Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality

After publishing three books between 2021 and 2022 on climate-change fiction, which he calls his NARMESH trilogy (mesh standing for the entanglement of mankind with the natural environment), Marco Caracciolo is connecting ecocriticism with an investigation of how narrative deals with the materiality of the world. This book, therefore, could easily be seen as the fourth installment of the NARMESH series. Its marriage of reflection on the nature of materiality with environmental concerns is the trademark of a loose philosophical movement of the past 20 years from which Caracciolo draws inspiration, but without following it unconditionally, known as New Materialism and represented by authors such as Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Tim Morton, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Steven Shaviro, Ian Bogost, and Bruno Latour. Though not a unified school, the movement is characterized by a will to decenter the human, leading to a “flat” ontology that denies any exceptionalism to mankind; by sympathy for panpsychism, the view that some kind of mental energy, vital force, or cosmic consciousness inhabits matter as well as life forms; by belief in the agency of things (“thing-power,” as Bennett calls it); and by the idea that all things are connected in a network of active agents.The problem with devoting a book to narrative representations of materiality is that matter is the fabric of reality and consequently occurs everywhere in narrative: in the bodies of characters, in the world they inhabit, in the objects they manipulate, even in the air they breathe, which is made of atoms. What then does it take for narrative to “stage materiality,” something that, according to Caracciolo, only some narratives do (192), and how can a critical reading represent this staging?To give a theoretical foundation to his book, Caracciolo proposes a diagram (9) that represents “multiple perspectives on thingness” and that he calls “the spectrum of materiality.” At the center of the diagram lies the concept of thing. It is traversed by four arrows that capture dichotomies, the most important of which—and the most frequently discussed—is the opposition between “passive matter” and “vibrant materiality,” a term inspired by Jane Bennett’s concept of “thing power.” According to Caracciolo, Western thinking is obsessed with an opposition between an active subject and “mere,” lifeless matter, and ignores therefore the vibrant nature of materiality. It is this ignorance that has led Western powers to plunder and deplete natural resources and has put the earth on a path of climate change hurtling toward an apocalyptic future. The sorry state of the earth that results from climate change can be regarded as the revenge of matter against those who believed they could master it. The other axes of the diagram are not nearly as prominent in the book as the opposition between passive and vibrant materiality, nor as self-explanatory. One leads from relational, defined by Caracciolo as “entanglement in a more-than-human assemblage” (9) to “inaccessible,” which suggests unknowable, though it is not exactly a polar opposite of relational. Then there is “determinate,” that is, “clearcut, completely determined in both space and conceptual terms,” which suggests knowable, vs. “uncertain,” redundantly defined as “surrounded by uncertainty and mystery.” But how does uncertain differ from the previously mentioned inaccessible? The last dichotomy, “abstract vs. physical,” refers to the contrast between the attribution of symbolic meaning to things as opposed to attention to their material texture and sensory features. Whether these binaries form a comprehensive system or are just a tentative collection of possible points of view, in other words, how useful the model is for a theorization of the abstract concept of materiality, is for the reader to decide. One wishes the book would offer a synopsis of how these features are illustrated in the various chapters, but except for the first dichotomy, they reappear only toward the end of the book. This suggests that the introduction, where the dichotomies are defined, was written after all the other chapters, as is frequently the case, and that the last three dichotomies are belated thoughts inspired by the later chapters.All the chapters are structured in a similar way. The introduction associates each of them with a so-called “spatial figure” ranging from abstract formal patterns such as the network and the gap to concrete types of places defined either naturally, culturally, or functionally: the museum, the deserted island, the forest and wilderness, the office, the ruins, and the infrastructure. The chapters proper begin with the discussion of theoretical concepts relevant to the works under scrutiny; then comes a preview of the points to be made in the chapter, and finally a contrasting discussion and close reading of two or three texts that put the theoretical concepts into play. Readers unfamiliar with the texts, or who do not care about them, will still be rewarded by the discussion of the theoretical concepts, which displays an impressive range of expertise. The texts themselves are drawn from multiple media: text-based narrative, mostly novels but also a poetry collection, multimodal narratives, films, and computer games, and they were all composed after 1962, mostly after 2010.The second chapter is the most theoretically significant from a narratological point of view. Its purpose is to propose a new analytical category: object-oriented plotting, a term inspired by Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology. Virtually all narratives include objects; what then makes a plot “object-oriented”? One possibility that comes to mind is the pursuit of a desired object (the princess, the Holy Grail) in the archetype of the hero’s journey, but Caracciolo rejects this type of plot because “the sought-after object is subordinated to human intentionality” (25); the hero’s journey represents, therefore, the discredited Western attitude that subordinates matter to human desires. One would expect that the “it” narratives of the eighteenth century, which depict the circulation of an object in the diverse strata of society and often attribute agency to this object, would fit the bill, but Caracciolo also rejects them because they serve “an ideological or didactic function” (25). Moreover, these objects are anthropomorphized. To be considered “object-oriented,” Caracciolo tells us, a plot must “challenge the subject vs. object dualism that is at the heart of Greimas’s model, revealing instead the breadth of the spectrum of materiality. Uncoupled from human instrumentalization or symbolic domestication, things are presented as a site of uncertainty as well as resistance to anthropocentrism” (25). In other words, an object-oriented plot must stage the resistance of things with respect to human intentionality. The chapter discusses two examples of this idea. One is the film by Alejandro Iñarritu, Babel, where an object serves as a “material anchor” that connects three distinct stories, one located in Japan, another in Morocco, and the third on the United States/Mexico border. A gun is given as a gift by a Japanese tourist to his guide during a hunting expedition in Africa; it is then inadvertently fired by a young Moroccan boy and wounds an American tourist; this event has repercussions for the Mexican nanny who takes care of the woman’s children. The gun in the film has no special symbolic meaning; its importance for the plot lies in the connection it establishes between the three stories, as well as in its unpredictable behavior. This idea that objects cannot be fully controlled by humans demonstrates the agency of materiality and forms the dominant theme of the book. Caracciolo’s other example of object-oriented plotting is the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo, in which a baseball plays a major role: the ball hit by Bobby Thompson in a walk-off home run in a 1951 playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers, a hit that has become known in baseball lore as “the shot heard around the world.” Here the importance of the object lies clearly in its cultural significance, which distinguishes it from all other baseballs, but its authenticity cannot be established since it requires the reconstruction of a chain of custody from the kid who caught the ball to the collector who acquires it. In addition to its historical value (which Caracciolo somewhat downplays, preferring to read the baseball as an imprint of the environment bearing traces of paint, grass, dirt, and human sweat), the baseball is said to connect various strands in the plot. This leaves one wondering what common feature makes the two plots object-oriented. There are many ways in which narrative objects can grab the reader’s attention: through detailed descriptions, through their thematic (i.e., symbolic) importance, through their strategic role in the plot, and as structural connectors—the only function present in both texts. But if one regards this function as the defining feature of object-oriented plotting, then there is no reason to exclude “it” narratives from the category. Distinguishing and investigating the roles that objects can take in narrative is more important to narratology than labeling certain plots “object-oriented.”In the third chapter, Caracciolo turns from the materiality of the objects in the storyworld to the materiality of the text itself. After a theoretical prelude that discusses the role of gaps in literary texts and the genre of the multimodal narrative, the chapter turns to works that perform surgical operations on a preexisting narrative. Tree of Codes, by Jonathan Safran Foer, cuts out substantial parts from Street of Crocodiles by the Polish writer and Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz, revealing a subtext that subverts the narrativity of the original (the bold characters in my quote show how Foer’s title can be derived from Schulz’s original). In Darkness by Yedda Morrison, the text of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is mostly erased, leaving only the passages that refer to the natural world, in what Caracciolo regards as an impossible attempt to remove the traces of Western colonization and restore the world to its primitive wholeness. A third text discussed in the chapter, the multimodal novel Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, uses faded or overexposed Polaroid pictures, such as a picture of an Apache cemetery that renders inscriptions illegible, to suggest forgotten lives. All three texts are read by Caracciolo as a denunciation of Western assumptions about the passivity of matter, which he holds responsible not only for environmental disaster but also for the atrocities of history.In a world threatened by climate catastrophe, the need to preserve objects and life forms from a rapidly disappearing past takes on increased urgency. The kind of institution devoted to this preservation, namely, the museum, is the common theme of the three texts discussed in Chapter 4. Caracciolo opens the chapter with the description of a “trope” that he calls the Anthropocene museum. This imaginary concept is “a collection of artifacts (which may well include textual artifacts) that provide an affective perspective on human society as we . . . know it” (70). It is not clear to me why the Anthropocene museum is called a trope, and what the trope really means, but Caracciolo tells us that it is “no longer caught up in Western dichotomies” and functions as a “material anchor for the complexity of the Anthropocene,” a complexity that “brings in a great deal of uncertainty” (68). In other words, the Anthropocene museum should make us feel bad about what we have done to the earth rather than glorify civilization, as actual museums often do. In Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, the Anthropocene museum takes the form of a kind of time capsule of objects that represent contemporary civilization to future generations, such as snow globes, the prototypical useless souvenir; in the poetry collection The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy, octopi collect remnants of human culture after the climate change-induced rise of the ocean has destroyed mankind and made them the dominant species; in Flights, a collection of both narrative and non-narrative fragments by Olga Tokarczuk, the museum idea is replaced by its Baroque-age predecessor, the Cabinet of curiosities, where parts of human bodies preserved in jars are displayed next to other kinds of objects, thus “blurring ontological boundaries” (83) between the human and the nonhuman (83). Caracciolo regards the Cabinet of curiosities as the antithesis of the modern museum, which reinforces the scientific taxonomies of the Enlightenment and deprives matter of its vibrant quality: “the Cabinet of curiosities operates by way of surprising parallels that rewrite, at least potentially, the rigid templates of Western thinking and invite the audience to confront the spectrum of materiality” (67). While the first text is a novel, the other two break down the linearity of narrative, thereby raising the question, often asked by ecocritics, of whether experimental texts are better suited than standard narratives to represent the uncertainty of the Anthropocene.The next chapter focuses on recent variations on the myth of the castaway, made famous by Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s novel is now causing the ire of eco- and postcolonialist critics for being “an embodiment of Western colonialism, with its ruthless instrumentalization of both nonhuman ecosystems and Indigenous individuals” (85), though Robinson’s clever use of the material found on the ship could be regarded as a positive example of recycling. This is what the hero of the film Swiss Army Man does with a corpse he finds on the desert island on which he is marooned: in a grotesque conception of instrumentality, he uses the body for various practical purposes—as a jet ski, as a compass, as a line thrower—and even makes a friend with the body when it shows signs of life and develops into a character named Manny. The film thus contests several binaries: between life and death, between things and people, between subject and object, achieving a comic effect reminiscent of Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. The other film discussed in the chapter, Cast Away, also undermines the distinction between passive things and active humans by having the hero anthropomorphize a volleyball and turn it into a friend. Caracciolo provides a theoretical support to the chapter with a lengthy discussion of three concepts at play in these narratives: the fetish, as representative of “vibrant matter” (it is inhabited by a ghost), anthropomorphism (which Caracciolo opposes to anthropocentrism, and regards as much more positive), and personification.The theme of the castaway is expanded in Chapter 6, with the discussion of two computer games focused on the survival of the player in a hostile environment, The Forest and Raft. By featuring objects that either serve or hamper the goals of the player, computer games could be regarded as the embodiment of the conception of materiality that Caracciolo but by to objects that makes them to the in they also the idea of active materiality. 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