Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect by Heather Houser (review)

Heather Houser’s first book, the third title in Columbia University’s Literature Now series focusing on “contemporary literature and the way we understand its meaning,” exists at the intersection of environmental humanities and the affective turn in cultural studies. Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction draws on materialist, postmodern, and posthuman theories to define a new category in millennial American fiction, a category that explores affective relationships at the intersection of what Houser identifies throughout the book as “earth and soma.” In her introduction, Houser convincingly situates “ecosickness fiction” in both a historical and an aesthetic context, citing a series of twentieth-century developments related to an increasing “interdependence” between the terms of this earth/soma paradigm. Among the historical developments Houser cites are the proliferation of environmental legislation (the Clean Air, Wilderness, and Clean Water acts), cultural/scientific milestones (the moon landing), and economic/industrial modernization (biomedicalization). These significant changes, she argues, have reshaped our conception of humanity’s bodily relationships to the planet on which it continues to evolve.

From this starting point, Houser proposes a definition of sickness in the current “technoscientific age” that builds upon but goes beyond Arthur Kleinman’s (1988) and Julia Epstein’s (1995) distinction between “disease” and “illness”:

“Disease” implies that there is a biological agent to which medical professionals respond with therapeutic measures. . . . Regardless of what blood tests, scans, x-rays, or biopsies might show, illness exists to the extent that someone lives with it and even assumes it as an identity. Self-perception decouples person and diagnosis; whatever the content of the diagnosis of treatment might be, the person can determine the form and meaning that illness assumes. Dramas of disease and illness certainly energize ecosickness fiction, but I give preference to sickness to emphasize the relational dimension of dysfunction in contemporary narrative. If disease is synonymous with diagnosis and illness with personalized experience, sickness is a relation.

(2014, 11)

Through this more relational definition of sickness, Houser seeks to particularize affect for the Ecosickness project, contending that “sickness is thus both material—above all, bodies are its most sensitive gauge—and subjective—differently lived and demanding representation” (12). Though one might be able to identify a common environmental problem, like pollution or climate change, it is Houser’s contention that each body in that environment is going to have a highly individualized reaction to those problems. This highly situational definition of sickness motivates Houser’s skepticism toward grand, universal narratives of environmental change and enables her to deal with the very different books to which she turns her gaze.

Ecosickness contains chapters on David Wojnarowicz and Jan Zita Grover, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and Marge Piercy and Leslie Marmon Silko. These authors, Houser argues, render deeply subjective and variously lived experiences of sickness in three stages: first, by “apprehend[ing] somatic and ecological vitality as shared concerns that cannot be isolated from each other”; second, by “demonstrating the interdependence of narrative strategies and affect and experiments with ethicopolitical effects of emotional idioms”; and third, by “expounding . . . conceptions of agency, ethics, and action” (12–13). Because the work of these authors is, as Houser sees it, to apprehend, demonstrate, and expound—rather than, for instance, to seek out causalities or etiologies— Houser likens this literature to “sandboxes for ideas of agency rather than fixed treatises on it” and notes that the works themselves “are sometimes inconsistent on individuals’ capacity to act” (18–19). In keeping with the ethos of ecosickness fiction Houser’s project “does not resolve these inconsistencies but instead elaborates the complexities of narrative affect that produce them” (19).

Genealogically, Houser makes the bold claim that Ecosickness does not have any direct precursors; rather, the study “has a prehistory and a shadow.” This prehistory includes Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) along with Meridel Le Sueur’s mid-twentieth century stories and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) as texts that “introduce powerful relays between soma and space . . . under more advanced conditions...