Palimbiosis

How does one begin to talk about the end? Contemporary artistic and literary responses to climate change frequently invoke Romantic traditions, in part because many theorists attribute our current crisis to historical developments in the Romantic period, but also as means of representing how climate change collapses the familiar orderliness of time. This essay is about the narrative forms that emerge when our place of safety is revealed to be as unstable as melting permafrost. It centers on Mary Shelley’s 1825 essay about a frozen Englishman reanimated during that especially warm summer. I read Shelley’s essay anachronistically alongside contemporary climate art in order to explore narrative forms that disrupt the linear progression of time and suggest the possibility of other narratives that might emerge in the plurality of our endings. We are accustomed to thinking of Romanticism as environmentally informed by ice. This essay is about the thaw.