Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World by Christine L. Marran (review)

Within the scope of recent publications on or about the Anthropocene, within the context of ecocriticism, Ecology without Culture certainly represents an original take on the subject. As its title already suggests, Marran formulates an answer to Timothy Morton’s book Ecology without Nature (2007). Whereas Morton tries to free ecological thinking from nature as it imposes too much on it due to its romantic tradition, Marran points her finger to human culture in general as the culprit as the material world, in her opinion, exceeds culture (p. 5). As the subtitle of her book suggests, Maran focuses on several toxic events and sees how these lead to a “transcorporeality,” a terminology borrowed from Stacy Alaimo, that connects humans and nonhumans with a strong “recognition of the agency of the nonhuman world” (p. 44).

As a remedy for the influence of cultural humanism, Marran introduces as a solution in four chapters “ecological imaginaries and ways of thinking ecocritically outside the protective enclosure of cultural and human exceptionalism,” while the introduction is completely dedicated to “the problems of culture for eco-criticism” (p. 6). To address these problems, Marran introduces the concept of the biotrope. She observes how various cultures have used “biological elements to prove their strength and longevity, to make themselves appear as inevitable as the earth itself.” This results in some unmovable connotations, “fixe[d] . . . as if in amber,” between nature and culture. Marran names two explicit examples of these biotropes, one of which is “America’s amber waves of grain” as part of the hymn “America the Beautiful.” The other, about which Marran is very explicit and unforgiving, is Murakami Haruki’s use in July 2011 of “the biotrope of the cherry blossom to claim Japan as an ethnic national collectivity that would inevitably recover from the catastrophic experience of tsunami flooding and nuclear meltdown” (p. 7). Both instances indeed demonstrate how an aspect of nature is used to claim a nation’s identity without much attention for its wider implications. They make very clear how nature is trapped in a certain narrative for which there needs to be found an alternative.

Marran, a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, declares herself to be inspired by new materialist perspectives as proven by, among others, her reference to Alaimo and others. With the biotrope clearly being connected to both materialism and storytelling, it will be no surprise that the latter takes the lead in her discourse, in the first place as an obligation, where storytelling is connected to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” which allows to draw attention to willfully overlooked situations. Obligate storytelling is defined by Marran as coming out of a relation, investing in a particular kind of voice, describing what storytelling means for its subject. Her main example in this chapter is Ishimure Michiko, who has written extensively about the poisoning of the Shiranui Sea, including in her Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow (1969). Ishimure has attention for the stories of material objects, such as stones, just like Ursula K. Le Guin, whose quote from “The Marrow” about a crying stone opens the chapter.

The other chapters, on slow violence in film, the domestic turn in environmental literature and finally literature without us, are explicitly illustrated by many non-Anglophone, often Japanese examples. The chapter on slow violence is for instance almost solely dedicated to Tsuchimoto Noriaki and his films on mercury poisoning and seems therefore somewhat out of balance. The chapter “Res Nullius” on the domestic turn, its title referring to “property belonging to no one,” equally focuses mainly on one case study, namely Ariyoshi Sawako’s Cumulative Pollution, which takes the compounded toxic effect of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a biotrope and discusses poisoning in urban domiciles (p. 98). The chapter “Literature without Us” functions as a conclusion in which Marran criticizes the concept of the...