Abstract
This chapter takes Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017) as a starting point to discuss the recently popularised genre of climate change fiction and the role of the nonhuman within it. While climate change fiction often turns to future scenarios and thus leans on dystopia and speculative fiction, Autumn and Reservoir 13 are narratives of anticipation (Mayer) which are firmly rooted in the present. Rather than using emotional categories linked to event-centred narratives, the two novels work through sensory descriptions that make the reader aware of a certain atmosphere without being able to categorise this atmosphere into concrete feelings. How, this chapter asks, can literature forego easy anthropomorphising when it deals with the Anthropocene and its nonhuman geological forces? And how, ultimately, can literature forego the “fear appeal” (Mayer 24) and make us engage with climate change? This chapter will show that affective encounters with nonhuman are central to this endeavour.
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Notes
- 1.
I am aware that European readers will also have different experiences relating to climate change. My point is solely that huge, spectacular events that are easily linkable to climate change, such as hurricanes, floods, and droughts, most often and most dramatically occur in the Global South and not in Europe.
- 2.
In The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (2003), Dana Phillips criticises realism and realistic descriptions of nature as tools of representing the natural world. “I want to urge,” she writes, “that the ‘ecocentrism’ of literature not be understood to hinge on whether literature represents the natural world realistically or not. Verbal representation of nature, honestly weighed in the scales of realism, seems clumsy at best” (165). While I agree that ecocriticism of course is not dependent on realism as a mode of representation, I claim that verbal representations of nature do have the power to affect us bodily by evoking sensory body memories.
- 3.
The repetitive nature of the ‘worst of times’ coming again and again is further underlined through the ironic use of intertextuality, alluding to Charles Dicken’s famous beginning of Tales of Two Cities (1859) but changing the sentence from “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” to “it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
- 4.
Kevin Birth in his fine study Time Blind (2016) even shows how the “International System (SI) second,” “the global standard unit for measuring time” is “a polysemic sign that a global bureaucracy concerned with measurement attempts to contain to a single meaning” (5).
- 5.
For instance, on seeing the prices for milk in the local supermarket, the dairy man Thompson remarks: “They’d been up three hours already. There’d be more money in pouring the milk straight down the drain. If the prices didn’t pick up soon it would be impossible to carry on” (173).
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Liebermann, Y. (2021). The Climate Crisis and Affective Nonhuman Encounters: Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017). In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_11
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