The History and Limits of Experimentation: Atmospheric Things in John Dollar

Marianne Wiggins’s John Dollar: A Novel (1989) has often been read for its participation in the desert island literary genre.¹ This complex and enduring genre depicts islands as imaginative sites of experimentation, as spaces in which to explore and confirm hypotheses about violence, education, human nature, and more. In this essay, we argue that Wiggins’s novel does not confine its investigation of experimentation to the island but also illuminates experiments that take form in relation to the atmosphere, including human aspirations to fly and precarious attempts to harness the power of fire, smoke, and wind. Within the environmental humanities, the term experiment bears diverse meanings. We use it to evoke the process of trying out, the effort of heightening conditions of uncertainty and emergence.² In experimenting, people shape spaces and times in which it is particularly evident that knowledge and outcomes are not established. In John Dollar, such efforts are enabled not only by human characters but also by the air and the elements and relations bound up in it, from soaring birds to drifting smoke. Timothy Choy argues that humans often experience atmospheric things in terms of relative insubstantiality and elusiveness; and as such, atmospheric things often prompt relationships that are experimental and open to novelty. Such things, he writes, “require and drive the development of new sensory disciplines and prostheses.”³ Building on Choy’s work, Derek P. McCormack describes atmospheric things as “objects, processes, or events that in some ways disclose, generate, or intensify the condition of being enveloped by the elemental forces of atmospheres.”⁴ Wiggins’s characters engage with atmospheric things such as soaring birds, kites, and smoke. They seek to modulate their potential safety by influencing the smoke let offby fires, and they explore flight by creating a variety of kites. In these moments of trying out, their bodies become sites for registering elemental forces and atmospheric variations beyond their control. For these characters, contact with light and smoke shapes new experiences of interconnection, vulnerability, and embodied lightness. Yet atmospheric experimentation does not take place in, nor does it create, conditions of total novelty. In reading John Dollar, we examine how experimental flight, smoke signaling, bird keeping, and wind power are interwoven with colonial histories of resource extraction and territorial appropriation.

In taking up John Dollar’s story of these practices, we gesture to the importance and limitations of experimentation for the environmental humanities. The term experimentation recurs energetically, albeit in fleeting references, across a vast array of works in the field. Conceiving our struggles for new relationships with atmosphere, especially in contexts such as climate change or air pollution, in experimental terms is appealing. By trying out atmospheric things, we can shape creative relationships with the atmosphere while not assuming that these efforts are guaranteed or must be enduring. Along these lines, Richard Grusin introduces the collection Anthropocene Feminism “as something of an experiment, a kind of scholarly and artistic crucible.”⁵ In the collection, the term experiment speaks of how feminist and queer theoretical approaches break with the patriarchal narratives about the power of mankind brought by Anthropocene theory. Yet Grusin also uses the term experiment to tell a story about the scholarly importance of uncertainty and of methods that are emerging and unfinished. Describing speculation and imagination as important to knowledge production, Grusin writes that, “counter to the technoscientific desire for specificity, definition, and fact, we coined the term anthropocene feminism as an experiment.”⁶ If experiment appears here for its emphasis on a scholarly mode that creatively engages uncertainty, it has an interconnected but quite different life in environmental humanities scholarship that examines nuclear weapons programs, pharmaceuticals development, and other deleterious processes. Rob Nixon writes of climate change as the result “of a 200-year experiment in hydrocarbon-fueled capitalism whose historic beneficiaries have been disproportionately rich and white.”⁷ The term experiment here evokes the governmental and corporate work of heightening uncertainties to the extent of “profligacy,” as well as the calculated exertions of power and profit bound up in...