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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8157-0 Meteorologies of Modernity explores the ways in which literature reflects and participates in discourses on weather and climate - historically as well as at our contemporary moment. Literature contains a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries. The essays collected in this volume therefore ask to what extent literature can bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view, how literature offers ways to think through the challenges of the Anthropocene both culturally, historically, and aesthetically, and, last but not least, how it helps us to conceptualize a radically new understanding of what it means to be human. The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles and cover a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. Topics include representations of tropical climates in Shakespeare, the close yet tense relationship between literature and the rising discipline of meteorology in the nineteenth century, allegories of climate change in postcolonial literature, and climate catastrophes in the contemporary clifi novel. By employing a historicizing and comparative approach, the volume addresses the need for studying representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, transnational and transhistorical framework, overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that are essential when debating the Anthropocene. 33 Volume 33 (2017) Meteorologies of Modernity Edited by Sarah Fekadu, Hanna Straß-Senol and Tobias Döring Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 33 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Ansgar Nünning · Donald E. Pease 33 Meteorologies of Modernity Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene Edited by Sarah Fekadu, Hanna Straß-Senol and Tobias Döring Notice to Contributors The editors invite submission of manuscripts appropriate to the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2018 volume, edited by Donald Pease, will be on “Populist Imaginaries”. The 2019 volume, edited by Winfried Fluck and Johannes Voelz, will be on “The Return of Aesthetics in American Studies? ”. Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and a pdf file of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to the volume editors or via an advisor. They should reach the volume editors by December 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 10,000 words (including endnotes and references). To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on cd or disc; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 sqq.). All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. © 2017 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-8233-8157-0 ISSN 0723-0338 Editors Tobias Döring , LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck , Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Ansgar Nünning , Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease , English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Acknowledgements The conception of this volume roots in a conference at Ludwig-Maximilians- University Munich (LMU) titled “Meteorologies of Modernity.” The event, which took place in Munich in June 2014, was hosted by the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Globalization and Literature” (LMU Munich) and the Postcolonial Europe Network (Utrecht University). We wish to thank the DFG Research Training Group “Globalization and Literature” and the Postcolonial Europe Network for making this conference possible and are grateful to all the participants for their engaging papers, the lively discussions during the three days of intellectual exchange, and also for their willingness and commitment to cooperate on this volume. Special thanks go to Fabienne Imlinger and Sandra Ponzanesi, our liaison to these two programs, for their incessant support. We also send our thanks to Isabel Kranz who was part of our editorial team during an early stage of conception of the volume and generously contributed her ideas and experience. For their assistance in editing this volume, we wish to thank Karsten Schöllner for his translation of Robert Stockhammer’s and Patrick Ramponi’s contributions, Karen Carolin for her thorough copy-editing, and Katrin Bauer and Niklas Anke for helping us putting the chapters into their final layout. We also thank the general editors of the REAL yearbook series for their enthusiasm for the topic and the comparative approach of this volume, and the competent team at Narr publishers for making the publication process such a pleasant one. The editors acknowledge with thanks permission granted to reproduce in this volume the following material previously published elsewhere. From Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories” in Critical Inquiry 41(2014). Reprinted by permission of the author. From Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, “Tell Them,” in Iep Altok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. © 2017 Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press. From Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s December. 39 Pictures and 39 Stories (2012). A photograph reprinted with the kind permission of Gerhard Richter. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. Sarah Fekadu, Hanna Straß-Senol, Tobias Döring Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................. v Contributors .............................................................................................. ix S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL Introduction .....................................................................................................1 I. T HEORIZING W EATHER AND C LIMATE C HANGE D IPESH C HAKRABARTY Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories ......................................19 R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER Philology in the Anthropocene ..............................................................43 E VA H ORN Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat ...........................................65 II. H ISTORICIZING P ERSPECTIVES J OHANNES U NGELENK The Climate of th‘ Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest.....................................85 O LIVER G RILL Weather - or Not? Meteorology and the Art of Prediction in Humboldt’s Kosmos and Stifter’s Der Nachsommer.............................101 S OLVEJG N ITZKE Creating “Klima” in a Changing World: Weather and Environment in Peter Rosegger’s Forest Fictions.......121 P ATRICK R AMPONI Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy: Weather, Sickness and the Globalization of ‘Milieu’ ......................... 141 III. M ETHODS AND P ERSPECTIVES A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife ................................................................................. 173 R EINHARD H ENNIG Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction: Gert Nygårdshaug’s ‘Eco-Thriller’ Chimera ........................................191 U RS B ÜTTNER Nature Makes History: Narrating Nature in Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s December .................................................................217 IV. P OSTCOLONIAL R ESPONSES E LIZABETH D ELOUGHREY The Sea is Rising: Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific Islands ............................237 S ARAH F EKADU The North and the Desert: Tayeb Salih’s Poetics of the Anthropocene .........................................255 H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale ..............273 Contributors BÜTTNER, URS. Peter Szondi-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany CHAKRABARTY, DIPESH. Department of History, The University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA DELOUGHREY, ELIZABETH. Department of English, University of California L.A., 149 Humanities Building, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA FEKADU, SARAH. Institut für Englische Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München, Schellingstr. 3, 80799 München, Germany GRILL, OLIVER. Institut für Deutsche Philologie, Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität München, Schellingstr. 3, 80799 München, Germany HENNIG, REINHARD. Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Niels Henrik Abels vei 360313 Oslo, Norway HORN, EVA. Institut für Germanistik, Universität Wien, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria NITZKE, SOLVEJG. Institut für Germanistik, Universität Wien, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria RAMPONI, PATRICK. Neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft, Heinrichvon-Buz-Str. 12, 86153 Ausburg, Germany STOCKHAMMER, ROBERT. Institut für Komparatistik, Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München, Schellingstr. 3, 80799 München, Germany STRAß-SENOL, HANNA. Institute for English and American Literary and Cultural Studies, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstr. 114-118, 26129 Oldenburg, Germany UNGELENK, JOHANNES. Institut für Romanische Philologie, Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität München, Schellingstr. 3, 80799 München, Germany WEIK VON MOSSNER, ALEXA. Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Universitätsstr. 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL Meteorologies of Modernity Introduction Weather and Climate in the Anthropocene What can literature and literary studies contribute to the study of meteorology, of weather and climate discourses, and the Anthropocene? Of all the terms used in the title of this volume, only ‘modernity’ belongs to the domain of the humanities in the classic sense, all the others form part of the sciences. Yet, as no one can deny, descriptions of weather, climate change and climate catastrophes have always played a central role in Western literature - especially in the genre of the novel but also in poetry and drama - even to the extent that, in 1892, Mark Twain ironically declared in the opening pages of his novel The American Claimant that “no weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather”(Twain vi). Twain elaborates that literary descriptions disrupt the flow of the narrative and thus pose a problem to both author and reader. Also, as Twain argues, weather descriptions should be handled by “qualified and recognized experts” - obviously, Twain wrote these lines at a time when literary imaginations of the weather were increasingly put under pressure by the emerging discipline of meteorology that claimed not only to scientifically analyze but also to be able to predict the changing behavior of the atmosphere. 1 Yet, even Twain concedes that “weather is necessary to a narrative of human ex-perience” (vi). Exploring the relationships between the three components that Twain mentions here - weather, narrative, and human experience - is the objective of our volume. As Mike Hulme reminds us in his latest book Weathered: Cultures of Climate (2017), what we tend to forget in times of climate change and global warming is that weather and climate, besides being an object of scientific study, have to be thought of first and foremost in their cultural dimension (Hulme xii). Even weather, arguably the more concrete phenomenon of the two because it can be felt bodily, is difficult to grasp and can mostly be experienced in the effects it has on other things. As Christina Rossetti already wrote in 1872: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you/ But when the leaves hang trembling/ The wind is passing through” (Rossetti 250). As abstract entities, climate and weather cannot be thought of inde- 1 See also Schulz. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 2 pendently of the ways they are recreated, studied and acted upon in the human imagination - a task that humankind has performed through the ages and cultures, in different disciplines and through different media but also, and perhaps most notably, in literature. The current era of environmental transition on a planetary scale, now generally referred to as the Anthropocene, only intensifies the representational challenge that climate has always posed to the human imagination. As Hulme writes, “[c]limate change should rather be seen as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate, an idea which enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural and material artefacts, practices, rituals, and symbols” (xiii). A contemporary example of how atmospheric conditions and the human enter into a symbolic relationship can be found in the highly acclaimed novel of American-Nigerian writer Teju Cole, Open City (2011). In this narrative, we follow the young New Yorker psychiatrist Julius on his random walks through the cities of New York and Brussels and his reflections on their divergent histories. As someone who explores his environment on foot, the protagonist also shows a marked interest in weather-related phenomena - bird migrations (Cole 3), the change of seasons and the influence of light on his well-being (193-94), and - last but not least - climate change. In a passage early in the book, the protagonist reflects upon the extraordinarily warm November weather in New York. His thoughts show a marked insecurity about how to conceptualize the link between weather and climate, an insecurity triggered by the current debates on climate change: I had my recurrent worry about how warm it had been all season long. Although I did not enjoy the cold seasons at their most intense, I had come to agree that there was a rightness about them, that there was a natural order in such things. The absence of this order, the absence of cold when it ought to be cold, was something I now sensed as a sudden discomfort. The idea that the weather was changing noticeably bothered me, even if there was as yet no evidence that this warm fall in particular wasn’t due to a perfectly normal variation in patterns that stretched across centuries. There had been a natural little ice age in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, and so, why not a little warm age in our own time, independent of human causes? (Cole 28) Here, the absence of cold weather in November is experienced as a loss of order, although, as the narrator himself admits, it could also just be a variation in pattern. Yet, the protagonist hesitates to relate the oddly warm November weather directly to the climate changes that happen on a grander scale. Although explaining that he is not any longer the global warming skeptic that he used to be, he is suspicious about people who “draw the link too easily”: “I still couldn’t tolerate the tendency some had of jumping to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence: global warming was a fact, but that did not mean it was the explanation for why a given day was warm” (28). Introduction 3 Several issues are at stake here that are also of concern to our volume. First, the relationship between weather and climate. Although weather forms part of climate, we only have physical, i.e. bodily and sensory access to the first one; climate itself can neither be shown nor felt. As Mike Hulme remarks, in contrast to the unsteadiness of local weather, “climate hint[s] at a physical reality that is both more stable and durable than the weather. […] The idea of climate connects material and imaginative worlds in ways that create order and offer stability to human existence” (2). Yet, weather, precisely due to its transience and unsteadiness, can only hint to the larger patterns that we associate with climate. Considering climate change, the situation gets even more intricate: this process is of such complexity and vastness in scale that it utterly lacks phenomenal concreteness. As Eva Horn writes in her contribution to the present volume, “climate change […] can neither be felt nor seen, nor can its potential consequences be clearly outlined or anticipated” (66). It is due to the elusiveness of climate change that Julius, the protagonist of Open City, is indecisive about whether he should read the warm New York fall as evidence of larger transformations in global climate or simply as a variation in the pattern. In times of climate change and global warming, the relationship between weather and climate might have to be reconceptualized entirely: When climate ceases to be a relatively stable force, weather, with its transience and unpredictability, might be reconsidered as more than a local and temporal manifestation of climate. Rather, weather becomes the most potent reminder that humans, although being able to change the world on a geological scale, are not in control of the unexpected consequences of their behavior. Second, what is also at stake in the passage from Open City quoted above is the relevance of climate and weather for the ways in which we invent ourselves. As Kathryn Schulz writes in an article in The New Yorker, “[t]hrough the ages, we have used weather in our stories to illuminate the workings of the universe, our culture, our politics, our relationships, and ourselves.” While ancient texts told weather stories in order to understand meteorological phenomena, with the advent of modernity, the role of weather in literary representations starts to change: It is used increasingly as a metaphor to explain ourselves (ibid.), as in the extensive weather imagery in Shakespeare’s King Lear or, as Johannes Ungelenk elaborates in this volume, in The Tempest, or the development of sociometeorological correspondence theories explored by Patrick Ramponi. In the passage from Cole’s Open City, the odd weather condition of an unusually warm November makes the protagonist reflect both on himself and on the condition of society as a whole: Still, the way my thoughts returned to the fact that it was the middle of November and I hadn’t yet had occasion to wear my coat made me wonder if, already, I was S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 4 one of those people, the overinterpreters. This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more toward snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy; it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence. (28) In a rather bold move, the narrator-protagonist establishes a link between an ‘unscientific’ handling of climate change and the propensity of a society to be easily manipulated by demagogues. Climate change, thus, is made a metonymic marker for the political and ethical dilemma of the present rather than for an environmental catastrophe in the future. What Julius’ reflections on the warm November weather in New York make clear is that, when thinking about the weather in our time, we can neither easily skip the issue of climate change nor easily come to terms with it. Nor is it possible to relegate it to the domain of scientific investigation and isolate it from other issues and ideologies that have shaped modernity and continue to transform our present - capitalism, imperialism, globalization, to name but a few. The social and environmental problems created by these ideologies and historical phenomena that we have come to see as the defining features of modernity, however, persist even if some people suggest that the Anthropocene marks the end of modernity. The task that the present volume therefore sets itself is to address the complexities of climate change from the perspective of literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies and through the medium of literature. We aim to do so by giving special emphasis to three different aspects: a theoretical consideration of the challenges the current era of environmental transition poses to the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that used to define the humanities; a historicizing perspective on current debates of climate change and weather, and - last but not least - a consideration of literature as a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries that helps bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view and to think through it both culturally, historically, and aesthetically. Theorizing, Historicizing and Aestheticizing the Climates of Modernity The theoretical angle that we propose in this volume is closely connected to recent discussions surrounding the relatively new concept of the ‘Anthropocene.’ The Anthropocene encapsulates and condenses many of the challenges that the large-scale transitions subsumed under the label ‘climate change’ pose to the disciplinary premises of the humanities. Recent seminal work by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the philosopher Bruno Latour, or literary scholars like Timothy Clark, points to the fact that the Anthropocene calls for Introduction 5 a reformulation and reconceptualization of the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that have shaped the humanities up until the twentyfirst century (Chakrabarty “Climate,” Latour, Clark). The Anthropocene, conceived of in the earth sciences and coined by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and the marine ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000, designates a new geochronological epoch which is characterized by the impact of human activities on the world’s ecology, geology and atmosphere. Central to the Anthropocene concept is the assumption that humans “wield a geological force” that influences “the most basic physical processes on the earth,” causing changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, rising sea levels and alterations of the climate (Oreskes qtd. in Chakrabarty, “Climate” 206-207). Different moments in human history have been suggested to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. Proponents of the early Anthropocene hypothesis want to date it to the rise of agricultural civilizations, whereas the dominant Anthropocene narrative sees the Industrial Revolution in Europe with the invention of the steam engine and the ever-increasing use of fossil energy as the defining historical fact that marks humanity’s ascent to biospheric supremacy (Malm and Hornborg 63). While the concrete point of its beginning has not been decided yet, 2 the question of the Anthropocene concept’s interpretative usefulness and critical potential has nevertheless animated many discussions in a variety of academic fields, not least in the humanities. 3 In an age where the very subject of the humanities - the human - has changed its status to a geophysical force with scale effects that are difficult to imagine, let alone predict, the distinctions between nature and culture, human and natural history are being renegotiated. The humanities, hence, need to critically engage with these paradigm shifts and the field’s own necessary reorientation. Taken seriously, the Anthropocene calls for nothing less than a critical reassessment of what it means to be human and for consideration of what the shift in humanity’s geophysical agency entails. 2 In August 2016, the Anthropocene working group installed by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy recommended that the International Commission on Stratigraphy officially accept the Anthropocene as describing a new geological epoch (Carrington). However, to officially date the beginning of the new epoch, a “golden spike,” that is a particular point or time boundary discernible between different strata, must be found (“Working Group”). There are suggestions that go beyond the 1800s as well as suggestions to date the new epoch from the 1950s allowing it to be defined with respect to the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests that can be found in particular stratal sections (ibid.). 3 These debates manifest in the steadily rising number of essays, edited collections, and individual volumes as well as the publication of an eponymous journal dedicated to the new epoch, which not only carry the ‘Anthropocene’ as a trendy buzzword in their titles but critically engage with it. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 6 One of the central aporias of the new geological epoch lies at the heart of the concept itself. Since anthropos in Anthropocene is meant to acknowledge and emphasize the central role of humankind in the shaping of the planet’s geology and ecology, it is precisely the notion of the human, the anthropos, that is at stake here. For by becoming a geological force, human beings have collectively attained a form of existence that has no ontological dimension, as Chakrabarty persuasively argues. In his seminal article “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), he proposes to use “species” - in its antiessentialist Darwinian sense - to account for this non-ontological mode of being. However, conceiving of ourselves in terms of a species with a universal species history poses imaginative hurdles precisely because of it “pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience” (Chakrabarty, “Climate” 222). It is particularly this universal dimension of the species narrative that has provoked severe criticism from a number of scholars who disapprove of its de-historicizing and de-politicizing impetus. One of the quandaries constitutive of the Anthropocene is that its presumed ‘oneness’ of humanity as a geological agent does not imply a collective political agency. 4 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg argue in their timely critique of the Anthropocene narrative that the use of the species category is inimical to action. First, the species narrative conflates the distinctions between nature and culture and thus loses the analytical value of keeping them separate (Malm and Hornborg 63), thereby forfeiting the possibilities of a cultural critique as it denaturalizes climate change by relocating it to the sphere of human activity, only to renaturalize it as “derived from an innate human trait” (65). More importantly, they remind us that “[i]ntra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis” and must not be ignored in an attempt to understand and address it (62). 5 While Malm and Hornborg proceed to argue the case for the sociogenic quality of climate change (66, original emphasis), other critics like the political ecologist Jason W. Moore prefer to speak of the “Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’” (1), in order to stress the fact that the environmental crisis humanity faces as a whole is inextricably intertwined with the endless accumulation of capital in our capitalist world. 6 Both Malm and 4 See also Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial” 13-14. 5 Pointing to the fact that the historical origins of anthropogenic climate change rested upon highly inequitable global processes from the start (i.e. technological and industrial developments as well as the forceful processes that accompanied the integration of a large number of regions across the globe into the capitalist world system), Malm and Hornborg argue for a view that concedes the past and present role of combined and uneven development in the production of our current environmental crisis (63-64). 6 For Jason W. Moore, the shift in perspective from Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas which he finds to be definitive of the Anthropocene to a perspective that scrutinizes the dynamics of capitalism as a world ecology of power, capital, and nature is Introduction 7 Hornborg and Moore share an emphasis on questions of social justice and argue for a historically contextualized analyses of the present crises that, in their opinion, cannot be effectively addressed by way of the Anthropocene narrative and its focus on humanity as a ‘species.’ Similar to the criticism set forth above, a number of scholars in postcolonial and ecocritical studies have also reminded us that the effects of climate change - however global its effects might be - are distributed unequally and mediated by global and postcolonial inequities already in place (Nixon, Mukherjee). Consequently, at the “historical juncture” we find ourselves at right now, we need to think through “contradictory figures of the human” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 1, 5) to come to terms with the scope and complexities of anthropogenic consequences. With this in mind, the last three contributions in the present volume add to a postcolonial perspective on the Anthropocene discourse which critically intervenes in the basic ideological underpinnings that sustain inequalities in our time. Along with the philosophical challenges to our received notions of “the human” (and their socio-political implications) emerges a decisive change in our relation to time and space and to the natural world. If the interconnected, large-scale natural systems of air and oceanic currents that regulate the temperature on the globe must be re-conceptualized in terms of their cultural malleability, and human history conflates with the earth’s geostory, concepts like modernity automatically undergo refutation. Consequently, Latour emphatically describes the Anthropocene as what could become the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological political concept yet produced as an alternative to the notions of ‘Modern’ and ‘modernity.’ 7 Other critics also contend that the Anthropocene marks the end of modernity or more precisely, as Timothy Clark puts it, the closure of modernity in the sense of Derrida: “The epoch whose closure is at issue is that in which the finitude of the earth was ignored, discounted or forgotten” (132). According to Clark, climate change renders the intellectual structures that underpin the modern era both newly perceptible and philosophically exhausted (ibid.). For obvious reasons, most debates on climate now operate in a future tense and are driven by projections and extrapolations. 8 Yet, if, as critics like Latour and Clark have rather boldly suggested, we find ourselves at various end-points - not only the end-point of modernity but also the end-point of weather and climate as we know them - it seems appropriate to take a look beneficial in so far as it allows a historically contextualized analysis of the present crises which does not gloss over existing inequalities. 7 Latour writes: “[L’Anthropocène] peut devenir le concept philosophique, religieux, anthropologique et, comme nous allons le voir bientôt, politique le plus pertinent pour commencer à se détourner pour de bon des notions de ‘moderne’ et de ‘modernit’” (154). 8 See also Harris 18. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 8 back. This is what the present volume seeks to do by offering a historicizing perspective to climate and climate change. Examining how earlier cultures and literatures have told stories about the weather and have related to the climate of their time and place, we do not only want to point to the different meanings climate can take on in different cultures and historical epochs but also aim to gain a deeper, culture-oriented understanding of what the focus on ‘change’ in contemporary discussions of climate entails historically, aesthetically, and politically. In fact, ‘climate’ might be just another signifier for ‘culture.’ As James Rodger Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic have pointed out, the contemporary definition of climate as statistical index is “an anomaly” (2). In the course of history, climate “has more often been defined as what it does rather than what it is” (ibid.). Rather than simply being an index of aggregated weather trends, the two historians of science argue that climate has more often been used as an agent - as an explanatory framework for human behavior, national character, economic growth, and for defining geographical ‘problem areas.’ 9 Or, in Mike Hulme’s words: “The idea of climate has been bound up with, inter alia, imperial power, chauvinism, identity, nationhood, diet, colonialism, trade, health and morality” (26). In short, climate retains a cultural dimension as it is connected to a number of areas relevant to human existence. As a consequence, one could argue that the idea of climate is intimately tied to power relations and that the current state of unprecedented climate apprehension tells us more about the state of the world’s social relations 10 than a general synopsis of weather. While we as scholars of the humanities can hardly contribute to the future projections and simulations of physical climate conducted by climate science, we can certainly contribute to a historical understanding of climate by investigating the metaphoricity and the varying meanings different cultures have assigned at different times to climatic phenomena. The third axis that we suggest in order to intervene in current debates about the role of the human in the Anthropocene is a focus on the arts, and particularly on literature. As recent publications like Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) have impressively shown, literature contains a huge meteorological archive where weather and climate knowledge is not only registered but also scrutinized and produced. It affords insight into the different ways people have related to climate and, thus, forms an important part of the cultural history of climate we have argued for above. Yet, the value of literature for an understanding of climate 9 See also Hulme 16-26. 10 This, of course, includes the privileged position and normative domain climate science has acquired over the centuries. The scientific status of meteorology and climate science has not always been undisputed, though as is explored in detail in Peter Moore’s historical account of nineteenth century meteorologists titled The Weather Experiment (2015). Introduction 9 and the situation of climate change we are facing today should not only be seen in historicizing the present but also in dramatizing the future. What has been identified as one of the main challenges in the era of the Anthropocene - the problem of scale that poses a challenge to the human imagination - feeds without doubt into the core domain of literature and the arts: the power - and the problem - of imagination and representation. As Kathryn Yusoff has argued, at a time when humans face the challenge to think of themselves both in terms of a subject and in terms of a geophysical force, aesthetics, with their capacity of experimentation and condensation, “provide a possible site and mode of sensibility for engaging with the temporal and material contractions of the Anthropocene” (383). The task that the present volume sets itself, then, is not only to look for the depiction of future scenarios of climate disaster in literature - what eco-fiction has often been associated with - but also to explore the aesthetic potential of literature for poetically capturing the disjunctions that mark the Anthropocene and, thus, help them enter representation. Moreover, in the light of persisting power structures and inequalities inherited from modernity that continue to persist even as we enter a new geological epoch, another focus of the literary analyses attempted in this book lies on exploring how works of literature fashion the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in larger global networks - like those called upon by climate change. 11 The focus of the present volume is certainly not restricted to a particular kind of genre fiction, such as cli-fi, or to a particular kind of approach, such as ecocriticism. The project rather is to explore the huge meteorological archive that literature provides us with in order to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural, political, and aesthetic meanings that have emerged in the discourse on weather and climate in the past as well as in the present. The contributions collected in this volume largely proceed by way of a close reading of a single text, situating its ideas against wider historical, cultural, scientific or aesthetic currents. While it has been justifiably argued that this method has its limits, 12 we hold that the historical and aesthetic scope that the essays collected here as a whole certainly answer the need to study representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational framework as several critics have put forward. 13 In fact, our volume’s unique and new feature, also new to the REAL yearbook series, is its comparative approach to the topic. The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles, including weather debates in the nineteenth 11 See also Heise, Sense 210. 12 For a criticism regarding the method of close reading with regard to climate change, see Trexler and Johns-Putra 189. 13 See, e.g., Heise, “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities.” S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 10 century as well as the contemporary cli-fi novel, and with regard to a broad range of geographical contexts. As representatives of a variety of disciplines, such as German, Comparative, Scandinavian, British and American Literary Studies, the contributors adopt different methodological approaches to investigate the imaginative challenges of anthropogenic climate change and unpredictable weather, linking these with different philological concerns. With this interdisciplinary line-up, we aim to address the need for overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that major thinkers deem essential when debating the Anthropocene (cf. Clark 144). Reading Weather and Climate As pointed out above, anthropogenic climate change affects the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that used to define the humanities in at least three different ways: Firstly, by challenging the very distinction between nature and culture, human history and natural history. Secondly - and obviously related to the first point - by posing the challenge to think of human history and agency across multiple and incompatible scales at once, or as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, to think “disjunctively” about the human (“Postcolonial Studies” 2). Thirdly, anthropogenic climate change, as a profoundly abstract process, leaves us with the question of how to aesthetically and politically represent a phenomenon that is extraordinarily vast in temporal scale and extraordinarily complex and abstract in its effects and interrelations. The first three essays collected under the heading “Theorizing Weather and Climate Change” in this volume address all of these problems each with a different emphasis. The volume opens with a contribution by historian DIPESH CHA- KRABARTY, who initiated the ongoing discussion about the profound challenges and consequences of the Anthropocene for the humanities with “The Climate of History” (2009). In his essay “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Chakrabarty addresses the problem of different and incompatible scales of history that anthropogenic climate change prompts us to take into consideration simultaneously: “the history of the earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of the industrial civilization” (19). One result of the incommensurability of these differently scaled histories is the emergence of significant gaps - or “rifts,” as Chakrabarty calls them (21) - between cognition and action, which ultimately impede the development of a comprehensive politics of climate change. The major challenge is to translate the non-human scales that are constitutive of the two non-anthropocentric histories involved in anthropogenic climate change into a mode that is humanly experienceable in such a Introduction 11 way that they become meaningful and productive in the necessary fight against climate change. While he concedes that capitalism’s role in the emergence of the Anthropocene is undeniable, Chakrabarty contends that the capitalist history of late modernity cannot be considered the sole driver of such large-scale processes like planetary warming and makes a case for interplanetary research and thinking as more productive in the attempt to overcome the rifts in our thinking of the human in times of global warming. Taking anthropogenic climate change as a point of departure, ROBERT STOCKHAMMER argues that the central challenge for literary studies emerges from the diffusion of the boundary “between verum and factum, between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’” (44) and the need to respond to the shift in certainties that engagement with our anthropogenically shaped future has to confront. Stockhammer suggests three possible and necessary responses: the study of literary texts on climate change, the study of scientific texts on climate change, and the examination of prevailing rhetorical patterns in the dominant climate change discourse - which he understands to complement each other. He chooses to do the latter and proceeds to investigate three key terms crucial in contemporary climate change discourse: man, world, and we. Submitting these terms to a historical discussion, Stockhammer first explores the philosophical distinction between homo and anthropos and how each of these raises different implications about a climate-changing humanity. Second, by recourse to Humboldt’s meteorological studies in Kosmos, he discusses how the different conceptions of world and earth relate to humans and humanity as a geologically active force. Third, he critically discusses the ‘we’ of the anthropos that is the Anthropocene’s main premise and questions its presumed inclusivity. By scrutinizing the essential unrepresentability of climate change, EVA HORN conducts both a theoretical and a historical investigation into the trope of heat. As she argues, heat has been used politically as well as aesthetically to translate the very abstract processes of global warming into the realm of the graspable and imaginable. By analyzing the different implications of the thermal metaphor from Aristotle via Montesquieu to the present, Horn demonstrates the need to think of climate in terms of a cultural history that offers insight into the varying relationships between humankind and nature, cultures and climates, and into the different ways climate has been framed and been made to express itself. Horn’s essay lays out the theoretical groundwork for the “Historicizing Perspectives” that the next four essays in our volume offer. All look at representations of climate and weather in literary texts that were conceived long before the notion of climate change became virulent. JOHANNES UNGELENK takes a look at the immense meteorological archive that William Shakespeare has left us with in his work. By conducting a close S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 12 analysis of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Ungelenk constructs a proximity between the experience of unfamiliar and often hostile climates in the newly established British colonies and the experience produced in the relatively new cultural practice of early modern theatre. He reads Shakespeare’s theatre as a “hyper-space of climate” (98) that, like the rough climates experienced in the new world colonies, shake up the familiar climate at home and, ultimately, touch upon the body politic. A similar link between representations of weather and aesthetic practices, albeit with regard to another epoch and another genre, is explored in OLIVER GRILL’s contribution. With recourse to the inceptions of meteorological practice in Humboldt’s Kosmos, Grill engages with weather representations in Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (1857). Weather is not only one of the main topics Stifter’s characters discuss but also a central thematic device that animates and propels what remains of this novel’s plot. Grill explores this function by examining the way in which the unpredictability of weather undermines the idea of a cosmic order. He relates this meteorological contingency not only to the irreducible contingency specific to modernity but also to the genre of the novel, whose narrative structure, like meteorology, conventionally also works with patterns of expectation and fulfillment. Historically and culturally, the following contribution by SOLVEJG NITZKE remains in the same period. Nitzke investigates how the village stories of the Austrian writer Peter Rosegger register the modern developments in the rural nineteenth century Austrian countryside. Juxtaposing Rosegger’s seemingly sentimental and romanticizing fiction with the state of the art developments in meteorological science that are discussed in the country’s capital, Vienna, at that time, Nitzke opens up a tension that allows her to read meteorological events in Rosegger’s forest-fiction alongside the formalization and institutionalization of climatology. Rosegger’s texts, she argues, are not only an archive of contemporary cultural knowledge about weather and climate but also a commentary on modernization. Moreover, they provide an alternative perspective to the techno-industrial relationship towards nature that is calcifying throughout the late nineteenth century. Focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s assumed meteoropathy, PATRICK RAMPONI looks at the relationship between individual bodily experiences of weather and different climatic conditions, the meteorological knowledge of the late nineteenth century, and contemporary philosophical and cultural conceptions of how humans are influenced by weather and climate. After historically and culturally contextualizing the notion of sociometeorological correspondence, he illustrates the extent to which Nietzsche’s personal communication about his meteoropathy engages with weather and contemporary meteorology. In the philosopher’s correspondence, Ramponi argues, the main stance to weather is not primarily one that perceives it as a geophysical Introduction 13 phenomenon but rather as a psychophysiological one. This, in turn, makes Nietzsche rather skeptical towards the positivism of contemporary quantitative meteorology and the climatic and milieu-theoretical ideology of the nineteenth century. The next section, titled “Methods and Perspectives,” turns to contemporary negotiations of climate and climate change in literary fiction. Concerned with different genres - such as the contemporary cli-fi novel and photoembedded fiction - and various regions (North America, Europe’s northern regions, Africa, and Switzerland), the authors explore how contemporary literature relates aesthetically to the vast climatological shifts that affect the present. Focusing on the American author Paolo Bacigalupi and his novel The Water Knife (2015), ALEXA WEIK VON MOSSNER analyzes the implications of a dystopian vision of drought-ridden North America. The only essay to deal with the genre of cli-fi in a narrow sense, Weik von Mossner is not only interested in the estranged diegetic worlds this kind of fiction presents us with but also asks what kind of awareness-raising potential can be accorded to such novels. By taking up the approach of what she calls ‘cognitive econarratoloy,’ she argues that Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel aims at making its readers imaginatively experience the drastic effects of climate change on a visceral level. In contrast, REINHARD HENNIG is more concerned with the ethicopolitical implications than with aesthetic procedures of contemporary climate change fiction. The scholar of Scandinavian literature shows that the genre of climate change does not always serve the purpose of raising awareness for the devastating effects of climate change, but can also, as critics tend to forget, serve as an expression of the other end of the political scale, namely climate change denial. Focusing on the novel Chimera (2011) by Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug, Hennig also explores how strategies of climate change denial interrelate with other political ideologies such as islamophobia and the hope for totalitarian rule. Turning to the depiction of nature in Gerhard Richter’s and Alexander Kluge’s December (2010), URS BÜTTNER’s contribution engages with a recently published collaborative work by the artist and the writer that creatively brings together text and photography. Büttner explores how Kluge’s stories and Richter’s photographs that make up December individually and collectively challenge and subvert conventional narrative templates commonly used to narrate stories about nature. The author pays particular attention to how December frames and reframes the conditions for agency and events respectively. He argues that the photographs as well as the texts undermine commonplace patterns of narrating nature by redefining the parameters of S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 14 human and non-human agency, throwing into relief what constitutes an event and, thereby, upsetting narrative coherence. Whereas the essays by Weik von Mossner, Hennig and Büttner explore literature that deals with the effects of climate change on humanity as a whole and on the way we tell stories about it, the contributions presented in the last section of our volume, “Postcolonial Responses,” focus on the question of how issues of difference - not only in the sense of colonial and environmental injustice but also in the incompatibility of global developments and local concerns - persist and are articulated in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film. Focusing on Northern American film documentaries that deal with sinking islands in the Pacific due to sea level rise, ELIZABETH DE- LOUGHREY argues that most of these documentaries, despite their humble aim to raise awareness for the environmental catastrophe happening in the Pacific, display a colonial, patronizing attitude towards the Pacific Islands and their inhabitants. This, according to DeLoughrey, makes itself felt in both the images and the narratives chosen in order to represent the problem of the sinking islands. DeLoughrey sees a phenomenon she terms “imperialist nostalgia” (following Renato Rosaldo) operating at the heart of these documentaries, in which the main polluters, rather than taking a stance for the marginalized cultures and environments at stake, mourn that these exotic ‘island paradises’ no longer exist in the form they once entered colonial and exotic fantasies. Rereading Season of Migration to the North (1966/ 1969), the now classic postcolonial novel by Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, with specific regard to representations of nature - particularly the desert - SARAH FEKADU asks to what extent literature is able to give us a sense of the confrontation between human and nonhuman scales that characterize the Anthropocene. She argues that in Season of Migration to the North, the colonial spatial conflict between East and West, North and South is gradually superimposed by the attempt to poetically capture a nonhuman realm whose temporality is withdrawn from human colonization and control, thus pointing its readers to the disjunctions that mark life in the Anthropocene. In her contribution on Linda Hogan’s novel People of the Whale, HANNA STRAß-SENOL analyzes how Hogan’s novel can be read as an allegory of climate change that differs from familiar types of climate change narratives. Commonly, much of contemporary climate change fiction adopts either the narrative of catastrophe or that of anticipation to comment on climate change - both narrative strategies are anticipatory and future-oriented. In contrast, Hogan’s text, Straß-Senol argues, addresses and mediates climate change risks by narrating a story of enduring crisis. She further explores how People of the Whale’s allegorical story embeds a critique of the exploitative and re- Introduction 15 source-depleting lifestyle of industrialized societies and advocates a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. Giving room to all these different perspectives, our volume does not attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question of how to conceptualize the relationship between climate and weather in the Anthropocene, a question also raised by Cole’s protagonist Julius in Open City. Rather it hopes to contribute to the discourse of climate change in the humanities on a variety of theoretical and practical levels. Works Cited Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 1-18 ---. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 197- 222. Clark, Timothy. “Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental Politics, and the Closure of Ecocriticism.” The Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010): 131-149 Cole, Teju. Open City. London: Faber & Faber, 2011. Fleming, James Rodger and Vladimir Jankovic. “Revisiting Klima.” OSIRIS 26.1 (2011): 1-15. Harris, Alexandra. Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. Heise, Ursula K . “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities.” State of the Discipline Report: The 2014-15 Report of the State of the Discipline in Comparative Literature. 9 March 2014. <https: / / stateofthe discipline.acla.org/ entry/ comparative-literature-and-environmentalhumanities>. Web. 7 March 2017. ---. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hulme, Mike. Weathered: Cultures of Climate. London: SAGE Publications, 2017. Latour, Bruno. Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2015. Malm, Andreas and Alf Hornborg. „The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1.1 (2014): 62 -69. Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene - Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” 2014. <http: / / www.jasonwmoore.com/ uploads/ The_Capitalocene__Part_I__June_2014.pdf>. Web. 4 March 2017. Moore, Peter. The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers who Sought to See the Future. London: Chatto & Windus, 2015. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 16 Mukherjee, Upamanyu P. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Nixon, Rob. “The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene”. MLA 2014. Profession. 19 March 2014. <http: / / profession.commons.mla.org/ 2014/ 03/ 19/ the-greatacceleration-and-the-great-divergence-vulnerability-in-theanthropocene/ >. Web. 4 March 2017. Rossetti, Christina G. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin, 2001. Schulz, Kathryn. “Writers in the Storm: How Weather Went from Symbol to Science and Back Again”. The New Yorker November 23, 2015. http: / / www.newyorker.com/ magazine/ 2015/ 11/ 23/ writers-in-thestorm. Web. 05 March 2017. Trexler, Adam, and Adeline Johns-Putra. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism.” Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Reviews - Climate Change 2.2 (2011): 185-200. Twain, Mark. The American Claimant. 1892. The Complete Works of Mark Twain. New York: Harper, 1924. I. T HEORIZING W EATHER AND C LIMATE C HANGE D IPESH C HAKRABARTY Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 1 “It is hard, as humans, to get a perspective on the human race.” - Jan Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us. Anthropogenic global warming brings into view the collision—or the running up against one another—of three histories that, from the point of view of human history, are normally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: the history of the earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of the industrial civilization (for many, capitalism). Humans now unintentionally straddle these three histories that operate on different scales and at different speeds. The very language through which we speak of the climate crisis is shot through with this problem of human and inor non-human scales of time. Take the most ubiquitous distinction we make in our everyday prose between non-renewable sources of energy and the ‘renewables’. Fossil fuels we consider non-renewable on our terms but as Bryan Lovell, a geologist who worked as an advisor for BP and is an ex-president of the Geological Society of London, points out, fossil fuels are indeed renewable if only we think of them on a scale that is (in his terms) “inhuman”: “Two hundred million years from now, a form of life requiring abundant oil for some purpose should find that plenty has formed since our own times.” 2 Paleoclimatologists tell a very long history when it comes to explaining the significance of anthropogenic global warming. There is, first of all, the question of evidence. Ice core samples of ancient air—more than 800,000 years old—have been critical in establishing the anthropogenic nature of the current warming. There are, besides, paleoclimatic records of the past in fossils and other geological materials. In his lucid book on the oil industry’s response—not always or uniformly negative—to the climate crisis, Bryan Lovell writes that the group within the industry—those who supplied it with compelling evidence of the serious challenge that greenhouse gas emissions posed to the future of humanity—were geologists who could read deep cli- 1 A version of this article was first published in Critical Inquiry 41 (Autumn 2014): 1-23. We kindly thank Dipesh Chakrabarty and the editors of Critical Inquiry for allowing us to reprint this article. 2 See Solomon 446, Box 6.2. D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 20 mate histories buried in sedimentary rocks to see the effects of “a dramatic warming event that took place 55 million years ago.” In the literature, this is known as the late Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM): Comparison of the volume of carbon released to the atmosphere [then] […] and the volume we are now releasing ourselves strongly suggests that we are indeed facing a major global challenge. We are in danger of repeating that 55 million-yearold global warming event, which disrupted Earth over 100 000 years. That event took place long before Homo sapiens was around to light as much as a campfire. (Lovell xi) How far the arc of the geological history explaining the present climate crisis projects into the future may be quickly seen from the very subtitle of David Archer’s The Long Thaw, How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. “Mankind is becoming a force in climate comparable to the orbital variations that drive glacial cycles,” writes Archer (6). “The long lifetime of fossil fuel CO 2 ,” he continues, “creates a sense of fleeting folly about the use of fossil fuels as an energy source. Our fossil fuel deposits, 100 million years old, could be gone in a few centuries, leaving climate impacts that will last for hundreds of millennia. The lifetime of fossil fuel CO 2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25% that lasts essentially forever” (11). The carbon cycle of the Earth—as Archer explains and as Curt Stager repeats— will eventually clean up the excess CO 2 we put out in the atmosphere, but it works on an inhumanly long time scale (Stager chap. 2). The climate crisis thus produces problems that we ponder on very different and incompatible scales of time. Policy specialists think in terms of years, decades, at most centuries while politicians in democracies think in terms of their electoral cycles. Understanding what anthropogenic climate change is and how long its effects may last calls for thinking on very large and small scales at once, including scales that defy the usual measures of time that inform human affairs. This is another reason that makes it difficult to develop a comprehensive politics of climate change. Archer goes to the heart of the problem here when he acknowledges that the million-year time-scale of the planet’s carbon cycle is “irrelevant for political considerations of climate change on human time scales.” Yet, he insists, it remains relevant to any understanding of anthropogenic climate change because “ultimately the global warming climate event will last for as long as it takes these slow processes to act” (Archer 21). Significant gaps between cognition and action thus open up in the existing literature on the climate problem between what we scientifically know about it—the vastness of its nonor inhuman scale, for instance—and how we think about it when we treat it as a problem to be handled by the human means at our disposal. The latter have been developed for addressing problems we face on familiar scales of time. I call these gaps or openings in the Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 21 landscape of our thoughts “rifts” because they are like fault lines on a seemingly continuous surface: we have to keep crossing or straddling them as we think or speak of climate change. They inject a certain degree of contradictoriness in our thinking for we are being asked to think on different scales at once. I want to discuss here three such rifts: the various regimes of probability that govern our everyday lives in modern economies now having to be supplemented by our knowledge of the radical uncertainty (of the climate); the story of our necessarily divided human lives having to be supplemented by the story of our collective life as a species, a dominant species, on the planet; and having to wrestle with our inevitably anthropocentric thinking in order to supplement it with forms of disposition towards the planet that do not put humans first. We have not yet overcome these dilemmas to settle decidedly on any one side of them. They remain as rifts. In what follows, I elaborate on these rifts with a view to demonstrating that the analytics of capital (or of the market), while necessary, are insufficient instruments in helping us come to grips with anthropogenic climate change. I will go on to conclude by proposing that the climate crisis makes visible an emergent but critical distinction between the global and the planetary that will need to be explored further in order to develop a perspective on the human meaning(s) of global warming. Probability and Radical Uncertainty Modern life is ruled by regimes of probabilistic thinking. From evaluating lives for actuarial ends to the working of money and stock markets we manage our societies by calculating risks and assigning probability values to them. 3 “Economics,” writes Charles S. Pearson “often makes a distinction between risk, where probabilities of outcome are known, and uncertainty, where probabilities are not known and perhaps unknowable” (25). This is surely one reason why economics as a discipline has emerged as the major art of social management today. 4 There is, therefore, an understandable tendency in both climate-justice and climate-policy literature—the latter dominated by economists or law scholars who think like economists—to focus not 3 A thoughtful series of essays connecting public perceptions of risks and their management through statistical analyses and political and legal regulation is to be had in Sunstein, hereafter abbreviated RR. 4 A classic text on this topic is Knight. Knight would have objected to my use of the word “art” with regard to the discipline of economics for he considered it to be part of the sciences. He begins the book with the statement: “Economics, or more properly theoretical economics, is the only one of the social sciences which has aspired to the distinction of an exact science” (3) while praising Physics for securing “our present marvelous mastery over the forces of nature” (5). D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 22 so much on what paleoclimatologists or geophysicists who study planetary climate historically have to say about climate change but rather on what we might call the physics of global warming that often presents a predictable, static set of relationships of probability and proportion; if the share of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere goes up by X, then the probability of the earth’s average surface temperature going up by so much is Y. 5 Such a way of thinking assumes a kind of stability or predictability— however probabilistic it may be—on the part of a warming atmosphere that paleoclimatologists, focused more on the greater danger of tipping points, often do not assume. This is not because policy thinkers are not concerned about the dangers of climate change; nor because they are ignorant of the profoundly nonlinear nature of the relationship between greenhouse gases and rise in the planet’s average surface temperature. They clearly are. But their methods are such that they appear to hold or bracket climate change as a broadly known variable (converting its uncertainties into risks that have been acknowledged and evaluated) while working out options that humans can create for themselves striving together or even wrangling among themselves. The world climate system, in other words, has no significant capacity to be a wild card in their calculations in so far as they can make policy prescriptions; it is there in a relatively predictable form to be managed by human ingenuity and political mobilization. 6 The rhetoric of the climate scientists, on the other hand, in what they write to persuade the public is often remarkably vitalist. In explaining the danger of anthropogenic climate change, they often resort to a language that portrays the climate system as a living organism. There is not only the famous case of James Lovelock comparing life on the planet to a single living organism that he christened Gaia—a point that even the “sober” Archer accommodates in his primer on the global carbon cycle as a fair but “philosophical definition” (22). 7 Archer himself describes the “carbon cycle of the Earth” as “alive” (1). The image of climate as a temperamental animal also inhabits 5 See, for example, the chart reproduced in Stern 200. See also Posner and Weisbach chap. 2. 6 In a series of essays, the economist Martin Weitzman has emphasized how the usual cost-benefit analyses of “welfare loss” due to climate change assume temperature rises on the lower side, as the uncertainties of calculating the “damage function” consequent on a catastrophic rise of 10°-20° Celsius in the average global surface temperature throw economic calculations haywire. Weitzman remarks: “Even just acknowledging more openly the incredible magnitude of the deep structural uncertainties […] involved in climate-change analysis - and explain to policy makers that the artificial crispness conveyed by conventional IAM [Integrated Assessment Model]-based CBAs [Cost-Benefit Analysis] […] is especially and unusually misleading compared with more-ordinary non-climate-change CBA situations - might elevate the level of public discourse concerning what to do about global warming” (Weitzmann, “Some“ 26; Weitzmann, “GHG Targets” 221-244). 7 Lovelock himself defends the “concept” of Gaia at least as a metaphor (13). Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 23 the language of Wallace (Wally) Broecker who, with Robert Kunzig, thus describes his studies: Every now and then, [...] nature has decided to give a good swift kick to the climate beast. And the beast has responded, as beasts will—violently and a little unpredictably. Computer models [...] [are] certainly a valid approach. But studying how the beast has responded in the past under stress is another way to prepare ourselves for what might happen as we take a whack at it ourselves. That’s the idea that has obsessed Broecker for the past twenty-five years, and with each passing year it has come to seem more urgent. (100) Or notice how Hansen uses the word “lethargy” in explaining climate change: The speed of glacial-interglacial change is dictated by 20,000-, 40,000-, and 100,000year time scales for changes of Earth’s orbit—but this does not mean that the climate system is inherently that lethargic. On the contrary. Human-made climate forcing, by paleoclimate standards, is large and changes in decades, not tens of thousands of years. (Hansen 71) The vitalism of this prose does not arise because climate scientists are less “scientific” than economists and policy makers. The vitalist metaphors issue from climate scientists’ anxiousness to communicate and underscore two points about Earth’s climate: that its many uncertainties cannot ever be completely tamed by existing human knowledge and hence the inherent unpredictability of its exact “tipping points.” As Archer puts it: The IPCC forecast for climate change in the coming century is for a generally smooth increase in temperature. […] However, actual climate changes in the past have tended to be abrupt [...]. [C]limate models [...] are for the most part unable to simulate the flip flops in the past climate record very well. (95) It is in fact this sense of a “climate beast” that is missing from both the literature inspired by economics and that inspired by political commitments on the left. John Broome, a lead author of the Working Group III of the IPCC 2007 report and himself an economist-turned-philosopher, looks forward to a future where climate models continue to “narrow” the probabilities that “should be assigned to various possibilities.” For economic reasoning to have a better grasp of the world, “detailed information about probabilities” is needed, and, adds Broome, “we are waiting for it to be supplied by scientists” (128, 129). But this may be to misunderstand the nature of the planet’s climate and that of the models humans make of it. Climate uncertainties may not always be like measurable risks. “Do we really need to know more than we know now about how much the Earth will warm? Can we know more? ” asks Paul Edwards rhetorically. “It is now virtually certain that CO 2 concentrations will reach 550 ppm (the doubling point) sometime in the middle of this century,” and the planet “will almost certainly overshoot CO 2 doubling.” D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 24 Climate scientists, he reports, are engaged in the speculation “that we will probably never get a more exact estimate than we already have” (438-439). The reasoning behind Edwards’ statement is relevant to my argument. “If engineers are sociologists,” writes Edwards, “then climate scientists are historians.” Like historians, “every generation of climate scientists revisit the same data, the same events— digging through the archives to ferret out new evidence, correct some previous interpretation,” and so on. And “just as with human history, we will never get a single, unshakable narrative of the global climate’s past. Instead we get versions of the atmosphere, […] convergent yet never identical” (431). Moreover, “all of today’s analyses are based on the climate we have experienced in historical time.” “‘Once the world has warmed by 4°C,’” he quotes scientists Myles Allen and David Frame, “‘conditions will be so different from anything we can observe today (and still more different from the last ice age) that it is inherently hard to say when the warming will stop.’” Their point, Edwards explains, is this: it is not only that we do not know if “there is some ‘safe’ level of greenhouse gases that would ‘stabilize’ the climate” for humans; thanks to anthropogenic global warming, we may “never” be in a position to find out whether such a point of stabilization can exist in human timescales (439). The first rift that I speak of thus organizes itself around the question of the tipping point of the climate, a point beyond which global warming could be catastrophic for humans. That such a possibility exists is not in doubt. Paleoclimatologists know that the planet has undergone such warming in the geological past (as in the case of PETM event). But we cannot predict how quickly such a point could arrive. It remains an uncertainty that is not amenable to the usual cost-benefit analyses that are a necessary part of riskmanagement strategies. As Pearson explains, “BC [benefit-cost analysis] is not well suited for making catastrophe policy” and acknowledges that the “special features that distinguish uncertainty in global warming are the presence of nonlinearities, thresholds and potential tipping points, irreversibilities, and the long time horizon” that make “projections of technology, economic structure, preferences and a host of other variables 100 years from now increasingly questionable” (26, 31). “The implication of uncertainty, thresholds, tipping points,” he writes, “is that we should take a precautionary approach,” that is, “avoid taking steps today that lead to irreversible changes” (30). But “the precautionary principle,” as Sunstein explains, also involves cost-benefit analysis and some estimation of probability: “Certainly we should acknowledge that a small probability (say, 1 in 100,000) of serious harm (say, 100,000 deaths) deserves extremely serious attention” (103). But we simply don’t know the probability of the tipping point being reached over the next several decades or by 2100, for the tipping point would be a function of the rise in global temperature and multiple, unpredictable amplifying Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 25 feedback loops working together. Under the circumstances, the one principle that Hansen recommends to policy thinkers concerns the use of coal as a fuel. He writes: “If we want to solve the climate problem, we must phase out coal emissions. Period” (176). Not quite a “precautionary principle” but what in the literature on risks would be known as “the maximin principle”: “choose the policy with the best worst-case outcome” (Sunstein 129 n 40). But this would seem unacceptable to governments and business around the world, for without coal, which China and India are still dependent on to a large degree (68-70 percent of their energy supply), how would the majority of the world’s poor be lifted out of poverty in the next few decades and thus equipped to adapt to the impact of climate change? Or, would the world scrambling to avoid the tipping point of the climate make the global economy itself tip over and cause untold human misery? Thus, would avoiding “the harm” itself do more harm, especially as we do not know the probability of reaching the tipping point in the coming few decades? This is the dilemma that goes with the application here of the precautionary or the maximum principle, as both Sunstein and Pearson explain. 8 It is not surprising that Stephen Gardiner’s chapter on “cost-benefit” analyses in the context of climate change should be named “Cost-Benefit Paralysis! ” 9 Our Divided Lives as Humans and Our Collective Life as a Dominant Species Human-induced Climate Change gives rise to large and diverse issues of justice: justice between generations, between small island-nations and the polluting countries (both past and prospective), between developed, industrialized nations (historically responsible for most emissions) and the newly industrializing ones, and so on. Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson thus express a sense of discomfiture about the use of the word human in the expression human-induced climate change. They write: Behind the cosy language used to describe climate change as a common threat to all humankind it is clear that some people and countries contribute to it disproportionately, while other bear the brunt of its effects. What makes it a particularly tricky issue to address is that it is the people that will suffer most that currently 8 Sunstein acknowledges that “the worst-case scenario involving global warming” calls for the application of the maximin principle and yet recommends the “‘cap-and-trade’ system”—which assumes a gradual transition to renewables - as it “seems to be the most promising, in part because it is so much less expensive than the alternatives” (129). This amounts to replacing the maximum principle by the precautionary one. We can only infer how little understood the challenge of global warming-related “uncertainty” was among scholars who assumed that the usual strategies of risk-management would be an adequate response to the problem. 9 See Gardiner chap. 8. D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 26 contribute least to the problem, i.e. the poor in the developing world. Despite often being talked about as a scientific question, climate change is first and foremost a deeply political and moral issue. (7, author’s emphasis) In her endorsement of their book, the Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain remarks that “Climate Change we know is intrinsically linked to the model of economic growth in the world” (Climate Capitalism, back cover). The climate crisis, write John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York in their thoughtful book, The Ecological Rift, is “at bottom, the product of a social rift: the domination of human being by human being. The driving force is a society based on class, inequality, and acquisition without end” (47). A very similar position was put forward in 2009 when the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations published a report carrying the title Promoting Development and Saving the Planet. 10 In signing off the report, Sha Zukang, the then United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs wrote: The climate crisis is the result of the very uneven pattern of economic development that evolved over the past two centuries, which allowed today’s rich countries to attain their current levels of income, in part through not having to account for the environmental damage now threatening the lives and livelihoods of others. (viii) Characterizing climate change as a “development challenge,” Zukang went on to remark how a certain deficit of trust marks the attitude of the non- Western countries towards the West (xviii). The report actually expanded on his point: “How developing countries can achieve catch-up growth and economic convergence in a carbon-constrained world and what the advanced countries must do to relieve these concerns have become leading questions for policymakers at the national and international levels.” 11 The original formulation of this position, to the best of my knowledge, goes back to 1991 when two well-known and respected Indian environmental activists, the late Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, authored a booklet titled Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism published by their organization, Centre for Science and Environment, in Delhi. This booklet did much to generate the idea of “common but differentiated responsibilities” and the tendency to argue from figures of per capita emissions of greenhouse gases that became popular as part of the Kyoto protocol. 12 There are good reasons why questions of justice arise. Only a few nations (some twelve or fourteen including China and India in the last decade or so) and a fragment of humanity (about one-fifth) are historically responsible for 10 See Zukang. 11 See Department of Economic and Social Affairs 3. 12 This was part of the Principle 7 of the 1992 Rio Declaration of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 27 most of the emissions of greenhouse gases so far. This is true. But we would not be able to differentiate between humans as actors and the planet itself as an actor in this crisis if we did not realize that, leaving aside the question of inter-generational ethics that concerns the future, anthropogenic climate change is not inherently—or logically—a problem of past or accumulated intra-human injustice. Imagine the counterfactual reality of a more even prosperous and just world made up of the same number of people and based on exploitation of cheap energy sourced from fossil fuel. Such a world would have undoubtedly been more egalitarian and just—at least in terms of distribution of income and wealth—but the climate crisis would have been worse! Our collective carbon footprint would have only been larger—for the world’s poor do not consume much and contribute little to the production of greenhouse gases—and the climate change crisis would have been on us much sooner and in a much more drastic way. It is, ironically, thanks to the poor— that is, to the fact that development is uneven and unfair—that we do not put out even larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the biosphere than we actually do. Thus, logically speaking, the climate crisis is not inherently a result of economic inequalities—it is really a matter of the quantity of greenhouses gases we put out into the atmosphere. Those who connect climate change exclusively to historical origins/ formations of income inequalities in the modern world raise valid questions about historical inequalities; but a reduction of the problem of climate change to that of capitalism (folded into the histories of modern European expansion and empires) only blinds us to the nature of our present, a present defined by the coming together of the relatively short-term processes of human history and other much longer-term processes that belong to earth-systems history and that of the history of life on the planet. Agarwal and Narain’s insistence, however, that the natural carbon sinks—such as the oceans—are part of the global commons and hence best distributed between nations by applying the principle of equal access on a per capita basis if the world were to “aspire […] to such lofty ideals like global justice, equity and sustainability,” raises, by implication a very important issue: the simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed problem of population (5-9). Population is often the elephant in the room in discussions of climate change. The “problem” of population—while due surely in part to modern medicine, public health measures, eradication of epidemics, the use of artificial fertilizers, and so on—cannot be attributed in any straightforward way to a logic of a predatory and capitalist West, for neither China nor India pursued unbridled capitalism while their populations exploded. If India had been more successful with population control or with economic development, her per capita emission figures would have been higher (that the richer classes in India want to emulate Western styles and standards of consump- D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 28 tion would be obvious to any observer). Indeed, the Indian Minister in charge of the Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, said as much in an address to the Indian Parliament in 2009: “per-capita is an accident of history. It so happened that we could not control our population” (238). 13 Population remains a very important factor in how the climate crisis plays out. For without their having such large populations that the Chinese and Indian governments legitimately desire to “pull out of poverty,” they would not be building so many coal-fired power stations every year. The Indian government is fond of quoting Gandhi on the present environmental crisis: “Earth [prithvi] provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.” 14 Yet “greed” and “need” become indistinguishable from each other in arguments in defense of continued use of coal, the worst offender among fossil fuels. India and China want coal; Australia and other countries want to export it. It is still the cheapest variety of fossil fuel. In 2011, “‘coal represented 30 percent of world energy’” and that was “‘the highest share it [had] had since 1969.’” Coal use was expected to increase by 50 percent by 2035, bringing enormous export opportunities to companies in South America. “American coal companies,” remarked the report in the New York Times, “badly want to export coal from the country’s most productive mines in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana” as they saw that in the longer term, thanks to China and India, coal’s future seemed “bright— mainly because it is cheaper than its competitors” (Galuszka, n. pag.). This vast market for coal would not have come about without China and India justifying the use of coal by referring to the needs of their poor. Population is also a problem because the total size and distribution of humanity matters in how the climate crisis unfolds, particularly with regards to species extinction. There is the widely accepted point that humans have been putting pressure on other species for quite some time now; I do not need to belabor it. Indeed, the war between humans and wild animals such as rhinoceroses, elephants, monkeys, and big cats may be seen everyday in 13 See also the paper by D. Raghunandan in this book where he argues that this “climate justice” position that India championed at many international forums on climate change was informed more by “geopolitical assessments” than by any “deep scientific understanding” (Raghunandan 172, 173). 14 Quoted in Anand and Lindley 1. Gandhi is supposed to have said this in Hindi in 1947 to his secretary Pyarelal Nayyar who reproduced it in his book, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase. 2 vols. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House,1956- 1958). Anand and Lindley say that Gandhi was influenced by the work of J. C. Kumarappa, in turn a Gandhian economist to whose book Economy of Permanence (1945) Gandhi contributed a preface. Interestingly, India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change incorrectly paraphrases Gandhi’s dictum as saying “The earth has enough resources to meet people’s needs, but will never have enough to satisfy people’s greed,” thus missing the emphasis that Gandhi typically put on the individual’s sense of moral responsibility (Government of India 1). Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 29 many Indian cities and villages. That we have consumed many varieties of marine life out of existence is also generally accepted. Ocean acidification threatens the lives of many species (see SM). And, clearly, as many have pointed out, the exponential growth of human population in the twentieth century has itself had much to do with fossil fuels through the use of artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and pumps for irrigation. 15 But there is another reason why the history of human evolution and the total number of human beings today matter when we get to the question of species survival as the planet warms. One way that species threatened by global warming will try to survive is by migrating to areas more conducive to their existence. This is how they have survived past changes in the climatic conditions of the planet. But now there are so many of us, and we are so widespread on this planet, that we stand in the way. Curt Stager puts it clearly: Even if we take a relatively moderate emissions path into the future and thereby hope to avoid destroying the last polar and alpine refugees, warming on the scale [expected] [...] will still nudge many species toward higher latitudes and elevations. In the past, species could simply move [...] but this time they’ll be trapped within the confines of habitats that are mostly immobilized by our presence[...]. As Anthropocene warming rises toward its as yet unspecified peak, our longsuffering biotic neighbors face a situation that they have never encountered before in the long, dramatic history of ice ages and interglacials. They can’t move because we’re standing in their way. (62) The irony of the point runs deeper. The spread of human groups throughout the world— the Pacific islands were the last to be settled by around 3,500 BP—and their growth in the age of industrial civilization now make it difficult for human climate refugees to move to safer and more inhabitable climes (Denny and Matisoo-Smith, n. pag.). Other humans will stand in their way. Burton Richter puts the point thus: We [humans] were able to adapt to [climate] change in the past [...] but there were tens of thousands of years to each swing compared with only hundreds of years for the earth to heat up this time. The slow pace of change gave the relatively small population back then time to move, and that is just what it did during the many temperature swings of the past, including the ice ages. The population now is too big to move en masse, so we had better do our best to limit the damage that we are causing (2) The history of population thus belongs to two histories at once: the very short-term history of the industrial way of life—of modern medicine, technology, and fossil fuels (fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation)—that accompanied and enabled the growth in our numbers and the much, much longer-term evolutionary or deep history of our species, the history through which we 15 See Smil 221, and Butler 11-12. D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 30 have evolved to be the dominant species of the planet, spreading all over it and now threatening the existence of many other life-forms. The poor participate in that shared history of human evolution just as much as the rich do. The Duke University geologist, P. K. Haff, has convincingly argued in a recent paper that it would not be possible to sustain the lives of seven - soon to be nine - billion people on the planet without modern forms of energy and communications technology touching all our lives in some significant ways. Minus this network of connections, he argues, the total human population on earth will collapse to about 10 million. The “technosphere,” he argues, has become the condition of possibility enabling so many of us, both rich and poor, to live on this planet and act as its dominant species (Haff, n.pag.). The per capita emission figures, while useful in making a necessary and corrective polemical point in the political economy of climate change, hide the larger history of the species in which both the rich and the poor participate. Population is clearly a category that conjoins the two histories together. Are Humans Special? The Moral Rift of the Anthropocene Just because the climate crisis reveals the sudden coming together—the enjambment, if you will—of the usually-separated syntactic orders of recorded and deep histories of the human kind, of species history and the history of the earth systems, revealing the deep connections through which the planet’s carbon cycle and life interact with each other and so on, it does not mean that this knowledge will stop humans from pursuing, with vigor and vengeance, our all too human ambitions and squabbles that unite and divide us at the same time. In their fascinating paper on the Anthropocene, Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill have drawn our attention to what they call— after Polyani, I assume—the period of “The Great Acceleration” in human history, circa 1945 to 2015, when global figures for population, real GDPs, foreign direct investment, damning of rivers, water use, fertilizer consumption, urban population, paper consumption, transport motor vehicles, telephones, international tourism, and McDonald’s Restaurants (yes! ) all began to increase dramatically in an exponential fashion (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill 614-621). This period, they suggest, could be a strong candidate for an answer to the question, When did the Anthropocene begin? While the Anthropocene may stand for all the climate problems we face today collectively, as a historian of human affairs it is impossible for me not to notice that this period of so-called great acceleration is also the period of great decolonization in countries that had been dominated by European imperial powers and that made a move towards modernization (the damming of rivers, for instance) over the ensuing decades and, with the globalization of the last twenty years, towards a certain degree of democratization of consumption as well. I cannot Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 31 ignore the fact that “the great acceleration” included the production and consumption of consumer durables—such as the refrigerator and the washing machine—in Western households that were touted as “emancipatory” for women. 16 Nor can I forget the pride with which today the most ordinary and poor Indian citizen now possesses his or her smart phone or a fake and cheap substitute (Doron and Jeffrey). The lurch into the Anthropocene has also been globally the story of some long-anticipated social justice as well, at least in the sphere of consumption. This justice between humans, however, comes at a price. The result of growing human consumption has been a near-complete human appropriation of the biosphere. Jan Zalasiewicz cites some sobering statistics from the researches of Vaclav Smil: Smil has taken our measure from the most objective criterion of all: collective weight. Considered simply as body mass […] we now bulk up to about a third of terrestrial vertebrate body mass on Earth. Most of the other two-thirds, by the same measure, comprise what we keep to eat: cows, pigs, sheep and such. Something under 5% and perhaps as little as 3%, is now made of the genuinely wild animals—the cheetahs, elephants, antelopes and the like. […] Earlier in the Quaternary [the last two million years], […] humans were just one of some 350 large […] vertebrate species. “Given the precipitate drop in the numbers of wild vertebrates, one might imagine that vertebrate biomass as a whole has gone down,” writes Jalasiewicz. “Well, no,” he continues: Humans have become very good at, firstly, increasing the rate of vegetable growth, by conjuring nitrogen from the air and phosphorus from the ground, and then directing that extra growth towards its brief stopover in our captive beasts, and thence, to us. […] The total vertebrate biomass has increased by something approaching an order of magnitude above ‘natural’ levels. (24) “Staggering, isn’t it? ” Zalasiewicz remarks. 17 Vaclav Smil concludes his massively researched book, Harvesting the Biosphere, with these cautionary words: If billions of poor people in low-income countries were to claim even half the current per capita harvests prevailing in affluent economies, too little of the Earth’s primary production would be left in its more or less natural state, and very little would remain for mammalian species other than ours. (252) 16 For an Australian example of this, see Johnson. 17 Zalasiewicz 24. While Zalasiewicz’s summary of Smil’s researches is extremely helpful, it should be remembered most of Smil’s effort in Harvesting the Biosphere is directed at reminding the reader of the methodological challenges involved in measuring the changes reported on here and how approximate and provisional the relevant numbers are. Zalasiewicz’s figures quotes here are based on Smil 613-636. I owe this reference to Jan Zalasiewicz. D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 32 This raises a question that bears striking similarity to the question that Europeans often asked themselves when they forcibly or otherwise took over other peoples’ lands: by what right or on what grounds do we arrogate to ourselves the almost exclusive claims to appropriate for human needs the biosphere of the planet? The Oxford moral philosopher John Broome confronts this question in his book on “ethics in a warming world.” In a section entitled “What is ultimately good? ,” Broome acknowledges that climate change raises this question - “in particular the question if nature - species, ecosystems, wildernesses, landscapes - has value in itself.” But that question he decides is “too big” for his book and yet still proceeds to offer these thoughts on the value of nature: Nature is undoubtedly valuable because it is good for people. It provides material goods and services. The river brings us our clean water and takes away our dirty water. Wild plants provide many of our medicines, [...] Nature also brings emotional good to people. But the significant question raised by climate change is whether nature has value in itself. [...] This question is too big for this book. I shall concentrate on the good of the people. (112-113) But is “the good of the people” an unquestionable good? Are we special? The paleoclimatologist David Archer begins his book The Long Thaw addressing this very question. Science, Archer thinks, is humbling for humans for it does not hold up the case for human specialness. It rather tells us we are not “biologically ‘special’” - “we are descended from monkeys, and they from even humbler origins.” Geological evidence, he further writes, “tells us that the world is much older than we are, and there’s no evidence that it was created especially for us[...]. This is all very humbling” (2). But the tricky question of the assumed specialness of humans takes us into a past much longer than that of capital and into territories that we never had to cross in thinking about the inequalities and injustices of the rule of capital. The idea that humans are special has, of course, a long history. We should perhaps speak of anthropocentrisms in the plural here. There is, for instance, a long line of thinking—from religions that long came after humans established the first urban centers of civilization and created the idea of a transcendental God through to the modern social sciences—that has humans positioned as facing the rest of the world, as nature. These later religions are in strong contrast, it seems, with the much more ancient religions of huntinggathering peoples (I think here of the Australian Aboriginals and their stories) that often saw humans as part of animal life (as though we were part of the Animal Planet show and not simply watching it from outside the idiot box). The humans were not necessarily special in these ancient religions. They ate and got eaten in the same way that other animals did. They were part of life. Recall Durkheim’s position on totemism. In determining “the place of man” in the scheme of totemistic beliefs, Durkheim was clear that Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 33 totemism pointed to a doubly conceived human, or what he called the “double nature” of man: “Two beings co-exist within him: a man and an animal.” And again: “we must be careful not to consider totemism a sort of animal worship. …Their [men and their totems’] relations are rather those of two things who are on the same level and of equal value” (134-139). The very idea of a transcendental God puts humans in a special relationship to the Creator and to his creation, the world. This point needs a separate and longer discussion but for a completely random and arbitrary—arbitrary, for I could have chosen examples from other religious traditions including Hinduism—example of this for now, consider the following remarks from Fazlur Rahman. By way of explaining the term qadar—meaning both “power and measuring out”—that the Quran uses in close association with another word, amr, meaning “‘command’” to express the nature of God, Rahman remarks thus on God’s relationship to man as mediated through nature: [The] all-powerful, purposeful, and merciful God […] ‘measures out’ everything, bestowing upon everything the right range of its potentialities, its laws of behavior, in sum, its character. This measuring on the one hand ensures the orderliness of nature and on the other expresses the most fundamental, unbridgeable difference between the nature of God and the nature of man: the Creator’s measuring implies an infinitude wherein no measured creature […] may literally share. (12, 13) This is why “nature does not and cannot disobey God’s commands [amr] and cannot violate natural laws” (12-13). While this enjoins very clearly that man must not play God, it does not mean, as Rahman clarifies, that “man cannot discover those laws and apply them for the good of man” (13). God is kind because he has stocked the world with provisions for us! 18 Environmentalists, similarly, have long cited a verse in the Genesis in which “the Lord says ‘[Let men] have dominion . . . over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on earth.’ He enjoins man to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it’” (Partridge 103). The literature on climate change thus reconfigures an older debate on anthropocentrism and so-called nonanthropocentrism that has long exercised philosophers and scholars interested in environmental ethics: do we value 18 An interesting text claiming from a mixture of Hindu and Budhhist perspectives—a special relationship between man and God is Rabindranath Tagore’s 1930 Oxford Hibbert Lectures published as “The Religion of Man” (1931) in which Tagore showed an awareness of a Hindu theological position that conceived of God as indifferent to human affairs but rejected it in favor of a Buddhist understanding of infinity that “was not the idea of a spirit of an unbounded cosmic activity, but the infinite whose meaning is in the positive ideal of goodness and love, which cannot be otherwise than human” (Tagore 111). D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 34 the nonhuman for its own sake or because it is good for us? 19 Nonanthropocentrism, however, may indeed be a chimera for, as the Chinese scholar Feng Han points out in a different context, “human values will always be from a human (or anthropocentric) point of view” (22-23). 20 While ecologicallyminded philosophers in the 1980s made a distinction between “weak” and “strong” versions of anthropocentrism, they supported the weak versions. Strong anthropocentrism had to do with unreflexive and instinctive use or exploitation of nature for purely human preferences; weak anthropocentrism was seen as a position arrived at through rational reflections on why the nonhuman was important for human flourishing. 21 Lovelock’s work on climate change, however, produces a radically different position, on the other side of the rift as it were. He packs it into a pithy proposition that works almost as the motto of his book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: “to consider the health of the Earth without the constraint that the welfare of humankind comes first” (35-36). He emphasizes: “I see the health of the Earth as primary, for we are utterly dependent upon a healthy planet for survival” (36). In an interview given to the BBC in 2009, he even contemplated the prospect of a crash of human population, for he thought that “living the way we do,” not more than one billion lives were sustainable without harm to life on the planet. 22 What does it mean for humans, given their inescapable anthropocentrism, to consider “the Earth as primary” or to contemplate the implications of Archer’s statement that the world was not “created specially for us? ” I will consider this question in the following and concluding section of this essay. Climate and Capital, the Global and the Planetary In his book, Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek made some interesting criticism of my essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Some of it concerned points about the true nature of Hegelian dialectic that I will not discuss here. But he also made a point about the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and “the capitalist mode of production” that allows me to get into my final stride in this essay. Responding to my points that there were “natural parameters” to our existence as a species that were relatively independent of our choices between capitalism and socialism and 19 See, for instance, Buell 224-242. 20 I am grateful to Professor Ken Taylor for drawing my attention to this thesis. Han, of course, is echoing Eugene Hargrove; see Hargrove 183-207, and Lai 79. 21 See, for example, Norton: 131-48. Norton was the first to propose the idea of “weak anthropocentrism” that has since been taken up by many. 22 BBC interview with James Lovelock, “Population Reduction ‘Max. 1 Billion” on You Tube, http: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=dBUvZDSY2D0 [accessed on June 9, 2014]. Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 35 that we therefore needed to think deep history of the species and the much shorter history of capital together, Žižek remarked: Of course, the natural parameters of our environment are ‘independent of capitalism or socialism’ - they harbor a potential threat to all of us, independently of economic development, political system, etc. However, the fact that their stability has been threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication that the one allowed by Chakrabarty: in a way, we have to admit that the Whole is contained by its Part, that the fate of the Whole (life on earth) hinges on what goes on in what was formerly one of its parts (the socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on earth). (333-334) Given this premise, his conclusion followed: we also have to accept the paradox that … the key struggle is the particular one: one can solve the universal problem (of the survival of human species) only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. … [T]he the key to the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such. (333-334) Žižek’s proposition with regard to the role of the capitalist mode of production in the drama of Climate Change goes well beyond what I have proposed in this essay. That the capitalist or industrial civilization, dependent on largescale availability of cheap fossil-fuel energy, is a proximate or efficient cause of the climate crisis is not in doubt. I am in agreement with most scholars on that point. But Žižek puts capitalism in the driver’s seat; it is the “part” that now determines “the whole.” My position is different: to say that the history and logic of a particular human institutions have gotten caught up in the much larger processes of the earth systems and evolutionary history (stressing the lives of several species including ourselves) is not to say that human history is the driver of these large-scale processes. These latter processes continue over scales of space and time that are much larger than those of capitalism; hence the rifts we have discussed. As Stager and Archer point out, however much the “excess” CO 2 we put out today, the long-term processes of the earth-system, it’s million-year carbon cycle, for instance, will most likely “clean it up” one day, humans or no humans (Stager chap. 2, Archer 20). Which is why it seems logically more consistent to see these longterm Earth-system processes as co-actors in the drama of global warming. This is also suggested by the fact that, unlike the problems of wealth accumulation or income inequalities, or the questions posed by globalization, the problem of anthropogenic climate change could not have been predicted from within the usual frameworks deployed to study the logics of capital. The methods of political economic investigation and analyses do not usually entail digging up 800,000-year-old ice-core samples or making satellite observations of changes in the mean temperature of the planet’s surface. “Climate Change” is a problem defined and constructed by climate scientists D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 36 whose research methods, analytical strategies, and skill-sets are different from those possessed by students of political economy. Once we grant processes belonging to the deeper history of Earth and life the role of co-actors in the current crisis, playing themselves out on scales both human and non-human, the prescience of a sentence Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote a while ago comes into view: “The planet is the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it” (338). Spivak was on to something. Her formulation takes a step towards pondering the human implications of the kind of planetary studies that inform and underpin the science of climate change. This science drives a clear wedge between an emergent conception of the planetary and existing ideas regarding the global. For even though the current phase of warming of the earth’s atmosphere is indeed anthropogenic, it is only contingently so; humans have no intrinsic role to play in the science of planetary warming as such. The science is not even specific to this planet - it is part of what is called planetary science. It does not belong to an earthbound imagination. A basic textbook used in many Geophysics departments to teach “planetary warming” is simply called Planetary Science. 23 Our current warming is an instance of planetary warming that has happened both on this planet and on other planets, humans or no humans, and with different consequences. It just so happens that the current warming of the earth is of human doing. The “global” of globalization literature, on the other hand, cannot be thought without humans directly and necessarily placed at the very center of the narrative. It is not surprising then that some of the key scientists active in debates on global warming are scholars who used to study other planets. James Hansen, often thought of as the Godfather of the science of global warming in the US, was initially a student of planetary warming on Venus and only later transferred his interests to earth, out of concern and curiosity. Hansen writes: “[…] in 1978, I was still studying Venus” (xiv). He shifted to studying the earth because, he says, the atmosphere of our home planet was changing before our eyes, and it was changing more and more rapidly. […] The most important change was the level of carbon dioxide, which was being added to the air by the burning of fossil fuels. We knew that carbon dioxide determined the climate on Mars and Venus. I decided it would be more useful and interesting to try to help understand how the climate of our own planet would change, rather than study the veil of clouds shrouding Venus. (xiv-xv) He shifted the site of his research to this planet, thinking that it would be a “temporary obsession”(xv). 23 See Pierrehumbert. Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories 37 Consider the case of James Lovelock and his legendary, if controversial, theory of the Gaia. His “moment of inspiration” reportedly came “one afternoon in September 1965” when he was in California, working for NASA, “worrying about the composition of the atmosphere on Mars as opposed to that on Earth”(Ruse 5). 24 Why was earth so rich in life while Mars seemed barren? Did the red planet once harbor life? Could life have left its imprint in the planet’s atmosphere? Those were the questions driving Lovelock’s investigations much as they still do many other students of the planetary system. What makes a planet host and sustain life? Does life have a role to play in its own sustenance? 25 Similar questions inspired Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams to write their book, The Goldilocks Planet. In the trade, the life-harboring quality of a planet is called the “Habitability Problem,” and as Pierrehumbert reminds us, “the book is far from closed” on this issue (10-14). The scientific problem of climate change thus emerges from what may be called “comparative planetary studies” and entails a degree of interplanetary research and thinking. The imagination at work here is not humancentered. It speaks to a growing divergence in our consciousness between the global - a singularly human story - and the planetary, a perspective to which humans are incidental. 26 The climate crisis is about waking up to the rude of shock of the recognition of the otherness of the planet. The planet, to speak with Spivak again, “is the species of alterity, belonging to another system.” And “yet,” as she puts it, “we live on it.” If there is to be a comprehensive politics of climate change, it has to begin from this perspective. The realization that humans - all humans, rich or poor come late in the planet’s life and dwell more in the position of passing guests than possessive hosts, has to be an integral part of the perspective from which we pursue our all-too-human but legitimate quest for justice on issues to do with the iniquitous impact of anthropogenic climate change. Acknowledgements I have presented versions of this paper to different audiences: at the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2013 initially, and then at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Harvard University, The University of California at Berkeley, The Australian National University, University of Technology, Sydney, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. I am grateful to my hosts and 24 The mention of NASA also reminds us of the role that the Cold War played in government patronage for such research. 25 This is, of course, the famous “Gaia” hypothesis. 26 I speak of the “growing divergence” between the planetary and the global because there is an established tradition of using the two words to mean the same thing. See, for instance, Schmitt 86-88, 173, 351. D IPESH C HAKRABARTY 38 audiences for their engaged comments and criticisms. Special thanks are due to the editorial collective and staff of Critical Inquiry, Clive Hamilton, Fredrik Jonsson, Jan Zalasiewicz, Devleena Ghosh, Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Bernd Scherer, Émilie Hache, Bruno Latour, Ewa Domanska, Sanjay Seth, James Mallet, Jeremy Schmidt, Dan Smail, Emma Rothschild, Homi K. 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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010. Zukang, Sha. “Overview.” Promoting Development and Saving the Planet. World Economic and Social Survey 2009. New York, 2009. <http: / / www.un.org/ en/ development/ desa/ policy/ wess/ wess_archive/ 2009wess.pdf>. Web. 9 June 2014. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER Philology in the Anthropocene Preliminary Remarks: The Possible Tasks of a Philology in the Anthropocene According to Paul Crutzen and others, ‘we’ - and I will return to the problem of this use of the first-person plural pronoun at the end of this article - might find ourselves in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. An Anthropocene Working Group has already recommended recognizing this new epoch - but has to leave its official acceptation to three parent organizations whose decisions might take some time (“Media Note“). The name of this epoch is as much in need of explanation as the very fact that a whole new epoch is supposed to be commencing. The official epoch so far, the Holocene, is still remarkably young in geological time, just 11,717 years old; besides it is hard to surpass this epoch, since geologists have already described it as the “totally new” epoch (from: ὅλος, ‘totally’, and καινός, ‘new’), and what could be newer than the totally new? Moreover, the mention of the ‘human’ in the title of this proposed new epoch can be misleading, since humans have long existed in the Holocene. (There were already human beings during the Pleistocene, incidentally, although readers of German literature might be perplexed about this: Geiser, the protagonist of Max Frisch’s novel Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, confuses the two epochs, and the title adopts his confusion.) What is newer than the totally new, what is in fact humanly-new (from: ἄνθρωπος, ‘human, and καινός, ‘new’) is that humans have changed the Earth in such a way that the consequences of these changes will in all likelihood continue to leave their mark for a long time yet to come. If 23,000 years from now archeologists from the planet Kepler-186 f (an Earth-like exoplanet only 492 light-years from the Earth) land here, they will find, among other things, enormous hollowed-out layers of stone as well as elevated CO 2 levels, 1 and their research will show these to be caused by humans - even if there are no longer any living specimens of humanity left, even if the stench of billions of human corpses has already dissipated (cf. Horn 12 for a critique of such aseptic post-apocalyptic scenarios like this one I have just invented). Whether the Anthropocene gets dated back to the invention of the steam engine or the atom bomb is relatively insignificant, since these are extremely 1 These can be regarded as indicative signatures, or “geological signals,” in strata now forming for the International Commission on Stratigraphy to formally accept the Anthropocene as a new geographical epoch (cf. Subcomission on Quarternary Stratigraphy). R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 44 brief moments on the geological time scale - whereas the duration of the noticeable consequences will certainly be measurable on this scale: “Humans have become geological agents” (Oreskes 1686). In this “mix up of time scales,” the “distinction between history and geostory” vanishes, Latour notes (“Le mélange d’échelles de temps,” “la distinction entre l’histoire et la géohistorie avait soudainement disparu,” 153-154). This “mix up of time scales” has epistemological consequences among others; as Dipesh Chakrabarty formulated it, “anthropogenetic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (“Climate of History” 201). Chakrabarty primarily looks to Giambattista Vico’s epistemological distinction between the verum, as the object of natural history, and the factum, the man-made, as the object of human history. As Chakrabarty explicitly concedes that this dichotomy is a simplification owing more to Benedetto Croce’s influential reception of Vico than to Vico’s own text, a fresh reading of some paragraphs of the Scienza Nuova might be helpful. After all, Vico’s epistemological reflections also concern philology, the discipline that today’s literary theorists are heirs to. For according to Vico, human history is the essential object of philology, which includes “all the grammarians, historians, critics who have occupied themselves with the cognition of languages and deeds of peoples” (“Questa Degnità per la seconda parte diffinisce i Filologi essere tutti i Gramatici, Istorici, Critici, che son’occupati d’intorno alla cognizione delle Lingue, e de’ Fatti de’ popoli [...],” 120). He adds that philology adheres to the “certain things” (“la Filologia osserva l’Autorità dell’ Umano Arbitrio, onde viene la Coscienza del Certo,” 120) and is able to know these things precisely and only because they have been made by humans (172-173, 187). This connection between the made and the certain can be seen in the Latinate and Romance languages: factum, fatto, fait; facts are made. And it follows from this, in fact, that the melting of the polar ice or the flooding of the South Pacific Islands are part of the subject matter of philology insofar as these phenomena can be traced back to anthropogenic climate change. This conclusion, admittedly, looks megalomaniacal and also, in view of the advanced differentiation of the sciences, impracticable. Moreover, one could object that climate change is not a certainty (Certo) but rather involves various degrees of probability: that it is occurring is a near certainty; the predictions of concrete consequences have very different degrees of probability. Yet this blurring of the boundary between verum and factum, between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture,’ challenges philology to reflect on how it can respond to anthropogenic climate change. At first glance, three possible sorts of reaction are conceivable. (1) As far as philology sees itself as literary studies, it can study literary representations of climate change. In fact an entire genre labeled “Cli-Fi” has already been Philology in the Anthropocene 45 identified and the first anthologies are coming out (Adams). Ecocriticism, a currently fashionable subdiscipline in literary studies, has only turned to the topic of climate change quite recently, however. 2 Moreover, ecocriticism itself tends to reduce speech to the function of appeal. An article on Roland Emmerich’s film The Day After Tomorrow is typical in this regard: After a sheepish admission that the film represents the worst sort of dumbing-down, the article ultimately defends the film, noting that it at least produces an emotional response that could then be further processed in “educational contexts” (Weik von Mossner 254). 3 To take specifically literary speech (or the specific methods of film or other media and arts) more seriously philologists would have to ask, for example, whether climate change is just an object in the sense that a university campus is an object, that is, whether the group of artifacts in question can simply be defined by thematic criteria in advance (Horn 166). Climate change is not so much an ‘object’ as it is a ‘hyperobject’ that is not localizable and cannot be unproblematically objectified (Morton). It requires careful reflection to determine which texts that are not explicitly and thematically related to climate change can nonetheless offer insights, and for what reasons. - In this article I refer only sparingly to texts that count thematically as part of the literature on climate change in the narrow sense; one text I discuss at the end, by Mirko Bonné, deals not so much with climate change as with the difficulty of representing climate change, whereas others (from Sophocles, Lucretius and Wallace Stevens) are not specifically responding to climate change at all. (2) Philology can also bring scientific texts on climate change into its investigations, not only to have a basis of more or less certain facts to refer to as the necessary background knowledge for any engagement with climate change, but also and above all out of an interest in how this knowledge gets generated. This is all the more necessary as many representatives of the ‘literary culture’ hold onto a crude version of Snow’s ‘two cultures’ dichotomy - and are thus even more naïve than the representatives of the ‘scientific culture’ who they accuse of naivety. Intellectuals, who are typically only cognizant of the discussions in mass media - where research results are reported in an extremely reductive form and the mere opinions of ‘climate sceptics’ are severely overrepresented - seem to find it an intellectually responsible position to emphasize that climate research has not produced any certain knowledge and that there are sceptics who shouldn’t be dismissed. (The intellectuals of this pseudo-free-thinking sort include novelists such as Crichton and McEwan - or at least their narrators.) Firstly, however, there is essen- 2 In his Cambridge Introduction, Timothy Clark notes the surprisingly low number of pertinent contributions and explains: “Ecocriticism evolved primarily to address local and easily identifiable outrages and injustices” (10-11). 3 The best possible reaction to this film came just a year after its release: “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow,” the eighth episode of the ninth season of South Park. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 46 tially no fundamental and scientifically grounded skepticism about the extremely high probability of global warming and its source in human activity (Oreskes); and secondly, those in the climate sciences are very much aware of the fact that they are dealing with probabilities of various degrees and not with certainties - the idea that empirical sciences have to formulate certainties is a projection on the part of non-scientists. “No less than molecular biology or physics, climate science relies on simulations and models, which we nonetheless cannot dismiss as ‘pure constructions’ and therefore untrue” (Horn 176). Some of the procedures for generating knowledge about climate change are far more similar to philological methods than many philologists would ever dream of (Gramelsberger); hence scientists have long adhered to the conclusion from Vico’s epistemological premises that the melting of the polar ice is an object of philology. - This article is not meant to contribute to an analysis of our current knowledge of climate, but it will more precisely describe these procedures in an older form (in Alexander von Humboldt’s work) and argues that the categories developed there can still help to understand the current situation. (3) Finally, philology can examine the forms of speech and writing prevailing in the general discourse (not limited to either literature or the relevant scientific disciplines) about climate change. Many words get used here in distressingly unreflective ways. For example, it is popular to ask in surveys whether or not someone ‘believes’ in climate change - as if this were a religious question, rather than a question that could, after a review of the research results, be translated into the more precise question: ‘According to the results of Naomi Oreskes, out of 928 articles on climate change published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, no single article disputes the warming of the Earth or its anthropogenic character (and nothing essential has changed since then). What do you think is the probability that all of these scientific publishers are being manipulated by financially powerful and ideologically motivated environmentalists who have succeeded in preventing all the climate skeptics financed by the oil and gas industries from publishing their divergent findings? ’ What is more, the words and sentences used to appeal to individuals to do something or other against climate change are rather hollow. These include warnings like ‘the world will end’ or ‘humanity will die out’ - warnings that can be visualized particularly well in literary and cinematic fictions. The flaw of such apocalyptic scenarios is not that they exaggerate or are guilty of fear-mongering - as the know-it-all ‘free-thinkers’ of the Crichton or McEwan variety claim - but, to the contrary, that they downplay the problem by pretending that climate change can be understood as a catastrophic event in the classical sense: as producing a sudden shift or turn (Horn, see p. 166 for some of the most precise formulations of her conclusive critique). The suddenness of our extinction, as these fictions imagine Philology in the Anthropocene 47 it - or even as pictured in a speculative non-fictional work like Weisman’s The World Without Us - leaves out all the time in between. But, “In the meantime, we definitely have a situation” (Don DeLillo White Noise, quoted in Heise, Sense 162, and in Horn 293). Although one cannot be too cautious about predictions, what is far more likely than the immediate extinction of mankind is simply that throughout the course of the 21 st century several billion people will lose the resources they need to survive; I am simply not capable of finding any consolation in this. The undifferentiated use of the words human and related terms (humanity, man, mankind etc.) is one of the methods of reducing speech to the function of appeal and blocking any further reflection. Something similar might be said about the other big word world and the allegedly small pronoun we. - This article focuses on the plurivalence of these three words and makes for the most part historically founded proposals for a more differentiated use - without wanting to insinuate that the meanings of these words could be clarified once and for all with finer distinctions. Moreover, the division between man, world and we is only a heuristic one, since the three words are obviously intimately related to one another. Those working in the humanities will not save humanity, the world, or us, but they may contribute to a more precise way of talking about them. Man (homo vs. ἄνθρωπος) Those working in cultural studies above all tend to be uncomfortable with the name Anthropocene for a new geological epoch, as it might seem to go hand-in-hand with an unreflective reprisal of that “empirico-transcendental doublet” known as man whose time was supposed to be up, as in the famous poetic conclusion of the work, now a half-century old: “- alors on put bien parier que l’homme s’effacerait, comme à la limite de la mer un visage de sable” (Foucault, Les mots 398). 4 The humanities had hardly finished putting man to rest, and had happily arrived in the post-humanist stage - and now the geologists are threatening to drag them back into anthropocentrism (Schmieder). A naïve use of the term Anthropocene could in fact cement the idea that ‘man’ is the measure of all things and can transform the Earth as he sees fit. In the current discussions about responses to climate change this could be used to justify the use of new and obviously risky technologies such as carbon sequestration; Crutzen himself is not entirely innocent of this, since in the penultimate sentence of his short 2002 article he explicitly considers the possibilities of “geoengineering” (23; cf. also his short remark in an interview 4 “[…] then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault, Order of Things 387) R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 48 according to which he wasn’t aware of the latent anthropocentric implications in his proposed name Anthropocene, Schwägerl 35). Hence it is all the more important to distinguish between (at least) two conceptions of humanity, as Chakrabarty has done: But what happens when we say humans are acting like a geophysical force? We then liken humans to some nonhuman, nonliving agency. That is why I say the science of anthropogenic global warming has doubled the figure of the human— you have to think of the two figures of the human simultaneously: the humanhuman and the nonhuman-human. (“Postcolonial Studies” 11) The nonhuman-human as geophysical agency has brought about effects that were obviously unintended - the oldest extant description of the nonhumanhuman is: πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει. τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισιν περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασιν. θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν, Γᾶν ἄφθιτον, ἀκαμάταν, ἀποτρύεται ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων. Many things cause terror and wonder, yet nothing is more terrifying and wonderful than man. / This thing goes across the gray / sea on the blasts of winter / storms, passing beneath / waters towering ‘round him. The Earth, / eldest of the gods, / unwithering and untiring, this thing wears down / as his plows go back and forth year after year / furrowing her with the issue of horses. (Sophocles, vv. 332-341) Man 2 , this uncannily powerful being (δεινά is the same root as in dinosaur) which I propose to call ἄνθρωπος, is a ζῷον ἀποτρύον, a fracking animal who has chafed the Earth to the degree that the traces of his work can no longer be distinguished from ‘nature.’ But he works in a blind rage; as Latour acutely puts the point, the Anthropocene is for this reason no anthropocentric figure at all, but rather “the most radical term that would simultaneously put an end to anthropocentrism as well as to older forms of naturalism by suddenly foregrounding the human agent under another shape” (“Le terme le plus radicale pour mettre fin à l’anthropocentrisme ainsi qu’aux anciennes formes de naturalisme en recomposant complètement le rôle de l’agent humain,” 154). I would propose reserving the Latin term homo for Man 1 , “the humanhuman” (according to Chakrabarty) as an empirico-transcendental doublet. The difference between ἄνθρωπος and homo is nowhere clearer than at the point where they seem to converge: in Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, a text dating from the beginning of the episteme where, Philology in the Anthropocene 49 as Foucault sees it, man first gets configured. Here Herder seems to anticipate anthropogenic climate change when he writes: “we may consider mankind, therefore, as a band of bold though diminutive giants, gradually descending from the mountains, to subjugate the Earth, and change climates with their feeble arms” (Herder 269 / engl. trans. by Churchill 316-7). 5 But this similarity is merely superficial: not only because Herder is here thinking of microclimates (such as the changes in the Nile delta due to its canalization and extension), but above all because Herder imagines homo intentionally carrying out these reformations of the Earth, as if he knew what he was doing. Ironically enough, the first volume of the Ideen came out in the same year to which Timothy Morton dates James Watt’s invention of the steam engine - and thus the beginning of the Anthropocene (7). Since 1784 the new ἄνθρωπος has been trailing the equally reconfigured homo like a shadow, though only now is it becoming increasingly visible. Chakrabarty connects his distinction between two “figures of the human” with an appeal for enlightened reform. In a discussion in Munich he drew an analogy to Freud’s famous sentence “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“Where id was, there shall ego be”): 6 Where the nonhuman-human was, the humanhuman shall be. I am however skeptical whether this model of individual enlightenment can directly carry over to seven billion specimens of the species. I could formulate my skepticism here in grammatical terms: Whereas Freud’s ego and id have an equivalent status (as instances within a model of the psyche), the two “figures of the human” can only be conceived in the collective singular to quite different degrees, can only be seen as “figures of the human” with the help of quite different abstractions. This seems relatively unproblematic in the case of homo or the “human-human,” since this has always been conceived as a collective singular category in a long and fully developed tradition of thought since 1800; this is the grammatical form of an idea of ‘man’ that is realized in each specimen. This idea also underlies Vico’s notion of the “common sense of mankind” (“senso commune di Gener’Umano,” Vico 187, original emphasis). It is not the philologist who is responsible for this idea, but the philosopher. The New Science Vico has in mind must be produced jointly by the philologist and the philosopher, each of them having to supplement the competences of the other and correct the other’s onesidedness (120). While the philologist studies the certo in all its varieties, the philosopher has to insist on the verum (120), on the universal and eternal idea (126) even while this idea is not recognizable in itself, but has to be postulat- 5 See Macho 132 for a succinct analysis of the ambivalent rhetoric in this passage. 6 Editors‘ note: Dipesh Chakrabarty was invited keynote speaker at the conference Meteorologies of Modernity organized by the DFG-funded research training group “Literature and Globalization” at LMU in Munich in 2014. R. Stockhammer refers here to a preceding discussion between Chakrabarty and members of the research training group on the day before the conference. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 50 ed as a driving force of all human history, in all of its contingencies. In short, the object of philosophy is the homo; the object of philology is the works and deeds of the ἄνθρωποι in an irreducible plural (languages, costumes, laws, wars, peace, etc.; Vico 120). But the collective singular of ἄνθρωπος or “nonhuman-human” essentializes ‘an’ agent that essentially is not one but rather consists in a group of dissimilar agents. Within the discourse on climate change, this collective singular obscures the fact that humans - in an irreducible plural - are emitting carbon-dioxide to very different degrees and are affected by these emissions to very different degrees: “Who was it exactly that changed the planet, who profited from these changes, and who are they hurting? ” (Heise, “Posthumanismus” 39). This collective singular form might also be called for if the extinction of the ‘species’ 7 were imminent (as in “the dodo is extinct”) - as long as this is not very likely, the use of the collective singular appeals to a commonality that does not exist: “very little commonality can be taken for granted, and [...] speaking about humans, humanity, humanness, or the Anthropocene requires a patient and meticulous process of assembly - in its most craftsmanlike and technological connotations” (Heise, “Comparative Ecocriticism” 29). The commonality of homo is not comparable to the inequality within the ἄνθρωποι. Chakrabarty himself illustrates this when he - provocatively but plausibly - criticizes the proposal that every individual on the Earth should have a claim to the same per capita emissions. If everyone in Africa and Asia were now allowed to catch up and to emit as much as Europeans and North Americans already have, the situation would be even worse. “It is, ironically, thanks to the poor—that is, to the fact that development is uneven and unfair—that we do not put out even larger quantities of greenhouse gases into the biosphere than we actually do” (Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital” 11). Humans as ἄνθρωποι are not the most suitable subjects to project a notion of equality onto. Nonetheless not everyone will want to abandon every idea of equality. I myself, for example, would like to hold on to the idea that every human life is equally deserving of protection, so I cannot follow the calculations of a climate ethicist for whom the goal of ethics is optimizing the sum of happiness on Earth, such that the death of 2000 Calcuttans (with an average happiness coefficient of 3) is not as bad as the death of 1200 Swedes (with an average happiness coefficient of 5.6; Gesang 143). 7 Chakrabarty uses this word only tentatively (“Call that mode of being a ‘species’ or something else,” “Postcolonial Studies” 14). Philology in the Anthropocene 51 World (and/ or Earth, Meteorologically vs. Uranologically) Timothy Morton has responded to the threat that the world might soon end with the ingenious observation that the world has already ended, since a world depends on a distinction between background and foreground which has become impossible (99). One of the advantages of this quite pointed formulation is that it draws the attention to what is called ‘world.’ As Martin Heidegger (“Zeit des Weltbildes”) has made clear, a ‘world’ depends on a ‘world-picture,’ and this world-picture, the emergence of which can be dated back to early modernity, might have come to an end. Morton does not dispute that the Earth still exists, and that there are humans living on it. Alexander von Humboldt is one of those who insisted emphatically on the “scientific distinction between world and Earth (“wissenschaftliche Absonderung von Welt und Erde”), and he criticized expressions such as map of the world or new world, since they in fact only refer to the Earth (in the first case) or (in the second case) only a part of the Earth (I: 61/ engl. trans. by Otte 67). Thus I will suspend any discussion of the world for now and reconstruct Humboldt’s description of the Earth, an essential part of which is a theory of climates. The theory can be seen most clearly in a map, which is not taken from Humboldt’s own late work Kosmos, but rather from an atlas that was originally meant to be published as a supplementary volume to Kosmos, but was published separately due to contingent problems with the publishers: Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas, the first larger collection of so-called thematic maps, showing the geographical distribution of organic and anorganic features (like temperatures, animals, languages, human races, and many other things). This atlas opens with a map, entitled “Alexander von Humboldt’s System der Isothermen-Kurven, in Merkator’s Projektion”: R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 52 The indication of the projection used is to be read like an indication of a genre (for example, Wuthering Heights. A Novel). The main reason for the choice of the Mercator projection is that it is the most prominent member of a class of projections called cylindrical. In contrast to azimuthal projections (which show parallels as concentric circles) and conic projections (some of which show meridians and parallels as curved lines), cylindrical projections display the Earth as an arrangement of straight lines, with meridians and parallels at angles of 90°. 8 (Diagrammatic representation of a cylindrical projection) These lines do not preserve any feature reminiscent of the sphericity of the Earth, but, for the very same reason, they are the most rigorous in projecting a geometrically perfect body from the realm of the spherical to the realm of the plane, the plane of a rectangular sheet of paper. In a genre poetics of cartographic projections (yet to be written, as far as I know), cylindrical projections should be discussed as the most radical projections, since they most radically abstract from the curvedness of the Earth in its three-dimensional shape (as well as in its symbolic counterpart, the globe). Berghaus’ map of Humboldt’s isothermal curves shows climate in a double sense, or rather: it shows the very conflict between two meanings of climate, as a conflict between straight and curved lines. On the one hand, one of the Greek names for parallels - only represented as straight lines in a cylindrical projection - is κλίμα. Derived from the verb κλίνειν, ‘to bend’ (preserved in English words like decline or inclination), κλίμα originally denoted nothing more or less than a particular angle of inclination of sunrays at a particular area of the Earth’s spherical surface (Liddell/ Scott, sense I.2.: “terrestrial latitude, latitudes, region”). In Ancient Greek, κλίμα did not 8 The first three maps in Berghaus’ Atlas, all of which are concerned with the representation of climate, pertain to these three classes of projections, as if they wanted to echo the tripartite classification of epic, lyrical, and dramatic genres of literature, codified only in the late 18 th century. - I am skipping the notorious discussion about the allegedly ‘Eurocentric’ shape of the Mercator projection, a reproach that is partly based on oversimplification, partly on ideology (cf. Brotton 378-404 for a recent and sufficiently dialectic reconstruction of this debate); the only important point here is simply that the Mercator projection belongs to the class of cylindrical projections (as does, by the way, Peters’s projection). Philology in the Anthropocene 53 have the implications it has nowadays, and, conversely, most Greek texts that do contain knowledge that would nowadays be classified as climate knowledge do not use κλίμα for this notion. 9 On the other hand, the Humboldtian map does of course deal with climate in the modern sense. By using straight lines for the parallels, the mapmaker evokes the κλίματα (in the sense of parallels) as a horizon of expectation, as a plausible “idea of order” 10 for climate in the sense of average temperatures. In his Kosmos, Humboldt comments: Wenn die Oberfläche der Erde aus einer und derselben homogenen flüssigen Masse oder aus Gesteinschichten zusammengesetzt wäre, welche gleiche Farbe, gleiche Dichtigkeit, gleiche Glätte, gleiches Absorptionsvermögen für die Sonnenstrahlen besäßen und auf gleiche Weise durch die Atmosphäre gegen den Weltraum ausstrahlten, so würden die Isothermen [...] sämmtlich dem Aequator parallel laufen. (I: 340-1) If the surface of the Earth consisted of one and the same homogeneous fluid mass, or of strata of rock having the same color, density, smoothness, and power of absorbing heat from the solar rays, and of radiating it in a similar manner through 9 The text usually entitled “Airs, Waters, Places” (contained in the Corpus Hippocraticum), for example, uses ὥρα for what is translated as “climate”; Aristotle, Politics, uses τόπος (1327 b). Conversely, when Greek texts use κλίμα within the model of “seven latitudinal strips in the οἰκουμένη” (Liddell/ Scott I.4), these are distinguished by the length of the days in the respective strips, not by cold and heat - a perspective only developed in the Arab and medieval Latin tradition. 10 Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” serves as a pretense to use the area around Florida as an illustration. R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 54 the atmosphere, the isothermal [...] 11 lines would all be parallel to the equator. (emphasis added; engl. transl. by Otte 318) Evidently, the isothermal lines - the blue and green lines connecting points of identical average temperature - do not run parallel to the equator. This would be a “hypothetische[r] Zustand” (“hypothetical condition”) only, which Humboldt also calls the “mittleren, gleichsam primitiven Zustande” (“mean, and, as it were, primitive condition,” I: 341/ engl. transl. by Otte 318). This state is used as the basis for what he calls “die mathematische Betrachtung der Klimate” (“the mathematical consideration of climates,” ibid.). And this ‘mathematical’ dimension of climates is distinguished from the ‘physical’ dimension, which includes everything that is responsible for the fact that isotherms do not follow the parallels, that they are inflected (“Alles, was das Absorptions- und Ausstrahlungsvermögen an einzelnen Theilen der Oberfläche, die auf gleichen Parallelkreisen liegen, verändert, bringt Inflexionen in den Isothermen hervor.” / “Whatever alters the capacity for absorption and radiation, at places lying under the same parallel of latitude, gives rise to inflections in the isothermal lines.” ibid.) Primitively, mathematically, the average temperature of New York, for example, could be expected to equal the average temperature of Naples - but it is obviously lower, closer to the average temperature of Munich, about 8° latitude farther north. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it is important to explain Humboldt’s notion of the ‘mathematical,’ especially since the physical view also involves a lot of calculating. To draw isotherms, isotheres and isocheims, millions of data have to be collected at thousands of weather stations, such as the data also published in the Berghaus Atlas: 11 I have left out the isotheres (lines connecting points of identical summer average temperature), and the isocheims (lines connecting points of identical winter average temperature). Philology in the Anthropocene 55 These data have to be statistically evaluated in order to obtain “mean numerical values” which are, according to Humboldt, the “ultimate aim of investigation, being the expression of the physical laws, or forces of the Cosmos” (“der letzte Zweck, ja der Ausdruck physischer Gesetze und Mächte des Kosmos,” I: 82/ engl. transl. by Otte 16). These calculations, however, are R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 56 physical, and not mathematical in Humboldt’s sense, since he reserves the term mathematical for a kind of geometry that deals with idealized geometrical bodies. In a ‘mathematical’ view, the Earth is taken as a perfect sphere for whose complete description only one single value is needed: its diameter. This is the Earth as presupposed in most cartographic projections. The physical shape of the Earth, to the contrary, is far from being a perfect body, but “is affected by all the accidents and inequalities of the solid parts” (“allen Zufälligkeiten und Unebenheiten des Starren,” I: 172/ engl. transl. by Otte 163). Humboldt’s distinction between mathematical and physical description can be related to the distinction between uranology and meteorology, to be found in Aristotle’s book on the latter subject. This analogy is valid not so much with regard to the objects of these disciplines, but rather with regard to the epistemological premises involved. These premises are very clearly displayed at the beginning of his Meteorology, where Aristotle discusses the shift from his Uranology (Peri Ouranou) to the later book which is presented as a sequel to the former: We have already discussed the first causes of nature, and all natural motion, also the stars ordered in the motion of the heavens [...] There remains for consideration a part of this inquiry which all our predecessors called meteorology. It is concerned with events that are natural, though their order is less perfect [ἀτακτοτέρος ] than that of the first of the elements of bodies. They take place in the region nearest to the motion of the stars. Such are the milky way, and comets, and the movements of meteors. It studies also all the affections we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts. (Meteorologica 338 a-b) Meteorology is concerned with everything that comes from above without following regular laws (meteors as well as thunderbolts). While uranology, in other words, deals with perfect bodies, meteorology deals with the Earth as a less orderly, imperfect body, a body subject to all the contingent, non-parallel inflections Lucretius termed clinamen (another term derived, of course, from κλίνειν; cf. Serres for an updated reading of Lucretius for a physics of nonlinear systems, which is epistemologically related to meteorology). Humboldt’s mathematical view corresponds to the uranological dimension, and his physical view corresponds to the meteorological dimension. The Earth can be the object of either view, particularly if one abandons the geocentric perspective and sees it, like Humboldt, as an “airport Earth” (Sloterdijk 42) that one could fly to from outer space. The Earth is a globus in two senses of this Latin word (which is usually reduced to the first sense): from afar it seems to be a perfectly rounded, uranological sphere; a closer look shows it to be a very irregular, imperfect meteorological body, a sort of a dumpling (another meaning of globus). And the isothermic map precisely Philology in the Anthropocene 57 represents the tension, the dispute between the Earth as an uranological globus 1 and the Earth as meteorological globus 2 , the dispute between the mathematical “idea of order” represented by the straight lines of the cylindrical projection on the one hand, and on the other hand all the physical, irregular inflections, shown as inclinations (clinamina) of the curved iso-lines. The mathematical figure of the Earth displays a surface on which all points are equidistant from the center; the physical figure of the Earth displays irregularities, “a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal” (Moretti 55-6, using Wallerstein), inequalities that can only be described by means of statistical laws. The isothermic map shows both these figures in their dispute. These distinctions found in Aristotle, Vico and Humboldt can be ordered as a series of oppositions, whereby each pair of opposites is not meant to represent a pair of alternative options one could choose between, but rather the poles of a tension that are to be reflected on in their tension: Aristotle: uranology vs. meteorology Vico: philosophy philology (communal sense) (languages, deeds of different peoples) Humboldt: mathematical view physical view Earth as perfect sphere Earth as imperfect body globus as sphere globus as dumpling κλίματα as straight lines isothermes as inflections homo ἄνθρωποι And now I can finally reintroduce the word world, which Humboldt avoids in his discussions of the Earth. Humboldt’s view that the use of world should be restricted to denoting the whole universe (in German words like Weltraum or Weltgebäude, I: 61/ engl. transl. by Otte 63), ignores the history of the word world, which has almost always also signified “any self-enclosing whole” (Hayot 39) and can be applied on very different scales (cf. expressions like ‘world of ants’). Unlike Timothy Morton, I will not assume that such units have disappeared once and for all; but I suggest that their existence cannot be assumed as self-evident either, and least of all should be assumed that they are coextensive with the Earth. Not only does the world change, what a world can be also changes, in what circumstances there can be a world or even one world. In any case world cannot simply be identified with either of the two conceptions of Earth; but world might be conceived in the tension between these conceptions of the Earth. And yes, here I am intentionally replacing Heidegger’s notion of a “dispute between world and earth” (“Ursprung” 36) with a notion of ‘world as a dispute between two conflicting concepts of Earth.’ The distinction between the mathematico-uranological and the physico-meteorological perspective on global relations may be help- R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 58 ful in describing these relations under different aspects without excluding parts of these relation; it may help in filling the “need [...] to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 14), in the tension between the ideal of human equality and the brute fact of humans’ inequality. We (Invs. Exclusivity) One of the typical characteristics of the writing and speech about climate change that limits itself to pure appeal is, ultimately, the uninterrogated use of personal or possessive pronouns in the first-personal plural. “Our responsibility for the future of the Earth” is the subtitle of the stimulating exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene” shown in the German Museum in Munich between the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2016. In their preface to the exhibition, its initiators, the directors of the Rachel Carson Center, explain their agenda: [T]he Anthropocene idea also means that we will only be able to solve the environmental problems that we as humans have created, particularly since industrialization, through the intelligent use of our scientific and technological creativity in full awareness of our responsibility for the future of the Earth. (Mauch and Trischler 8) This sentence contains four personal or possessive pronouns in the firstperson plural, one of which refers to “we as humans,” hence potentially including all seven billion specimens (assuming that they all can read German and have access to a publication that can only easily be acquired in the German Museum bookstore - or can at least read English and can find the translated quote in a specialized medium for English and American Literature). But how many humans have been creating these problems “since industrialization,” how many are in a position to use their “scientific and technological creativity” for “the future of the Earth”? Doesn’t this we hold too many people responsible for the problem who can do nothing or at least very little about it, and doesn’t it at the same time ask too much of these people in obligating them to work towards a solution? Authors who reflect on speaking about climate change occasionally note this problem of the we (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 10; Macho 132); but there has yet been no more precise analysis of the use of this pronoun. Some languages use different forms for the addressee-inclusive and the addressee-exclusive we, such as Tok Pisin, a creole spoken in Papua New Guinea, where the speakers of the substrate language have translated their need for this distinction using the means of the English superstrate language into an opposition between the addressee-inclusive yumi (‘you and me’) and the addressee-exclusive mipela (’me and some other fellows, but not you’). But Philology in the Anthropocene 59 these distinctions work in this ideal form only in spoken language at best, where the situative contexts can be determined with relatively little ambiguity, or to put the point more cautiously: in which the complexity of situative contexts can be reduced in such a way that all those involved can agree on. Derrida’s sentence probably holds of oral speech acts as well, but it certainly holds of written speech acts: that “a context is never absolutely determinable” (“un contexte n’est jamais absolument determinable,” 369, cf. also Stockhammer for a first attempt to introduce speech act theory into an analysis of the discourse on climate change). This indeterminacy of context only enlarges as its scope expands, of course, and thus especially when a topic of potentially planetary scope is at stake. But the context does not grow uniformly in a gradual ascent to larger and larger units such as family, village/ neighborhood, city, region, ethnicity, nation, continent all the way to world. These units are criss-crossed by other forms of communality that do not conform to this topology of concentric circles - with its accompanying assumption of familiarity decreasing in proportion to distance. As Timothy Clark has convincingly demonstrated, it is no longer possible to smoothly zoom from smaller to larger scales or vice versa (Ecocriticism 71). Just as temporal scales are getting blurred, it is increasingly problematic to accomplish any spatial “scale framing” either (73-75). This has important consequences for readings of (fictional, poetical, and other) texts which usually take particular frames for granted, instead of interrogating them, or even breaking them up by acts of “unframing” (104, original emphasis). Since the non-linear system of global climate corresponds to a non-linear multiplication of possible uses of we, these uses are typical instances of acts of framing or unframing. Whose poems, for example, are the “Poems of Our Climate,” to quote the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens that first appeared in the volume Parts of A World (1942)? If the I vocalizing this our is a person living in Hartford, CT, is he - with regard to Humboldt’s distinction between the mathematical and physical view - referring to the κλίμα (in the sense of latitude, 41° N) he shares with people from Madrid, or rather referring to the climate (in the sense of average temperatures, about 9° centigrade, according to the map in the Berghaus Atlas) he shares with people from Dresden? Moreover, who is the we in the concluding lines of this poem: The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. (Stevens 193) According to Aristotle, imperfection is a defining feature of the Earth as a meteorological body; according to Lucretius, life came into being precisely because of imperfections, of non-parallel inflections (clinamina). On the one hand, therefore, this our in Stevens’ poem is all-inclusive, since it refers to all R OBERT S TOCKHAMMER 60 of ‘us,’ to all living beings on Earth. All of us for whom delight lies in flawed words in a doubled sense, since flawless words would erroneously insinuate the existence of a flawless world that does not exist? 12 On the other hand, the poem sketches the poetics of an advanced European modernity - or, in the engagement with this modernity, a specifically US-American modernity - the presuppositions of which are far from universal and are not even shared by everyone within Europe and the US. Should ‘we’ not seek for perfection, aesthetically and otherwise? Doesn’t this firstperson plural pronoun exclude many readers? Or is the distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive we not made by the text but rather to be remade anew by every reader? Is every we just an offer than can be accepted or rejected? Does it challenge the reader to make “interpolations of we” (Chakrabarty in the discussion already mentioned) that have to be continually constructed anew? Remarkably enough, the first-person plural pronoun only occurs at the end of the poem, whereas in the twenty prior verses the impersonal pronoun one was dominant (with five occurrences). The climate of the poem becomes ours only by reading the poem. A text of Mirko Bonné marks such an “interpolation of we” and develops it. The text was written for the project Weather Stations, where writers don’t just write Cli-Fi novels but isolate in their writing the different ways it is possible to write about climate change. Bonné’s text starts from an unease with the dominant speech act about climate change and positions his own speech act about climate change as addressed to non-humans, using the Australian saying “Tell it to the Bees”: “Gib nicht auf. Erzähl es den Bienen.” (“Don’t give up. Tell it to the bees.”) He avoids every use of we, every speech in the name of a group. When a marine scientist says “We lost the kelp forests,” the first-person narrator says that he “would have liked to ask who this ‘we’ is supposed to be.” After the report on these conversations with the marine scientist, however, the saying “tell it to the bees” gets transposed into the first-person plural: “No, we won’t give up. We’ll tell it to the bees! ” Thus the text does not offer any explicit answer to the question it poses, “who is this ‘we’ supposed to be” - but it answers implicitly: it is always a group that constitutes itself in the very processes of negotiation. 12 Note that κλίμα also denotes several kinds of inclinations (“flaws”? ) of words, and Lucretius has parallelized the clinamen with the inclinations of linguistic signifiers: “quin etiam passim nostris in versibus ipsis / multa elementa vides multis communia verbis, / cum tamen inter se versus ac verba necessest / confiteare et re et sonitu distare sonanti./ tantum elementa queunt permutato ordine solo”; (“Nay, thou beholdest in our verses here / Elements many, common to many worlds, / Albeit thou must confess each verse, each word / From one another differs both in sense / And ring of soundso much the elements / Can bring about by change of order alone”, I: 823-827). 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London: Cape, 2010. “Media note: Anthropocene Working Group (AWG).” 29 August, 2016. <http: / / www2.le.ac.uk/ offices/ press/ press-releases/ 2016/ august/ media-note-anthropocene-working-group-awg>. Web. 26 January 2017. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54-68. Philology in the Anthropocene 63 Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2013. Scans of the map “Alexander von Humboldt’s System der Isothermen- Kurven” and three sections of it from: <http: / / www.davidrumsey. com/ luna/ servlet/ detail/ RUMSEY~8~1~1477~160017: Alexander-von- Humboldt-s-System-Der#>, and the table “Hauptmomente der Temperatur” from: <http: / / www.davidrumsey.com/ luna/ servlet/ detail/ RUMSEY~8~1~1480~160102: Die-Hauptmomente-Der-Temperatur-Auf? >. Web. 26 January 2017. Schwägerl, Christian. “‘Wir sind nicht dem Untergang geweiht‘: Ein Gespräch mit Paul J. Crutzen.” Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde. Ed. Nina Möllers, Christian Schwägerl, and Helmuth Trischler. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2015. 30-36. Sloterdijk, Peter. Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals: Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Sophocles. “Antigone. Trans. Blake Tyrrell.” <https: / / www.msu.edu/ ~ tyrrell/ antigone.pdf>. Web. 8 September 2015. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1982. Stockhammer, Robert. “Das Tier, das vorhersagt. Ver-Sprechakte zwischen Pro- und Para-Sprechakten, besonders im Bereich des Klimawandels.” Prophetie und Prognostik: Verfügungen über Zukunft in Wissenschaften, Religionen und Künsten. Ed. Daniel Weidner and Stefan Willer. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. 123-45. Subcomission on Quarternary Stratigraphy. “What is the ‘Anthropocene’? current definition and status.” 4 January 2016. <http: / / quaternary.stratigraphy.org/ workinggroups/ anthropocene/ >. Web. 11 February 2017. Vico, Giambattista. “Principi di una scienza nuova d‘intorno alla communa natura delle nazioni.“ Volume 1, gemäß 3. Edition v. 1744. Ed. Fausto Nicolini. Bari: Laterza. 1911. <https: / / it.wikisource.org/ wiki/ Indice: Vico_-_La_scienza_nuova,_1,_1911.djvu>. Web. 15 February 2017. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “Die Vorstellung der Zukunft: Dystopische Klimaszenarien in der Populärkultur.” Ökologie und die Künste. Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Daniela Hahn. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2015. 245-56. E VA H ORN Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat Global Warming or Climate Change? From being a contentious topic between so-called ‘climate sceptics’ and ‘climate catastrophists,’ climate change has, in the past decade, morphed into a mostly uncontested scientific fact and thus a political issue taken seriously by most political players. However, many of the publications from the past ten years on climate change (or what in German has more dramatically come to be known as “Klimakatastrophe”) bear the mark of this contentiousness that had been staged by lobbyists and so-called scientific “merchants of doubt” throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. 1 Looking at popular books on climate change from the past 15 years we notice a strong rhetoric of persuasion, as if the readers must still be convinced both of the subject’s reality and of its urgency. In order to make a contested and abstract topic feel ‘real,’ many of these books resort to the trope of heat. Here is a short, certainly incomplete, list: Monbiot, George. Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning. London: Allen Lane, 2006. Bailey, Ian and Hugh Compston, eds. Feeling the Heat: The Politics of Climate Policy in Rapidly Industrializing Countries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Motavalli, Jim, ed. Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change. London: Routledge, 2004. Berger, John J. Beating the Heat: Why and How We Must Combat Global Warming. Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2000. Pittock, A. Barrie. Climate Change: Turning Up the Heat. London: Routledge, 2005. At first glance, it might seem trivial to employ the concept of heat when dealing with a phenomenon of rising global temperatures. However, what is striking about these books is that they hardly ever speak of heat: of intense, tropical heat, torrid climates, and the effect of heat, whether dry or wet, on the soil, the vegetation and on animal or human bodies. What they talk about instead are rather unimpressive averages and slow gradual changes in climates and landscapes: a rise of temperatures by two degrees Celsius within the next hundred years (Berger), the rise of the sea level by one or two millimeters per year (Monbiot), changing coastlines (Motavalli), or melting glaci- 1 The term has been coined by Eric M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes in their book of the same title published in 2010. E VA H ORN 66 ers and a change in local vegetation. They uniformly point to the well-known causes, such as the destruction of primary forests in South America and Southeast Asia, the massive consumption of fossil fuels, the melting of permafrost in Siberia and Alaska, methane emissions from cattle and rice paddies, the ensuing rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and ocean acidification, the change of water cycles etc. Not surprisingly, the heat-books come up with suggestions concerning national climate policy: One book, for instance, in an oddly chosen historical term, suggests a Chinese “green leap forward” (Schröder 97), others give everyday life advice such as lowering the setting on air conditioning in the house or switching to a hybrid car (Berger). What all of these publications make clear to us is that climate change does not designate a predictable process of warming (sometimes stupidly welcomed by the argument that “we will be able to grow vines in Scotland”), but the disruption or alteration of an immensely complex system of atmospheric flows, of the chemistry of the air and the oceans, including the unpredictable transformations of water cycles, erosion of landscapes and coastlines and many more phenomena. Considering the vastness and complexity of climate change consequences, the expression ‘global warming’ itself almost seems like a reductionist buzzword for a process too complicated to be pressed into one word. Clearly, the goal of these books trying to popularize knowledge about and awareness of global warming is to lend this elusive and abstract phenomenon some graspable, concrete quality. Climate change as such mostly lacks phenomenal concreteness, it can neither be felt nor seen, nor can its potential consequences be clearly outlined and anticipated. What we have are graphs, simulations and scenarios. Even climate itself - unlike weatherevents - stays in the background of our everyday experience; it is a pattern of expectations more than events, of habits more than specific situations. Climate is about averages and long-term periods: Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system. (IPCC Third Assessment Report) Defined as a long-term average, climate and climate change despite its profound consequences for any living condition on the globe are purely abstract entities. While we can get a sense of climate at specific locations (i.e. we know typical weather patterns for Stuttgart, Singapore, or Stockholm) there is no such thing as ‘global climate’ as an object of sensory experience. So, in order to convey a sense of urgency to the transformation of this highly abstract Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 67 entity, authors of the past 15 years tended to resort to a very familiar feeling: heat. Even if heat in the sense of the familiar scorching feeling is mainly absent from the books flaunting it in their titles, the thermal metaphor has been of vital importance for any politics related to climate change. In fact, ‘climate change’ seems like a euphemism for a much more dramatic process, the fact that (among many other frightening things) global temperatures are rising. Timothy Morton, the über-hip guru of a new form of ecological thought and of a theory of global warming as a ‘hyperobject,’ points out this logic of euphemism by explaining why he refuses to use the term ‘climate change’ in his book: Throughout [my book] I shall be calling it global warming and not climate change. Why? [...] Climate change as a substitute [for what should be called “climate change as a result of global warming”] enables cynical reason (both right and left) to say that “the climate has always been changing,” which to my ears sounds like “people have always been killing one another” as a fatuous reason not to control the sale of machine guns. (Morton 8) Drawing the comparison between climate change/ global warming and the justifications for uncontrolled gun sales, Morton calls for rhetorics of urgency and trauma as the precondition for politicizing the topic: What we desperately need is an appropriate level of shock and anxiety concerning a specific ecological trauma indeed, the ecological trauma of our age, the very thing that defines the Anthropocene as such. (8-9) The metaphor of heat or warming, however, is not only supposed to shock us into awareness and political action, it also serves as the hidden bedrock of the book’s core point, the concept of ‘hyperobject.’ According to Morton, hyperobjects such as climate change, radioactive matter, omnipresent styrofoam and plastic particles and other man-made highly deleterious, and ontologically uncanny entities are objects that elude perception and conceptualization precisely because they are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). They defy metalanguage because they contaminate the forms and concepts that are being used to account for them. For Morton, global warming is the ‘hyperobject’ par excellence, extended in time and space, invisible, barely computable, consisting not in a materially graspable entity but in a vast and complex mesh of inter-objective effects and interrelations. Obviously, the ‘hyper-ness’ of the hyperobject ‘global warming’ hinges on the thermal metaphor of heat - heat as an inescapable quality of atmospheres that bodies can be trapped in, heat as a threat to organic life, and eventually as a physical state of growing entropy. Yet, the thermal metaphor can also serve as a shibboleth distinguishing between friends and enemies in the political battle about how to take care of the current ecological crisis. In a conversation with the late sociologist Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour comes up with an almost Schmittian declaration of enmi- E VA H ORN 68 ty towards all those who lamely talk about ‘climate change’ instead of ‘global warming’: The decision is brutally clear: Either you make a distinction between friends and enemies - then you enter the realm of the political. Or you back off from waging wars and having enemies, but then you eschew politics. (Selchow, n. pag.) 2 He considers those who talk about “climate change” as enemies, as a radically different species: They live in a different world than I do, they live in a world that is being destroyed [...] they are humans, I am Gaian. (ibid.) The Thermal Metaphor Talking about ‘heat’ and not just ‘change’ thus seems to be essential when dealing with the epistemology, the politics and the philosophy of what might perhaps appropriately but also somewhat abstractly - be called ‘the Anthropocene’: the fact that mankind is leaving its destructive and ineffaceable mark on the surface of the planet. What becomes clear from this use of the term is that ‘heat’ and ‘warming’ here are not neutral descriptions but expressions coined to convey the urgency of an imminent threat, the trauma of a looming catastrophe. Heat here is not just a metaphor that conveys a physical sense of a process - or rather: a whole ensemble of hyper-complex, yet impalpable processes of ecological transformation and destruction. In a way much akin to Morton’s ‘hyperobjects,’ heat in this context becomes a hypermetaphor: It evokes not only a dimension of sensory perception that climate change dramatically lacks, but it also generates an affect - the ‘shock and trauma’ of a dramatically changing life-world. While we cannot feel global warming on our skins, and while we cannot see it, except in photo series of a hundred years of shrinking glaciers or in long-term simulations of flooded cities, global warming needs to be felt here and now, or made to be felt both sensitively and affectively. The heat metaphor seeks to convey a phenomenal sensibility to an uncanny, complex and unrepresentable process that exceeds our categories of perception and cognition. This affect has a political effect. While we are still debating the transition of rich Western economies to carbon-neutrality, we are, at the same time, also facing growing issues of ‘climate justice’ for Asian and African economies, claiming that reducing greenhouse gases unjustly hampers the economic development of the poor countries. Caught in these political rifts of costbenefit debates in the West, and the desire for a Western lifestyle elsewhere, the thermal hyper-metaphor may transport an affect of trauma and anxiety, 2 Translated from German by E. Horn. Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 69 but perhaps also the feeling of a newly defined union of mankind as a species: Aren’t we all bodies suffering from heat? The heat metaphor may help us grasp the problem’s urgency and transfer it into political structures. In Bruno Latour’s words: The task might not be to “liberate climatology” from the undue weight of political influence [...]. On the contrary, the task is to follow the threads with which climatologists have built the models needed to bring the whole Earth on stage. With this lesson in hand we begin to imagine how to do the same in our efforts to assemble a political body able to claim its part of responsibility for the Earth’s changing state. After all, this mix up of science and politics is exactly what is embodied in the very notion of the Anthropocene: Why would we go on trying to separate what geologists, earnest people if any, have themselves intermingled? (Latour 8) Analyzing the rhetorical structure of this key term in the current ecologicopolitical debates, however, might lead one down a slippery slope. Calling ‘global warming’ a metaphor does not imply that it is only a metaphor - and ultimately nothing but a trick of the hysterical green lobby. My point is not to dismiss the thermal metaphor but to point out that we cannot even address climate change or - to cast the problem even more broadly - the vast ecological transformation of the Anthropocene culturally and politically without resorting to metaphors. This also includes the metaphor’s aesthetic offspring such as images, symbols, imaginations and fictions. The abstractness of climate change and other aspects of the Anthropocene call for a translation into visible, sensible, imaginable tropes in order to effectively penetrate into the realms of collective awareness and political debate. The epistemic inevitability of metaphor, stated by the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, shows its eminently political dimension most clearly in the case of global warming (Blumenberg). A Cultural History of Climate How can we analyze this ineluctable hyper-metaphor? Certainly not by the idea that calling climate change a metaphor debunks it. On the contrary, in order to understand the profound transition of our environment and our lifeworlds brought forth by climate change, we need to do more than to rely on the simulations of climate research or the findings of ecologists, biologists, and geologists. As scholars of the humanities, we are called upon to investigate the history, the philosophy and the aesthetics of the relationship between humankind and nature, between cultures and climates. Ever since antiquity, the concept of climate (and its various synonyms such as zone, latitude, airs, circumfusa, atmosphere, etc.) has denoted much more than the chemical and physical states of the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘Climate’ has dealt with an array of relations: the relations of bodies to their environment and E VA H ORN 70 their means of subsistence, of populations to the locations they dwell in, of cultures to the thermal conditions they exist in. Climate, as Mike Hulme has recently argued, is not just a natural phenomenon but a cultural pattern: I propose that climate best be understood as an idea which mediates the sensory experience of ephemeral weather and the cultural ways of living which humans have developed to accommodate this experience. The idea of climate connects material and imaginative worlds in ways that create order and offer stability to human existence. People could not live without their climate. (2) If climate must be understood as a cultural pattern designed to make sense out of the ephemeral, irritating, yet existentially fundamental experience of ‘being-in-the-weather,’ we need to analyze and interpret the cultural significance granted to climatic phenomena. As for our topic, the question here is not so much as to how and to what degree the Earth is heating up, which indeed pertains to the natural sciences. From a humanities point of view, it means to ask about a cultural history of heat as the history of man’s knowledge, theories and imaginations about this thermal condition. And it also means to ask for an aesthetics of heat as the poetic, pictorial, and auditive rendering of a state that, despite its overwhelming sensual power and immediate perceptibility, seems hard to represent in media through words, images, or sounds. How can we “feel the heat” (or make us feel it) when we are not in the thick of it? What is the cultural significance of heat? What can we learn from the historical or fictional accounts and theories about the effects of tropical climates on the human body, soul, and culture? My hypothesis is that heat is a very specific thermal condition, a condition that is not just at the other end of the thermometer as opposed to cold. Heat - in its cultural understanding - melts the boundaries between man and nature, between the inside and the outside of the body, between perception and imagination, between the subject and the object of cognition. Thinking about the history and cultural significance of heat has to start with a concept of climate that is entirely different from what we discuss as ‘global climate’ today. For a long tradition of thought from antiquity through the Age of Enlightenment to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the idea of a ‘world climate’ would not have made any sense at all. ‘Climate,’ derived from the Greek term κλίνειν, marks the specific angle of the sun on the slope of the Earth’s surface, which defines the thermal conditions of a geographical zone. Climate is thus essentially a local category, specifying and explaining the temperature, quality of air, soil and water sources, the vegetation, the forms of agriculture and trade in a given region. Unlike today, where we have come to see climate mainly as a temporal phenomenon - subject to long-term changes, fluctuations and, eventually, human interventions -, throughout the long history of the concept climate has been an entity related to a specific locality. It has thus been perceived as essentially stable or subject to very slow Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 71 historical change - a change that, for some authors, accounts for changes in culture and the downfall of empires. Climate concerns a sense of place, not of time, and conveys an explanation of the differences between one locale and its inhabitants and those of another. By determining a specific region, climate can be used as a category to explain and understand mankind’s relationship to the specific environment humans inhabit. The emphasis is on distinction: The differences in temperature, winds, and forms of subsistence account for the differences between mentalities, cultures and political institutions. The treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places, attributed to Hippocrates (ca. 400 B.C), e.g., suggests that a doctor first and foremost has to know everything about the seasons, winds and rainfall in a given place in order to understand the bodies, mentalities and ailments of its inhabitants (148-149). Aristotle famously argued that the temperatures have an effect on the inhabitants’ cultural and social institutions: The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity. (VII, 7, 1327b) Aristotle links the temperature of an area to the skills and temperaments of its inhabitants. From here he draws conclusions regarding the political forms that the population of a given climatic zone can assume: While the cold facilitates a spirit of liberty, yet disables political organization, hot climates create intelligence, but numb the sense of political freedom. Only the temperate zone in the middle enjoys the virtues of both intelligence and political organization. What we see here is the beginning of a tradition that links the climatic conditions of a place to the cultural and social institutions of its inhabitants. Today, this long tradition of what could be called anthropology of climate has been discarded as ‘determinist.’ Yet, unlike our contemporary idea of a global and temporalized climate, this tradition establishes a link between cultures and climates. It offers explanations for the differences between cultures and their histories, and it asks how cultures have evolved in a constant exchange with the natural environment. Instead of strictly separating nature and culture, this tradition of an anthropology of climate offers a view on human culture and society not as a way of liberating humans from the constraints of nature, but as multiple forms of negotiating human life and environmental conditions in a process of mutual influence and transformation. E VA H ORN 72 Theories of Heat One of the most famous attempts at constructing a political anthropology of climate in the footsteps of Aristotle is the XIV th book of Montesquieu‘s The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Montesquieu’s overall goal is to establish a theory of legal and political institutions in relation to the facts of human existence, such as climate, religion, forms of trade, modes of subsistence, and the geopolitical position of a country. If climate is one of the determining facts of human existence, Montesquieu argues that it is well worth explaining the different forms of social institutions such as democracy or despotism, monogamy or polygamy, a cult of passive submission or vigorous work ethics in relation to the influences of the climate upon human nature. Montesquieu’s idea of climate is relatively simplistic: He sees temperature as the major determinant of human existence. Consequently, his point of departure is a physiological theory of the effects of coldness and heat on the human body and nervous system: Cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of the body; [...] consequently, it increases also their force. […] On the contrary, warm air relaxes and lengthens the extremes of the fibres; of course, it diminishes their force and elasticity […]. People are, therefore, more vigorous in cold climates. Here [...] the action of the heart and the reaction of the extremities of the fibres are better performed, the blood moves more freely towards the heart, and, reciprocally, the heart has more power. This superiority of strength must produce various effects; for instance, a greater boldness, that is, more courage; a greater sense of superiority, that is, less desire of revenge; a greater opinion of security, that is, more frankness, less suspicion, policy, and cunning [...]. Put a man into a close, warm place, and, for the reasons above given, he will feel a great faintness [...]. The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous; the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave. (Montesquieu 221-222) While the cold preserves the forces of both body and soul and therefore allows for physical strength as well as boldness and courage, heat, in Montesquieu’s view, softens the fibers of the body. It weakens the body’s forces, and hampers a person’s willingness to do hard work. Heat makes him passive, lazy, cowardly and more inclined to sensual and especially sexual pleasures. Montesquieu’s theory of the physical and mental effects of heat and cold not only draws on an array of travel accounts and colonial lore of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, describing the seemingly outlandish mores of Asian and African societies from a colonialist perspective. It also refers to a relatively crude idea of the body, based on a simple physiological experiment. By freezing a sheep’s tongue Montesquieu observes that in the cold the taste-buds contract while they open and expand when thawing (222-223). Heat, he concludes, opens up the human body to relinquish its energy, but also opens man’s mind and soul to perception, imagination and religious Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 73 faith. Heat thus can have paradoxical effects. The Indians for instance - as typical inhabitants of the hot South - are so delicate and sensitive that their climate-induced passivity and cowardice can be overcome by the power of their imagination that is intensified by the heat: Nature, having framed these people of a texture so weak as to fill them with timidity, has formed them, at the same time, of an imagination so lively, that every object makes the strongest impression upon them. That delicacy of organs, which renders them apprehensive of death, contributes likewise to make them dread a thousand things more than death: the very same sensibility induces them to fly, and dare, all dangers. (Montesquieu 224) Of course all this sounds like the jingoistic theory of a climate theorist from the North, who, just like Aristotle, sets his home climate as the norm of truly beneficial temperatures. And this jingoism will be the birthmark of many theories of climate and culture from Montesquieu up to twentieth century theorists such as Ellsworth Huntington or Willy Hellpach. Unlike these modern theorists, however, Montesquieu allows for paradoxical effects of the temperatures or even for institutions that effectively counteract the effects of the climate. While in the Indian example heat - by the power of imagination - counteracts its own slackening effects, Montesquieu also mentions an example of deliberate human resistance to the effects of climate: The Chinese, equally challenged by hot temperatures on their territory, establish a cult of work which opposes the weakening force of heat: “The more the physical causes incline mankind to inaction,” he writes, “the more the moral causes should estrange them from it” (226). Humans, in Montesquieu’s view, may be challenged by climate - but by means of well chosen social and legal institutions they can decide whether to give in or to resist the forcings of their climate. In his essay “Kultur und Klima” (1938), Willy Hellpach, a German physiologist and psychologist of the beginning of the twentieth century, follows in Montesquieu’s footsteps to produce a similar typology of cultures and social behavior determined by climatic conditions. Hellpach, however, does not assume any degree of liberty within these climatic conditions. He bluntly states the differences in cultures and mentalities between Northerners and Southerners as follows: The inhabitants of the northern parts of each continent are largely characterized by such essential traits as sobriety, austerity, coolness, calmness, readiness to get to work, patience, tenacity, rigor, and the consequent exertion of the understanding and the will. In the southern parts the essential traits are liveliness, excitability, impulsiveness, sensitivity of the spheres of feeling and imagination, a sedate letting-things-go or sudden flaring-up. Within a nation, its northern population is more practical, dependable, but less open and sociable, whereas the southerners are more musical, more open (pleasant, endearing, chatty), but inconstant. (Hellpach 429-430) E VA H ORN 74 The anthropology of climate seems to project a disparaging, if not utterly racist view on any culture other than the Northern-Occidental. From a postcolonial point of view, these broad-brush and mildly ludicrous theories on the cultures of “the South” or of “the North” reflect not much more than the eternal self-proclaimed superiority of the colonial gaze. However, it could be useful to throw a more redeeming glance on this tradition of the anthropology of climate. Bruno Latour has criticized the idea of modernity as a path towards a separation of man and nature (Latour, We have). By pursuing a process of separating and ‘cleansing’ the spheres of culture and nature, human culture has emerged not as a liberation from or domination of nature, but as a constant re-entanglement of both spheres (Latour, “Waiting” 10). If human culture and social structures are not seen as a liberation from nature but as constant renegotiations between nature and the human, Montesquieu has a point: He tries to establish a theory of human society that links the facticity of a natural habitat to the normativity of human institutions. He thereby investigates the degrees of freedom or determination of culture by nature. We cannot think of the structures of government or of the family outside and independent from the ground, the locality and the natural conditions in which they are set. While modern climate anthropologists such as Hellpach or the most famous of modern climate determinists, Ellsworth Huntington, see humans essentially bound and determined by their climatic origin, Montesquieu emphasizes that within these settings, man has a choice: The good lawmaker will try to counterbalance the pressures of climate on humans for instance by establishing a cult of work in the hot regions where people are prone to laziness, as the Chinese had done. He tries to think man’s freedom to make his own rules and laws, i.e. man’s modernity, but within the framework of his climatic environment, not independent of it. Without the determinism that has often marked the anthropological theories of climate, Montesquieu may be seen as a first attempt to think acclimatisation, the endless negotiation between man and his climatic conditions. What we call today the “cultural history of climate” is the history of this negotiation (Behringer 1). After Montesquieu, with more and more Europeans confronted to the intense experiences of tropical heat through the rise of colonialism in the nineteenth century, heat gains a reputation of being a massive hazard to both mental and physical health. The nineteenth century abounds with medical treatises on the deleterious effects of tropical climates on European bodies and souls. 3 Tropical heat is not just suspected to temporarily ruin the health of colonial officials and travelers but it also affects their modes of life, moral composure and heredity. Eventually, the destructive effects of heat are even 3 The most influential early work on these effects is James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates (1812). Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 75 passed on to their offspring (Livingstone 93-110). Europeans, within a few generations, “degenerate” in the tropical heat: […] those Europeans who arrive on the banks of the Ganges, many fall early victims to the climate, as will be shown hereafter. That others droop, and are forced, ere many years, to seek their native air, is also well known. That the successors of all would gradually and assuredly degenerate, if they remained in the country, cannot be questioned. (Martin 454-455) Within colonial medicine, heat is cast as the chief villain: It wrecks bodies and minds, undermines the virtues of a European lifestyle, and either kills Europeans or eventually brings them to mingle with the natives. It is this colonialist discourse on the deleterious effects of hot climates that will eventually form the basis for climate-determinist anthropology. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theories of climatic influences on human minds, characters, and work efficiency will eventually conflate climatic factors with hereditary categories such as race or genetic health. For the geographer Ellsworth Huntington, superior civilization can only thrive in a ‘temperate climate,’ free from the extremes of heat or cold, yet blessed with an invigorating seasonal contrast between winter and summer. Huntington actually even measures the performance loss among workers in the Southern US during the summer months. He concludes that heat unfailingly reduces mental and physical energy and, therefore, that no advanced cultural or scientific achievements could be expected from the inhabitants of hot countries. Consequently, the colonial theories of heat and the deterministic takes on the relation between climate and culture were often used to legitimize repressive measures for overcoming native “sloth” or to raise the efficiency of workers by artificial cooling through air conditioning (Horn 233-234). The Aesthetics of Heat Even if these deterministic theories on extreme climates are mostly defunct today, the demonization of heat as a particularly intense climatic factor cannot be entirely dismissed. Physically, heat presents a particular challenge. It is a thermal condition that is much more powerful, much more invasive than cold against which the body can easily be protected by muscular contraction, clothing, and housing. Heat cannot be so easily escaped. In the tradition of the anthropology of climate (deterministic or not, colonial or post-colonial), heat is perceived as the epitome of climate influence tout court, a climate that radically shapes man and human culture. Cold is external to human fibers; it makes them contract within themselves which in turn facilitates more freedom of movement, more restraint, more control - in other words: more independence from the surrounding environment. As thermal influences on bodies and cultures, heat and cold are, thus, not just gradually different E VA H ORN 76 values on the thermometer, they are qualitatively different. Cold closes the body off from its environment, it calls for contraction and insulation. Heat, on the contrary, makes the body dissolve into it, open up to it. The body cannot help but being infused with heat. While cold allows for distance, selfreflection and objectivity, heat triggers apathy and relaxation, but also, as Hellpach suggests, it is supposed to facilitate social intercourse and communication. It makes us open up not only to the natural but also to the social environment. Heat gets us involved, as it were, involved with the world around us as our senses are being sharpened to the point of oversensitivity. Our imagination intensifies. Our bodies soften and melt into the sensual and sexual appetites that heat stimulates. Most of the authors examining the influences of temperature on human bodies either favor ‘temperate climates’ - usually located at the place where they happen to live - or sing the praise of the invigorating effects of cold climates. Yet, with the rise of modern traveling and tourism to tropical countries, warm climates have gained in public favor. What once accounted for the noxious character of tropical zones now has become their special point of attraction: lush nature, exotic bodies, the ‘relaxed’ lifestyle of the South, and erotic stimulation (Cocks 215-235). Michael Taussig, one of the few ethnographers to address heat as the almost inevitable condition of ethnographic research (at least in tropical countries), sketches out a theory of heat as a force to transform perception and consciousness. Heat is a force like color that sets aside the understanding in place of something less conscious and more overflowing, radiance instead of line, immanence instead of that famous bird's-eye view. As our planet heats up and the Tropics spread, is it not possible that not only a new human body but a new type of bodily consciousness will be created in both temperate and tropical regions, a consciousness that reattaches the body to the cosmos? (31) By suggesting surrendering to the intense, mind-opening force of heat, Taussig gets to the core of its fundamentally aesthetic impact. In the inescapable, penetrating force of heat, we realize how climate transforms the human being. Not just the culture, mind, work-efficienc y or mentality, but more fundamentally, the very conditions of the human relationship to the world. Heat ra-diates, penetrates and transforms solid matter and thereby dissolves clear-cut lines and boundaries. It oozes out of the atmosphere into bodies and things, it sticks to objects, it distorts our view, and it intensifies our feelings. Heat is - as it were - the bodily sensation of what Morton describes as the “viscosity” of the hyperobject. Hyperobjects, such as climate, elude conceptualization precisely because they are too extended in time and space. At the same time they are also too close to be perceived. They don’t allow for a dis- Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 77 tanced reflexive kind of cognition. We are always already immersed in them, as they are immersed in us: Global warming [...] is viscous. It never stops sticking to you, no matter where you move on Earth. [...] The object is already there. Before we look at it. Global warming is not a function of our measuring devices. Yet because it’s distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it’s very hard to see as a unique entity. (Morton 45) Heat, in other words, is the quality of something that has no qualities, yet a quality that challenges the terms and conditions of perception itself. Heat allows for no bird’s-eye view on global warming, no distanced perception or cognition of heat. Heat must be felt, like an affect. Heat may just be an affect. Representing Heat The question is: How can one represent heat? How can one describe it, make it palpable? We can look at graphs of rising temperatures, but that will not do much to help us - as the books on global warming advise - to “feel the heat.” How can we feel the heat when it is not (yet) hot? When the temperature where we live and produce massive greenhouse gases is moderate? What would the aesthetics of heat look, feel, sound, and taste like? I can only give two small, maybe far-fetched and in every respect ‘exotic’ examples. The first one is a passage from the novel Tropen by the Austrian expressionist Robert Müller, published in 1915. Tropen is a lurid, slightly surrealist account of a trip three men took into the jungle between Venezuela and Brazil, a journey full of violence, dreams, plans and the desire for an enigmatic indigenous woman called Zana. As the men are being rowed upstream on the fictional Rio Taquado, in white, blistering tropical heat, the narrator half-consciously starts contemplating: All of this I had already experienced once. This mild, weary water had washed around me. This illusory light, this sweetness, this mood, this dawning of the unspeakable, it was not new, it resonated with the memory in man, it was a - repetition. It was […] hot, ha, hot, the river might even have cut across the equator; […] Perhaps I’m just one of the lichens that turn in the water, one with a brain, with a sick, evil brain […]. The fat arms of lianas hugged the overhanging trees and fed an entourage of lascivious-looking flowers. Orchids spread their little, thick snouts through the knotted leaves […]. In the depths of my consciousness, in the mountain of my provenance slumbered a mood from the prehistory of millions of living beings, the maternal lactation and feeding of the river, the obliging calm of idleness had gratified my simple drive […]. Between me and this life about me there existed not only perhaps a metaphysical, but even a superb material identity […]. I am a much improved tropical landscape. Wherever I go and wherever I stand, I E VA H ORN 78 bring with me a normal temperature of 36 degrees, a sumptuous shooting of juices, a vegetation of warm splendor. (Müller 24-30) 4 It is obvious that Müller, who possibly never visited the tropics but may instead have spent the time in question in a psychiatric hospital, borrows his tropes of the tropics from colonial literature (such as, e.g. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)) and climate anthropology: the laziness and lust triggered by the suffocating heat and moisture; the lush, sexualized landscape and vegetation; and the regression to ‘primal instincts’ and to lower stages of consciousness. However, what is most striking in this passage is the blurring of the boundaries and instances of cognition: While immersed in the perception of the tropical jungle, he suddenly perceives himself not only as part of this jungle but also as the landscape itself. He is the landscape turned outside in, a tropical biotope at stable 36 degrees Celsius, “a sumptuous shooting of juices, a vegetation of warm splendor” (30). In Müller’s fictional vision of heat, not only does the instance of perception and the perceived collapse into one flowing, productive stream or mush but the narrator also dives into the deep time of his ontogenesis, the fetus floating in the nutritious waters of the womb, and into the even deeper time of the origin of life as such: into the world of liquids and cells, molecules and temperatures, the “prehistory of millions of living beings, the maternal lactation and feeding of the river”(27). The world of the formation of species, yet in their mere potentiality, in their origin, not yet formed. Heat allows for a relation to this primordial world, and perhaps, according Taussig, a “bodily consciousness [...] that reattaches the body to the cosmos” (31). Müller’s fictional tropics open up a world of pre-history, a trip back into unfathomable pasts: of the individual into his origin, into the pre-history of the human species as well as the becoming of life in general. J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962) will take up this idea of heat as a reversal of time by depicting a world that has returned to the heavy heat of the Triassic period. Clocks start going backwards, animals and plants revolve to prehistoric shapes and sizes. The novel develops a theory of time as climate: Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now [with the Triassic heat] being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. (Ballard 56) Heat allows for a relation to these pasts, a relation of the observing subject to the history and the continuous becoming of everything around it. It dissolves 4 I am grateful to Ben Robinson for translating the passage. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is no English translation of the novel so far. Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat 79 not only the boundaries of bodies, the positions of subject and object, observer and observed, body and environment. It also reverses time, sets the human in relation to a prehistory of life that exceeds human consciousness and existence. In this sense, heat may actually be the appropriate temperature of the Anthropocene. This may sound a bit vague, if not esoteric. Let me deepen this impression of vagueness with my second example, Max Ernst’s L’Europe après la pluie II (1942). Max Ernst: L'Europe après la pluie II, décalcomanie, oil on canvas (148,2 x 54,9 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, USA. I cannot go into Ernst’s surrealist aesthetics of landscape in detail. Instead, I would like to focus on the question what it could mean to depict a landscape formed by and infused with heat. What does it mean to ‘paint’ heat, to make it visible? Obviously, it does not mean to depict the sun or objects warmed by the sun, nor using so-called ‘warm’ colors (even though Ernst actually does use mostly oranges, yellows, and browns). The depiction of heat does not even seem to be Ernst’s primary goal. What we see in L’Europe II is the scenery of strange vegetal, animal and inorganic shapes, rocks, steep mountains and rotting wood, and organisms that look like sponges and corals. Others look like animals or human beings in strange attire, both exotic and archaic, with a head (or headgear) in the shape of a bird. Artwork and natural form are indistinguishable. The sky is bright and mildly clouded, watery in contrast to the solidity of the landscape in the foreground, an effect created by the gooey color paste used in the décalcomanie technique. What we see is living matter, yet not fixed in species or objects, but metamorphosing from organic to inorganic, from marine to terrestrial, from animal to human and back. What looks like coral may as well be a cow’s head. What looks like a human body may as well be a corpse, or a statue. Everything, however, seems to be made of one common substance: the vegetation, the rocks, as well as the human or animal figures that emerge darkly against the bright backdrop of the clear sky. E VA H ORN 80 This is what I believe comes closest to what one could call the visual aesthetics of heat. Ernst paints heat without even trying to mimetically represent it, by light, sweat, mist or the use of certain colors. Ernst shows what heat does and brings forth: a melting of forms and shapes, a consubstantiality of nature and what might be human figures, made out of living matter that just takes ever-changing shapes. Heat brings out the inseparable, non-objective, ‘viscous’ coherence of life, a life or super-organism of which the human species is a part, yet only a part. Like any other species, it is formed by and yet also forming and transforming this living matter. Understanding the Anthropocene that we are facing might therefore be a task that necessarily not only involves a new look at history - both the natural history of the Earth and of the human species and the history of cultures, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has convincingly argued (197-222) - but also on the mutual transformations between humans, climates, and cultures. This view on the historical anthropology of climate must necessarily also draw on works of art, fiction, and the bizarre imaginations of the heated and overheated brains of artists. “As the planet is heating up,” as Taussig puts it, the only way to re-think the relationship between man and nature is to re-think the complexity of the mesh of life, to ‘feel the heat’ through an aesthetics of heat, and to learn its lesson. Works Cited Aristotle. Politics. Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Vol. 21. Trans. Harris Rackham. Reprint from the 1944 edition. London: William Heinemann, 1990. Bailey, Ian, and Hugh Compston, eds. Feeling the Heat: The Politics of Climate Policy in Rapidly Industrializing Countries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Ballard, J. G. The Drowned World [1962]. New York: Norton, 2012. Berger, John J. Beating the Heat: Why and How We Must Combat Global Warming. Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2000. Behringer, Wolfgang. A Cultural History of Climate. London: Wiley, 2009. 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Motavalli, Jim, ed. Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Change. London: Routledge, 2004. Müller, Robert. Tropen. Der Mythos der Reise. Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs (1915). Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993. E VA H ORN 82 Pittock, A. Barrie. Climate Change: Turning Up the Heat. London: Routledge. 2005. Schröder, Miriam. “Supporting China’s Green Leap Forward: Political Strategies for China’s Climate Policies.” Feeling the Heat: The Politics of Climate Policy in Rapidly Industrializing Countries. Ed. Ian Bailey and Hugh Compston. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 97-122. Selchow, Sabine. “Die Apokalypse duldet keinen Sachzwang.“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 May 2014. <http: / / www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuilleton/ debatten/ ulrich-beck-undbruno-latour-zur-klimakatastrophe-12939499.html? printPagedArticle= true#pageIndex_2>. Web. 12 January 2017. Taussig, Michael. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. II. H ISTORICIZING P ERSPECTIVES J OHANNES U NGELENK The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest Colonial Climates When on S. James his day, Iuly 24. being Monday (preparing for no lesse all the blacke night before) the clouds gathering thicke upon us, and the windes singing, and whistling most unusually, which made us to cast off our Pinace towing the same untill then asterne, a dreadfull storme and hideous began to blow from out the North-east, which swelling, and roaring as it were by fits, some houres with more violence then others, at length did beate all light from heaven; which like an hell of darkenesse turned blacke upon us, so much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and feare use to overrunne the troubled, and overmastered sences of all, which (taken up with amazement) the eares lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the windes, and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken. […] For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body, and most loathsomely affecteth all the powers thereof […]. [I]t being now Friday, the fourth morning, it wanted little, but that there had bin a generall determination, to have shut up the hatches, and commending our sinfull soules to God, committed the Shippe to the mercy of the Sea: surely, that night we must have done it, and that night had we then perished: but see the goodness and sweet introduction of better hope, by our mercifull God given unto us. Sir George Summers, when no man dreamed of such happinesse, had discovered, and cried Land. (Strachey 1735-37) It is indeed thanks to the “mercifull God[’s]” causing the shipwreck to take place near the shore of an island and delivering all the ship’s passengers to safe ground, that William Strachey’s letter reached its addressee and, via various detours, the modern reader. Its publication history is complicated: It had formed part of Richard Hakluyt’s vast collection of travel narratives but did not find its way to publication. It was eventually acquired by Samuel Purchas after Hakluyt’s death and published in the fourth volume of his Purchas His Pilgrimes in the year 1625. There is, however, persuasive evidence that the letter must have circulated in manuscript long before its publication. Most prominently, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, first played in November 1611, draws on Strachey’s text: The spectacular stage storm and destructive debacle of the first scene are clearly informed by William Strachey’s J OHANNES U NGELENK 86 account of the ‘colonial’ tempest and shipwreck. 1 In other words, we probably owe one of the most daring, in any case, one of the most prominent sea-storm and shipwreck scenes in the history of theatre to the providence of the “mercifull God” who saved the crew of this unlucky colonial passage. The aim of this chapter is to work out a proximity of the discourse on climatic experiences in the colonies and the experiences produced by the relatively new cultural practice of early modern theatre: In The Tempest Shakespeare metatheatrically stages such a proximity as a reflection upon his theatrical art and the manner in which it functions. My paper takes its point of departure in the tradition of reading The Tempest from a postcolonial perspective: Edward Malone’s early discovery of the affinity between Shakespeare’s play and texts that originated in the context of the English settlement in Virginia initiated a well-researched topos in the field of Shakespeare Studies, kindling the fruitful tradition of postcolonial readings of this work. 2 It is the same corpus of texts that will be referred to in my argument about early modern reflections on the climate and its connection to the theatre. A New Historicist approach is used to reconstruct a historical and cultural framework from the most prominent of the texts which were produced in the wake of the colonial project in Virginia, using travel writings collected by Thomas Hakluyt, William Strachey’s “True Reportory,” Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Barmudas and a pamphlet known as A True Declaration published by the Counseil for Virginia, all circulating in London at the time when The Tempest was written. The terrible storm William Strachey tells of hit a group of ships on their way from England to Jamestown, a settlement founded in 1607 on the North- American continent. The flagship of the mission, called the Sea Venture, aboard which Strachey happened to be together with eminent figures of the plantation-enterprise run by the Virginia Company, was separated from the rest of the ships, suffered leakage and was wrecked on the rocks of a group of islands. There was no great harm done, the group of about one hundred and fifty people were saved and stayed for ten months on the uninhabited island, building two new ships and gathering provisions in order to finally sail to Jamestown - thereby providing a happy ending for an exotic, miraculous story that could not have been better fabricated. It is no coincidence that this story has survived the course of time, due in part to Shakespeare and Shakespeare Studies. As William Strachey’s letter shows, the endeavor to found a plantation on the River James resulted in some severe problems that threatened the success of the project as a whole: 1 For a good summary of the background of Strachey’s text, its history of publication and the debates about its influence on Shakespeare’s Tempest see Alden T. Vaughan, Strachey. 2 V. Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan give an extensive overview of this topos in their introduction to the Arden 3rd edition of The Tempest. The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 87 Its main marketing strategy of praising the exceptionally temperate climate responsible for the plantation’s abundance, and the huge profits it promised, came under attack, owing to news of miseries and upheavals. When in 1584 the first English explorers approached the shore of the later colony, they were guided by a promising scent, as Arthur Barlowe, a member of the expedition writes: The second of July, we found shole water, which smelt so sweetly, and was so strong a smell, as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden, abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured, that the land could not be farre distant. (Hakluyt 728) And indeed, what the English explorers ultimately found there satisfied the keenest fantasies of a golden age and paradise, fostered in addition by earlier travel accounts of Columbus and Vespucci: Wee found the people most gentle, louing, and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age. The earth bringeth forth all things in aboundance, as in the first creation, without toile or labour. (Hakluyt 731) When, however, twenty-six years later the shipwrecked crew of the Sea Venture ultimately made it to the settlement at Jamestown in May 1610, they found, as William Strachey reports, “all things so contrary to our expectations, so full of misery and misgovernment” (Stratchey 1749) that it is hard to believe they were talking of the same ‘paradisiac’ strip of land: Viewing the Fort, we found the Pallisadoes torne downe, the Ports open, the Gates from off the hinges, and emptie houses (which Owners death had taken from them) rent up and burnt, rather then the dwellers would step into the Woods, stones cast off from them, to fetch other fire-wood: and it is true, the Indian killed as fast without, if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of their Block-house, as Famine and Pestilence did within, with many more particularities of their sufferances (brought upon them by their owne disorders the last yeere) then I have heart to expresse. (Stratchey 1749) In short, there was no trace of a golden age or paradise, nor of abundance or an absence of treason and violence. The “disorders” that Strachey alludes to referred to a whole series of riots that threw the settlement into anarchy. Strachey’s report, for strategic reasons, hardly mentions that it was above all the climate that was causing severe problems: The fact that the passengers and crew of the voyage immediately travelled back to England, happily taking provisions from another ship that arrived at Jamestown, may indicate the utter absence of abundance and healthy living conditions. Rumor was spreading rapidly about the miseries of the settlement in Virginia, so much so that the Virginia Company felt compelled to react. The pamphlet that the J OHANNES U NGELENK 88 Company published in a rather desperate attempt to refute these rumors finally called the alleged problems by their climatic name: First the daungerous passage by sea, secondly the barrennesse of the countrie, thirdly the unholesomnesse of the climate: the storme that separated the admirall from the fleete proving the first, the famine amongst our men importing the second, the sicknesse of our men arguing the third. (Counseil 17-18) It is here that the story of the shipwreck and the miraculous saving of the passengers comes into play. The island on whose rocks the Sea Venture was wrecked was just not any island: It belonged to the Bermudas. They were a famously dreaded place: “For the Ilands of the Barmudas,” writes Silvester Jourdain, were “ever esteemed and reputed, a most prodigious and inchanted place, affoording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather” (Jourdain 8). They were, adds William Strachey, “often afflicted and rent with tempests, great strokes of thunder, lightning and raine in the extreamity of violence” (Stratchey 1738), “so terrible to all that ever touched on them, and such tempests, thunders, and other fearfull obiects are seene and heard about them, that they be called commonly the Devils Ilands” (Stratchey 1737). “Yet,” writes Silvester Jourdain, “did we finde there the ayre so temperate and the Country so aboundantly fruitful of all fit necessaries, for the sustentation and preservation of mans life” (9) that the old myth of a paradise on earth is enlivened anew: Wherefore my opinion sincerely of this Iland is, that whereas it hath beene, and is still accounted, the most dangerous infortunate, and most forlorne place of the world, it is in truth the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land, (the quantity and bignesse thereof considered) and merely natural, as ever man set foote upon. (Jourdain 10) The “mercifull God” has thus not only shown “his goodness” in rescuing more than 150 lives - the shipwrecked party finding themselves stranded on an island famous for its foul, deadly weather turns out to be (some sort of) temperate paradise, instead, that could be marketed as a providential hint. As can be easily imagined, this story of rescue and unexpected paradise was exactly the kind of news the Virginia Company was waiting for. One could not have dreamed of better material for countering the bad publicity circulating in England and threatening the colonial endeavor as a whole. Fortunately, the Company’s pamphlet, promoting the shipwreck and delivery of crew and passengers, has survived: Claiming that God’s providence favored the colonial project, the Virginia Counsell tried to establish the difficult argument that “plenty and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries can be reconciled together” (Counseil 33-34). The strategy the pamphlet employs hinges completely on the story of the shipwreck. The aim is to transfer the story’s narrative structure, its movement from misery to bliss, to the settlement. The terror of shipwreck and rumors of a dangerously The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 89 unwholesome climate are thus to be turned into the discovery of a paradisiac, temperate climate that provides the perfect basis for a well-governed, prosperous future colony. The text explicitly calls the disastrous state of the settlement the “greater shipwrack in the continent of Virginia,” a metaphorical shipwreck brought about “by the tempest of dissention” (Counseil 34). All hopes for rescuing the settlement from falling into anarchy and decay were set on the hero of the shipwreck story, Sir Thomas Gates, who organized the stranded community - dealing with several riots - and led the mission back to Jamestown. However, the Company’s argument for his governing as a healing force, potentially solving the problem of sickness and death spreading among the settlers does not seem particularly convincing: “he professeth, that in a fortnights space he recovered the health of most of them by moderat labour, whose sicknesse was bred in them by intemperate idleness” (Counseil 33). Without any doubt, the challenge that Sir Thomas Gates, and with him the colonies (to be) were facing in general was one of climate, and of tempering oneself to the weather conditions. As “the tempest of dissention” in the pamphlet shows, the task of re-establishing a ‘healthy’ balance concerns the individual body as well as the body politic. From our modern perspective this complex of heavy weather, ideas of (individual) sickness and political instability must appear metaphorical and random; however, in the early modern age, this complex expresses the very core of the dominant worldview of analogies: The imperfect, elemental world, in contrast to the perfect heavenly world, is subjected to continuous processes of balances and imbalances. The paradigm for these processes is the weather. Incidents of imbalance, sickness or political crises are therefore associated with, or, better, seen as analogous to incidents of heavy weather, as the Latin word tempestas, signifying both ‘a storm’ and ‘a riot’ exemplifies: Lat. Tempestas, atis, f.g. Time, a seasonable time and faire weather, a faire or good season: a tempest or storme, a boysterous or troublous weather, be it winde, haile, or raine: commonlie it signifieth a tempest or storme of rain & haile together. also great trouble, busines or ruffling in a common weale, a storme or trouble of adversitie, daunger or perill, a commotion. (Thomas, s.v. Tempestas, atis) As heavy weather was in the early modern age still widely understood as a divine intervention, God punishing mankind for their irreverence and sinful lives (Höfele 25-38), Sir Thomas Gates’s suggestion of a Protestant working ethic as a cure for the disastrous climate of the colonies does make some sense. However, his attempt at re-establishing the paradise in Virginia, “[t]he fertility of the soyle, the temperature of the climate, the form of government, the condition of our people, their daily invocating of the name of God, being thus expressed” (Counseil 52) also suggests its limitedness: The paternalistic comment that “Adam himselfe might not live in a paradice without dressing J OHANNES U NGELENK 90 the garden” (Counseil 36) threatens to backfire, for the simple reason that Adam’s garden is very likely to have been planted with more providence regarding the factual choice of its geographical location: How is it possible that such a virgin and temperate aire, should work such contrarie effects, but because our fort (that lyeth as a semy-Iland) is most part invironed with an ebbing and flowing salt water, the owze of which sendeth forth un unwholesome & contagious vapour? (Counseil 33) The marketing experts of the Virginia Company resort to an interesting tactic to counter this weighty argument against the wholesomeness of their colonial project: “No man ought to judge of any Countrie by the fennes and marshes (such as is the place where James towne standeth) except we will condemne all England” (Counseil 32). With this argument the debates about the climate abroad return to the soil where the dreams and fantasies of paradise, of abundance and temperate air and of “people most gentle, louing, and faithfull,” living together in harmony, “void of all guile, and treason,” are fostered. It underlines and makes explicit a dimension of the discussion about the colonial climate and also of the colonial enterprise itself that might remain latent, that might be concealed behind the company’s economic interest and the advertising character of their intervention. However, at this early stage, with the obvious insignificance of the project, economically still a disaster, with a negligible number of people involved, the huge public interest testified by the circulation and ‘consumption’ of texts covering the colonial enterprise point to the fact that the colonies, at least in these early stages, primarily fulfill a different function: they offer a way of engaging with ‘their own,’ of taking an unfamiliar view of the familiar, following a very special, new mode. What the Londoners found and probably enjoyed in the stories brought back from the “new world” were their own utopian hopes and their own reality of misery and political violence, in an intensified, more extreme form: The colonies open up a hyper-space of climate and processes of temperance, not different from their own reality, but more delicate, with more to win and more to lose. Although these colonial events are taking place far away, in an ‘other’ place, seemingly unconnected to their own reality, they nevertheless always comment and recur to the current status quo at home. Theatrical Climates: The Tempest The Tempest by William Shakespeare, first performed probably late in the year 1611, tells the story of the very special climate of an island. The play opens, as already mentioned, with the staging of a sea-storm, a revolutionary, unheard of dramatic spectacle in the early modern age. It then uses the chaos of the situation to spread the shipwrecked cast in groups around The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 91 the island so that the audience can watch them exploring it, encountering its few inhabitants - and, what will be the focus here, experiencing its strange climate. The biggest group consists of the courtiers assembled around the king of Naples, Alonso, and the illegitimate Duke of Milan, Antonio. Both are Prospero’s enemies, since they usurped his dukedom and sent him to sea in a small boat, a “rotten carcass of a butt” (1.2.146). They could not know that they would be facing him later, on this very island. It does not take long for this group to start debating about the island’s climate: ADRIAN. Though this island seem to be desert - […] Uninhabitable and almost inaccessible - […] It must needs be of subtle, tender and delicate temperance. ANTONIO. Temperance was a delicate wench. SEBASTIAN. Ay, and a subtle, as he most learnedly delivered. ADRIAN. The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. SEBASTIAN. As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. ANTONIO. Or, as ’twere perfumed by a fen. GONZALO. Here is everything advantageous to life. ANTONIO. True, save means to live. SEBASTIAN. Of that there’s none, or little. GONZALO. How lush and lusty the grass looks! How green! ANTONIO. The ground indeed is tawny. SEBASTIAN. With an eye of green in’t. ANTONIO. He misses not much. SEBASTIAN. No; he doth but mistake the truth totally. (2.1.37-59) In a paper called “Shakespeare’s Virginian Mask,” John Gillies has proposed linking this discussion to the debates about the Virginia settlement’s climate: Is it paradisiac, “of subtle, tender and delicate temperance,” does the “air” breathe “most sweetly,” is everything “lush and lusty” and “green” - or, rather, “tawny,” barren, not providing “means to live,” as a result of the rotten ooze of the “fens”? The details of allusions to the controversial discussion prevailing in London at the time The Tempest was written and first performed is indeed striking. All the more so, since, only a few lines later, the talkative Gonzalo even tells us about his utopic dream of founding a settlement on the island where they have just landed: “Had I plantation of this isle” (2.1.144), he says, using the term plantation (cf. OED, s.v. plantation def. 2.b.), current for describing colonial enterprises in Ireland or Virginia, “I would with such perfection govern, sir, / T’excel the Golden Age” (2.1.168- 169). The vision he elaborates is more or less copied verbatim from Montaigne’s “Of the Caniballes,” where an encounter with Brazilian natives is depicted, their living harmoniously in abundance, “Without sweat or en- J OHANNES U NGELENK 92 deavor; treason, felony” (2.1.161), as Gonzalo would have it. John Gillies’s reading, following this thread of Virginia and (colonial) temperance through the play with special attention paid to the depiction of temperance in the mask performed for Ferdinand and Miranda in act four is extremely interesting; it only raises one, decisive question: How can an unrigged bark, set to sea somewhere between Milan and Naples, be washed ashore on an island ‘in the middle’ of the Atlantic Ocean? Can a ship sailing from Tunis to Naples, troubled by a storm find itself shipwrecked thousands of miles away, in the middle of nowhere on a course to the “new world”? Something seems to be essentially wrong with Shakespeare’s geography, which is a problem when talking about climate: In early modern English this term was still closely connected to the late ancient and medieval notion of a region of the earth, a belt, defined by its latitude (cf. OED, s.v. climate def. 1.a.). Since, unlike Shakespeare’s usual working routine, the play’s plot is not based on a literary or historiographical source, his re-locating of the shipwreck he borrows from Strachey and others is highly significant. We do not know where exactly to locate the island the play is set upon; the only explicit information we get is that it is not the Bermudas - Ariel relates, in half a sentence, that he was once asked to “fetch dew / From the still-vexed Bermudas” (1.2.228-229), implying that he had to travel there. As Shakespeare’s relocating of the island, his consciously disassociating it from historical and geographic references shows, he is doing more with the debate about climates and temperance than merely depicting specific cultural events of the time. In order to answer the main question of what Shakespeare is making of this debate on climates and temperance, it seems to be sensible to start with the easiest question of all: What is it actually like, the climate of Shakespeare’s isle? Is it temperate and healthy, or rather devilishly sickening? Are Adrian and Gonzalo right, is the grass “lush and lusty,” does the air breathe “most sweetly,” or is it Sebastian and Antonio who are pointing to the ‘true’ state of things by calling the ground “tawny” and the air “rotten”? For the early modern audience in the Globe Theatre, the ground the actors are standing on may indeed be called “tawny”; the stage was made of wood, yellowish-brown. And, to be sure, the air ‘breathed’ towards the stage from the pits, crowded by all sorts of ‘simple’ people, was unlikely to be “sweet”; the description of the place as a “fen,” breathing out rank air, “as if it had lungs,” “rotten ones,” being, in a way, more true than Sebastian could have known it to be. Nevertheless, the conventions and habits of the early modern platform stage, without scenery, which to a very large extent relied on the audience’s imagination would perfectly well have allowed the island to be as green and lush, and abundantly fruitful as is, literally, imaginable, and without any conflict arising. The fact that a conflict does arise in the scene in which the shipwrecked noblemen explore the island is therefore significant: The The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 93 party’s argument about the state of the isle turns out to be a metatheatrical commentary. Their exploring of the stage/ island mirrors the audience’s position in early modern theatre: The audience finds itself and its viewing position represented on stage. Due to the absence of dramatic text giving the onstage audience’s imagination sufficient clues, the onstage theatrical situation does not quite work, and conflict arises. It is this dysfunction that is used to exhibit the conventions of the early modern stage. The way theatre works is brought before the eyes of the ‘real’ audience that is not only watching a theatrical spectacle but also watching representatives of themselves observing the effect that theatre has on its audience. In short, in being induced to discover the island’s climate, we are induced to discover early modern theatre as well. This reflective pragmatic, metatheatrical structure of having both the spectacle and an audience for this spectacle on stage is typical for Shakespeare’s Tempest. Prospero’s enemies, the audience and the ‘victims’ of his metatheatrical manipulations, arrive on the island as early as the second scene so that everything that is to follow has to be watched by the ‘real’ audience as a sort of play-within-a-play. Only the first scene escapes this special pragmatic structure and can, and has to be, viewed by the audience, without the theatrical illusions being broken, in all its intensity. Here the characters on stage, not knowing that they are in fact also already being spectators for an impressive theatrical spectacle, behave the way a ‘good’ audience is meant to behave: by taking the spectacle for real and being moved by it. It is no coincidence that this scene is the famous tempest scene that lends the play its title. Despite its not being metatheatrically reflective, it develops the central analogy between theatre and weather that the rest of the play will then unfold. In the passage of his letter describing the shipwreck, William Strachey had already noticed the strange proximity of tempestuous weather and a certain sort of human ‘utterances,’ speaking of “terrible cries and murmurs of the windes,” which affected the listeners’ bodies in an intense way: So much the more fuller of horror, as in such cases horror and feare use to overrunne the troubled, and overmastered sences of all, which (taken up with amazement) the eares lay so sensible to the terrible cries and murmurs of the windes, and distraction of our Company, as who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken. […] For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body, and most loathsomely affecteth all the powers thereof […]. (Stratchey 1735) It is this analogy that Shakespeare exploits in his metatheatrical use of the storm: this whistling, roaring and murmuring of the troubled sea - and of the passengers on board. “You do assist the storm” (1.1.14), the boatswain accuses the courtiers that did not follow his commands to retreat to their cabins J OHANNES U NGELENK 94 - that is to say, to leave the stage. He proves unable to silence them (“To cabin! Silence! Trouble us not! ” (1.1.17-18)) just as the courtiers are incapable of commanding to silence the roaring elements: BOATSWAIN. […] What cares these roarers for the name of king? […] You are a councillor; if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority! If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. (1.1.16-26) What are the courtiers doing other than what we expect characters on stage to do: speaking and acting? In this they are “assist[ing] the storm,” breathing forth anxious words, troubling the boatswain just as the heavy weather is: “A plague upon this howling. They are louder than the weather or our office” (1.1.35-36). “Nay, good, be patient” (1.1.15), Gonzalo tells the Boatswain, who is complaining about their marring his labor - “When the sea is! ” (1.1.16), the Boatswain tellingly answers. It is the effect of the “terrible cries and murmurs of the windes” that William Strachey speaks of that proves to be interesting for metatheatrical reflections. Shakespeare uses the enormous power of the weather on the bystanders that Stratchey relates, the fact that “who was most armed, and best prepared, was not a little shaken,” “that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body,” for claiming an analogy of weather and theatre. All this would probably sound utterly constructed, for a paper on climate and early modern theatre, if the play itself, in its second scene, did not explicitly stage these metatheatrical reflections. This occurs two times: Firstly, in a dialogue between Prospero, who confesses to have been the stage-master (director) of this tempest, and Miranda, his daughter, a viewer of the scene, who is deeply moved to pity and amazement by it (1.2.1-20). Secondly, when Prospero speaks to Ariel, the main metatheatrical actor: PROSPERO. Hast thou, spirit, Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee? ARIEL. To every article. I boarded the King’s ship: now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin I flamed amazement. […] PROSPERO. My brave spirit, Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil Would not infect his reason? ARIEL. Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad and played Some tricks of desperation. […] (1.2.193-210) The intemperate climate of the ‘island’ has thus literally “worke[d] upon the whole frame of the body” - causing “distempered bodies” (Counseil 33) as The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 95 the medical vocabulary, “infect[ing]” and “fever,” indicates. Prospero and Ariel will even increase this “fever of the mad” by exposing their victims to further spectacles - this time not featuring the weather but harpies, banquets and that kind of ‘fantastic’ stuff - until their “brains [are] / (now useless) boiled within their] skull[s]” (5.1.59-60), their fancy so “unsettled” (5.1.60) that they are, in the end, unable to move or react. However, there is also “sweet air,” or “solemn air” on the island, not only finally curing, and re-tempering “brains,” “unsettled fancy” and passions, but also “allaying” the fury of the waters: FERDINAND. Where should this music be? I’th’ air, or th’earth? It sounds no more, and sure it waits upon Some god o’th’ island. Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wreck, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion With its sweet air. […] (1.2.388-394) Although these airs are primarily thought of as music, which re-introduces harmony amongst the troubled elements and humors, these “sweet airs” are an important part of the island’s climate, as Caliban’s famous line - that has even made it into the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in London 2012 - states: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (3.2.135-136). Thus in a way, on this odd island, we do in fact find “plenty and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries […] reconciled together” (Counseil 33-34). This fact may account for the observation that all the characters coming to this climate, like Ferdinand, suspect there is “Some god o’th’island” in charge of its weather, some higher authority responsible for its climate, no matter whether “sweet airs,” as here with Ferdinand, or in Miranda’s invoking a “god of power” in the earlier scene directly after the tempest. Prospero’s island is, as Silvester Jourdain reported for the Bermudas, “a most prodigious and inchanted place” (Jourdain 8), or as Gonzalo conclusively puts it in the end: “All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement / inhabits here” (5.1.104-5). The play introduces a ‘master’ of the island who is indeed powerful enough to make its weather: Prospero. He has “by [his] arts,” as Miranda calls it, “Put the wild waters in [the first scene’s] roar” - and allayed the fury of the waters afterwards. Shakespeare’s Tempest is, however, not a fantasy of total, immediate power, of a superior authority that would even have brought the weather under its control. On the contrary, the analogy the play establishes between Prospero as stage master and God (in early modern thinking the provident and punishing master over the weather) aims precisely at the medium through which these interventions are taking place: As the J OHANNES U NGELENK 96 first scene emblematically stages, the masters (of stage and weather) remain absent (“Where is the Master? ” (1.1.9) - “Do you not hear him” (1.1.13)). What is present and produces effects on the bystanders’ bodies is the medium: the weather, the weathery spectacle. In Shakespeare’s play the character of Ariel stands for this intermediary position in-between master and audience. As we have seen in his post-performance dialogue with his master Prospero, it is he who performs, who is present and who has to inform the absent master about the spectacle. With regard to the climate of the island, his name is no coincidence: “Ariel”, an “airy spirit,” as the folio list of characters tells us, is a personification of the weathery character of theatre. The etymology of spirit, deriving from lat. spiritus, the Vulgata term for the biblical pneuma (cf. OED, s.v. spirit) signifying both a gust of wind and breath, points to the central analogy of weather and theatrical speech that Shakespeare’s play exploits - in order to emphasize the fact that weather and theatre bring forth similar effects on the bodies subjected and exposed to them. Following this weathery, metatheatrical reading of The Tempest provides us with a simple answer to a much-discussed question in criticism of the play: Why does Prospero abjure his magic before returning to Milan, and not just govern Milan with the help of his “arts,” which have proved so efficient during the last three hours? Simply because his “arts” are theatrical: they are bound to a specific place and to a certain length of time: the audience arrives at “his island,” the court party of the play and the London audience alike - and will leave after two or three hours. The “quality of th’climate” on this theatre island appears to be unique - is it? Here, in the early modern theatre, “plenty and famine, a temperate climate, and distempered bodies, felicities and miseries can be reconciled together” (Conseil 33-34). Shakespeare’s theatre is, despite Gonzalo’s vision, surely not a place where paradise can be found for some hours in the midst of early modern London, not a tropical island of perfect temperature, not an oasis depicting perfectly governed states and ideal human beings. It is, rather, a weathery place: a tempestuous place, where one is shaken and moved by the weather, where one tempers oneself to that weather and its stormy gusts or solemn sweet airs blowing from the stage - and back. And it is exactly here that the colonial and the theatrical meet. It is here that they come together: through the weather and the climate of the colonies and the stage. A Politics of Intensity: Critical Climates To summarize what the political and dramatic tempests examined here share and what their interaction produces, I would like to return to a sentence of Strachey’s report already quoted in the very beginning of this paper: The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 97 For it is most true, there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations, but that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body. (Stratchey 1735) Without trying to offer an exhaustive interpretation of these dense, and somewhat dark words, many of which would deserve their own close reading, this sentence is definitely valid for both the (imaginary and the experiences of the) colonies and the early modern theatre. It is the deviation from the “commonly,” the fact that “there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest” that approximates colonial and theatrical experiences. The parallel between the two is however not established by what we get to see and experience in the theatre, not by the representation of the hitherto un-seen, not by the contact with the ‘other.’ Despite the harpies and the vanishing banquet, Shakespeare does not call his play The Enchanted Island, as Dryden and Davenant would later do, but simply The Tempest: aiming not at the exotic, the unfamiliar, but referring to a weather phenomenon more than familiar to the London audience. It is, however, the intensity that makes the difference: “there ariseth commonly no such unmercifull tempest.” It is this intensity that accounts for the weather’s and thereby for the theatre’s effect: “that it worketh upon the whole frame of the body.” Like the “unmercifull tempest” in the colonies, Shakespeare’s theatrical Tempest does not only affect the audiences’ individual bodies and their healthy balance: it also touches upon the harmony of the body politic. For the London discussions on the Virginian weather as for Shakespeare’s theatrical practice it is the intensity of the tempests that offers a central political perspective. I therefore would speak of a politics of the weather: The uncommon intensity (also always) ‘comments’ on, perhaps temporarily troubles the ‘familiar’ status quo; it tests the common. The discussions about the Virginian weather/ climate, as the circulation of letters and the number of publications show, was obviously of great interest for London society, despite the relative smallness of the enterprise. The question of the climate in Virginia, the tempests there - that are also political tempests in the sense explained above, with their riots and a body politic close to anarchic failure - are not only of pertinence with regard to the uncommon climate far-off, but always also comment on the ‘common’ state of things at home in London. 3 Against this background the suggestion of a Protestant working-ethic as a solution to the climatic problems in Virginia, readable also as a political comment on quarrels ‘at home,’ may even lose some of its oddity. 3 The reign of James I, and especially the first decade of the seventeenth century, was a time of political tension: the religious quarrels between Protestants and Catholics as well as James’ problematic relation to parliament proved a continual source of instability and conflict. ‘Mutiny’ and ‘upheaval’ was not foreign to this era: the so-called ‘Gunpowder Plot’ stands emblematically for a whole series of religiously motivated ‘plots’ against James and the Protestant rule that shaped this decade. J OHANNES U NGELENK 98 It is not a coincidence that Shakespeare borrows this ‘colonial’ tempest, this uncommon “unmercifull tempest, compound of so many contrary and divers Nations” for reflecting on his own theatrical practice. Historically speaking, Shakespearean theatre emerges as a sister of English overseas colonial enterprises. The two might also in fact be related in some respects, as cultural, even as ‘political’ practices. Formulated more carefully, they may be invested with a similar, a very complex cultural, perhaps even ‘political,’ or at least ‘critical’ function. They provide the English public with a new space for experience and reflection, a space that is characterized by its uncommon intensity. With theatrical as well as colonial experience, it is the characteristic intensity that on the one hand differentiates it from our own ‘common’ reality and on the other hand brings about a new political perspective on what seems familiar and ‘common’ - without giving answers, always ambiguous but still troubling, unsettling, opening up questions. If we are to believe in what Shakespeare’s Tempest tells us metatheatrically about the climate of the island theatre, there is no need to trot around the world, to expose our bodies to all kinds of climatic experiences. For experiences that are brought home and are made to circulate in order to be reflected on and discussed, amongst other issues, about the state of things ‘at home,’ there was an island available, a Globe on the banks of the Thames, a hyper-space of climate and processes of temperance, not different from our own reality, but a more ‘delicate’ staging of the world between Paradise - and Hell. Works Cited “Climate.” Def. 1.a. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3 rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Counseil for Virginia. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia with a Confutation of Such Scandalous Reports as Haue Tended to the Disgrace of So Worthy an Enterprise. London, 1610. Dryden, John and William Davenant. The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island. London, 1670. Gillies, John. “Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque.” ELH 53.4 (1986). 673-707. Hakluyt, Richard. The Principall Nauigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Ouer Land. London, 1589. Höfele, Andreas. “Raising Tempests: Religion, Science, and the Magic of Theatre.” Magic, Science, Technology, and Literature. Ed. Jarmila Mildorf, Hans Ulrich Seeber, and Martin Windisch. Berlin: Lit, 2006. 25-38. Jourdain, Silvester. A Discovery of the Barmudas. London, 1610. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes. Trans. John Florio. London, 1603. The Climate of th’Isle: Shakespeare’s Tempest 99 “Plantation.” Def. 2.b. The Oxford English Dictionary . 3 rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Fiue Bookes. Vol. 4. 5 vols. London, 1625. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011. “Spirit.” The Oxford English Dictionary . 3 rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Strachey, William. “A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight.” Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Bookes. Ed. Samuel Purchas. London, 1625. 1734-58. Thomas, Thomas. Dictionarium Linguae Latinae Et Anglicanae. Cantebrigiae, 1587. Vaughan, Alden T. “William Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Shakespeare: A Close Look at the Evidence.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59.3 (2008): 245-73. Vaughan, Virginia Mason and Alden T. Vaughan. “Introduction”. The Tempest. By William Shakespeare. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011. 1-138. O LIVER G RILL Weather - or Not? Meteorology and the Art of Prediction in Humboldt’s Kosmos and Stifter’s Der Nachsommer 1 A Study in Weather In Adalbert Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer, published in 1857, the two protagonists get to know each other by way of a dispute about an approaching thunderstorm. Due to his meteorological knowledge Heinrich Drendorf is convinced that there is “ein Gewitter im Anzuge” (N I: 49). 2 His interlocutor Gustav von Risach on the other hand emphatically proclaims: “Das Gewitter wird nicht zum Ausbruche kommen” (N I: 49). The subsequent discussion about this weather forecast is conducted at the unprecedented length of more than eighty pages. Thus, weather dominates “Die Einkehr” and “Die Beherbergung”; those two chapters in which the course for Heinrich’s life is set. Later, again in key scenes, a considerable number of weather situations accrue: For example, the sleet before Heinrich’s visit to the theatre, in the course of which he sees his future wife for the first time - Natalie, is “schneebleich” on account of the stormy night in King Lear (N I: 198). Or the thunderstorm, when lightning illuminates the beauty of an antique sculpture for Heinrich to see, whereby he reaches a new understanding of art and beauty (N II: 99). Or the risky ascent of a mountain in winter, the success of which entirely depends on the correctness of Heinrich’s weather forecast. This adventure gives him “ein erhabenes Gefühl […], fast so erhaben wie [s]eine Liebe zu Natalie” (N III: 111). Heinrich receives this feeling in the right time, namely before Risach tells him about his failed “gewitterartige Liebe” for Natalie’s mother Mathilde (N III: 223). 3 Thus, weather is undoubtedly the main topic of Nachsommer, as Gerhard Neumann points out (“Wolkenspuren” 304). Heinrich Drendorf’s story al- 1 A slightly different German version of this essay was published recently in: Zeitschrift für Germanistik XXVI (2016). I kindly thank Annalisa Fischer for the translation. 2 Stifter’s Nachsommer is here and will henceforth be cited parenthetically in the text by ‘N vol. no.: p. no.’ The text quoted in the footnotes by ‘InS p. no.’ is taken from Indian Summer, the translation of Wendell Frye: “there’s a thunderstorm coming up”, “The thunderstorm won’t come” (InS 35). 3 “pale as the driven snow” (InS 115), “A sublime feeling […], almost as sublime as my love for Natalie” (InS 382); “gewitterartige Liebe” means ‘stormy love.’ In the cited edition it is not translated literally (cf. InS 445). O LIVER G RILL 102 most seems to be designed as a ‘study in weather,’ but why? Why is the weather in Stifter’s text not leading the usual, so to speak, atmospheric existence in the background but becomes the focal point of the diegesis? 4 In the following I want to pursue this question, taking a detour to contemporary meteorology via the example of Alexander von Humboldt. Aside from the fact that this approach accommodates the currently increased interest of cultural studies in weather and climate, 5 it is also crucial to my argument. Humboldt’s Kosmos, on which I will concentrate, not only represents the state of meteorology around 1850 in summa - it also reveals a tension essential to the meteorological discourse: Humboldt hopes to find some kind of determinism for atmospheric phenomena but those hopes, however, are thoroughly disappointed by the unpredictability of the weather. This tension is part of the basic aporia of the Kosmos-project and essential for the understanding of the weather’s role in Nachsommer as well. 6 Here and there, weather proves the idea of a cosmic order of the world to be incompatible with the experience of irreducible contingency specific to modernity. It will turn out that both Humboldt’s and Stifter’s claim to totality is put to a test when the integration of weather into the respective world order is attempted. 7 On the one hand, since the unfulfillable desire for totality has always been a problem of the novel as such, focusing on the weather in the cosmological attempts of Kosmos and Nachsommer provides a deeper understanding of the novel as a genre. On the other hand, the question of meteorological prognosis itself leads to problems of safeguarding, prevision, and precaution - and thus leads to cultural concepts of dealing with the future particular to modernity. Therefore, I will interpret the ‘non-cosmic’ weather with regard to the discourse of the future in modernity, with regard to the genre of the novel in general and with regard to the narrative structure of Nachsommer in particular. Progress - or Not? One has to see Humboldt’s activities within the field of meteorology against the background of a characteristic feature of the weather: As subject of empiricism it repeatedly puts empiricism itself in an epistemic crisis. In the nineteenth century the subsequent uncertainty obviously was so profound that 4 According to Neumann, in Nachsommer weather and love are inseparably linked (“Archäologie” 72). My reading picks up this observation. 5 Cf. the articles in the topical issue “Rätsel der Atmosphäre - Nicht-Wissen zwischen Himmel und Erde” of the journal Zeitschrift für Germanistik 24.2 (2014) as well as Horn. 6 The relevance of Kosmos for Der Nachsommer has often been stressed, e.g. by Stockhammer 173-77. 7 Regarding the experience of being embedded in a cosmic order in the epoch of realism see Koschorke 269. Weather - or Not? 103 important thinkers of the twentieth century could state for their own time (the time after the uncertainty principle) that the world is the exception and the meteorological the rule (Serres 8) or that now all clocks are clouds (Popper 214-68). That these points seem to be well illustrated is because meteorologists until then could not provide clocks but with their attempts to that effect mainly emphasized the weather’s disorder. This disorder is phrased particularly significantly by Goethe in his Versuch einer Witterungslehre from 1825. In weather one thing is: immer noch von einem anderen durchdrungen […]; es verursacht und erleidet Einwirkungen, und wenn so viele Wesen durch einander arbeiten, wo soll am Ende die Einsicht, die Entscheidung herkommen, was das Herrschende was das Dienende sei, was voranzugehen bestimmt, was zu folgen genötigt ist? (Goethe 275) 8 For Goethe weather virtually implies chaos and anarchy. This assessment marks the major problem of a meteorology, which still thinks in the paradigm of classical mechanics in desirable clarity. It shows how the dominion over the meteorological discourse threatens to slip away to the extent to which the question of causal links remains unanswered. As long as no law of cause and effect can be established, weather in its non-linearity disturbs the order of the scientific discourse. With this uneasiness in terms of disorderly weather conditions comes a shift of connotation whose reference point mostly is the French Revolution: When metaphors of weather since time immemorial served to symbolize divine or secular power (Demandt 135, Jäger 29-32), in modernity they in contrast illustrate all kinds of revolutions (Demandt 136). Now, as one might guess, there is little trace of any revolutionary chaos of weather in the meteorological portion of Humboldt’s Kosmos. In this portion Humboldt lists the established meteorological parameters of observation and afterwards explains them step-by-step. The ideas of a global overview, of a synopsis and of a harmonic arrangement of physical knowledge - all of which are central to the Kosmos-project (Böhme 19) - seem to be executed in an exemplary way. Merely the remarks on temperature appear disproportionately long and detailed. This is because Humboldt explicates his method of comparative climatology. For this purpose he lists the average temperature of various regions of the world and additionally talks about the consequences for each region’s vegetation, farming, and “das Gefühl klimatischer Behaglichkeit” (K I: 169-70). 9 Despite the confusing amount of data Hum- 8 “[In weather] everything is permeated by something else […]; it causes and suffers influences. And when so many beings work simultaneously, where is the insight, the decision supposed to come from, what is the dominant and what the serving? What has been created to precede, what is forced to follow? ” (Translation A.F.). 9 Humboldt’s Kosmos is here and will henceforth be cited parenthetically in the text by ‘K vol. no.: p. no.’ Humboldt’s numerous emphases are not rendered. The text quoted in O LIVER G RILL 104 boldt piles up here, it would be inapt to speak of an empirical excess. In light of the mass of information which Humboldt manages to compress so effectively, one rather has to talk about the success of his statistical method which he initiatively elevates to the ideal way of physics: Bei allem Beweglichen und Veränderlichen im Raume sind mittlere Zahlenwerthe der letzte Zweck, ja der Ausdruck physikalischer Gesetze; sie zeigen uns das Stetige in dem Wechsel und in der Flucht der Erscheinungen. (K I: 39) 10 Since the meteorological portion of Kosmos rests completely on these mean numerical values, Humboldt’s assessment of scientific progress is rather optimistic. In contrast, for example, to Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck - who noted in 1802 that meteorology until then had only accumulated enormous amounts of data but not made any progress whatsoever (Lamarck 102-03) - Humboldt speaks of the fast development of meteorological knowledge (K I: 166). And he does so precisely because he is able to statistically condense these enormous amounts of data. There are also clear ideas about the contents of the progress: Humboldt announces that one will “im eigentlichsten Sinne lernen […], woher der Wind komme” (ibid.). In the future, he adds, due to comparative climatology it will be possible “unermeßliche Reihen scheinbar isoliert stehender Tatsachen mit einander durch empirische, numerisch ausgedrückte Gesetze zu verbinden und die Nothwendigkeit ihrer gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit zu erweisen” (K I: 168). 11 Thus, Humboldt seems to be surprisingly successful in integrating the weather into the order of his Kosmos. There is no sign of an epistemic crisis. In fact, the statistical reduction of complexity raises high hopes for meteorological progress which Humboldt announces in the form of an imminent understanding of necessary, linearly ordered causal connections. But there is a serious snag: One method contradicts the other. The formation of mean numerical values thwarts the search for causal links. In the second half of the nineteenth century meteorology will problematize precisely this contradiction. For example, the physicist Johann von Lamont severely criticizes the statistical method in 1867: Aus der Vereinigung vieler Beobachtungen geht […] eine Elimination der Zufälligkeiten nicht hervor, und auch nach hundertjährigen Beobachtungsreihen lassen sich noch keine arithmetischen Mittel ableiten, die man im wahren Sinne des Worthe footnotes by ‘C p. no.’ is taken from the translation of E.C. Otté: “the feelings and mental condition of men” (C 318). 10 “In all that is subject to motion and change in space, the ultimate aim, the very expression of physical laws, depend upon mean numerical values, which show us the constant amid change, and the stable amid apparent fluctuations of phenomena” (C 81). 11 “we may learn, in the strictest sense, whence the wind cometh” (C 317). “it may some day be possible to connect together, by empirical and numerically expressed laws, vast series of apparently isolated facts, and to exhibit the mutual dependence which must necessarily exist among them” (C 320). Weather - or Not? 105 tes als meteorologische Konstanten zu bezeichnen berechtigt wäre. (Lamont 245- 46) 12 The German-Russian meteorologist Wladimir Köppen on the other hand absolutely recognizes the need for arithmetic means in meteorology, “um in der unendlichen Komplikation der Witterungs-Erscheinungen sich zurecht zu finden” (3). 13 But at the same time he is certain, dass eine ausschliessliche Anwendung dieser Methode […] die Erkenntnis des Kausal-Zusammenhangs in den Witterungsvorgängen unmöglich machen würde, denn das arithmetische Mittel, in welchem die allerverschiedensten Vorgänge vergraben werden, ist Nichts Wirkliches, sondern eine abstrakte Grösse. (ibid.) 14 Thereby Köppen negates Humboldt’s assumption that necessary natural laws can be deduced from the formation of mean numerical values. He also provides an important criterion for the differentiation between climatology and meteorology. As we have seen, for Humboldt arithmetic means are not at all “Nichts Wirkliches,” but exactly the most real, “der letzte Zweck, ja der Ausdruck physikalischer Gesetze.” However, in Humboldt’s summary of the meteorological part it is obvious that the laws of causality he so optimistically promises are not that easy to obtain. In contrast to the preceding optimism of progress his summary turns out surprisingly pessimistic. Humboldt repeats Goethe’s weather-problem almost literally when he declares, daß alle Processe […] welche das unermeßliche Luftmeer darbietet, so innig mit einander zusammenhangen, daß jeder einzelne meteorologische Proceß durch alle anderen gleichzeitig modificiert wird. Diese Mannigfaltigkeit der Störungen […] erschwert die Deutung der verwickelten meteorologischen Erscheinungen; sie beschränkt und macht größtentheils unmöglich die Vorherbestimmung atmosphärischer Veränderungen, welche für den Garten- und Landbau, für die Schifffahrt, für den Genuß und die Freuden des Lebens so wichtig wäre. (K I: 177) 15 12 “The combination of many observations does not lead to an elimination of contingencies and even after series of observations that lasted for hundreds of years one cannot derive an arithmetic mean which one could call a meteorological invariable in the true sense of the word” (Translation A.F.). 13 “to orientate oneself in the endless complications of weather” (Translation A.F.). 14 “that an exclusive application of this method […] would render the insight into the causal link in weather processes impossible, because the arithmetic mean, in which the different processes are buried, is nothing real but an abstract quantity” (Translation A.F.). 15 “[…] the processes […] of the vast aërial ocean are all so intimately connected together, that each individual meteorological process is modified by the action of all the others. The complicated nature of these disturbing causes […] increases the difficulty of giving a full explanation of these involved meteorological phenomena, and likewise limits, or wholly precludes the possibility of that predetermination of atmospheric changes which would be so important for horticulture, agriculture, and navigation, no less than for the comfort and enjoyment of life” (C 337-38). O LIVER G RILL 106 Immensity and diversity, complexity and disruption, impeded analysis and unpredictability… Nothing in this summary corresponds to the hope that in the future one will be able to formulate “numerisch ausgedrückte Gesetze” and “die Nothwendigkeit ihrer gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit.” The successively created impression that weather could be overviewed globally, concentrated statistically, and in the near future dominated by the means of physics, is profoundly undermined with a view to the “einzelnen meteorologischen Proceß” itself. Each elimination of contingencies, addressed by Lamont, does not only not happen in Humboldt’s Kosmos, but the unpredictability of the weather positively gets out of hand in the “Vervielfältigung und Complication der Störungen” (K I: 178). 16 The unforeseeable detail withstands the statistical normalization. Thus, even in Kosmos the weather remains an endless complication, as Köppen puts it. This tension between irreducible irregularity and statistical normalization in particular manifests itself in Humboldt’s skepticism towards the weather forecasts. The announced insight into necessity and regularity actually should entail the possibility of calculating the upcoming weather. The opposite, however, is the case. As cited, Humboldt rejects this prognosis as almost impossible; not even a prognostic calculus seems conceivable to him, even though it would be so important “für den Genuß und die Freuden des Lebens.” With this he marks the negative end of a scale of ratings the weather forecast around 1850 is subject to. The positive end is defined by John Stuart Mill who in 1843 proclaims some kind of Laplace’s demon for meteorology. In A System of Logic, Mill states (factually correct) that, when all preconditions are known, it should be possible to “predict […] the state of the weather at any future time” (843). But these preconditions, “diese Mannigfaltigkeit der Störungen,” are precisely Humboldt’s problem. And that is why the weather portion of Kosmos ends with the recommendation: meteorology should look for its “Heil” in “jener glücklichen Region, wo immer dieselben Lüfte wehen; ” in those areas where the “problematische Vorherbestimmung” reduces itself to the periodic return of weather conditions (K I: 177-78). 17 All in all, Humboldt emphatically announces progress for meteorology but is pessimistic in regard to the technique of prognosis itself. Albeit on different levels this makes for an ambivalent outlook on the future in Kosmos. On the one hand Humboldt believes himself to be able to read the weather with certainty, but on the other hand he rates it as completely indeterminable in specific cases. Ultimately, the meteorological portion of Kosmos oscillates between the inextricable singular case of the weather and its statistical 16 “the manifold nature and complication of disturbances” (C 339). 17 “meteorology must first seek its foundation and its progress in the torrid zone, where the variations […] are all of periodic occurrence”; “this problematic species of prediction” (C 338-39). Weather - or Not? 107 (dis)solution, between meteorology and climatology as well as between uncertainty and certainty about the future. These contradictions are symptomatic in two ways: First of all for the basic aporia which is intrinsic to the Kosmos-project. And second for modernity’s open horizon of expectation as Reinhart Koselleck has described it (349- 75). Regarding the first aspect, research has shown that the intended totality of Kosmos continually gets into an irreconcilable conflict with the empirical details (Böhme 20). Humboldt himself addresses this problem more than once: “Das Auffinden der Einheit in der Totalität” for the time being remains “unvollständig,” as he writes in the introduction. And nature itself is a “nicht zu fassendes und in allgemeiner ursächlicher Erkenntniß von dem Zusammenwirken aller Kräfte ein unauflösbares Problem” (K I: 39). 18 Seen in this light, weather is the paradigmatic case of Humboldt’s idea of nature in Kosmos. In the meteorological portion the interdependency of powers remains a truly indissoluble problem; in the end there is no possibility of any “Einheit in der Totalität” or “allgemeine ursächliche Erkenntniß” of weather conditions, even though it is announced so resolutely. On the contrary, as we have seen, weather rather than a cosmic side brings forth the modern side of Humboldt’s world - the weather-side of a world which has to do without causal unity and without final conclusion of insight. Probably based on such observations, Hans Blumenberg proposes that Humboldt thought the readability of his world “von der Metapher des Romans her” (Lesbarkeit 283). 19 This somehow surprising proposal becomes more plausible if one takes into account modernity’s specific concept of reality as Blumenberg described it in his essay “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans”: Modern reality is characterized by the physical experience in its open-endedness and no longer by a divine unity in totality (12). This implies a “niemals endgültig und absolut zugestandene Konsistenz” without any intuition of the truth in the sense of evidentia (ibid. 22). 20 Hence the dilemma of the modern novel, which is trying to depict this reality as a whole, lies in the desire to evoke “als endlicher Text die Vorstellung eines unendlichen Kontextes.” 21 This puts the basic problem of Humboldt’s Kosmos in a nutshell. Even the difficulty to include the infinite turbulences of the weather and to integrate them seamlessly into the cosmic order is thereby indicated. If thus both - the Kosmos and its weather - can be characterized 18 “The attempt perfectly to represent unity in diversity must […] prove unsuccessful”, “nature […] presents itself to the human intellect as a problem […] whose solution is impossible, since it requires a knowledge of the combined actions of all natural forces” (C 80). 19 “from the metaphor of the novel” (Translation A.F.). 20 “a progressive certainty which can never reach a total, final consistency” (Translation by Wilson 33). 21 The attempt of “a finite text” to “evoke an infinite context” (Translation by Wilson 42). O LIVER G RILL 108 with the metaphor of the novel, then conversely a poetology is conceivable which characterizes the novel with the metaphor of the weather. This will lead to the weather’s role in Nachsommer. But before, it is important to see that the (im)possibility of prediction and the open horizon of expectation are closely related to the modern concept of reality as described by Blumenberg. For the new, non-derivable can enter at any time into a certainty which can never reach a final consistency (Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff” 12-13). “Die Lehre von den letzten Dingen,” says Reinhart Koselleck, is replaced by a “Wagnis einer offenen Zukunft” (362). 22 Being such a venture the future of modernity at the same time calls into action new methods of prevision, projection, and precaution which no longer operate prophetically but rather prognostically. They do not in the least consist of the search for causal and stochastic links (Luhmann 133). Humboldt holds out the prospect of exactly those two forms of the calculation of the future, but - in the specific case of the weather forecast - assesses them to be nearly impossible. His belief in progress is based on an open future of the possible, the contents of this possible progress however are directed at the future closure of the horizon of expectation by means of statistics, law of nature, and causal necessity. The practice of the weather forecast itself is rated as almost impossible which restricts the future of meteorology in so far as its possible progress becomes doubtable. But at the same time this assessment keeps the future wide open, since for the time being it has to remain completely unclear what tomorrow’s weather will be like. Thus, the weather and its prognosis prove themselves to be exemplary for a modern future which even from a cosmological point of view is never completely foreseeable. I now return to the dispute about prognosis in Stifter’s Nachsommer. Keeping Humboldt’s meteorology in mind, three questions are obvious: Firstly, the question to what degree weather as a subject is compatible with the claim to totality of the diegesis or the novel respectively. Secondly, the question which concept of the future Stifter implements with the weather in regard to his ‘conservative’ narration. 23 And finally, the question how this concept relates to the narrated order as well as the order established by the narration. Is something like a cosmic harmony, which Nachsommer seemingly tries to evoke, possible at all if the weather (and not the stars) provides the novel’s crucial constellation? Or could one consider weather and meteorology rather important means of reflection with which Stifter raises the issue of the impossibility of a cosmic harmony in a ‘natural’ way and thus, quasi 22 “the doctrine of the Final Days,” “the hazards of an open future” (Translation by Tribe 278). 23 About the tension between progress and the Restoration in Nachsommer see Borchmeyer and Bulang. Weather - or Not? 109 through the backdoor, inscribes the signatures of modernity - the signs of his time - into the novel, the dominant narrative medium of this time? Weather - or Not? At first glance the already mentioned unshakeable certainty with which Risach assesses the upcoming thunderstorm seems like a solution of Humboldt’s dilemma of prognosis in the rehearsal room of fiction. Neither Austria in general nor the House of Roses in particular (where most of the story of Nachsommer takes place) are part of those lucky regions “wo immer dieselben Lüfte wehen” which for Humboldt imply the prognostic salvation of meteorology. Nevertheless the area of the House of Roses - as a harmonic microcosm on the one hand and as a place of ritual recurrence of the neverchanging on the other - obviously provide the demanded but doubted security of weather forecasts. Risach predicts with great certainty “daß heute auf dieses Haus diesen Garten und diese Gegend kein Regen niederfallen wird” (N I: 50), and the absence of the thunderstorm proves him right. Furthermore he is able to explain in detail to Heinrich how he could predict this absence with “fast völliger Gewissheit” (N I: 120). 24 Consequently, Risach acts optimistic concerning meteorological progress: Mir kommen diese Dinge [i.e. the indications of weather] so zufällig in den Garten und in das Haus; ihr [Heinrich] aber werdet sie weit besser und weit gründlicher kennen lernen, wenn ihr die Wege der neuen Wissenschaftlichkeit wandelt, und die Hilfsmittel benüzt, die es jezt gibt, besonders die Rechnung. Wenn ihr namentlich eine einzelne Richtung einschlagt, so werdet ihr in derselben ungewöhnlich große Fortschritte machen. (N I: 125) 25 Deviating from Humboldt’s point of view, in Stifter’s novel there is a convergence of optimism for progress and optimism for forecasting. The insistence on the detail - “dieses Haus diesen Garten und diese Gegend” or the “einzelne Richtung” - seems to be almost an alternative concept to the meteorology of Kosmos: Instead of an entanglement in the unforeseeable incident of the “einzelnen meteorologischen Prozeß” in spite of a global weathersynopsis, there is a locally bound knowledge of weather in Nachsommer which allows for the reliable calculation of each individual case. But on closer inspection, Risach’s certainty is not as certain as it seems. It has not only been gained by chance but is also the product of a complicated 24 “that today no rain will fall on this house, this yard, or the whole area.” (InS 33) “almost complete certainty” (InS 72). 25 “I encounter these things by chance in the garden and in my house; you, however, will know them far better and more thoroughly if you tread the paths of the new sciences and use the aids now available, especially mathematics. If you have now taken a particular direction, you will make unusually great progress in it” (InS 75). O LIVER G RILL 110 trial based on circumstantial evidence. Risach indeed explains that the established measuring instruments would deliver “Anzeichen” and “ein kleines Wölklein an einer bestimmten Stelle des Himmels” might even be “ein sicherer Gewitteranzeiger” (N I: 119). However, the “Schauplaz, auf welchem sich die Witterungsverhältnisse gestalten” is very large - “Die Anzeichen können daher auch täuschen” (ibid.). 26 Against these deceiving signs Risach cites the sensorium of human nerves; not a really scientific but for someone who once despaired of “gewitterartige Liebe” an all the more important ‘meteorosensitivity.’ But this too does not offer any certainty, for the nerves “sprechen zu [dem Menschen] nicht mehr so deutlich” (N I: 120). At least, Risach continues, “die Thiere machen in Folge [einer] Vorempfindung Anstalten für ihre Zukunft” from which one could draw conclusions (ibid.). For this technique of prognosis insects would actually be most suitable but they are very hard to observe. Risach explicates that instead one has to gather the behavior of the insects from the behavior of bigger animals which in turn “die Gefahr zu irren größer macht, als sie bei der unmittelbaren Betrachtung und der gleichsam redenden Thatsache ist” (N I: 121). 27 One can see what this amounts to: Apparent certainties are cited almost obtrusively only to be exposed as uncertain clues and hints in the next step (Begemann, Die Welt 30). The ‘almost’ of Risach’s almost complete certainty weighs heavy: Prophetic evidentia, any “gleichsam redende Thatsache” of the upcoming, is nowhere to be found! Instead the never-ending enumeration of weather signs exemplarily demonstrates the physical experience in its openendedness; an open-endedness on which the ‘form’ of the novel is based as well as defined by Blumenberg. Instead of an immediate certainty, Risach only has the indirect link to a myriad of signs at his disposal. The longer Stifter exposes Risach fabricating this consistency the clearer he brings this to light, by means of the endless context named weather, the “niemals endgültig und absolut zugestandene Konsistenz” of modern reality and the modern novel, respectively. This meteorological erosion of the diegesis - which is intent on safety and certainty - affects the logic of events in Nachsommer. It is not even irrevocably certain, whether the thunderstorm occurs or not. Although the rain feared by Heinrich fails to appear for the time being, it is thundering a lot. And since Heinrich falls asleep in exactly the moment the wind comes up, even the 26 “signs”, “a small cloud hovering in a certain place in the sky […] is a sure sign of a thunderstorm”, “the stage on which the weather conditions are formed is immense […]. Therefore, the signs can be deceptive” (InS 71-72). 27 “they no longer speak to him [the human being] […] clearly”, “the animals make certain preparations as a result of these perceptions [of their nerves]”, “which makes the possibility of error greater than is the case of direct observation when the facts speak for themselves” (InS 72-73). This “animal meteorology” goes back to the influence of Andreas von Baumgartner’s Naturlehre (Begemann, “Metaphysik” 123). Weather - or Not? 111 absence of rain has to be reconstructed laboriously. Heinrich tells Risach the next morning: “Ich habe noch den Wind gehört, der sich gestern Abends erhoben hat, was weiter geschehen ist, weiß ich nicht; aber das weiß ich, daß heute die Erde trocken ist, und daß ihr Recht gehabt habet.” (N I: 84) Instead of an evident proof - which is per se unavailable for something nonappearing - Heinrich only has a self-conscious certainty of derivation at his disposal. Consequently, weather becomes a matter of belief: “Ich glaube, daß nicht ein Tropfen auf diese Gegend vom Himmel gefallen ist,” Risach answers, and Heinrich counters: “Wie das Aussehen der Erde zeigt, glaube ich es auch” (ibid.). 28 So when Risach invites Heinrich to come into his house “mit oder ohne Gewitter” (N I: 51), 29 it isn’t clear even the next day whether he brought severe weather with him or not. Stifter delays the decision of whether the thunderstorm will take place or not to the point of intolerability. He virtually makes it undecidable. This undecidability however ultimately implies a spectacular annulment of the weather as an event of narration as well as the impossibility of any ‘visionary’ knowledge of the future. Risach’s certainty, appearing to be prophetic, secretly proves to be a prognostic uncertainty; it proves itself to be a narration of the gradual fabrication of the probable in the medium of the novel. Within this narrative construction, not even the programmatic absence of an event (cf. Schuller) is an actual event since it is only presumably absent. This observation leads back to the initial question of the structural meaning of the meteorological calculus. In order to answer it, we need to remind ourselves of the conditions under which Risach and Drendorf meet at the House of Roses: Risach is retired. He gave up his position as a clerk and retreated from the city to a country house. There he keeps his romantic relationship with Mathilde alive - which failed in his youth - in an unvarying cult of roses. This love once came over him like a “Sturmwind” and a “Wetterstrahl,” admits Risach - hundreds of pages after the initial meteorological dispute (N III: 189). 30 But due to the objection of Mathilde’s parents, this story-within-the-story ends in misery. When the two reconcile decades later, they don’t end up getting married. “Nach den Tagen der feurigen gewitterartigen Liebe,” Risach tells Heinrich, he and Mathilde would instead be 28 “I heard the wind that came up last evening, but what happened after that, I don’t know; but I do know that the ground is dry today and that you were right about the storm”, “I don’t think that a drop fell on this area”, “Judging from the appearance of the earth, I don’t think so either” (InS 52). 29 The implication of undecidedness in this ‘with or without a thunderstorm’ is crucial here. In the cited edition Risach’s words are not translated literally (cf. InS 33). 30 “the winds of a storm”, “a bolt of lightning” (InS 426). O LIVER G RILL 112 living “in Glück und Stettigkeit [! ] gleichsam einen Nachsommer ohne vorhergegangenen Sommer” (N III: 224). 31 With this delayed look back on a “gewitterartige Liebe” Stifter expects his reader to re-read the thunderstorm of the first volume in the light of the third volume’s thunderstorm. If one does that the oppressive feeling arises that with his prognosis in the first volume Risach says more about himself than about the atmosphere. One wants to assume that the thunderstorm not only will not occur, but - as a literalized metaphor of affect - must not occur. Under the surface of meteorological shoptalk the avoidance of a repetition of Risach’s past is subliminally dealt with. This past (contrary to the present of the novel) includes the risky moment of love, strokes of fate and catastrophes. Thus, on the one hand it acknowledges the “Vervielfältigung und Complication der Störungen” because of which Humboldt thinks the weather forecast to be almost impossible. On the other hand, with the incident of the stormy love it picks up again the eruptive, more or less life-threatening weather-events which like a leitmotif are noticeable throughout Stifter’s oeuvre: thunderstorms, floods, hail and snow in Bunte Steine, lightning bolts in Abdias or the ‘cloud of war’ in Hochwald are illustrative examples. 32 It is these novellasʼ use of weather as an event which Nachsommer - whose origin is traceable to a novella - is trying to avoid with the presented techniques of calculation, narrative delay, and the undecidability of occurrence. In the end, Stifter with the aid of meteorology intends not to let the novella-like weather, the “gewitterartige” catastrophe in Risach’s life, become the trauma of the novel. 33 In this broad sense, Risach, his complex technique of forecast, and the novel itself prove to be meteorosensitive - intra-fictional in terms of Risach’s past and extra-fictional in terms of Stifter’s earlier stories. Nobody could have diagnosed this sensitivity as well as the corresponding trauma better than Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft wrote the following about “prophetische Menschen”: Ihr habt kein Gefühl dafür, dass prophetische Menschen sehr leidende Menschen sind: ihr meint nur, es sei ihnen eine schöne “Gabe” gegeben, und möchtet diese wohl gern selber haben, — doch ich will mich durch ein Gleichniss ausdrücken. Wie viel mögen die Thiere durch die Luft- und Wolken-Electricität leiden! Wir sehen, dass einige Arten von ihnen ein prophetisches Vermögen hinsichtlich des Wetters haben […]. Aber wir denken nicht daran, dass ihre Schmerzen — für sie 31 “After the first ardent days of passionate love that are like a thunderstorm […] we are living in happiness and with a sense of constancy as if in an Indian Summer without the preceding summer” (InS 445). 32 Begemann already points out Stifter’s obsession with weather (Begemann, Die Welt 85). It recently received increased attention, see e.g. the works of Gamper or Schuster. 33 The reverse relationship between a novella-like core and a novelistic cover for Walter Benjamin famously is existent in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften. Weather - or Not? 113 die Propheten sind! Wenn eine starke positive Electricität plötzlich unter dem Einflusse einer heranziehenden, noch lange nicht sichtbaren Wolke in negative Electricität umschlägt und eine Veränderung des Wetters sich vorbereitet, da benehmen sich diese Thiere so, als ob ein Feind herannahe, und richten sich zur Abwehr oder zur Flucht ein; meistens verkriechen sie sich, — sie verstehen das schlechte Wetter nicht als Wetter, sondern als Feind, dessen Hand sie schon fühlen! (Nietzsche 229) 34 For Nietzsche, prophecy isn’t a visionary gift but rather a combination of the memory of pain and the resulting sense of danger. Stifter closely links Risach’s art of prediction to such a pain-induced need for prevention, even though if you look at the initial situation between Risach and Heinrich it does not seem to require any. After all Heinrich is only concerned with a rather harmless thunderstorm of which, for the time being, neither he nor the reader knows the emotional ‘charge.’ By the end of the novel however it’s clear that said “Anstalten für [die] Zukunft” apply to much more than just the behavior of spiders or ants. Risach’s preparation for the future exemplarily tested on the weather is, as Humboldt would put it, “so wichtig” “für den Genuß und die Freuden des Lebens” in Nachsommer in general. It is explained to and is effective on the very person who shall not be befallen by “gewitterartige Liebe,” Heinrich Drendorf. From the very first dialogue onwards, it is all about the circumspect closure of Heinrich’s future, who is “nur des anziehenden Gewitters willen von der Landstraße abgewichen, und zu diesem Hause heraufgestiegen” (N I: 51). 35 Through attraction and deviation, Heinrich, who enters Risach’s world “mit oder ohne Gewitter” by accident, signifies the incalculable possibility of a recurrence of “gewitterartige Liebe.” Heinrich possesses not only insufficient meteorological knowledge and therefore is wrong about the upcoming weather but is generally troubled by a largely undefined future. His childhood days were controlled by the “regelmäßigen Verlauf der Zeit, von dem nicht abgewichen werden durfte.” Heinrich’s mother would indeed have allowed his “Abweichen von dem angege- 34 “Prophetic human beings. — You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic human beings are afflicted with a great deal of suffering; you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful ‘gift,’ and you would even like to have it yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable. How much may animals suffer from the electricity in the air and the clouds! We see how some species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather […]. But we pay no heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly turns into negative electricity and a change of the weather is impending, these animals behave as if an enemy were drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide: They do not understand bad weather as a kind of weather but as an enemy whose hand they already feel” (trans. Kaufmann 251). 35 “since only because of it [the thunderstorm] did I turn off the highway and come up to this house” (InS 33). O LIVER G RILL 114 ben Zeitlaufe zu Gunsten einer Lust,” but “Furcht vor dem Vater” prevailed (N I: 12). 36 In the midst of this patriarchal-structured daily life the open future approaches him quite literally: “Endlich trat in Bezug auf mich die Frage heran, was denn in der Zukunft mit mir zu geschehen habe” (N I: 17). The perplexity prevailing with regard to this question is quite intense: Mir schwebte auch nicht ein besonderer Nuzen vor, den ich durch mein Bestreben erreichen wollte, sondern es war mir nur, als müßte ich so thun, als liege etwas innerlich Gültiges und Wichtiges in der Zukunft. Was ich aber im Einzelnen beginnen […] sollte, das wußte weder ich, noch wußten es die Meinigen. (N I: 18) 37 When Heinrich and Risach meet for the first time, it is the encounter between a man who knows too little about the upcoming weather and a man who knows too much about it. It is also the encounter between one who is helpless in the face of his all-too-little-determined future and another whose future is carefully impregnated against unforeseen events and therefore overdetermined. Following the dispute, both enter into a sort of alliance concerning the shaping of their future. Starting with the thunderstorm debate, Risach is going to profoundly influence Heinrich’s life. After Heinrich’s first deviation from his route due to the “anziehenden Gewitter” - which seems to be related to the different kinds of deviation “zu Gunsten einer Lust” that Heinrich refrained from in his childhood - there is simply no other derivation in his life. In fact, Risach gently guides him along the path of his life which regularly leads him to the House of Roses. Conversely, the ‘open future’ Heinrich brings with him wakes Risach’s well-regulated world from its Sleeping Beauty slumber. For with the slowly initiated marriage between Natalie and Heinrich, a marriage precisely without stormy love, Risach at the end of the novel overcomes his own failure. He ‘heals’ the catastrophe of his life in the next generation inasmuch as he provides himself and Mathilde a socially acceptable direction with a genealogical future that biologically was never before granted to them (cf. Zumbusch 268). So far I basically have read the meteorological beginning of Nachsommer in the light of its ending, that is to say with Risach’s previous history of his failed romantic relationship with Mathilde in mind. In the text itself the characters opt for the reverse direction of reading. The initial thunderstorm is hermeneutically revised in the end, whereby Natalie’s and Heinrich’s wedding obtains a surplus of “Bedeutung” (N III: 266) in a rather forced way. In 36 “she would have liked to let us [Heinrich and his sister] deviate from our routine so we could enjoy ourselves more but was prevented from doing so because of Father” (InS 11). 37 “Finally, the question arose concerning my future,” “I also did not have a specific purpose in mind; rather, it just seemed as if I had to keep on, as if I had something within me that would prove to be true and significant sometime in the future. Neither I nor my family knew specifically where I should begin” (InS 14). Weather - or Not? 115 the “Abschluß”-chapter, Risach not only claims to have recognized at first glance - “so schnell wie die Electricität” - Heinrich to be the right man for Natalie (N III: 265) but he also declares the thunderstorm the initial determinant for all further events: “Und alles hing davon ab, daß du [Heinrich] hartnäckig gemeint hast, ein Gewitter werde kommen, und daß du meinen Gegenreden nicht geglaubt hast.” Heinrich responds: “Darum, Vater, war es Fügung, und die Vorsicht selber hat mich zu meinem Glücke geführt” (N III, 266). 38 And on top of these strong words Heinrich’s biological father adds an old woman’s obscure prophecy from Heinrich’s childhood days which vaguely enough predicts Heinrich a bright future (ibid.). In short, a lot of meaning has to be created to read Heinrich’s accidental deviation into the cosmic order of the House of Roses - and at the same time, there is the scandal of a contingency of weather that is not completely resolvable by meteorology. What here has been called the laborious fabrication of the possible in the medium of the novel is exactly what the characters decidedly try to deny. The traditional registers of absolute certainty about the future - prophecy, fatherly foreordination, destiny etc. - try to negate the prognostic “almost” in Risach’s certainty about the weather; not to speak of Humboldt’s diagnosis of an impossible “Vorherbestimmung atmosphärischer Veränderungen.” Were one to engage in this intra-textual interpretation, it would result in a love story or novel structure conspicuously docile for the year 1857 which visibly in the style of Heinrich von Ofterdingen leads from expectation to fulfillment (and which different from Ofterdingen was able to narrate this fulfillment to the end). However, the formulation “Vorsicht selber” is ambiguous. For Heinrich is obviously not talking about a divine plan of salvation. Rather the sacred semantics are undermined by the most profane topic of conversation: the directly preceding memory of the weather-dispute. This “Vorsicht selber” superficially seems to be meant as a pathos formula for divine providence. But the context of the conversation reveals that it’s mostly aimed at the ideal but nevertheless immanent “father” Risach, his meteorological talent and his cautiousness, since “Vorsicht” here means both prevision and caution. This talent itself is quite the opposite of any ‘visionary’ knowledge or salvation-historical providence inasmuch as it is based on a calculus of consideration, a chain of circumstantial evidences and on a painfully personal meteorosensitivity. Thus, the sacralizing interpretation remains nothing more than a reminiscence: Though Stifter’s characters bring ‘expectation and fulfillment’ as a 38 “significance”, “as quick as lightning”, “And everything depended on your stubbornly believing that a thunderstorm was coming and not accepting my arguments to the contrary”, “Therefore, Father, it was Providence and caution itself that brought me to my happiness” (InS 469). O LIVER G RILL 116 typological mode of narration or interpretation into play, the novel itself provides a strictly secular view of the future which does not address the ether - the cosmically well-ordered realm of stars and gods - but operates on a lower level striving to ascertain a ‘modern’ degree of certainty in the realm of atmosphere. Correspondingly, the storm front obscures “manchen weißen Punkt des Landes, der Wohnungen bezeichnet, von denen [Risach] sprechen möchte” (N I: 72); 39 that is to say it obscures Mathilde’s Sternenhof of whose inhabitant Risach will speak of a few hundred pages later. That this subliminally expressed ‘expectation’ of a narration can reach its ‘fulfillment’ at all presupposes its contents not returning as the plot of the novel. In other words: In order for Risach to be able to narrate his ill-fated love story to Heinrich it must not repeat itself with Heinrich as its protagonist. Furthermore Heinrich first has to prove himself as weatherproof - for example as the recipient of a stormy love story - as Risach who is by now able to walk, figuratively speaking, “einmal eine kurze Strecke im Regen ohne Kopfbedeckung” (N III: 125). 40 Heinrich’s ‘study in weather’ is then hereby completed. Initiated in Risach’s meteorology and exposed to the weather in continuous augmentation, he has proven himself as a subject of a “Wetterpädagogik” of which Jean Paul writes that its measures - among them the “Donnerwetterbad” - are adequate to cause a “langsame […] Abhärtung” “gegen den Windstoß der zufälligen, unberechneten, wehrlos findenden Gefahr” (279). The end of Nachsommer doesn’t want its success to be doubted: Heinrich is optimally resistant to the kind of gust that once blew him off track. Meteorology - the Discipline that Matters To follow the “anziehendes Gewitter” for Stifter means a “Abweichung” from the ideal state of cosmic order which is the weather’s antipode already insofar as it has been described as unpredictably chaotic by nineteenth century meteorology. At the same time Stifter’s weather is something that lies ‘in the nature of men’ and as such, even when it befalls them seemingly and solely from the outside, connotes uncontrollable affective states. Both incidents - the real thunderstorm and the stormy love - nevertheless are conditions of possibility for the narration of Nachsommer: They link Heinrich and Risach, they anchor the text’s narrative energies over long passages and above all they represent those events whose invalidation the whole story amounts to. 39 “many little white dots on the lower land that are houses I would like to mention” (InS 45). 40 “to walk for a short stretch in the rain without something on my head” (InS 390). Weather - or Not? 117 In this connection meteorology in the full sense of the word is the discipline that matters. It is supposed to call to order both forms of weather disturbances and make them foreseeable for a diegesis which has the “Vorsicht zum Geseze gemacht” (N I: 178): 41 Heinrich’s ‘study in weather’ is pedagogic disciplining, because he brings an all too vague future into the determined structure of the House of Roses which for Risach means the potential return of weather-like events or feelings. Underhand these meteorological techniques are not only used for real weather forecasts but also counter a contingent and mercurial deviation from the path of life. Although Nachsommer suggests something different (as its bored readers know), the risk of eventful coincidences is not excluded at the outset. Since Risach’s art of prediction is less prophetic than prognostic - and since it cannot rely on a cosmic order, but rather is devoted to the novel’s modern representation of reality - the future that has to be told remains at least a little bit open (which is why it has to be told in the first place). Altogether Stifter’s weather forms the unpredictable emotive rear side to the persistently displayed order of things in the foreground. Since even with the greatest effort it cannot be made a part of this order, weather signifies the chaotic other in Stifter’s world which it nevertheless needs. Dynamics, emotion, riskiness, tension, uncertain future, and catastrophes are the signatures of this weather-side of Stifter’s narration. Works Cited Begemann, Christian. Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. ---. “Metaphysik und Empirie. Konkurrierende Naturkonzepte im Werk Adalbert Stifters.” Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Lutz Danneberg and Friedrich Vollhardt. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. 92-126. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Lesbarkeit Der Welt. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. ---. “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel.” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange. Trans. David Henry Wilson et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. 29-48. ---. “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans.” Nachahmung und Illusion. Ed. H.R. Jauß. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1969. 9-27. Böhme, Hartmuth. “Ästhetische Wissenschaft. Aporien im Werk Alexander von Humboldts.“ Alexander von Humboldt - Aufbruch in die Moderne. Ed. Ottmar Ette et al. Berlin: Akademie, 2001. 17-33. 41 “made caution [its] rule” (InS 105). O LIVER G RILL 118 Borchmeyer, Dieter. “Stifters Nachsommer - eine restaurative Utopie? ” Poetica 12 (1980): 59-82. Bulang, Tobias. “Die Rettung der Geschichte in Adalbert Stifters Nachsommer.” Poetica 32 (2000): 373-405. Demandt, Alexander. Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken. München: C. H. Beck, 1979. Gamper, Michael. “Wetterrätsel. Zu Adalbert Stifters Katzensilber.” Literatur und Nicht-Wissen: Historische Konstellationen 1730-1930. Ed. Michael Bies and Michael Gamper. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2012. 325-338. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Versuch einer Witterungslehre.” Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche - Band 25: Schriften zur allgemeinen Naturlehre, Geologie und Mineralogie. Ed. Wolf von Engelhardt and Manfred Wenzel. Frankfurt a.M.: DKV, 1989. Horn, Eva. Zukunft als Katastrophe. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2014. Humboldt, Alexander von. Cosmos. A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe. Vol. I. Trans. E. C. Otté. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ---. Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung. Ed. Ottmar Ette and Oliver Lubrich. Frankfurt a.M.: Eichborn, 2004. Jäger, Hans-Wolf. Politische Metaphorik im Jakobinismus und im Vormärz. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971. Köppen, Wladimir Peter. “Über die Abhängigkeit des klimatischen Characters der Winde von ihrem Ursprunge.” Repertorium für Meteorologie 4 (1874): 1-15. Koschorke, Albrecht. Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Times. Trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985. ---. Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979. Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de. “Considérations sur la nécessité d'avoir un but en observant les faits météorologiques.” Annuaire Météorologique pour l’An X.3 (1802): 102-124. Lamont, Johann von. “Über die Bedeutung arithmetischer Mittelwerte in der Meteorologie.” Zeitschrift der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Meteorologie 2.1 (1867): 241-247. Luhmann, Niklas. “Die Zukunft kann nicht beginnen. Temporalstrukturen der modernen Gesellschaft.” Vor der Jahrtausendwende: Berichte zur Lage der Zukunft. Vol. 1. Ed. Peter Sloterdijk. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. 119- 150. Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive. Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Weather - or Not? 119 Neumann, Gerhard. “Archäologie der Passion. Zum Liebeskonzept in Stifters Nachsommer.” JASILO 11 (2004): 69-79. ---. “Wolkenspuren. Goethes Erfindung des Übergänglichen.” Kalender kleiner Innovationen: 50 Anfänge einer Moderne zwischen 1755 und 1856. Ed. Roland Borgards, Almuth Hammer, and Christiane Holm. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. 303-317. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. KGW, Vol. V.2. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973. ---. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. Paul, Jean. “Wetterpädagogik.” Schwarze Pädagogik: Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung. Ed. Katharina Rutschky. Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1977. 277-279. Popper, Karl R. Objektive Erkenntnis: Ein evolutionärer Entwurf. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1993. Schuller, Marianne. “Das Gewitter findet nicht statt oder die Abdankung der Kunst. Zu Adalbert Stifters Roman Der Nachsommer.” Poetica 10 (1978): 25- 52. Schuster, Jana. “Der Stoff des Lebens. Atmosphäre und Kreatur in Stifters Abdias.” ZfG 24.2 (2014): 296-311. Serres, Michel. Hermes IV - Die Verteilung. Ed. Günther Rösch. Trans. Michael Bischoff. Berlin: Merve, 1993. Stifter, Adalbert. “Der Nachsommer. Eine Erzählung.“ Werke und Briefe. HKG, Vol. 4.1-4.3. Ed. Alfred Doppler and Wolfgang Frühwald. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1997-2000. ---. Indian Summer. Trans. Wendell Frye. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Stockhammer, Robert. Kartierung der Erde: Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007. Zumbusch, Cornelia. “Nachgetragene Ursprünge. Vorgeschichten im Bildungsroman (Wieland, Goethe und Stifter).” Poetica 43 (2011): 267-99. S OLVEJG N ITZKE Creating “Klima” in a Changing World: Weather and Environment in Peter Rosegger’s Forest Fictions Urban Meteorology vs. Country Weather In the 1870s, two very different approaches to weather and climate unfolded in Austria. While Vienna hosted the First International Meteorological Congress in 1873, Styrian author and magazine editor Peter Rosegger published two of his best-known stories, Schriften eines Waldschulmeisters in 1875 and the autobiographically influenced collection Waldheimat in 1877. 1 As the titles suggest, both texts are set in the forests of the Austrian countryside, an environment that could not be more removed from the thriving metropolis of Vienna. Rosegger’s forest fictions take place in villages so remote that they seem to be left out of the processes of modernization which characterize the world around them. Likewise, the protagonists, Waldschulmeister Andreas Erdmann and the Waldbauernbübel, 2 Rosegger’s childhood alter ego, are almost comically distinguished and cut off from modern people as well as modern goods and customs. However, it becomes clear during the course of the texts that the villages are in fact part of vast modern networks and subject to fundamental transformation. The parallel occurrence of the First International Meteorological Congress in Vienna and Rosegger’s programmatic tales of remoteness points, on the one hand, to the different states of knowledge in regard to atmospheric phenomena and, on the other hand, to a specific technique of resistance to the perceived “upscaling” of (scientific and political) authority (Woods 494) which marks the modernization processes of the second half of the nineteenth century. Initially, Rosegger’s stories, which are often characterized as sentimental renderings of an idyllic Heimat - ‘home, homeland’ - that never existed as such, might not appear to have much in common with the specialized scientific meeting that took place almost at the same time. In this paper, I will argue that they must be read against the backdrop of a radical scientific and imaginative reorganization of the world that the stories’ characters as well as 1 Die Schriften des Waldschulmeisters [Manuscripts of a forest teacher] in the following quoted as Schriften and Waldheimat: Erzählungen aus der Jugendzeit [Forest Home: Tales from a time of youth] do not exist in a published English translation. All quotations are translated by the author. 2 “Waldschulmeister” can be translated as forest teacher. “Waldbauernbübel” is an endearing form of “forest-farmer’s son.” S OLVEJG N ITZKE 122 Rosegger’s readers inhabit. The stories create a space which by appearing as natural offers a sense of deceleration and familiarity that is lacking in the urban centers. Yet the rural idyll in these stories is never oblivious to the already almost fully realized modernity ‘outside.’ Especially in regard to the narrative function of weather events, their perception as normal or extraordinary and the critical observation of a changing environment, Rosegger’s stories are a rich source of contemporary cultural knowledge about climate and its place in the natural world. The local and temporal remoteness of his subjects allows Rosegger to view the transformations of the world from an apparently secluded viewpoint and thus to imagine albeit a utopian way to resist them. By analyzing representations of weather phenomena within these texts, I aim to show how they create a distinct “Klima” (Fleming and Jankovic 1) in which the villages and their inhabitants emerge as part of one common environment. The attempt to “decouple Klima from its current exclusive association with atmospheric sciences and revisit the implications of an ancient vocabulary” (ibid.) signifies, here, an approach to literature as part of a broader cultural process which informs and shapes discourses on the natural, the social and the political. Looking at the emergence of climatology as a discipline and literary representations of weather in the village story allows for the observation of the vastly different paces of and attitudes toward modernization. I propose to read meteorological instances in Rosegger’s forest-fiction and the formalization and institutionalization of climatology as phenomena of functional differentiation and commentary on modernization respectively. Whereas the Congress marks the beginning of a successful scientific history, Rosegger’s seemingly untimely account represents a side of progress that is often overlooked. Images of the “global countryside” as Michael Woods coins it in the context of neoliberal globalization (486) are, as I will argue, rooted in historical conceptualizations of the rural in which the genre of the village story plays a pivotal role. Rossegger’s texts, which I will use as an example, employ the rural as a means to create a narrative space in which the intricate connection of humans and nature becomes not only visible but is reinforced as a desirable, albeit lost, relationship. The analysis of meteorological phenomena, hence, stands in the context of a developing concept of what we would call today ecological consciousness. Weather, in this respect, is a particularly interesting issue because it highlights the differences between urban and rural environments. While this aspect of nature affects both country and cities, it has vastly different effects on the two spheres. In short, even ‘normal,’ expectable weather like heavy rain in summer - a mere inconvenience in an urban environment - can threaten the livelihood of an entire village in Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 123 the countryside as the narrator of Schriften eines Waldschulmeisters witnesses at the beginning of the story. The contrast between the increasingly specialized meteorological and climatological knowledge of the urban centers and the experience based knowledge of the countryside is in itself a marker of modernity. I argue that the village story thus uses this contrast to create a distinctly rural “Klima,” or rural ecolology avant la lettre, to promote an alternative to the specialized and estranged relationship to nature that it attributes to urban-centered processes of modernization. Thus, it presents a powerful historical instance of “environmental reflexivity” (Locher and Fressoz 579) which provides fruitful insights for a cultural history of climate and climate changes. The Work of Standardization The participants of the 1873 First International Meteorological Congress in Vienna had high and partly idealistic goals. Its central purpose was to establish organization(s) and standards that would allow for the sharing of the already vast amounts of data that were collected from all over the globe. While the technology of telegraphy allowed for data exchange in real time since the 1850s, there was no uniform system in which meteorological data was to be collected - neither in terms of measurement, nor of description and notation formats. By the time of the conference, national meteorological institutes were responsible for the observation and recording of the weather, but there was no interor non-governmental organization present to organize global communication and data sharing. Hence, “the bulk of the 1873 Congress’ agenda focused on standards for international data networks […] The proceedings exemplified the tension between already established, politically powerful national systems and newer, politically weaker international norms” (Edwards 52). The aspirations of some of the conference participants exceeded these practical efforts as they took them only as a starting-point for a “genuinely global observing network” integrating observations from remote areas of the world thus far lacking observation (Edwards 51). “But in the 1870s the ambitions of meteorologists far exceeded their governments’ willingness to pay for such stations, or for the expensive telegraph connections that would have been necessary to integrate them into the data network” (Edwards 52). Despite the ongoing rivalries and reservations of governments, the Vienna congress laid the groundwork for the international cooperation without which neither meteorology nor climatology can produce relevant findings. Aside from the geographical coincidence, the Vienna conference is important for the interpretation of Rosegger’s texts in light of the ‘Meteorologies of Modernity’ because it represents the immense progress of meteorolog- S OLVEJG N ITZKE 124 ical research in the nineteenth century as well as the state of what was understood and, maybe even more importantly, what was not understood about weather and climate. 3 By the middle of the nineteenth century the basic structure of the global climatic circulation as well as the forces driving it were well established, the causal relationship between weather and climate, however, remained poorly understood well into the twentieth century (Edwards 61). Meteorology, then, was divided into three disciplines - weather forecast, theoretical, and empirical meteorology - covering different interests and establishing different ideas about what weather is and what the chief objectives of meteorology should be. While demanding exceptional efforts in regard to international cooperation, meteorology as a discipline is part of a larger movement towards standardization and unification in the nineteenth century. Essential requirements for the network-extensions proposed in Vienna - universal time, the use of Morse code for telegraphic communication, universal measuring systems, etc. - were already available and serve as proof for the tremendous endeavors that were underway and their ongoing success (Edwards 27-48). In more than one way, the conference marks a key moment in the development of professional meteorology and with it the knowledge-producing practices that play an important part in forming ideas of what weather and climate is and how it is to be represented. In the case of meteorology, the interconnectedness and interdependency of technology, political agreement, financial potency, and scientific progress becomes especially apparent. But while meteorology was already far advanced, climatology in the present understanding was still in its infancy: 4 Scientific discourses of climate first appeared mainly in the context of natural history and geography. Descriptions of climate, topography and the other physical features of regional environments accompanied narratives and catalogs of flora and fauna. Though climatic description sometimes included data analysis, more often it took the form of experience-based qualitative narrative, perhaps with a few measurements thrown in for support. By 1900, however, techniques of statistical analysis provided the wherewithal to make more direct use of the rapidly accumulating data. (Edwards 63) It is especially interesting for my argument that the early stages of the scientific discourse of climate were characterized by the use of “experience-based qualitative narrative” as opposed to the advanced quantitative methods that 3 For the role of literature in generating meteorological knowledge and non-knowledge [Nicht-Wissen], see Gamper. 4 While meteorology is chiefly concerned with weather - precipitation, cloudage and atmospheric pressure - and hence phenomena which can be measured directly, climatology is concerned with climate, “essentially the history of weather, averaged over time” (Edwards 287), that is, an abstract extrapolation of measurements dependent on mathematical modeling that cannot be directly experienced. Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 125 have been used for meteorology and are the foundation of any climate model and hence any climate research today. Deborah Coen has shown how influential these narrative accounts have been especially in the Habsburg empire. The methods of geo-scientific research employed by the continental empires were distinctly different from those of the European overseas empires, particularly the British. Not only had the continental empires the advantage of geographical continuity: Coen shows how for example the “Climatographies” by Heinrich von Ficker contributed to the nation-building efforts by mediating between different scales of climate knowledge instead of ‘upscaling’ climate knowledge and thus placing it out of touch with local knowledge (Coen 52-60). However, von Ficker’s “meteorological travel narratives” (Coen 62) were not only contested within the academic circles of Vienna 5 but ultimately discarded in the course of the “globalization of atmospheric science [which] would mean the abstraction of meteorological knowledge from the people and places that produced it” (ibid.). According to Edwards, only three decades after the Meteorological Congress, the data volume for climatology and the techniques to make use of it were available, hence rendering qualitative approaches superflous. It can be said then that the scientific discourse on climate was on the verge of professionalization when Rosegger wrote and published his stories. Professionalization in this case refers to the distinction between qualitative narrative approaches and quantitative empirical or statistical methods to describe a phenomenon as well as the differentiation of climatology as a scientific discipline. This transformation of knowledge production fittingly illustrates the context in which cultural knowledge about the climate was formed and thus forms the background for the way in which climate is featured in the Austrian Heimat-stories. The conference and its results might itself have been too avant-garde for a broader public to take notice of the details. However, the growing belief in the understandability and predictability of weather was of great interest and was met with enthusiasm like many of the scientific developments of the time. Moreover, its “backdrop of [a] vast and powerful but incomplete and uneven convergence toward common languages, metrics, technological systems, and scientific understanding” (Edwards 50) was visible in every respect of (city) life. If standardization, as Paul Edwards suggests, is seen as a “major characteristic of this historical period” (Edwards 49), it comes as no surprise that authors like Rosegger and his contemporaries refer to the institutions and industries demanding and furthering standardization. 6 However, as I 5 The relative stability von Ficker and his colleague Julius von Hann ascribe to climate is in stark contrast to Eduard Brückner’s (1863-1927) hypotheses of climate variation [“Klimaschwankung”]. 6 Rosegger in particular used his magazine Heimgarten as a vehicle for his skepticism towards normalization and technological progress. An especially striking example in S OLVEJG N ITZKE 126 will explore later in this article, the growing visibility of the effects of said industries dampened enthusiasm for progress significantly. From a contemporary perspective, Edwards’ above mentioned distinction between the scientific advancement of meteorology and the relative backwardness of early climatological discourse might not be as apparent as it seems for a 21 st century reader. Rather, it becomes apparent that the scientific and technological progress did not ‘throw out’ older ideas and practices all at once but surpassed them, if at all, at a very slow pace. The sometimes excruciating negotiations for funding, common standards and cooperation among meteorological observation systems and institutions convincingly illustrate 7 how science and scientific progress depend just as much on what is possible at a given time theoretically and technologically as they do on what people and institutions are willing to implement. In fact, it is not only the lack of data and the lack of methods to make use of the data 8 but also a specific formation of ideas that characterizes the climatological discourse. The comparatively backwards discourse on climate must be regarded in its own context - a context that is in some respects much closer to the narrative techniques of literature than the methods of contemporary meteorology. The distinction between weather and climate is determined chiefly by different modes of access. Weather is directly perceptible because it consists of a specific state of the atmosphere at a given time and place. Although single events might be palpable, the perception and representation even of weather in and outside of scientific discourses is strongly shaped by cultural patterns. 9 This is even more apparent when it comes to climate. Climate is an abstraction of those different atmospheric states which is aimed at making long-term statements about what kind of weather can be expected or existed at any given place or region: “Climate is essentially the history of weather, averaged over time” (Edwards 287). Understood as a kind of vessel for weather records, it is no surprise that up to the point when statistical methods became the defining technique to determine ‘a climate,’ climate description relied on experience-based narratives. Until climate was thoroughly established as a factor in the Earth’s history that was subject to change and thus caused major transformation of entire ecosystems if not the entire planthis respect is Rosegger’s essay “Veränderung der Landschaft” (“Transformation of the landscape,” Heimgarten 1903) which follows up on his method to imagine an ideal, inherently Austrian landscape that is willfully destroyed by the profit-oriented forces of modernization. He contrasts his observation of a landscape polluted both aesthetically (by non-traditional architecture) and materially (by black smoke of now ubiquitous factory chimneys) with the deep time of geology in order to stress the extent to which humans have become a decisive force in shaping environments. 7 See Edwards 49-59. 8 In fact, climate data and weather data are decidedly not the same (see Edwards 287- 322). 9 See for example Harris, and Boia. Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 127 et, a description of the status quo must have seemed sufficient enough. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate climatology’s importance. Despite the discovery of severe changes in the Earth’s climate in history and particularly during the so-called ice age in the first half of the nineteenth century, climate remained a category of stability rather than change. The nineteenth century ‘flirted’ with the idea of climatic oscillations and prepared the ground for the more wide-ranging interpretations of the following century. Nevertheless, it firmly believed that climate had remained fairly constant since the end of the ice age, in other words, over the entire course of recorded history. (Boia 88) Lucian Boia argues further that the reason climate theories in the nineteenth century resisted actualization despite scientific evidence is rooted in a “resolutely determinist” attitude that “preferred simple relations of cause and effect […] Even if the existence of several factors was acknowledged, one factor had to take precedence over the others, an original and determining principle” (77). Although there was no shortness of efforts to get away from climate determinism, 10 according to Boia, racism, imperialism, and nationalism respectively persisted in organizing the world hierarchically according to climates and its supposed effects on ‘native’ peoples (67-69). Therefore, climate in the nineteenth century is as much a factor in human psychology and physiology as it is a “physical feature of regional environments” (Edwards 62). Before one dismisses this understanding and with it all (non-scientific) accounts of climate, a closer look into the primary texts reveals a much more differentiated picture. Rosegger’s forest fictions serve as an example for a perspective that offers images of a delicate and sometimes complex relationship between human beings and their surrounding environments, which are the shared convictions Boia describes in principle. Narrating Nature in Village Stories and Forest Fictions The genre of the Dorfgeschichte, 11 which shares many of the same characteristics as Waldheimat and Schriften eines Waldschulmeisters, has a strong tradition especially in the German-speaking world (Neumann and Twellmann, “Dorfgeschichten”). Beginning with Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten in 1843, the Dorfgeschichte quickly gained momentum and 10 Boia mentions Charles Comte’s Traité de législation, ou exposition des lois générales suivant lesquelles les peuples prospèrent, dépérissent ou restent stationnaires and Ernst Haeckel’s ecology as examples to make the case for a widened idea of ‘environment’ (Boia 71-77). 11 The German term Dorfgeschichte can mean both tales of villages and history of villages. The ambiguity is indeed intentional in many cases. See Baur Dorfgeschichte and Neumann and Twellmann “Marginalität.” S OLVEJG N ITZKE 128 grew to be one of the most successful genres of nineteenth century German literature (Baur, Dorfgeschichte 14). While Auerbach and his imminent successors during the 1840s intended the realism of their stories as part of their political, even revolutionary intentions, 12 the genre quickly moved to favor a seemingly depoliticized version of Heimat - ‘home, homeland’ - and Heimeligkeit - ‘homeliness’ - after the Revolution in 1848. In the beginnings, however, writers like Auerbach and his Austrian contemporary Joseph Rank pursued the narrative representation of the respective villages in the Black Forest and the Bohemian Forest with scientific demeanor. The aspiration to depict the village realistically in respect to structure, customs, environmental conditions, and spoken language closely resembled the ethnological endeavors of the same period. 13 Hence, the description of climatic conditions is a vital part of the narrative. From their somewhat artificial perspective, the stories effectively recreate the village people of their own Heimat as exotic figures. Their contact to the modern world and its bureaucracy, means of transportation, and colonial goods, though mitigated by “brokers” 14 often seems either endearing or ridiculous. When Rosegger published his forest fictions, the genre of the Dorfgeschichte was well past its prime. Both of his spatially and historically remote locations suggest that there were no ‘untouched’ villages like those Rank and Auerbach described. In the second half of the century rural inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire migrated in large numbers to the cities and centers of industrialization (Vocelka 221-226). The mechanization of agriculture progressed very slowly and although peasants were freed of servitude by 1782 and of all dues to landlords by 1848, conditions did not improve enough to keep people in the countryside. However, modernization was not only met with enthusiasm. Slums were a common sight in all large cities of Europe and workers lived in dire conditions. That might have been one of the reasons why the rural idylls of Rosegger and others were so successful. However, since literacy among workers was rare, the former peasants were not the target audience, but the bourgeoisie. Even though many in the target audience might have only known country life from similar stories, they longed for images and, preferably, experiences of an intact relationship between humans and nature. Rosegger’s repeated calls for a return to nature as 12 Auerbach was put in jail for revolutionary actions and for belonging to a fraternity. The Austrian writer Joseph Rank became a member of the first German parliament, the Frankfurt National Assembly, in 1848. 13 See Zeyringer and Gollner 151-152 and Baur Dorfgeschichte. 14 For the example of tradesmen who are comfortable in both worlds, see Neumann and Twellmann, “Marginalität” 480. Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 129 well as the construction of a past state of countrylife in his stories testify to an increasing feeling of estrangement from nature among his audience. 15 The tales from the albeit imagined countryside served a similar purpose as the parks and countryside retreats did just outside the city. 16 Although, the Dorfand Heimatgeschichten of the late nineteenth century did not quite lose their ethnologically inspired perspective, they subordinated it to a different purpose. Instead of attempting to use narrative techniques to represent people who would otherwise have no (political) standing, the tales about the periphery supplied the centers with diversion from the crowded and increasingly polluted city life and, even more importantly, were a vital part in the formation of a sense of community in the emerging nation-states of Europe. This perspective on the countryside promised to deliver a sense of simplicity and authenticity that was in high demand by the intended audience. 17 Consequently, the depiction of natural environments must be read as part of a larger effort to create and preserve a ‘natural’ Heimat, 18 serving as (imagined) origin and home for the citizens of a nation. 19 Writers like Ludwig Anzengruber, Franz Stelzhamer and Peter Rosegger vigorously marketed their rootedness in the region in which their stories were set. They fashioned themselves, their language and their writing, after the natural forces of their Heimat. Hence, for example, local dialiects (Mundart) were promoted and interpreted as characteristics of a life in a specific (e.g., mountainous) landscape. They also managed to maintain the impression of having somehow escaped alienation from their origins and thus were able to serve as mediators between the ‘true’ homeland and its modernized 15 Rosegger discusses the possibility and strong desirability of a return to nature in several essays e.g., “Rückkehr zur Natur, Ein Zweigespräch [sic! ]“ (Heimgarten 16, 1891/ 92), “Rückkehr zur ländlichen Natur” (Heimgarten 22, 1897/ 98), “Zurück zur Scholle” (Heimgarten 31, 1906/ 07). It is important to note that Rosegger by no means advocates a Waldenesque path into wild nature but rather a reactivation of rural customs and peasantry. 16 See Zeyringer and Gollner 298-302. 17 See Baur Dorfgeschichte and “Peter Rosegger.” 18 The term originates from an essay by W.G. Sebald who claims that Austrian authors turned to look at their own “natürliche Heimat” in the late twentieth century (Sebald 16). 19 ‘Natural’ in this respect refers to a sense of simplicitly and stability that is lost in the seemingly ever-changing modern world, best exemplified in the relationship between peasant and parcel of land (“Scholle”). While nature as a state of wilderness was rejected, the idealized relationship between a man and the land he lives off was regarded as the core of a healthy and functioning society. Thus, representations of natural phenomena, wheather in particular, could be interpreted solely based on the experience-based knowledge of those people who were directly connected to the land. Hence developments in science which were not only in regard to climatology progressing to a more globalized perspective were regarded with skepticism. S OLVEJG N ITZKE 130 peoples. 20 It comes as no surprise that the reception of this literary tradition is tainted by its instrumentalization in the National-Socialist contexts and after 1945 is marked by an utter ignorance of many critics in regard to any nationalist, racist and in particular anti-semitic tendencies. 21 Nevertheless, to reduce this discourse as it occurs in interpretations focusing on Dorfand Heimatgeschichten solely to the precursors of Blut und Boden-ideology (Baur, “Peter Rosegger” 18), often fails to take into account the conditions of particular texts and to differentiate between a specific sense of place and its exploitation in a political discourse. Yet, this careful distinction not only serves to better understand the perception of how human impact on natural environments was perceived and mediated but also of how these depictions were framed politically. In the 1970s, academic interest in Rosegger’s works was triggered by his exceptionally vocal engagement for the preservation of natural habitats, forests in particular. Although, as Uwe Baur rightfully cautions, one should not mistake him for an early ‘green’ writer (“Peter Rosegger”), his depictions of natural environments and his apparent awareness for the need to ensure their preservation is indeed striking. Rosegger’s works are especially rich sources for the analysis of “environmental reflexivity” (Locher and Fressoz 579) since they take part in a wide range of different discourses. As editor of Heimgarten, a monthly journal containing literature, poems, and essays on various subjects, Rosegger published several texts on matters dealing directly with the changed and still changing relationship between human beings and nature. One of the most straight-forward examples, a short essay called “Wald und Wasser” [“Woods and Water”] (1906), exemplifies impressively Rosegger’s attitude towards what today would be called the ‘natural resources’ of his country: He complains about the deterioration of fresh-water sources all over the country - shrinking rivers and a decline in precipitation are, according to Rosegger, only the most obvious warning signs of a growing problem. With the cities already suffering from water shortages and access to rivers being fiercely contested, a sudden and thorough change of behavior is necessary. Rosegger claims that it is not only growing demand but an actual decline of water due to unrightful actions and he does not hesitate to identify the responsible party: “Die übergroße, gefräßige Industrie. Sie frißt nicht nur bloß die Bauersleute auf, sondern auch ihre Wälder und sauft ihre Wässer aus. Was sie übrig läßt, das verdirbt sie, daß sogar des Wassers urangestammter Bewohner, der Fisch, darin verenden muß” (“Wald und 20 They themselves filled - maybe even more than Auerbach, Rank and the likes - the role of broker (Neumann and Twellmann) and identified with the narrators of their stories, and the lyrical I of their poems, which included using the regional dialect. See Bengesser, Zeyringer and Gollner. 21 For a discussion of nationalist and National-Socialist reception of Rosegger’s works see Hölzl. Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 131 Wasser” 457). 22 With strong language Rosegger condemns industrial practices in a way that at first glance appears very close to the language environmental organizations have used since the 1970s. The personified industry, in his words, eats up peasants and what is theirs. When the text was published in the very beginning of the twentieth century, it was not long after the peasants were finally freed from the last ties to the land that they were working on and its landlords. 23 Thus the actual proprietary situation is not what Rosegger reflects on when he speaks of “their forests and their water.” Rather than to ownership, he refers to a sense of belonging that is neglected and destroyed by the industrialization of the Habsburg Empire. Actually, Rosegger’s text with its rage takes part in creating this relationship between peasants and land in the first place. Like fish in the water, he associates the connection between those who (used to) live and work in and near the forests as their original inhabitants, a relationship so strong that he calls it “urangestammt,” exaggerating its supposed naturalness. This allows him to build upon a clear-cut friend-foe opposition between peasants (victim) and industry (offender) to state his case. He does, however, introduce a third party, “us, the well-to-do,” whom he claims to be the cause and possible solution of the problem: Wenn wir, die besser Situierten, die ‚Bourgeois’, die Aristokraten der Kulturländer und Staaten, uns einmal zehn Jahre lang enthalten von all dem überflüssigen Zeug, von den Luxusdingen, in denen jetzt viele nachgerade ersticken, wenn wir uns nur das Nötige, das wahrhaft Nützliche anschaffen, eine einfache Lebensweise annehmen - in zehn Jahren ist die Industrie reduziert und ins richtige Verhältnis zum Staatsorganismus gebracht. (“Wald und Wasser” 546) 24 While at first, it seems the case that Rosegger simplifies matters by blaming industry alone, he quickly introduces consumerist attitudes as the actual cause of deforestation and water shortages. In its consumer-based approach to change, Rosegger’s essay appears almost ahead of his time. The call for a simpler lifestyle that refrains from useless consumerism and thus prevents the exploitation of both natural and human resources has become a rhetorical beacon of environmentalism. Except, it is this aspect of the text that is mis- 22 “The outsized and ravenous industry. It not only devours the peasants but also their forests and guzzles their water. What is left is spoiled in a way that even the water’s original inhabitants, the fish, must die a miserable death.” 23 The final “Bauernbefreiung” (abolition of serfdom) was achieved only in 1848 (Vocelka 201-202). 24 “Would we, the well-to-do, the ‘Bourgeois,’ the aristocrats of the cultured nations and states, refrain from all the superfluous stuff, from the luxury goods that today are wellnigh suffocating many [of us]; would we only acquire what is truly necessary, truly useful and take on a simple lifestyle - in ten years the industry is going to be reduced and brought to a balanced ratio with the state organism.” S OLVEJG N ITZKE 132 leadingly interpreted as ‘green’: While Rosegger uses apocalyptic threats 25 to stress the necessity of his proposed solution, in his vision the decline of the ‘original’ natural environments results in an upheaval in the political landscape, namely the rise of the working classes. 26 The apocalyptic threats, Rosegger issues, are thence not chiefly concerned with a conservationist attitude towards natural environments but with a conservative political stance. “Wald und Wasser” features a specific constellation of proto-environmental concern that varies significantly from that of the late twentieth century. As the analysis of Schriften eines Waldschulmeisters will further illustrate, Rosegger’s writings advocate a top-down implementation of modernization. The literary text employs an agent of the ruling classes to educate villagers in the modern ways and customs in order to protect natural environments from commodification and peasants from displacement. Nevertheless, while Rosegger’s texts in accordance to other village stories present a causal link between the degradation of soil and the degradation of the worker, his attitude is everything but politically progressive. While current environmentalismhas roots in leftist politics (despite some conservative strains), 27 Rosegger, in contrast, is particularly concerned about the destruction of the established political order alongside that of traditional ways of life, and natural environments. Hence, anxiety about political change might be the actual motivation of his critique of modernization in “Wald und Wasser.” While his rhetoric is remniniscent of more recent Marxist critiques of capitalism, Rosegger opposes the emancipation of the working classes decisively. His call for consumerist restraint aims at the opposite: “So bekämpft man die Sozialdemokratie. So ganz allein, und mit Erfolg. Und zwar zum Wohle der Arbeiter, wovon dann viele wieder ihre Scholle suchen und ihre Zufriedenheit finden werden” (“Wald und Wasser” 546). 28 Rosegger’s short “Wald und Wasser” essay challenges Boia’s generalized assumption that the nineteenth century remains resolutely determinist (Boia 77). Presumably, the reason for a more complex view of the matter is his sense of imminent danger which he believes to encounter all around him and which is also caused by his own behavior. Hence, his cultural criticism must not be mistaken as an early token of ‘green’ politics in the modern sense; his 25 A rethorical strategy often employed in first-wave environmentalism (Garrard, Ecocriticism 93-116). 26 Rosegger contrasts his call for an abstention from consumption with the “much more costly” [“kostspieliger”] alternative of a “terrible civil war” [“ungeheurer Bürgerkrieg”] that he says will inevitably be the consequence of the further displacement of rural communities and concurrent fuelling of political working class movements (“Wald und Wasser” 458). 27 See for example Garrard Oxford Handbook. 28 “This is how one fights social democracy. This way only, and with success. And to the benefit of the workers, many of which are going to return to their clod and find content.” Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 133 appeal for a simpler lifestyle is anything but close to politically left critique of the same matter. On the contrary, Rosegger calls for the preservation of woods and waters not only for practical reasons but in order to prevent a political revolution (of the working classes) from following the Industrial Revolution that already changed the face of the nation. Rosegger’s texts show a striking awareness of the fundamental change in the relationship between humans and nature that fully realizes itself during the nineteenth century. Forest-“Klima” One of the defining aspects of Peter Rosegger’s fiction is its peculiar relationship to scientific knowledge and practice. Schriften eines Waldschulmeisters and Waldheimat take a complementary approach to natural phenomena than contemporary science, though not without recognizing and even reflecting on the perspective they refuse or fail to take. Andreas Erdmann, the forest teacher, repeatedly attempts to study his surroundings but fails as often as he tries: Ich habe mir wieder, wie seiner Tage einmal, aber ernstlicher vorgenommen, in meinen freien Stunden des Sommers mich mit der Pflanzenwelt abzugeben, sie wissenschaftlich zu zerlegen und zu betrachten. Aber wie geht es mir dabei? Da habe ich heute ein Pflänzlein gefunden, gepflückt und hier auf meine Mappe gelegt. Mich reut der Mord. Es ist so frisch und hold gestanden am Rain und hat seine kleinen Arme ausgestreckt, den lieben Sonnenschein zu umarmen. […] Zu schluchzen hab' ich angefangen, ich altes Kind. Und das heißt Pflanzenkunde treiben? - Andreas, für die Wissenschaft bist du ganz und gar nicht zu brauchen, du bist ein Träumer. (Schriften 294) 29 He calls himself a dreamer for regretting to have to “murder” the plants he wants to study according to their botanic characteristic. Instead he personifies the flower he plucks in an almost exaggerated romantic manner. Instead of quantifying and more importantly finding a universal descriptive language, Rosegger’s tales defy standardization by stressing tradition and individual experience. Still, at the heart of the texts lies the assumption that there is in fact a universal, or rather unifying language in which nature can be experienced - the language of emotions. The forest teacher’s failure is representative of Rosegger’s approach to nature as a writer: the attempt to go at it with scientific accuracy exists, but again and again he lets himself be over- 29 “Again, I attempted - and this time seriously - to use my free time to busy myself with the flora; to observe it and to take it apart scientifically. But how do I feel? Today, I found a little flower, plucked it and put it on my portfolio. I do regret the murder. It stood so fresh and lovely and stretched its little arms, to embrace the dear sunshine. […] I started sobbing, old child that I am. Is this what is it like to be pursuing botany? - Andreas, you utterly useless scientist, you are a dreamer.” S OLVEJG N ITZKE 134 whelmed by the poetic quality and his feelings for the environments he depicts. This is as much a pose as it is a poetic program. In other editions of Waldheimat and Schriften des Waldschulmeisters alike, the author claims not to aim at educating his audience but rather to bring his audience back their youth and “dem Leser vielleicht ein wenig kühle Waldluft und schuldlose Kindesfroheit” 30 (Waldheimat 6). In order to illustrate how these texts create a space that cannot be reached by the fundamental transformations of the Industrial Revolution, I would like to bring attention to three key aspects: the narrative function of weather events, the forest as a refuge and symbol, as well as the creation of a specific “Klima.” The literary tradition that these texts build upon did, as already mentioned above, go through a shift from a politically and ethnologically inspired perspective to a more reassuring gesture of wholesome homeliness. 31 Rosegger follows in this direction while at the same time paying special attention to the environments of his characters. The forest teacher’s failure to look at nature like a botanist can also be understood as a reference to one of the most famous nature writers in the German-speaking world. Although Rosegger admired Adalbert Stifter’s prose immensely, 32 nature in his fiction is not (as) sublime and his depiction does not commit to the realism of Stifter’s. Nevertheless, in many ways Stifter can be regarded as a model for forest fiction in so far as his writings shape the literary (Austrian) landscape that Rosegger refers to. His story, “Einer Weihnacht Lust und Gefahr” ([“A Christmas’ Pleasure and Peril”] Waldheimat 131), illustrates references to and emancipation from one of Stifter’s best-known narratives, “Bergkristall” [Rock Crystal]. Both stories revolve around children who get lost on Christmas Eve. Brother and Sister in Rock Crystal lose their way home due to a sudden snowstorm that obscures a signpost 33 and they need to survive the night in a glacier. The Waldbauernbübel, in turn, similarily fails to find his companion after church and has to be saved by the Mooswaberl. 34 The saving of the children in both stories goes along with a moment of recognition and integration of former outcasts into a community. 30 “A bit of cool forest air and innocent childhood pleasure.” 31 For a detailed analysis of the genre before and after 1848 see Baur Dorfgeschichte. 32 In fact, Rosegger’s place in literary history might be due more to the fact that he together with his (and formally Stifter’s) publisher Gustav Heckenast worked incessantly on repopularizing Stifter and thus helped his works to the canonical status they can claim today. 33 For a detailed analysis of the children’s way home and the significance of the signpost see Sinka. 34 “Mooswaberl” translates roughly to “moss wife,” a name for an impoverished woman who is surrounded by rumors which turn her into a fairytale-like figure similar to a witch. Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 135 The most evident and distinguishing feature of the two texts is the narrative perspective and the associated approach to meteorological knowledge. 35 The nostalgic perspective of a remembered childhood in Rosegger is contrasted with an omniscient narrator in “Bergkristall.” Although the narrators of both stories apparently are able to look back on a number of Christmases, the introduction to Stifter’s tale conveys an impression of timelessness compared to the personalized narrative of Rosegger. Both, however, introduce Christmas and its traditions as the “(most) beautiful”: “Eines der schönsten Feste feiert die Kirche fast mitten im Winter, wo beinahe die längsten Nächte und kürzesten Tage sind, wo die Sonne am schiefsten gegen unsere Gefilde steht, und Schnee alle Fluren deckt, das Fest der Weihnacht” (“Bergkristall” 173). 36 Here, Christmas and its traditions are introduced in a manner that thoroughly notes its different aspects (as if it was described for someone who does not know about it) and, as the use of “us” suggests, a manner that sets the stage by painting a familiar picture. The Waldbauernbübel on the other hand, marvels at the mysterious goings-on in the house: there are delicate objects that he must not touch and busy preparations going on, and then his parents leave for church in the early morning leaving the boy dreaming of the wonders he is missing. 37 Snow is the defining element of the scenery in both stories. Its coming is expected judging from the traditions like the Christmas tree and other indoor-lights 38 which stress the difference between inside and outside. The coziness of the home against the backdrop of the cold outside is a central motive of Rosegger’s stories. While in “Bergkristall”, the weather quickly turns into a perilous challenge for the skillful children, 39 in “Einer Weihnacht 35 For more on Stifter’s “literary meteorology” see Gamper. 36 “One of the most beautiful of Church festivals comes in midwinter when nights are long and days are short, when the sun slants toward Earth obliquely and snow mantles the fields: Christmas” (Rock Crystal 3). 37 “Mother and father walked several hours to hear mass [‘Rorate’] in the parish church. I dreamed after them and (in my dream) even heard the church bells, the sound of the organ and the carrol: Hail Mary, glorious morning star.” - “Der Vater und die Mutter gingen in die mehrere Stunden entfernte Pfarrkirche zur Rorate. Ich träumte ihnen nach, ich hörte die Kirchenglocken, ich hörte den Ton der Orgel und das Adventlied: Maria, sei gegrüßet, du lichter Morgenstern! ” (Waldheimat 132). 38 In Die Schriften des Waldschulmeisters, Rosegger dedicates a great deal of attention to the introduction of the first Christmas tree - here it becomes a telltale sign of modernity entering the forest world, since at first the villagers cannot believe how a tree can grow inside and gleam to spend warmth and light: “Da gucken die alten Männlein und Weiblein gottswunderlich drein, und kichern und reiben sich die Augen über den närrischen Traum. Daß auf einem Baum des Waldes Lichter wachsen, das haben sie all ihrer Tage noch nicht gesehen” (Schriften 253). 39 That the children are more than capable to find their way between the valleys under normal circumstances is described in detail and their survival is attributed in large parts to the level-headedness of Konrad, who keeps his younger sister, Susanna, awake and thus manages to keep both of them from freezing in the glacier. S OLVEJG N ITZKE 136 Lust und Gefahr”, it is the carelessness of the boy that turns the mystifying snowy cover of the otherwise well-known landscape into a life-threatening danger. The difference in the treatment of the weather is significant since it influences the whole setup of the narratives. For Rosegger its description serves a clear purpose - as scenery and occasion for his story. Hence, as soon as someone capable to deal with the threat comes along, the problem is resolved. In “Bergkristall,” the extensive account of environmental conditions raises them from the background of the story to its actual topic. There is nothing magical or mysterious about the way the children experience nature. On the contrary, even though Rosegger’s boy at one point hopes to find a deer to show him the way 40 and finally succumbs to his overwhelming surroundings, the children in “Bergkristall” are as much part of their saving as the adults who bring them home in the end. Their experience of the night sky over their shelter humbles them as much as it would anyone, 41 but it does not keep the older brother, Konrad, from taking sensitive measures to ensure their survival. Nature might be “unfathomable” (Rock Crystal 61) to the children, but despite their young age, they are aware that knowledge and caution are the only things shielding them from its overwhelming force. In comparison, nature seems somewhat smaller in Waldheimat. The Waldbauernbübel, though younger and alone, never grasps the grandeur of the landscape he is lost in and thus the overall cozy atmosphere of the story is not threatened by actual fear for the boy or by any ‘outsized’ study of nature. “Bergkristall” contemplates nature in all its sublime beauty and terror, whereas in Waldheimat nature seems to yield to human dimensions in so far as it never ceases to be the background for Rosegger’s wholesome Christmas story. Nevertheless, weather is an important factor in Rosegger’s narratives, for it is most often used as an agent of story-telling that allows him to create a perilous situation like that in “Einer Weihnacht Lust und Gefahr” or “Vom Urgroßvater, der auf der Tanne saß” (Waldheimat 34-47) or as a tactic to change a character’s way. The fictional editor of the forest teacher’s manuscripts for example would never have come to the village Winkelsteg had it not been for a sudden downpour. At the same time, the narrative illustrates the close relationship of the characters and their surroundings. The downpour which is inconveniencing the wanderer destroys the harvest the villagers depend on. It is characterized as utterly unpredictable and, moreover, 40 “Ich wußte nicht, wo ich war. - Wenn jetzt ein Reh käme, ich würde es fragen nach dem Weg, in der Christnacht reden ja Tiere menschliche Sprache! ” (Waldheimat 148). 41 The children’s knowledge is characterized as practical, thus they do not know that stars in the night sky move westwards and that they could tell time based on the position of the stars (“Bergkristall” 214, Rock Crystal 56) or what the milky white band is, let alone the Northern lights that light up the night sky (“Bergkristall” 217, Rock Crystal 60). Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 137 inherently unfair since it can destroy one village’s harvest while another village hardly notices that it rained (Schriften 3). Similarly, while the snow might appear to be dangerous only to a boy, the story of the greatgrandfather who had to spend a night in a tree he climbed to flee from wolves, embraces the force of a lightning storm with all its magnificence. At the same time it makes the so-called “graue Tanne” or “Türkentanne” 42 part of the family history. Personal relationships to specific environments or individual aspects of it are of much more importance in Rosegger’s texts than scientific accuracy. Just as the weather is only significant in relation to the character who experiences it, the forests that are central to the texts gain relevance solely by their inhabitants. The Waldbauern-family considers the “Türkentanne” as a natural monument of the founding of their family’s (now lost) fortunes and for a similar reason holds on to a group of spruces despite significant financial difficulties (Waldheimat 410). The larchs that are sold as timber for railroad construction instead mark the defeat of the old ways. The moment in which they turn from living trees on the land of the farmer to timber for industrial use coincides with the reframing of the forest as a resource for industrial exploitation. A major part of Die Schriften des Waldschulmeisters deals with the deforestation that goes along with this reinterpretation. Observing the lumberjacks, the forest teacher notices the disconnection of nature and human beings: Hundert Frühlinge haben ihn emporgehoben mit ihrer Liebe und Strenge; jetzt ist er tot, und die Welt ist und bleibt ganz auch ohne ihn - den lebendigen Baum. Still stehen die zwei, drei Menschlein, sie stützen sich auf den Beilstiel und blicken auf ihr Opfer. Sie klagen nicht, sie jauchzen nicht, eine grausame Kaltblütigkeit liegt auf ihren rauhen, sonnverbrannten Zügen; ihr Gesicht und ihre Hände sehen auch aus wie von Fichtenrinden. (Schriften 93) 43 In Andreas’ eyes, the workers are not to be held responsible for the destruction of the forest. They go about their job in “cruel cold-bloodedness,” disconnected from any feeling towards the living organism they cut down. The commodification of tree into timber seems to be completed, and the con- 42 The names Türkentanne and graue Tanne [Turk’s fir and grey fir] refer to the age of the tree and the skeleton of a fir [“das Gerippe einer Tanne”] that supposedly witnessed the Ottoman invasions. The text does not specify this claim beyond mentioning that, according to folk tales, hundreds of years prior, the tree stood under the ‘half moon’ and much Christian blood was shed under it [“der Sage nach vor mehreren hundert Jahren, als der Türke im Lande war, der Halbmond geprangt haben und unter welcher viel Christenblut gefloss-en sein soll] (Waldheimat 34). 43 “A hundred springs have raised him with their love and rigor; now he is dead and the world goes on without him - the living tree. Quietly, the two or three men stand there, leaning on the handles of their axes and looking upon their victim. They don’t mourn, they don’t cheer, a cruel cold-bloodedness marks their rough, sun-burned features; their faces and hands look like the bark of spruces, too.” S OLVEJG N ITZKE 138 trasting accounts of the same object are irreconcilable. Moreover, it seems to the forest teacher as if the lumberjacks themselves look like the tree they felled, for they share its fate and are themselves not more than (human) resources to their employers. With the shrinking of the forest, Winkelsteg, the village in the forest, will inevitably move closer to the outside world and probably lose its meaning as a refuge for those who cannot find a place in it. The forest teacher’s efforts to preserve the forest are fruitless. Already, the last corner of primordial forest belonging to Winkelsteg has been designated as a graveyard: Die Gegend altert schnell. Die Berge werden grau und kahl; der Wald wird verbrannt; in allen Tälern rauchen Kohlstätten. Mit Mühe hab' ich es durchgesetzt, daß sie da oben an der Hebung einen kleinen Schachen stehen lassen. Der soll das letzte und bleibende Stück Urwald sein und unter seinem Schatten sollen die toten Winkelsteger ruhen. (Schriften 198) 44 These scenes of woodcutting and deforestation resonate strongly with Rosegger’s raging words in “Wald und Wasser.” The destructive forces of modernization have all but advanced into the otherwise secluded forest worlds. Even though the characters take every measure possible to try to keep them out, the signs of the impact of industrialized modernity on the so far poor but pristine communities and their environments can no longer be denied. Only a little more than two decades later at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Rosegger claims that the Industrial Revolution not only devours their own but in the long run changes the climate. This climate change must not only be understood in regards to the diminishing amounts of precipitation, he assigns to the ‘ravenous industry,’ but as a more general change in ‘Klima.’ His narratives invent a place in space and time from which it is possible to have a (last) look at a world that has not yet changed but can also no longer be imagined as unchangeable. Hence, the Heimat they create is a fiction that contains the world as it was and naturally as it - in Rosegger’s eyes - should but can no longer be. In contrast to the developments in climatology which happen at the same time, the forest here becomes an example for the benefits of a holistic understanding of nature. The Waldschulmeister observes a growing relationship between humans and natural environment that depends on mutual transformation. It is in no way a celebration of wilderness but quite the opposite: careful manipulation - education and cultivation, respectively - allows for a “Klima,” in which humans and nature can thrive. The absence of extremes thus connects Rosegger to the climatic visions of the eighteenth century, the ideal of a temperate climate both in terms 44 “The region ages quickly. The mountains become grey and bleak; the forest is being burned; in all the valleys coal is smoking. With a good deal of trouble I have managed to have them leave a small grove [Schachen]. This shall be the last and remaining piece of primordial forest [Urwald] and the dead of Winkelsteg shall rest in its shade.” Creating “Klima” in a Changing World 139 of atmospheric conditions and social organization (cf. Horn). By creating the past as a desirable yet unreachable state, they also anticipate the pointlessness of his call for a (return to a) simpler lifestyle. The stories’ wholesome homeliness, even kitsch, might be read as a gesture of (over)compensating the longing for a simpler world and as an imaginative refuge from the apparently unstoppable program of modernization. Works Cited Baur, Uwe. Dorfgeschichte. Zur Entstehung und gesellschaftlichen Funktion einer literarischen Gattung im Vormärz. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1978. ---. “Peter Rosegger: in der Wissenschaft.” “Fremd gemacht? ” Der Volksschriftsteller Peter Rosegger. Ed. Uwe Baur, Gerald Schöpfer, and Gerhard Pail. Wien: Böhlau, 1988. 11-24. Bengesser, Silvia, ed. Franz Stelzhamer - Wanderer zwischen den Welten: Dokumentation eines Lebens in Bruchstücken; zum 200. Geburtstag des Dichters. Linz: Land Oberösterreich, Adalbert-Stifter-Inst., 2002. Boia, Lucian. The Weather in the Imagination. London: Reaktion Books 2005. Coen, Deborah R. “Imperial Climatologies from Tyrol to Turkestan.” Osiris 26.1: Klima (2011): 45-65. Edwards, Paul. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Fleming, J. Rodger, and Vladimir Jankovic. “Revisiting Klima.” Osiris 26.1: Klima (2011): 1-15. Gamper, Michael. “Literarische Meteorologie. Am Beispiel von Stifters ‘Haidedorf’.” Wind und Wetter: Kultur - Wissen - Ästhetik. Ed. Georg Braungart and Urs Büttner. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. 247-263. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London, New York: Routledge, 2012. ---. “Introduction.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Ed. Greg Garrard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 1-24. Harris, Alexandra. Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. London: Thames and Hudson, 2015. Hölzl, Wolfgang. Der grossdeutsche Bekenner: Nationale und nationalsozialistische Rosegger-Rezeption. Frankfurt a.M./ New York: Lang, 1991. Locher, Fabien, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. “Modernity's Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity.” Critical Inquiry 38.3 (2012): 579-598. Neumann, Michael, and Marcus Twellmann. “Dorfgeschichten. Anthropologie und Weltliteratur.” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift (DVjs) 88.1 (2014): 22- 45. ---. “Marginalität und Fürsprache: Dorfgeschichten zwischen Realismus, Microstoria und historischer Anthropologie.” IASL 39.2 (2014): 476-492. S OLVEJG N ITZKE 140 Rosegger, Peter. Die Schriften des Waldschulmeister: Gesammelte Werke von Peter Rosegger. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1913. ---. “Veränderung der Landschaft.” Heimgarten 30 (1903): 447-451. ---. “Wald und Wasser.” Heimgarten 30 (1906): 546-548. ---. Waldheimat. Erzählungen aus der Jugendzeit: Gesammelte Werke von Peter Rosegger. Vol. 11. Leipzig: Staackmann, 1914. Sebald, W.G. Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer TB, 1995. Sinka, Margit M. “Unappreciated Symbol: The Unglückssäule in Stifter’s Bergkristall.” Modern Austrian Literature 16.2 (1983): 1-17. Stifter, Adalbert. “Bergkristall.” Bunte Steine. Ed. Helmut Bachmaier. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994. 171-229. ---. Rock Crystal. Trans. Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore. New York: NYBR Classics, 2008. Vocelka, Karl. Geschichte Österreichs. Kultur - Gesellschaft - Politik. Graz/ Wien/ Köln: Styria, 2000. Woods, Michael. “Engaging the Global Countryside: Globalization, Hybridity, and the Reconstitution of Rural Place.” Progress in Human Geography 31.4 (2007): 485-507. Zeyringer, Klaus, and Helmut Gollner. Eine Literaturgeschichte: Österreich seit 1650. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2014. P ATRICK R AMPONI Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy: Weather, Sickness and the Globalization of ‘Milieu’ In 1897, Friedrich Nietzsche’s personal publisher, the Naumann publishing house, brought out a collection of aphorisms by a certain Paul Mongré entitled Sant’ Ilario. Gedanken aus der Landschaft Zarathustras: Our spring announces itself with a torrent of death notices in the newspapers; this kind of ‘springtime,’ with its days heralding summer and relapses of winter, can insidiously finish off those sufferers who imagine they have been given another year. Summer follows, which tends to alternate close heat and rain so as to deny any rest to the working part of the population: evenings, Sundays and holiday weeks are irrevocably wet, desolate and unpleasant. Autumn inherits summer’s rain and lasts until December or January: then a late winter without character, little snow but a great deal of cold mud, and then spring again. The whole is a system of systemlessness, a deliberate nonsense, a game of chance with only probabilities of losing, a modus vivendi that no-one can live with. (Mongré 167-168, emphasis P.R.) 1 The idea of weather as a “system of systemlessness” is a prevalent topos in nineteenth century meteorological discourse - as are the lamentations about weather that is always too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry. And that it rains on the day off work of all days, that the seasons are full of deceitful intentions and make our life more difficult, that the malicious whims of the weather as a whole are not to be trusted, all of that is surprisingly universal and also quite current. The “joyous saint” who wrote these lines under the pseudonym of Paul Mongré, in an age that hadn’t yet heard of climate change, was the Leipzig mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Felix Hausdorff, who knew more than a little about weather; he earned his postdoctoral lecture qualification with his work Über die Absorption des Lichts in der Atmosphäre [On the absorption of light in the atmosphere]. At the time of writing Sant’ Ilario he was on leave from his professorial duties, staying on the Ligurian coast to cure his respiratory illness, not far from the site where ten years earlier Nietzsche had written his Zarathustra. The quite weather-sensitive Hausdorff, intoxicated by the “idleness of the South” (Mongré 173), shows complete understanding for 1 If not otherwise indicated all translations of German original text quotations into English have been done by Karsten Schöllner. P ATRICK R AMPONI 142 the European in our latitudes who catches a new illness, weather-neurasthenia: he is only responding to the increasingly pronounced disparity between climate and organism, and feels the urgent admonition, as a kind of haruspicium (alas, from his own entrails! ), to migrate to milder stretches of earth. (Mongré 167; emphasis P.R.) With this concept of “weather-neurasthenia” Felix Hausdorff ventured to diagnose a complaint that occupied many doctors towards the end of the nineteenth century and prompted a torrent of scholarly and popular publications. Yet by 1900, there was hardly a serious physician who would have given this diagnosis. The etiology of this new psychosomatic hypersensitivity to weather conditions, termed meteoropathy by academic medicine a short while later, was still too nebulous. 2 And in fact its symptoms resembled in many points those of the unspecific but highly epidemic and fashionable illness of the fin-de-siècle: neurasthenia (Steiner 120). The pathologically weather-sensitive, it was generally held, already had weak nerves to begin with as well as a sickly constitution. And the numerous hygienic writings, dietetics and health guides available towards the end of the nineteenth century all prescribed a single therapy: a change of location and thus of climate. It is no accident that Hausdorff wrote of a “disparity between climate and organism.” He was playing off an influential tradition of thought from Hippocrates and Aristotle that ran through Locke, Montesquieu, Herder, and the political geography of the nineteenth century and prevailed up to 1900: climate theory, or perhaps it is better to say, climate culture theory. In very rough terms it rested on the assumption that there was a more or less causal connection between the geography and climate of a region and the individual nature or collective character of its inhabitants. We “European[s],” as the lines quoted here suggest, are no longer at home in our ancestral latitudes, the weather is making us ill, hence we must migrate to more southern regions. The symptoms of this weather malady lead to a paradox that continually haunted climate theory since Montesquieu at the latest: if geography and climate decisively shape humans, how can we explain the adaptive ability shown by diverse migrations? After all, history reveals numerous examples of successful acclimatization. Hippocrates, perhaps the first proponent of environmental medicine, assumed that the human organism has to continually adapt to different climatic conditions. And Romantic medicine discovered that a change of climate (or of diet) could produce an irritating effect on the organism, and if used therapeutically could effect a cure. Hence, the differ- 2 The medical field still does not see meteoropathy as an independent illness today. Rather a lower stimulation threshold of the autonomic nervous system is thought to lead to an increased sensitivity of the human organism to atmospheric weather conditions. Surveys show that in the Federal Republic of Germany alone 50% of the population reports being meteoropathic (Schuh 55-57). For a foundational review of the medical history of meteoropathy, see Assmann 1-10. Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 143 ence between sickness and health is connected to the relative success of this adaptation (Schuh 11). Thus cultural geography turns into climatic geography. In this article I hope to make this argument plausible using the exemplary case of a philosophical meteoropath. “Signs of cultural weather” For a classical philologist Nietzsche occupied himself with the weather more than one would expect. 3 The rhetoric of weather and climatic tropes pervade almost all of his philosophical works; moreover, in his most productive phase, in the 1880s, when he was traveling between the alpine Engadin and the Mediterranean Riviera, he was exposed to constant changes of location and climate. Even though Nietzsche never wrote a work solely about the weather, there are clear meteorological traces in his most important figures of thought - the critique of subjectivity through the lived experience of the body, the will to power, the hypothesis of eternal return. Moreover, his ethics, which could be better conceived as a ‘dietetic’ theory of how life-forms are perceived (and are means of perception), takes its unity of self-forming, self-renunciation and self-overcoming from the exposure to weather. And Nietzsche’s critique of religion and culture as well as his reflections on the connections between morality, religion, health and culture make use, often polemically, of a rich repertoire of traditional weather topoi. For example, German politics and the ‘teutonic’ way of life strike him as a “kind of permanent winter and bad weather” (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,807 - letter from 24.2.1887). 4 When Nietzsche talks about culture, he usually talks about weather as well, and the talk about weather does not seldom imply an entire climatic theory of culture. It is in this sense that the phrase “signs of cultural weather” [“Wetterzeichen der Cultur”] crops up in one of the central aphorisms of the second part of Human, All Too Human, moreover with a strong emphasis on the critique of religion: There are so few decisive signs of the cultural weather; we must be glad if we find we have at any rate one reliable one in our hands for use in our house and garden. 3 The philological work on Nietzsche to date has not seen weather as a theme to be worked on systematically - with the exception of an unpublished MA thesis by Posth, from which this article has profited. Posth’s work not only sifts the material quite adeptly but also eruditely locates Nietzsche’s philosophy of weather within the philosophical dimensions of the “will to power” and the affective dynamics it implies. The primary interest of this study, in contrast, is not in Nietzsche’s meteorological philosophy, but rather in meteoropathy as a cultural symptom that points to a different epistemology of modernity. I am currently working on a monograph on meteorosensitivity as an epochal malady between 1800 and 1900. See also Ramponi 39-56. 4 All Nietzsche quotes are cited, if not indicated otherwise, from D’Iorio, abbreviated as eKGWB in the running text. P ATRICK R AMPONI 144 To test whether someone is one of us or not - I mean whether he is a free spirit or not - one should test his feelings towards Christianity. If he stands towards it in any other way than critically then we turn our back on him; he is going to bring us impure air and bad weather. - It is no longer our task to teach such people what a sirocco is; they have Moses and the weather-prophets and the prophets of the Enlightenment: if they will not pay heed to these, then -- ( eKGWB/ WS-182 ) 5 If here Nietzsche treats the question of personal religious conviction according to the paradigm of a weather forecast, it is by sanding the metaphorical excesses of the notion of Enlightenment down to its metaphorical minimum: The notion of ‘Enlightenment’ as - on the one hand - secularization and critique of religion, and - on the other, meteorological hand - as an atmospheric lightening of the skies, become indistinguishable. The sirocco, as we will see, becomes the key to Nietzsche’s philosophical meteorology; it unites in itself culture and nature, symbolic event and weather in its psychosomatic influence on the human organism. The “signs of cultural weather,” the meteorological figures that pervade Nietzsche’s work, are difficult to chart: a fluctuation of highs and lows, glaring sunlight yields to complicated wind currents that draw clouds and storms after them. Yet the opening aphorism makes it clear that Nietzsche’s weather changes insistently not just between nature, culture and morality, but also between the abstraction of culture on the one hand and a quite personal, somatically experienced atmospherology on the other. To put a rather fine point on it, we could say that the semiotics of weather reaches its terminus in Nietzsche’s philosophy at the latest. Winds, clouds, storms, rain, and also sunlight and heat are in his work no longer signs of the gods and certainly not any pure signifier; their ability to prophesize over cultural affairs is put on par with the ability of animals to sense changes in weather before they become visible. But for Nietzsche the weather retains that elemental character that the pre-Socratic materialists saw in it, above all Lucretius, the natural philosopher that Nietzsche admired, who saw weather as embedded in the contingent stream of natural, physiological forces. Referring to Lucretius, Nietzsche develops his anti-rhetorical poetics of the elements of weather (see H. Böhme, “Was” 13). Nietzsche, as I will show here, takes up atomistic natural philosophy, together with the other epistemic formation about climate and weather that dominated antiquity - the medical and cultural climate theory of Hippocrates, Galen, and their followers in early modernity - and brings it in line with the current scientific state of his age by conceiving weather less as a geophysical event than as a psychophysiological one. His own pathological meteoropathy directs his sceptical gaze at the positivism of the contemporary quantitative meteorology as well as the climatic and milieu-theoretical ideol- 5 Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale 354. Further English quotations are taken from this edition. Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 145 ogy of the globalizing nineteenth century. For Nietzsche was at war for his whole life with the immanent happening that is atmospheric weather. His comprehensive correspondence with the musician Heinrich Köselitz (pseudonym Peter Gast) for example reads like a single repository of meteorological lamentations and complaints about the daily weather: Nietzsche feels “very draped and hidden” again and again, incapable of any productivity, because the climate strikes him as an “absurd disorder” (eKGWB/ BVN- 1888,1049 - letter from 20.06.1888). His correspondence as a whole after his severe academic and health crisis in the last years in Basel showed a rapid increase in meteorological observations and worries about the weather. His decision in 1879 to permanently leave his position as professor seems to him in retrospect less a decision against the university and academic philosophy and more against the city of Basel itself, which he recognized - late but at last - as his “forbidden place” (eKGWB/ EH-Klug-2) - the “infamous, harmful Basel” (eKGWB/ BVN-1879,839 - letter from 12.04.1879) - against which he had developed a regular “Basileophobia”: “a true fear and shrinking from the bad weather, the bad air, the whole depressed essence of this unfortunate breeding ground of my sufferings” (eKGWB/ BVN-1879,832 - letter from 03.04.1879). Meteorology, as we can see in these passages and other countless testimonies from his letters, is for the philosopher above all a question of the body as affected by weather, the highly sensitive bodily perception of environmental stimuli, such that thinking and symbolic orientation, like all mental states for Nietzsche, can only be seen as “consequences and symbols” (eKGWB/ NF-1883,9[41]) of bodily states. This means that Nietzsche’s thought in every direction is always already climatically tempered. The meteorological figures are not mere conceptual metaphors or spatial symbols of meaning; rather, as the concrete consequences for the body they stand in a metonymic relation to their climatic environment, to that domain of dynamic phenomena where the body, space and the events and currents of the atmosphere become undifferentiable from one another (Small 189-207). The peculiarity of Nietzsche’s occupation with the weather is that at the epistemological level he seems to eliminate every anthropomorphism from our knowledge of the weather, and yet as a life-long meteoropath he reintegrates the human element into meteorology. With its orientation to the ambulant Nietzsche’s thought cashes in like no other on the distinction between work and life, between texts and their natural milieus and conditions of production, precisely in the time in which this distinction between text and life was becoming the leading philological paradigm of textual interpretation (Deleuze, “Nomaden-Denken” 105-121). That this still causes problems today for Nietzsche research, which after all passed through the constructivist P ATRICK R AMPONI 146 school (itself inspired by Nietzsche’s famous discussions of truth and rhetoric), is to be renegotiated through the phenomenon of weather. Thanks to the work of Gilles Deleuze and, following him, Stefan Günzel and Gary Shapiro, Nietzsche philology is in the meantime thoroughly aware of how intensively he occupied himself with questions of cultural geography and the anthropogeography of his time and how topography and topology inspired his turn to “geophilosophical” forms of thought that could be used to attack the teleology of academic historicism. 6 I will argue here that the model of climate theory that can be traced back to antiquity and came to prominence in early modernity, the (more or less deterministic) thesis that peoples and characters are influenced by geographical location and climatic environment, is given a decisive epistemic turn by Nietzsche. The equation of culture and climate is expanded by a third term which Nietzsche introduces by way of his reception of the empirical climate sciences and the medical weather experiments of his time: the physics of weather and the physiology of the body exposed to weather. Nietzsche emancipates the concept of climate from space and thus from its etymological derivation from the ancient Greek word κλίμα (inclination, angle of the sun) that still treats weather in terms of a mechanics of the sky. Nietzsche in contrast is primarily interested in the change of climate, which is always a question of the semiosomatic sensing of weather shifts. Nietzsche’s framing of cultural phenomena in terms of imagined climates can be seen clearly exemplified in his famous “Turin letter from May 1888,” his great reckoning with Richard Wagner. It is well known that The Case of Wagner is also Nietzsche’s fulminating engagement with the nervous overstimulation of his epoch and his own “problem of decadence” (eKGWB/ WA- Vorwort), written immediately before his paralytic collapse in Turin in January of 1889. The polemic against Wagner begins with the programmatic call “Il faut méditerraniser la musique” (eKGWB/ WA-3) and the invocation of Georges Bizets opera Carmen, the southern lightness of which he contrasts with the “heaviness” of Wagner’s operatic art: With Bizet’s work one takes leave of the humid north, and all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal. Even the dramatic action saves us from it […] It possesses, above all, what belongs to the warm climate, the dryness of the air, its limpidezza. Here, in all respects, the climate is altered. Here a different sensuality expresses itself, a different sensibility, a different gaiety. (eKGWB/ WA-2) 6 Stefan Günzel introduced the “geophilosophical turn” in Nietzsche studies with his canonical study: Geophilosophie. Nietzsches philosophische Geographie (2001). See also the instructive review by Knut Ebeling and the work of Shapiro. These authors’ engagement with space in Nietzsche’s work is, in turn, decisively inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “geophilosophy” (97-131). Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 147 We cannot underestimate this certainly somewhat polemical intervention of Nietzsche’s in the semantics of the climatic zone models prevalent in Germany at the latest since Hegel and his geographical student Carl Ritter: while Hegel’s geomorphological mapping of the world-spirit still follows a temperature index of heat and cold along with the telos of ‘moderate zones’ already preferred by the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche here emphasizes the qualities of the air (Günzel, “Nietzsches Geophilosophie” 25). The mention of “dryness” and “limpidezza” shifts the register from geography to the chemistry of the air and makes Nietzsche one of the first to introduce the atmospheric dimension to climate theory. Wagner’s music, Nietzsche goes on to say in The Case of Wagner, oppresses with “a hundred atmospheres” (eKGWB/ WA-8): “how detrimental to me is this Wagnerian orchestral sound! I call it sirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat. My good weather is gone” (eKGWB/ WA-1). 7 That Nietzsche clearly suffers a physiological response to Wagner’s famous compositional technique - the tonal veiling 8 of harmonic sequences - feeling it as an atmospheric veiling, points to the doubled register of this philosophical meteorology: whereas Nietzsche as epistemologist (as a ‘constructivist’ theoretician of metaphors and tropes) practices techniques of veiling, 9 as an atmospheric thinker he is a physiologist of the ‘real,’ who uses his entire energy to achieve atmospheric clarification and clarity. Wagner’s music has the same influence on Nietzsche as the disagreeable climate. In speaking of the sirocco he is of course alluding to the southern downward wind - well documented in the advice literature on climate therapy and the medical tour-guides for recuperative trips which flourished in the end of the nineteenth century - which was the arch-nemesis of the Mediterranean treatment. Hence here Nietzsche is not just drawing on all the registers of climate-theoretical metaphors that use the semantic opposition between ‘North’ and ‘South; ’ 10 he also expands his polemic on climactic determinism (Bizet’s “African” “cheerfulness,” eKGWB/ WA-2) to include a clearly physiological dimension. The attribution of possessive pronouns to 7 Nieztsche was probably also inspired here by a statement of his friend Reinhard von Seydlitz, as he writes in a letter to Köselitz from Nice on March 21, 1888: “He complains of the Khamsin blowing there [in Egypt] ‘that resembles a Brahms symphony translated into meteorology: relentless, sandy, dry, inconceivable, nerve-shattering, a tenfold sirocco.’” (eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1007 - letter from 21.03.1888) 8 That Wagner sees veiling as an aesthetic condition of his musical drama is a commonplace in the literature since Adorno’s In Search of Wagner at the latest. The meteorological dimensions of this veiling aesthetic have so far been barely taken into consideration at all. 9 That the concept of veiling plays a central role for Nietzsche can be seen in its use in Ecce Homo. See also Sommer 342. 10 On the complex of the “South” in Nietzsche see Schaefer; on Gottfried Benn’s repurposing of Nietzsche’s climatic and geosemantic oppositional pairs see Berthold 143. P ATRICK R AMPONI 148 the weather (“My good weather is gone,” eKGWB/ WA-1) implies a correspondence between inner and outer mood modelled by the atmospheric. This formulation not only indicates that weather as a natural event also always intervenes in cultural affairs; in the context of a meteorology increasingly reliant on quantification and measurement, Nietzsche aims to grasp weather as a “subjective fact” (G. Böhme 149), what we might describe today as bio-weather (Schuh) - as “felt temperature.” This kind of philosophical meteorology can only be understood in light of the “phenomenology of weather” stemming from Goethe and Herder, a kind of “study of weather […] that does not describe weather as an objective fact, nor as a framing condition for human action, but rather as the correlate of sensations, more specifically: bodily traces” (G. Böhme 156). What we can study in Nietzsche is the metaphorical interchange between weather and feelings, between meteorological, atmospheric turbulences and mental or spiritual atmospheres. 11 If Nietzsche sketches something like a musical response aesthetics, a cultural somatics of sound in meteorological or even atmospheric terms, then this can only be understood in light of the subliminal thesis that Nietzsche propounds here in “The Case of Wagner” as a proxy for his philosophy of weather: Cultural (hence aesthetic and moral) and physiological dispositions are both equally subject to a “transcendental meteorology,” 12 to adapt Merleau Ponty’s formulation. Even art, literature and philosophy are for Nietzsche subject to the transcendentality of atmospheric meteorology. Thus it is not just a witticism when Nietzsche writes to Heinrich Köselitz on September 3, 1883: “This Engadin is the birthplace of my ‘Zarathustra.’ I just found the first sketch of the thoughts he connects; underneath it reads ‘beginning of August 1881 in Sils-Maria, 6000 feet over the ocean and higher still over all human things’” (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,461; see also Geier). We know of Nietzsche’s alpine affinities, his extensive “mountain marches” (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,842 - letter from 04.05.1887), but also his preference for the imaginary heights of a “free and voluntary life in ice and lofty mountains” (eKGWB/ EH-Vorwort-3; see also Ireton 194). It would be a half-truth to read the tropes of ascent and descent, the vertical topology pervading the Zarathustra work, as purely emblematic. We have seen that Nietzsche thinks very little of reading signs into the weather. Rather Zarathustra develops an atmospheric poetics that binds the symbolic directionality of conceptual flights, the “wind rose of thought,” as Hartmut Böhme quite astutely put it, 11 The way that this anticipates several insights of the New Phenomenology cannot be discussed here. See Schmitz for a detailed discussion. 12 In the context of Husserl’s discussion of the phenomenologically primal spatiality as an anti-Copernican turn of a certain kind Maurice Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “transcendental geology” (cited in Günzel 19-20) Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 149 to an element. 13 More important than the indication of geographical height are the wind conditions - and this is what Nietzsche means when Zarathustra says he “doesn’t love the plains” (eKGWB/ Za-III-Wanderer): in 1874 in Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche had already written “To rise as high as any thinker yet into the pure icy air of the mountain, where there are no mists and veils, and the inner constitution of things is shown in a stark and piercing clarity! ” (eKGWB/ SE-5). It is the clear, pure air that transcends the bad weather on the ground (the nomosphere) and that is for Nietzsche the element of freedom and superhuman joy. This air is a curiously joyous substance, as Bachelard said, a substance without any substantial qualities (175). In Zarathustra and the commentaries accompanying it Nietzsche displays an atmospheric complex aimed at the conditions of production of literature and philosophy - and the “enveloping atmosphere,” incidentally, was decidedly “unhistorical” for Nietzsche, something only overcome with the divisions created by consciousness, which give rise to both time and historical directionality (cf. eKGWB/ HL-1). Nietzsche still recalls the geo-climactic 14 genealogy of his Zarathustra poem at Lake Silvaplana in his last work, his autobiography Ecce Homo, when he speaks of Zarathustra as his “mountain-air book” (eKGWB/ EH-Vorwort- 4). A very characteristic example of this is the chapter “Before Sunrise” from the third part of Zarathustra, the lyrical tone of which recalls sentimental, romantic nature poetry: “Oh sky above me, you pure, you deep one! You abyss of light! Gazing at you I shudder with godlike desires. / To hurl myself into your height - that is my depth! To hide myself in your purity - that is my innocence! ” (eKGWB/ Za-III-Sonnen) This (catachrestic) weaving of heights and depths, of ascent and descent (H. Böhme, “Windrose” 27-29) which is so central for the poetics of Zarathustra, shifting between mountain treks and aviational desire (“the only thing my will wants is to fly, to fly into you! ,” eKGWB/ Za-III-Sonnen), is complemented here by the address 15 to the sky as a partner: “Together we learned everything; together we learned to climb up 13 H. Böhme focuses above all on the dimensions of spatial symbolism and landscape morphology in Nietzsche’s poetics. In this sense the title of the article also alludes more to the dynamics of directional topology and hardly at all to the atmospheric elements. 14 It is telling that Sils-Maria is for Nietzsche, in terms of climate theory, the ideal site to merge the northern and the southern; Engadin seems to him a “height, which has encamped itself without fear next to the terrors of eternal snow, where Italy and Finland have come together to form a union” (eKGWB/ WS-338). 15 Nietzsche’s association of his philosophy with the cultural-geographical topos of the ‘South’ can be found e.g. in the following passage in a letter from Sils-Maria to Overbeck on September 14, 1884: “what one hates about me […] is the clear sky. An Italian said to me recently, compared to what we call the sky cielo, the German sky is une carricatura./ Bravo! That’s my entire philosophy! ” (eKGWB/ BVN-1884,533 - letter from 14.09.1884) Böhme interprets the “clear-skied south as a metaphor for philosophy” (Böhme 30). P ATRICK R AMPONI 150 to ourselves by climbing over ourselves, and to smile cloudlessly” (ibid.). The cloudless smiling is to be read in the sense of a resistance to those “drifting clouds” (ibid.) that are conceived in the same passage as media (as “middlemen and mixers,” eKGWB/ Za-II-Dichter) disrupting the vertical communication between the alpine Zarathustra and the “sky of light” (eKGWB/ Za-III- Sonnen): “I grudge these drifting clouds, these creeping predator-cats.” (ibid.) The meaning of this struggle against the clouds is illuminated by the figure of dancing that is so insistent in Nietzsche’s philosophy: “that you are my dance floor for divine accident,” (ibid.) Zarathustra continues, turning to the sky. Whereas clouds (the metaphorics of veiling! ), cloudedness, etc. signify, it is the winds that bring the sky to dance. Here the north Provençal wind stands out, to which Nietzsche - in contrast to the hated sirocco - has dedicated the euphoric poem “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind”: Wildly rushing, clouds outleaping, / Care-destroying, Heaven sweeping, Mistral wind, thou art my friend! […] How you bound across the ocean, / Unimpeded, free in motion, / Swifter than with boat or wing! / […] Off with those who spoil Earth’s gladness, / Blow away all clouds of sadness, / Till our heavens clear we see. (eKGWB/ FW-Lieder-14) Thus Nietzsche’s “message of clouds,” to use Joseph Vogl’s formulation, marks a third epistemic break in the history of meteorological knowledge: whereas in the Renaissance clouds were simply that which impeded the telescope’s view of the stars, and whereas in the anti-astronomical meteorology of Luke Howard and Goethe the clouds as atmospheric irregularities were the object of aesthetic and physiological fascination, for Nietzsche the clouds are the “sky-beclouders” (eKGWB/ FW-Lieder-14) which moreover becloud soul and mind and not least of all the sensitive body - and wind is the “misery-murderer” (ibid.). From here we can get a glimpse of the epistemic zone in which the diverse currents of Nietzsche’s obsession with weather all run together. In the following I will argue that we can describe this site of non-knowledge (cf. Bies and Gamper) about the weather using the concept of meteoropathy. I use the term non-knowledge intentionally, since in 1880 the emergent disciplines of positivistic, quantitative meteorology, the climatology reliant on global compilation of data, and the unsystematic attempts at medical epidemiology for the most part conducted by practicing doctors, were all almost entirely working in a sub-disciplinary and interdisciplinary grey area (Büttner, “Meteorologie” 406). A causally oriented meteorology was very unreliable and susceptible to error in Nietzsche’s time, not to speak of the primary interest of this meteorology, weather forecasting. Hence meteoropathy seems to me to be not just the core of what we might describe as Nie- Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 151 tzsche’s “meteorological complex; ” 16 in the second half of the nineteenth century, meteoropathy can be defined as the syndrome that precisely reflects the deficiencies of contemporary meteorology. Nietzsche’s Medical Files: Meteoropathy “‘I forgot my umbrella’” (eKGWB/ NF-1881,12[62]). This remark in scarequotes from the Nachlass, which Nietzsche must have written between 1880 and 1882, appears as an erratic and lonely fragment in the work. Derrida famously used it as the occasion to reflect on the connections and limits of a work and on the impossibility of a hermeneutic unity of work, meaning and life (158-9). But this overlooks the seemingly trivial fact that the umbrella, or more precisely its employment as a parasol, took on a particular function among Nietzsche’s things, as the philosopher used it on his extended wanderings to protect himself from the direct sunlight which has led to painful inflammations of his sensitive eyes again and again. Nietzsche himself frequently objected to the “hypocritically feigned contempt of the closest things,” the “contempt for the demands of the body and the deliberate desire to look away from them” (eKGWB/ NF-1888,15[89]). The literature on Nietzsche has still not grown tired of posthumously maintaining this poetic philosopher’s medical files and continually introducing newly observed symptoms, offering new diagnoses, and redefining the relation between his work and his illness. It seems otiose to continue to offer posthumous diagnoses of the disease that killed him - and not a few medical historians are still pursuing this project today with a detective’s pathological meticulousness 17 - and the question of the causal connection between philosophy and mental illness seems just as irrelevant from today’s perspective. The genre of “pathography” (Schmiedebach 203-204) saw a boom after Nietzsche’s death, from Paul Julius Möbius through Kurt Hildebrandt and Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum up to Karl Jaspers’ philosophical psychopathology. Here I am not concerned to produce another diagnosis for the patient Nietzsche. Whether Nietzsche suffered from meteoropathy cannot be decided by the diagnostic criteria of contemporary medical handbooks. (It is still in dispute today whether any scientifically demonstrable epidemiological causality can be found between the skies and humans.) 18 From a his- 16 I take this concept from Sebastian Posth’s MA thesis, l.c. 17 Whereas for a long time it was assumed that Nietzsche suffered from increasing dementia as a result of an early syphilis infection, the research in recent years has determined that a brain tumor (meningioma) is the most likely final cause of his death (Sax). A summary of the latest research can be found in Huenemann; see also the classic study by Volz. 18 See Frey. Jürgen Kleinschmidt, professor emeritus in München and specialist in balneology, is one of the most vehement critics of meteoropathy as an illness: P ATRICK R AMPONI 152 torical perspective the diagnosis would be anachronistic anyways: No serious doctor would have made it - and Nietzsche sought out countless doctors and discussed his weather-sensitivity with them again and again. I am concerned here more with a reconfiguration of the symptoms, as Gilles Deleuze proposed following Nietzsche, seeing the author not as ill but as “the doctor of himself and the world”: “The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with the man” (Essays 3). 19 In Deleuzian terms, the “symptomatology” (Deleuze, “Mystique” 12-13) of meteoropathy would be located outside of clinical medicine, at the point of origin where poets and philosophers, doctors and patients meet and first bring forth the knowledge of that object that they themselves have long since found themselves to be. A small find from 1913 that the Nietzsche literature has hardly taken note of can serve to trace the contours of the genesis of meteoropathy as a cultural affliction using “the case of Nietzsche,” and at the same time to reconstruct the discursive conditions in which meteoropathy comes to look like the blueprint for the climatic and environmental medicine that first emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested here in the connection between the physiological and the aesthetic frames of reference in the early discussion of pathogenic meteoropathy. The composer, theater critic and music journalist Paul Zschorlich published a two-page “psychoclimatic study” in the Propyläen in 1913 in which he concedes that Nietzsche’s nervous condition made him dependent on the landscape around him and the weather to an extent that the average person cannot even imagine. Perhaps there has never been an artist whose creative activity has been so intimately connected to the climate and landscape as Nietzsche. […] For years Nietzsche had no greater personal worry than the climate. His powers of thought, his work capacity, his personal mood were dependent on the weather to an extent rarely seen. […] We healthy people can only with great difficulty imagine ourselves into the position of a man who falls into an insufferable physical state as soon as the sky is clouded. (278) In 1887, in his study Moderne Behandlung der Nervenschwäche [“Modern Treatment of Weak Nerves”] Leopold Löwenfeld had already noted the neurasthenic’s susceptibility to changes in weather (45-46). (Nietzsche knew the book well! ) But Zschorlich goes further: In describing Nietzsche as someone outside the norm, as an exceptional case, he also connects to the relevant discourses on the “etiology of genius.” Before Zschorlich, Max Nordau, http: / / www.prof-kleinschmidt.de. Scientific evidence for meteoropathy can be found in Schuh, see also Wessel. 19 “Literature then appears as an enterprise of health; not that the writer necessarily be in good health […] he possesses irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him […] The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with red eyes and pierced eardrums.” (Deleuze) Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 153 Cesare Lombroso and Paul Julius Möbius had also speculated as to whether Nietzsche’s thought was shaped by his sickly disposition. Nietzsche himself was famously both an object of the debate about the pathology of geniuses as well as an actively involved psychologist of his own “degeneration” and “decadence” - the cultural illness of his time which he treated in The Case of Wagner. Alongside racial, hereditary, sexual and physiognomic aspects, the physiology and the metabolism of the genius were also discussed and linked to a heightened sensory awareness and extreme irritability, which “are just as much the necessary preconditions for the production of art as they are symptoms of organic dysfunction” (Moore 261). That this also hinges on the weather can be read in Lombroso’s treatise Der geniale Mensch from 1890. Lombroso explicitly refers to the climatic cultural theory and the aesthetics of genius from the eighteenth century 20 on the positivistic foundation of the nineteenth century, making use of Adolphe Quetelet’s probabilistic and statistically based “physique sociale” as a methodological reference point (Lombroso 119). He begins by introducing pages of statistical assessments showing a measurable correlation between climate, altitude, atmospheric state and the quality of the air and the living environment for ingenious people and creations. He concludes “that genius cannot prosper in areas with impure air” and that thin air above all is the ideal atmospheric environment for great achievements of genius: “From ancient times the common people and the wise have had a premonition of this almost unqualified correlation between genius and climate and unanimously attributed the cause of the frequent appearance of ingenious men to the hilly lands” (Lombroso 153-154). 21 Nietzsche also reports again and again that he progresses in his work only during good weather, with a clear sky (“the weather is so glorious, that it’s no great feat to make something good,” eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1137 - letter from 30.10.1888). In this he completely follows Lombroso’s empirical geopsychology (and not the climate-theoretical aesthetics of genius of the eighteenth century anymore! ). On September 2, 1884 Nietzsche calculates that his best and most important works (The Birth of Tragedy, Zarathustra) coincide with the maximum of magnetic solar radiation, and that his decision to go into philology and his ideational affinity with Schopenhauer - which he later describes as a “kind of loss of faith in myself” (eKGWB/ BVN-1884,536 - letter from 20.09.1884: “eine Art Selbst-Irre- 20 The centrality of argumentative figures taken from climate theory for the discussion of genius from early modernity to the 18 th century can be seen in the Abbé Du Bos’ Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture. The poetics of Winckelmann, Herder, Lessing, Hölderlin and Schiller - to name just a few - have included climate-theoretical arguments for a genealogy of genius. For a fundamental review see Zacharasiewicz 576 or Fink. 21 On the metaphorical function of weather and the sky in the discourse on genius around 1900 in general see Köhne 114-126. P ATRICK R AMPONI 154 werden”) - were caused by an atmospheric “minimum” (ibid.) that also marked his decisive health crisis. One year earlier he had complained that his winter agony was triggered by the many “electrical ‘storms’” “that astonished all observers of electrical currents in the fall and winter months: they coincide temporally with great sunspots becoming visible” (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,415 - letter from 10.05.1883). But the decisive point in the debate about the meteorology of genius seems to me to lie in the diagnosis of an augmented affective system in natural geniuses. It remains unclear whether the lowering of sensory stimulation thresholds is itself climatically determined (the arguments of cultural climate theorists for this would have to be that people in certain zones have a particular tendency to nervous symptoms) or whether genius can be traced back to a pathological organism which is then especially sensitive to shifts in weather. Just as the mental states of the mentally ill change in quantitatively measurable ways in relation to temperature and air pressure, the “degenerated” genius, wrote Cesare Lombroso, is distinguished by his particular “meteoric sensitivity” (118). 22 Lombroso offers numerous examples, such as Montaigne, Diderot, Maine de Brian, Alfieri, W. Irving, Goethe, Michelet etc. 23 It is not completely clear whether Nietzsche was familiar with Lombroso’s theses about weather and genius, but it seems quite probable since, after all, Lombroso was professor at the University of Turin where Nietzsche lived repeatedly for his last conscious years. In any case, in a letter to Franz Overbeck from July 4, 1888 Nietzsche wrote of his “extreme irritability under meteorological impressions” (eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1056) which he 22 Lombroso conducted empirical studies on 23,405 mentally ill patients and noted the results in a table. Lombroso’s study is in this sense one of the first examples of statistical climatic medicine. See Lombroso. 23 The pages-long quotes from and references to intellectual meteoropaths and their inspirations from the weather read like a brief literary history of meteoropathy (Lombroso 119-132). Lombroso was concerned to show statistically the exact frequency of seasons, weather conditions and literary or scientific innovations. The most productive months are May, September and April. February, October and December are less favorable (134). “I believe I can group together the aesthetic and the scientific creations, since both share the moment of psychic excitation and extreme sensitivity which brings oppositions and the furthest removed things closer together and breathes new light into the doubting, in brief that fruitful something that we call creativity, in which poet and scholar stand closer together than one generally assumes.” (139) Moreover Lombroso examines the geographical influence as well as the “atmospheric influence” (146) of certain altitudes on the living conditions of particularly gifted people: “All the great lowlands, such as Belgium, Holland, Egypt, and those mountain lands that, like Switzerland and the Savoy, are enclosed within mountainous heights, are haunted by goiter and cretinism and are poor in ingenious men; the swamp lands are yet poorer. The few ingenious people Switzerland has produced were born only after the race defeated the influence of goiter, and are the sons of immigrated French and Italians…” (146) Like all climatic cultural theorists, Lombroso was concerned to underline the favorability to genius of his own latitude, his own climate zone: Italy, particularly Tuscany (147). Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 155 contends pointed to a “certain total exhaustion” (ibid.). In this letter Nietzsche even goes so far as to describe his chronic headaches and stomach problems not as true illnesses, but rather merely as symptoms of his nervous suffering under the weather, which dominates all other complaints. Paul Cohn, the Berlin nerve doctor and one of the pioneers of psychosomatic medicine, dedicated a chapter of his 1931 study Um Nietzsches Untergang to the complex “Nietzsche und das Wetter” (59-67). From his experience with patients as a practicing doctor Cohn confirms the connection between neurasthenia and sensitivity to abrupt changes in the weather: It was the days when the barometer fell abruptly, followed by those more frequent bodily complaints in the consultation as well as the cluster of mental conflicts outside the consultation. The barometer rose: and everything cleared up, the massed clouds dispersed, inside as well as outside. It was the influence of the weather that led to these clustered ailments, and particularly in the case of more sensitive people known as neurasthenics. (60) Whereas in 1913 Zschorlich had treated Nietzsche’s weather-responsive mood swings on the basis of the ancient clinical picture of “melancholy,” the symptoms of which have included moodiness triggered by bad air ever since Galen (who listed six non naturales as external factors of the traditional medical hygiene) 24 and Robert Burton, in 1931 Cohn provided an explanatory model for the influence of weather on mental and physical health based on biochemistry and the physics of air pressure. He attributes changes in muscular states to shifts in the “atmospheric total pressure,” for one thing. Musculature goes slack with lower pressure, which puts greater demands on the will, increasing the frequency of mental activities, with significant repercussions for the circulation of blood and the lymphatic system (Cohn 61). The effect of air pressure on the inner organs (Vivenot) is particularly strong: the “reduced pressure on the intestines” leads to “increased expansion of the internal gasses” and a “swelling of the body,” all “vexatious symptoms that drive the neurasthenic to the doctor” (Cohn 63). On the other hand, in the debate about the organic influence of weather, Cohn’s position gives pride of place to the central nervous system; for mood swings are for him simply “altered vibrations of the brain” (ibid.), which are quite sensitive to the electricity in the air and the ionization of the atmosphere. In a central passage of the chapter Cohn puts together a schema organizing the various forms of weather influence on the “tone,” that is, the “total tension of the body.” 25 Here the weather 24 That Nietzsche also followed the Galenic concept of melancholy has been shown by Dahlkvist 148-153. See also Kilbansky/ Panofsky/ Saxl 148-149. 25 He distinguishes between “hypertonizing, hypotonizing and perhaps paratonizing weather,” “where the first refers to an increase in tone, the second to a reduction in tone, and the third to a change in tone, analogous to other types of tension and vibration in the brain with the other corresponding mental signs. A vibration through the whole brain can increase, decrease or change the brain’s native vibration. One could call P ATRICK R AMPONI 156 perturbs the brain’s native vibrations, which leads either to a mental sensation of desire (eutonus) or to tensions that foster aversion (dystonus). Nietzsche himself provided the central terms to locate his sensitivity to weather - Cohn speaks of “meteoroasthesia” (65) - in his philosophy of affect: It is intimately connected to his theses about the Dionysian in his Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, the nature of which Nietzsche describes as follows: In the Dionysian state […] the whole affective system is excited and enhanced […]. The essential feature here remains the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to react […]. It is impossible for the Dionysian type not to understand any suggestion; he does not overlook any sign of an affect; he possesses the instinct of understanding and guessing in the highest degree, just as he commands the art of communication in the highest degree. He enters into any skin, into any affect: he constantly transforms himself. (eKGWB/ GD-Streifzuege-10) In the anti-bourgeois “Dionysian” state of increased susceptibility to stimulus, the regulation of corporeality and weather goes entirely off track, which manifests itself above all in the correlation between atmospheric, psychic and cognitive fluctuations. Paul Cohn speaks metaphorically of “weather-vane natures,” or neurasthenic “Aeolian harps, played by the slightest wind shift,” (64) and he goes on to specify: To Nietzsche, body and soul were the finest instruments for all climatic and meteorolo-gical influences, the slightest shifts in which he could read off of himself like a fine recording mechanism. He was particularly sensitive to lack of light, humid air, clouds, winds, and abrupt shifts in weather, which his sensitive nervous system couldn’t catch up to quickly enough. […] Nietzsche is the classic example of a meteoropath, and his letters are the first comprehensive diary of such in the literature. (67-68; emphasis in original) Hence the diagnosis of “meteoropathy” (Duhot) which is above all defined as the pathological sensitivity to weather and weather changes. The point here is that the meteorological hypersensitivity noted by Zschorlich and Cohn is both the sign of a degenerate constitution and organic dysfunction as well as the condition for intellectual creativity, the creation of poetry. Nietzsche saw this connection quite clearly as he wrote to Köselitz in Venice on September 4, 1883 shortly before leaving Sils-Maria: How might my anguish and confusion of mind have influenced the colors of the first part [of Zarathustra]? (for the thoughts and directions were granted) strange, old friend! I mean it quite seriously, that Zarathustra came out more cheerier and more comical than it would have otherwise. I could almost prove this with “docthe tension with positive mental signs, i.e. the appetitive tension, eutonus and speak of eutonic weather, and the tension with negative mental signs dystonus and speak of dystonic weather. […] There is a weather of mental cramps and a weather of their dispersion.” (Cohn 65) Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 157 umentation.” On the other hand: I would have suffered and would suffer far, far, far less, if in the last two years I hadn’t translated motifs from my hermit theory into practice fifty times and been driven to doubt myself by the worst, the gruesome consequences of this “practice.” In this way “Zarathustra” has cheered itself up at my expense, and I have darkened myself at its expense. (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,461) Hence contrary to the implications of the rather passive image of the Aeolian harp, the weather guides Nietzsche’s writing in part by correcting if not sublimating his own meteoropathy: Rather than being merely affected, the Dionysian ‘reads’ the ‘signs’ of his affects. Nietzsche uses the empowering strategy of creatively shaping the weather in the imaginary meteorology of his work to style himself as a weather-maker, as he tells his mother in a postcard from December 3, 1887 from Nice: My dear old mother, we have almost ceaselessly a sad weather that oppresses me: such that neither my health nor my work are making any progress. Otherwise I would have reason to be in good spirits: there were beautiful and unexpected letters from all corners of the earth. Your son is well-nigh powerful: he strengthens and revitalizes, he makes ‘good weather’ for others. (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,962) But Nietzsche the weather-maker is at the same time the “philosophical doctor” who uses the elements of the weather as media of transcription, as he makes unmistakably clear in the fall of 1886 in the preface to the second edition of the Gay Science, written in Genoa: It seems to be written in the language of the thawing wind: high spirits, unrest, contradiction, April weather are present in it, so that one is constantly reminded no less of the proximity of winter than of the triumph over the winter that is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come. (eKGWB/ FW-Vorrede-1; Nietzsche, The Gay Science 32) Yet philosophers, Nietzsche explains in the same preface, are “not objectifying and registering devices with frozen entrails” (preface GS). Nietzsche’s aesthetics of weather can thus be seen as the attempt at a weather-writing that transcends its role as passive instrument in the power of the elements. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche brings into play the ancient model of inspiration: “what the poets of strong times called inspiration” is not just “being the mere medium of overpowering forces” (eKGWB/ EH-Za-3). It is not the weather that speaks through him, rather the physiological reaction of the ecstatic body to weather - from delight to tension to shuddering - transmits the signals to the surface of consciousness. In this sense the cloudiness, the fog or the sunniness of the feelings are not to be located inside of a subject, however constituted. They are not triggers but reactions to an event that does not arise from within but to the contrary seems to befall us from without: like lightning, like an excess of light or even, as Nietzsche writes, “as if the things themselves came inside” (eKGWB/ EH-Za-3). When we speak of a flash of inspiration or of clouded thoughts these are anything but metaphorical figures; they are affec- P ATRICK R AMPONI 158 tive powers that seize us: Weather and the body that is always already tempered by the climate can no longer be divided into subject and object, but rather form an atmospheric unity of reciprocal effect. Johann Gottfried Herder was aware of this when he spoke of a “climatology of the human powers of thought and sensation” (239) of which his era knew far too little. “The whole world will finally be a series of sanatoria” - Climatic Hygiene and Milieu Nietzsche wrote on June 23, 1881 to Heinrich Köselitz in Venice: It is hard for my nature to find the right height and depth, it is essentially a groping about, there are many factors involved that cannot be strictly grasped (e.g. the electricity of the drifting clouds and the effects of the winds: I am convinced that eighty times out of 100 I have these influences to thank for my suffering.) Where is the land with lots of shade, eternally clear skies, a constant strong sea-breeze from morning to evening, with no changes in weather? There, there - I wish to - go! Even if it is outside Europe. (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,119) The allusion to Mignon’s song in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister plays upon the Arcadian aesthetics of harmonious landscapes (where incidentally “a gentle wind from deep-blue heaven blows”) but only in order to decisively strike it out by the preceding sentence. For the reality of Nietzsche’s existential weather plays out in secrecy: The idyllic imagery of a clear sky and shaded spots of the traditional picture of longed-for Italy is foiled by the meteorological domains located beyond the visible and below the perceptual threshold of the external senses, which are the organs of distanced perception: it is no longer the clouds veiling the sky but rather the electrical charge of the atmosphere; it is no longer the breeze on one’s skin, but the physics of wind currents and weather zones that make up Nietzsche’s outer and inner weather. Karl Jaspers was one of the first to describe this new understanding of landscape when he wrote in his famous 1936 study of Nietzsche: “In his world nature and the elements are not like paintings that can be seen or music that can be heard; they are like the unrepresentable type of reality that speaks as itself without mediation” (Jaspers 368). 26 This gives us the precise outlines of Nietzsche’s anti-semiotic understanding of the weather. For this no longer implies the old European notion of landscape 27 and certainly not 26 Karl Jaspers writes in his Nietzsche study: “The causality that influences the emergence of something tells nothing about the value of that which emerges” (he specifies: “the internally non-comprehensible causality of natural events”), but not without coming to speak in a later part of the book about the influence of landscape on Nietzsche’s thought (101). 27 See Bah. On the concept of landscape in Nietzsche see Schneider. Here landscape is still seen in the Ritter-inspired tradition of “aesthetic landscape” which seeks to compensate Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 159 the associated topos of a signifying and significant nature (natura loquans); Nietzsche’s weather landscapes imply an epistemology oriented by the modern natural sciences, an epistemology of invisible, chaotic and contingent influences operating in the ‘reality’ of the meteorological space (see Engell, Siegert and Vogl 5-8). The land of much sun and shade and “with no changes in weather” was, in the end, not sought by Nietzsche outside Europe. 28 He famously spent his last ten years before his collapse in Turin in restless travel, as a “fugitivus errans” (eKGWB/ BVN-1879,869 - letter from July 1879; see also Farago 68- 75) in the climatic triangle of the Italian Riviera, the Côte d’Azur and the high valleys of Grisons. Like a wandering barometer, he plunged himself into a “terrible spell of travelling” (eKGWB/ BVN-1880,17 - letter from 22.03.1880), driven by the weather, fleeing every approaching depth towards dry mountain air or the next coastal climate he found favourable to himself. 29 In March of 1884 he was able to report to Malwida von Meysenburg: “What I need, firstly, secondly, and thirdly […] is bright skies and sunshine without any clouds, never mind the sirocco, my mortal enemy. Nice had on average 220 such days as I need: I wish to carry my work forward under this sky” (eKGWB/ BVN-1884,498). In his first winter in Nice, Nietzsche wrote the third part of Zarathustra, which can be read as a poetics of the mixed zones, time standing still, becalmed air and the mid-day, the ‘midi’ (see also Nieradka-Steiner). But this climatic liberation of an intense and profound life, such as the poetry of Zarathustra celebrates and uses to create its own milieu in which the mind can regenerate itself, was ultimately just a brief stage although Nietzsche’s relation to Nice lasted five winters. Nietzsche’s suffering from the weather is both a physiological and an aesthetic occurrence operating below the threshold of subjective control. This is the motor of his meteorological poetics. The modulation of this poetics, as I will argue in conclusion, is subject to the “regime of illness” (Därmann 138) 30 for the absence of nature with an endless regress of emblematic representations of landscape. 28 On October 28, 1881 he wrote to Franz Overbeck on a postcard: “It is because of the appalling influences of atmospheric electricity on me - they will one day drive me off the earth, there must be better living conditions for my nature. For example on the high plains of Mexico, on the side of the Pacific Ocean (Swiss colony ‘New Bern’). Very, very, very tormented, day after day.” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,163) 29 That it is as if the weather dictates the choice of place is shown by the following passage from a letter from April 4, 1888: “It is not a decision, but a coercion, that I spent the summer of Oberangadin, the winter on the Riviere.” (eKGWB/ BVN-1888,1014) 30 “The regime of illness has Nietzsche solidly in its grasp, hinders him in working, travelling or living and leads him to seek for his very own ‘personal diet,’ modified by place, climate and his felt condition.” (Därmann 138) - I am indebted to Därmann’s detailed study for inspiring many of these considerations on Nietzsche’s climate hygiene, particularly since her concept of an “ethics of dietetic existence” (140) is of vital significance for the meteoropath Nietzsche. P ATRICK R AMPONI 160 that had Nietzsche solidly in its grasp for almost his entire life, as well as the strict hygienic regimen 31 that allows him to bring the truly disorderly and ungovernable into manageable channels and to wrest the “demands of the body” from the weather (eKGWB/ NF-1888,15[89]). Nietzsche complements the inner dietetics he intensively concerned himself with - the strict regulation of his meal-times and eating habits, an alimentary based “ethics of dietetic existence” (Därmann, 140) - with an outer dietetics, primarily climatic hygiene. Here Nietzsche’s concept of “great health” - the “physiological precondition” (eKGWB/ EH-Za-2) of the Zarathustra type - is also relevant for our theme of weather; after all, “great health” includes “getting acclimatized to keen, high air, winter wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense” (eKGWB/ NF-1885,2[164]), as Nietzsche writes in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals. It would be a mistake, however, to derive from this only that climatic strategy of hardening oneself that is generally associated with the concept of the superman. Rather, Nietzsche follows the old Hippocratic counsel of contraria contraris, curing an illness triggered by certain influences by the means that cause the exact opposite effect. Hence weather therapy or climatic therapy was a self-evident step. Nietzsche was constantly looking for the right place, or better: the suitable climatic milieu to alleviate if not cure his various chronic pains, his stubborn migraines, his light-sensitive, almost blinded eyes and the complicated symptoms of his irregular metabolism. He got most of the practical information about the places that would be climatically favourable to him from the climate therapy guidebooks that were an extremely successful genre in his time. 32 From the countless guidebooks available to the more moneyed spa visitors of the Wilhelminian age and the Fin-de-Siècle we can find one clear schema: Dry and invigorating climates were recommended to those patients suffering from nervous exhaustion syndromes (like Nietzsche himself), for example Nice in the winter and Engadin in the summer; those whose nerves were easily irritated, however, or suffered from diseases of the heart, the circulatory system or the lungs, were advised to seek out mild, humid and less windy milieus like Venice or Tenerife. Nietzsche’s visit to Venice in March of 1880 shows what sort of fatal health effects the wrong choice of place could have. After numerous visits to other health resorts on the Mediterranean Nietzsche found in this city of lagoons a climate diametrically opposed to the dry climate of the Ligurian coast and the Côte d’Azur: 31 Dahlkvist reads Nietzsche’s entire philosophy - particularly Ecce Homo - as a “System of Hygiene” (139). 32 From among the mass of advice literature on medical climatology we can mention the following, which Nietzsche is known to have consulted: Sigmund; Goubet, see Moore 83. Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 161 For the time being the terrible spell of travelling is at an end! And I am conducting a very necessary experiment whether a decidedly ‘depressing’ climate (medically speaking) might not be better for my head than the exciting ones applied so far. Venice has a favorable influence on many with head ailments. (eKGWB/ BVN- 1880,17 - letter from 22.03.1880) But he would soon be disabused of this notion. While the health of other patients profited from the calming, dulling effect of the lagoon weather on the circulatory system, Nietzsche only noticed headaches and melancholy, as he was able to say in retrospect. Nietzsche’s choice of place, as he wrote on June 7, 1881 to his sister, was “a pure experimentation” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,121), like the numerous diets he put himself through. For he had to account “for conditions, that are only so decisive for my type of nature (that of atmospheric electricity); hence I have to try the places out myself” (ibid.). In this way Nietzsche the patient stylized himself as his own doctor 33 - under the southern sun. His obsessive occupation with the weather, as Gregory Moore has demonstrated, is part of the wide-ranging but not thoroughly disciplined discourse around medical climatology and climate theory that became increasingly popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. 34 In these years many doctors who engaged with meteorological phenomena were deeply entrenched in the Hippocratic hygienic tradition and had essentially two functions: on the one hand they were to offer comfort and convalescence to the sick, and on the other hand they served to prevent diseases that spread atmospherically such as cholera, typhus or dysentery. Etiologies of the latter diseases based on miasmic theory were dominant for a long time, even after the speculative discoveries of bacteria. 35 33 For example, he writes on July 9 to his mother: “My brain ailment is very hard to judge; concerning the scientific material that is necessary, I am superior to every doctor. In fact it insults my scientific pride, when you suggest new spas to me and claim that I ‘let my illness run’. […] So far I have only been under my own treatment for 2 years, and if I’ve made a mistake, it’s only due to the fact that I finally gave in to others’ zealous cajoling and made experiments. These include the stay in Naumburg, in Marienbad etc. […], and what I have to do above all is try to eliminate the severe aftereffects of all these false methods that were used to treat me for so long. Do not be angry with me if I seem to rebuff your love and sympathy in this regard. But I very much wish to be my own doctor from now on, and people should say of me that I was a good doctor - and not just for myself alone.” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,125) 34 On this and the following see the wealth of material in the study of Moore 81. - In her standard work on Nietzsche’s history of illness Daniela Volz lists a series of medical and natural-scientific writings that Nietzsche consulted, particularly on the subject of climate and medicine (Voltz 381). Nietzsche owned a copy of the above-mentioned work of Löwenfeld’s, Die moderne Behandlung der Nervenschwäche, with a hand-written reference of Nietzsche’s to the passages about the “beneficial effects of high climates” (Volz 72). - Other sources can be found in Posth 41-57. 35 On the epistemological break around 1860 between the premodern epidemiology and the bacteriological era see King and Rütten. P ATRICK R AMPONI 162 In the 1880s in particular, Nietzsche fervently read all the publications on contemporary meteorology and climatology he could get his hands on. “One is soundly punished for one’s ignorance,” he wrote to his mother and sister on March 14, 1884 from Nice. “If I had only occupied myself in due time with medical, climatological and similar problems, instead of with Suidas and Laertius Diogenes: I wouldn’t be a half-ruined man” (eKGWB/ BVN- 1885,581). The standard works of the time on neo-Hippocratic dietetics and public hygiene as well as medical epidemiology were not very illuminating for Nietzsche (Ramponi). In 1881, with great expectations, he ordered from Overbeck the German edition of the handbook Meteorologie mit Rücksicht auf die Lehre vom Kosmos und ihren Beziehungen zur Medizin und allgemeinen Gesundheitslehre (1859) [“Meteorology with a View to the Doctrine of Cosmos and its Relations to Medicine and General Theory of Health”] by the French doctor Pierre Foissac. Yet he was quickly disappointed. Although he understood that atmospheric electricity is what triggers climactic ailments, as he noted in a letter from November 14, 1881, the “medical meteorology” he was reading was “a science in its infancy and as it concerns my own personal problems a dozen additional question marks” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,167). In summary, meteorology had advanced rapidly since the 1850s, but most experts only knew that atmospheric conditions influenced the human organism and not how exactly they did so or what was to be done about it. Hence Nietzsche found it necessary to develop his own theorems and therapies; he discussed weather problems at every visit to the doctor and tried to link the abstract knowledge about atmospheric physics and air chemistry from natural-scientific works with practical knowledge. Conclusion The central problem that every empirical meteorology faced around 1880 was forecasting the weather. Most larger daily newspapers had large-format weather maps since the 1880s that indicated long-term weather tendencies (Anderson 187-210; Momonier), supplanting the older tables of measurements, which were actually weather retrospectives (see Büttner, “Poetik”). Yet Nietzsche preferred to rely on his own “climatological studies” (eKGWB/ BVN-1883,394) to decipher regular patterns from the contingencies of weather. By 1875 his letters had begun to accumulate detailed weather protocols that were used as the occasion to explain his somatic ailments or his affective and emotional shifts and to make the corresponding diagnosis of his poor health in terms of the weather. Nietzsche speaks of his postal “weather reports,” and he even calls the parts of his letters not directly related to the weather his “intellectual weather report(s)” (eKGWB/ BVN- 1884,525 - letter from 10.08.1884). His real concern however was to impose a Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 163 form onto the unpredictability of the weather, to defeat his “opponent” the weather again and again by calculating it. 36 “That a month of pure clear sky has become a necessity of life for me, I can now see: I cannot much longer bear myself up against this constant change, these gathering clouds! And how much energy of patience I use up vainly in the struggle against this unreasonable element” (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,153 - letter from 22.09.1881). Again and again Nietzsche compiles all the weather data available to him from travel literature, spa guidebooks, travel guides, etc. and constructs his own meteorological tables to calculate the statistical probabilities for his next destination. An example of this is the letter to Meta von Salis from June 17, 1888: With the help of meteorological tables I have just ascertained the following, most unlikely sounding truth. “January in Italy” sunny days rainy days degree of clouds Turin 10.3 2 4.9 Florence 9.1 9.7 5.7 Rome 8.2 10 5.8 Naples 7.7 10.8 5.2 Palermo 3.2 13.5 6.5 This means that in winter, the further south one goes, the worse the weather is (- fewer clear days, more days of rain and a continually clouded sky -) And we all instinctively believe the opposite! ! (eKGWB/ BVN- 1888,1048 - letter from 17.06.1888) Whereas this elaborate meteorological statistic seemed to serve him as a means for choosing his next place to live, his other empirical weather obsessions can be ascribed to the complex of meteoropathy. For ultimately, as he argues in Ecce Homo, his own meteoropathic body is the only valid meteorological procedure: Now when from long practice I can read off climatic effects and meteorological origins from myself as if from a very delicate and dependable instrument, and even on a short journey, say, from Turin to Milan, can physiologically verify in myself the change in the degree of humidity, I reflect with horror upon the ghastly fact that my life up to the last ten years, the life-threatening years, has always been played out in places false and expressly forbidden to me. (eKGWB/ EH-Klug-2; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 26-27.) One’s own body is more precise than any barometer, thermometer or hygrometer as an instrument to measure the finest changes in weather. It is the secretive electrical phenomena of the atmosphere that particularly worry Nietzsche and that his reading of hygienic guides and medical meteorology was unable to sufficiently explain. Thus he wrote in a letter to Franz Overbeck on November 14, 1881: Maybe we now know more - in Paris I should have gone to the electricity exhibit, partly to learn the newest information, partly to be an object of the exhibition: for as a sensor of electrical changes and so-called weather prophet I can compete with the apes and I am probably a “specialty.” Could Hagenbach perhaps say what 36 On the semantics of the “struggle” with the weather and the “topos of calculation” in Nietzsche’s weather letters see Posth 37-38. P ATRICK R AMPONI 164 clothes (or chains, rings etc.) are best to protect oneself from these all too strong influences? (eKGWB/ BVN-1881,167) In summary we can say that Nietzsche’s meteoropathology leaves behind the causal determinism of climate-theoretical models in focusing on the human body, which, as a meteoropathic body, is no longer subject to any clear laws and thus inserts itself as an unknown into the statistics of weather forecasting as well as the equation of culture and climate. The way the meteoropathic body responds to the specific environmental influences of climate and weather cannot be derived from any general law that distinguishes between cause and effect - in this point Nietzsche follows Herder’s thoughts about climate. We could say that climate theory has come to its end, in terms of philosophical history, with Hegel, who had recompiled everything that the entire philosophy of weather from Hippocrates to Montesquieu had dreamed up. For the global success of the Occident shows the historical philosopher that it does in fact have the best and most ideal climate. After Hegel it is the theoreticians of milieus in the nineteenth century who individualize climate theory so to speak: Rather than climatic zones determining the character of peoples, it is the environment (the milieu) that determines the individual person. Nietzsche was quite familiar with Hippolyte Taine, and once called him the “most substantial mind in today’s France” (eKGWB/ BVN-1887,849 - letter from 19.05.1887). At the same time, as a practical meteorologist himself, Nietzsche contradicts all the regularities of milieu theory. The important point here is that the theory of milieus fails as soon as people start to move. For Nietzsche they do this primarily for health reasons. Medical meteorology as a healing art is the test of all climatic schema. Accordingly, the aphorism 188 from The Wanderer and his Shadow bears the following succinct rubric: “Intellectual and physical transplantation as remedies” (eKGWB/ WS-188) and it exemplifies Nietzsche’s milieu theory as transformed by his meteoropathy: The different cultures are so many intellectual climates, every one of which is peculiarly harmful or beneficial to this or that organism. History as a whole, as the knowledge of different cultures, is the science of remedies, but not the science of the healing art itself. We still need a physician who can make use of these remedies, in order to send every one - temporarily or permanently - to the climate that just suits him. To live in the present, within the limits of a single culture, is insufficient as a universal remedy: too many highly useful kinds of men, who cannot breathe freely in this atmosphere, would perish. […] Add to this cure of intellects that humanity, on considerations of bodily health, must strive to discover by means of a medical geography what kinds of degeneration and disease are caused by each region of the earth, and conversely, what ingredients of health the earth affords: and then, gradually, nations, families, and individuals must be transplanted long and permanently enough for them to become masters of their inherited Nietzsche’s Meteoropathy 165 physical infirmities. The whole world will finally be a series of sanatoria. (eKGWB/ WS-188) Hence Nietzsche’s meteorology, in passing through meteoropathy and medical meteorology, returns once more to a geophilosophical concept of a “sense of earth,” that situates individual milieus beyond the cultural and political boundaries of peoples and fatherlands (Shapiro “Beyond”). 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Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24 March 2015. <http: / / www.sueddeutsche.de/ muenchen/ interview-eine-gewisse-gereiztheit-1.2406809>. Web. 24 January 2017. Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. Die Klimatheorie in der englischen Literatur und Literaturkritik von der Mitte des 16. bis zum frühen 18. Jahrhundert. Vienna: New Academic Press, 1977. Zschorlich, Paul. “Nietzsche und das Wetter. Eine psychoklimatische Studie.” Die Propyläen. Münchener Wochenschrift 10.18 (1913): 278-279. III. M ETHODS AND P ERSPECTIVES A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife The future is hot and dusty in Paolo Bacigalupi’s dystopian eco-thriller The Water Knife (2015). Set in the drought-ridden American Southwest at some point in the twenty-first century, Bacigalupi’s speculative novel gives readers a glimpse into what it will mean to live in a climate-changed world that has run out of water. It is a world in which the sun shines indifferently on people’s desperate struggles for survival while the southwestern states are entrenched in a brutal fight over the remaining shares of the Colorado River. Always a contested waterway in the region, the Colorado has now become the all-important source of life—without access to the river’s steady flows, no farm, no village, and no metropolis in the region can survive. When that access is shut off, the only option left is abandonment: those who can afford it move north or east to places with more favorable climates. Those who are less privileged try to hold out as long as they can, and once they have exhausted their strength and their health, they become migrants, fugitives, outcasts in communities that long ago have lost any sense of solidarity or sociality. Most of the refugees are from the now devastated Texas, but Arizona is not much better off. Phoenix—where most of the action is set—is a dying city that eventually will fall apart just like “Austin, but bigger and badder and more total” (Bacigalupi 24). Bacigalupi hurls his protagonists into this fierce and disintegrating world: one of them a Texas refugee, one of them a journalist doing “collapse pornography” in Phoenix, and one of them a water knife and thus a man who will stop at nothing to ensure that the water is flowing in the right direction. The Water Knife is not Bacigalupi’s first contribution to the emergent genre of climate change fiction—nicknamed cli-fi by the journalist Dan Bloom—but it may be the one that is most successful in conjuring future climatic conditions in a way that allows readers to imaginatively experience them. 1 As ecocritic Adeline Johns-Putra has noted, “overwhelmingly, climate change appears in novels as part of a futuristic dystopian and/ or post-apocalyptic 1 Bacigalupi’s earlier climate change novels include The Windup Girl (2009) and the young adult dystopias Ship Breaker (2011) and The Drowned Cities (2012). For an ecocritical discussion of Ship Breaker, see Weik von Mossner (forthcoming). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 174 setting. In such novels climate change is depicted not just as an internal or psychological problem but for its external effects, often as part of an overall collapse, including technological over-reliance, economic instability, and increased social division” (270). 2 The Water Knife is a typical example of this trend. As María Isabel Pérez Ramos has observed, the novel “uses a future post-apocalyptic scenario to discuss aspects already explored by [environmental historian] Donald Worster in books like Rivers of Empire (1985), and foretold by Marc Reisner in his iconic book Cadillac Desert (1986),” which suggest that “the current water management in the Southwest is unsustainable and doomed to fail” (Perez Ramos 48). The difference between these nonfiction studies and Baccigalupi’s novel is that the latter text channels its dramatic evocation of climate change’s external effects through the minds and bodies of its protagonists, thus allowing readers to imaginatively experience what it is like to live in a climate-changed world. 3 In this essay, I will use the methodological tools of cognitive eco-narratology to explore the ways in which Bacigalupi provides readers with what the literary theorist Marco Caracciolo has called “an instruction manual” for mental simulation (83). As Erin James has pointed out, an econarratological engagement with storyworlds “embraces the key concerns of each of its parent discourses [ecocriticism and narratology]—it maintains an interest in studying the relationship between literature and the physical environment, but does so with sensitivity to the literary structures and devices that we use to communicate representations of the physical environment to each other via narratives” (23). James suggests that postclassical narratological approaches, in particular cognitive and contextual narratology, are best suited for an investigation of the complex storyworlds that are evoked in environmental literature. 4 My analysis of The Water Knife will draw on this theoretical archive in order to demonstrate that Bacigalupi's dystopian novel uses the 2 Arguably, the earliest science fiction novels that focus on climate change date all the way back to the 1960s. Although the scenarios they evoke are not anthropogenic in nature, books such as Brian Aldiss’ The Hot House (1962) and J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) envision a radically different planet Earth that is the result of an increase in surface temperature. The drastically changed ecological worlds they depict, however, are driven by an altered radiation of the sun and thus by factors that lie beyond the agential reach of humans. It is only since the late 1990s that anthropogenic climate change becomes a topic in dystopian American fiction, from Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer (1999) and T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000) to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) and Robinson’s Science in the Capital series (2004-2007). More recent publications include Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2010), Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay (2010), as well as Bacigalupi’s climate change novels. 3 The notion of what it is like to experience something individually and subjectively is what psychologists and philosophers call qualia. In his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ” the philosopher Thomas Nagel defines qualia as the sense or feeling of “what it is like” for someone to undergo conscious experience (435). 4 On postclassical narratology, see Alber and Fludernik (2010). Sensing the Heat 175 human body and its sensual and affective capacities in order to allow readers to imaginatively experience a decidedly unpleasant future world. Rather than simply evoking “bad weather,” Bacigalupi uses anthropogenic climate change as a catalyst for drastic developments in the ecological, economic and social realm and invites readers to understand on a visceral level that changed climatic conditions will inevitably lead to such conflicts and vulnerabilities. Dystopian Climate Change Fiction and the Evocation of Estranged Storyworlds Dystopian climate change fiction belongs to the larger genre of environmental science fiction which, as Eric Otto has pointed out, “often employ[s] a rhetoric of estrangement and extrapolation that compels readers toward critical reflection on seemingly invisible attitudes and habits” (7). This rhetoric is at the heart of what science fiction scholar Tom Moylan has called an “enlightening triangulation between an individual reader’s limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” (xvi-xvii). Both Moylan and Otto thus locate the transformative potential of speculative fiction in its capacity to make things strange and thus different from readers’ lived reality in ways that are enlightening. It bears mentioning that Moylan refers to “the alternative world on the pages” of a science fiction text and thus to the imaginary environment within which the characters’ actions take place. We call such environments imaginary or virtual because they only exist in the writer’s mind and in those of individual readers, their only material dimension being that of black dots on a white page or pixels on an electronic reading device. And yet they can be so vivid and engaging that readers feel strongly moved by them und even unwilling to (mentally) leave them by refocusing their attention on their actual environment. While all narrative texts, as James has observed, “offer up virtual environments for their readers to model mentally and inhabit emotionally” (54), such worldbuilding is of particular importance to science fiction because of its speculative and futuristic nature. As Moylan has shown, the transportation into an alternative world is one of the main pleasures provided by science fiction texts. Readers familiar with the genre may be less interested in character development or even plot than they are in the detailed description of a place they have never imagined before (5). How exactly such “transportation” into an imaginary environment comes to pass has been explained differently by different scholars. The psychologist Richard Gerrig suggests that it is in part an unconscious mental performance that involves what he calls readers’ “memory traces” (42), but he does not spell out how exactly such a performative act plays out in reader’s minds. A more empirically substantial explanation is offered by embodied simulation A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 176 theory as it has been proposed and developed by the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese. Embodied simulation theory is built on mirror neuron research and—on the most basic level—it describes “a form of active bodily relational experience” (Gallese 3). Neuroimaging research has shown that when we see another person act—be it a directly perceived person or an actor in a film—we map those actions onto our premotor cortex, the part of the brain that is also active when we engage in actual movement. Remarkably, something related also happens when our brains process literary texts. As Gallese sums up the empirical results of several functional neuroimaging (fMRI) studies: Silent reading of words referring to face, arm, or leg actions, or listening to sentences expressing actions performed with the mouth, the hand, and the foot, both produce activation of different sectors of the premotor cortex. … These activated premotor sectors coarsely correspond to those active during the execution/ observation of hand, mouth, and foot actions. Thus, it appears that the MNS [mirror neuron system] is involved not only in understanding visually presented actions, but also in mapping acoustically or visually presented action-related linguistic expressions. (443) Whereas in the case of direct perception (or film viewing) the premotor cortex “mirrors” the movements we see in others, in reading (or listening), the perception of movement thus plays out on the imaginary level, with our brains reacting much in the same way they would respond to personally performed movement while our bodies remain still. This is what cognitive scientists call neuronal reuse, since the same neurons that are activated by performed movement also fire in response to perceived movement and imagined movement. Importantly, the mirror neuron system does not only help us recognize the actions of others, real and imagined, but also aids us in the attribution of mental states such as sensations, attitudes, and emotions. “The perception of pain or grief, or of disgust experienced by others,” explain neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, “activates the same areas of the cerebral cortex that are involved when we experience these emotions ourselves” (xii). Such “feeling with” another person is what we call empathy, and the embodied simulation thesis therefore also offers a plausible neurophysiological explanation for the notion that narrative texts are “instruction manuals” that allow readers to simulate the sensory and emotional experiences of characters. Studies have shown that visual imagery activates the visual cortex whereas textual imagery that relates to sound, smell, taste or touch activates other relevant brain regions through neuronal reuse (Keysers and Gazzola 2009). Taken together, these studies provide evidence for the claim, forwarded by Gallese and the literary scholar Hannah Wojciehowski, that our experience of literary characters relies to a large degree on liberated Sensing the Heat 177 embodied simulation (2011). 5 For econarratological readings, it is important to note that liberated embodied simulation is crucial not only for our understanding of characters, but also for our experience of the storyworlds that surround these characters and that stand in complex relationships to them. Interestingly, this is also true for the storyworlds of specular fiction, that is, for our imaginary experience of fictional environments that have no direct correspondence to our everyday experience of the actual world. The metaphor of the instruction manual is an interesting one because it stresses the active role of the reader as someone who performs the narrative and surrounding storyworld in their minds, as Gerrig would put it (17). Just like actors on a stage, he suggests, readers engage in acts of simulation during which “they must use their own experiences of the world to bridge the gaps in texts” (17). And yet—as the history of science fiction and other speculative modes of storytelling demonstrates—readers can also simulate the look and feel of a strange and foreign world they have no personal experience with. Like instruction manuals, literary narratives “invite readers to entertain certain imaginings” (Caracciolo 83), and those imaginings are not limited to previously lived experience in the actual world or even to the laws of physics that govern it. In the case of near-future science fiction such as Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, the terrestrial laws of physics tend to still apply; in fact, this mode of speculative fiction draws part of its fascination precisely from the fact that it is familiar and strange at the same time, thus offering an experience that science fiction scholar Darko Suvin has famously termed “cognitive estrangement” (49). As Otto explains “[p]ure estrangement severs us entirely from our experienced reality and we are left in fantasy. Pure cognition, if not directed toward contemplating the novum in the narrative, severs us entirely from the imagined possibility and we are left in a reality indistinguishable from our own. When estrangement and cognition interact, however, we are encouraged to access the novum and consider its origins or conditions of existence” (8). While I take issue with Otto’s use of the term “cognition” here, which seems unduly limiting and unaware of the fact that our cognitive apparatus is also what allows us to perceive and process things that are “strange” (though we might not be able to explain them), I agree that it is the combination of the familiar and the strange that is central for both our enjoyment of (near future) science fiction and for the possible insights we might draw from it. In the case of dystopian climate change fiction, such cognitive estrangement may help us to get a better understanding of the potential future repercussions of our current actions. 5 Such processes liberated because they are “freed from the burden of modeling our actual presence in daily life” (Wojciehowski and Gallese, n. pag.). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 178 Cognitive Estrangement and the Virtual Experience of Bad Weather in The Water Knife The Water Knife invites readers to imaginatively experience a world that, on one level, feels deceptively familiar. As Hector Tobar notes dryly in his review of the novel for the Washington Post, “[t]he great book publicist in the sky has been working his magic on behalf of Paolo Bacigalupi. His new book, a novel about a bone-dry dystopia, arrives just weeks after Gov. Jerry Brown declared that California was facing the worst drought emergency in memory” (2015). Tobar goes on to speculate that “[r]esidents in the southwestern United States enduring that water crisis will appreciate the precision with which Bacigalupi imagines our thirsty future,” and yet, this eerily familiar world is also considerably different from the contemporary American Southwest. Bacigalupi opens his tale with an extended reflection on the nature and history of human sweat, but the man who believes that this salty body fluid tells “you everything about” whether someone will “survive another day” is not located outside in the dusty hot landscape of Nevada (1). Instead, the water knife Angel Velasquez is “perched high above Cypress 1’s central bore and watching Charles Braxton as he lumbered up the Cascade Trail, the sweat on the lawyer’s brow” telling him that “some people weren’t near as important as they liked to think” (1). The mentioning of the Cascade Trail might evoke an image of the rugged American wilderness in the minds of readers who have hiked along winding mountain trails. But they will also understand that the picturesque wilderness of Cypress 1 is a human creation. The enormous arcology is one of the prestige projects of Angel’s employer Catherine Case, the “Queen of the Colorado” (4). 6 It is a remarkable piece of design and engineering, an artful imitation of nature with a closed watercycle and climate-controlled air below an overarching glass dome that allows sunlight to filter “down from above, dappling bamboo and rain trees, illuminating tropical birds and casting pocket-mirror flashes on mossy koi ponds” (2). Surrounding this artificial domed landscape is the city of Las Vegas, or what is left of it, engaged in a constant struggle against the encroaching desert, the unbearable heat, the dust storms, and the near-permanent drought conditions. 6 The term arcology is a linguistic blend of the words architecture and ecology. It denotes a utopian structure that provides space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities and often is self-sufficient and ecologically sustainable. Arcologies have frequently been features in science fiction literature and film, but equally ambitious projects in the actual world have proven difficult. Famous and notorious examples include Paolo Soleri’s experimental prototype Arcosanti in central Arizona and the Dongtan project near Shangai, which both have yet to be completed. Urban projects reflecting arcology principles have been somewhat more successful, but no current project would come anywhere near the Cypress arcologies in Bacigalupi’s novel. Sensing the Heat 179 Angel cannot help but “enjoy […] the view” from the “aerie” he occupies high up in the arcology as he waits for the sweating lawyer to make his way up the trail. From his elevated position, the people below seem “smaller than ants. Not really people at all” (2). Readers might suspect that there is a metaphorical dimension to Angel’s ruminations, and once they read on they will see confirmed that he is used to observing the world from a position of power, a position he holds thanks to Case, who controls a large part of the Colorado River and thus decides who lives and who dies in the region. But regardless of whether they notice the metaphorical dimension or not, the text invites readers to see both the arcology and the humans who populate it through Angel’s eyes. Bacigalupi’s third-person narrator uses the ruthless water knife as a focalizer throughout the first chapter, thus limiting readers’ imaginary experience of the storyworld to his perspective. 7 They can only simulate what Angel sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels at any given moment, and they also share his affective and cognitive processing of this sensory information, which is inevitably colored by the fact that he used to be one of the poor creatures who fought for survival in the heat and dust outside and who only recently has come into a position of privilege. Angel is an exconvict who now lives the high life because Case has released him from prison and given him a housing permit in the lush paradise of Cypress 1. In exchange, she “own[s] his ass” (1). There is nothing that Angel would not do for his boss, and the first chapter of the novel demonstrates just how far he will go. Cutting off a whole town from the much-needed water supply leaves him as indifferent as the threatening, torturing, or killing of those who dare to challenge Case’s reign. The time is gone, he knows, when people played by the rules, “believing there was a way for everyone to get by, pretending they could cooperate and share their way out of the situation” (12). By now “Big Daddy Drought” has worsened the environmental conditions to a degree that it has become a dog-eats-dog situation in which the southwestern states will fight each other to the death for the last drop of water. The fact that readers are bound to Angel’s perspective in this first chapter has important consequences for their initial understanding of the novel’s storyworld. The narratologist David Herman has argued that we constantly attempt to reconstruct not only the events in a narrative, but also the environment that surrounds the characters and their actions (13-4). Seeing the arid Southwest through Angel’s eyes allows readers to share his privileged position also in terms of knowledge. His words and thoughts tend to be sarcastic and they convey well how much the possession of water has become a merciless business operation in a time of enduring drought. Angel pictures Case in her office: 7 The notion of focalization goes back to the French narrative theorist Gerard Genette and refers to the perspective or point of view through which a narrative is presented. A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 180 With maps of the state of Nevada and the Colorado River Basin floor to ceiling on the walls around her, her domain laid out in real-time data feeds—the veins of every tributary blinking red, amber, or green indicating stream flow in cubic feet per second. Numbers flickering over the various catchment basins of the Rocky Mountains—red, amber, green—monitoring how much snow cover remained and variation off the norm as it melted. Other numbers, displaying the depths of the reservoirs and dams … Over it all, emergency purchase prices on streamflows and futures offers scrolled via NASDAQ, available open-market purchase options if she needed to recharge the depth in Lake Mead, the unforgiving numbers that ruled her world as relentlessly as she ruled Angel’s. (Bacigalupi 5) What Bacigalupi evokes here is a futuristic, speculative scenario that has no direct correspondence in readers’ actual worlds. And yet, the description makes it easy to picture Case’s workplace since it draws heavily on visual imagery that we know, if not from personal experience, from stock exchange newscasts, financial market reporting, and from Hollywood films such as Wall Street (1987) and The Big Short (2015). Although the description is lacking in detail, most readers will immediately be able to simulate the situation in their minds and understand that in this future world water has become even more of a precious commodity than it is today, a commodity that sustains a form of gambling that may be even more precarious than contemporary stock trading since it is wholly dependent on the prevailing weather conditions. If the climate was to shift towards somewhat wetter conditions again, Case and her opponents in California and Arizona would be quickly out of business. There is no sign, however, that the weather will change. Throughout the novel, Bacigalupi presents the severe drought conditions as a fact of life and as something that will only get worse over time. Whereas the first chapter considers those conditions in the abstract and from a safe distance, the second chapter of The Water Knife plunges readers in the middle of things, allowing them to experience the material side of the drought in more immediate ways through the novel’s second protagonist, the journalist Lucy Monroe. In a way, Lucy’s trajectory has been the opposite of Angel’s: unlike him, she started from a position of privilege and chose to move to the dying city of Phoenix, Arizona, in order to become “a collapse pornographer … hunting for salacious imagery, like the vultures who descended on Houston after a Cat 6, or the sensationalized imagery of a fallen Detroit being swallowed by nature” (24). On her bad days, Lucy agrees with her critics that this is what her work amounts to. On others, she feels “that she wasn’t so much eroticizing a city’s death as excavating a future as it yawned below them. As if she were saying This is us. This is how we all end” (24). Most importantly, however, Lucy realizes that she is no longer a distant observer of environmental collapse. Instead, she has become “one of the actors” (25) and therefore someone who is as much exposed to the horrific ma- Sensing the Heat 181 terial conditions around her as the poor Zoners who still manage to hold out in the city. When we first meet Lucy, she wakes up in the middle of the night because her house is shaking under the onslaught of yet another dust storm. At first she believes that she hears rain, but once she is fully awake she realizes “it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home, but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again” (19). Bacigalupi uses a physical metaphor here to give readers a sense of the weight that the Arizona weather is putting on Lucy’s existence. 8 In this early passage in the chapter that introduces Lucy, readers do not yet know in what conditions she lives, but they can simulate in their mind the sense of a weight crushing down on one’s body. This allows them to understand on a visceral level that Lucy’s life is hard, and that its hardship is directly connected to the meteorological conditions around her. To this, the narrative quickly adds a vague sense of fear, as Lucy observes her dog Sunny cowering anxiously underneath her bed. “No matter how much Lucy tried to tell herself that the dog was crazy,” the narrator tells us, “her own lizard brain believed in the dog’s warning” (Bacigalupi 21). What happens between Lucy and Sunny when she peers underneath her bed and finds him “crouched and shivering” (20) is a case of what psychologists call trans-species Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotional contagion. Not only does Lucy cognitively read her dog’s body position as an expression of fear, but she also engages on an affective level in a sub-conscious process of embodied simulation. This is what we call affective empathy or emotional contagion, a process that has been well researched on the intra-species level, but that also seems to be working across species lines (in both directions) as many pet owners and animal trainers will attest. 9 As I have discussed in the previous section, processes of embodied simulation also operate during our exposure to literary texts, and so this passage not only represents contagious fear between Sunny and Lucy but also processes of embodied simulation. Readers are cued to feel along with both of them as they simulate in their minds the dog’s physical display of fear as he “huddle[s] underneath the bed, fur and skin twitching, giving off a low, continuous, miserable whine” (20), and Lucy’s reaction to it as she tries to “force herself to relax, but a nervous shiver of her own refuses[s] to stop rippling under her skin” (21). 10 This makes it easy to understand that Lucy feels compelled to get up in order to check the 8 As Lakoff and Johnson have shown, we use metaphors not only in literature but also in our everyday understanding of the world around us because they help us to map the unfamiliar onto the more familiar on the grounds of structural similarity (152). 9 For discussions of cognitive and affective empathy on the intra-species level, see Marco Iacoboni (2009) and Frans de Waal (2009). 10 For the central importance of ToM for fiction reading, see Zunshine (2006). For study that considers the role of empathy in fiction reading, see Keen (2007). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 182 dead bolts on the doors and the seals of the windows, even though she keeps telling herself that she is being paranoid. The narrative here cues feelings of suspense in readers, which are intensified by Lucy’s belief that “something was outside, something dark and hungry, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the horrific thing was turning its attention to her—to her and Sunny and this safe little island of hunkered adobe shelter that she called home” (21). 11 The novel has thus set the mood for the part of the narrative that takes place in Phoenix, a place that Lucy imagines as “a sinkhole, sucking everything down—buildings, lives, streets, history—all of it tipping and spilling into the gaping maw of disaster—sand, slumped saguaros, subdivisions—all of it going down” (24). What it means to live in that sinkhole becomes clear just a little later in the chapter, when Lucy sees herself forced to leave her house in the middle of the dust storm to report on a local murder case. At this point, the narrative invites readers to simulate what such a storm feels like to those who are directly exposed to it. After strapping on her REI filter mask and grit goggles Lucy presses open the door and tries to orient herself: Sand blasted her skin raw as she ran toward the memory of her truck. She fumbled with its door handle, squinting in the darkness, and finally got it open. Slammed it closed behind her and sat hunched, feeling her heart pounding as wind shook the cab. Grit hissed against glass and metal. When she powered up the truck, dust motes swirled inside, a red veil before the glow of the instrument panel’s LEDs. She revved the engine, trying to remember the last time she had changed the filters on its intakes, hoping it wouldn’t clog and die. She switched on storm lights and pulled out, bumping down the potholed street more by memory than by sight. (26) Using Lucy as a focalizer, the passage narrates the urban landscape as it presents itself to her. Packed with visual and other sensory imagery, it cues readers to simulate the feeling of sand blasting against one’s skin, of squinting one’s eyes, of one’s heart pounding out of fear and exertion. They are invited to imagine the sound of grit against glass and metal, the sight of red dust, the confusion of trying to orient oneself without eyesight. There is no information in the passage that would be external to Lucy’s perception and cognition. As readers, we cannot help but share her experience of the storm as well as her affective and cognitive response to it. This does not change, however, that we may be critical of her behavior, thinking that it is crazy to go outside during such a severe storm and wondering whether it is worth the risk. Focalization through the consciousness of a protagonist allows for intense embodied simulation and therefore for a particularly vivid experience of the 11 On suspense in literary reading, see Chapter 2 of Keith Oatley’s The Passionate Muse (2012). Sensing the Heat 183 narrated situation, but it does not keep readers from making analytical judgments about that situation or from being curious about what it will lead to. In fact, as Gregory Currie has argued, character desires—our empathetic suffering with a protagonist and our sympathetic hope that things will turn out well for her—are often in conflict with our narrative desires, i.e. the desire for a suspenseful, exciting story (183). Thriller plots such as the one we find in The Water Knife have a particular strong tendency to create such conflicting desires as they put their characters through hell in the service of an action-packed, page-turning story. As Fritz Breithaupt has noted, “readers do not always feel the same emotions as the characters they are reading about” (440) but may have a more complicated affective response. Breithaupt even detects what he calls “empathetic sadism” in readers as they both suffer with characters and enjoy the reading experience at the same time (440). We could also locate such empathetic sadism in writers, however, since they deliberately exploit readers’ capacity for empathy—also in moments of suffering—in order to create more immersive reading experiences. The Water Knife is a good example of this kind of sadism, since Lucy will undergo torture in the course of the story and Bacigalupi describes the physical and psychological experience of that ordeal in graphic detail, allowing for a high degree of embodied simulation. In this early passage in the novel, however, he uses sensory imagery to give readers an equally visceral and agonizing sense of the extreme Phoenix weather conditions. The third protagonist and focalizer of the novel, the refugee Maria Villarosa, allows readers to get an even more immediate sense of that environment for the simple fact that she is not in a position to protect herself from it. Maria is one of the “Merry Perrys,” as the refugees are contemptuously nicknamed by those who are better off. Like most of the other climate refugees that populate Phoenix, she is originally from Texas and thus one of the many American citizens that are now treated much like the displaced Oklahoma farmers at the height of the 1930’s Dust Bowl. The people who have fled the devastated environment of what used to be Texas, Maria notes self-consciously, “stank of fear and stale sweat that had moistened and dried. They stank of Clearsac plastic and piss. They stank of one another from lying crammed together like sardines in the plywood ghettos that they’d packed in close to wherever the Red Cross had spied relief pumps into the ground” (37). The situation of the refugees is so desperate that they are forced to recycle their own urine back into drinking water by filtering it through the omnipresent Clearsacs—an image that, along with the sensual imagery of foul-smelling bodies, will likely trigger a disgust response in most readers. The only relief provided for the displaced Texans is the water pumps that the Red Cross/ China Friendship has installed all over town, but that water does not come for free. Instead, the price at the pumps is continuously changing A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 184 with the market price, symbolizing the moment when the green, amber, and red numbers that flicker across Catherine Case’s office walls materialize into the amount of water that a poor person can afford. Chinese corporations are omnipresent now not only in Vegas and Phoenix, but all over the American Southwest. “They knew how to make things happen” (34), knows Maria, not least because her father was working a construction job on the Taiyang Arcology, a sister project to the arcology in Vegas, before falling to his death from the nineteenth floor. Now an orphan, Maria struggles to survive with the help of her friend Lisa who coughs up blood because she has been exposed to unfiltered air for too long and sells her body to whoever is interested. Maria starts out as the most disenfranchised protagonist of the novel, but she is also the one who is most determined to survive. She waits patiently by the water pump because she hopes to “see the world as clearly” as the hydrologist who currently pays for Sarah’s body (44). From him she receives the information that there are moments when the price at the pump will dramatically drop for a brief moment because of uneven withdrawal from the large users. Her plan is to take advantage of that moment and to later re-sell her water for a higher price to those who need it. Her business model mirrors those of the large players such as Case, but because she is poor and physically weak, it is doomed to failure. Although she succeeds at the pump, she is later forced to give up her water to the bigger dogs that control her neighborhood. And Sarah’s involvement with the hydrologist eventually leads both of the women into a much larger and increasingly deadly water conflict that also involves Angel and Lucy. Bacigalupi’s characters are disappointingly flat and most of the plot developments in the second half of The Water Knife are highly generic thriller fare written in “relentless bursts of testosterone-driven prose” (Tobar 2015). Looking at the novel from an econarratological perspective, we must concede that the structural weaknesses of the novel and the frequent display of graphic violence may impede some readers’ ability and willingness to empathize with the characters in a way that would allow them to experience the storyworld through their consciousness. And yet, the novel is nevertheless interesting from such a perspective precisely because its generic thriller plot—which will appeal to readers who enjoy that kind of genre fiction—is driven by a conflict that is caused by anthropogenic climate change. It is because the climate is changing that the ancient water rights that are at the center of the conflict have become invaluable in the drought-ridden Southwest. Even Angel has to learn that in a world without enough water, no privilege, no friendship, no loyalty, and not even love has any enduring value. When he drives his elegant Tesla past the “[r]efugees and recycling opera- Sensing the Heat 185 tions dotting the […] dark zone” on the fringes of Phoenix, he gazes from inside the climate-controlled space of the car at what appears to him as “[g]host images: a woman clutching the back of a scooter, whipped by wind, arms around her man’s waist, her eyes and mouth pursed tight against the dust. Another scooter, hauling a five-gallon water cube strapped down by bungee cords, the driver hunched over his handlebars, a bright blue Sparkle Pony filter mask hiding his features” (97). Once again, Angel looks at people from a distance and in a way that denies their humanity. He only leaves the Tesla when he reaches the Hilton 6 hotel where his room is “barricaded from the outside world by humidifiers and HEPA filters and argon-filled insulating glass” (100). To Angel, Phoenix is an alien place, its suffering familiar and yet strange, not part of his current world. His position at this point in the narrative mirrors that of its readers. They, too, are to some degree familiar with dust storms and soaring temperatures. And they, too, have seen humans on scooters wearing filter masks and the many other signs of environmental degradation and injustice. What makes these phenomena strange is their presence in the middle of a major American city in the twenty-first century. Yet, together with Angel, readers soon learn that it is impossible to keep one’s distance when one is physically present in a place like this. Once Angel leaves the insulated spaces of his car and hotel behind in order to find out whether someone is betraying Catherine Case, he comes in close contact not only with Maria and Lucy, but also with the merciless forces that shape both women’s lives. Pérez Ramos notes that “The Water Knife is an admonishment and a cautionary tale, with constant references to what could/ should have been done when there was still time” (55). Tobar widens the perspective, observing that “much of the social and political life of [the novel’s] future America is shaped by the kind of disorder, law-breaking and violence one finds in present-day South Sudan and Syria” (2015). Such comparisons between contemporary reality and the imagined future world of the novel are constantly invited by the text and almost inevitable. Erin James has noted that “comprehending a narrative is an inherently comparative process, in which readers reconstruct sequences of events, states, and actions integratively by considering both the world that is in the narrative and the world that is not. This process involves determining how the actions and events depicted in a narrative relate to other possible past events, alternative presents, or potential happenings in the future” (xi). Tobar’s review of The Water Knife demonstrates some of the possible results of such inherently comparative processes on part of the reader, as it includes a quote from the novel that explicitly links the violence of its storyworld to anthropogenic climate change: “We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway,” says Lucy’s friend Jamie soon before he is mur- A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 186 dered, “There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity” (Bacigalupi 29). It sounds like a warning from the future. Conclusion The Water Knife is a good example of how the narrative strategies of dystopian climate change fiction can enable the “enlightened triangulation” that Moylan sees at the heart of science fiction’s awareness-raising potential: Readers are invited to draw connections between their own “limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society” (Moylan xvi-xvii). Critical responses to the novel suggest that such triangulations are particularly easy for readers whose actual environment closely mirrors the imaginary world of the novel. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Denise Hamilton observes that “[r]eading the novel in 93-degree March weather while L.A. newscasts warned of water rationing and extended drought, I felt the hot panting breath of the desert on my nape and I shivered, hoping that Bacigalupi’s vision of the future won’t be ours” (n. pag.). Given that readers’ actual experience plays an important role in their sense of transportation into a storyworld and their ability to imagine that storyworld vividly, as Gerrig and others have argued, such findings are not surprising. 12 But clearly, The Water Knife and other pieces of cli-fi also engage readers whose personal experiences do not match their virtual experience during the reading process quite as closely. After all, our affective response to a literary text is determined not only by the emotional memories we have retained from previous experiences (real and imagined), but also by the vivacity of the things we imagine while reading. As literary scholar Elaine Scarry has argued, such imaginary vivacity “comes about by reproducing the deep structures of perception” (9) through the powerful evocation of the material properties of storyworld itself and a description of characters’ sensual perception of and affective responses to them. The Water Knife excels at providing its readers with material and sensory imagery that allows them to imagine its climate-changed future world vividly through processes of embodied simulation. This may be its modest contribution to the cultural discourse around climate change, its overly violent plotlines and flat characters notwithstanding. The British climatologist Mike Hulme has argued that we must get away from understanding climate only as a physical reality, and begin to see it also as “an imaginative idea—an idea constructed and endowed with meaning and value through cultural practice” (14). Thus understood, anthropogenic climate change is not only a scientific but also a cultural problem. How we 12 On this point see also Green and Chow et al.. Sensing the Heat 187 address it depends in part on cultural values and economic priorities, and in part on our species’ very capacity to sense, process, and understand information. As long as we do not believe that climate change concerns us directly, we are unlikely to engage in or support any action to curb greenhouse gas emissions more effectively. Psychologists Van der Linden et al. suggest that “instead of a future, distant, global, nonpersonal, and analytical risk that is often framed as an overt loss for society,” climate change should be framed “as a present, local, and personal risk” in ways that “facilitate more affective and experiential engagement” (758). Cognitive psychologist Paul Slovic and ecocritic Scott Slovic similarly remind us in Numbers and Nerves (2015) that “we as a species think best when we allow numbers and narratives, abstract information and experiential discourse, to interact, to work together”(4). 13 Mirror neuron-enabled processes of liberated embodied simulation, as we experience during our engagement with narrative fiction, may be considered an important component of the experiential system, regardless of the fact that the experiences in question are virtual. This is precisely the reason why climate change fiction, like other speculative modes of writing, can help us consider the potential future outcomes of our current choices. Instead of speaking abstractly about a changing climate, as scientific discourse must do, such texts as Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife allow us to experience on the imaginary level what it might mean to deal with the resulting weather and what ecological, economic, and social consequences such meteorological shifts may have. Works Cited Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik, eds. Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Aziz-Zadeh, Lisa, and Antonio Damasio. “Embodied Semantics for Actions: Findings from Functional Brain Imaging.” Journal of Physiology - Paris 102 (2008): 35-39. Bacigalupi, Paolo. The Water Knife. London: Orbit, 2015. Breithaupt, Fritz. “Empathetic Sadism: How Readers Get Implicated.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 440-461. Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Chow, Ho Ming, Raymond A. Mar, Yisheng Xu, Siyuan Liu, Suraji Wagage, and Allen R. Braun. “Personal Experience with Narrated Events Modu- 13 On this point see also Marshall (2014). A LEXA W EIK VON M OSSNER 188 lates Functional Connectivity within Visual and Motor Systems During Story Comprehension.” Human Brain Mapping 36.4 (2015): 1494-505. Currie, Gregory. “Narrative Desire.” Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion. Ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 183-199. De Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Three River Press, 2009. Gallese, Vittorio. “Bodily Framing.” Experience: Culture, Cognition and the Common Sense. Ed. Caroline Jones, Rebecca Uchill, and David Mather. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 1-15. ---. “Mirror Neurons and Art.” Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy. Ed. Alfonsina Scarinzi. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business, 2014. 441-449. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 2 nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Gerrig, Richard J. “Conscious and Unconscious Processes in Readers’ Narrative Experiences.” Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olson. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 37-60. ---. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. 2 nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Green, Melanie C.. “Transportation into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism.” Discourse Processes 38 (2004): 247-266. Hamilton, Denise. “Amid a Real Drought, Thriller ‘Water Knife’ Cuts to the Quick.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 21 May 2015. <http: / / www.latimes.com/ books/ jacketcopy/ la-ca-jc-paolo-bacigalupi- 20150524-story.html>. Web. 31 March 2016. Hermann, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others. New York: Picador, 2009. Jacobs, Arthur M., and Raoul Schrott. “Captivated by the Cinema of Mind.” Concentration. Ed. Ingo Niermann. Berlin: Fiktion.cc, 2014. 118-149. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Johns-Putra, Adeline. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism.” WILEY Interdisciplinary Reviews—Climate Change 7.2 (2016): 266-282. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Sensing the Heat 189 Keysers, Christian and Valeria Gazzola. “Expanding the Mirror: Vicarious Activity for Actions, Emotions, and Sensations.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 19 (2009): 1-6. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Marshall, George. Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ” The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): 435-450. Oatley, Keith. The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pérez Ramos, María Isabel. “The Water Apocalypse: Utopian Desert Venice Cities and Arcologies in Southwestern Dystopian Fiction.” Ecozon@ 7.2 (2016): 44-64. Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. 2 nd ed. New York: Penguin, 1993. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Tobar, Hector. “Imagining a Thirsty Future in Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘The Water Knife.’” The Washington Post. The Washington Post, 25 May 2015. <https: / / www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/ books/ imagining-athirsty-future-in-paolo-bacigalupis-the-water-knife/ 2015/ 05/ 28/ 40689c 74-fa6 0-11e4-9ef4_1bb7ce3b3fb7_story.html>. Web. 31 March 2016. Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “Vulnerable Lives: The Affective Dimensions of Risk in Young Adult Cli-Fi.” Textual Practice 31.3 (2017): 553-566. Wojciehowski, Hannah, and Vittorio Gallese. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies 2.1 (2011). <http: / / escholarship.org/ uc/ item/ 3jg726c2>. Web. 1 February 2017. Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. 2 nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. R EINHARD H ENNIG Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction: Gert Nygårdshaug’s ‘Eco-Thriller’ Chimera Introduction According to Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, the massive anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere causing climate change is one of the main factors that led to the transition from the Holocene to a new geological era which they propose to name Anthropocene (17-18). While there is a certain disagreement about when exactly the Anthropocene began, most consider its starting point to be the large-scale burning of fossil fuels that began with the Industrial Revolution (Steffen et al. 848). Accepting the premises of the Anthropocene concept therefore includes acknowledging the scientific consensus that humans are altering the global climate through the emission of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels. 1 The Anthropocene concept could therefore be assumed to counteract any form of climate change denial. Yet denial - “a refusal to believe something no matter what the evidence” (Washington and Cook 1) - is still widespread with regard to the topic of anthropogenic global warming. The reasons are manifold. While religious beliefs may play a role in some cases, one of the most frequent causes of denial is the fear that adequate measures for mitigating climate change would endanger one’s own economic interests, especially when the latter are tied to the fossil fuel industry (Diethelm and McKee 3). Many may even consider the acknowledgement of anthropogenic global warming as a threat to their personal identities and to lifestyles connected to high greenhouse gas emissions (Washington and Cook 101). Climate change denial therefore usually aims at preventing and - if this is not possible - delaying the implementation of measures to mitigate global warming. While there is a great variety of reasons why people deny the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, the strategies applied in the 1 In the most comprehensive study on this issue so far, John Cook et al. assessed 11,944 articles published by 29,083 authors in 1,980 scientific journals between 1991 and 2001. Their results showed that 97.1% of those articles that commented on the causes of climate change confirmed that it is mainly caused by human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also confirms the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change in its Fifth Assessment Report: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid- 20th century” (IPCC 15; emphasis in the original). R EINHARD H ENNIG 192 process of such denial are even more diverse. Haydn Washington and John Cook list three main categories of climate change denial. Literal denial, as “the assertion that something did not happen or is not true” (98), means rejecting or doubting the truth of anthropogenic global warming altogether. Interpretive denial, on the other hand, does not deny that climate change is happening, but interprets it in such a way that no action is needed, for example through claiming that a warming planet might be something good. James Hoggan coined the term “nondenier deniers” (118) for those practicing this sort of denial. A third and related category is implicatory denial, which means knowing about and accepting anthropogenic climate change and its highly problematic character, yet failing “to incorporate this knowledge into everyday life or transform it into social action” (Washington and Cook 98). In recent years, climate change has become a topic that is frequently taken up even in literary fiction, and scholars in the field of ecocriticism often emphasize literary texts’ educational potential in this context (see Johns-Putra 274). It is thus assumed that climate change fiction can contribute to raising awareness about global warming and motivate readers to commit to mitigation. The circumstance that fictional texts just as well can function as a medium of climate change denial has received considerably less scholarly attention, despite the prominent example of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004), which has been deemed “the most popular climate change novel to date” (Trexler 35). In this thriller, anthropogenic global warming is revealed as a threat that has been invented by scientists in order to receive more funding for their research and that is used by unscrupulous environmentalists to generate more donations for their organizations. What is more, in the novel a retired sociologist claims that politicians, the military and the media are using climate change as a means of keeping the population in a state of permanent fear that would make it easier for them to exert control and to pursue their own interests (Crichton 540-542). Yet, it is repeatedly stated by the ‘good guys’ among the novel’s characters that even “if global warming really does occur, it will probably benefit most nations of the world” (506). State of Fear thus combines strategies of both literal and interpretive denial. An indication of the novel’s considerable impact at least in the U.S. is that Crichton was asked by James M. Inhofe (a Republican who openly denies anthropogenic global warming) to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in 2005 and that in the same year a meeting between Crichton and then U.S. president George W. Bush was arranged after the latter had read State of Fear (Hoggan 54). A more recent example of climate change denial in literary fiction from the U.S. is Chris Skates’ novel Going Green (2011), in which an employee of a coal-fired power plant discovers that global warming is not only nonexistent, but moreover is used by ‘communist’ states as a means of ruining Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 193 the U.S. economy through establishing unnecessary mitigating measures, with industry-hating U.S. politicians, environmental activists, and the media unknowingly contributing to the success of this conspiracy. Meanwhile, Muslim terrorists connected to al-Qaeda and pretending to be lobbyists for climate protection use Democratic politicians’ and environmentalists’ irrational concern about CO 2 emissions as part of their own plan to destroy the entire power grid in the U.S. in order to create social chaos in the entire country. State of Fear and Going Green are literary texts that provide rather obvious examples of literal climate change denial. Although some of the novels’ characters believe in the reality of climate change, the novels’ plots leave no doubt at all that global warming is indeed not happening. Yet, there are even literary texts containing more subtle strategies of denial, which are harder to recognize as such. An informed close reading can demonstrate how even such novels function as a medium of climate change denial. In the following such a reading will be conducted with regard to strategies of denial in the novel Chimera (2011) by Norwegian writer Gert Nygårdshaug. Gert Nygårdshaug: Chimera Nygårdshaug (born 1946) is the author of a huge number of crime thrillers. While his novels are relatively popular and sell well in Norway itself, only few of them have been translated into other languages, and it can be presumed that Nygårdshaug is targeting a primarily Norwegian readership with his texts. His most successful novel so far and his first one taking up environmental questions is the thriller Mengele Zoo (1989). It primarily addresses rainforest destruction and mentions climate change only once as a remote possible consequence of deforestation (368). This is different in Chimera, Nygårdshaug’s most recent novel addressing environmental issues, which, for the first time in his oeuvre, depicts possible consequences of global warming as part of a fictional future scenario. Like many other of Nygårdshaug’s novels, Chimera is a highly political text. In an interview about the novel, Nygårdshaug called himself “more a political than a literary writer” 2 (Korsvold 4) and stated that he shares the views uttered by the narrator and the central characters of Chimera. Chimera’s text is preceded by a prologue in which Nygårdshaug recounts how he met a virologist who had inspired him to write this novel and whom he represents under the pseudonym Istvan Carval Xtolec. The novel itself is divided into ten chapters of which the first one is titled “The Water Warden” (Vannvokteren). This chapter is written from a second-person perspective. It 2 “[M]er en politisk enn litterær forfatter.” All translations from the Norwegian in this article are my own. R EINHARD H ENNIG 194 tells the story of a writer, identified rather explicitly as Nygårdshaug himself (“you could be a writer, maybe be called Gert Nygårdshaug”, 22), 3 who is dwelling in a town in the Niger Delta and planning to write a novel about how toxic waste from the industrial nations pollutes the environment in African countries. Yet when a diver working for a marine research institute tells him about the pollution and acidification of the oceans, the writer - overwhelmed by pessimism - throws away all the material that he had already collected for his novel. After this, the novel’s main story, which is narrated in the third person, begins. It is interspersed with short pieces of text that are said to constitute quotes from publications and oral or written statements by the virologist Xtolec. The story is set some fifteen to twenty years in the future, and its main setting is the (fictitious) Congo Rainforest Center (CORAC), an international research center located in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where sixteen scientists, among them botanists, zoologists, entomologists, ornithologists and biochemists, led by the ecologist Gauthier de Payens research the effects of global warming on biodiversity. The station is subordinate to a (likewise fictitious) subsidiary organization of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) called International Global Overwatch and referred to as IGLOO. Climatic changes are at this time already considerably affecting ecosystems on a global scale. The researchers at CORAC happen to discover a new, highly lethal virus that has killed the population of a small indigenous village close by. This virus, which they name ‘Chimera,’ has the potential to spread globally unnoticed and to kill the majority of humans on earth. Since there is a consensus among the scientists that a total collapse of ecological and social systems is to be expected soon unless something is done to limit human population growth, de Payens decides that four of the scientists should release the virus at various international airports and thus enforce a reduction of the world’s population. When one of these four, the Norwegian zoologist Karl Iver Lyngvin, is about to implement this plan, he learns that the virus is only contained in the capsule that he himself had received, and that thus the decision about its release is up to him alone. The end of the novel leaves his choice open. Strategy 1: Portraying Norwegians as Innocent Victims of Climate Change While many arguments against the existence of anthropogenic global warming or against mitigating action are used in similar ways by climate change 3 “Du kann være forfatter, kanskje hete Gert Nygårdshaug.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 195 deniers in different countries, national contexts often play a very important role with regard to which strategies of denial are pursued. As the above description of State of Fear and Going Green may already have indicated, these are novels embedded in and referring to a specifically U.S.-American social, economic and cultural framing of climate change. In both of them the ‘American way of life’ and with it U.S.-American culture and national identity appear as threatened by any acknowledgement of anthropogenic global warming. Chimera, on the other hand, contains many references to Norwegian culture and national identity in connection to strategies of climate change denial. For an analysis of these strategies it is therefore necessary to consider the novel’s specifically Norwegian background. Norway is an especially interesting example with regard to the topic of climate change denial, since it currently can be regarded as the world’s wealthiest country - ranking first in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report (UNDP) - while much of its wealth is based on the export of fossil fuels and thus on precisely the energy source whose use is the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. As Kari Marie Norgaard argues in her study Living in Denial, literal climate change denial is not nearly as widespread in Norwegian society as in the U.S. Yet in interviews with the inhabitants of a Norwegian rural community Norgaard found that her interviewees had developed a variety of strategies of what she calls “socially organized denial” (9) which effectively prevented them from acting on climate change despite acknowledging its existence and its problematic consequences. Most of her interviewees tried “to construct their own innocence from the resources of their culture’s particular tool kit” (222), among others through references to a specifically Norwegian national identity. One prominent element in how this identity was constructed from the nineteenth century on is an idealization of Norwegian society as a farming society. Traditional rural life is looked upon as embodying authenticity, simplicity and closeness to nature, while modern urbanity often is rejected, even though a majority of Norwegians are living in urban environments today (Eriksen 18-19). Closely linked to this idealization of the rural is the idea that Norwegians are (or should be) closer to nature than the inhabitants of other countries. This closeness is to be maintained through activities that require being outdoors such as hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, hiking and skiing. All of these activities are usually subsumed in Norwegian under the term friluftsliv, which roughly translates as ‘outdoor life.’ Many Norwegians, however, consider themselves to be not only closer to ‘nature,’ but also more rational, egalitarian and democratically oriented than the citizens of other states. In addition, there is a widespread perception that, as a small country without a colonial past, Norway can in a unique way ac- R EINHARD H ENNIG 196 cept global responsibility through internationally promoting peace, democracy and human rights (Norges offentlige utredninger 51-52). The Norwegian historian Terje Tvedt has coined the (critically intended) term “national regime of goodness” (nasjonal godhetsregime) for this element of the Norwegian national self-image. This ‘regime of goodness’ is not limited to the humanitarian realm, but includes global ecological commitment as well. For example in the Norwegian government’s so-called “Climate and Forest Initiative,” climate protection and the conservation of rainforests are linked together, as countries such as Brazil and Indonesia receive financial compensation if they in return protect rainforests on their state territories (see Klima-og miljødepartementet). Through such global commitment, Norway has even “[i]n the eyes of the outside world [...] become the epitome of good governance, environmental concern, and enlightened altruism” (Witoszek 7). Norway’s national (self-)image is, however, challenged by the country’s large-scale offshore extraction of oil and natural gas. Started in 1971, this has been Norway’s most important economic sector for several decades now. In 2009, 50% of Norwegian export earnings came from fossil fuels and roughly 15% of all jobs were directly or indirectly dependent upon this sector (Schiefloe 34-35). The material wealth created through the petroleum industry has led to a low unemployment rate, to fast increasing wages and consumption, and has made it possible to significantly expand the public sector and the welfare state (37). That Norway is ranking highest in the United Nations Human Development Report is thus not only, but to a large extent, attributable to an economy based on the extraction and export of fossil fuels. Yet, Norway, both through its main export and through the consumerism that the oil wealth has generated in the country, is contributing extraordinarily to global greenhouse gas emissions and thus to anthropogenic climate change (Curtis 12). With global warming constituting a threat especially to poor countries, which - other than the rich ones - are unable to adapt, Norway’s economical model runs contrary to the country’s humanitarian and ecological commitment. This discrepancy questions the reality behind the Norwegian national self-image. Trond Berg Eriksen, Andreas Hompland and Eivind Tjønneland, for example, judge that the oil wealth constitutes “an embarrassing defeat for the Norwegian self-image of cautious modesty, for the belief that we are more reasonable than others” (476). 4 Yet, as Norgaard’s study shows, the contradictory nature of national ideals and economic reality may even have a self-reinforcing effect on the Norwegian national self-image: 4 “[E]t pinlig nederlag for det norske selvbildet av forsiktig nøysomhet, for troen på at vi er fornuftigere enn andre.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 197 By portraying Norwegians as close to nature, egalitarian, simple, and humble, these narratives of national identity counter the criticism that Norwegians face with regard to climate change and petroleum policies. [...] [T]hese discourses, which may seem trivial or unconnected to climate change, are in fact central to the process of socially organized denial. (140) Emphasizing Norwegian national identity is thus one strategy of denying a specifically Norwegian responsibility for global warming and its problematic consequences. Norwegian environmental activists and many NGOs have criticized the contradiction between appearance and reality of Norwegian humanitarian and environmental politics. The threats to both the climate and to Norwegian national identity originating from an economy mainly based on the extraction of fossil fuels have in recent years even been addressed in several works of literary fiction. Jostein Gaarder’s young-adult novel Anna - A Fable about the Planet’s Climate and Environment (Anna. En fabel om klodens klima og miljø, 2013), for example, contains clear criticism of the Norwegian oil industry and of overconsumption. It can be read as a call for global and intergenerational justice in light of the threats emanating from climate change. Bård Isdahl’s novel Accident (Havari, 2013), set a few decades in the future, likewise addresses disaster and migration from poor countries forced by climate change and focuses in particular on the Norwegian fossil fuel industry’s responsibility. Climate change also forms a very discernable element in Chimera’s setting. The scientists at CORAC are worried about a drastic decrease in biodiversity due to global warming (107) and they consider the future of all life to be “highly insecure” 5 (96). Flora and fauna in the forest in Virunga National Park are described as being visibly affected by changes in weather patterns. Since there is too little rain, most of the environment in which the research station is located consists of “decayed, withered and withering forest” (55). 6 The few larger land mammals that can still be found there are emaciated and weakened because of a lack of prey (93). Despite the main setting being the Congolese rainforest, most representations of environmental degradation in the novel refer to the planet’s northern regions. The Finnish woods and waters are in bad condition because of pollution and climate change (385-386). Many important fish species in the North Sea have almost vanished, and this has, in turn, led to the extinction of several once large bird populations (168). The vegetation in Alaska is described as “crippled, brown and miserable” 7 (389). According to the narrator, the climatic changes are nowhere as visible as in the Arctic regions (389). 5 “[H]øyst usikker.” 6 “[R]åtten, inntørket og visnende skog.” 7 “[F]orkrøplet, brun og ynkelig.” R EINHARD H ENNIG 198 “One of the world’s most species-rich Arctic ecosystems” 8 (168), the sea off the coast of British Columbia, has already collapsed. In the Arctic Ocean and around Svalbard - an Arctic archipelago that belongs to Norway - the cod stocks are declining dramatically (168). The third-person narrator’s focus switches between several of the employees at the research station. However, the perspective of Karl Iver Lyngvin, who is the only Norwegian among the novel’s characters, dominates clearly. Lyngvin is a stereotypical Norwegian in so far as he despises urban life and is devoted to friluftsliv. His greatest wish is “to be allowed to spend his entire life out in nature” 9 (95). Already in his youth he enjoyed “the solitude during the long tours around in the Norwegian alpine world, both in summer and in winter” 10 (186) and even during his student days he avoided the city and took his books with him into the woods (186). Later, Lyngvin worked a long time as a ranger in the Norwegian Femundsmarka national park. For him, Femundsmarka is “a landscape that he loved and that he never grew tired of” 11 (74), and he “wished that the calm and happiness that he felt in this landscape would never end” 12 (94). When he later on visits Femundsmarka once again, he enjoys “the fresh mountain air” 13 (383) and remembers all the activities he formerly used to pursue there. This specifically Nordic landscape with “the stones, the birch slopes, the reindeer herds, the mountain trout and the blueberry scrub” 14 (94) and the friluftsliv possible in it refer plainly to nature as a central element of Norwegian national identity. Femundsmarka functions in the novel as a sort of ‘Holy Land’ that pars pro toto represents Norway’s nature in its entirety. Yet even this place is clearly endangered through climate change: The crowberries there are no longer pollinated, since bees and bumblebees have vanished (94-95). Brooks and rivers have run dry and the fish stocks have vanished. Occasionally, extreme rainfalls cause flooding and soil erosion, making the national park less appealing to tourists who want to practice friluftsliv in it: “The hiking trails in Femundsmarka were used less and less” 15 (74). This implies, then, that climate change not only threatens nature, but even Norwegian national culture through making one of the latter’s core elements all but impossible. 8 “[E]t av verdens mest artsrike arktiske økosystemer.” 9 “[Å] få tilbringe hele sitt liv ute i naturen.” 10 “[E]nsomheten i de lange turene rundt omkring i den norske fjellheimen, sommer som vinter.” 11 “[E]t landskap han elsket og aldri gikk lei av.” 12 “[Ø]nsket at roen og den lykken han følte i dette landskapet aldri skulle ta slutt.” 13 “[D]en friske fjellluften.” 14 “[S]teinene, bjørkeliene, reinsdyrflokkene, fjellørreten og blåbærlyngen.” 15 “Turstiene i Femundsmarka ble mindre og mindre brukt.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 199 Given the central role of friluftsliv in the construction of Norwegian national identity, it may not be surprising that the effects of climate change are viewed upon by many Norwegians as problematic. As Norgaard remarks: “Especially attuned to their natural environment, Norwegians are in a special position to notice climate change and to have their national identity affected by it. [...] What happens to a ski culture when there isn’t snow? ” (20). Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian professor of climate strategy and one of the co-authors of the first The Limits to Growth study in 1972, utters precisely such concern in his recent book 2052. A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (2012). In a paragraph titled “Will the Climate Problem Hurt Us? ,” he mourns that winter temperatures in the Oslo region (where he is living) already have gone up considerably and that thus the opportunities for cross-country skiing in the forests surrounding the city have been greatly reduced since 1986: “One-half of the Oslo winter is gone, sacrificed on the altar of climate change” and this generates “a longing, among the grown-ups, for the good old days” (242). Randers even expresses concern that due to climate change, ecosystem degradation and population growth, virtual reality will increasingly supersede ‘real’ experience of nature (176-177). Norgaard calls the emphasis on a special connection of Norwegians to nature “a tool of innocence” (149). Practicing friluftsliv functioned for her interviewees as a way of blocking out their own responsibility for global warming and demonstrating “that despite their rising materialism, petroleum development, and wealth, they too are pure, naturally good, even ‘natural’ environmentalists” (149). In Chimera, references to friluftsliv similarly serve to imply Norwegian innocence. Norwegian nature and friluftsliv are described in the novel as threatened by climate change in order to portray Norwegians and their national identity as victims of climate change. While it certainly is legitimate to point out that global warming affects even Norway, in Chimera its causes - such as the burning of fossil fuels - are never mentioned, and the victimization of Norwegians in the novel therefore functions as a strategy of implicatory denial. The reality of climate change is thus not denied in Chimera. On the contrary, it is emphasized strongly, yet the main purpose of this emphasis is - somewhat paradoxically - to detract attention from Norwegians’ own responsibility for global warming and from any obligation following from it to commit to mitigation. Strategy 2: Hoping for Technological Quick-Fixes Despite the novel’s emphasis on its detrimental effects, climate change appears in Chimera as a problem that can be solved with relative ease by technological means. Both the narrator and the central characters emphasize again and again that large-scale technological means exist to fight global R EINHARD H ENNIG 200 warming: Humankind, “with its constantly more advanced technology” 16 (169), can counteract any kind of climatic change, even the emergence of a new ice age. As an example already practiced successfully at the story’s future level, the covering of Sahara and of Arctic and Antarctic regions with a metal foil reflecting sunlight is mentioned (69-70). This refers to ‘solar radiation management,’ one of several ideas for so-called geo-engineering presently discussed as possible technological measures for deliberately altering earth’s climate (see Anshelm and Hansson). One of the critiques that hitherto have been brought forward against the Anthropocene concept is that it may encourage inappropriate technological optimism, including the belief “that humans will be able to create painless technological fixes through massive geo-engineering projects” (LeCain 4). Ideas of geo-engineering have indeed received increasing prominence in recent years (Steffen et al. 858). Yet most environmentalists reject such methods, pointing at the immense risks involved and considering them as yet another way of legitimizing business-as-usual with regard to the burning of fossil fuels. Proposing ideas for geo-engineering can be regarded as a strategy of implicatory climate change denial, since it suggests that mitigating measures (such as a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions) are either unrealistic and not to be expected in time, or generally unnecessary since large-scale technological solutions will take care of the problem anyway. In Norway, not geo-engineering as such, but another supposed technological ‘wonder-weapon’ has functioned in a very similar way in public debate in recent years: the so called carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). This technique is supposed to capture CO 2 emissions at for example power plants and refineries and to store them underground instead of releasing them into the atmosphere. If the technology would work and be available at a reasonable price, therefore, continued use of fossil fuels would be unproblematic with regard to the climate. Randers deems CCS to be a good solution not only for the reduction of CO 2 emissions from conventional plants but also one that could be used in wood-fired power plants, making it possible to actually remove CO 2 from the atmosphere. Yet even he admits that it is unlikely that this technology will be applied on a broad scale in the near future (117). Indeed the Norwegian government announced in 2014 that the attempt to implement CCS in a gas power plant at Mongstad in southern Norway would be cancelled because it had proven to be too expensive (Kongsnes 27). The Mongstad project had previously been referred to by the then Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg as a legitimization for the further extraction of fossil fuels. Stoltenberg even called it Norway’s “moon landing” in his New Year’s speech in 2007 (quoted in Swensen 334). He and other supporters of the project claimed that Norway, through developing 16 “[M]ed sin stadig mer avanserte teknologi.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 201 and providing the technology for CCS, would soon be contributing to the reduction of CO 2 emissions worldwide. Representatives of environmental organizations such as Greenpeace Norway argued, however, that relying on CCS was a way of prolonging the extraction and use of fossil fuels instead of investing in energy efficiency and renewable energies (Swensen 343-345). Washington and Cook regard CCS as a means to make it possible for governments to continue business-as-usual instead of committing to mitigation, and thus as a form of implicatory climate change denial (146-8). Interpreted against this background, the repeated emphasis in Chimera that the climate problem can easily be solved through geo-engineering or other technological means that yet need to be developed is also a strategy of implicatory denial: No changes in current economic structures and resource use are necessary, since the resulting emissions can be dealt with later. In the novel’s Norwegian context, this implies that the country’s economy can continue to be based on fossil fuels. Strategy 3: Denying the Scientific Consensus on Anthropogenic Climate Change In Chimera, implicatory denial is augmented by a strategy of literal denial. The scientists at CORAC are not convinced that global warming indeed is anthropogenic. The station’s leader, de Payens, states, for example, that “whether the temperature rise we’ve had during the last years is man-made or not is an irrelevant question. The main point is that it is a fact. Our planet has at all times had dramatic temperature fluctuations” 17 (70; emphasis in the original). Lyngvin likewise refuses to make up his mind concerning the question whether or not global warming is anthropogenic “or caused by other things” 18 (95), and the narrator repeats and expands de Payen’s statement, emphasizing that the causes of global warming are irrelevant and that there has always been a variety of ‘natural’ reasons for changes in global temperature (169). This may not seem to be climate change denial at first sight, since the reality of global warming and even the necessity of counteracting it (at least by technological means) are acknowledged. The implications of an indetermination concerning the causes of global warming are, however, considerable: If it is not clear whether human activities are altering the climate are not, then anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (and thus those who produce them) 17 “Om den temperaturøkningen vi har hatt de siste årene er menneskeskapt eller ikke, er et uvesentlig spørsmål. Hovedsaken er at det er et faktum. Kloden vår har til alle tider hatt dramatiske temperatursvingninger.” 18 “[E]ller skyldtes andre ting.” R EINHARD H ENNIG 202 are possibly not even responsible for global warming. 19 Referring to climatic changes and fluctuations in the past and deducing from them that even the current changes must be natural is a very popular (although logically flawed) argument among climate change deniers (Washington and Cook 50-51). Pointing out possible natural origins is thus supposed to cast doubt on whether or not any changes to business-as-usual are necessary. That future scientists researching the effects of climate change are portrayed in Chimera as being not sure about its causes literally denies today’s de facto scientific consensus about the mainly anthropogenic origins of global warming. Therefore, through referring to large-scale future technological solutions on the one hand, and creating doubt concerning the causes of climate change on the other hand, any particular responsibility of countries with relatively high greenhouse gas emissions - such as Norway - is denied in the novel. Strategy 4: Blaming Others Norgaard found in her interviews with Norwegians that a common strategy to minimize their individual responsibility for global warming was to blame others - mainly through pointing out that other countries - especially the U.S. - had much higher emissions than Norway with its relatively small population of about five million (142 and 163-167). Such “perspectival selectivity” (163) combined with distraction is the main strategy of climate change denial pursued in Chimera. The worth of technological solutions to climate change is thus relativized through the view held by the scientists of CORAC that the crucial question concerning the planet’s future is not climate change, but rather human population growth (346). According to de Payens, since climate change is not “the real problem” 20 (71), it would not be of any use to stabilize the CO 2 content of the atmosphere. An ornithologist states in a similar way that a world in which the climate problem was solved but in which ten to twelve billion humans lived would nevertheless unavoidably be heading for disaster (179). “Waste separation” 21 (180; emphasis in the original) would not help anything against this. 19 That Lyngvin at one point in the story complains that “we’ve not heard of one single really effective and environmentally friendly alternative to oil and coal for stopping the warming of the planet” (“vi har ikke hørt om et eneste virkelig, effektivt og miljøvennlig alternativ til olje eller kull for å stanse opphetningen av kloden,” 316; emphasis in the original) is in contradiction to his previously stated indetermination concerning the causes of global warming (and a rather strange claim considering that technologies for utilizing wind power, solar energy, etc. already exist today). 20 “[D]et virkelige problemet.” 21 “[K]ildesortering.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 203 This ironic depreciation of conventional approaches to environmental protection implies that the removal of symptoms of the ecological crisis will not be of any use, and that only tackling its roots can lead to a real solution. It is made explicitly clear by the narrator that human population growth constitutes this actual cause of all environmental problems: “the climate crisis they were having now, the destruction of rainforests, that the Earth’s biological diversity was seriously threatened” 22 (398). Therefore the solution inevitably aims at a drastic reduction of human beings on earth. The theory “that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man” and that therefore the number of humans necessarily is limited through famines, epidemics and wars, goes back to Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798 (Malthus 5). Malthus considers this ‘principle’ to be a natural law and draws the conclusion that it would be wrong to attempt diminishing the hardships of the poor, since this only would lead to an even higher fertility rate and as a consequence would produce even worse suffering (31-32). He regards the persistence of social inequality and thus of the established ownership structures in society even as mandatory for the protection of civilization (111-112). Positions inspired by Malthus that emphasize - much more than Malthus did himself - the harm that population growth does to the environment spread widely in the 1960s. The most prominent advocate of this neo- Malthusianism was the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 published the bestseller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich claims that it will by no means be possible to feed the fast-growing populations of the developing countries and that therefore the starvation of hundreds of millions of humans in the near future will be unavoidable (xi). He considers every form of environmental damage to be a consequence of population growth: “Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide - all can be traced easily to too many people” (66-67; emphasis in the original). A substantial enlargement of areas under cultivation and thus of food production - so that the latter would conform to the growth of world population - is impossible according to Ehrlich (96 and 108). He therefore suggests to strictly regulate population growth in the U.S. through incentives, penalties, education and possibly mass sterilization, and to terminate all food deliveries to developing countries with already too large populations, even though hunger catastrophes would then have to be expected there (135-139 and 160). After the death of those who cannot be fed, demographers 22 “Klimakrisen de hadde nå, ødeleggelsene av regnskogene, at Jordens artsmangfold var alvorlig truet.” R EINHARD H ENNIG 204 should determine the proper population size of each and every country in relation to its natural resources (164). In Chimera, reflections concerning the predicted further strong growth of human populations in many African countries can be found already in the very first chapter. The writer - who is rather explicitly identified as Nygårdshaug himself and who is the central character in this chapter - tries to envision the future of the people there, but then states: “You see nothing, absolutely nothing” 23 (27). When spotting some farm hands, he calls them “zombies” 24 (29) and, thus, implies the unavoidable death of these people that is already looming ahead in the present. On the story’s future level, the report of an unnamed ‘expert’ is quoted extensively, who refers explicitly to Malthus and Ehrlich and deduces his analysis of the world’s ecological situation from their views. According to him, the production of ever more food for humans and the cultivation of plants for the production of biofuel cause mass species extinction (126), which he calls a “biological holocaust” 25 (125). Like Malthus and Ehrlich, he does not see an unequal distribution of resources and consumption levels as the basic problem, but holds instead that the size of human populations must be consistent with “the ecology, the biodiversity and carrying capacity of every single country” 26 (124). Every increase in food production for humans would - irrespectively of any technological innovations - inevitably lead to further species extinction. Therefore there is “a deep and serious contradiction between fulfilling every individual human’s minimum demand for food and quality of living and the protection of the planet’s diversity of those species that precisely form the precondition for all life here on this planet” 27 (127). “Irrefutable expertise” 28 (127) would moreover show that “the entire system, large parts of the world’s food production, are facing a complete collapse” 29 (127), since the nonrenewable resource phosphor - necessary for the production of artificial fertilizer - would soon be depleted. The premises of this ‘expertise’ are shared by both the research station’s head, de Payens, and by the majority of the scientists working there. De Payens states that consumption, waste and pollution would further increase through a continuously growing world population (71). Lyngvin’s own nightmare scenario are “cities that grew and swelled up in tremendous 23 “Du ser ingenting, absolutt ingenting.” 24 “[Z]ombier.” 25 “[B]iologiske holocaust.” 26 “[H]vert enkelt lands økologi, bio-mangfold og bærekraft.” 27 “[E]n dyp og alvorlig motsetning mellom det å ivareta ethvert menneskes krav på et minimum av mat og livskvalitet og det å bevare klodens mangfold av de arter som nettopp er forutsetningen for alt liv her på kloden.” 28 “[D]en ugjendrivelige ekspertisen.” 29 “[H]ele systemet, store deler av verdens matvareproduksjon står overfor en fullstendig kollaps.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 205 speed” 30 (74) and “humans who tore to pieces and destroyed ever more of our pristine, beautiful nature” 31 (74). In his view, the inevitable consequence of population growth will be future resource scarcity: “When the oil ran out, the production of artificial fertilizer ended because of a lack of phosphor, and the number of the planet’s inhabitants came close to ten billion, a catastrophe of scary dimensions would be unavoidable” 32 (398). The virus appears in this context as “the remedy that can save this tormented planet” 33 (218). That its application in order to kill billions of people is the only possible conclusion is repeatedly made clear in the novel, for “the alternative was far worse” 34 (398), that is, “a world in pain, a dark future in a slowly burning and suffering century, with riots, wars, hardship, hunger and slow death” 35 (414). The virus is “the only possible escape” 36 (396) from this catastrophic scenario. Although Nygårdshaug claimed that Dan Brown in his novel Inferno had ‘stolen’ from Chimera the idea of deliberately using a virus to reduce overpopulation (quoted in Bjørnskau), this idea is not in the least new. It was already envisioned in quite some detail as a possible future scenario in Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (70-71), and has been frequently adopted in literature and TV, for example in the Star Trek episode The Mark of Gideon (1969) and in the German writer Carl Amery’s novel The Fall of the City of Passau (Der Untergang der Stadt Passau, 1975). A more recent example (which, however, also predates Chimera) is Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003). Randers likewise mentions in 2052 that a pandemic disease killing at least two billion people may be unlikely, but would at the same time constitute “a solution to the climate problem” (252). What Chimera also has in common with many other neo-Malthusian scenarios is that through addressing world population, a seemingly global approach to environmental questions is taken. The necessity of such an approach has been repeatedly emphasized with regard to the Anthropocene concept, which is supposed to require humans to adopt a truly global perspective not only on environmental change but also on humans as a species and the ways in which this species is changing the earth (e.g. Chakrabarty 213). According to Timothy Clark, the Anthropocene “represents, for the first 30 “Byer som vokste og este ut i voldsomt tempo.” 31 “[M]ennesker som tråkket i stykker og ødela stadig mer av vår opprinnelige, vakre natur.” 32 “Når oljen tok slutt, kunstgjødselproduksjonen opphørte på grunn av mangel på fosfor og klodens innbygertall nærmet seg ti milliarder, ville en katastrofe med uhyggelige dimensjoner være uunngåelig.” 33 “[M]iddelet som kan redde denne forpinte kloden.” 34 “[A]lternativet var langt verre.” 35 “[E]n verden i smerte, en mørk fremtid i et langsomt brennende og lidende århundre, med oppstand, kriger, nød, sult og langsom død.” 36 “[D]en eneste mulige utveien.” R EINHARD H ENNIG 206 time, the demand made upon a species consciously to consider its impact, as a whole and as a natural/ physical force, upon the whole planet - the advent of a kind of new, totalizing reflexivity as a species” (86). Yet such calls for a ‘species perspective’ have also been criticized for blurring uneven social and national responsibilities for the problematic developments that led to the Anthropocene, and also for neglecting the fact that the negative effects of climate change do not equally affect the entire human species, but rather hit those who are the least responsible for them the hardest. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, for example, point out that it was only a very small part of the human species - those capitalists who had the necessary financial means - who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, started and carried out the transition to fossil fuel based economies. They emphasize also that enormous differences concerning the amounts of greenhouse gas emissions exist both historically and contemporarily between nations and within individual societies (64). David Satterthwaite argues that the global increase in greenhouse gas emissions has been and continues to be driven much more by increases in consumption of the privileged than by population growth, and that if emissions were calculated based on per capita consumption, the wealthiest fifth of world population would be responsible for more than 80% of all greenhouse gas emissions, while the poorest fifth would only account for around 1% of global emissions (563). Against this background, Malm and Hornborg state that “species-thinking on climate change is conducive to mystification and political paralysis. It cannot serve as a basis for challenging the vested interests of business-as-usual” (67). In Chimera, however, responsibility for all kinds of environmental problems is frequently traced to the species level. The above mentioned ‘expert’ states for example that environmentally harmful soy monocultures in Brazil are “supplying the world’s rising population with food” 37 (126) and that giant sugar cane plantations (also in Brazil) for which rainforests are destroyed serve to produce biodiesel for “keeping the world’s - again growing - fleet of cars in motion” 38 (126). In this way, “the world” and thus all human beings are made equally responsible for the consumption of soy and biodiesel, without mentioning, for example, that around three quarters of the world’s soy production is used as animal feed in meat production and only about 6% directly as food for humans (WWF 14-15) - even though vegetarian diets could feed many more people while having a considerably lower environmental impact (Reijnders and Soret 665S). Meat is, moreover, only consumed by those parts of humanity that can afford it - such as Norwegians. Imports of soy for use in meat production and fish farming in Norway have doubled between 2004 and 2013 (with more than 80% of that soy 37 “[F]orsyner verdens stigende befolkning med mat.” 38 “[H]olde verdens - igjen stigende - bilpark i bevegelse.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 207 coming from Brazil; Lindahl 3), while Norwegian meat consumption in the same period went up from the already very high level of 70 kg per person per year in 2004 to 77 kg in 2013 (Helsedirektoratet 6). The ‘expert’ in Chimera, however, seems to be unaware of such figures. Through blaming the entire human species equally for environmental problems, any differences in financial means and consumption patterns between the privileged and the poor parts of humanity are obliterated. The lifestyle of the rich is never put into the context of environmental degradation. A change of lifestyles and reduction in consumption are not mentioned as options in the novel. Quite the contrary happens: The scientists at CORAC are themselves living in considerable luxury, with “all the conveniences that the researchers could wish for” 39 (57), including an obviously anything but vegetarian diet of the highest culinary standards, as is repeatedly emphasized (228 and 282). Rich societies with high levels of consumption, such as the Norwegian, are, thus, not particularly held accountable for environmental degradation in Chimera, while countries such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are explicitly exposed as places of excessive population growth (27 and 310) and are thus (following the ‘scientific’ argumentation of the above mentioned ‘expert’) made responsible for global environmental degradation and species extinction. That these are countries ranking at the opposite end of the United Nations Human Development Index than Norway and having much lower per capita consumption and emission rates than the Global North is not mentioned once in Chimera. An implied message is then, in turn, that Norway with its small population has - if any - only a vanishingly small coresponsibility for environmental problems. Blaming population growth in poor countries for environmental degradation as it is done in Chimera can thus be interpreted as a strategy of denying an extraordinary high responsibility of the privileged for climate change. Presenting the deliberate extinguishing of a large part of humanity through a virus as the only solution to environmental problems distracts attention from any approaches that involve questions of social and global justice and that argue for changes in lifestyles and consumption behavior. Moreover, since a virus epidemic on such a scale seems to be at least highly unlikely and since there is no ethically acceptable ad hoc way of reducing human population sizes, the conclusions drawn in Chimera with regard to the solution of environmental problems are ultimately pointless. Washington and Cook consider distraction and blameshifting as forms of implicatory denial serving to divert attention from one’s own responsibility with regard to climate change (99). In Chimera, however, all the main characters agree that climate change is not the ‘real’ problem and that it should be 39 “[A]lle de bekvemmeligheter forskerne kunne ønske seg.” R EINHARD H ENNIG 208 neglected in order to focus instead on human population growth. This is rather a strategy belonging to the category of interpretative denial, since it acknowledges climate change per se, but argues that there actually is no need or no possibility to deal with it at present, since other issues need to be prioritized. 40 Interestingly, in Chimera, environmental degradation caused by population growth is discursively linked to a hostility against certain religions, whose members are accused of opposing “birth control” 41 (128). De Payens blames in particular Catholic and Muslim countries for preventing the adopting of effective environmental protection measures on a global scale, and calls Catholicism and Islam in this context a “medieval superstition” 42 (72). According to one zoologist, Muslims have “never understood how the real cosmos functioned” 43 (408) and are mentally unable to leave their ‘superstition’ behind. In this way, again there is a scapegoat. It is not the ethnic Norwegians - a huge majority of whom still are members of the Lutheran state church while an increasing number are not part of any religious community at all - but rather the ‘unenlightened’ populations of other countries and minority groups such as Muslims living in Norway who cause environmental problems. It is them and their unimpeded proliferation that need to be dealt with - preferably through some kind of “Endlösung” (398), as the application of the virus is explicitly called by one of the scientists in Chimera. This scapegoating directed against foreigners and national minorities, again, serves as a strategy of denying responsibility of ethnic Norwegians for climate change. Strategy 5: Hoping for Authoritarian and Totalitarian Rule Chimera also contains criticism against an alleged inability of international organizations, such as the United Nations, to initialize effective measures for solving environmental problems. The fictitious UN organization IGLOO, which in the novel theoretically would have the power and the means to decide about solutions, frequently acts too late, if at all, because of time- 40 Even Washington and Cook, in their study of climate change denial, call overpopulation “the only problem more ‘wicked’ than climate change” (115), without, however, providing any substantial evidence for this claim. Other than in the case of anthropogenic global warming, there is no scientific consensus that human population growth necessarily “exacerbates all the other environmental problems, including climate change” (116), as they suggest. It could thus be said that Washington and Cook themselves through such statements come close to a form of interpretative climate change denial. 41 “[F]ødselsbegrensende tiltak.” 42 “[M]iddelaldersk overtro.” 43 “[A]ldri skjønt hvordan det virkelige kosmos fungerte.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 209 consuming inner disputes (59). In de Payen’s eyes, a main impediment within IGLOO is that decisions are made by the principle of majority rule: “There were unfortunately no actions that could be taken without a majority vote, and a majority for something that craved considerable efforts both with regard to capital and unselfish willingness to sacrifice occurred rarely, all too rarely” 44 (128). According to the narrator, the few measures already taken are completely insufficient, yet improvements are not to be expected: Disputes, useless discussions, sly reasoning, demand for special treatment, exceptions and dispensations used up almost all time in those institutions that were supposed to administrate the planet’s future. Yet the worst thing was that a holistic analysis was absent, one which included all those factors upon which a planet with life was dependent to remain viable in the unforeseeable future. 45 (170) The novel thus ties in discursively with an ecologically motivated criticism of democracy and an endorsement of authoritarian rule that is also advocated by Randers. The latter argues in a very similar way that solving the climate problem could be done relatively easily, yet “only if the voters and rulers actually want to do it, which is rarely the case” (326). In Randers’ view, democratic decision-making processes that involve weighing of interests and dissent take too much time, given the urgency of ecological problems. Therefore, “a stronger state” (30) that can act before it is too late would be necessary - “a government that would act in the long-term interest of the people, even if they do not agree in the short-term” (249). It is thus only “forwardlooking authoritarian regimes that have the liberty to consult more rarely with their populations” (166) who can deal properly with global ecological problems. Randers’ conclusion is that it would be the best for the future wellbeing of humanity “if a benevolent dictator took control” (239) and enforced the necessary measures without needing to take into consideration the shortterm interests that, according to Randers, always dominate democracies. In Chimera, de Payens is precisely such a benevolent dictator, who, moreover, possesses the “holistic view” that the narrator claims is absent in international organizations. He is portrayed as an older, high-ranking ecologist and biologist (68), whose outward appearance “could be reminiscent of a medieval Knight Templar” 46 (69). That de Payens, moreover, has the same last name as the founder of the Knight Templars, Hugues de Payens, charac- 44 “Dessverre var det ingen tiltak som kunne iverksettes uten en flertallsbeslutning, og flertall for noe som krevde betydelige anstrengelser både hva kapital og uselvisk offervilje angikk, forekom sjelden, altfor sjelden.” 45 “Krangel, ørkesløse diskusjoner, finurlig argumentasjon, krav om særbehandling, unntak og dispensasjoner tok nesten all tid i de organene som skulle forvalte klodens fremtid. Men verst var det at en helhetlig analyse som inkluderte alle de faktorene en klode med liv var avhengig av for å kunne fortsette å være levedyktig i uoverskuelig fremtid, manglet.” 46 “[K]unne minne om en middelaldersk tempelridder.” R EINHARD H ENNIG 210 terizes him as a secular pendant of this historical person: Just like the medieval de Payens who founded the Knights Templars for the protection of Christian pilgrims, the novel’s de Payens leads the scientists in protecting the environment. He is regarded by the others as an excellent leader with enormous knowledge and farsightedness (338). Even in difficult situations he remains calm and self-controlled (327), and his authority seems to be undisputed at the research station (106). Since he, as the only one among the scientists, is in frequent contact with the outside world, it is him who receives information first and who chooses what he conveys to the others (103). He makes even decisions with enormous consequences entirely alone and is in charge of their implementation, including the targeted distribution of the virus. He informs the leaders of other research stations about his plan, yet not as an idea to be discussed, but as a “fait accompli” (378). Through the motif of a headband on which jaguars are depicted, de Payens is linked to the virologist Xtolec, from whom he states to have received the headband (378). Xtolec is introduced in Nygårdshaug’s preface and is frequently cited as a scientific authority throughout the novel. De Payens thus combines the roles of a rational scientist and of a strong, authoritarian leader. Therefore, he is not only able to analyze the situation correctly and to draw the right conclusions, but he can also enforce the actions he has recognized as necessary without involving democratic considerations and finding of compromise. Through his identification with the supposedly ‘real life’ scientific authority Xtolec, any doubt concerning his qualification to judge correctly on facts and circumstances is erased. Surprisingly, the anti-Islamic and authoritarian rhetoric in Chimera that through the character of de Payens is combined with a Knights Templar and crusader imagery was not commented upon by literary critics in Norway, although the novel was published in 2011, only a short time after the terrorist attacks by Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killing 77 people. Breivik (under the name Andrew Berwick) claimed in an anti-Islamic manifesto released on the day of the attacks to be a member of a renewed Order of the Temple that aimed at protecting Europe from a “Muslim invasion/ colonisation” (Berwick 827). According to Breivik, Muslims are conducting “demographic warfare” (825) against Western countries through mass-immigration combined with high birthrates. The idealization of authoritarian rule by ‘experts’ who do not shy away from violence against human beings, combined with neo-Malthusian views and an anti-Islamic rhetoric throughout the novel, thus shows very clear parallels to the mindset of Norwegian right-wing extremists such as Breivik. In the novel, however, this combination functions primarily as a strategy of implicatory climate change denial: While global warming is acknowledged as being problematic, it seems as though nothing could be done to mitigate it Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 211 within the current political system. Only if what Randers calls a “benevolent dictator” takes control, the necessary measures will be enforced. Following this logic, individuals can do nothing to mitigate global environmental problems, apart from transferring their political agency to ‘experts’ and to authoritarian or totalitarian rulers. With unrestricted rule by one ecologically minded dictator or authoritarian regime over the entire planet being more than unlikely to appear in time to prevent catastrophic climate change, however, this way of thinking - besides being highly problematic from a democratic and human rights perspective - is pointless and ultimately results in a denial of any individual responsibility for mitigating climate change. It rejects any attempts of mitigation because of their inherent complexity, and indefinitely defers any measures through suggesting that only a totalitarian all-in-one solution forced upon the world’s population from above could successfully deal with global environmental problems. Conclusion Chimera is a novel in which global warming plays a central role and that addresses it as a serious problem. Yet despite this, the text contains at least five different strategies of climate change denial. All of these serve to detract attention from any particular Norwegian responsibility with regard to greenhouse gas emissions, and to portray immediate mitigating measures as unnecessary or even impossible. These strategies range from literal denial (denying the scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming) via interpretative denial (stating that climate change is not the ‘real problem’ and instead blaming the poor and certain religions for all sorts of environmental degradation) to implicatory denial (portraying Norwegians and their national identity as innocent victims of climate change, suggesting that technological quick-fixes will be developed, and hoping for authoritarian or totalitarian rule in the future instead of committing to mitigating action in the present). Against my contention that Chimera propagates climate change denial could be objected that a novel is not a scientific text and that it, therefore, does not need to be scientifically accurate. Yet it is, on the other hand, very clear that Chimera contains political messages that are highlighted frequently both explicitly and implicitly throughout the entire text. As mentioned earlier, Nygårdshaug himself has described his authorship as politically motivated, and he has made clear that he shares the views uttered by the narrator and the central characters of Chimera. There can thus be little doubt that the novel indeed represents a political agenda. R EINHARD H ENNIG 212 Nygårdshaug has, moreover, claimed that “everything in the book is based on facts” 47 (Sætren 30), thus trying to add credibility to the fictional future scenario presented in Chimera. The frequent quotes from allegedly ‘scientific’ texts interspersed throughout the novel serve the same purpose. Yet, as I hopefully have been able to show, what in Chimera is presented as scientifically proven ‘truth’ is, in reality, not at all in accordance with the current scientific state of knowledge. With regard to the causes of climate change and other environmental issues, the novel’s scenario is instead based on ignorance and a distortion of actual science. It seems nevertheless that Nygårdshaug has been rather successful in convincing his primarily Norwegian audience of the credibility of the ecological ‘facts’ in Chimera and the conclusions drawn from them. Cathrine Krøger criticized the novel’s style in the newspaper Dagbladet, yet called Nygårdshaug an “environmental spearhead” 48 and praised the commitment she saw expressed in Chimera (Krøger 8). Other reviewers likewise highlighted that the novel was based on thorough research and represented an environmentally committed attitude (e.g. Lillehaug 16 and Oppedal 44). Tellingly, it was not a professional literary critic, but an employee of the environmental organization Naturvernforbundet, who, as the only reviewer of Chimera, at least raised some doubt concerning the claim that human population growth is the main cause of environmental degradation (Opdal 31). Yet, no reviewer commented upon the literal denial of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming in Chimera, or on the strategies of both interpretative and implicatory climate change denial in it. The book’s relative popularity in Norway can be deduced from the circumstance that it was nominated for the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize in 2011. It is unlikely that the climate change denial contained in Chimera would not have met substantial critique had it instead been put forward in a political debate or in a work of non-fiction. That, as part of a novel, readers let it pass without comment may indicate that strategies of climate change denial woven into works of fiction are less easily identifiable as what they are than when the same strategies are pursued in other genres or media. It is, thus, all the more important to bring to light such strategies in literary works and to make clear that they are part of an overall attempt of denying climate change that indeed constitutes the precise opposite of altruistic environmental and social commitment. Novels such as Chimera, State of Fear or Going Green do not constitute examples of a littérature engagée that enlightens its readership concerning important environmental issues. On the contrary: They are texts that contribute to the spreading of ignorance and that provide excuses for not acting on the actual causes of global environmental change. 47 “Alt i boka er basert på fakta.” 48 “[M]iljøforkemperen.” Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction 213 The impact of works of fiction on public opinion may be difficult to assess, yet it would be wrong to assume that they have none. At a time when distortion of facts and targeted misinformation are used as strategic tools for bringing climate change deniers into the highest political offices (see Lemos), literary critics cannot limit themselves to judging the aesthetic quality of literary works and to celebrating fiction’s potential to stir the imagination. They also need to be able to conduct critical assessments of the often highly problematic relation between fiction and fact, and be aware of the manifold ways in which literary fiction can function as a medium of denial. 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The Origins of the ‘Regime of Goodness’: Remapping the Cultural History of Norway. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2011. WWF. The Growth of Soy. Impacts and Solutions. WWFPanda.org2014. <http: / / wwf.panda.org/ what_we_do/ footprint/ agriculture/ soy/ soy report/ >. Web. 14 Febuary 2016. U RS B ÜTTNER Nature Makes History: Narrating Nature in Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s December In ancient times, people told stories in which natural powers appear figuratively, often as divine beings. In these stories, human beings make sacrifices in favor of nature or suffer from the deities’ wrath. People also narrated stories about divine humans miraculously fighting the natural powers. In all these stories, the natural powers are credited with agency. These stories share a conception of the world based on the interchange between humans and nature and shifts in constellations of domination. From the early Modern Age onwards, people told stories about nature in a different way as the conception of the world had changed fundamentally. The human subject has been coronated to be the only entity to have agency and to dominate nature by the virtue of creating causal relations (Riskin). However, this conception of the human dominion over nature has been brought to crisis over the last decades since the limits of human control over nature and the non-intentional consequences of human actions have become more and more apparent. Environmental degradation, the extinction of species, and climate change are the most significant indications of this crisis. Recent research argues that these developments, which cannot be overlooked anymore today, are anthropogenic (i.e. man-made). 1 They have already begun in the early Modern Age and have rapidly accelerated since the Industrial Revolution. Narratives about the global environmental crisis and, in particular, about climate change consequently also hinge on discourses about the relationship between humans and nature. While classic templates to narrate nature are mainly premised on the notion of the human domination of nature as I will show in the following, newer texts today offer alternative approaches - especially with respect to the concept of (non-human) agency - which might provide impulses for reconceptualizing the human attitude towards nature. The philosopher Charles Taylor systematically links conceptions of the world to narration. He argues that people’s self-images and imaginations of the world usually remain tacitly assumed. Being a sort of background, they provide context, define particular situations, and frame actions. However, 1 This is one reason why some scientists suggest to not consider our current geological age as still being part of the Holocene and proclaimed a new age, the ‘Anthropocene.’ U RS B ÜTTNER 218 these contextual frames are bound to more general ideas about how oneself exists in a particular world. Eventually, these ideas about existence gravitate towards cosmological and metaphysical attitudes and beliefs. Not all parts of one’s world view have to be coherently connected. Members of a culture share or at least have learned about common interpretative patterns and frames to a certain degree. That enables people to understand each other and to coordinate cooperative actions. In this way, these background assumptions are descriptive and normative at the same time as they entail a sense of how actions and processes normally and properly take place. People are usually not conscious of their background assumptions in a way that they can disclose their premises theoretically, but they are usually able to reveal them illustratively: in the form of narrations, images, or metaphors. Hence, Taylor calls these background assumptions “social imaginaries” (23-30). Adapting Taylor’s theoretical approach to humans’ behavior towards nature I want to speak of “natural imaginaries” (Büttner, “Naturbewältigung” 25-28). Furthermore, I claim that artworks, in contrast to the non-artistic modes of presentation Taylor mainly talks about, do not only illustrate background assumptions but can also reveal them as such. This capability allows art to criticize natural imaginaries. Artworks are able to indicate inherent issues and aporias of familiar ways of narrating nature and to tell stories depicting nature in unfamiliar ways. By their defamiliarization, they gain aesthetic benefit and offer alternative views. Therein lies art’s potential to exert influence on the humans’ attitude towards nature. The central problem of narrating nature in the Anthropocene seems to be connected to the question of agency. Hence, the first question I want to raise in my paper is: What constitutes a narration? Then I will proceed to my second question: What is agency? As I have shown at the beginning of this paper, agency is nothing one ‘has’ but a capability which entities are credited with. Thus, my third question is: Who endows which entity with agency and to whom is it denied for which reasons? This brings me to my forth and last questions: What are, in general, possible connections between the elements of a narration (subjects, objects etc.)? In order to answer these questions, I will turn towards Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s collaborative work December. 2 The German original came out in autumn 2010, the English translation by Martin Chalmers appeared two years later. The small book combines, as the subtitle says, 39 Pictures and 39 Stories. The 39 pictures are photographs taken by Richter which show winter sights of the snowy woods. Kluge accompanies each of Richter’s photos with a story. Every single day of the title-giving month is attributed a picture and a story (sometimes two at a time), but the stories are dated to different years. The collaboration developed during a winter vaca- 2 The collaboration was continued in Kluge and Richter’s Nachricht. Nature Makes History 219 tion that both spent at the same hotel. As Kluge recounts in an interview from 2010, both are almost same age and became aware of a shared interest in different modes of experiencing time. 3 Gerhard Richter, certainly one of Germany’s most famous artists, is wellknown as a painter, but not as a photographer. Nevertheless, photography plays an important role for his paintings. Many paintings use photography as a template and others are painted over photographs. Sometimes he stylizes the photograph into a painted icon, pointing beyond the motif itself. The effect these techniques produce is that it evokes notions of a certain historical or local referentiality and then instantaneously undermines it again. This interest in playing with referentiality on the one hand and with contiguity and potential temporal orders on the other can also be found in Richter’s contribution to December. His co-author Alexander Kluge was mainly known as a filmmaker and one of the main representatives of New German Cinema for a long time. Since the mid-1980s, he has been noted also as a producer of late-night cultural programs on private TV. Only since 2000, when he republished his previous literary work in two large volumes and then published a book comprised of his latest stories almost every other year, he has been perceived as a writer as well. Kluge writes stories, anywhere from a half page to a few pages in length, not seldom based on historical facts and often anecdotal. His literary repertoire consistently starts with him having a new idea on how to investigate questions like: How can history be told in a different way? How would history have changed, if one detail had been different? What could have happened, even if it actually did not happen? He continues to ask these questions in December as well. It can be observed that environmental issues and humans’ interactions with nature became more and more important to Kluge in the last few years. In December, he deals explicitly with climate change and deep time. In a first section, I will show how Richter’s photographs explore what makes a narration a narration while questioning what can be regarded as a natural event and what are regular occurrences. I continue in the second section with a narrative sketch where I explain how people usually try to avoid natural events by denying the natural powers’ agency and grant agency exclusively to intentional actors. I distinguish three types of narratives that are commonly used to do so: the in-depth-causal-analysis, the miracle story, and the teleological explanation. In a third section, I further discuss how Kluge reveals shortcomings and aporias in the different narrative types and offers alternatives. 3 On this issue see also Birkmeyer. U RS B ÜTTNER 220 Richter’s Photos At first sight, Richter’s photographs create the impression that he just took his camera on a winter walk. The sky on the winter’s day is grey and the light pale. It is not easy to guess what time it is. The photographs show different views of a snowy forest. None of them is very spectacular: Some of the photos detail the barely penetrable branches of trees which are heavily bent under the weight of snow. Others depict a hillside overgrown with greenbrown spruce trees, shimmering through white granulate. And others again capture how the landscape loses its contours, blurred by fog. Nothing happens in any of the photos, or more precisely, almost nothing: One single time, a deer jumps out of the undergrowth at the opposite hillside, discovers the photographer, stops, realizes there is no danger and disappears again into the woods. 4 The following photos in the series again show only snow and branches and branches and snow. Only nature, no humans. Towards the end of the book, the camera’s eye approaches inhabited areas. On the second-to-last picture, a 4 The image shows the photograph printed on page 70 in December. It is reprinted with the friendly permission of Gerhard Richter, who holds the copyright. Nature Makes History 221 house, still far away, can be spotted through two tree trunks. It is followed by a picture of a street with a fence and tire tracks leading out of the forest. In the interview mentioned above, Kluge states that Richter actually shot these photographs in December 2009 close to their vacation domicile in Sils- Maria in Switzerland, but not on a single day. He supposedly took each picture on a different day. It is not important whether or not this is true. In any case, Kluge’s statement draws the spectator’s attention to the artful arrangement of the images. Christmas is clearly marked as the peak on the December holiday calendar, for it is on Christmas Eve that the photographer encounters the deer. And on Christmas Eve, the focus also reaches its largest size and stays large for four days. Previously the focus had gradually changed from smaller to larger following no obvious rule, but without considerable jumps in size. Nearly the same motif appears on two, sometimes on three, and only one time on four pictures in a row. It is not unlikely that the photos with the same motif were taken immediately after each other. Even if the principles of the pictures’ succession cannot be figured out easily, it does not seem as if there were not any. To bring these impressions together, I want to refer to some ideas of Thierry de Duve’s almost classical essay on photography theory. The art critic distinguishes two coexisting yet mutually exclusive modes of perception of any photograph with regard to its temporality. According to de Duve, one can consider a photograph as an event or as a picture. In the first case, one assumes that time passes from one moment to the next and the camera’s eye bans some moments on film. The photo freezes certain moments and preserves them over time. These moments are apprehended as events. Since time keeps moving forward and each occurrence also takes time, the camera’s eye always takes the photo either too early or too late to capture the action as a whole. This way of looking at photographs entails a strong idea of referentiality. The second mode de Duve talks about, the picture mode, grants the photos their own temporality. The whole idea of linear time progression is omitted. Employing a term French philosopher Henri Bergson coined the photo’s temporality is ‘durée’; that means enduring present. Thus, de Duve can say the photos show “protracted life” (117). What they show is perceived as typical or recurring. Nothing surprising is happening on the images. They could have been taken at any time. In fact, it does not matter when exactly they were taken because their ontological status is pure virtuality in a Deleuzian sense. Looking at the photos in this way releases them from any reference function and refers them, if at all, to other pictures. To sum up the contrast between the two modes of perception, one could say in structuralist terms: The first mode (event) takes the single photo primarily as part of a syntagma, the second one (picture) takes the single photo as a U RS B ÜTTNER 222 paradigma. De Duve cleanly distinguishes between the two types as extreme poles of perception. He himself suggests this in his discussion of photographic proofs and memorial photos as particularly good illustrations for the perception of photographs as either an event or a picture. Usual perception lingers somewhere in between these two poles. Bearing de Duve’s conception in mind, I return to Richter’s photographs now. It seems that neither of these extreme positions de Duve outlined fits properly to Richter’s photographs. They do not show events, but they cannot be apprehended as proper pictures either. In the first case, both the succession of the calendar days of December and the rapprochement to inhabited areas in the end introduce a temporal order to the photos. Therefore, one would assume they provide the elements of a plot; these expectations, however, are disappointed. As mentioned above, the pictures show nearly interchangeable snowy winter landscapes and the only potential event is the appearance of a deer. But: Is the appearance of a deer in the woods really an event? Either Richter is ironically playing with the spectator’s expectations of an event or he wants to reveal that, in principle, natural processes cannot be adequately grasped in terms of human historic conceptions like ‘event.’ If the category of the event does not apply to Richter’s photographs, de Duve’s category of picture is similarly unsuitable. Taking the photographs as pictures would mean to emphasize that the book is simply entitled December and does not refer to the particular December of 2009, nor does it matter whether the photos were taken on one or over several days. When one perceives the photographs as paradigmatic, they show typical December sights. This impression, however, would be much stronger if Richter had kept to one single focus and a regular succession, as the mode of presentation would not distract the spectator’s attention. Understanding the largest focus as an indicator lets one assume that the most typical pictures of December are taken at Christmas. Certainly, iconic images of a Christmas tree, presents, and the whole family around a festive dinner table circulate through the cultural imagination in the Western world. Nevertheless, these images are perhaps the most distinctive but by no means the most representative of December on a whole. However, in terms of natural photography it does not matter whether it is Christmas or not. Seen in a sober light, Richter’s Christmas photographs cannot be distinguished from the other winter pictures in a way that allows the viewer to know anything about the day they were taken. Here again Richter plays with the spectator’s expectations. He questions background assumptions about regular processes and tempts the spectator’s desire for meaning and order. In the light of de Duve’s theoretical approach, Richter’s arrangement of the photographs turns out to be an investigation into different modes of possible connections between them. The arrangement is certainly more than Nature Makes History 223 a mere list where this photo and that photo are just held together by addition. The mode of presentation of the book introduces a timeline and by doing so suggests the photos’ temporal order, in the sense of a sequence of first this photo and then that. This strategy of presentation facilitates the transition from a syntagmatic addition to a narrative. However, the result still lacks the foremost feature qualifying a proper narrative: motivation. The spectator’s desire to ask why does this happen first and then that and not the other way round indicates this. A proper narrative provides an interpretation: It says this occurrence comes later because the other occurrence came first and not the other way around. There are two central ways to establish motivation: firstly, a strict physical causal explanation in terms of laws, and secondly, the attribution to an intentional decision (Koschorke 74-77). Richter gives certain hints with respect to explanation and intention in the photos’ subject matter as well as in the artistic way the photos are taken and presented, yet he withholds unambiguous motivations. Hence, the spectator is tempted to imaginatively complete the photos’ arrangement into a proper narrative. At the same time, Richter also suggests that the photos show the law-governed processes of nature and that there is nothing to narrate, since laws cannot be narrated and the pictures are only connected by their subject’s contiguity. Thus emerges the odd experience of Richter’s photos. They converge towards both of de Duve’s categories but never merge with one of them. Three Common Ways of Narrating Nature In a certain way, one could say, Kluge pursues the investigation exactly from where Richter ceases his. Before I move to Kluge’s stories, however, I have to explain how nature was and is usually narrated in order to analyze the way in which Kluge deviates from the norm and narrates it in an unusual way. I will start with the example of factual story telling, since narrative conventions become particularly apparent here. My key question here is: What is agency? Whoever or whatever has agency can make things happen. Making things happen implies that these things would not have happened otherwise. Only the kind of things which we assume to not happen inevitably can be perceived and narrated as an event - although they do not necessarily have to be (cf. Schmid 1-21). According to Schmid, an event means an occurrence perceived as a temporal discontinuity (20), since it seems to leave behind the habitual and expected course or even nature’s lawful organization. The impression of eventfulness results from occurrences that take place too suddenly or only very rarely and for which people do not have interpretative patterns to assess what is going on at once. Since people cannot interpret these occurrences, they cannot predict or control them either (Hampe 79-81). Having agency means being perceived as acting eventfully. U RS B ÜTTNER 224 Now, let me proceed to my third question: Who endows which entity with agency and to whom is it denied for which reasons? Whoever or whatever else that has agency is out of my control. That is the reason why people claim agency for themselves but tend to grant agency only very cautiously to others. If it is inevitable, as happens fairly often, people endow other humans with agency. However, people are much more reluctant to grant agency also to non-human entities. They try to avoid it whenever possible. They sometimes might grant agency to animals but not to wind and stones; only if they cannot disavow the impression that the processes of non-living nature appear as an event. If a potential natural event of such kind breaks into human history, it is therefore very often described as an “incident” or “accident.” These concepts step in as a negative form of agency when agency is missing. Occurrences are considered incidents, to use the more neutral term, if they intervene in an action sequence instead of being a human plan or decision. For that reason, they arouse a certain uneasiness and that is why people normally dislike incidents. This uneasiness has two sources: The first one is the experience of feeling disorientated and powerless. The philosopher Michael Hampe elaborates on this: Understanding [an occurrence] as an incident is a denial and a negative experience of the fact that things are not related with each other and that nothing can be done here. Obviously, living beings want neither to be exposed to mere coincidences nor to be victims of a higher power. What they want is to influence what happens to them so that things are determined by their behavior at least a little bit. This capabilty, however, has only someone who identifies cause-effect-relations and can get involved. (Hampe 21, Trans. Büttner) The second source of people’s uneasiness is the experience of feeling morally violated and not taken seriously. Regardless of whether natural occurrences do a favor or damage, they do not indicate any reason or rationality as to why and to whom they happen. People, however, usually expect any being credited with agency to have intention. Yet, nature seems to ‘refuse’ any answer to this question about intention. Even if there is no inherent meaning in natural processes, people often are not satisfied with nature’s silence and do not cease searching for a deeper meaning. From their point of view, not reacting seems to be a reaction of nature as well. In this sense, nature evokes the impression as if it ‘remains’ completely unimpressed by the people’s desire for responses and explanations. People feel left alone with their moral feelings and these feelings of gratitude or anger and despair do not find a proper addressee in nature. Correspondingly, compensation such as a refund or revenge and punishment, which might be perceived to be able to repair the now imbalanced order, are also not appropriate for the encounters with an ‘un-acting’ nature. If nature ‘insists’ on its entire lack of morality and Nature Makes History 225 therefore ‘evades’ any responsibility (Hampe 22-24, 89-90), people do not know what to do with their moral feelings and claims resulting from how nature ‘behaved’ towards them. Now, let me come to my forth question: What are, in general, possible connections between the elements of a narration? I will answer this question in two parts. First, I will outline three common types of narratives that make it possible to elude a lack of human agency, and second, I will show how and why Kluge uses them in an uncommon way. These three types of narrative are: the in-depth-causal-analysis, the miracle tale, and the teleological narrative. In their modern standard version all three types of narrative appoint the human being as the only subject of action and disavow all powers of nature. In so doing, they save people from any uneasiness. This approach, however, is not followed by Kluge. Just like the stories of ancient times, Kluge’s stories grant agency to nature. The first type of narrative solves the problem of human agency even before the natural event happens. The basic idea is that every event comes about in a causal chain which is, in principle, infinite and branches out into the past. Hence, an in-depth-causal-analysis can always go back further, before the natural event, eventually identifying a human causer and explaining the alleged natural event as a result of his or her action’s means or effects. How far one must go back depends on the chosen scientific, legal, moral or religious interpretative framework (Koselleck 124-125). It is not surprising that such a model of explanation can become very ramified and complex (Winiwarter and Knoll 115-146). The irritation caused by a natural event makes it ‘tellable’ as an event in the first place and, in return, the telling then consumes all the potential irritation. In a perfectly coherent cause-andreaction sequence, there is no place for incidental events anymore. Things go as they always go (Hampe 91-92, 108-109, 204-203). The second type of narrative occurs instantly in the moment when the natural event happens. It uses a different set of roles than the in-depth-causalanalysis which solely employs the roles of perpetrators and victims. Instead, it tells a story about miracles. A hero’s or heroine’s miraculous deeds cut off the causal chain of events and begin a new one. Thus, their deeds can be regarded as the counterpart to the discontinuity of a natural event in terms of human action. Telling a miracle story creates “over-coherence” within the narration as a whole because one can determine its narrative motivation for every single moment, as Albrecht Koschorke explains in his Cultural Narratology (80). Heroes and heroines, one could say, perform like humanincarnated incidents. When incidents break into the ordinary routines of everyday life, heroes and heroines fight them with likewise extraordinary powers that go far beyond what humans normally can do. Both, the natural event and the hero or heroine are able to suspend the laws of nature. Heroes U RS B ÜTTNER 226 and heroines create the rules themselves and are not subject to external rules. In earlier times, they embodied the divine in the world and, in modern times, they embody abstract principles of reason, virtue, and morals. Narrative charismatization of the hero or heroine demands the display of miraculous deeds that originate solely from his or her extraordinary personal abilities instead of depending on any extrinsic precondition. Their deed must be unquestionable, and in order to do so the tale of the hero or heroine utilizes internal focalization for him or her to gain the audience’s favor (Giesen 15- 25). The third and last narrative type unfolds after the natural event that is supposed to happen incidentally. It reveals that, in fact, it does not. In order to create this effect, this third narrative type is split into two points of view: that of the victim and one that is omniscient. Thereby, what seems to be incidental from the victim’s perspective turns out to be planned on a larger scale. The unforeseen event can be explained as an effect of a limited scope of perception. God has the omniscient view; from his point of view, the course of the world which is governed by his providence is useful and just. This very idea of different viewpoints has survived secularization. That is why this narrative type still persists in modernity (Koschorke 82-84), albeit with less religious overtones. With the benefit of hindsight, a natural event can turn out to be caused by a human action that is or is not justified. A storm tide ‘explains’ why an expensive dike has to be built or, if the dike had already been built, the storm tide ‘confirms’ the failure of the intervention protecting the coast. In a teleological interpretation, the natural event is either employed as a preceding cause for an action nor does it comply with the purpose the action is aimed at. The narration motivates the natural event as a ‘prearrangement’ or ‘extension’ of human action. Narrating supposed natural events this way changes them entirely: They are neither natural nor events anymore (Hampe 27, 43, 83, 100). Kluge’s Stories In December, Kluge ties together a multiplicity of stories in his typical manner. They are similar to calendar stories, dating from December 1 to 31, but the calendar years range from the last Ice Age dated 21,999 B.C. up to the the year 2010 A.D. This composition principle develops a dense weave of possible causal relations and repetitive moments. Kluge uses it skillfully to explore leeways and aporias of the three standard narratives introduced above. His aesthetic investigation is driven by the question: Why is agency distributed the way it is in these common narratives and what could be the alternative narrative structures? Nature Makes History 227 At present, the in-depth-causal-analysis is without a doubt the most important strategy in factual story telling to ‘disable’ the natural power’s agency. That is certainly the reason why Kluge attacks the in-depth-causalanalysis so vigorously and questions nearly all of its structural features, even causality itself. In some stories, he amazes the reader by turning the normal usage of the narrative the other way round, tracing back events in human history to their natural causes. In one story, for instance, Kluge reduces world history to a bodily history when he draws the reader’s attention to one of Napoleon’s teeth which had to be extracted shortly before his death. He stylizes the tooth as a hitherto neglected precondition of the Corsican’s military success: He had had this tooth before Toulon, in Italy, in Egypt. He had hardly noticed the individual parts of his body. For years his senses had been directed outwards. His toenails, his neck muscles, yet his heart and fingers (playing their part in a division of labour, hardly felt by him when they were healthy) had accompanied him on his campaigns. […] But he had never paid attention to the tooth. (Kluge and Richter, December 38-39) In this quote, Kluge reveals the narrative arbitrariness to the reader. The narrative cuts off the causal chain at the intentional deciding agent. Yet, the chain does not originate from the Emperor’s strong will but from a tiny part of his body, the tooth. In so doing, Kluge implicitly contests that a clear distinction between culture and nature can be drawn. Kluge takes this one step further when he shows that acting and experiencing are not only irresolvably intertwined in concrete situations but also on a categorical level. He investigates this issue with two stories about weather engineering. Until today, weather is considered to be one of the most important natural influences in everyday life, nevertheless, changes can only be predicted shortly in advance. As a result, weather engineering is still the ultimate phantasm of omnipotence and the dominance of nature. Diverse enterprises in weather engineering have had only very modest success until today (Fleming, Hamilton, Büttner “Art Meteorologie,” “Meteorologie”). In the story assigned to December 4, 1941, Kluge’s narrator describes the National Socialist’s dream of bringing about the final turn at the Eastern Front with the use of weather steering: There was a huge area of high pressure over the Atlantic with its centre to the south-west of Ireland. A weak ridge extended in a north-easterly direction over Scandinavia as far as the Arctic Ocean. It separated an extensive low-pressure area over Russia. At its base cold continental Arctic air mingled with cloud masses pushing up from the south. This was the causal chain which brought about the sudden cold spell of December 1941. According to weather researcher and meteorologist Dr. Hofmeister of the Potsdam Weather Station, by applying the principle of DYNAMIC METEOROLOGY the German forces could have been warned ten days beforehand. […] U RS B ÜTTNER 228 The school of dynamic meteorology pressed for ‘an active intervention in weather conditions.’ In order for that to happen, air squadrons would, if necessary, have to bomb cloud masses to a breadth and length of several hundred miles with dry ice and carbonic acid packs. That would only make sense if one knew in advance what such an active intervention set in motion. Dynamic meteorology came too late for the battles on the Eastern Front. (Kluge and Richter, December 7-8) 5 This story is fascinating since it presents a junction into an alternate possible world at a point of the causal chain which had never before been noticed as a real option to intervene. The natural winter environment in a time of war was assumed to be a ceteris paribus condition. Dr. Hofmeister, however, does not take it for granted anymore. From the reader’s point of view, Hofmeister’s future is already in the past as the whole story is told retrospectively. The time in which Hofmeister talks about what could have been done with weather engineering at the Eastern Front is already known to today’s readers as having passed and the war known to have been lost by Germany. Furthermore, as the narrator adds later, what Hofmeister believes to be the possibilities of dynamic meteorology exceeds its real capabilities at the time by far. Even though Hofmeister did not do anything and, hence, did not change history, the important point is that he believed in his capability to act. Thereby, what retrospectively seems as a non-action turns into an action in the historical moment. Kluge shows that whether something is regarded as an action or an experience exclusively depends on the point of view. A further story provides another good example for the claim that the ascription of action or experience is not restricted to single occurrences, since there are no single occurrences. Whatever happens always affects other processes, too. Hence controlling one process always exerts non-intentional influence on many other processes. Kluge demonstrates this with a story that takes place at the World Climate Congress 2009 in Copenhagen. Surprisingly, an agreement on saving the world’s climate has come within reach. But these hopes are dashed: [T]he representatives of the UN Climate Council shift their hopes. In their circles they say that the LITTLE ICE AGE which Planet Earth is still experiencing holds a quantity of cooling reserve, so that the date of the consequences of the warming caused by carbon dioxide and methane has been further put back. Yesterday’s assumptions have been revised. (Kluge and Richter, December 49) The story continues: Giovanni di Lorenzo, the German weekly’s Die Zeit editor-in-chief, draws a parallel between the World Climate Summit failure and The Hague’s Peace Conference fiasco in 1907 in his lead article. 5 Cf. Kluge and Richter (1). The same narrative strategy can be found in the December 1 story. It tells about a weapon to fight weather in the shape of winter-proof tanks modeled after a mammoth’s physiology. Nature Makes History 229 The story discloses the question of whether acting and experiencing is directed by strategic attributions. If the actual crisis is enduring, then there is no reason to panic and not to act can be the appropriate way to act. The story furthermore reveals how the effect of in-depth-causal-analysis changes from large to much smaller scales. In addition, it shows how the application of different scales is determined by the choice of aspect of a larger topic. Kluge’s text illustrates this in two ways: On the one hand, anthropogenic climate change is shown to be a relatively recent development in geo-chronological climate history. On the other, Di Lorenzo’s comparison defies being read as a simple association because it raises the question of long-term cyclical repetitions in history and its causes. 6 Up to this point, I discussed how nature’s non-action can be declared as an action (i.e. an intentional use of its capacity to act). However, Kluge radicalizes this idea by portraying any kind of action as non-action. For this purpose, he discusses three ‘evolutionary’ approaches to history in his texts. In one story attributed to December, 8, 1941, he portrays Horst Becker, a historian who employs Darwin’s theory to analyze fascist politics with regard to “short-time evolutions.” His question is this: How does the ONE CERTAINTY which leads to catastrophe develop from a muddled structure of uncertainties, while other uncertainties (‘possibilities’) simply dissipate? Boecker is working on a ‘Biological History of Evil.’ (Kluge and Richter, December 20) This story is followed by Kluge’s narrator reporting about two legal scholars in December 1941, discussing the following question: Has “freedom […] evolve[d] in such a way that it would better flourish in the REALM OF EVIL” or has “THE EVOLUTIONARY OPPORTUNITY OF EVIL […] not been great [enough yet]” (Kluge and Richter, December 23)? Eventually the reader learns that a biochemist who owns a transcript of the legal scholars’ dialogue today has calculated on his computer the capacity of Good and Bad under conditions of freedom. He comes to the conclusion that with an increasing degree of human or divine capacity for decision-making, then for lack of averageness, evil falls statistically behind (because arrogant, because extremely taxing, because unsociable). (Kluge and Richter, December 24) The biochemist’s evolutionary narrative provokes the human selfunderstanding of having a free will and the ability to decide morally by describing human history as if it was a natural process. Regrettably, Kluge only tells about evolutionary accounts on history but does not tell such an evolutionary history himself. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine the features 6 Cf. Kluge and Richter (84). In his December 29, 21.999 B.C. story, Kluge uses the change of scale and the repetition of structure in a similar, complimentary fashion. The Ice Age’s climate is reinterpreted only to become a daily weather forecast. U RS B ÜTTNER 230 of such a story. If human history was a natural process, there would be no intentional agents, and hence, no space for moral critique anymore. Since no one was able to act in a different way than he or she actually did, actions could not be traced back to intentional decisions anymore. One would not call them actions anymore, since they would have been completely determined by laws of nature. Hence, the moral categories ‘good’ and ‘evil’ could not be applied properly to the ‘actors’ any longer. They would only reflect what the historian or scientist understands as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ developments of history. Kluge has developed his critique of the in-depth-causal-analysis considerably far with this narrative about evolution. However, he surpasses the critique of the inherent moments of its structure and even deconstructs causality itself. This critique is more fundamental, since it questions the precondition of the whole narrative’s structure. In one story, Kluge shows that the cause-effect-relation often cannot be sharply distinguished from mere coincidence. On the calendar date of December 19, 2009, Kluge’s narrator notes: Twelve assistants of the US president, two budget chiefs and the White House national security advisor are preparing the largest budget in the history of the Pentagon, six hundred and thirty-six billion dollars. It must be ready for the following day. DURING THE NIGHT THE FIRST SNOW FALLS IN WASHINGTON. At 9 p.m. the president goes over to his family to eat supper. The security advisor leaves at midnight. The others work until five in the morning. When they come out of the White House by a side exit, the surroundings are snow-covered. It is a pleasure to step in the fresh snow. (Kluge and Richter, December 54) At first glance it seems that this short passage reports nothing unusual. It is part of the job of high officers in the US-administration to work through the night sometimes if an important law or act must be prepared for the next day. Yet, the reader will assume that if this story did not tell anything worth telling, Kluge would not have included it. By way of the typography the text gives a hint to the reader to draw closer attention the the details. The reason that makes the story worth telling must reside in the many details it mentions. There are two very remarkable details: First, the story deals with the greatest defense budget in the US history and second, the first snow has fallen, which is in all caps. The reader is then deceivingly encouraged to search for a causal relation between these two occurrences. However, as far as it is humanly possible to judge, there is no solution for this enigma. It is a feint Kluge strategically places in order to reveal to the reader that it is an unreasonable desire to find a relationship between unrelated occurrences and to frustrate this desire. Now that I have presented Kluge’s critique of the in-depth-causalanalysis, I will explore how Kluge engages with the other two narrative Nature Makes History 231 types. The complexity of Kluge’s critique again needs to be unfolded in several steps. However, in this second part, I will proceed much faster (without wanting to create the impression that this part is any less important). What Kluge does with the other two narrative types can be summarized in one essential claim, making it much easier to describe the structure of his argument. Kluge uses the miracle tale and the teleological explanation in a decisively different way than the in-depth-causal-analysis in the December collection. Today, miracles and final causes usually only play a marginal role in our science-based modern world. Kluge, however, discovers the particular appeal of these narrative types in their capabilities of telling alternate stories beyond causal explanations. They provide the possibility of restituting nature as an agentive force. In these narrative forms, nature can appear as a personification or as a principle. Thus it, or rather ‘he’ or ‘she,’ can become an equal counterpart to the human subject. I want to discuss only one miracle tale as an example that is very similar to several other stories in December. 7 In the text associated with the date of December 12, 2009, Kluge mentions that a river has undermined a railroad bridge in New Zealand. The bridge collapses and a fully loaded train falls several meters down. Afterwards the following dialogue takes place: - You exclude the possibility of sabotage? - Who would have carried it out? - You spoke earlier of the Wangachu River being ‘animated.’ The souls of Maori warriors whom the British colonial forces had killed diverted the masses of water towards the bridge piers. - People say that. To me it sounds fantastic. - But it’s noticeable that the accident occurred right in the middle of Advent, in the run-up to the most important Christian festival. What made the heathen souls think of that? - One can’t construct a conspiracy theory around every odd event. - But there’s no need for a conspiracy theory. - Why not? - Because souls living in the water have no need of a conspiracy. (Kluge and Richter, December 35-36) 7 Cf. Kluge and Richter, December 41-42, 76-78 and 86-90. The stories of December, 14, 2009, December, 26, 2004, and December, 30, 1940 follow the same pattern. The first story speculates whether the cosmological theory that a meteor’s impact brought life to planet earth does not prove false. The earth might have been already populated before the meteor collided into the planet and the impact only decimated a number of creatures. Hence, the story concludes, the impact can be identified with the myth of the giant Ymir, who was struck dead by a ‘fellow.’ The second story discusses whether the mud flow on Christmas in South America should be understood as the eradicated Indians’ latest revenge. And in the last story, two physicists who had fled from the National Socialists argue about ‘winter’s will’ and ‘summer’s will,’ whose interaction produces Good and Evil in history. U RS B ÜTTNER 232 Right at the beginning of this dialogue the interlocutors exclude man-madcauses. Instead of searching for someone responsible for the accident, one of the dialogue partners offers an interpretation deeply perplexing the other one. The first speaker insists confidently on her heterodox interpretation and defends it against external labels like “fantastic” or “conspiracy theory.” Her interpretation relies exclusively on the inherent logic and explanatory power of the story. She therefore employs the idea of a cosmological system of revenge not distinguishing between human and non-human agents. Even if Kluge introduces such ‘animistic’ explanatory patterns only as quotes, the frequency in which he does so indicates that he sees potential therein for unsettling common expectations. The explanation comprises subtle irony: Nature in the shape of the animated river turns out to be a figurative ‘hero’ being able to break the ‘laws of nature.’ Finally, I also want to turn the attention to Kluge’s use of teleological narratives. As said before, Kluge revises the in-depth-causal-analysis also by countering it with the teleological narrative structure to produce an alternative. In the text assigned to the date of December 3, 1931, Kluge describes a near-accident. 8 Hitler’s tipsy chauffeur almost collides with another car on an icy road. The text confronts the technical-rational explanation, “[o]nly another 15-16 inches and the two powerful vehicles would have collided on the icy surface with fatal consequences,” with this short dialogue: “It’s only thanks to Providence that the vehicles missed one another. / - What do you mean by Providence? ” (Kluge and Richter, December 5). In the same way like in the story about dynamic meteorology a non-event opens up another possible course of history. The implicit question in Kluge’s story is whether or not fascism could have been prevented in Germany, if Hitler had died in this car crash. Yet, the story goes beyond this question. Beyond any causal explanation the question about meaning arises, even if it remains open. Why did the icy surface in combination with the very physiologically described drunkenness not cause the accident? By referring to providence a classical religious answer is offered and immediately transformed ironically. The text does not pursue the idea of providence any further and the interjection remains a strange foreign body in a very technical description. Furthermore, todays reader would perhaps accept providence as an explanation if Hitler had died, but not if he had survived the crash. 8 There are more stories in December where Kluge experiments with this third type of narrative. None of them, however, deals with natural phenomena. Nature Makes History 233 Conclusion With his photographs in December, Richter explores the human desire to make sense of natural occurrences by employing narrative form. He does not favor a particular interpretation of nature but discloses that every interpretation encounters particular obstacles. To bypass these obstacles, each interpretation produces its own shortcomings. They are inevitable. Therefore, with his artworks, Richter wants to make an argument for a plurality of approaches towards nature. Kluge supports Richter’s argument with his stories. He pursues the investigation of different interpretations’ shortcomings. With his stories, Kluge demonstrates that not only the distribution of the categories ‘natural’ and ‘human’ is negotiable, but also the description of any occurrence as ‘action’ or ‘experience.’ How the decisions are made depends on the narrator’s particular interests. The structure of the in-depth-causal-analyses permits only one single agency, and humans claim this agency for themselves with good reason. Hence, employing the in-depth-causal-analysis prescribes the human domination over and objectivization of nature. This kind of narration is grounded in the predominant natural imaginary of the Western world. Kluge in contrast valorizes the other two narrative types, the miracle tale and the teleologic explanation. These two narrative types’ structures can, but do not necessarily have to, permit more than one agency. Since they are able to consider nature to be an agentive force as well, they allow a human encounter with nature that is of equal footing. Certainly, Kluge does not want to suggest to modern people an animistic, magical or providential attitude towards nature like in the ancient world. He does not want to substitute the indepth-causal-analysis with the other two types of narrative. Rather, his usage of these two narrative types is playful and ironically breached. However, he wants to bring back into play these narrative types as alternative options. Furthermore, he would not claim being able to alter the collectively shared natural imaginary of Western societies alter with one single artwork. This was too ambitious. Nevertheless, Richter and Kluge deconstruct the predominant modern view of nature and collect strategies to approach a moral framework of a human-nature-relation based on mutual and just exchange. Only a humble human subject who knows and acknow-ledges his or her agency’s limits will not extinguish nature, and finally himor herself. Works Cited Birkmeyer, Jens. “Zeitzonen des Wirklichen: Maßgebliche Momente in Alexander Kluges Erzählsammlung Dezember.” Text + Kritik 85/ 86 (2011): 66-75. U RS B ÜTTNER 234 Büttner, Urs. “Art Meteorologie.” Literatur und Wissen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Roland Borgards et. al. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2013. 96-100. ---. “Meteorologie.” Futorologien: Ordnungen des Zukunftswissens. Ed. Benjamin Bühler and Stefan Willer. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016. 405-416. ---. “Naturbewältigung, ‘Natural Imaginaries’ und die Möglichkeiten der Kunst: Ein theoretischer Versuch zur Ökologie des Wissens.” Wind und Wetter: Kultur - Wissen - Ästhetik. Ed. 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P OSTCOLONIAL R ESPONSES E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY The Sea is Rising: Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific Islands I begin with our earth island; a concept made possible by the satellite technologies developed in the Cold War; a battle that, while largely invisible to the majority of the people of the globe, was violently propagated on the small atolls and great ocean of the Pacific. The myth of the island isolate, adapted by ecologists and anthropologists alike, helped to justify the detonation of hundreds of thermonuclear weapons in the atolls of the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia. In selecting the atolls for nuclear detonations, the island was treated as metonymic of our terraqueous globe. Blowing up the island was understood in a part-for-whole relationship in which one could make predictions for the destruction and irradiation of the earth. Bravo, a 15megaton hydrogen weapon that detonated in the Pacific in 1954, might be seen as an originary event for the Anthropocene, in which the human destruction of an island might be scaled up to the earth itself (DeLoughrey, “The Myth”). 1 The radiation from Bravo permeated the global atmosphere, creating the world’s first modern ‘environmental refugees’ and catalyzed the field of atmospheric chemistry. Studying the nuclear irradiation of the global atmosphere led directly to the science of the Anthropocene. While the Pacific Islands were used as laboratories and thus were at the vanguard of new technologies of weaponry, high-speed cameras, color film, radiocarbon dating, and developments in ecology, the islands were consistently denied their imbrication with the globe, interpellated as “isolated” and “primitive” in the films and documents of the Atomic Energy Commission (DeLoughrey, “The Myth” 168, 175). 1 Operation Castle, a series of 6 nuclear explosions at Enewetak and Bikini in 1954, featured the notorious 15-megaton thermonuclear weapon Bravo, left a crater (or antiisland) 6,500 feet wide and 250 feet deep. Bravo covered the surrounding islands with radioactive strontium, cesium, and iodine, and became an ecological and political relations disaster. Bravo’s fallout exposed hundreds of Marshall Islanders to nuclear radiation, contributing to countless miscarriages, leukemia deaths, thyroid cancers, and the kind of chromosome damage which knows no genealogical limit. It covered the neighboring island of Rongelap with “radioactive snow” and permanently displaced the Rongelapese from their homeland due to continuing lethal levels of Cesium 137, over 40 years later. Estimated at 1000 times the force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bravo has been called the worst radiological disaster in history. See also Johnston and Barker, Boyer, Firth, Dean, Lang and Makay, and Teaiwa. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 238 Island studies has long been concerned with this paradox in which tropical islands are depicted as isolated, and remote, and yet seem to be under constant surveillance, visualized and visited by the US military, the anthropologist, the filmmaker, and the tourist. This is made possible by colonial logics in which the metropole is figured as historical and temporal in contradistinction to the presumably atemporal colonies. 2 Yet the discourse of isolation is also made possible by the naturalization of the sea, a practice of suppressing the world ocean as a vital material space constitutive to flows of empire, modernity, and globalization. Far from being a pure ‘natural’ space outside of history, the ocean is increasingly being recognized as a space from which to theorize our evolutionary past, and to model our climate futures. In the Anthropocene we recognize humans as a geological force, yet the ocean seems to be our proxy. This paper will engage the ways in which sea level rise has created a new oceanic imaginary for the Anthropocene, visible in climate change discourse and films, in the poetry produced in island spaces, and in visions of the planetary future. New Oceanic Imaginaries The humanities and social sciences have taken an oceanic turn which can be tied to a general trend to complicate the limits of the nation state through recourse to the complex trajectories of migration, diaspora, and the global flows of empire, capital, and culture. In examining the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea, cultural histories of the ocean, and the more recent patenting of sea life there are major geopolitical, environmental and even biopolitical reasons for this oceanic turn 3 We are on the cusp of an entirely new development in this oceanic imaginary which is visible in work that is responding to the threat of sea level rise. This adds a new dimension to how we might theorize our relationship to the largest space on earth, which until recently for most, was imagined as always external to ordinary ambits. In other words, for most humans the ocean was understood as largely alien until sea level rise and catastrophic weather events such as hurricanes, tsunamis, and flooding brought it into so many homes. With glacial melt and oceanic thermal expansion, our planetary future is becoming more oceanic. Sea level rise may be one of our greatest visible signs of planetary change, connecting the activity of the earth’s poles with the rest of the terrestrial world, producing a new sense of planetary scale and 2 See also Fabian. 3 630 million people live within 30 feet of the ocean. The current projections for sea level rise are a significant threat to the 10 percent of the world’s population that lives at 10 meters or below, as well as 13 percent of the world’s urban population. See also DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, Helmreich, and Gornitz. The Sea is Rising 239 perhaps even interconnectedness through the rising of a world ocean. In some recent U.S. cultural productions, the ocean is a figure for apocalypse and terror, destabilizing social, cultural and national systems. An active, threatening ocean is evident in blockbuster Hollywood films such as Noah (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2014) and 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich, 2009) as well as scholarly books such as Brian Fagan’s The Attacking Ocean (2013). So while the Anthropocene locates humans as geological agents, one might also trace out a sensationalist discourse of “climate terror” deriving from an oceanic agent. Twenty years ago, Epeli Hau‛ofa published his influential essay Our Sea of Islands, arguing that the legacies of colonial belittlement that render the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” need to be reinvigorated by a more accurate and world-enlarging view (Hau‛ofa 153). Instead of the narratives of small, vulnerable, and peripheral places, he argued, we must recognize the primacy of the largest ocean on the planet which facilitated both the legacies of trans- Pacific voyaging as well as contemporary circuits of globalization, rendering the region as “a sea of islands” better known as Oceania. Hau‛ofa’s work has made a tremendous contribution, reconfiguring methodologies for the humanities and social sciences as well as inspiring an arts movement at the Oceania Centre that he established at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. Pacific Island Studies, which is closely linked to indigenous discourses of embeddedness in the land, has been extensively engaged with the depictions of the ocean as a space of origins and of the future. For instance, the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokule‛a suggests the ways in which the regeneration of traditions (in this case non-instrument navigational knowledges transferred from Micronesia to Hawai‛i) can be used to benefit new connections between the islands. It also aids science and a pedagogy of climate change, since NASA and other organizations support the Hokule‛a’s voyages to raise environmental consciousness. Hau‛ofa has famously inscribed the voyaging traditions of the region as producing a shared sense of origins and one of regional destiny in the wake of migration and globalization. 4 As such, the ocean has functioned in cosmological, historical, and evolutionary terms as a place of origins, and more recently, as human if not planetary future. While Hau‛ofa was a visionary, he could not have foreseen the ways in which climate change, particularly sea level rise, has transformed islands that are in fact threatened by the expansion of the sea, faced with a new era of carbon colonialism. 5 In his address to the UN General Assembly in 2009, Federated States of Micronesia President Emanuel Mori invoked the history 4 See his collected essays We are the Ocean (2008). This is explored at length in my book Routes and Roots. 5 See Agarwal and Narain, and Ziser and Sze. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 240 of Pacific voyaging and concluded that “sadly […] the ocean that has always nurtured us is becoming the very instrument of our destruction” (Mori, no pag.). A new vocabulary is developing in Oceania in which words for climate change, which do not exist in indigenous languages, are being formed. New pedagogies, programs, and knowledges are being developed to communicate across a broad spectrum of those affected. Since the low lying atolls of the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tokelau, and Tuvalu are the first to feel the impact as the waters begin to rise, new maps of the Pacific are being drawn in which the smallest atolls are now attracting global attention, becoming once again signifiers for the globe’s future. Ironically, the globe displayed at the Copenhagen Climate Summit did not include them. In some media, these mappings reinvigorate colonial constructions of the islands as laboratories, Edens before the fall, and spaces in need of a type of salvage anthropology. In the past year I have attended multiple conferences about climate change (in the Pacific) and the Anthropocene (in the U.S. and Europe). The conversations could not be more different and perhaps mutually unintelligible. One group speaks of the salinization of staple crops and water supplies, migration, culture, the land, the ancestors, family, and children. The other speaks of species, history, temporality, modernity, and the west. Broadly speaking, climate change discourse is concerned with embodied space, Anthropocene discourse is concerned with modalities of time. Yet these differences are fitting and I’d argue necessary, because claiming to speak of an enormous system like climate requires multiple narrative registers as well as scales. We know from the work of Barbara Adam and others that communicating environmental risks is to rely on the visibility of materiality, an effective form yet one that may detract from what is “latent and immanent” (Adam 12). 6 Building upon Susan Sontag’s “aesthetics of disaster,” I turn here to what Julie Doyle calls the “aesthetics of the image” (Doyle 132) in climate change films about the Pacific. These are texts produced (primarily) by the white settler cultures of North America, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, which I will argue can be read in terms of a new era of what I call salvage environmentalism. Visualizing Climate Change One of the contradictions pointed out by scholars of climate change is that the science, which measures the deep time of the earth’s systems and makes projections far into the future, is not commiserate with the everyday experience of human communities and their observations of weather. 7 This 6 See also Doyle. 7 See e.g. Serres and Chakrabarty. The Sea is Rising 241 creates a bifurcation between the experience of place and time, and to go back to the opening of this paper, a break down in the metonymic relationship between part and whole figured through island and earth. Sheila Jasanoff remarks, “climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded experience” (Jasanoff 233). Moreover, climate “is spatially unbounded. It is everywhere and nowhere, hence not easily accessible to imaginations rooted in specific places” (237). In order to cognitively bring the scales of climate and weather together, the visualization of climate change, which may produce both evidence and empathy, becomes crucial. Therefore the distribution of images of stranded polar bears on ice floes, or Pacific Islanders wading through flooded villages, creates a new oceanic imaginary and becomes the means by which many are able to recognize, empathize, and perhaps even become inspired to mitigate climate change. 8 Global warming is a long cumulative effect of industrial capitalism, what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” which exceeds the narrative boundaries of the temporal pace of modernity. 9 Thus these Islanders become the embodied figures for the “articulated stress” of climate change as well as “ventriloquists for a western crisis of nature” (Farbotko and Lazrus 383). In keeping with a part-for-the whole-relationship that figures the small tropical island as the world, the atoll signifies enormous scalar density. First, this is evident in a spatial collapse between earth and atoll. Second, it is also evident in a temporal elongation in which the premodern past is harnessed to our global warming future. This is in keeping with previous environmental discourse in which “the future and past are presented as imminent in the present” (Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhäusler 7). However, this has different implications for the representation of the embodied indigenous subject. Thus in the works I will discuss the ‘native’ as representative of the human past, depicted in a close relationship with nonhuman nature, especially the sea. The island becomes a symbol for the planetary future, in that the threatened atolls are represented as the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of atmospheric pollution (Farbotko 2). Thus space - the island - enters the future and therefore temporality via climate change. Problematically, the figure of the indigenous islander - who is associated with lost culture - is represented in atemporal terms akin to the logic of what Renato Rosaldo has termed “imperialist nostalgia.” 10 It is this concern of visualizing climate change, and bringing those who are the most impacted by sea level rise to the largest greenhouse gas emitters, aka the United States, that inspired the 2010 Water is Rising performance 8 See also Doyle; Dobrin and Morey, and O’Neill and Smith. 9 See also Doyle and Adam. 10 See Rosaldo’s essay of the same title. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 242 event, an enormous undertaking by one of my UCLA colleagues that employed the arts in the service of raising awareness of the ongoing US “dispossession of the atmosphere.” 11 My colleague raised funds to support the recruitment of dancers from the Pacific Island nations Kiribati, Tokelau, and Tuvalu to share both their traditional and new dance forms they had developed to raise consciousness of the ways in which the salinization of their taro beds, flooding of their schools and homes, and loss of their ancestral burial grounds were making atoll life untenable. In an era of American-style climate change denial, the Islanders of the Water is Rising event became the visible evidence of the reality of global warming. I first met the Water is Rising dance troupe at UCLA, their first stop on a tour that would take them to universities across the country. As I crossed the quad to the building in which we were to host a roundtable on climate change, I could see the dance troupe sitting in a large circle in the grass outside the building, dressed in t-shirts, lavalavas, jeans and flip flops, playing guitars and singing Bob Marley songs. When the preview to the performance began an hour later they performed in the style of their homes and languages (without English translation), and were introduced as travelling from some of the most isolated islands of the Pacific. The dances, which represent complex knowledge systems in the Pacific, were presented as entertainment. The juxtaposition of reggae-singing youth to the performance of an isolated indigeneity was striking, and something I had already encountered in the UCLA marketing of the event. We can see this by comparing two images of Mikaele Maiava, the artistic director of the troupe from Tokelau. On the Water is Rising site we learn that he studied overseas, worked for nearly a decade for the UN, and has been active in various international indigenous fora on the environment and climate change. In our campus newspaper, his name is misspelled and his ample bionote is reduced to “a native of Tokelau” (Lee). In fact, the first version of this piece referred to him simply as “a native of the South Pacific” until I complained to the editor. This got me thinking about how North American audiences were receiving Pacific Islanders as the harbingers of climate change, habitually rendered as figures of an isolated, natural and nature-loving culture that were being appropriated to critique American petrocapitalism. I turned to the remarkable output of documentaries on the topic that focus on the atolls and low lying islands of the Pacific. This begins with the 2000 film Rising Waters: Global Warming and the Fate of the Pacific Islands which is a good educational and historical film featuring scholars like Patrick Nunn. Yet after the events of 9/ 11 we see a shift to salvage environmentalism. The documentary Paradise 11 This expression has been coined in Liverman’s essay of the same title, “Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger and the Dispossession of the Atmosphere” (2009). The Sea is Rising 243 Drowned: Tuvalu, the Disappearing Nation was released in 2001 and features the caption “see the world’s most endangered country.” There are ample similarities in the film posters, all of which feature the ocean. In 2004 and 2005 The Disappearing of Tuvalu: Trouble in Paradise (2004) and Time and Tide (2005) were released, followed by There Once was an Island (2010) which focused on the island Taku in Papua New Guinea, and finally The Hungry Tide (2011) which turns to Kiribati. 12 This particular genre begins to solidify over the years and while there is some diversity in those one or two films that mention colonial history or nuclear testing, or show testimonies and struggles at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit, generally speaking these documentaries tell the story in predictable ways. The films focus almost exclusively on village life, feature ample images of the ocean, islanders fishing, children running on the beach, sunsets, palm trees, the camera person at work on the island, images of flooded homes, and interviews with subjects who are considering migration to metropolitan centers of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Atoll life is quite beautifully imagined in the romantic light of the setting sun over the ocean, reflecting what the film suggests is a dying culture. This dying culture is at once the death of an untouched pastoral past (in the tradition of the colonial South Seas idyll) as well as the planet’s future. The keywords of the films, evidenced by their titles are: paradise, disappearance, and endangerment, remarkably like the kind of extinction narratives in documentaries about the loss of nonhuman species. In recovering the “vanishing native,” the filmmaker is positioned in a long history of salvage anthropology, utilizing the realism of documentary film to depict a kind of mourning that we might liken to “imperialist nostalgia.” This nostalgia is particular to a long history of colonial South Seas discourse, in which travel narratives, novels, paintings, and later films aestheticize an Edenic island lifestyle imagined outside of modernity, history, empire, and labor. This trope of the island tropics is evident in the following promotion material on the Time and Tide website: The heart wrenching and beautiful film TIME AND TIDE is like one of Gauguin’s rare, found-object sculptures, simultaneously celebrating a precious, edenic time and place while calling attention to the fact that it is perhaps lost forever. - Rob Bindler For instance, in the trailer of the film King Tide: The Sinking of Tuvalu (dir. Juriaan Booij 2007), an English speaking narrator depicts the nation of Tuvalu as “small,” “remote,” endangered, and sinking, and covers all the basic aesthetic and informational ground of these ‘climate nostalgia’ films: the sea, fishing communities, children in the water, village life and flooding, testimony of increasing tides, evidence of garden flooding, traditional dance, 12 See also Chambers and Chambers for an overview of the films on Tuvalu. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 244 migration narratives, a white male scientist, and a Tuvaluan testifying that they can trust in god because he already told Noah earthly flooding was over. The only thing missing in this particular clip is island music and the sunset. These documentaries trade in what Susan Sontag referred to as the “imagination of disaster,” but they differ in their engagement with modernity. In her critique of science fiction films, Sontag was focused on what she called “a dispassionate aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view” that we might see in films like 2012 (45). In contrast, these climate change films specifically bracket out modernity and technology from atoll life, visibly depicting slow violence and a narrative of mourning about the loss of a subsistence mode of living in which capitalism is only distantly implicated. Rosaldo defines imperialist nostalgia as when “agents of colonialism long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed” (108). Let me quote from him at length in order to show how different imperialist narrative forms become rekindled in an era of carbon colonialism: Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: a person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroy their environment, and then they worship nature. In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent yearning’ both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination. […] ‘We’ (who believe in progress) valorize innovation and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our own past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two. (108) This yearning, in western aesthetic terms, is elegy, a form where nature figures as scenery or backdrop, “an analogue for what has been lost” (Morton 253). As Timothy Morton points out, when the poet - or filmmaker - tries to mourn the loss of nature itself, the “sounding board […] becomes the object of lamentation” creating a shift from mourning (which can locate the lost object) to melancholia, without a method of redressing loss (251). Writing about climate change Morton notes that (western) “ecological elegy weeps for that which will have passed given a continuation of the current state of affairs” (254). In contrast, these films weep for a loss of culture that figures as a loss of the environment (254). These films complicate Morton’s argument; they are able to circumvent this issue of the lost object by using Pacific Islanders as the figures for nature, reinvigorating a well-worn colonial trope. Therefore the continental viewer mourns the loss of atoll culture and life worlds as an analogue for a destruction of a global environment. By bracketing out empire, capitalism, and carbon colonialism, these films trade on a salvage environmentalism that recuperates a historic and nostalgic nature by The Sea is Rising 245 detemporalizing the Pacific Islander, while suppressing the issue of the viewer’s complicity. Hau‛ofa has encouraged us to examine the oceanic contours of a “sea of islands,” and climate change has made that a necessity. But this oceanic imaginary of sea level rise, at least for most of these films, has fallen into the well-worn tread of, to draw from Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques. 13 The ocean, which has long figured in the Pacific Islands as a means of subsistence, origins, cosmology and regional connection now becomes a figure for destructive change. Rosaldo reminds us that ‘salvage work’ is meant to record a culture before it disappears in the wake of modernity, and in this case modernity is paradoxically nature and anthropogenic climate change. The salvage narrative that once helped to authorize funding for a generation of anthropologists in the Pacific under British, French, and American empires is now catalyzing a new generation of journalists, film makers, and scholars who fly across the world to descend on Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Tokelau to interrogate the residents about nothing but climate change (Farbotko “Tuvalu”). Salvage work has the possibility to “criticize destructive intrusions of imperialism and regimes” and can be used to critique the imperial center (Rosaldo 31). Rather than dismissing these films altogether, which is tempting, I suggest that this form of oceanic imaginary, as misrepresentative as it might be of the islands and peoples themselves, might utilize an effective narrative strategy for those people, to quote from Michel Serres, who “are indifferent to climate except during vacations when they rediscover the world in a clumsy arcadian way” (28). Salvage environmental films reflect a new idiom of a well-worn trope, appealing to those who “pollute what they don’t know, which rarely hurts them and never concerns them” (28). To that end, the few of these films that juxtapose atoll life with the ways in which community leaders are fighting for environmental justice and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions provide clearer ways for some members of the audience to position the islands in history rather than always distant in an irrecoverable pastoral past. “Tell Them”: Weaving the Strands of Obligation There is a sense of déja-vu in some climate change discourses, a point Mike Hulme has argued in tracing out the return of climate determinism. Up until the early twentieth century, a colonial version of climate determinism reduced the peoples of the tropics to a torrid and languid climate, claiming they were incapable of producing civilization or modernity. The salvage 13 See Lévi-Strauss’ famous 1955 travelogue of the same title. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 246 environmental films I’ve mentioned also limit Pacific Islanders to responding to or resisting the modernity of climate change. Ironically, nature, or the weather, becomes a modern historical agent capable of producing change while the “Native” can “either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce it” (Clifford 122, original emphasis). The new form of climate determinism, Hulme argues, can be seen in how climate science modelling is being used as a universal determiner of political, social, and cultural futures. Climate reductionism is a scientific trend that extracts climate from a myriad of variable factors to predict migration, economics, disease, state infrastructural collapse, civil war, and other calamities without engaging other disciplines or studies, say for instance the humanities and social sciences. Oddly, in this era of “neoenvironmental determinism” climate becomes variable, but human behavior is not. As seen in the salvage environmental films, “the possibilities of human agency are relegated to footnotes, the changing cultural norms and practices made invisible, the creative potential of the human imagination ignored” (Hulme 256). For all the tremendous academic production around climate change and the Anthropocene in metropolitan centers, it is not the determining discourse elsewhere. Perhaps not surprisingly, climate change is not the major subject of Pacific Island literary, cultural, and visual production. 14 When it is addressed it is largely through the initiative of development and arts grants that originate from the larger carbon emitters, like the United States and Australia. However, there’s one poem I’d like to conclude with because it offers a far more complex narrative form that does not idealize a South Seas pastoral, and suggests the webs of obligation that connect us across the seas. Moreover, it brings us back, movingly, to the disjuncture between the embodied experience of weather, and the universalizing discourse of climate. The root of obligation, Michel Serres writes, is ligare - to bond, to tie, to weave (Serrres 47). I conclude my paper with an alternative aesthetic of sea level rise by the Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. This performance, recorded at the 2012 Olympics Poetry Parnassus, does not employ an aerial ‘god’s eye’ view of the tropical atoll but rather places the poet high above the audience, with the cold stormy skies of London swirling behind her. Her poem invokes some of the same imagery that we have seen in the documentaries: “fine white sand,” “sweet harmonies […] of songs”, and “papaya golden sunsets,” but she immediately juxtaposes what might initially be considered idyllic with everyday modernities, like an island “clogged with chugging cars,” and “styrofoam cups of koolaid.” Jetnil-Kijiner’s emphasis here, in foregrounding a narrative of a gifted basket, is about weaving together connections and obligations across the Pacific. These bonds are legally established with the “compact of free associa- 14 See also Nunn, “The end of the Pacific? ” The Sea is Rising 247 tion” Micronesian states have with the United States, which grew out of the 1946 American annexation of Micronesia in order to develop a base for the U.S. military and to conduct three decades of nuclear testing which poisoned and displaced thousands of Marshallese. 15 In a shift from irradiation to sea level rise, this colonial relationship between the U.S. and the Marshalls is producing new ecological effects. In speaking about the imminent threat of losing the islands to the sea and framing it as a matter of national security to the UN Security Council in 2013, Marshallese Senator and Minister of Foreign Affairs Tony de Brum observes that “the people of the Marshall Islands are not strangers to being moved around in the name of somebody else’s peace and security. Displacement as a means to take land for military activities is not something new to us” (De Brum, n. pag.). In her poem, Jetnil-Kijiner offers her American friends a gift, handcrafted jewels from the sea, “black pearls” and “cowry shell” earrings, placed in hand-woven baskets, products of women’s love and labor. Inside this basket is a message for the reader/ viewer to pass on: “you tell them,” she implores, where these gifts came from, the Marshall Islands, and asks the reader to “show them where it is on a map.” Deeply influenced by Hau‛ofa’s work on Pacific voyaging cultures and networks of trade and kinship, she declares an embodied relationship in that “we are the ocean,” invoking the title of Hau‛ofa’s essay collection. She fashions her poetry as a basket, which in turn is a metaphor for the island. Emphasizing the ways in which the earrings and the basket she has made for her audience travel, like her words, the poet creates new webs of obligation in an alternative vision of sea level rise. I leave the poet to conclude: Tell Them 16 I prepared the package for my friends in the states the dangling earrings woven into half moons black pearls glinting like an eye in a storm of tight spirals the baskets sturdy, also woven brown cowry shells shiny intricate mandalas shaped by calloused fingers Inside the basket a message: Wear these earrings to parties 15 See also Johnston and Barker. 16 Reprinted with friendly permission from the University of Arizona Press. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 248 to your classes and meetings to the grocery store, the corner store and while riding the bus Store jewelry, incense, copper coins and curling letters like this one in this basket and when others ask you where you got this you tell them they’re from the Marshall Islands show them where it is on a map tell them we are a proud people toasted dark brown as the carved ribs of a tree stump tell them we are descendents of the finest navigators in the world tell them our islands were dropped from a basket carried by a giant tell them we are the hollow hulls of canoes as fast as the wind slicing through the pacific sea we are wood shavings and drying pandanus leaves and sticky bwiros 17 at kemems 18 tell them we are sweet harmonies of grandmothers mothers aunties and sisters songs late into night tell them we are whispered prayers the breath of God a crown of fushia flowers encircling aunty mary’s white sea foam hair tell them we are styrofoam cups of koolaid red waiting patiently for the ilomij 19 tell them we are papaya golden sunsets bleeding into a glittering open sea we are skies uncluttered majestic in their sweeping landscape we are the ocean terrifying and regal in its power tell them we are dusty rubber slippers swiped from concrete doorsteps 17 Preserved Breadfruit 18 First birthday party 19 A wake, to pay respects The Sea is Rising 249 we are the ripped seams and the broken door handles of taxis we are sweaty hands shaking another sweaty hand in heat tell them we are days and nights hotter than anything you can imagine tell them we are little girls with braids cartwheeling beneath the rain we are shards of broken beer bottles burrowed beneath fine white sand we are children flinging like rubber bands across a road clogged with chugging cars tell them we only have one road and after all this tell them about the water how we have seen it rising flooding across our cemeteries gushing over the sea walls and crashing against our homes tell them what it’s like to see the entire ocean__level___with the land tell them we are afraid tell them we don’t know of the politics or the science but tell them we see what is in our own backyard tell them that some of us are old fishermen who believe that God made us a promise some of us are more skeptical of God but most importantly tell them we don’t want to leave we’ve never wanted to leave and that we are nothing without our islands. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 250 Works Cited Adam, Barbara. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environmental and Invisible hazards. London, New York: Routledge, 1998. Argawal, Anil and Sunira Narain. Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism. New Delhi: Centre for Science and the Environment, 1991. Baldacchino, Godfrey. “Studying Islands: On Whose Terms? Some Epistemological and Methodological Challenges to the Pursuit of Island Studies.” Island Studies Journal 3.1 (2008): 37-56. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Brockmeier, Jens, Peter Mühlhäusler, and Rom Harré. Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse. New York: SAGE Publishing, 1999. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197-222. Chambers, Anne F. and Keith S. Chambers. “Five Takes on Climate and Cultural Change in Tuvalu.” The Contemporary Pacific 19.1 (Spring 2007): 294- 306. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Dawson, Helen. “Archaeology, Aquapelagos and Island Studies.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 6.1 (2012): 17-24. Dean, Jonathan, Melanie Leng, and Anson Mackay. “Is There an Isotopic Signature of the Anthropocene? ” The Anthropocene Review 1.13 (2014): 276- 287. DeBrum, Tony. “Climate Change in the Pacific Islands and Implications for Hawai’i. Waves of Change Keynote Address.“ The Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. 4-6 April 2013. <http: / / olelo.granicus.com/ MediaPlayer.php? view_id=30&clip_id=3431 1>. Web. 14 March 2017. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‛i Press, 2007. ---. “The Myth of Isolates: Ecosystem Ecologies in the Nuclear Pacific.” Cultural Geographies 20.2 (2013): 167-184. Dobrin, Sidney, I. and Sean Morey, eds. Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Doyle, Julie. “Picturing the Clima(c)tic: Greenpeace and the Representational Politics of Climate Change Communication.” Science as Culture 16.2 (2007): 129-150. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. The Sea is Rising 251 Farbotko, Carol and Heather Lazrus. “The first climate refugees? Contesting Global Narratives of Climate Change in Tuvalu.” Global Environmental Change 22.2 (2012): 382-90. Farbotko, Carol. “‘The global warming clock is ticking so see these places while you can’: Voyeuristic Tourism and Model Environmental Citizens on Tuvalu’s Disappearing Islands.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31.2 (2010): 224-238. ---. “Tuvalu and Climate Change: Constructions of Environmental Displacement in the Sydney Morning Herald.” Geografiska Annaler 87.4 (2005): 279- 293. Firth, Stewart. Nuclear Playground. Honolulu: University of Hawai‛i Press, 1987. Gornitz, Vivien. Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Hau‛ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” 1993. The Contemporary Pacific 6.1 (1994): 147-161. ---. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. University of Hawai‛i Press, 2008. Hayward, Philip. “Aquapelagos and Aquapelagic Assemblages.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 6.1 (2012): 1-11. Helmreich, Stefan. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Hulme, Mike. “Reducing the Future to Climate: a Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism.” Osiris 26.1 (2011): 245-266. Jasanoff, Sheila. “A New Climate for Society.” Theory, Culture & Society 27 (2010): 233-50. Jetnil-Kijiner, Kathy. “Tell Them.” Iep Jaltok: Poems From a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. 64-67. Johnston, Barbara Rose and Holly M. Barker. Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Record. London: Routledge, 2008. Kelman, Ilan, James Lewis, J. C. Gaillard, and Jessica Mercer. “Participatory Action Research for Dealing with Disasters on Islands.” Island Studies Journal 6.1 (2011): 59-68. King Tide: The Sinking of Tuvalu. Dir. Juriaan Booij. 2007. Lee, Cynthia. “Pacific Islanders Reflect ‘Human Face’ of Climate Change.” UCLA Today. UCLA Today, 5 October 2011. <http: / / newsroom.ucla.edu/ stories/ remote-pacific-islanders-at-risk-216825>. Web. 14 March 2017. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. 1955. Trans. John Weightman. London, New York: Penguin, 2012. Liverman, Diana. “Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger and the Dispossession of the Atmosphere.” Journal of Historical Geography 35.2 (2009): 279-296. E LIZABETH D E L OUGHREY 252 Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Mori, H. E. Emanuel. “Adress by H. E. Emanuel Mori, President of the Federated States of Micronesia Before the 64th United Nations Assembly, New York.” 25 September 2009. <http: / / archive.today/ Exo9#selection- 27.0-209.10>. Web. 13 March 2017. Morton, Timothy. “The Dark Ecology of Elegy.” The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Ed. Karen Weisman. Oxford University Press, 2012. 251-71. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Nunn, Patrick D. “The End of the Pacific? Effects of Sea Level Rise on Pacific Island Livelihoods.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 34 (2013): 143- 171. ---. Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Honolulu Press, 2012. O’Neill, Saffron, and Nicholas Smith. “Climate Change and Visual Imagery.” WIREs Climate Change 5.1 (2014): 73-87. Paradise Drowned: Tuvalu, The Disappearing Nation. Dir. Mike O’Connor, Savana Jones-Middleton, and Wayne Tourell. Writ. and prod. Wayne Tourell. Longtail Distribution Network, 2010. Peter, Joakim. “Matauen Ese Pwipwi, Mataauen ese Nounou: ‘Disruptive Oceans’ and Waves of Moving Island(er)s.” Waves of Change Conference. University of Hawai’i, Manoa, 4-6 April 2013. <http: / / www.hawaii.edu/ cpis/ 2013conf/ >. Web. 13 February 2017. Rising Waters: Global Warming and the Fate of the Pacific Islands. Dir. Andrea Torrice. Prod. Andrea Torrice in association with the Independent Television Service and Pacific Islanders in Communications. Bullfrog Films, 2000. Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon 1989. 68-87. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995. Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. 42-48. Teaiwa, Teresia K. “Bikinis and other s/ pacific n/ oceans.” The Contemporary Pacific 6.1 (1994): 87-109. The Disappearing of Tuvalu. Trouble in Paradise. Dir. Christopher Horner. Prod. Gilliane Le Gallic. DER, 2004. The Hungry Tide. Dir. Tom Zubrycki. JOTZ Productions, 2011. There Once was an Island. Te Henoa e Nnoho. Dir. Briar March. Prod. Lyn Collie. On the Level Productions, 2010. The Sea is Rising 253 Time and Tide. Dir. Julie Bayer and Josh Salzman. Prod. Peter Gilbert. Wavecrest Films, 2005. Tuvalu: That Sinking Feeling. Prod. and dir. Elizabeth Pollock. Storm Footage, 2002. Yusoff, Kathryn and Jennifer Gabrys. “Climate Change and the Imagination.” WIREs Climate Change 2.4 (2011): 516-534. Ziser, Michael and Julie Sze. “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies.“ Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29.2 (2007): 384-410. S ARAH F EKADU The North and the Desert: Tayeb Salih’s Poetics of the Anthropocene Postcolonial, Posthuman: Historical Thinking in the Anthropocene With the planetary crisis of climate change now being a matter of wide recognition and concern, human life is not what it used to be. As the term ‘Anthropocene’ implies, the earth has entered a geological period in which humans, at the latest from the age of the Industrial Revolution onwards, have become a force able to change the climatological and chemical makeup of the planet. This fact profoundly challenges our received understanding of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, the natural and the cultural, and the historical and the non-historical. 1 Various scholars in the humanities, especially in the historical fields such as postcolonial studies, have expressed in very personal terms how the Anthropocene challenges the way they were trained to think. Dipesh Chakrabarty frankly admits that “all my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-five years, […] had really not prepared me for making sense of this planetary juncture within which humanity finds itself today” (Chakrabarty, “Climate” 199). Ian Baucom writes that “until very recently it would not have occurred to me that postcolonial study, critical theory, or the humanities disciplines in general needed to periodize in relation not only to capital but to carbon, not only in modernities and postmodernities but in parts-per-million, not only in dates but in degrees Celsius” (Baucom, “History 4°” 125). As this quotation illustrates, the Anthropocene requires the humanities to take into account historical and geological scales that at once include but also surpass the human by far. The challenge for the humanities, especially the more historically oriented ones, is to think of the human as “belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 14). This also includes a rethinking of the relationship between human and nonhuman life: extending human agen- 1 The neologism ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000, but has only recently gained wide attention across the disciplines, with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” being the watershed text for a consideration of the Anthropocene in the humanities. S ARAH F EKADU 256 cy beyond a realm that can be apprehended, represented or controlled. The Anthropocene also asks us to take into account the agency of the nonhuman in order to position humanity in a multidimensional planetarity. 2 In other words, the postcolonial interest in tracing how modernity is shaped by the movements of humans, in processes of diaspora and hybridization, has to be put in conversation with phenomena that cannot be reduced to human scales. Mark McGurl illustrates the paradigm change in the reflection of the human by juxtaposing the image of the ‘tree’ and the ‘rock’: In its long-limbed, humanoid verticality, the tree has made a perfect poster child for ‘nature’ in the discourse of liberal environmentalism. Here one instead finds the obdurate rock, the dead-cold stone taking center stage as an image of the nonhuman thing, the thing that simply does not care, and has been not-caring for longer than anyone can remember - in fact, longer than there has been such a thing as memory. (384) More than ever before, the new geological epoch demands that the human be thought of alongside scales to which humans are incidental but that yet engulf and affect human life. It prompts us to take into account, according to McGurl, “the bizarrely humiliating length of geologic time, the staggering vastness and complexity of the known universe, the relative puniness in the play of fundamental and evolutionary forces” (380-381). Or as Heather Houser puts it: “[…] the range of time concepts keyed to human phenomenological experience will not suffice for apprehending environmental crises” (145). This, of course, poses serious methodological challenges to a body of critical thinking that, as Baucom has pointed out, has long understood its vocation as both “descriptive” and “transformative” (125). This essay is concerned with modes and possibilities of representing the Anthropocene in a literary genre that has also been defined as potentially descriptive and transformative, committed not only to analyzing histories and discourses but also to changing them: the postcolonial novel. Postcolonial literature and the concomitant studies have habitually been associated with uncovering the workings of history and time rather than with the pursuit of the timeless, with a focus on migration and displacement rather than on place, with the foregrounding of processes of cross-fertilization and hybridization rather than of preservation, and with an interest in political rather than in meteorological climates. 3 The essay takes as its focus Tayeb Salih’s novel Season of Migration to the North (1966) in order to show that even a novel from the early days of colonial independence is not only concerned with ‘writing back’ to imperialist discourse but also attempts to articulate a more capacious understanding of the relationship between history and a nonhuman realm whose temporality is withdrawn from human control, thus offer- 2 See also McGurl 384 and Houser 150. 3 See also Nixon 235. The North and the Desert 257 ing an occasion for experiencing the disjunctions that mark the present age in an aesthetic mode. By foregrounding the ways in which the Sudanese people engage with their environment - most prominently, the desert - the novel stages a sustained confrontation between human and nonhuman forms of life. I argue that this confrontation, which has been little regarded up to now, presents a challenge to the dominant theme of intercultural encounters in the novel. The colonial spatial conflicts between East and West and North and South, around which the narrative is structured are gradually superseded by the radically different temporality of the desert, thus pointing the reader to the necessity of imagining what Marc McGurl has called “a new cultural geology”: “[…] a range of theoretical and other initiatives that position culture in a time-frame large enough to crack open the carapace of human selfconcern, exposing it to the idea, and maybe even the fact, of its external ontological preconditions, its ground” (McGurl 380). My analysis will proceed in two steps: The first part of this essay will explore how the novel orchestrates an environmental consciousness that brings into view the particular ecological situation of post-independence Sudan. The second part will focus on how the novel also leaves this particular historical background behind and works towards an entirely different frame of temporal reference. Toward a Sudanese Village Ecology Published in 1966 in Arabic as a serial in the Lebanese magazine Hiwar and, three years later, in the Heinemann African writer series in an English translation by Denys Johnson-Denies done in close collaboration with Salih, Season of Migration to the North is one of the rare examples of a literary work that has received wide critical acclaim in both the fields of Arab and of English literature. While scholars of English literature have read the novel in the context of postcolonial rewritings of colonial fiction, scholars of Arab and/ or Comparative Literature have pointed to the context of the Nahda - the late-nineteenthcentury Arabic literary renaissance (Makdisi 805). I would argue that by staging an intercultural encounter between the West and the East from a retrospective point of view, the novel is indeed both: a rewriting of dominant colonial narratives about the ‘East’ and a modern Arab-African story dealing with the transition of a country into colonial and postcolonial modernity. The intercultural encounter is staged through the trips to England that the unnamed narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed (both native Sudanese) undertake in order to pursue their studies. In a reversal of the classic ‘quest into the unknown’-motif that characterizes many Africanist tales from the colonial era - most famously Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) - Salih has his two S ARAH F EKADU 258 protagonists travel into the heart of the British Empire, London. Yet, the two have very different ends: While the narrator spends his time “delving into the life of an obscure English poet” (Salih 9), thereby adopting the culture and education of his colonizers rather uncritically, Sa’eed, whom the narrator only meets when returning to the Sudan, embarks on a bizarre enterprise of counter-colonialism: Claiming to “liberate Africa with my penis”(100), he seduces English women by taking on the identity of an exotic Othello, catering to their projections and fantasies of the Oriental man, until he is sentenced for having killed one of these women. At the point the narration sets in, however, these events have already happened. The story begins with the narrator’s return to the Sudanese village he was born in and is heavily concerned with his process of reintegration into a society that has changed during his absence almost as much as he has. Another strand of the narrative, told in flashbacks, tells Sa’eed’s story of departure from the Sudan in the 1910s and his return - until the moment when the narrator finds Sa’eed’s farewell note and realizes that he has drowned himself in the Nile. Consequently, large parts of the novel are concerned with the colonial encounter between Britain and the Sudan and its consequences. 4 In terms of imagery, this is largely transmitted through an extensive evocation of spatial and climate tropes. Just as birds are drawn into certain directions during their migration periods, the protagonists, so the novel suggests, are irresistibly drawn to the North in the late days of colonialism (Sa’eed) and the early days of independence (the narrator). On their journeys the two Northeastern African metropolises Khartoum and Cairo figure as intermediate stations that lure them deeper and deeper into the colonial metropolitan center of London. The relationship between the Sudan and Europe carries deeply erotic connotations, only that - in a reversal of traditional Orientalist accounts - it is mostly the North that is cast in the role of the seducer, with Cairo, where Sa’eed attends secondary school and takes the Englishwoman Mrs. Robinson as his foster mother, figuring as “a European woman just like Mrs Robinson, its arms embracing me, its perfume and the odour of its body filling my nostrils” (23). It is in the metropolitan center of London that the respective desires for the ‘other’ and the imagined corresponding climate finally converge. Sa’eed deliberately takes on the image of the exotic Northern African man that English women impose on him. His first encounter with a woman after his arrival in London substantiates this convergence: 4 The Sudan had been under joint Egyptian-British rule from 1899 to 1955. In 1956, the Sudan gained its independence and inherited its boundaries from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Since its independence, the Sudan has been plagued by internal conflict, including the First and Second Sudan Civil War, the war in Darfur and the secession of South Sudan in 2011. The North and the Desert 259 What was it that attracted Ann Hammond to me? […] Unlike me, she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings. I am South that yearns for the North and the ice. (Salih 27) This passage illustrates the novel’s masterful employment of spatial tropes quite well. With England, specifically London, figuring as both ‘West’ and ‘North’ and the Sudan as an African country with a mostly Islamic religion and culture figuring as both ‘East’ and ‘South,’ the novel borrows both the cultural as well as the climatic and geographical stereotypes of imperialist discourse in order to explore the logic of the imperial endeavor and its profound consequences for individuals as well as for the Sudan as a whole. Sa’eed posing as “Othello”(33), his London bedroom becoming transformed into a “harem”(27), and his sexuality described as “a wilderness of southern desires” (32) by which numerous English women are hopelessly seduced all belong to the large archive of Orientalist images produced by the West as an act of self-affirmation. 5 The stereotypical images of the geographic ‘North’ and ‘South’ that the novel takes up pertain to a related imperial tradition in which hegemonic demands to colonize a country are justified by an ideology that connects the value and civilizational status of a certain region to its climate. The novel constantly points to the cultural meanings attached to climate and location. It presents itself as highly aware of the fact that, in a colonial context, evocations of climate and landscape are hardly ever innocent. In other words, the material reality is never the point of concern but always already an idea and part of a cultural realization, with a distinct set of values attached to it. Witness, for example, Sa’eed’s first impression of the English landscape and weather after his arrival: I look to right and left, at the dark greenness, at the Saxon villages standing on the fringes of the hills. The red roofs of houses vaulted like the back of cows. A transparent veil of mist is spread above the valleys. What a great amount of water there is here, how vast the greenness! And all those colours! […] this is an ordered world; its houses, fields, and trees are ranged in accordance with a plan. The streams do not follow a zigzag course but flow between artificial banks. (Salih 24) The “greenness” and “water” the narrator alludes to here are not part of a natural but of a cultural formation; they are, in fact, nothing else than a representation of Englishness. Moreover, the natural environment, ordered according to a “plan” and disciplined by human intervention, is presented here as something that is not simply ‘there,’ but that is a practice, in the sense of Robert Burden’s argument: “Space […] is always already a practice. A place (the English countryside) is a spatial practice (as landscape, scenery, 5 These images have been extensively analyzed in Edward Said’s pathbreaking study Orientalism (1978). S ARAH F EKADU 260 farm, theme park) encoded with aesthetic, cultural, and social relations - including those of class and power” (18). The politics of power become apparent in the juxtaposition of the greenness of England and the dryness and barrenness of the ‘South’ - the Sudan - from which apparently no progress can develop; a prejudice that the two narrators in the novel are highly aware of: “By the standards of the European industrial world we are poor peasants […]” (Salih 61). Large parts of the novel are concerned with the uncovering of the asymmetrical construction of the relationship between the North and the South, thus substantiating Said’s view of imperialism as essentially “an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space of the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control” (Said, “Yeats” 77). But the novel does not settle on analyzing the epistemic violence inherent in colonial discourses of landscape and climate, it also attempts to invert the imperialist geo-meteorological ordering of space: with Sa’eed setting up his ‘harem’ in the very center of London and, in a contrary move, his setting up of an English library in the middle of the remote Sudanese village of Wad Hamid, the ‘South’ finally becomes implanted into the ‘North’ and vice versa, thereby proving that what once seemed to be fixed and reliable cultural and geographical markers must also be called into question. Up to this point, the novel might be read as a prototypical postcolonial dissection of the power regimes that structure colonial space and extend far into the postcolonial age. 6 Indeed, the novel has mostly been read within the critical framework of a postcolonial ‘re-writing’ of empire and the hegemonic narratives attached to it. Hence, Saree S. Makdisi notes: If Heart of Darkness narrates the history of modern British imperialism from a position deep within its metropolitan centre, Season of Migration presents itself as the counternarrative of the same bitter history. Just as Conrad’s novel was bound up with Britain’s imperial project, Salih’s participates (in an oppositional way) in the afterlife of the same project today, by ‘writing back’ to the colonial power that once ruled the Sudan. (535) Said and Robert S. Burroughs read Salih’s novels straightforwardly as a rewriting of Heart of Darkness (Said, Culture 34, Burroughs 934). According to Said, “Salih’s hero in Season of Migration to the North does (and is) the reverse of what Kurtz does (and is): the Black man journeys north into white territory” (34). Various other critics have pointed to the stereotypical geographical and directional tropes that Salih employs in order to grasp the difficult relationship between the West and the East, which characterized colonialism and, as the novel illustrates, continues to characterize the postcolonial condition. As Mike Velez has it, “Salih borrows the familiar, the literary, archetyp- 6 Other examples of early post-independence African place writing include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (118) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1967). The North and the Desert 261 al imagery of North and South, in order to reenvision the fraught relations between West and East” (191). In addition, Barbara Harlow has pointed to the various stereotypical images of the ‘East’ the novel highlights by establishing an intertextual relationship between Mustafa Sa’eed and Shakespeare’s iconic tragic hero Othello. However, the exclusive focus on how the novel ‘writes back’ to dominant narratives and hegemonic versions of the relationship between Europe and Africa, the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ and the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ respectively has obscured the ways in which representations of place in the novel can be read as comments on modernity on a larger scale, and not only as comments on the immediate past of European colonialism in Africa. While the colonial and Orientalist implications of the novel’s geographical imagery have been exhaustively analyzed, only little - if any - attention has been paid to the climatological and environmental connotations this imagery also carries. What I want to argue in the following is that a consideration of climate is intrinsic to the novel’s consideration of place, and that this meteorological dimension of place involves a commentary on - and criticism of - modernity itself. 7 The connections between climate and place become already visible in the title of the novel, which features both a geographical term - the ‘North’ - and a meteorological unit - ‘season.’ The imagination of place in the novel is thus closely interwoven with meteorological phenomena. Moreover, place in the novel is predominantly conceived of in terms of environments - the Sudanese desert and its dryness, the lush vegetation of the village close to the Nile, and the urban setting of London. It is tempting to read the multiple references to places and their specific climates solely in metaphorical terms; as a negotiation of the archetypal imagery imperialism has attached to both the North and the South in order to justify the civilizing mission. Yet what becomes clear through a climateconscious reading is that, besides its multiple allusions to stereotypical images of the ‘North’ and the ‘South,’ the novel can also be seen as an archive of Northeast African cultural knowledge about climate, which in the process of Sudanese independence also undergoes significant changes. This becomes especially obvious in depictions of the village Wad Hamid - “that small village at the bend of the Nile” (Salih 3) - which provides the rural counterpart to metropolitan London. Since the novel starts with his return to Wad Hamid after seven years of studying literature at a British University, rather than 7 Deloughrey and Handley have pointed to the fact that “[p]lace has infinite meanings and morphologies: it might be defined geographically, in terms of the expansion of empire; environmentally, in terms of wilderness or urban settings; genealogically, in linking communal ancestry to land; as well as phenomenologically, connecting body to place” (4). S ARAH F EKADU 262 with the narrator’s departure, the village provides an important - if not the most important - setting of the narrative: It is the place where the narrator tries to reconnect to his people, and it is also the place where he meets Mustafa Sa’eed, another returnee from London, who makes him reflect on the consequences of the colonial encounter. When, in a classic scene of homecoming to the mother country after a long period of self-imposed exile in the colonial center, the unnamed narrator-protagonist returns to the Sudanese village he was born in, his realignment with the social environment he has left a long time ago takes place mainly through close observations of his natural surroundings: It was, gentlemen, after a long absence - seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe - that I returned to my people. […] Because of having thought so much about them during my absence, something rather like fog rose up between them and me the first instance I saw them. But the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my life in childhood and the onset of adolescence. I listened intently to the wind: that indeed was a sound wellknown to me, a sound which in our village possessed a merry whispering - the sound of the wind passing through palm trees is different from when it passes through fields of corn. I heard the cooing of the turtle-dove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing at the courtyard of our house and I knew that all was still well with life. I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down to the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like a palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose. (Salih 3-4) Here, in the narrator’s perception of the narrator, the sensory experience of the wind, the turtle-dove and the palm tree trigger memories of childhood and create a strong sense of home. The material surrounding creates stability and reassurance, making the narrator feel “that all was still well with life” (4). The most prominent symbol for the dwelt-in environment of the rural Sudanese village to which the narrator returns is the palm tree. With its “strong straight trunk,” its “roots,” and its “green branches”, this palm tree not only has a strong physical presence but is also made to stand symbolically for a stable sense of self (”a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose”) that has been threatened by the narrator’s long absence from home and the ensuing fear of alienation from his people. In his perception, then, the palm tree stands for both nature and culture; as a guarantor of the stability of both his physical and cultural surroundings. Yet the atmosphere of wholesome homeliness is interrupted already on the second day after the narrator’s return. He slowly comes to realize that the environment of the village cannot offer a place in which the past is preserved; it cannot offer a refuge from the burden of history since it is itself part The North and the Desert 263 of the political, economic and environmental networks of modernity that the narrator, in his naiveté, located somewhere else, in the metropolitan centers of Europe. Again, processes of cultural transformation manifest themselves in processes of environmental transformation: From my position under the tree I saw the village slowly undergo a change: the water-wheels disappeared to be replaced on the bank of the Nile by pumps, each one doing the work of a hundred water-wheels. I saw the bank retreating year after year in front of the thrustings of the water, while on another part it was the water that retreated. […] I looked at the river - its waters had begun to take on a cloudy look with the alluvial mud brought down by the rains that must have poured in torrents on the hills of Ethiopia - […]. (6) Other than he hoped for, the geographical remoteness of Wad Hamid does not allow the narrator to watch the transformations going on in the rest of the world from a secluded viewpoint, itself untouched by change. On the contrary: modernity, in the form of industrialization and the extraction of natural resources, has found its way even into the remotest parts of the Sudan, thus tempering any attempt to romanticize the natural landscape. What the river Nile also discloses is, to borrow a phrase from Ursula K. Heise, “the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in global networks” (210) which even such a presumably remote place as Wad Hamid is involved in. The connection between the Sudan and Ethiopia by way of the Nile, as emphasized in these lines, shows Wad Hamid as inextricably local and transnational. Yet Wad Hamid’s alluvial mud points not only to the essentially transnational nature of climate and environment, but also to a very national concern - the complex water politics that are associated with the Nile and still engender one of the severest conflicts in the region. 8 The novel thus works towards a postcolonial ecology in which nature, rather than simply being a “bystander to human experience” (Deloughrey and Handley 4), turns into an active participant in historical processes, functioning alternatively as a reminder of other (precolonial) times, a memorial of colonial violence, a sig- 8 The Nile water conflict dates back to the earliest days of human settlement along the river. The countries sharing the Nile’s river basin are Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. However, there is no international treaty on how the Nile’s water should be distributed. Egypt, the most populous nation in North Africa, was granted a right to veto upstream water projects in 1929, at the end of British colonial rule. Moreover, ever since an agreement with Sudan in 1959, Egypt has been using 87% of the Nile’s flow for itself, on which it is hugely dependent. This is the only official agreement currently in place. Ethiopia, lying further upstream than Egypt, could only make little use of the Nile’s water in the past but is trying to change that by building a huge dam on the Blue Nile. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’s construction (short “GERD”) is scheduled to be finished in 2017. From the beginning of the construction works, it has caused heavy controversies, with both Egypt and Sudan fearing that the dam will rob them of large parts of their vital supply of Nile water. See also Knell; and Lienhard and Strzepek. S ARAH F EKADU 264 nifier of modernization processes and a marker of an evolving ecological consciousness. The way Season of Migration to the North engages with this specific ecology could be characterized as a dialogic mode. Since the novel does not feature a narrator who is positioned outside the time and setting of the narrative, the literary negotiation of the relationship between historical and ecological processes in post-independence Sudan is largely carried out by juxtaposing the differing views of the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed. For the narrator, the retreating water banks of the Nile do not pose a threat. Nor do they trigger contemplation on the fraught relationship between local, national, and transnational environmental politics, but rather prompt him to digress into general, quasi-philosophical thoughts on the nature of life. This points to an internal conflict within himself. Swept by his desire for the recuperation of a past Sudan, he tries to ignore the physical signs of change in the village, even to the extent of disavowing the traces of colonialism in the present Sudan. Again, it is the natural surroundings of the village that are made to represent a land outside the relations of violent colonial conquest and appropriation: I am from here, just like the palm tree planted in the courtyard of our house grew in our courtyard and did not grow in some one [sic] else’s. And if [the British] came to our villages, I don’t know why, does this mean that we must poison our present and our future? They will leave our country sooner or later, just as other people have left other countries throughout history. […] Once again we shall be as we were - ordinary people - and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making. (Salih 41) The narrator’s village ecology thus moves along the lines of a bucolic pastoral. It places Wad Hamid outside the relations of colonial appropriation and idealizes the relationship between nature and culture so as to repress the realization that the experience of colonialism cannot simply be reversed or skipped. This idealized version of rural Sudan is corroborated by the narrator’s description of his old grandfather, whom he likens to a specific sort of desert bushes, thus optimistically stressing the robust nature of the Sudanese land and its people and their presumably infinite potential for renewal: “He is no towering oak tree with luxuriant branches growing in a land on which Nature has bestowed water and fertility, rather is he like the sayal bushes in the deserts of the Sudan, thick of bark and sharp of thorn, defeating death because they ask so little of life” (Salih 61-62). This vision is confronted with the opposing perspective of Mustafa Sa’eed, who negates the possibility of recuperating nature and a precolonial past. Barking at the narrator that “[w]e have no need of poetry here. It would have been better if you’d studied agriculture, engineering or medicine”(9), Sa’eed sharply rejects the view that rejoicing in a bucolic earthiness could provide feasible ways of engaging with the Sudan’s future. Having eagerly picked up a Western education in eco- The North and the Desert 265 nomics (“the first Sudanese to be sent on a scholarship abroad,” 44), he holds that the Sudan can only recover through rigorous modernization: “Knowledge, though, of whatsoever kind is necessary for the advancement of our country” (10). His own contribution lies in cultivating the land as a farmer, working for the village’s agricultural council, and advising his fellow villagers on how to make the best use of technological innovations like the water pumps. By putting these two characters into dialogue, the novel stages its preoccupation with the climatic and soil conditions as a constitutive aspect of postcoloniality. It is important to note that already in 1966 - a time associated with the dawn of modern environmentalism in the U.S. 9 - the novel constructs an ecologic imaginary that is uniquely inspired by and suited to the specific climate of the Northeastern African country of the Sudan whose proximity to the Nile and the Sahara makes it prone to both droughts and floodings. 10 It thus stages an environmental consciousness that focuses, to borrow a definition by Deloughrey and Handley, on “the historical process of nature’s mobility, transplantation, and consumption” (13). 11 In foregrounding processes of rapid agricultural modernization in a transnational context (as becomes evident in the description of the Nile water flow) that radically alter not only the Sudan’s ecology, but also its society, the novel echoes Said’s view of imperialism as a process in which not only the cultural, but also the ecological makeup of a society becomes radically transformed: […] a huge number of plants, animals, and crops as well as building methods gradually turned the colony into a new place, complete with new diseases, environmental imbalances, and traumatic dislocations for the overpowered natives. A changed ecology also introduced a changed political system. (Said, “Yeats” 77) In juxtaposing the narrator’s and Mustafa Sa’eed’s attitudes towards these processes, the novel negotiates the difficulty of newly decolonized nations to come to terms with this colonial legacy. While Sa’eed represents the stance of the ‘cold’ technician who, due to his colonial education, is unable to feel an uncorrupted sense of belonging to his mother country, the romanticized national mythmaking of the narrator, who claims that the Sudanese people entertained an immaculate relationship to nature until the arrival of the colonizers, is also called into question. It is only in the final chapter of the novel 9 See Houser 144, who mentions the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and U.S. legislation acts on clean air, wilderness, and water in the 1960s and 70s as expressions of a new environmental consciousness. 10 Sa’eed, in fact, disappears in a period of severe flooding (Salih 38). 11 The privileging of the Northern hemisphere (especially the U. S.) and concomitant discourses of virgin wilderness in ecocriticism and modern environmentalism has been criticized by many scholars working in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. See Deloughrey and Handley; Nixon; and Huggan and Tiffin. S ARAH F EKADU 266 that the narrator finds a middle ground between the alienating forces of the North and the romantic postcolonial nationalisms of the South and learns to embrace the fact that, while one’s attachment to a particular place or landscape may seem natural, it in the end always depends on historical contingencies. The Poetics of the Desert Up to this point, my reading has been concerned with the ways in which Season of Migration to the North foregrounds the influence of human actions on ecological processes and environmental formations, thus confirming the point made by many critics that the novel as genre is essentially a form which imaginatively records modern forms of human community, empire, and the nation. 12 To this effect, Season of Migration to the North’s engagement with nature illustrates man’s entrapment in the quagmires of history, which, in case of formerly colonized countries and subjects, continues to limit their citizens’ possibilities and determines their lives after independence. And yet, and quite unexpectedly, the novel also stages an engagement with the nonhuman realm, which is here figured by the desert. In a chapter that occurs almost at the end, the narrator, when returning to Khartoum for work after the circumcision celebrations of the two sons Mustafa Sa’eed has left behind, decides to take a lorry, which carries him through the desert. In contrast to the other chapters, in which the narrative proceeds mostly in a realistic manner without stylistic experimentation, the form of this chapter is distinctive in the ways in which it combines the personal voice of the narrator transmitted in the past tense with a poetic, impersonal narrative voice, which interrupts the narrator’s stream of consciousness several times and whose source cannot clearly be determined. This voice proceeds in the present tense, manifesting the merciless conditions of the desert in a repetitious style that seems to imitate the monotonous scenery it evokes: There is no shelter from the sun which rises up into the sky with unhurried steps, its rays spilling out on the ground as though there existed an old blood feud between it and the people on the earth. There is no shelter […]. A monotonous road rises and falls with nothing to entice the eye: scattered bushes in the desert, all thorns and leafless, miserable trees that are neither alive nor dead. […] There is not a single cloud heralding hope in this hot sky which is like the lid of Hell-fire. The day here is something without value. A mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. […] The road is endless, without limit, the sun indefatigable. […] Where, O God, is the shade? Such land brings forth nothing but prophets. This drought can be cured only by the sky. The road is unending and the sun merciless. (Salih 87, 89) 12 See also Anderson. The North and the Desert 267 Clearly, this is not a depiction of the South as the dichotomous counterpart of a water-saturated North in the sense outlined earlier, but a depiction of the desert. The desert becomes the sole agent here, an agent that determines the movement and life rhythm of the humans entering this space. Yet it seems itself completely withdrawn from temporal and spatial relations. Marked by uniformity (“The day here is something without value”) and stasis, which is poetically conveyed in the varied, but essentially repetitive evocation of the “merciless sun,” the desert represents an uncharted and unchartable space, whose vastness resists human designs. The desert is represented here as a space more or less empty (“The lorry travels for hours without our coming across single human being or animal” 87), yet it is also overdetermined and potentially a transcendent space: “such land brings forth nothing but prophets.” The heat that characterizes this place is indifferent to human life, and it has always been like this: The sun is the enemy. Now it is exactly in the liver of the sky, as the Arabs say, What a fiery liver! And thus it will remain for hours without moving - or so it will seem to living creatures when even the stones groan, the trees weep, and iron cries out for help. (Salih 92) The desert heat is imagined here as an excess of atmospheric energy that negates any ideology of human exceptionalism. Living creatures are directly linked to stones, trees, and iron in their reaction to heat. While there might be many travelogues and other accounts in which the Northeast African desert is heroically conquered, 13 the novel focuses on the desert’s general inhospitableness and hostility towards human life. Yet, even though the desert is shown here as a space beyond human exploration, it still affects the ways in which human life understands itself. In the context of the desert, human life is stripped down to the need and will to survive, a cause that unites everyone moving through it. At sunset, when the lorry can stop for the night, the narrator feels connected to both human and nonhuman forces in his fight against the heat. He contends that “the war ended in victory for us all: the stones, the trees, the animals, and the iron.” Moreover, he emphatically feels connected to the humans surrounding him: “I feel that we are all brothers; he who drinks and he who prays and he who steals and he who commits adultery and he who fights and he who kills”(93). This ‘desert condition,’ in which the differences that mark everyday human life become invisible and men are united in their pure will to survive, could be considered a poetical analogue to the Anthropocene requirement to think of humanity as a whole, or as Chakrabarty argues, as a species (Chakrabarty, “Climate” 213). Chakrabarty explains that species is a word 13 Wolfgang Struck mentions Thomas Edward Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922/ 192) as one of the most influential examples (448). S ARAH F EKADU 268 that would never occur in any standard history or socio-political account of globalization. Nevertheless it is necessary because it gives us an idea of the ‘deep history’ of geology and the planet that humanity is part of, at least since becoming the driving force in global warming (ibid.). In his 2012 essay “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” he further elaborates the differences between thinking of the human in a historicallyoriented discipline like Postcolonial Studies and thinking of the human in the Anthropocene. He argues that in the Anthropocene the differential thinking advocated by a postcolonial-postmodern view must be complemented and not substituted by a consideration of humanity as “constitutively one” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 2). The challenge of the Anthropocene, then, is the “necessity of thinking disjunctively about the human,” as Chakrabarty has famously put it (2). Yet, this poses a problem both for the imagination and for representation. As emphasized by other critics and in several chapters in the present volume, the species history can never become part of phenomenological experience. To quote again from Chakrabarty: Even if we were to emotionally identify with a word like mankind, we would not know what being a species is, for, in species history, humans are only an instance of the concept as indeed would be any other life form. But one never experiences a concept. (“Climate” 220). I would argue that, although written long before any scientific or critical engagement with the Anthropocene, Season of Migration to the North provides a point of departure for imaginatively experiencing the disjunctive histories in which the human is simultaneously embedded, as indicated in Chakrabarty’s reflection on the Anthropocene. By supplementing the North- South binary, which provides an entirely human-centered frame of reference, with the desert, the novel introduces a figure of the non-human that is removed from human colonization but not entirely external to human concerns, thus suturing human history to a more encompassing history of the planet. While the main theme of the novel, concerned with the effects of intercultural affiliation and the struggle of the formerly colonized to become citizens in their own right, is firmly placed on the scale of human life, the desert confronts the human with a supra-human scale, thus reminding the narrator (and us as readers) that the human exists alongside factors that remain irreducibly alien to human concerns. It thus adds a layer of geological time to human history that puts into perspective conventional postcolonial assumptions about historical change, thereby engaging aesthetically with what Baucom has termed “the need […] for a method that will take as its starting point an investigation of the multi-scaled, ontologically plural, simultaneously historical, infra-historical, and supra-historical ‘situation’ in which we find ourselves” (“History 4°” 134), or, in short, the multi-scaled temporality of the Anthropocene. The North and the Desert 269 Conclusion “In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,“ writes a modern biologist, “the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.“ 14 This quotation is not taken from contemporary science fiction writing, but is part of the eighteenth thesis of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” dating back to 1940. Expanding the historical sense of modernity to the much larger time frame of the recorded history of homo sapiens, and then reminding the reader that, in relation to organic life on earth, even this expanded time frame of the human is just a blink of the eye, Benjamin enwraps his own biographical time in more encompassing layers of time and history. Considering that Benjamin wrote the “Theses” in 1940 shortly before his flight from Spain to the United States failed and he committed suicide, this reflection on the embeddedness of human history within other histories of a much larger scale also carries an eschatological dimension that points to redemption, thus lending it a decidedly theological orientation. My essay has argued that Season of Migration to the North, in similar ways as suggested by Benjamin, confronts the historical epoch of imperialism - as an epoch of human history - with the much grander histories of the nonhuman embodied by the desert. In doing so, the novel participates in what Baucom has termed a “material turn ‘above’ history - the contemporary supra-historical turn” (“History 4°” 132), through which the nature/ culture and human/ nonhuman dichotomy established by modernity is fundamentally called into question. While I would hesitate to call Season of Migration to the North an ‘Anthropocene novel’ - as the first part of my essay has shown, its negotiation of ecological concerns is still firmly planted in a postcolonial framework -, I contend that the novel makes the Anthropocene readable as precisely a figure of the vexed relationship between the human and the nonhuman. As older texts such as Benjamin’s and Salih’s show, this relationship may always have been vexed, but the current age of anthropogenic global warming reminds us with increased intensity of the volatility of human claims to exceptionalism. One might think that reading the desert as a figure of the non-human lends the novel’s reflection on the complex entanglement of histories that 14 English translation taken from Baucom, “’Moving Centers,’” 145. In the German original, this passage reads: “‘Die kümmerlichen fünf Jahrzehntausende des homo sapiens‘, sagt ein neuerer Biologe, ‘stellen im Verhältnis zur Geschichte des organischen Lebens auf der Erde etwas wie zwei Sekunden am Schluß eines Tages von vierundzwanzig Stunden dar. Die Geschichte der zivilisierten Menschheit vollends würde, in diesen Maßstab eingetragen, ein Fünftel der letzten Sekunde der letzten Stunde füllen.‘“ (Benjamin 703) S ARAH F EKADU 270 proceed on entirely different scales a fatalistic notion: In its essential inhospitality to humans, the desert is imagined as an environment that finally points to mankind’s ineluctable extinction. Seen from this catastrophic endpoint of human history, not only might the colonizers’ atrocities appear downsized but also the outlook of achieving a socially just vision for the future. As a result, the valid remains of postcolonial thinking might be profoundly diminished. 15 While this might manifest a tendency towards atemporality, an analysis of Season of Migration to the North in the context of the Anthropocene sheds another light on the novel. It stresses the motif of the desert as a way of aesthetically engaging with the disjunctive histories of the human and the nonhuman, thus allowing its readers to experience what otherwise fundamentally resists phenomenological experience. It is this capability of poetically condensing radically incommensurate scales of time that makes the novel a performative model of the Anthropocene, thereby providing the - perhaps only - possibility to come to terms with it: in the aesthetic mode. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 2000. 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Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman.” Cultural Geographies 22.3 (2015): 383-407. H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale “There’s going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done.” (Hogan 108) Summary Climate change, by now widely accepted as an anthropogenic phenomenon, is currently the most central concern in global environmental discourse. Erratic weather events, like freak storms or inundations, and long-term alterations of climatic conditions, such as sustained droughts or uncommon amounts of precipitation, negatively affect an increasingly growing number of communities on earth. Engaging with the cultural perception and responses to these events, the humanities - in particular the field commonly labeled as ecocriticism - have augmented their involvement in research on climate change. Recent ecocritical work has shown that climate change and its possible effects need to be mediated and staged by way of narratives which make this vast and diverse phenomenon “more easily perceptible, intelligible, and concrete” (Mayer 23). Fictional literature can be ascribed a central role in this mediation process. In her essay “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation,” Sylvia Mayer suggests that there are two types of fictional narratives that are used in response to climate change and its possible long-term effects: the “narrative of catastrophe” and the “narrative of anticipation” (24). While these two categories possibly match most of the contemporary cli-fi novels produced in the US, my contribution to the present volume looks at a novel that cannot easily fit into either of these two definitions. I argue that Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) is a novel that addresses and mediates climate change risks without imagining a catastrophic future or through anticipating a catastrophe to come: Hogan’s novel tells the story of a Native American community which has already been immediately affected by a disastrous climatic event. Foregrounding the influence of human actions on ecological and meteorological processes, Hogan’s novel can be read as an allegorical story about the adverse effects of exploitative behavior with respect to natural resources. By embedding its criticism within a narrative that draws connections between H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 274 colonialism, neo-colonialism and capitalist exploitation, People of the Whale makes a strong environmental justice argument that emphasizes the interconnection of social and environmental concerns and proposes a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. Literature as Mediator of Anthropogenic Climate Change One of the biggest hurdles to communicate climate change and its effects on ecosystems and people is what Rob Nixon has called “the drama deficit of climate change” (Nixon, Slow 264). Climate change per se is such a vast, diverse and complex phenomenon manifesting itself in a variety of individual and collective experiences that its scope is difficult to grasp. In addition, many effects only show gradually and over a long period of time, which makes their causal relationship with alterations in the global climate even more abstract. This abstractness is a problem for the mediation of climate change. Scientific climate change research first and foremost provides computerized and abstract data that inhibit an intimate engagement with the problem. In this context, several literary scholars, among them Ursula Heise (“Toxins,” Sense, “Cultures”), Sylvia Mayer, Rob Nixon (Slow, “Great”), Adam Trexler or Michael Zizer and Julie Sze, have made a strong point about the role of fictional literature in the mediation of global climate change. A recent publication arguing in this vein is the essay collection The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (2014), edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. The contributions in this collection adopt the currently prominent trajectory for literary and cultural studies to engage with climate change by looking at it through the lens of risk theory. Understanding climate change as a risk discourse, Mayer argues in her individual article “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation” that fictional literature and films contribute strongly to discourses of climate change and the perception of its risks by “introduc[ing] the issue to a much wider audience than the one reached by scientific accounts” (Mayer 23). Mayer builds upon previous work by Ursula Heise, one of the first literary scholars to engage risk theory. Heise emphasizes the necessity of risk being mediated, including environmental risks. Enlisting “the literary myths of Dr. Faustus and Dr. Frankenstein,” she stresses the role of fictional literature in the process of culturally filtering scientific information about the dangers of modern technology (Heise, “Cultures” 18). Heise further argues that: [L]ess obviously but no less crucially, narrative templates such as that of pastoral or apocalypse, and narrative choices about the relation of the narrator to the narrative material, about protagonists and antagonists, and beginnings and endings Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 275 shape the way in which risks are perceived and communicated, as do particular metaphors and visual icons. (ibid.) Heise’s concluding contention is that narratives “provide important cultural tools for organizing information about risks into intelligible and meaningful stories” (Heise, Sense 138). This way, they also participate in environmental risk communication. In contrast to scientific texts, Mayer adds, fictional texts can “explore the complexity of individual risk experiences - their cultural, social, political, economic, or psychological dimensions - and they engage their readers imaginatively, intellectually, and emotionally through storytelling” (Mayer and Weik von Mossner 12). Fiction, with its “essentially infinitive imaginative and formal range,” thus, makes the various factors that shape specific experiences of climate change “more easily perceptible, intelligible, and concrete” (Mayer 23). The mainstream climate change novel, according to Mayer, can be categorized into two kinds of “risk narratives”: the dystopian “narrative of catastrophe” in which the future climate catastrophe has already happened on the one hand, and the “narrative of anticipation” which provides a story world in which the threat of climate collapse is perceived but can still be averted (24). While rightly observing that “risk perception relies on worldviews and cultural biases emerging from specific social contexts” (Mayer and Weik von Mossner 11), the proclamation of the “genre-defining distinction” into these two narrative forms (13) seems to particularly fit white, US-American novels. Looking at an ethnic American novel, Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, I want to make the case for a fictional text that fits neither one nor the other category neatly but nevertheless succeeds in mediating the phenomenon of climate change and makes its risks very concretely perceptible. In addition, Hogan’s text presents the reader with an alternative vision of relating to the natural environment; a vision that is grounded in indigenous cosmology and perceives the human as intricately interconnected with the non-human. What is promoted in the text is an ethical stance to the non-human world that posits responsibility towards it as constitutive of cultural and individual health. The Drought Like most contemporary environmentally oriented literature, People of the Whale has a straightforward environmentalist message that is conveyed mainly by way of its story. This warrants the engagement with the novel’s storyline before taking a closer look at its plot structure and narrative technique. For large parts, Hogan’s novel is set in Dark River, a small coastal town located in the northwest region of the United States. Dark River is home to the A’atsika, a fictional Native American tribe that has lived off the ocean for H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 276 centuries. The inhabitants of Dark River are plunged into an existential crisis when a prolonged drought hits the reservation. The drought destroys the livelihoods of many people, including the protagonist Ruth’s, who is a fisherwoman and relies on the seasonal salmon run for income. Initially, the drought is not perceived as such by the people of Dark River. It only manifests itself slowly in small, successive weather changes: “the clouds abandoned the sky [...] the coastal rains ended [...] the ocean tides slowed and then the winds of the world decided not to blow [...] the moon no longer pulls water back and forth” (Hogan 124). The omniscient narrator’s accumulation of individual phenomena on her list mirrors how the accumulation of climatic changes produces a number of aggregate effects, such as the warming of coastal waters, which, in turn, leads to a decline in fish. In the diegesis, two possible explanations for the drought are given: National and regional news reporters fall back on meteorological computations and the explanation of scientists who contend that the drought and the rise in water temperature are “a cyclical event” (126) that is “part of the natural rhythms of the earth and sea, part of the weather cycle” (135). The people of Dark River, in contrast, reject these techno-scientific explanations. The narrator states that for Ruth and her friends the official account disseminated by mainstream media “is not true” (126). For them, meteorological cycles and long-term calculations provide a means neither to explain nor to apprehend the absence of rain. Instead, they find an explanation for the drought when turning to indigenous cosmology. The local fisher-men interpret the drought as a “curse” (126) and the result of a wrongful action. Ruth’s mother observes: “It’s like the silence after a death out there” (124). Indeed, the novel’s diegesis reveals that there is a causal connection between the drought and a controversial whale hunt that had turned into a bloody spectacle. The whale hunt is the narrative’s central event around which the plot revolves. People of the Whale, in fact, tells the story of Thomas, a Vietnam War veteran, who returns to Dark River in order to participate in a gray whale hunt. His former friends, Dwight and other veterans, set up the event after secretly concluding a deal with a Japanese company to sell the whale meat for good profit. In order to circumvent international whaling legislation, Dwight uses the rhetoric of environmental and indigenous justice, calling upon treaty rights and A’atsika traditions. He argues that killing a whale promises the community a return to tribal customs and authentic spirituality: “Whale-hunting [...] will bring us back to ourselves. [...] [Whale meat is] our traditional food. We need it. We are starved for it” (69). Thomas and the other men are ensnared by Dwight’s argument and believe that the whale hunt offers them a means to reconnect with their traditional heritage from which they feel painfully separated. It appears as a way to “fill their hearts and souls with the wealth of something they wrongly believed had been lost and Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 277 wanted back. Tradition, they called it” (Hogan 68). Especially Thomas, the grandson of the community’s greatest whaler, hopes that killing a whale will “save himself from one history and return to another” (70) and thus redeem him from the traumatic experience of fighting and killing in Vietnam and from abandoning his family - Ruth and their teenage son, Marco. The hunt, which becomes a national media spectacle, eventually turns into a catastrophic event. As a result of the fact that the A’atsika had ceased hunting whales decades earlier and the knowledge about the customary practices had not been retained, the men embark on the hunt insufficiently prepared and inexperienced with respect to the task at hand. They kill a whale that is too young to be killed according to tribal customs, disregarding traditional rules that are meant to guarantee a sustainable relationship with the marine life that sustains them. When Marco tries to prevent the men from slaughtering the young whale, thereby jeopardizing Dwight’s monetary prospects, the latter drowns the boy in the confusion that unfolds during the whale’s death struggle. In the eyes of the tribe’s more traditional members, the conjoined deaths of Marco and the young whale cause the drought. One of the community’s elders prophesizes: “Mark my words. There’s going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done. Maybe more than one wrong thing. There will be a drought” (108). Interpreting the drought as the result of the untimely and unjustified deaths of Marco and the whale frames the extreme weather conditions in terms of an indigenous animist cosmology in which the human and the nonhuman are not only physically connected by sharing a common ecosystem but also metaphysically by sharing spiritual bonds. The relationship between cetaceans and humans plays a particularly important role in the tribe’s cosmology: According to the A’atsika origin myth, humans are born from whales and therefore trace their genealogy back to these sea creatures (Hogan 267, 278, 283). The wrongful killings of Marco and the whale mark a breach in the relationship with the more-than-human world, which unsettles the presumed equilibrium that governs A’atsika cosmology. This breach derails not only the daily lives of the novel’s characters but also larger ecological processes. The narrator contends that the drought shows that the world has “been thrown off course” (128). In the diegesis, the drought is the symptom of a larger disruption in the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. The Motif of the Drought Droughts are a recurrent motif in Native American literature. Commonly, the absence of life-giving rain signifies a man-made disturbance of the cosmological order. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), for example, H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 278 such a disruption is brought about by European settler colonialism, mineral resource exploitation in the American Southwest, the evolution of the US into a nuclear super power and the protagonist’s traumatic experience of fighting in WWII, and it manifests itself in prolonged dry periods: “The drought years had returned again, as they had after the First World War […]. They said it had been that way for the past six years” (Silko 10-11). Silko’s text explicitly traces back the origins of the cosmological disruption from the atomic age, to WWII and WWI, to the occupation of Native American lands by the “white skin people” (132). These are described as a people ethically and spiritually severed from the non-human world, a people who “grow away from the earth [and] from the sun” and for whom “the world is a dead thing” (135-136, emphasis original). Silko’s narrator concludes that such a relationship towards the earth and its resources results in exploitative extractive behavior, which influences the biosphere to the extent that it ultimately endangers the human species as a whole (246). 1 Similarly to Silko’s classic text, People of the Whale also addresses the cumulative, adverse effects that white settler colonialism, industrialization, and the extraction of natural resources had and still have on Native American communities. In addition, Hogan’s novel raises the question of environmental justice even more poignantly by drawing a connection between the economic and political marginalization of her protagonists and environmental exploitation in the name of capitalism. Consequently, the drought of Dark River can be read as pointing to a variety of interconnected instances of injustice and violence whereby it gains allegorical meaning. Life of the A’atsika is circumscribed by poverty, unemployment and alcoholism - dire conditions that frequently shape the reality of Native communities across the United States. 2 Most of the veterans in Hogan’s novel have not found a job, let alone a well-paying one. Consequently, the biggest incentive the men have to go on the whale hunt, apart from Thomas and Marco who are not privy to the deal with the Japanese company, is the money they are promised by Dwight. Killing a whale and selling its meat presents itself as an easy way to increase their income. 1 The narrator in Ceremony stresses that the uranium mines from which the ore used in the United States’ first atomic bomb at Alamogordo has been taken are located on land that originally belonged to the Laguna people. The extraction of uranium ore on Laguna land endangers not only the survival of the Laguna people, but facilitates the development of a destructive power that threatens populations across the world. The super power status of the US, acquired at the end of WWII and cemented throughout the Cold War, hence rests on the occupation of Native lands and the dispossession of Native peoples. 2 Particularly for the Makah people, on whose story Hogan modeled her fictional intervention into the whale hunting debate of the late 1990s, these problems are well documented by Gaard (5). Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 279 Native American Studies scholars argue that the economic problems with which many Native communities struggle are direct consequences of the exclusionary and oppressive regime of settler colonialism (Allen 29-31; Singh and Schmidt 6). 3 Geographically separated in reservations and excluded from mainstream American life, Native peoples have been systemically marginalized in the United States. As Native American customary ways of life cannot compete with the modern capitalist lifestyle that constitutes the US mainstream, scholars distinguish the concomitant alienation from tribal traditions as another severe problem for Native communities. Customary practices as well as the knowledge connected to these get lost when Native communities are forcefully (semi-)integrated into modern society; and community members might feel alienated from their tribal roots and heritage. It is in this context that the drought signifies more than just the absence of rain: The drought in People of the Whale also designates a spiritual drought - the absence of a way of life that is guided by traditional values and tribal knowledge. People of the Whale places the notion of alienation and the separation from one’s traditions at the center of the story. The narrator explains that the men think that the whale hunt would “fill their hearts and souls with the wealth of […] [t]radition,” a tradition that they believe is “lost and [they] wanted back” (Hogan 68). The omniscient voice presents the fact that many of the characters feel estranged and alienated from their tribal identities because they had lost “the old way of being in the world” by being “soldier[s] and businessm[e]n” as the main reason for the hunt (69). However, the lack of traditional knowledge also has a bearing on the novel’s central event, the whale hunt. As none of the men are accustomed to the old hunting practices or strong enough to actually paddle out in canoes, overpower the whale, and bring it back in, they use speedboats, guns, and other modern equipment to ensure their hunting success; a deviation of old practices that contributes to the “wrong thing[s]” that have been done and ultimately effect the drought. The erratic weather event, then, provides a motif that encapsulates a conglomerate of historical injustices and their cultural and collective as well as individual ramifications. Colonization, neo-colonialist ventures such as the Vietnam War (and the experience of being drawn into it by being an American citizen), and the exploitation of natural resources - all instances of violence and from an A’atsika perspective signs of a deep hostility against other living beings - hence contribute to the derailment of the world. 3 Scholars, such as Arnold Krupat, one of the most prolific Native American Studies scholars, further argue that colonial practices remain operative today and colonialism still is a contemporary experience. Krupat elaborates: “[T]here is not yet a ‘post-’ to the colonial status of Native Americans. [...] a considerable number of Native people exist in conditions of politically sustained subalternity” (Krupat 73). H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 280 Emplotment and Narrative Structure If Heise suggests that narratives provide important cultural tools to mediate environmental risks, it is important to add that different cultures produce different kinds of narratives. In accordance with this observation, one can assume that a climate change narrative written by a Native American author, such as Hogan’s People of the Whale, might take a different form or might at least be influenced by a different literary tradition and different cultural beliefs than narratives created by white American authors. In People of the Whale, Hogan creates a fictional ethnic cultural heritage that frames the characters’ relationship with the more-than-human world. In addition, she draws on icons (whales) and narrative templates (apocalypse) common to mainstream environmentalist narratives while at the same time problematizing them. Such a combination of dominant narrative templates and indigenous literary traditions is a phenomenon that has been described for other environmentally oriented ethnic literature as well. Patrick D. Murphy observes in his monograph Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature that contemporary ethnic writers in particular draw on their ethnic cultural heritage for the “intellectual, emphatic, and sensory engagement with the uncultured dimensions of the world” (73-74). Hogan realizes an emphatic engagement with the more than human world by way of characters that have “supernatural” abilities (Hogan 141) who transgress the boundaries between human and non-human. The drought prompts Ruth to turn to the A’atsika elders with the request to call upon the Rain Priest, “one of the immortals” with the capability to bring back the water (133). Soon afterwards, a stranger appears in Dark River; first the room he stays in starts to leak and later the rains return to the village. The Rain Priest is a shape-shifter who recurrently appears throughout the narrative in the form of an octopus that walks on land or climbs onto boats. In his human form, the man allows Ruth to feel “compassion for him” the way she knows that he feels compassion for her (149). This reciprocal recognition and emotional connection signifies a relationship between humans and the morethan-human world that is essential for the well-being of both and that is a prerequisite for the Rain Priest to “restore” the balance that had been lost in Dark River (149). The Rain Priest episodes as well as other moments in the text, such as the spiritual connection between Marco and the whales and Marco’s transformation into a whale after his death, the supernatural ability of old Witka to stay under water for minutes on end or of the “old woman from the north” who extinguishes fires by just lying in their way (140), the story about Ruth being born with gills, and last but not least the drought itself as a direct reaction of the cosmos to wrongful human behavior have contributed to the novel being labeled magic realism. While Murphy concedes that literary works Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 281 by indigenous writers that “tap into historical cultural formations that give greater credence to forms of human perception other than the rationally conscious” cannot be described in terms of an “Anglo-American Enlightenment realism” (Murphy 73-74), he rejects magic realism as an adequate designation. Instead, Murphy suggests using the term “situated realism” with respect to Native American literature. Situated realism according to Murphy “relies on the consensual reality of a given people in a given locale, but that is not presented as a universal truth” (31-32). The interpretation of the drought as a result of human interference with a natural order presents such a consensual reality for the traditional members of the A’atsika and conforms to their animist worldview. Hence, the realism of Hogan’s novel can indeed be described in terms of a situated realism rather than of magic realism. Despite the fact that the majority of Hogan’s readers does not share such an indigenous cosmovision - and, indeed, cannot share a fictional tribe’s worldview - the narrative nevertheless speaks to a non-indigenous readership by establishing referentiality to the outer textual world. Its allegorical quality, as I show below, derives from the story’s emplotment. Critics go so far as to claim that realist narrative structures are inadequate for representing the large scale and complex phenomenon of climate change (Zizer and Sze 385). Timothy Clark for example notes: With its multiple scales, more or less invisibility, global scope, unpredictability and alarming menace, climate change seems more germane to modes of representation that involve unfamiliar non human agencies, multiple and perhaps elliptical plots. The situation invites a writing that might be a form of secularised magic realism, in which seemingly rational procedures and modes of thought and representation interact with bizarre and counter-intuitive non-human agencies, kinds of action-at-a-distance, with plural conventions of characterisation, symbolisation and plotting. (144) People of the Whale includes such non-human agencies, embodied for example in the character of the Rain Priest or expressed in the motif of the drought, and gives them key roles in the story. In addition, the novel is organized along the lines of a non-linear plot. By interweaving two narrative strands, one set in Dark River and the other one recounting Thomas’s Vietnam War experiences, the text connects past injustices with those of the present and also exposes how climate change is an issue that can only be understood as composed of multiple, disparate, and (ostensibly) unrelated human actions and decisions across the world. Thomas’s traumatic war experiences are recounted in the form of flashbacks that disrupt the narrative’s chronology. Importantly, it is only after the whale hunt - that is during the drought - that these flashbacks set in. The narrative void created by the drought, thus, formally provides the space for an engagement with Thomas’s traumatic memories. The absence of rain in the H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 282 main narrative sets off a series of Thomas’s reminiscences of Vietnam’s torrential rains. There, “[t]he rain was dangerous” (Hogan 171). The monsoon downpours are described as having a “disintegrating” quality, wearing out the men. Thomas notes that “[i]n the jungle weather it all comes apart” (119). Parallel to the disintegrating rains of Vietnam, the cataclysmic drought of Dark River forces the community to contemplate how everything has come apart for them. Thus, the tropical rains and the drought are presented as equally disruptive - both signifying the abundance and absence of an element, each the symptom of an imbalance. In the drought’s “hard light,” Ruth notes, “everything is seen,” the people’s “pain,” their “hearts and souls” (133). The drought, hence, is a symptom of the complex interplay of issues that had and continue to have negative effects on the A’atsika lifestyle. It encapsulates the loss of tribal bonds, the lack of spiritual guidance, the traumatic wartime experiences abroad and the disruptive experience of colonial occupation at home. The motif of the drought and its mirror motif of torrential rains functions as a link between the experiences of the Native peoples in the US to that of the indigenous population of mainland Southeast Asia. By paralleling the colonial history of the A’atsika to the hardships the tribal people in Vietnam and Cambodia suffer during the war (218, 255), the novel extrapolates the drought’s reach to a larger meteorological scale: it comes to signify an imbalance that affects not only Dark River and the “small islands on the other side of the ocean” but the whole world (128). As the narrator expands the significance of the drought (and its causes) to apply to the whole world, the novel becomes a climate change allegory. Moreover, Hogan’s text functions as an allegory because of its moral; it promotes a straightforward ethical message. In his essay “‘Trees are what everyone needs: ’ The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and the problem of Mimesis,” Hannes Bergthaller argues that the “ethical force of a text arises not from the facts it may be said to represent” but rather from “the way it picks up and transforms the narratives circulating in a culture” (155). Bergthaller contests the idea that environmentalist texts need to be referential to the outer-textual world in a strictly mimetic sense in order to have an ethical impetus. 4 Instead, he argues, the ethical force of a text emerges from its “emplotment,” that is to say from the way it is structured into a coherent narrative to which the reader can relate (Bergthaller 166). Despite its non-realist elements, which rationally 4 Bergthaller’s essay contributes to the lively debate about the role of mimesis in environmental literature. While the one side, with its most prominent proponent Lawrence Buell, argues for outer mimesis as a prerequisite for a text to be truly an environmental text (Buell, Environmental), the other side contends that a text needs not to be mimetic of the material world to be considered an environmental text (Phillips). (See also Bergthaller; Buell, Future; Bartosch.) Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 283 thwart mimetic representation, Hogan’s novel facilitates a referentiality which allows the reader to extrapolate from the narrative to her material reality. The text achieves this through the use of two popular narrative tropes: first, the whales as ‘charismatic megafauna’ which are widely used as an icon for the destructiveness of exploitative resource extraction; and second, the narrative template of apocalypse. For environmental activists, whales have long become iconic animals. They belong to those large mammalian species with great popular appeal (alongside the panda bear, the polar bear, the tiger or the orangutan) and therefore have been used widely in conservationist campaigns. Although People of the Whale has an environmentalist message and argues for a less exploitative relationship with the non-human world, the narrator also problematizes the way in which conservationist ideology constructs cetaceans as a universally endangered species and how this problematically clashes with indigenous reality. In the novel, a heated and at times violent controversy arises around the gray whale hunt. In the eyes of the animal activists, environmentalists and “protesters from San Francisco and thereabouts” (Hogan 87), the A’atsika hunters endanger international whaling regulations (69) by killing innocent members of an infraorder of marine mammals that has become the symbol for international wildlife preservation efforts. Without taking into account the population density of gray whales and the limited number that could be hunted by a small tribe like the A’atsika, these conservationists demonize the tribe and construct Hogan’s whalers as opponents to a global conservationist mission. Neither the non- Native environmentalists nor the more liberal reporters who concede that the A’atsika should be allowed to enact their treaty rights take into account the economic reality the community faces. Some journalists support the A’atsika’s fight for a whaling license, as the narrator relates. However, only at the cost of severe stereotyping: Some of these reporters, especially white men, thought the tribal hunters were men of mystery and spirit, foreign enough to their own America to be right. Yes, to return to their ways would be the right thing. After all America had done to them, they should be given that. (Hogan 68) The paternalistic defense of indigenous rights mythologizes the Indians and their idiosyncratic “ways” to which they presumably can “return” as mysterious, spiritual and ‘other.’ While conceding the injustice of colonialism, the news coverage simultaneously invokes nostalgia for a pre-colonial lifestyle and thereby continues the colonial othering and exclusion that the A’atsika try to controvert. By drawing out the complexity of the debate, the narration not only dismantles the unreflecting use of certain popular species in mainstream conservationist arguments but also points to the perseverance and H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 284 misuse of the stereotype of the “ecological Indian”; a stereotype that has long took root in environmentalist discourse. The ecological Indian stereotype represents “American Indians as environmentalists, as keepers of the land, or as worshippers of a Mother Earth goddess” (Schweninger 16). As a result, American Indians are transformed into a “symbol of a more ecological past” (Ray 90, 92) and are considered as ‘closer to nature,’ practicing an environmentally sustainable and ecologically conscious lifestyle. Sarah J. Ray argues that the stereotype of the ecological Indian is recurrently instrumentalized by mainstream environmentalism for its own ends, ignoring historical and contemporary realities and instead imposing an imagined identity on indigenous peoples. When Native Americans behave contrarily to the ideal of the ecological Indian - and in the novel the A’atsika do so because they hunt and kill whales - they betray non-native environmental sensibilities and also non-native expectations of an ecologically superior Native American identity. This frequently “puts Native Americans in an impossible position - to support modern environmentalist agendas or be seen as not authentically Native American” (Ray 86). By dismantling the othering tendencies of mainstream environmentalism, the novel criticizes how these practices ignore contemporary indigenous realities and continue colonial othering mechanisms, limiting indigenous agency. It is in this context, that the novel enables the reader to see beyond the iconographic imagery, to question the instrumentalization of certain icons (animal or human), and query larger historical, economic and ecological coherences. The second element of emplotment that facilitates reading the novel as an environmental allegory is Hogan’s use of the narrative template of apocalypse. Apocalypse has become a master-metaphor in environmentalist discourse (Buell, Environmental 285). What commends apocalypse for an environmentalist agenda is its double function of warning against a threat and simultaneously calling for change in order to prevent it. In contrast to the biblical apocalypse, secular forms of apocalypse suggest that the end of the world can be prevented if humanity decides on taking the right measures (Garrard 99). The practices that threaten the world can be altered and its occurrence forestalled. While the catastrophe in form of the drought is already underway in Dark River, it does not yet spell the end, as it would in much other dystopian “narratives of catastrophe” as Mayer’s categorization would have it (Mayer 24). Instead, the drought plays a cathartic role in Hogan’s novel and marks the waypoint from where the A’atsika need to rethink their situation. It initiates a spiritual process as it forces the community to contemplate their actions and evaluate the disintegration of tribal bonds and the detachment from traditional values: “With everything suspended, they are given time to think, [...] They think about the whale and what they’ve done, who they have be- Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 285 come in time” (Hogan 128). As much as the drought is a symptom of a cosmological imbalance, it is also a chance for renewal and resilience. What is problematic about the apocalyptic mode, however, is that it often implies an “ideal socioecological countermodel - often a pastoral one,” which perpetuates outmoded and romanticizing “ideals of naturally selfregenerating ecosystems and holistic communities in harmony with their surroundings” (Heise, Sense 141). While People of the Whale indeed tries to distance itself from romanticizing models, such as that of the ecological Indian for example, it nevertheless promotes the notion of a holistic lifestyle and ties it back to ancient A’atsika traditions and practices. However, I agree with Jonathan Steinwand that such a subscription to a romantic representation of indigenous life must be interpreted in terms of a “‘strategic exoticism’ aimed at subverting that representation and reclaiming some agency that has been misplaced when outsiders have infringed on the local scene” (195). From this perspective, one suggestion of the novel is that the solution to contemporary crises and catastrophes is a re-evaluation of indigenous knowledge and the associated lifestyle - albeit necessarily adapted to the contemporary state of affairs. Towards a Nonanthropocentric Environmental Ethic Despite its superficial tendency to romanticize an indigenous, animist and, thus, presumably holistic lifestyle, the strength of Hogan’s text lies exactly in its promotion of forms of knowledge about and engagement with the morethan-human world that are not governed by scientific rationalism. By juxtaposing the official meteorological accounts of the drought in news reports with the explanation provided by the A’atsika, the novel puts techno-science alongside indigenous knowledge. Even though the A’atsika do not find scientific explanations helpful to account for the phenomenon, neither of the two explanatory attempts is rejected in the diegesis. Rather, the novel makes explicit how large-scale weather alterations always manifest themselves in concrete and localized experiences of an individual or a community and that these concrete manifestations need to be interpreted by those affected. Such an interpretation makes it easier to mediate and apprehend individual effects and approximate the scope of climate change as a whole. In addition, People of the Whale shows that meteorological knowledge and the cultural practices that produce it are also highly localized and specific. By framing the drought in terms of A’atsika cosmology, the novel creates awareness for the fact that the dominant, techno-managerial science of ‘meteorology’ is not the only epistemological approach to weather phenomena and does not meaningfully apply in some cultural contexts. In the diegesis, “the sky that isn’t European” (Hogan 256) cannot be read by using a rational- H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 286 scientific procedure of European Enlightenment provenance. Instead, the A’atsika’s knowledge about the weather, like much other indigenous ecological knowledge, emerges from a way of knowing that differs from Western hegemonic epistemology and, thus, can be described as a form of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 583). In the case of People of the Whale, this situated knowledge emerges from a cosmology that considers the human and the non-human realm as mutually responsive and reacting to each other. “For every action,” the narrator notes, “there is a reaction. It’s true especially in the ocean” (Hogan 105-106) - and, one could add, by extension this seems also to be true for the weather. Weather, hence, is not something that can be understood uncoupled from human agency. Rather, it is directly influenced by human actions and vice versa. This assumption invests the A’atsika’s environmental perspective with an ethical relevance that reaches beyond the human and includes the non-human; and it reaches beyond the confines of Dark River as well. Hogan’s novel contributes to contemporary environmental discourse by calling to attention that there exist long traditions of nonanthropocentric environmental ethics, which also need to be considered in mainstream environmentalist debates. While these traditions might reject the results of environmental sciences as a basis for ethical behavior or action, they place emphasis on the kinship and interdependence of all living beings. Consistent with the stance promoted in Hogan’s People of the Whale, this means that human action shapes and is shaped by meteorological phenomena. Meteorological and ecological stability are dependent on sustainable and nonexploitative human cultural practices. While the novel refrains from claiming that its Native characters are not complicit in destructive environmental behavior, it nevertheless presents an ethical alternative relationship between humans and the more-than-human world. Conclusion Linda Hogan’s novel People of the Whale presents an argument of global environmental relevance. It criticizes the effects of a global modernity which manifests in environmental destruction, militarization, and capitalist resource exploitation and argues for taking into account in mainstream environmental debates a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic as well as the environmental knowledge of the people who live along the lines of such an ethic. By embedding the A’atsika community within not only a local or national framework but also within a global economic network (as the deal with the Japanese illustrates) and a trans-continental political and historical context (referring to the Vietnam War and the history of Euro-American colonization), the extreme drought the community faces transforms into an Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 287 allegory for the disastrous repercussions of the environmental exploitation and degradation that mark the Anthropocene. The novel expands its ethical concerns beyond the circumscribed setting of the A’atsika reservation when the uncommon weather change of this one locality stands in for the global risk of climate change. Thus, linking local nature and global responsibility, the narrative promotes ethical and environmental interconnectedness on a global scale. By way of its metonymic gesture which includes the whole world, the novel also addresses and challenges the reader to think about her individual relationship with the more-than-human world. Thereby, Hogan’s novel provides what Steinwand calls a “localized challenge to environmentalist universalism” (195) in that it problematizes the use of certain icons and romanticizing or sentimentalizing stereotypes that lack a deeper consideration of historical, material and cultural conditions of those communities that are directly affected by the repercussions of meteorological deviations and profound alterations of our global climate. Fictional texts such as Hogan’s, hence, must be understood as important contributions to environmental discourse and environmental ethics as well as to the corpus of cultural artifacts that help mediate the large-scale phenomenon of climate change. “In a world drowning in data, stories can play a vital role,” as Rob Nixon formulates this observation (Nixon, “Great,” n. pag.). Particularly fictional literature can make accessible the complexity of meteorological phenomena in a specific way and visualize the interconnectedness of disparate weather events at remote places of the earth as well as create attention and awareness with respect to the precarious state of our global climate and the environmental justice issues that come with it by telling stories of individual and collective experiences of climate change. Works Cited Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Bartosch, Roman. EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2013. Bergthaller, Hannes. “‘Trees are What Everyone Needs’: The Lorax, Anthropocentrism, and the Problem of Mimesis.” Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Ed. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 288 ---. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Clark, Timothy. “Some Climate Change Ironies: Deconstruction, Environmental Politics and the Closure of Ecocriticism.” Oxford Literary Review 32.1 (2010): 131-49. Gaard, Greta. “Tools for a Cross-Cultural Feminist Ethics: Exploring Ethical Contexts and Contents in the Makah Whale Hunt.” Hypatia 16.1 (2001): 1- 26. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London, New York: Routledge, 2011. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575- 99. Heise, Ursula K. “Cultures of Risk and the Aesthetic of Uncertainty.” Scientific Cultures - Technological Challenges: A Transatlantic Perspective. Ed. Klaus Benesch and Meike Zwingenberger. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 17- 44. ---. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ---. “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel.” American Literature 74.4 (2002): 747-78. Hogan, Linda. People of the Whale: A Novel. New York: Norton, 2009. Krupat, Arnold. “Postcolonialism, Ideology and Native American Literature.” Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 73-94. Mayer, Sylvia. “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation.” The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Ed. Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. Mayer, Sylvia, and Alexa Weik von Mossner. “The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture / Introduction.” The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture. Ed. Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge. Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2011. ---. “The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene.” MLA, 2014. Profession. <http: / / profession.commons. mla.org/ 2014/ 03/ 19/ the-great-acceleration-and-the-great-diver-gencevulnerability-in-the-anthropocene/ >. Web. 4 March 2017. Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale 289 Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Silko, Leslie M. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt. “On the Borders Between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory.” Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 3-69. Steinwand, Jonathan. “What the Whales Would Tell Us: Cetacean Communication in Novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda and Amitav Ghosh.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Zizer, Michael, and Julie Sze. “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies.” Discourse 29.2&3 (2007): 384-410. Call for Papers for REAL Vol. 35/ 2019 The Return of Aesthetics in American Studies? Ed. by Winfried Fluck and Johannes Voelz Over the last decades, the field of American Studies has had a strained relationship with aesthetics. In the founding period of the field—the decades before and after World War II—the aesthetic dimension of American culture was taken for granted. But in the 1970s and 1980s, as practitioners in the field committed themselves to ideology critique, political-minded historicism, and identity-political activism, aesthetics seemed either irrelevant or, more often, a conservative force that kept social realities out of sight. The annual convention of the American Studies Association attests to the marginalization of aesthetics from the discipline. Likewise, articles dealing with aesthetics are largely absent from the pages of American Quarterly, the association’s official journal. Recently, however, this marginalization of aesthetics has come under critical scrutiny. Scholars in the field aim to resuscitate modes of aesthetic analysis, either by showing that the aesthetic is a necessary ingredient to any efficacious politicized criticism, or by calling into question whether politically grounded critique ought to provide the normative horizon of Americanist inquiry at all. We invite contributions that continue these projects by either critically taking stock of recent reappraisals or significantly extending their scope. In view of the interdisciplinary orientation of American studies, it should be emphasized that discussions of the aesthetic are not restricted to works of art and may include popular culture and the media, aesthetic strategies in political and social life, and the performative dimensions of everyday life. Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8157-0 Meteorologies of Modernity explores the ways in which literature reflects and participates in discourses on weather and climate - historically as well as at our contemporary moment. Literature contains a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries. The essays collected in this volume therefore ask to what extent literature can bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view, how literature offers ways to think through the challenges of the Anthropocene both culturally, historically, and aesthetically, and, last but not least, how it helps us to conceptualize a radically new understanding of what it means to be human. The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles and cover a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. Topics include representations of tropical climates in Shakespeare, the close yet tense relationship between literature and the rising discipline of meteorology in the nineteenth century, allegories of climate change in postcolonial literature, and climate catastrophes in the contemporary clifi novel. By employing a historicizing and comparative approach, the volume addresses the need for studying representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, transnational and transhistorical framework, overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that are essential when debating the Anthropocene. 33 Volume 33 (2017) Meteorologies of Modernity Edited by Sarah Fekadu, Hanna Straß-Senol and Tobias Döring Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene