The striking thing about the stories written by the students in "Religion and the Anthropocene" - stories many told me they'd struggled writing, as they had never been asked to write a story before, or worked primarily in dialogues, etc. - is how many were written in the first person.
In one a camp counselor tells of how their beloved camp, which not only they but their parents had gone to as children, has been changed beyond recognition by climate change. In another, a young woman tells of confronting a raging forest fire that may have been set by an ecoterrorist group of which her mother is a member. In another, a teenager from another planet writes a diary about a disillusioning trip to the Earth. In another, a protagonist tells us of her scheme to get into one of the forests where the billionnaires who haven't left the planet reside, only to be left outside the glass bubble with an electric vehicle with no more juice. In another, a drag queen in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles tells us how she follows her bouffant wig when it blows over the side of her paddle boat in a polluted current. In another, a young woman writes in her diary imagining the world her mother knew when she was her age. In another, a "raving scholar" describes their epiphany that anthropogenic problems can't be solved by the same sorts of anthropogenic interventions which caused them. In another, what will be the last polar bear describes their rage and confusion at human caprice and short-sightedness...
I asked the class this morning about this preference for the first person voice. Some (including a self-confessed diarist, who said she probably writes for her future self) said it was familiar and easier. Others told me it was common in contemporary literature, even if every narrator is an unreliable one! But the most interesting spoke of the challenges of the third person narrator, who needs to know everything that's going on: they couldn't pull that off.
One of the texts we read in preparation for this assignment was the section from Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement which arraigns the modern realist novel for concealing the realities of climate change in its focus on "individual moral adventure": to allow characters to grow and change believably, they need to be placed by the author in a believable place and setting - where believable means stabile, even unlikely turns of fate must be probable, or the writer will be dismissed as a failure. Ghosh, writing as himself a novelist, sees the problem as fundamental, structural. He discounts genres like science and speculative fiction as inadequate alternatives - nobody takes their world-building for real, he thinks, when the challenge of the Anthropocene is an uncanny reality - and recommends we revive premodern literary forms like epic, fable and myth. (In his Gun Island he does just that.)
But all the forms of storytelling Ghosh considers are delivered in the third person. Have my students found a way out of his dilemma, or just another way of avoiding facing it? In many of their stories, what's stable (relatively) is the voice of the narrator, as it tries, more or less successfully, to make sense of an increasingly confounding reality devolving around it. Perhaps John Green (crediting his wife Sarah) was right to quip that in the Anthropocene "there are no detached observers." Perhaps those who insist on the "thousand names of Gaia" are right to argue that the illusion of a single god's or god-like human's view of the planet has been punctured - and, for those who don't see that yet, needs to be punctured.
Still (I guess I'm one of those resisting puncture) the middle of my course, taking us from the "Anthropocene" section to "Religion," is a section called "Stories," and I was, with Ghosh, thinking of stories in the third person or at least the first person plural. Isn't that what's implied when, for instance, Haraway writes in her "Camille Stories" that the communities where a new way of being emerged discovered that "storytelling was the most powerful practice for comforting, inspiring, remembering, warning, nurturing compassion, mourning, and becoming-with each other in their differences, hopes, and terrors"? Maybe not! Maybe, in the year Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the stories that keep things real are all in the first person singular ... but addressed to other first persons, too.
And yet the reading for today's class was Jill Schneiderman's "Awake in the Anthropocene," a celebration of the contributions geological and Buddhist ways of seeing beyond the personal can make to Anthropocene challenges...
