films, if you did not know, “spew from the Anthropocene unconscious.”
Yeah.
(Would you like me to tell you about how films about mutant bears in Maine can be interpreted as commenting critically, if presciently, upon the ambiguous human response to increasing cougar populations in Colorado? Because I can.)
Zombie films? Connected to climate change. The 2015 film Évolution, about young boys being abducted in order to aid the reproduction of another sentient species? Connected to climate change. (Because when young Nicolas escapes to a major city, he floats past a port refinery, which apparently returns him to “carbon culture” and an argument that some things cannot continue to reproduce in exploitative ways, and so on, and so on.) Now, the thing is that some of these links genuinely are credible. But others …
How can you separate credible links from bullshit ones? If contemporary texts reflect climate change in some capacity, no matter how tenuous or elliptical that reflection may be, is it because those connections exist in a meaningful manner, or is it because you can get someone like Bould (someone like me) to ferret them out? I’m quite sure that yes, actually, I can connect any text to climate change if I really want to.
Let’s try it. I’m sitting on my bed as I type this, bookshelves in front of me. I look up: the first book I see is The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory (2006). For those of you who haven’t read it, this is a historical fiction set in the time of Henry VIII and focusing on wives four and five, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, with a third storyline focusing on Henry’s former sister-in-law, Jane Boleyn. How does this reflect our collective subconscious connection to climate, spewing up from the Anthropocene as it is? Easy.
Henry’s well-documented desire for sons leads him to treat his wives as consumerist items, to be exploited and replaced as necessary. Despite a valuable focus on recycling, as items belonging to previous wives are repurposed to serve their replacements, this approach to marriage reflects the capitalist desire for growth at any cost. While Anne of Cleves is able to exit this continued cycle of exploitation, this is no true escape, as it is done with the active approval of those who would see this oppressive cycle continue under more favourable conditions. A more representative ending is that of Howard and Boleyn, who are both beheaded, symbolising the inescapably deadly end of an unrestricted focus on growth. Their blood—belonging to marginalised bodies, no less—is an early prefiguring of what some call the Necrocene, the age of death in progress, encompassing as it does the climate-induced Sixth Extinction that sees the end of bloodlines, both real and imagined.
I’d have to work for SyFy to produce worse rubbish than this.
If bad-faith arguments can link any modern text to climate, then the sum of those linkages is suspect. Not only are they not proof, they don’t even really provide meaningful support. The existence of bad-faith arguments, of course, doesn’t preclude the existence of good-faith and valid arguments, but Bould doesn’t produce enough of these to give his thesis weight, in my opinion.
What he also doesn’t do—and this is why I find the book so sympathetic, even as I disagree with it—is address just why this argument is so important to him. Ascribing motive to an author is always an ambiguous process, one that’s rarely valuable, but it’s not hard to come up with one here. Whether it’s valid or not I don’t know, but before me are two possibilities. The first is that artists everywhere are talking about climate, whether they know it or not. The second is that Bould wishes that artists everywhere were talking about climate, because the massive and continued indifference to the subject is fucking terrifying, and he’s found a way to make himself believe it, because that way hope lies. Even if it’s just a little hope. Even if it’s in four-thousand-page autobiographical novels. Even if it’s in Sharknado.
Are such discussions about climate ubiquitous in contemporary fiction, or are they—frighteningly—often not there at all? Unfortunately, I know which possibility I find the most credible.