In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene?American Fiction in Geological Time
  • Kate Marshall (bio)

Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

Don DeLillo, Point Omega

At this point in the twenty-first century, it has become difficult to take up the topic of temporality in contemporary fiction without reference to the geological concept of the Anthropocene. This term, used reflexively to name our present geological epoch as one of our own making, is infiltrating the self-periodizing gestures of both novels and their critical apparatus in ways that are, like the epoch’s traces themselves, becoming more visible. What’s captured by the concept is now well-known: for humanists, by way of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument in “The Climate of History,” that in the Anthropocene human history and geological history have become one; for social theorists, by way of Bruno Latour’s claim that the Anthropocene is the most important concept since modernity; and of course, for geologists, by way of the still-active debates among stratigraphers over the naming of our present geological epoch.1 The Anthropocene, more simply, is a way of marking time, or suggesting that there is a form of temporality that can be understood as a mediation of the surface of the globe by the human species.

Contemporary US fiction seems quite clearly to be responding to the pressures of the larger anthropocenic imagination by staging its [End Page 523] own temporality within increasing time scales and geologies. A growing body of literary fiction published in this decade understands itself within epochal, geologic time and includes that form of time within its larger formal operations. On the one hand, this could be seen as a continuing consolidation of the genre identified by Jonathan Levin, for example, in the Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011) as “postnatural writing” or “contemporary ecofiction” (1134). This turn toward epochal time also points at the way that contemporary fiction participates in the larger set of scalar moves within art and theory that Mark McGurl has named “the new cultural geology.” The novels I discuss in this essay form one set of what can be understood as an emerging body of US fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene. They include Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013) and Ken Kalfus’s Equilateral from the same year, along with Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010), all of which reflexively stage the production of art on Pleistocene desert sands, a gesture whose geological urgency is repeated on the ruined asphalt of Colson Whitehead’s postapocalyptic novel Zone One (2011), the text that will occasion the latter focus of this essay. This gesture in turn suggests an epochal shift in these novels’ self-positioning as temporal artifacts of their genre as they become novels of the Anthropocene, the powerful if paradoxical ascendant concept for defining the geologic contemporary, its forms of art in the present tense, and its geologically inscribed histories of the future. Put in other words, part of the self-described contemporaneity of these novels lies in their status as new novels of a newly self-aware geological epoch.

1. Desert Sands

To instance this particularly geological self-awareness, consider Reno, the young protagonist of Kushner’s künstlerroman The Flamethrowers, a character who has all of the attachment to geography that her name implies. She’s said to be “influenced by Land Art” having studied Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) at a large public university in the west in the early 1970s (6). Reno is a character who likes to write on the earth: unlike the minimalism practiced by her famous artist boyfriend, her art involves representation and abstraction, leaving traces in sand, snow, or salt, which become legible markers of the fast movement of bodies through space and then capturing images of those markers. Ski racing, for Reno, is “drawing in time,” and she makes an X on a frozen pond with cross-country skis and photographs it, draws doughnuts on a snowy meadow with a truck and photographs them, and...

pdf

Share