How to Read for Oil

I love to fly.

It’s not the indignities of post-9/11 commercial air travel that I love, but rather the thrill of acceleration when the pilot hits the gas and my body is jolted back into the seat. I love the technological sublime of an active airfield, the many kinds of labor that bring a plane from the sky to the gate, and the sea of twinkling blue lights at Detroit’s Metro airport by night.

I’ve recently been teaching a course titled Literature and Oil at the University of Michigan; cross listed between English and environmental studies, the course draws students from a wide range of majors and disciplines, including, in its second iteration, a group of eager first-year engineering students. Throughout the semester, I often talk about my love of flying in order to encourage students to think honestly and capaciously about oil, not only as an unfortunate necessity for so many aspects of everyday life, but also as a source of pleasure, even desire. “Loving oil” is Stephanie LeMenager’s term for this dynamic: a deep attachment not to the substance itself but rather to all of the things that oil makes possible.¹ In these days of high gas prices and climate change anxiety, it’s all too easy to “hate” oil or, more precisely, the oil companies who feed our societal addiction; to that end, I often speak about my love of flying—and the guilt that feels like oil dripping from my hands every time I get off a plane—to keep the class from disavowing too easily our own small part in modernity’s troubled love affair with oil.²

Several paradoxes provide conceptual touchstones for the course. Oil is everywhere and nowhere, I tell the students on the first day, as I invite them to imagine all the ways that oil is flowing through our classroom—including the manufacture of the objects in the room (and of the room itself), the various modes of transport that bring us and those objects together, and the economic activity that generates the revenue that makes the university run. Oil is everywhere, ubiquitous in our daily life, and yet we so rarely see oil, either literally or metaphorically.³ Given this simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility, our central questions are, how do we read for oil? and how do different kinds of texts—novels, short stories, poems, manifestos, essays, cartoons, photographs, and documentary films—either work against or contribute to oil’s invisibility? Such questions of representation and interpretation are fundamental to literary study, but we also ask rather different questions about the material aspects of literary production and consumption, about how oil not only fuels the imagination in a metaphorical sense but is also necessary for making and distributing books and films, Kindles and iPads. Our consideration of the relationships between literature and oil, in other words, ranges far beyond a thematic study of literature that is “about” oil. We ponder what to make of the fact that the English language occupies a privileged position in world literary space similar to that of the US dollar in the global oil market—these “universal” currencies each have profoundly uneven effects.

We also consider a second paradox: there is too little oil in the world, and too much. Oil is a finite, nonrenewable resource; the hydrocarbon-fueled modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was enabled by what Imre Szeman observes was an unrepeatable surplus of cheap energy that is now becoming ever-less cheap, more scarce, and more difficult to extract.⁴ The oil era isn’t over, but the era of easy oil is likely gone forever. Too little oil—but also far too much, when we consider either the additional carbon yet to be emitted into the atmosphere by the oil still left to burn or how much human suffering and environmental harm have already occurred at sites of extraction like Azerbaijan, the Oklahoma territory, and Saudi Arabia in the early twentieth century; the Niger Delta and Ecuador in the midtwentieth century; and North Dakota and the Alberta tar sands...