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Mark Bould, The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. A Review
Amy Bouwer
Biography | Notes
Keywords: sf, literary criticism, ecocriticism, contemporary culture
Introduction
Mark Bould’s The Anthropocene Unconscious is an ambitious exploration of contemporary culture, literary criticism, and what it means to write ‘about’ climate catastrophe. Despite spanning not quite 200 pages, it offers a sweeping analysis of our current literary landscape, arguing that an apprehension of our entanglements in a more-than-human world haunts texts from Ducks, Newburyport to Pacific Rim (2012), The God of Small Things to The Fast and the Furious (2001), The Wake to 28 Days Later (2002). Neglecting this ecological contingency – and suppressing awareness of our role in destroying it – characterizes the geological moment of the Anthropocene, hence Bould’s naming of a collective climatic unconscious that permeates our every creation.
The Anthropocene Unconscious is structured largely as a response to Amitav Ghosh’s critique that “most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight.”[1] This claim is “nonsense,” according to Bould’s double-edged thesis; since there is substantial evidence that “the art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe,” Ghosh’s disregard for anything beyond canonically ‘serious literature’ only perpetuates the purblind perspectives he is critiquing.[2] The mundane novel, Bould maintains, “developed so as to exclude itself from the fact that we are inseparable from the world,” whereas speculative fiction has always concerned itself with the more-than-human.[3] An extrapolative reading of Ghosh provides the foundation for Bould’s most daring contention: that “the mundane novel should become more like [science fiction] – a genre that operates entirely in the subjunctive, describing events that have not happened, including those that might happen, will not happen, have not yet happened and could have but did not happen.”[4]
The speculative unsettles the mundane as the ‘rightful’ subject of critical scholarship right from the outset of The Anthropocene Unconscious, whose first chapter is devoted almost entirely to an overview of the “sprawling, repetitive nine-hour Sharknado dreamwork.”[5] Bould notes that the film franchise’s prerogative to “[churn] through cultural detritus […], making it into capital once more” does not prevent it from addressing climate change: in fact, its retreat to the borderlands of the ‘serious’ and the ‘literary’ facilitates its preoccupation with bizarre ecological chaos. As Bould explores in Chapter Two, the novel form’s intensive internality is at least partially to blame for the tendency of ‘serious literature’ to “tighten its focus, narrow its range – and miss out the world.”[6] Nonetheless, it is possible to uncover the currents of climate catastrophe culture underlying all human-authored texts: Chapter Three re-examines the novels from Ghosh’s original critique to show how, despite their “modes of concealment,” “these fictions are undeniably about climate change.”[7] Chapters Four and Five further detail this argument with reference to the aquatic and terrestrial uncanny, respectively. While fictional explorations of “our liquid world” offer “lessons in duration and endurance,” arboreal imagery raises “questions of agency and identity, while troubling distinctions between human and nonhuman, between the subject and the world in which it is enmeshed.”[8] Accentuating the precarity and contingency of life – human and otherwise – in these ways pulls the Anthropocene to the surface of cultural consciousness.
Bould’s analysis is at its most compelling and incisive when it enacts these crossings (and even decimations) of generic boundaries, pulling the ‘literary’ into conversation with “[t]he popular, the trashy and the disreputable.”[9] It is in these deviant intersections, where Swamp Thing meets The Overstory, that his call for a transgressive critical praxis comes into full force: the assumption that climate catastrophe should be suppressed in our literary consciousness, that it detracts from the ‘serious’ interiority of the novel, prevents us from “making meaning meaningful” and “making criticism activism.”[10]
It is significant that The Anthropocene Unconscious is framed by two imaginative exercises: the first calling up a dystopian “future of foreclosed possibilities” determined by our paralytic approach to the climate crisis, and the second a longing for utopic possibility, “a flourishing biosphere in which we too flourish.”[11] The gulf between dystopia and utopia constitutes “a space in which to imagine the world to come”; in The Anthropocene Unconscious, it is a space (literally) inhabited by five chapters of transgressive literary criticism and incisive cultural critique, underpinned by climate consciousness.[12] Challenging the prevailing perspective of human exceptionalism is possible from within the critical sphere if, as Bould’s thesis exemplifies, we elucidate the Anthropocene unconscious in our textual encounters and centre it in our creative praxis. The dystopic/utopic tension at the heart of literary creation thus transforms into a conscious choice, epitomised in Bould’s final rousing citation of The Fast and the Furious: “Ecosocialism or barbarism. Ride or die.”[13]