“Feelings are strong here”: A Proximate Reading of Solastalgia in The Last Pulse

ABSTRACT

In Anson Cameron’s The Last Pulse, the monkeywrenching protagonist blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and spreads his solastalgia around, an affect Glenn Albrecht defines as homesickness at home induced by local ecological loss. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, from the character’s drought-stricken home town in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. The scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology; in this way, it can provide crucial insights into how readers’ environmental feelings and thinking are constantly reconfigured alongside shifting borders within and beyond the watershed in the novel.

KEYWORDS:

• Solastalgia
• proximate reading
• Murray–Darling Basin
• watershed consciousness
• monkeywrenching
• arts of flow

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 219.

2 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 246.

3 Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 264.

4 “Catchments in the Murray–Darling Basin,” Murray-Darling Basin Authority, updated 11 March 2022, https://www.mdba.gov.au/water-management/catchments.

5 Ken Gelder, “Proximate Reading: Australian Literature in Transnational Reading Frameworks,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special Issue: Common Readers and Cultural Critics (2010): 1.

6 Gelder, “Proximate Reading,” 4.

7 Suzanne Keen, “Narrative Empathy,” in Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 68. Keen notes that due to the nature of fictionality, readers’ affective and cognitive responses generated during the reading experience do not necessarily lead to empathy or altruism in real life.

8 Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 38.

9 “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3 (2005): 49.

10 Emily O’Gorman, Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (Collingwood, VIC: CSIRO Publishing, 2012), 7.

11 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Hoboken: Routledge, 2006), 3–4.

12 Important water laws and regulations were developed and passed in response to the Millennium drought, for example, the Water Act 2007 (Cth) and the Murray–Darling Basin Plan of 2012.

13 This episode alludes to water disputes between upstream Ethiopia and downstream Egypt caused by Ethiopia’s controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile River; Egyptian politicians were caught on live TV proposing military action over the dam but later denied it. See Ahmed Maher, “Egyptian Politicians Caught in on-Air Ethiopia Dam Gaffe,” BBC News, 4 June 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-22771563; “Egyptian Warning over Ethiopia Nile Dam,” BBC News, 10 June 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-22850124.

14 Glenn A. Albrecht, “Negating Solastalgia: An Emotional Revolution from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene,” American Imago 77, no. 1 (2020): 45.

15 Albrecht, “Negating Solastalgia,” 19.

16 Travis Wagner, “Reframing Ecotage as Ecoterrorism: News and the Discourse of Fear,” Environmental Communication 2, no. 1 (2008): 25–39.

17 Anson Cameron, The Last Pulse (Sydney: Vintage, 2014), 38.

18 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 40.

19 Jessica K. Weir, Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009), 19–20.

20 Intelligent sabotaging targets only properties and rejects violence against people, an idea based on how Malm also distinguishes intelligent sabotaging from terrorism. See Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (London: Verso Books, 2021).

21 Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 1 (2010): 17–31.

22 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 50.

23 In Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies”, affects can circulate in various sociocultural relationships and generate surfaces and boundaries between bodies. See Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39.

24 Albrecht, “Negating Solastalgia,” 24.

25 Albrecht, “Negating Solastalgia,” 26.

26 Vernon Owen Grumbling and Michael Daley, “The Progressive Political Foundations of Edward Abbey’s Environmental Advocacy,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 28, no. 1 (2021): 163.

27 Alexa Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017), 82.

28 Tom Quirk, “The Realism of Huckleberry Finn,” in Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), 9.

29 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 25.

30 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 162.

31 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 176.

32 Deborah Bird Rose, “Arts of Flow: Poetics of ‘Fit’ in Aboriginal Australia,” Dialectical Anthropology 38, no. 4 (2014): 431–45.

33 Rose, “Arts of Flow,” 435.

34 Rose, “Arts of Flow,” 441.

35 “Popular Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories,” welcometocountry.org, updated 6 January 2021, https://www.welcometocountry.org/aboriginal-dreamtime-stories/.

36 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 102.

37 Anne Davies, “Traditional Owners in Murray-Darling Basin Take Fight for Water Rights to Governments,” Guardian, 29 August 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/30/traditional-owners-in-murray-darling-basin-take-fight-for-water-rights-to-governments.

38 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 72.

39 The accident occurs as a result of Em and Barwon’s dispute over “ownership” of the fish. Em claims the fish is on her rod, while Barwon asserts that the fish comes from his water. In the midst of the argument, Barwon falls overboard when Em strikes him on the head with the tackle box in her determination to retrieve the fish.

40 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 91.

41 Rose, “Arts of Flow,” 440.

42 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 21.

43 Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 121.

44 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 70.

45 Cameron, The Last Pulse, 75.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC) under the Grant Australian Studies in China Program 2021 (http://www.fasic.org.au/index.php/features/australian-studies-in-china-program).