Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here

ABSTRACT

This essay develops a definition of a type of “narratorhood” specific to the Anthropocene. The concept of the strange stranger is adapted from Timothy Morton into narratological terms through an ecocritical perspective on unnatural narratology and the reading experience, arguing for an ethic of de-anthropomorphized reading that resists the interpretation of narrators as humanoids. Through analyses of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, this ethic is described as the encounter with a narrator-figure that is dialogic, radically indeterminate, and that foregrounds spatial juxtaposition and description over linear time and discourse representation.

Acknowledgements

The initial development of this material was presented at the 2015 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in Moscow, the 2015 Summer Course in Narrative Study in Sønderborg and the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association conference in Cambridge. I would like to thank Marco Caracciolo for continual discussion of these texts as well as Karin Kukkonen for her early interest in my work on comics. I would also like to thank Jeffrey Santa-Ana for helping refine early drafts of this essay, Mike Rubenstein for his helpful revisions, and J. Caity Swanson for always listening to my half-thoughts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Morton, Humankind, 186.

2 Kukkonen notes that it may be rare for readers to think about a global “narrator” proper in graphic novels, but it is common to sense “traces of narration” to reconcile seemingly natural interpretations of images (Kukkonen, 33).

3 See, for example, Huber, 72, who argues in analysis of other images in the novel, “Both his son and the reader are thus subliminally deceived in being presented with a seemingly neutral, direct mediation of what is actually a subjective mediation of the father.”

4 McCarthy, 261.

5 Alber, 70.

6 Ibid., 71.

7 See, for example, von Mossner; James.

8 Herman, 207–12.

9 The emphasis here is on potential; specifically, a potential deepening of ecological thought. Rather than arguing that a model of encounter with the nonhuman in literature is functional in the sense that it draws a lesson from literature into life, this essay evaluates a kind of ethical reading that foregrounds “strange strangeness” as an aesthetic quality recognizable in both life and models of life. Lee Mitchell argues that a consequence of New Formalism and close reading in general is to focus on what is afforded by the text by bracketing (or, maybe, negating) the transaction between life and text: “Instead, what we are left with is a second nuance, a reduction in scale, involving immediate queries about the relative strength of different kinds of ethical reading” (Mitchell, 19). I am proposing, in part, an ethical kind of reading that begins from a biocentric perspective that is not included in prior discussions of New Formalism.

10 Levine, “Model Thinking.”

11 Levine, Forms, 122.

12 Ibid., 19.

13 See Levine, “Enormity Effect,” 59–75.

14 See Wenzel, “Planet vs. Globe,” 19–30, for critique of straightforward attempts at non-anthropocentrism that do not account for the limits of personification and empathy.

15 Morton, “Ecology as Text,” 3.

16 Morton, Ecological Thought, 51.

17 Ryan, 147–8.

18 Ibid., 147 (my emphasis).

19 Caracciolo, Strange Narrators, 36.

20 Morton, Ecological Thought, 169.

21 Derrida, Gift of Death, 69.

22 Morton, “Queer Ecology,” 277.

23 McCarthy, 8.

24 See Altes, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation, 218–31, for discussion of how irony troubles linguistic and cognitive approaches to free indirect discourse and consciousness-attribution. Particularly, she is interested in how the juxtaposition of frames produces the grounding for interpretation: “But for me, what makes irony, or ambiguity, so characteristic for art experiences is the multiplication of frames that involve interpretations and evaluations of a state of affairs, which calls attention to these framings themselves” (229). Altes shifts the attention to how the specific historical context of a reader provides norms for interpreting ambiguity and irony; this is similar to my argument here about the specificity of encounter as a mode of reading in the Anthropocene.

25 Fludernik, “Narrative Voices,” 708.

26 See Mikkonen, “Presenting Minds,” 301–21, for the development of the oscillating impulse and impossibility to maintain this frame.

27 See Caracciolo, “Qui e allora.” He suggests that by flipping the formal background and foreground of storytelling in graphic narratives, Here also constitutes this potential, radical inversion of normal, anthropocentric readerly behaviour.

28 Mikkonen, Narratology of Comic Art, 77.

29 Fludernik is also interested in how the mimetic sense of voice is exaggerated in many communicative models of narration, but wants to keep readerly habit (“the tendency to attribute stylistic features to a hypothetical narrator persona and/or a character”; Fludernik, “New Wine,” 622) and theoretical model separated. My model is interested in this tendency, but argues it is most often misdirected toward an anthropomorphic figure.

30 Plumwood, 188.

31 Richardson, Unnatural Voices, 139.

32 Ibid., 80.

33 Ibid., 85–6.

34 See Fludernik, “New Wine,” 622; Richard Walsh also strongly argues against a theoretical “covert” narrator: where “even when the representation of a narrator is not sustained, the whole discourse is interpreted as a unified narrating instance because the narrator, a local representational issue of the language, is translated into its global, literal source” (Walsh, 80; emphasis in original). I am not trying to reinstate the mistaken idea of the covert narrator from classical narratology; Richardson’s figure of the interlocutor to which the text “responds” and the strange stranger that exists by way of encounter with the Anthropocene text emphasize how the “source” is the “issue”. Meaning, the anthropocentric perspective of narrative logic is presented, ironically, by a figure who occasionally “appears” or is “represented” by the discourse to trouble the ethics of stories that foreground humanity in the midst of environmental destruction.

35 Abbott, 104.

36 Ibid., 106.

37 McCarthy, 261.

38 Abbott, 104.

39 Marcussen, 14.

40 McCarthy, 20–1.

41 Plumwood, 189–90.

42 Mäkelä, 129–51 (emphasis in original).

43 Morton, Ecological Thought, 49–50.