Identity and Imagination in Climate Fiction

It seems as if… the climate fiction genre may be defined by the trope of a character’s inability to stay static in a world completely in flux.

ALTERED IDENITITES

Over the past sixty years, we have been exposed to a myriad of fiction in which various climate-related scenarios have been presented to us as a problem in need of a solution. On one hand, we have witnessed the personal transformations and realizations of some authors, posing practical approaches to the impending climate changes in our future, along with data that surely acts as a device of persuasion. In these writings, such as Squarzoni’s Climate Changed (2012) and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), it is evident that an awareness of climate science brings about a certain fluctuation of identity, serving as the text’s central character arc. In other, arguably more imaginative texts, such as J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and the more contemporary Gold Fame Citrus (2015) by Claire Vaye Watkins, the concept of identity becomes more abstract — and in some ways, more dramatic and understandable. By situating these texts in a fictional dystopian future, the authors are permitted to play more explicitly with the notion of a popular climate awareness. Therefore, it is my intention to better highlight the affective bonds within these two texts — the individual identities of Ballard and Watkins’ characters, as well as the relationships they have — while also discussing what these identities (projected into this climate-changed future) say about the larger, fictional society these authors have constructed, as well as our own.

In Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), set one hundred and eighty-three years after its publication date, London is virtually unrecognizable — a breeding ground of heavily evolved species of plant and animal life resembling a flooded lagoon. It is important to note that, through this small cast of characters, Ballard is easily capable of touching on their adaptability to this new climate. Strangely enough, Ballard’s writing does not deal with the popular notion of coming to terms with this new world. Instead, the novel begins with his characters being fairly adjusted to their environment. The novel rather quickly insinuates their reluctance to actually leave the place, despite its worsening conditions (43). From here, the only path Ballard has carved out for himself is one of further alteration — by this I mean: a tightening of the characters’ grasps on the environment surrounding them. In a way, this intentional adaption to the changing world is what needs to be mobilized in the readers of climate fiction. However, Ballard does not stop there. Thematically, Ballard’s work is far more complex, delving into the world of the collective unconscious, uniting his cast of characters through dreams resulting from a biological/neurological change catalyzed by the changing environment. Ballard writes:

Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… 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. (56)

The linking of an internal consciousness to an external, unfamiliar space is a literary device that ultimately unites the cast of characters by redefining human nature, but Ballard chooses to only focus on Dr. Kerans throughout the novel, exploring his change in identity as an effect of an eventuality that could possibly transform the entire human race in time. Ballard elaborates:

The further down the Central Nervous System you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and the Triassic Eras. (56)

This regression of human evolution in a sense provides quite a different look at how climate consciousness can alter someone, while still warranting an appropriate outcome that romanticizes a stronger awareness of the Earth. It is this journey’s destination that could be viewed as a loss of identity, instead of a persistence in maintaining one’s former identity. However, Ballard chooses to depict this in a positive light, implying that the remaking of Kerans’ identity is the fate the human race must come to terms with. In this sense, The Drowned World (1962) becomes a commentary on the collective humankind, despite its focus on a singular character. Ballard’s focus on Kerans opens the door to even paralleling Biblical mythology, such as Genesis — the end of the novel being a retelling of the infamous origins of human life acting as a new beginning in a very different world. We specifically see all of this in the novel’s conclusion, once Dr. Kerans reunites with a former, escaped associate, Hardman, which results in Kerans committing to living the rest of his days as the “second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn Sun” (198). However, the most poignant message here is the unique relationship with the earth, humbly depicting our species as inevitably returning to the earth it originated from, and instead of exhibiting reluctance, we should embrace it with open arms.

Embedded in this narrative, there are strands that speak of society, particularly reflective of 1962, however, they remain relevant in some sense today. In Dr. Robert Kerans’ relationship with one of his associates, Beatrice Dahl, we see Ballard’s problematic perspective on sexuality and women projected into a future in which a climate disaster does not relatively affect prejudice or objectification. This masculinist objectification and sexualization is certainly evident in Beatrice’s introduction:

Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck-chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python… The Colonel paused at the rail, looking down at the beautiful supple body with ungrudging approval… ‘All right, you two, get on with it. I’m not a strip show…’ ‘My dear Miss Dahl, you should be flattered that I keep coming to see you,’ Riggs told her… ‘Besides, as the military governor of this area’ — here he winked playfully at Kerans — ‘ I have certain responsibilities towards you. And vice versa..’ (37)

There is also a problematic discourse on race exhibited through Strangman’s character and his henchman. It is unclear whether or not this is a method in which Ballard is insinuating that social norms and interactions are also descending into further chaos, also resembling a cyclical or reversed structure in which the social collective is plunged through the violent prejudices of humanity’s past, or if Ballard was merely commenting on the social ailments of his time. This can be seen in the following passage:

As his Negro lieutenants re-started their engines and drifted off towards the bank, he surveyed the surrounding building with a critical eye… The alligators congregated like hounds around their master, the wheeling cries of the dense cloud of sentinel birds overhead, Nile plover and stone curlew, piercing the morning air. (103)

Regardless, it is important to note that Ballard would go to such lengths to flesh out a story in which the social collective is not necessarily remade or suffering from a loss of identity, but is somehow more corrupt in the wake of environmental catastrophe. Strangman’s purpose seems to, for the most part, represent the time before the world was remade over, clashing with Kerans and his associates’ adaptation to the haunting lagoon. This is especially evident when Strangman drains the city of water, revealing our world — their old world — underneath:

Half an hour later Beatrice, Kerans and Dr. Bodkin were able to walk out into the streets. Huge pools of water still lay about everywhere, leaking from the ground floors of the buildings, but they were a little more than two or three feet deep. There were clear stretches of pavement over a hundred yards long, and many of the further streets were completely drained. Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways, and huge banks of black sludge were silted up into the gutters and over the sidewalks… (144)

Therefore, I think at the heart of this novel is society’s reluctance to surrender their identities to the changing planet, but the individuals’ (Bodkin, Beatrice, Hardman, and, especially, Kerans) acceptance of it and the result of that remade identity.

In Gold Fame Citrus (2015), Claire Vaye Watkins is depicting something similar — except it seems more explicitly geared toward taking the typical route of improving the characters’ individual identities through hardships resulting from the changing climate. At the beginning of the novel, Luz Dunn views herself as a washed-up celebrity, squatting in a glamorous home in Los Angeles even though the world is seemingly heading towards an end (3). Although she is a twenty-five-year-old former model, she is also considered a generational symbol of sorts. In the wake of this new epoch, her identity is forcibly remade into a propaganda tool by the Bureau of Conservation, which named her “Baby Dunn,” in order to use her age as a landmark for the worsening environment (11). While Luz is mostly selfish and irresponsible in this dangerous world, her boyfriend Ray takes care of her, despite her shortcomings. In her relationship with Ray, she seems to define herself as carefree, until a conflict with a neglected baby arises. It is here that Watkins explores an identity crisis in her main protagonist, who sees herself in this innocent child and surrenders into the impulse of effectively kidnapping her (45–47). While the decision fits her current identity, the choice catalyzes a crisis in which Luz fights the feeling of identifying with baby Ig, as she is also, in some sense, a signifier that the world has been drastically remade over. Watkins makes sure to foreshadow Luz’s personal feelings for the baby almost immediately, linking Luz’s maternal feelings to her past with her own mother:

Immediately the child grimaced, squenched her face up in revulsion and opened her mouth. Luz cupped her hand beneath the child’s chin and the girl let the spitty fruit drop out. Liz tried a berry and found it a tasteless mucus. “Sorry,” she said. Ray chuckled a little and the girl told him to shut up. Ray balked. “Shut up!” the baby said once more, gleefully. Luz said, “Be kind,” her own mother’s line. (40)

While the narrative appears to be one in which a dangerous climate can still be conducive to a new family uniting under extreme circumstances, it slowly unfolds to be more than that: an odd coming of age story for a young woman in a dystopian future. Luz’s identity is constantly thrown into flux, often depending on her sexual and romantic encounters with others within the narrator. For instance, with Ray, she seems to be careless at first, ultimately attempting to reconcile her struggle with never becoming something normal or better. The novel, then, in my opinion, is the account of her trying to be a desired, useful woman, despite her circumstances. She strives to be maternal, to improve the conditions of baby Ig’s life, especially because she can relate to being a child during this disastrous climate — she has never really grown up. On page 227, after Luz’s effortful sexual encounter with Levi, Watkins writes:

She inhaled, excited by the sudden opportunity to be useful. “I have some money,” she offered. He winced. “I don’t even want it,” she said. “I haven’t even looked at it.” The hatbox sat in the corner… Inside, what was left of her modeling money… “I don’t have any use for it,” she said. “You can have it all. Wouldn’t that move things along?” Levi shook his head, gently. “Take it,” she insisted. That money belonged to another person, a child doll weakling. Baby Dunn, a Mojav quitter. She would be glad to be rid of it.

Later, the same Levi puts Luz in her place when he claims that it would be best if his collective — to which Ray and Luz do not belong — adopted baby Ig. Luz is faced with separating her identity from the child, ultimately doing the right thing, admitting to herself that she is not Ig’s people (336). I think that the end of Luz’s character arc can be read two different ways. While it is tragic that Luz must admit to herself that she is “obsolete” and surrender “her” child, going as far as naming Ig after her mother, and ultimately letting herself drown, it is also the most mature decision that Luz finally chooses to participate in (334–339). At the end of the novel, when Luz lets go of Ray and slips under the water, I think it is a positive transformation of a character arc — Luz is a tragic character, yes, but she has also come full circle, realizing the inevitable. In conclusion, her last words seem to summarize the development of the character:

“I’m okay,” Luz shouted back over the miraculous roar of water, all those prayers answered late. “I’d be okay,” she revised, smiling before she slipped forever under, “if I could just get my feet under me.” (339)

Both of these works deal with the changing of identities amidst a changing climate, but the texts work in almost opposing directions. Ultimately, however, each of these central characters undergo a tragic, but necessary transformation, coming into an identity that feels the need to surrender their life to the planet. It seems as if, by these two examples, the climate fiction genre may be defined by the trope of a character’s inability to stay static in a world completely in flux.

It is my hope that… I have appropriately underscored the importance of climate fiction and, in general, literary invention as a catalyst for ruminating about our current circumstances…

IMAGINATION AS INTERRUPTION

In Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), Scranton arguably employs the use of flash “non-fiction,” if you will, to parallel the consequences of war to the consequences of climate change. In its opening, Learning to Die reads:

Driving into Iraq in 2003 felt like driving into the future… With “shock and awe,” the US military had unleashed the end of the world on a city of six million — a city au the same size as Houston or Washington, D.C… I was a private in the United States Army. This damaged world was my new home. If I survived. Two and a half years later, still in the army but safe and lazy back in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I thought I had made it out. Then I watched on television as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This time it was the weather that inspired shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and collapse I’d seen in Baghdad, the same failure of planning and the same tide of anarchy. (13–14)

This short account, spanning only a total of a few short pages, of his personal experiences serves as a segue into the larger point of the book — a method he later defends on page 19:

In order for us to adapt to this strange new world, we’re going to need more than scientific reports and military policy. We’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need new myths and new stories, a new conceptual understanding of reality…

Scranton, self-admittedly, writes his book as a story, although “climate change is too big to be reduced to a single narrative” (24). By using the ideas employed in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), I intend on analyzing the micro-fiction publications of my fellows at the University of Florida, as well as my own, for the incorporation of the creative invention as a form of action.

In my own micro-fiction piece, there is an inherent juxtaposition between the beauty of the disastrous climate in Vancouver and the merciless, humiliating murder of women (Walton). In this piece, it was my intention to couple the issue of climate change with other social anxieties, such as misogyny and racism — two popular forms of prejudice that are perpetuated by a reluctance to move forward. It is my belief that this reluctance is highly comparable to the same one preventing us from addressing climate science and the planetary consequences of our actions. While the micro-fiction does not attempt to render that same scale, being situated in one locale for a brief snapshot, it does pose a larger reflection of a society existing today. In this way, I believe that my piece performs the important function of depicting the dangerous consequences of belief systems that refuse to accept societal progression, while opening the opportunity for discussion — how can this future be avoided? What of our current conditions can be altered to better our future chances of surviving the next epoch?

Just northwest of Vancouver the sun is always setting. The blossoming of orange light cascades over our urban kingdom, rendering those hidden behind tinted windows into inhuman shades.

“Too many people in the world,” is what they told us. But we didn’t listen.

She stands at the foot of an open window. Nude, as requested, she can feel the sting of the breeze flattening her afro.

A gunshot to her leg and she’s plummeting twenty-two stories. When she hits the water, she’s sure she can feel it rising.

“Next,” one of the silhouettes calls, but there are no women left. (Walton)

In Learning to Die, Scranton addresses a point that I believe is essential to my writing:

The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today… The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality. (22–23)

Through this lens, it is easy to view my piece as a cautionary tale, one that could spark the logic needed to understand the stakes of ignoring our responsibility to learn how to adapt to the incoming future. Despite its picturesque backdrop, the dire tone of the text is meant to inspire a sense of desire for change, in more ways than one. These types of messages are meant to inspire collective action. The gender divide present in my works is not merely an attempt to critique hegemonic masculinity — it is meant to further motivate its audience to seek change. While the content is disheartening in general, there is also a violent, historical aspect to my writing. “For most of human history, violence has been a central element of social conflict,” Scranton writes. “The first clear evidence of mass human violence is as old as civilization; the first evidence of its end has yet to be seen” (75). Therefore, the dismay found in my fiction may not only be attributed to the juxtaposition of the “beautiful” and the “abhorrent,” but also in the fact that it has some historical basis or “justification.” Scranton continues:

As Freud wrote in his famous debate with Einstein on the question of war, “It is a general principle… that conflicts of interest between men are settled by the use of violence. This is true of the whole animal kingdom…” The long record of human brutality seems to offer conclusive evidence that… socially organized violence [is] as biologically a part of human life as [is] sex, language, eating, that aggression and the drive for dominance are… species traits, and that we have little reason to hope that war and murder might someday disappear. Our future promises to be as savage as our past. (75)

From Scranton’s definition of an interruption, found on page 87, I believe that my micro-fiction can be best viewed as a “reflection” upon human nature — in its current and past states. In fact, I think that my piece is probably the most anarchic, or “counterproductive” in a sense, meaning “if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways.”

Elizabeth Wirick’s piece immerses the reader in the middle of a few moments, spanning the life of a New England boy turned grandfather. In this personal reflection, Wirick captures the essence of Scranton’s concept of the interruption:

Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence… to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror… environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying. (88)

This is the singular passage I think is most central to Wirick’s writing. Her form of interruption, while still rather dismal, begs a different question in the midst of a transformation — not unlike the period we currently reside in. It permits “the children” to interrupt the devastation of the planet we know by begging the question “What is a tree?” but allows its protagonist to gain an understanding and appreciation of the soon-to-be-extinct plant life. Indeed, Wirick uses her literary invention to reflect upon a time in her own childhood to inform a further response to this devastation:

On a grey dismal day, a New England boy looked out his back window. Men with hardhats and chainsaws were cutting down every last tree. Yellow bulldozers leveled his forest playground into his memory.

Generations come and go, idly standing by. Today’s children ask, “What is a tree?”

In the early mornings, he searched for snails under leaves and rocks in the lush green forest that had been steps away. Sometimes he stumbled across the nocturnal white-lipped snail.

Generations of greed and overpopulation led to urban sprawl and deforestation.

Today he watches his grandchild play in this concrete jungle.

Wirick’s response to the extreme deforestation of her fictional version of Earth is nostalgic in the sense that it tries to preserve some form of life from further going extinct. It is sentimental and belated, like most climate fiction, but it serves as an interruption to “generations of greed and overpopulation.” In Chapter Five, “A New Enlightenment,” Scranton talks about the primal impulse to struggle against the end, despite our constant knowledge of its certainty (89). So while my own fiction embraces the violence of the end, acknowledging human nature’s brutal history, Wirick’s seems to rage against the end, stalling the eventual outcome while simultaneously mourning it. It is possible that, from Scranton’s view, this type of reflection is superior in that it captures a more innately human feature in its interruption. This concept can be further seen in just Wirick’s closing sentence, in which she suddenly transforms her character into an elderly man, who watches his own descendant play in the vastly altered world. In just this one simple phrase, she turns the piece on its head, recognizing Scranton’s insistence on confronting our situation — to ultimately “realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves” and “accept the truth of our end is the beginning of wisdom”– so that “we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality” (23, 90). It is my opinion that Wirick brilliantly captures, then, the essential transformation of a spirit in denial to one that, when it — “environmental catastrophe” — is all said and done, has accepted how to die in the strange new world of her literary invention.

In terms of adaptation to a strange new world, Ryelin Segars’ “Twilight on Carbon Lake” goes as far as leaving planet Earth behind. Segars’ text is thematically very consistent with my own piece, along with Wirick’s, however, its use of science fiction tropes prioritizes some of Scranton’s concepts over others. For instance, Segars does not address any aspect of the social collective, only skimming the surface of addressing human nature, but, through its inhuman central characters, it rebels against the idea of civilizations’ end, projecting into a future in which it is possible to transport life to another planet entirely. This is subtly hinted at through the droids’ dialogue with one another: “they’re sleeping.” The reduction of a human cameo amplifies the importance of the droids’ purpose, elevating humanity’s resistance of accepting the inevitable truth of their failure to preserve a home.

AH78–42’s boots leave the ship’s metallic surface and press into the unblemished soil. AH60–8 follows. Another giant leap for humankind.

“Does AH78–42…”

“They’re asleep. Call me Evelyn while they’re sleeping.”

“Updating AH78–42’s identification preferences.”

The two rest beside a reflective pool.

The machines examine water on the third day.

AH78–42 removes the headgear and imagines breathing. Kneeling forward, AH78–42 looks into the pool. The night water displays obsolescent cosmos; trillions of dead stars on a fluid surface.

“There. The Milky Way….”

“Evelyn’s observation is incorrect.”

“…or a photograph.”

“Re-calculating.”

AH78–42 studies memories of light while pondering failure. Considering the options. (Segars)

I think that this is amplified by the piece’s most poignant aspect: its haunting remembrance of Mother Earth, and the human errors impressed upon her, in the wake of an environmental catastrophe. Even with the constraints of micro-fiction, Segars is able to convey this remembrance through simple descriptions, such as: the “unblemished soil” and “trillions of dead stars,” as if to say this planet has not yet been exposed to the means of its destruction quite yet, but others, including our own, has. Even his use of the infamous “third day” recalls the importance literature places on such an arbitrary number, resembling fairy tales, folklore, and other mythologies, like those occurring in the Bible and other religious texts (Liabenow 1).

This remembrance is explicitly seen in AH78–42’s striving to adopt a more human-like identity in claiming a name, imagining breathing, remembering the Milky Way, studying light, and, possibly most telling, pondering failure. The recollecting we are able to understand through this inhuman protagonist evokes one of the several conclusions Scranton comes to in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), specifically regarding remembrance and life evolving into something else entirely. Scranton writes:

The study of humanities is nothing less than the patient nurturing of the roots and heirloom varietals of human symbolic life. This nurturing is a practice not strictly of curation, as many seem to think today, but of active attention, cultivation, making and remaking. (99)

I think that, in extrapolating Scranton’s work here and applying it to Segars’ perpetuation of this common science fiction story, we can see that Segars is doing exactly what Scranton is discussing: it is remaking over a concept explored a thousand times. What “Twilight on Carbon Lake” loses in originality, in terms of overall plot, he makes up for with complex themes, like J. G. Ballard. Scranton further elaborates by quoting Hannah Arendt:

If it true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself. Experiences and even the stories which grow out of what men do to endure, of happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living world and the living deed unless they are talked about over and over again. (99)

It is this fragility, which Scranton is discussing, of the human race that Segars conveys as an interruption of daily thought — a remembrance that death is inevitable, but that we can endure if our resources are directed towards adaptation, survival, and correcting those actions that brought about past failures (Scranton 100).

In these three micro-fiction pieces, there have been clear elements resembling Scranton’s writings in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015), a reflection in and of itself. While each has varied in some way or another, they have also resembled one another at a conceptual level, potentially accomplishing more than initially observed. It is my hope that, in using Scranton’s book, I have appropriately underscored the importance of climate fiction and, in general, literary invention as a catalyst for ruminating about our current circumstances, while still considering the past and future circumstances of humankind. It is my opinion that, through this analysis, readers may better understand and appreciate micro-fiction in particular, as its brevity may often function as a more affective interruption, engaging with the readers’ imaginations in ways Scranton suggests are far more valuable to our species than we may have thought.

WORKS CITED

Ballard, J. G. The Drowned World. Liveright, 2013.

Liabenow, Alonna. “The Significance of the Numbers Three, Four, and Seven in Fairy Tales, Folklore, and Mythology.” Honors Projects, 418, 2014.

Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization.

City Lights Books, 2015.

Segars, Ryelin. “Twilight on Carbon Lake.” University of Florida, December 2017.

Squarzoni, Philippe. Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science. Translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger, Abrams, 2014.

Watkins, Claire Vaye. Gold Fame Citrus. Riverhead Books, 2015.

Walton, Joshwa. “Just northwest of Vancouver.” University of Florida, December 2017.

Wirick, Elizabeth. “On a Grey Dismal Day.” University of Florida, December 2017.