Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

WEAK PLANET

Weak Planet

Literature and Assisted Survival

Wai Chee Dimock

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47707-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47710-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47724-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226477244.001.0001

This book is published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Modern Language Association toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dimock, Wai-chee, 1953– author.

Title: Weak planet : literature and assisted survival / Wai Chee Dimock.

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020006489 | ISBN 9780226477077 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226477107 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226477244 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—21st century—History and criticism. | American literature—History and criticism. | English literature—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN771 .D57 2020 | DDC 809/.93353—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006489

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For GD and Beatrice, as always

Find Your Strength

—Spaulding Rehab

Contents

List of Figures

Introduction  •  Endangered

I   Revamped Genres

1   Still Hungry

Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie Edit Mary Rowlandson

2   Almost Extinct

Elegy, Pastoral, and Sounds in and out of Thoreau

3   Less Than Tragic

C. L. R. James, Frank Stella, and Amitav Ghosh Dilute Melville

II   Rebuilt Networks

4   Contagiously Irish

Colm Tóibín, W. B. Yeats, and Gish Jen Infect Henry James

5   Vaguely Islamic

Henri Matisse, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Langston Hughes, with Paul Bowles

6   Remotely Japanese

William Faulkner Indigenous and Trans-Pacific

Afterword  •  Not Paralyzed

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Figures

3.1  •  Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (1959)

3.2  •  Frank Stella, Ahab’s Leg (1989)

3.3  •  Frank Stella, Ahab and the Carpenter (1990)

5.1  •  Henri Matisse, Le marabout (1912/13)

5.2  •  Anon., Tangier, Casbah Marabout de Sidi-Berraïsoul (n.d.)

5.3  •  Henri Matisse, Le rifain debout (1912)

5.4  •  Henri Matisse, Vue sur la baie de Tanger (1912)

5.5  •  Henri Matisse, Les Marocains (1915–16)

5.6  •  Henri Matisse, Calypso (1935)

Introduction

Endangered

One moment the street was quiet and drizzly, so familiar that I barely gave it a thought. The next moment the headlights were on me, direct, blinding, a flood of illumination so incandescent and unexpected that what paralyzed me wasn’t fear but stupefaction. Then I was on the ground, screaming with a rage that took even me by surprise: No, I’m not OK! I’m not OK! I’m not OK!

A lot happened during the four weeks I spent at Spaulding Rehab.¹ The Red Sox won the World Series. A record number of women and minorities were elected to Congress. Participating in these bonds of anticipation, suspense, and elation didn’t make me forget that I was wedded to my wheelchair, another kind of bond, never before contemplated and in many ways more interesting than the others. This unsightly contraption, a marvel of metallic flexibility, was never apart from me or out of my mind: not the new normal but simply part of life, taken for granted and integral to my sense of myself. Not being able to live without it defined me, an identity I got used to with surprising ease.

The motto of Spaulding is Find Your Strength. It’s also the motto of this book, one long in the making. Evolving from a more general engagement with weak theory²—shaky paradigms with incomplete resolution—to one occasioned directly by the shaky future of the planet Earth, it’s an attempt to write literary history as part of the collective run-up to our climate crisis. I argue that the large-scale harms now opening up on so many fronts have a long past, that ecological disruptions have been part of human life for centuries. Mass casualties from European colonialism—a death toll of 56 million across the Americas—changed the earth’s climate,³ making adaptation and experimentation key to indigenous survival.⁴ Works of literature have much to tell us about this arc of vulnerability and resilience, and the attempts by endangered populations to find their strength, to avoid paralysis, to stay in the fray against all odds.⁵

While the broad argument of the book seemed clear enough, I couldn’t initially think of a good way to connect the macro narratives about ecosystems to what must remain micro narratives about the literary form: the ebb and flow of genre; the idiosyncratic use of verb tense, pronouns, and punctuation; the countless ways authors animate and accentuate the works bearing their signatures; and the countless ways these signatures instruct and delight. The planetary narrative and the literary narrative seem to pull in opposite directions. How could accounts of catastrophic change square with the sense of persistence that we get from individual literary works, works that (if only because they continue to be read) must attest to the staying power of their authors? Is the longevity of these works a tribute to their strength, or is that a fantasy, an optical illusion?

The question takes a different turn when the weakness of my own body makes itself felt so matter-of-factly, an odd kind of mechanical generalizability. It’s a reality check, a necessary amendment to the stories we tell about ourselves and our objects of study. For those of us living with the unpredictable course of the injured body, strength is not a given, not a fact in the present tense. Not securely lodged, it is rather an aspired-to outcome, the promise of a yet-to-be-realized future.⁶ One must work for it, try to find it. What one finds varies greatly from one person to another. There’s always the chance that the search would be in vain, that this aspired-to outcome would always remain aspired-to, beckoning from a place just beyond our reach.

That uncertain future brings to mind the taunt popularized by disability advocates: temporarily abled-bodied.⁷ Most of us think of injury as short term, coming to an end when we recover fully and return to normal life. These advocates remind us that this might not happen, that full recovery might elude us, and that the assumption about able-bodiedness as the condition of normalcy is misguided to begin with. Robert McRuer calls it compulsory able-bodiedness.⁸ Compulsory it might be, but this bodily norm also turns out to be sadly unenforceable over the course of a life, for a simple reason: time does not always cooperate. The trajectory that posits able-bodiedness as the end point is more honored in the breach, for time tends to go in the opposite direction, offering an entropic spiral, sending all of us to some form of disability as the baseline, a state of maximum likelihood.

Seen in this light, disability studies is not a minority discourse, of interest only to a small segment of the population. It speaks to all living things, calling out the vulnerability inscribed in our physical embodiment, an inscription dictated by time itself. Humans join other species on this common ground, the broadest and most egalitarian, uniting us where we least want to be, amid the age-induced weakness and general susceptibility to harm more likely than not to come our way. But disability studies is also broad and egalitarian in another sense. Accepting susceptibility to harm as our common lot, it turns that shared weakness into an injunction for shared labor, a planetwide imperative to provide access and accommodation, to redistribute agency in such a way as to correspond to the widest spectrum of abilities.⁹ Experiments in nonparalysis rather than terminal handicaps give rise to disability studies. Action rather than identity propels it. Resilience is its limit-accepting goal, its clear-eyed and nondespairing claim to the future.

What opens up here is what Donna Haraway calls a tentacular bond, linking different life-forms across the planet, allowing us to make kin among ecological devastations and to stay with the trouble we have collectively brought on ourselves.¹⁰ For 3.6 billion years the planet has nurtured life, meeting the needs and providing a robust reproductive environment for the myriad species making their homes here. That nurturing has been eroding since the Industrial Revolution, and with speed and ferocity in recent decades. The now-familiar term Anthropocene names human behavior as the cause for this catastrophic speed-up, a transformation so abrupt and so massively disruptive as to constitute a new geological epoch. No longer a reliable home, the planet has become overnight a disabling environment. Record cold alternating with record heat, devastating floods with devastating wildfires, this environment poses an ever-growing threat to all those dependent on it. A sixth extinction seems well under way: the elimination of a significant proportion of the world’s biota in a geologically insignificant amount of time.¹¹ The 2019 UN report on biodiversity warned that 1 million species might disappear within the next decades, making a weak claim to existence as much the rule as the exception.¹²

Can this weak claim lead to something like the species thinking envisioned by Dipesh Chakrabarty? Will humankind, a newly constituted endangered species, rally under this elemental threat, a form of life taking its place among other endangered life-forms on the planet?¹³ If so, will its primacy, long taken for granted, give way to non-species-based regions of existence, as Elizabeth Povinelli argues?¹⁴ At once perpetrator and victim, will this culpable species replace the innocently laboring species-being of Marx, yielding a politics enmeshed in and taking responsibility for the Anthropocene, as urged by Jedidiah Purdy?¹⁵ And can literary history bear witness to this no longer sovereign life-form, offering glimpses into its large-scale hazards, its inherited and ongoing harms, but also its attempts to rebuild, repair, and resuscitate?¹⁶

While literature has often been depicted as a sovereign domain—the home of masterly authors, hegemonic institutions, and dominant ideologies—turning that narrative on its head and beginning instead with vulnerability can take us outside this muscular preserve, human-centered and coming always in maximum strength. Friedrich Kittler famously says that writing is inscription burned into silicon by means of electron beam lithography.¹⁷ We don’t have to go that far to see that authorship is no longer the work of a sovereign species; it bears the imprint of the nonhuman as well as the human, speaking to the coevolution and codependence of these two.¹⁸ Agency here is laterally distributed rather than vertically integrated. Emerging at different locales, on different levels of a stack that can be continually reshuffled, it speaks to the limited power but also relative autonomy of each, as Benjamin Bratton reminds us.¹⁹ Input will come from many: from the peripheries, from lower elevations, requiring no mastery from the contributors, only the happenstance of being there and happening to pitch in.

What results are ad hoc networks with low membership threshold. Like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizomes, these networks multiply across species boundaries and along horizontal planes, not through linear ordering or vertical chains of command.²⁰ Bruno Latour calls attention to the variety of actors in such networks. In Reassembling the Social (2005), he urges us to be less wooden, less rigid, less stiff in imagining what sort of agencies populate the world.²¹ He distinguishes between two in particular, practiced by intermediaries and mediators—the former, rubber stamps that transmit information without change; the latter, catalysts that alter the relation between any aggregate form and its low-level participants,²² creating a new dynamics out of several newly connected and now jointly contributing localities. Mediation, on this view, is what keeps a network input-rich, providing links where none previously existed and new forms of action born of this new connectivity. Through such mediation, even a weak network can weigh in where it would otherwise have no say, paralyzed neither by dominant institutions nor powerful single individuals.²³

The nonparalysis of multiple weak ties forged with strangers was noted by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (1996), his pioneering study of the internet. Castells was struck by the ability of weak networks to make structural inequalities less determinative, less influential in framing, or even blocking, communication.²⁴ More recently, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman analyze such networked agency in terms of online partial membership: intermittent engagement in more than one group, freely entered into rather than institutionally prescribed, and more likely to result in faster, nimbler, and more imaginative responses in an emergency.²⁵

Sociologist Mark Granovetter captures this paradox in a memorable oxymoron: the strength of weak ties. Granovetter coined this phrase back in 1973, inspired by the crucial role of informal interaction in systems that are formally rationalized.²⁶ Focusing on the personal networking that facilitates job mobility, he argues that having a large pool of casual acquaintances, each with his or her own information network, is a decided plus here, a weak connectivity providing far more venues for action than a small, tight-knit circle with information overlap. Indeed, weak ties of this sort are the most reliable links to out-groups, allowing for the broadest dissemination of information across different social localities and serving as a macro-micro bridge²⁷ between large-scale statistics and small-scale outcomes.

How might literary history honor such low-bar networks, not powerful but also not trivial, alternating between the macro and micro, and between weakness and strength? One outcome could be a field multi-plane and continually crowdsourced, often below the line for public record, though not for meaningful action. Improvised from the ground up, with emerging vectors at every turn and input bearers always on hand, a field like this will never have enough finality to effect closure, even its own. It is involuntarily ongoing. Cause and effect could trade places here; foreground could become background; what’s momentarily in focus could become blurry, depending on the location and the mediating plane we happen to be on.

Among the dwellers of this unprepossessing field, none is more energized and less conclusive than literary genre, involuntarily ongoing in just this way. Far from being a done deal, a complete catalog of what exists and what is to come, genre is a mixed attempt at cataloging, doomed to come up short because there will always be more specimens coming its way, inconvenient specimens, unforeseen and unrecognizable on its terms. Genre cannot ban such evidence or deny its empirical force.²⁸ It’s a taxonomy that never quite taxonomizes. Its labels never keep everything straight. Ontologized out of habit but in practice without an ontology, it’s weak in the sense Gianni Vattimo would use that term.²⁹ Forever vulnerable to what has not yet materialized, genre is inadequate and interminable in the same breath, less a finished product than a virtual infrastructure, plagued by shortfalls, always only a fraction of what it could be.³⁰

As a virtual infrastructure, genre is a key player in the global mediascape that Arjun Appadurai associates with modernity.³¹ Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski highlight the plurality of scales and venues in such a mediascape.³² This is a very different world from the print-unified one analyzed by Benedict Anderson.³³ In this platform-rich universe, it’s helpful to think of literature as also platform-rich, only weakly standardized by print. Proliferating visually and sonically, as Marshall McLuhan predicted back in 1962, it’s a heterogeneous field, with no single medium achieving absolute domination.³⁴ Fan fiction, singled out by Henry Jenkins as a vibrant participatory culture, also speaks more generally to the bottom-up energies of contemporary media.³⁵ Weakly integrated and weakly policed, it flourishes through its scalar variety and platform plenitude, surprised by unscheduled appearances among its ranks and able to respond to crisis thanks to these.

These unscheduled appearances enable literature to weigh in on those situations where neither the solution nor even the nature of the problem is self-evident, and where unexpected input from unexpected quarters could make a significant difference. Faced with the impending catastrophes of the twenty-first century, literature offers many options, including the counterintuitive one of going forward by reaching back, giving the present a prehistory, an archive notable for its granularity and depth. Amid our fears about what’s to come, these past records of similar fears—but also of tenacity and inventiveness—have a special meaning. If nothing else, they show that susceptibility to harm could have reparative spinoffs; that diversification and collaboration often follow; and that humans as a species have a track record of bouncing back, turning the endgames of finite individuals into linked chapters in our ongoing life.

Resilience rather than strength is what humans can reasonably hope for in the twenty-first century. Starting out with susceptibility to harm as a baseline condition, resilience is a wager with time, a bet that we would be able to come out at the other end. It’s a long-term undertaking, a collateral effect, demonstrable only over the long haul and only through the steadfast presence of a mediating network. Survival here is assisted survival. Hanging on perilously and not by its effort alone, it needs an infrastructure, a support team on permanent standby, making up for imperfect outcomes with incessant labor.

Literary history has yet to be seen as a mediating network of this sort: imperfect and incessant.³⁶ Seen that way, as a nonsovereign field weakly durable because continually crowdsourced, it offers one of the best examples of redress as an incremental process, never finished because never without new input.³⁷ Mindful that the world isn’t what it should be and rarely able to effect a definitive cure, it always has room for one more try. The persistence of literature stems from that very incompleteness, a sequel-producing deficit giving it an extended relation to time. Especially striking in Native American literature and African American literature, this persistence is also generally true of any trial-and-error experiments by the historically handicapped, bent on repairing the past and reclaiming the future, learning from long practice not to be paralyzed by flawed attempts.

Not paralyzed, and coming up short as a matter of course, literary history finds its closest kin in pragmatism, the experimental method of William James and John Dewey, often found wanting yet not devastated by it. Public-facing and field-tested, such a method marks a crossover point from hermeneutics to politics, from the leisureliness of textual analysis to the urgency of repairing and reviving. It faces a unique challenge in that capacity. To repair and revive in the twenty-first century, it must be a climate pragmatism, speaking to the exigencies of the Anthropocene, owning up to all the ways we have imperiled our home and not looking away from the possibility that redress might not happen soon enough, might not be able to reverse the accelerating chain of events to give us a future. What does it mean to be finite as a species? How to keep going, when time seems to have run out, giving us no guarantee that the world inhabited today would be world inherited tomorrow?

The future is both a threat and a rallying cry for climate pragmatism. The starting point here is evidence of harm, empirically observable in humans and nonhumans, calling for a damage-responsive method. Such a method, venturing into uncharted waters, is necessarily improvised, drawn from many fields: environmental humanities, disability studies, Native American studies, and African American studies, as well as the radical empiricism of James and Dewey. Experimental and therefore inconclusive, it offers no confident forecasts. It has no ability to enforce conduct, to carve policy in stone. Its practical advocacies can appear onerous and dismissible, which, Dewey says, is usually the case with practical doing and making, the more so here because of the uncertainty which attends it. Such a weak method, subject to miscue, misdiagnosis, mismatch between means and ends, can never attain more than a precarious probability, Dewey concedes.³⁸ And yet, weak as it is, nothing but skin and bone, it tries nonetheless to mould itself upon the particular shape of this particular world’s carcass, James says,³⁹ stretching its capabilities as best it can, as if some kind of future were still a live option, still up to it to decide.

Climate pragmatism is, in this sense, shorthand for a more general form of open-eyed quixotism. We can think of it as a crisis-necessitated form of the subjunctive mood, a verb form persevering against the seeming negation of as if, against the strong likelihood of things being otherwise. Chastened but not deterred by the noise of facts,⁴⁰ it gives us a counterfactual agency, a wager with time and against time to save a world probably beyond saving at this point. Not fully justified in its procedures yet pitching in all the same, climate pragmatism is fact-based but not outcome-obsessed. Merely trying can pass for an acceptable effort when the indicative is loosened by the subjunctive. Modest but stubborn, this verb form enables those who don’t have much time left to spend it without reservation and without panic, as if an infinite future were still at their disposal. Such weak daring summarizes both the contents of the book and my own experimental method.

Six chapters—organized under two broad headings, Revamped Genres and Rebuilt Networks—chronicle these precarious and persistent experiments. Featuring authors far apart in space and time, some celebrated and some not, this literary history pays special attention to low-grade, low-visibility phenomena that, not always developed to their fullest or most forceful extent, have often been overlooked. Bringing these weak phenomena into relief and making them the occasion for further effort, such a history speaks to the crisis of the moment by offering literature as a crisis-responsive art form, long in its emergence and provisional in its expression, bearing the input of many, and surviving as an ad hoc archive, a preliminary report, though also a cautiously hopeful vote on behalf of the future.

Chapter 1, Still Hungry, features Mary Rowlandson, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie in just this light. These three authors, the last two unknown and most likely unwelcome to the first, make up a mediating network ongoing by necessity and not to be resolved anytime soon. The three in fact have more in common than one might think. Rowlandson, a wolfish reader by her own account, made so by her raging and unappeasable hunger, perpetuates that eating disorder as a reading disorder, devouring the gastronomic language of the Bible as addictive substance. Hunger here is energizing rather than disabling. Extending from Rowlandson to Erdrich and Alexie, it turns the captivity narrative into a long-running and user-amended genre, linking the hungry Puritan to two Native readers with hungers of their own and writing counterfactual histories out of that deficit. These histories won’t please everyone or work to the benefit of all. Still, they turn the most inhospitable of genres into the most intimate, aligning it with indigenous agency and reclaiming the past as a yet-to-be-realized future, an experiment with time apparently built into the captivity narrative.

Chapter 2, Almost Extinct, chronicles the hazards and resilience of the planet through two other genres, elegy and pastoral, each bearing witness to prospects of nonsurvival faced by humans and nonhumans—by frogs and toads, wolves, loons, and Native Americans. Taking these genres through an emerging field, sound studies, I trace a history of near extinction as a sonic history, running from the works of Thoreau to Maya Lin’s What Is Missing, a sound installation and last memorial to all endangered and vanished species. This history, though dire, is not without a counterpoint, a double helix with harm and tenacity entwined. In the climate activism of Native Americans against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, coupled with the resurgence of indigenous languages and the eloquence of recently elected Native legislators, we hear an audible alternative to the silence of extinction. A call to action rather than an act of mourning, these newly arisen sounds are those of a crisis-honed new pastoral, reaching beyond elegy to propose an experimental genre for the twenty-first century. Dedicated to life while mindful of death, this is a green print improvised out of devastation, responsive to both past and future, and honoring ancestors and descendants both.

Chapter 3, Less Than Tragic, begins with the reported demise of yet another genre, tragedy. If true, what does this extinction say about the current state of the world? And if not, what might this not-quite-dead genre tell us about ways of surviving and not surviving? I argue that tragedy is still flourishing in modernity but in a weaker form, less invested in catastrophe as a necessary end and becoming user-friendly and user-amended as a result. Turning to Moby-Dick as a case of