Reading the Anthropocene through science and apocalypse in the selected contemporary fiction of ...

243 Pages·2016·1.81 MB·English

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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

English

Reading the Anthropocene Through Science and Apocalypse in the Selected
Contemporary Fiction of J G Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy and Ian
McEwan

by

David William Fevyer

Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 2016

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
ABSTRACT
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
English
Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
READING THE ANTHROPOCENE THROUGH SCIENCE AND APOCALYPSE IN THE SELECTED
CONTEMPORARY FICTION OF J G BALLARD, KURT VONNEGUT, CORMAC MCCARTHY
AND IAN MCEWAN
By David William Fevyer

This thesis examines how six contemporary novels variously intervene in the current crisis of climate
change. Through close readings of J G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Hello America (1981);
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Galapagos (1985); and Ian
McEwan’s Solar (2010), the thesis aims to identify how the narrative and generic resources of
contemporary fiction might help readers to think through and beyond the consequences of anthropocentric
ways of thinking about the biosphere. Drawing upon the concept of the Anthropocene – and in particular
the account of this concept provided by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty – the thesis suggests that these
novels raise profound questions about how climate change is represented and understood. If accounts of
the human history of modernity have until recently overlooked the complex ways in which both the human
species and its contemporary fossil fuel cultures are intertwined with the geologic history of the planet,
how has contemporary fiction attended to this oversight? What light can imaginative apocalyptic future
histories of the biosphere, such as those presented in the fiction of Ballard, Vonnegut and McCarthy, shed
on predominant understandings of climate change? How has fiction highlighted the ways in which the
insights offered by the Anthropocene complicate the promises of scientific ‘reason’ to explain and provide
solutions to anthropogenic climate change? How do fictions such as those of Vonnegut and McEwan
contribute to a more nuanced account of the limits of such reasoning? To address these questions, the
thesis draws upon Martin Heidegger’s account of the anthropocentric enframing of nature through
technology, and suggests a re-thinking of Louis Althusser’s account of ideology through which we can begin
to understand how anthropocentric perspectives are naturalised in ways that illuminate some of the
difficulties identified by Chakrabarty. By bringing these three perspectives together, the thesis seeks to
develop a distinct critical approach to reading the responses of these literary fictions to climate change.
The first section of the thesis examines how the generic resources of apocalyptic fiction defamiliarise
assumed relationships between the human subjects and societies of industrial modernity and the
biosphere. Chapter 1 suggests that J G Ballard’s novel The Drowned World (1962) imaginatively connects
geologic and human history in order to disrupt key anthropocentric assumptions concerning the
relationship between humanity and the biosphere, whilst his later novel Hello America (1981) foregrounds
the anthropocentric inscription of industrial modernity through a self-consciously hallucinatory re-imagining
of American history. Chapter 2 examines Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Road (2006), and suggests
that the text presents a particular form of apocalyptic narrative that complicates the anthropocentric sub-
text of traditional apocalyptic narratives.
The second section of the thesis examines how the fictional representation of science and scientists
can help to illuminate the ways in which an anthropocentric faith in the technoscientific promise of human
power over nature serves to legitimate an illusion of human mastery over the biosphere. Chapter 3
considers how Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle (1963) offers a counterpoint to this faith by ironically
depicting scientist characters whose assumptions of beneficial technoscientific progress are undermined by
complex interconnections between individuals and the biosphere – connections that have apocalyptic
consequences. Such complex interactions are also a feature of the insights offered by ecology and
evolutionary science. Reading Vonnegut’s fiction after the Anthropocene underlines the ways in which
Vonnegut’s literary techniques can help readers to think through and beyond the complex connections
between natural and human history that these scientific disciplines begin to elucidate. As chapter 3
suggests, Vonnegut’s later novel Galapagos (1985) provides a particularly imaginative account of this
complexity through its fictional narrative of an evolutionary future history across the longue durée of
geologic time.
Building on the insights developed in chapter 3, chapter 4 considers the significance of Ian McEwan’s
ironic depiction of a fictional scientist who is unable to restrain his own overconsumption of resources in his
novel Solar (2010). In my reading, McEwan’s scientist figure functions as an allegory for the paradoxes of a
technoscientific culture that seems unable to apply scientific reason in meaningful responses to the dangers
of the Anthropocene. In so doing, the chapter illustrates how the use of allegorical codes and irony in Solar
draw attention to the ways in which a faith in technoscientific reason to provide solutions to anthropogenic
climate change is misplaced. This misplaced faith also naturalises the on-going enframing of nature as a
resource, with potentially apocalyptic consequences.
The apocalyptic narratives of the Ballard and McCarthy novels can be understood as quasi-scientific
literary speculations, which disrupt anthropocentric assumptions through the experimental futures they
depict. Similarly, the ironic depictions of scientists and scientific thinking in the Vonnegut and McEwan
novels draw attention to the anthropocentric limitations of conventional scientific thinking for fully
understanding and productively responding to the apocalyptic implications of climate change. In bringing
these readings together, the thesis attempts to provide valuable and timely insights into the techniques
through which the literary fiction of Ballard, Vonnegut, McCarthy and McEwan can help readers to think
differently about the complex relationship between human life and the biosphere. These readings also trace
how such fiction can draw attention to the ways in which anthropocentric patterns of thought contribute to
the catastrophic climatic implications of technoscientific culture.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... i
List of Figures .............................................................................................................. iii
DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP .................................................................................... v
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1: The Apocalyptic Imagining of the Anthropocene in J. G. Ballard’s The
Drowned World and Hello America .............................................................. 41
Chapter 2: Environmental Apocalypse and the End of the Anthropocene in Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road ................................................................................... 79
Chapter 3: The Science and Scientists of the Anthropocene in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s
Cradle and Galapagos ................................................................................119
Chapter 4: The Unwitting Consumer: Reading the Scientist of the Anthropocene in Ian
McEwan’s Solar ..........................................................................................161
Conclusion .................................................................................................................201
Bibliography ..............................................................................................................211

i

List of Figures

Figure 1: 2006 cover of The Drowned World ............................................................................... 25
Figure 2: 1963 cover of The Drowned World ............................................................................... 26
Figure 3: 1973 cover of Cat's Cradle ............................................................................................ 27
Figure 4: 2008 cover of Cat's Cradle ............................................................................................ 27
Figure 5: Margaret Bourke-White's At the Time of the Louisville Flood ...................................... 61

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DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP
I, David William Fevyer .........................................................................................................................
declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and has been generated by me as
the result of my own original research.
Reading the Anthropocene Through Science and Apocalypse in the Selected Contemporary Fiction
of J G Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy and Ian McEwan
..............................................................................................................................................................
I confirm that:
1. This work was done wholly or mainly while in candidature for a research degree at this
University;
2. Where any part of this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree or any other
qualification at this University or any other institution, this has been clearly stated;
3. Where I have consulted the published work of others, this is always clearly attributed;
4. Where I have quoted from the work of others, the source is always given. With the exception
of such quotations, this thesis is entirely my own work;
5. I have acknowledged all main sources of help;
6. Where the thesis is based on work done by myself jointly with others, I have made clear
exactly what was done by others and what I have contributed myself;
7. None of this work has been published before submission
Signed: ...............................................................................................................................................
Date: ...............................................................................................................................................

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