Narrative Loops and Climate Futures: A Form for Uncertain Times

Abstract Cross-fertilizing narrative theory and work in the environmental humanities, this article argues that the loop as a narrative form holds special significance vis-à-vis the imagining of climate change in contemporary fiction. More specifically, the loop captures the uncertainty and moral stakes of climate change as a planetary event that affirms human societies’ entanglement with the nonhuman but also disrupts their projection into a stable future. The starting point is Jesse Kellerman's time loop narrative Controller, which presents the reader with three alternative scenarios focusing on a man and his elderly mother. The discussion then turns to two novels (Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods and Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts) in which looping structures are more localized but nevertheless color the reader's interpretation of a dystopian situation. In both works, looping structures are deployed in conjunction with metafictional devices that hint at a way out of the loop. However, the loop remains unbroken in diegetic terms. Finally, the article turns to Hanya Yanagihara's novel To Paradise, arguing that its preoccupation with ethical entanglement with regard to climate disaster takes a loop-like form through the unexplained return of textual elements (e.g., the characters’ names) across the book's three parts.