Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism Hannah Klaubert 1 Introduction During the walking tour of Suffolk which he later memorialised in The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald came across a curious place called Orford Ness, a shingle spit off the coast of Aldeburgh. The spit, a narrow patch of land that formed and continues to form and re-form as shingle accumulates in front of the former coastline, was used as an airfield by the Royal Air Force from 1915 onwards and later hosted the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (1953-1971). A variety of technologies around radar systems and (nuclear) weapons deployment were tested on the spit (Davis 2022: 25). Around the time of Sebald’s visit in the early 1990s, it was sold to the National Trust and has since become an important natural and cultural heritage site. Sebald describes the landscape, to which he prescribes an “extraterritorial quality” (2020: 233), as follows: Far behind me to the west, scarcely to be discerned, were the gentle slopes of the uninhabited land; to the north and south, in Flashes of silver, gleamed the muddy bed of a dead arm of the river, through which now, at low tide, only a meagre trickle ran; and ahead lay nothing but destruction. (ibid.: 235) Indeed, the remains of the military buildings form the most prominent feature of the Ness: From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with the stones, in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. (ibid.: 235f.) Sebald here captures the enmeshment of different temporalities - the geological, the prehistoric, the Cold War and its Great Acceleration - and of cultural and natural environments (“concrete shells, shored up with the stones”) at the Ness. The site, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 with its fragmentary nature and troubled nuclear and military history, invites a narrative treatment that evokes large timespans of almost mythical proportions and traces of anthropogenic and natural change inscribed into the landscape. Decades later, the site continues to fascinate. The “controlled ruination” of the military structures, as the National Trust calls it (Davis 2022: 21), poses questions about how to engage with the difficult heritage of twentieth-century warfare - and about the role of nature in such an endeavour. Caitlin DeSilvey describes the Ness as “held in an implausible tension” where the “ragged seam between nature and culture unravels and, finally, dissolves” (2014: 83). Around 2012, author Robert Macfarlane was asked to contribute a libretto for a piece called Untrue Island, to be performed on Orford Ness. The libretto formed the basis for his later publication Ness, in cooperation with artist Stanley Donwood who produced ink drawings to accompany the prose poem. Ness is part myth and part suspenseful adventure story. It makes, I suggest in the following, use of narrative’s capacity to capture environmental processes and events that are hard to grasp in human everyday experience while straddling questions about nuclear culture and nuclear politics. It therefore lends itself to exploring two emergent subfields in literary and cultural studies: econarratology and the nuclear humanities. 2 Narrating Ness: Econarratology meets (Post-)Nuclear Environments My explorations into the representations of Orford Ness are shaped by two (re)emerging themes in literary and cultural criticism, namely: 1) methodologi‐ cally, a renewed interest in form not only as an ordering element in cultural representation but as a generative force in various forms of discourse, and more specifically, the uses of narrative form in representing the troubled ecological realities of what many have come to call the Anthropocene; and 2) thematically, a growing consideration of the material and infrastructural legacies of the Cold War nuclear conflict and nuclear technologies more broadly. As I have suggested elsewhere, these two strands of research can be fruitfully brought together - not least because the politics of ‘giving shape’ or form are particularly prevalent in the representation of phenomena which remain imperceptible or hard to grasp due to their material makeup and/ or due to their enmeshment with cultural forms of invisibility and secrecy, as often happens to be the case in the nuclear realm (Klaubert 2021). Additionally, questions of scale, temporality, and non-human agency animate both recent investigations into nuclear cultures and ecocritical interventions interested in the politics of narrative and literary form. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 272 Hannah Klaubert The exploration of narrative form has begun to take centre stage in ecocritical scholarship in the last few years. In Extraction Ecologies, for instance, Elizabeth C. Miller positions literary forms and genres as “important objects of environ‐ mental analysis” since they can be read as “epistemological structures that embed our most fundamental conceptual formations” (2021: 3). Taking an even broader view, Marco Caracciolo, in Narrating the Mesh, declares that “through formal strategies, narrative offers a wealth of imaginative resources to embrace the conceptual and affective trouble that defines our Anthropocene times” (2021: 26). Strongly informed by narratological scholarship, Erin James’ Narrative in the Anthropocene proposes that the examination of narrative forms adds to environmental discourses in three different ways; it helps us understand “what narrative resources tend to lend themselves to particular ideologies”, how “narrative is changing to accommodate or respond to new material, social, and political realities”, and “what work narratives do to readers and the world in which they read” and, consequently, how they can be mobilised for a more just and sustainable future (2022: 25). These scholars’ interventions, among many others, offer a robust argumentative basis for understanding the important roles that narrative form plays in humans’ interaction with and understanding of the material world around us. Econarratologist interventions of recent years can be understood somewhat in opposition to earlier ecocritical proposals by so-called material ecocritics. Serpil Oppermann, for instance, inspired by new materialist scholars like Karen Barad, proposes that “matter is not only lively, agentic and generative, as it is theorized in the new materialist paradigm […], but also densely storied” (Op‐ permann 2018: 411). Matter itself here becomes a “site of narrativity” embodying stories not only “in the minds of human agents” but also the “very structure of its own self-constructive forces” (ibid.). In such an understanding of narrative agency as distributed among all types of human and non-human actants, reading and narrating become undiscernible from other modes of interpretation or expression, and are positioned as activities similarly distributed among all kinds of actants, be they human, animal, bacterial, fungal, or geologic. Econarratologists, in contrast, warn of a conflation of these different terms and activities and stress the “inherently anthropogenic nature of narrative as a rhetorical mode” ( James 2022: 21). Nonetheless, as Caracciolo emphasises, the questions raised by Oppermann and others can help econarratologists explore “the strategies through which stories can channel materiality” (2021: 17) and the “pathways through which narrative can render, in formal terms, the complexity of our Anthropocene moment” (2021: 18). Narrative and formal analysis can nuance human ways of meaning-making and push for the continued relevance 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 273 of literature and literary readings in environmental debates. By stressing the narrative dimension of environmental discourses and our ways of relating to non-human processes, things, and timescales, econarratologists argue for the continued relevance of literary modes of reading and expression not despite but because of the fact that these are exclusively human activities. The second context in which this contribution is set is the slow consolidation of a field preliminarily called the nuclear humanities. While the humanities have, since the emergence of the nuclear age, been interested and invested in the cultural representations of nuclear technologies and particularly its potentially spectacularly devastating effects, the emergence of broader fields like the environmental and energy humanities have also paved the way for new and sustained inquiries into nuclear culture. This is not least because various ‘turns’, like the ‘material turn’ or the ‘infrastructural turn’, as well as central new concepts like Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” (2011) and Tim Morton’s “hyperobject” (2013), have turned scholars’ attention to phenomena which commonly escape, through various ways of disguise, the logic of attention within and beyond scholarship. This also concerns the fact that the techno-political project of nuclear tech‐ nology was and is deeply enmeshed with natural processes, materials, and environments, which some earlier scholarship on nuclear culture and history had overlooked. Hogg and Brown note how the post-1945 nuclearisation of Britain was not only dependent on the significant mobilisation of “money, scientific knowledge, people and military-industrial capacity” (2019: 63) but also on land being “set aside to accommodate nuclear infrastructures” (ibid.). These often-remote sites were deemed expendable in the face of what was seen as a much more urgent project of nuclear deterrence; and many of these spaces remain closed to the public to this day. In the US context, scholars have stressed how ‘weapons to wildlife’ conversions, for instance, the creation of nature reserves at former weapon production sites for which clean-up is either not feasible or deemed too expensive, mobilise environmental rhetoric to gloss over the complicated legacies of the Cold War (Krupar 2013; Cram 2016). In an observation of conservation practices around the Hanford site, where plutonium was produced during the Manhattan Project, Shannon Cram suggests that the “constitutive contradiction” of these nuclear wildlife/ wasteland environments, their oscillation between “ruin and redemption”, or “pristine habitat and waste frontier” (2016: 91), positions nature as a ‘healing’ force tasked with the material and discursive clean-up of uncomfortable, and often quite persistent, Cold War legacies. Other scholars have drawn attention to the fact that ‘the nuclear’, as a techno‐ political assemblage, extends far beyond the measurable presence of radiation. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 274 Hannah Klaubert Hecht’s influential concept of ‘nuclearity’ has opened paths to studying how the state of ‘being nuclear’ can be made, unmade, and remade in the face of geopolitical and market interests (2009). Jessica Hurley has stressed how the nuclear military-industrial complex in the United States was realised not only as “an unthinkable paradox or a future threat but also as a new national infrastructure that has determined the flow of resources and risks across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (2020: 3). Along these lines, the Nuclear Natures research project, underway at Linköping University in Sweden, investigates how nuclearity, whether radioactive or not, produces new human/ non-human relations. They emerge through the creation of buffer zones around operating power plants, through environmental monitoring around outflow canals, or through mining activities and nuclear waste burial in deep geologic storage sites. While not necessarily contaminated, these sites operate under the logic of nuclear regulation and can thus be understood, in some sense, as nuclear. Orford Ness is also a place that was remade under the nuclear logic without being contaminated. The experiments which took place there were designed to help with the seamless employment of nuclear weapons, even though no fissile material “was said to be involved”, as the National Trust ambiguously phrases it (National Trust n.d.), heeding to rumours that some actual nuclear testing may have taken place at the site. What is certain is that simulation tests for temperature, vibration, pressure, and flight paths were implemented to ensure the actual nuclear bombs would not explode while being transported or right after being dropped (Davis 2022: 25). The site afforded the experiments, to speak with Caroline Levine (2017), not only due to the pre-existence of military infrastructure, its flatness and relative remoteness, but also because the loose shingle could buffer accidental explosions. Several of the buildings in which tests were conducted are heaped with the small stones against the side walls and on the roof, which in some cases is held up by massive concrete pillars. “The silhouettes of these Brutalist ‘pagodas’”, DeSilvey writes, “became iconic of Cold War secrecy and threat” (2014: 80). The shapes of the structures found on Orford Ness have become emblematic of British nuclear cultural heritage, and their treatment in literature and art raises questions not only about British nuclear politics and the logics of nuclearity but also about the politics of form in representing them. In The Wild Places, prominent nature writer Robert Macfarlane himself provides something like a theory of natural forms. In stressing the interplay between chaos and order, he observes the “fractal habits of certain landscapes, their tendencies to replicate their own forms at different scales and in different contexts” (2017: 246). While the “wild energies” of natural forces have the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 275 “capacity to frustrate representation” as “feedback systems of unresolvable delicacy and intricacy” remain removed from the human gaze, he also prescribes a “near mythical sense of organization”, of “order and repetition” (ibid.), to some landscapes. Orford Ness, which Macfarlane mentions briefly in The Wild Places, has an “exquisite patterning” (ibid.: 241) to it, as he writes. The shingles, which form the basis for all life on the spit, are in “continual slow migration, forming and reforming their shape as they shift” (ibid.); though mineral in essence, Orford Ness acquires something of an organic character, with new shingle adding distinct new layers like growth rings on a tree. The spit has the “complex beauty of a neuron” (ibid.: 242), and the “dialogue between solid and liquid” (ibid.) that constitutes these porous landscapes creates a constant oscillation between disorder and order. This sense of liveliness and complex order returns in Macfarlane’s later treatment of the spit. In the following, I propose to read Ness through the lens of form, understood in the broadest sense as “patterning, shapes, and arrangements” which organise, according to Levine, “both social and literary objects” (2017: 13), and, as I would add here with Macfarlane, also partly organise the natural world - though, as Macfarlane stresses, the “wild energies” of non-human nature tend to break the formal constraints and expectation placed upon them. I suggest that Ness investigates the totalising logic of Cold War rhetoric through contrasting it with the unbound movement and rhythms of its non-human characters, and through a curious double-conversion - of place into character and character into place. 3 Place/ Character Conversions in Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s Ness Ness was written by Robert Macfarlane and first published in 2018 with ink illustrations by artist Stanley Donwood. The text consists of multiple narrative strands interwoven in a wild symphony of place. It is a generic hybrid, “part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play”, as the blurb announces. It creates suspense as “five forms” (1) - it, he, she, they, as - approach the land of Orford Ness to halt the destructive actions of a group of human-like figures, among them The Armourer, The Engineer, The Botanist, The Physicist, and The Ornithologist. In the “Green Chapel”, identified as one of the military testing pavilions now left to decay on Orford Ness, the group is preparing to detonate a “toothpaste-white finned missile a little longer than a man” (13), designed to “maximise injuries incompatible with life” (27). Yet, before they manage to perform the required rituals, which include the singing of a “firing song”, it, he, she, they, and as swerve (float, trickle, flow, grow, …) in and take over. In 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 276 Hannah Klaubert “uncontrolled ruination” (78), as the text cheekily comments on the National Trust’s wording of “controlled ruination”, the “firing song” of the Armourer is replaced with the “song of Ness” (ibid.). Kyra Morris has provided a convincing examination of the “fissile forms”, the poetic strategies, of the text. She describes Ness as a “lexicon of shingle beach, salt marsh, and nuclear detonation” (2022: 1) and carefully traces its intertextual references. In a Benjaminian reading of the prose poem, Morris suggests that the textual strategies produce paradoxical “non-fungible reproductions” (ibid.: 19) of this “untrue island”, evoking a flat ontology of ‘like-ness’ between the different characters. The estrangement elicited by this flatness, she argues, “allows for a theory of art useless for the purpose of autocratic ‘death-dreaming’ figures like The Armourer” (18) as it pushes against all essentialist claims of authenticity. I want to add to Morris’ reading, which is mostly focused on the poetic language and the play with metaphors, allusions, and intertextual references, by exam‐ ining further formal features of the text, and more specifically, one common feature of environmentally engaged literary writing, as Caracciolo and James have observed (Caracciolo 2021: 109f.; James 2022: 118f.): the transformation of place into character. Ness begins with an appeal to the reader: “Look - five forms moving fast through the forest to Ness” (1). It is central to the text’s poetic strength that these strange forms, moving with intention towards a narrative centre, the Green Chapel, are converted to character. In doing so, Ness deconstructs what Marco Caracciolo has called narrative’s “first and maybe most important pillar”, the “bias towards human or human-like characters” (2018: s174). It does so by making use of the ‘container’ of character, as a bounded whole with intention and purpose in the story, and breaking it down in various ways. The five beings, each in their own way, expand the boundary of what can function as a narrative agent in the text. First, after The Armourer and his companions have been introduced and their dark plans exposed, it approaches: “It is Drift. Drift nears Ness. Drift is a world-shaper. Drift makes itself up as it goes along” (Ness: 17). Drift “loves lists”, it “looks drastically disorganized to the untrained eye but is in fact a micro-manager of obsessive-compulsive tidiness” (ibid.). Of all the five forms, it even receives something like a biography, a back-story mocking the decided un-humanness of Drift: Drift is constantly underestimated by those who encounter it. Drift is frequently seen as lacking any clear direction in life. Drift’s school reports repeatedly drew attention to its lack of commitment, its inability to settle on a single course of action. […] Afloat on the job market, however, Drift began quietly to impress in its various workplaces with 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 277 its skills of improvisational spontaneity, untiring gathering, its devotion to habitat creation & and its ecumenical readiness to admit all-comers to its care. (ibid.: 18) The description of Drift then turns back to assembling seemingly disparate facts in lists; drift is “a hermit crab taking an Avon face-cream tub as its shell”, it “dislikes being made to represent anything, because Drift disapproves strongly of symbolism”, drift is “matter plus motion” and a “Colgate-Palmolive Teeth-Whitening Toothpaste tube, no tub” (19). Caracciolo has asked how narra‐ tive can “elevate the nonhuman - material objects, but also large-scale processes such as globalization or the weather - to the position of a character” (2018: s174). In the chapter introducing it, Ness flaunts this capacity by anthropomorphising natural processes, only to reign in the impulse immediately after as it resorts back to similes and lists. This also continues with the remaining characters coming to disturb The Armourer in his ventures. He, the second form approaching the island, is made up mostly of movement, but “you couldn’t call it walking; this march matches no known gait” (33), He “pours, sets, melts & pours again, in a skipping looping flow, learnt part from otter & part from water” (ibid.). His movement is described as a weaving, which he weaves as much as he is woven by it. Then, after another section of the detonation ceremony, “She nears Ness” (45). She is growth and liveliness, the animacy of the natural world. She “makes green & green fills the air around her & warps hard into objects within her radiance” (ibid.), and she is “committed to redefining decay as a form of verdancy, individuality as a biological aberration & gender as a parallax error or species anomaly” (46). The final two forms expand this experiment in testing the limits of character in narrative even further: They are the passing of time, though not in a linear sense but in the complex and overlapping rhythms of nature; they “have the patience of granite & the ardour of lava & the speed of starlight. / & they are the white band that rings a blue-grey chert stone held in the hand for a minute & for longer in the heart” (59). They also expand the form beyond conventional grammar at the level of the sentence, with each sentence beginning with an ampersand and consisting of a series of subordinate clauses without a main clause. Finally, As, the last of the five forms, fully breaks down grammatical rules: “As is as thin as mist. / As is as fast as gale & as slow as tar” (71), and concludes a few lines later: “As nears Ness. / As is hopelessness. / As is forgiveness. / As is Ness” (ibid.). Morris has observed how the similes of this section straddle both the material and the discursive, breaking down distinctions between the “physically and epistemologically fissile” (2022: 11) that make up the atomic shingle spit that is the Ness. Econarratologists have explored how narrative can move beyond its “an‐ thropomorphic bias” (Fludernik, cited in Caracciolo 2021: 97) by examining 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 278 Hannah Klaubert non-human characters and actors/ actants in narrative; and of particular interest are those who are not simply human-like characters going by another name, as would be the case in a fable, for instance. As Caracciolo notes, the Greima‐ sian actantial model of narrative, which defines actants as those performing “narrative-advancing actions”, can be useful for expanding theorisations of character in and for the Anthropocene - but only by moving beyond the clear subject-object binary which the structuralists sought to uphold, or spoken in more linguistic terms, by moving beyond “syntactic transitivity” (2018: s179). Caracciolo proposes that the “promotion of place to narrative actant” (ibid: s184) is one of the formal strategies employed to break the spell of anthropomorphising and he observes such an “actantial mediation of place” in the storyworld of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, where non-human forces permeating the storyworld infiltrate the human characters’ psychology. Inter‐ estingly, Caracciolo’s framing of this process as a “promotion” (based on his reading of the work of linguist Andrew Goatly) reinscribes a hierarchy into the space/ narrative agent relationship which it initially seeks to complicate. This ordering stands somewhat in contrast to the ontological flatness that Morris ascribes to Ness (2022: 9), and that is certainly also reflected in the ink drawings by Stanley Donwood which accompany the text. The drawings’ investment in the surfaces of the Ness, from ripples in the water to individual pebbles and the overgrown ruins, all portrayed in tight cross-hatching lines, further underlines, if not the primacy of the natural world and the spatial setting of the narrative, at least its dominance over and active engagement with the human-made structures in the landscape. Textually, Ness, helped by its myth-like form, is very explicit about its place/ character conversion by introducing the Ness in the five forms, yet it is also very reflexive about it, thus also playing with a perceived hierarchy between human and non-human narrative agents; with each ‘form’, the level of anthropomorphising is dialled back, each figure becoming less human-like to the extent that grammatical rules are bent in the section on as, essentially making as - likeness to Ness - the subject of its sentences. In doing so, Ness shows the breadth and function of anthropomorphism as well as its boundaries and the weird frictions and expansions of tellability that emerge at those borders. Ness also contrasts its unruly non-human characters with the clearly boun‐ ded, human-like figures in the Green Chapel, characterised only by their profession and fulfilling The Armourer’s orders swiftly and competently: The Ornithologist, The Physicist, The Engineer, and others. After going through a range of preparatory rituals (like describing “the Chapel’s design and position” and “ornament and flourish”, 11, original emphasis), they sing the “firing song” 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 279 in preparation for the detonation: “Song of the bomb, the arming song, / the firing song…” (14, original emphasis). However, already by the second iteration of the firing song, a sort of disintegration begins: One of The Engineer’s pupils, The Physicist notices, “has become oddly mobile, that it seems to be drifting rapidly back and forth across the confines of its iris” (28) whereas the other pupil “is standing out slightly from his eyeball, like a buried plug of old grey metal” (ibid.). A strange green light begins to fill the Green Chapel, and by the fourth iteration of the firing song, bee-like creatures are burrowing in The Ornithologist’s hair, whereas The Physicist’s “skin is scaled with a bright orange lichen” (55) and there are “fine branching white lines growing across his eyes, just below the surface” (ibid.). By the time The Armourer judges everything ready for the firing of the missile, The Engineer can only reply “with a hollowed and hardened voice” and his “speech has both the deep notes of bedrock and the bullety ting of flint flung on flint” (65). Yet, The Armourer insists on singing the firing song one last time; but now it has become the “song of the spores” the “song of the hag, the sea-coal song” (67). In the final scene in the Green Chapel, The Armourer himself finally is transformed, his hair is bracken, his innards are thickening peat, his back is clattered into a row of stones, his prick is soft and gilled as the Death Cap, foxes snarl in his blood, his tendons are all turned to high breaking-strain monofilament, all tuned to the wind-blown note of D flat, swifts scream through him on their hooligan tours, each of his ten nails is amber, his borders shift and re-form in each storm and he is Ness. (77, emphasis added) Here, then, the place/ character conversion is turned on its head, with the human-like characters becoming fully subsumed into their surroundings, char‐ acters becoming place while place has become character. James has commented on the presence of shifting and unstable spaces in Anthropocene narrative texts. She argues that spaces which are “unstable, or inexact in their multiplicity and thus difficult to inhabit” (2022: 119) are inherent to Anthropocene experiences - and that much narrative theory, which constructs space in the text as stable and inactive against the activity and mobility of characters, fails to account for these experiences. Anthropocene narratives can task readers with “inhabiting worlds in which space is not simply a stable background but itself the unstable foreground of narratives” (ibid.: 127). James proposes what she calls “despatialization”, that is, textual strategies rendering it difficult for the reader to fully inhabit the storyworld, as a prominent strategy for figuring Anthropocene spaces. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 280 Hannah Klaubert In Ness, the calls for the reader to ‘Look’ and ‘Listen’ initially create a stable readerly position and call for readers to immerse themselves into the storyworld. Additionally, the first utterance of The Armourer is to ask his congregation to “describe the Chapel’s design and position” (11, original emphasis), to which The Engineer responds by describing the architecture of the Green Chapel, one of the test pavilions on the spit, in detail, as a “perfect marriage of function and form” (ibid.). He also declares its ruination “controlled” (ibid.). However, as the five forms approach from all sides, the space shows itself to be much less graspable and controlled than the congregation in the Green Chapel or the reader may think. As the five forms take over, The Engineer now describes a completely different space, stretching vertically, which is the Chapel but is not: We are down now past the plastic, the sea-coal, the flip-flops, down through the flints, the quartzites, the hags, and down to the imprint-taking, relic-yielding clay. / We are among bracelet clasps, spindle-whorls, a whale-bone table. We are among fossils: the mammoths, the turtles, the sharks, the nautilus, the wing bone of the albatross, the ear bone of the eagle ray. (65f.) Quite similarly to Sebald’s descriptions of the Ness, the environment here becomes perceptible in all its temporal and material depth, reaching from contemporary drift to human history and geology. Ness comments, then, on our tangled existence of what may be called the Nu‐ clear Anthropocene in various ways. By elevating place to character, or rather, to multiple characters, the liveliness, multifaceted-ness and multi-directionality as well as the persistence of non-human beings comes to the fore. Or, to phrase it in more spatial terms, the distinction between the background of the story and the foreground, which is usually where the significant events of a narrative take place, is blurred, as background becomes foreground and ultimately takes over. The strongly centralised storyworld, with the Green Chapel at its centre and the “five forms” approaching from all sides, seems almost geometric in its order. Once the centre is subsumed into the surroundings, though, as The Armourer and his companions have become Ness themselves, the narrative centre itself integrates. “It was all sea once, in a long unbroken line” (83), the text ends. Contrasting the stability and perceived linearity of deep time with the instability and “fissile-ness” (Morris 2022: 11) of the shingle spit as well as the human endeavours taking place on it, Ness’ background is of geologic rather than historical dimension. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 281 4 Deep in Matter and Deep in Language One critical gesture that many contemporary nuclear humanities scholars have in common is an assessment of the work of early “nuclear critics”, a group of scholars who, in the early 1980s, argued that “critical theory ought to be making a more important contribution to the public discussion of nuclear issues” (“Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism” 1984: 2). Most prominently, Jacques Derrida’s characterisation of the nuclear threat as “fabulously textual” (1984: 23) has in recent years, after initially being taken up gratefully by literary and cultural critics, been criticised for overlooking the genuine material effects of civil and military nuclear infrastructures across the globe (see for instance Decamous 2018: 201; Wallace 2016: 6f.). Yet, Jessica Hurley suggests that this criticism relies on a slight misinterpre‐ tation of Derrida’s concerns. Hurley argues that he was acutely aware that the “fictionality of the bomb exists only in a dialectical relationship with the technical and social infrastructures that produce it and that it in turn produces” (2020: 8). Reversely, she suggests, criticism which is solely focused on the materiality of nuclear things also remains limited: By only ascribing nuclearity to the bomb, nuclear criticism risks being blinded to the negotiations of power, wealth, status, and vulnerability that are constantly in play around nuclear and contestably nuclear things, from bodies and rocks to highways and international treaties. (2020: 9) It is only through the “fabulous textuality” of nuclear politics and nuclear public discourse, its reliance on entirely non-material fear, risk estimates, and scenarios, that nuclear technologies and infrastructures were made into a material reality. They created large swaths of militarised and often contaminated landscapes, channelled incredible amounts of resources, and rendered certain bodies and communities expendable in the process (see Jacobs 2022; Hamblin and Richards 2023). Reversely, the materiality of nuclear things produces its textuality, a nuclear cultural and political imagination which drives geopolitical decisions. In other words, nuclearity is always both socio-political and material. Ness is, while invested in the lively materiality of the shingle spit, acutely aware of the politics of language and (literary) form in the context of nuclear weapons. The congregation of The Armourer on the “untrue island” is very aware of the “half-truths and full falsehoods”, the “speculation, suppressed revelation” (26) required to maintain a nuclear-military status quo. Ness also alludes to the rhetorical playfulness of some twentieth century nuclear discourse (as portrayed most prominently and critically in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove), with The Physicist praising the “Disney names” of the British nuclear bombs, which indeed 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 282 Hannah Klaubert had names like the “Blue Danube” or the “Yellow Sun”; and even a less poetically named bomb like the WE-177A is described as an “ice-white stork-dropped messenger from heaven, with such a bright future ahead of it” (27). Further playing with the meaning of language in the nuclear realm, The Physicist, who is tasked with the service, announces that he will “speak only in equations, for they are the purest of utterances and they address only the world of matter, and they have no correlate or purchase in the sphere of politics and yet they possess a vast and calculable power to alter the world we inhabit” (13, emphasis added). In this paradoxical announcement, Macfarlane captures the troubled nature of nuclear discourses and politics, which rely on probabilities and risk equations while simultaneously having fundamentally shaped not only the geopolitics of the recent decade but also the material makeup of planet Earth as a whole (cf. Brown 2022), making nuclear materials the most significant marker for the new geologic epoch of the Anthropocene (Anthropocene Work‐ ing Group 2019). Throughout the text, the repeated performance of the “firing song” points towards the importance of a constant reiteration of the nuclear threat for maintaining its effectiveness. The Armourer also asks The Engineer to recite “the detonation sequence, taking care to emphasize its causal beauty and irreversibility once commenced” (51, original emphasis). In the nuclear realm, to recite and to perform, to speculate, to calculate, and to test - to “shock-test, stress-test, temperature-test”, to “test for lethality” and “test for vulnerability” (26) - are as important as the detonation itself. Ultimately, the congregation ends up “deep in matter”, as The Engineer warns, so deep in fact that “Messages can’t make it, signals shatter” (66). “Thought is, language is”, he warns The Armourer, “turning into shingle” (ibid.). However, Ness’ non-anthropocentrism remains overtly and explicitly entrenched in language, and its place/ character conversions straddle the affordances and limits of representa‐ tions of natural environments. The “formal cleavages”, as Morris calls them (2022: 18), between the totalising impulses of nuclear discourses and the liveliness of the Ness are essential to the poetics of the text. In that, it can be thought of as commenting on the predicament of the nuclear age that the nuclear humanities are slowly coming to terms with: We remain both deep in matter and deep in language; and in the nuclear realm, in dealing with imperceptible phenomena like radiation but also risk, fear, and power, we cannot think one without the other. 5 Narrating (Never Quite) Post-Nuclear Landscapes In this contribution, I have argued for a cross-fertilisation of recent scholarship in ecocriticism, and particularly econarratology, and contemporary nuclear 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 283 1 This work is based on research done within the framework of the “Nuclear Natures” project, which received funding from the Swedish Research Council (VR), grant no. 2020-00623. I also want to thank Anna Tabouratzidis and To Uyen Nguyen for their thoughtful comments and editorial work. criticism. On the one hand, econarratology allows for the exploration of the portrayal of non-human agencies in texts, thus providing tools for reading literature in what we may call the Nuclear Anthropocene, an age where the material world forcefully shows itself as agential and resistant to human domination. On the other hand, some early and more recent nuclear criticism has drawn attention to the role of language and (literary) form and narrative in (re-)producing the material and discursive nuclear status quo; it thus engages fruitfully with the observations provided by econarratological readings. Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood, as I have shown, is attuned to both the liveliness and agency of the natural world as well as the power of the nuclear-military realm to shape natural environments through a continuous rhetoric of risk and potential destruction. It plays with the illusion of “controlled ruination” which the National Trust aims at while also acting out the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) - both of which perish under the onslaught of the ‘five forms’, the Ness reconfigured as characters. One could certainly argue that Macfarlane and Donwood’s post-anthropo‐ centric vision of the shingle spit is naively utopian and that the ‘nature taking back’ narrative is potentially not helpful in fully grasping our predicaments of living in a multiplicity of environmental and other crises for which a privileged group of humans are the cause and which humans seem unable to effectively address. Critiques of the “weapons to wildlife” conversions underway in spaces that are too contaminated or otherwise not economically viable to fully rehabilitate (Krupar 2013; Cram 2016), as well as critical engagements with the meaning of military heritage and “rewilding” on the Ness Field (DeSilvey 2014; Davis 2022), certainly make space for such an interpretation. In the face of a changing geopolitical situation, the United Kingdom has recently increased their cap on their nuclear stockpile, making it possible to acquire new nuclear weapons (Mills 2024: 4). In other words, The Armourer and his companions will continue their dark rituals elsewhere, in a different Chapel, and they also do so across the globe. 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