Petronarratology: A Bioregional Approach to Oil Stories

ABSTRACT

In “Petronarratology: A Bioregional Approach to Oil Stories”, Bart Welling argues that ecocritics and narratologists have an important role to play in challenging the narratives that help perpetuate the modern world’s catastrophic addiction to fossil fuels. Welling builds on the concept of reinhabitation, a central idea in the grassroots bioregional movement, as he explores strategies through which authors have reinhabited (i.e., transformed from within) not just oil-polluted places but problematic energy narratives, such as narratives that euphemize hydrocarbons as “energy” in the first place. Focusing on books by David Gessner and Stephanie LeMenager, Welling identifies six features of reinhabitory petronarratives: (1) they acknowledge their authors’ personal debts to oil; (2) they own up to the enmeshment of environmentally oriented ways of thinking in our hydrocarbon-fuelled culture; (3) they make room for the voices of ordinary residents of this culture, including people whose political perspectives clash with those of the authors; (4) they take seriously the reinhabitory capacities of nonhuman beings; (5) they rethink petroleum itself as a new kind of character in the fictions of “petromodernity”; and (6) they describe physical encounters with unprocessed hydrocarbons, thus addressing the massive problems posed by fossil fuels on a productively non-apocalyptic scale.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Negarestani, 19.

2 For a horrifying, carefully fact-checked vision of what the future might hold if we do not immediately begin transitioning to renewable energy sources on the largest possible scale, see Wallace-Wells.

3 Tillerson.

4 Petrocultures Research Group, 41. I may be overly fond of the “petro” prefix, but it serves as useful shorthand for hydrocarbons themselves, as well as for the fossil fuel industry and the whole infrastructures and ways of life that cheap oil, natural gas, and coal have made possible. When attached to words like “culture” and “modernity”, the prefix emphasizes how thoroughly entangled not just our technologies but our “values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings” (ibid., 9) have become with hydrocarbons. Contrary to popular belief, fossil fuels are more than sources of energy that we happen to use; they are absolutely central, if often hidden, aspects of everything we do, and of who we are.

5 Morton, 180.

6 Kapuściński, 35.

7 Ghosh, 29.

8 LeMenager, 104.

9 Caracciolo, 1.

10 LeMenager, 18.

11 Shah, 175.

12 Thoreau, 959; Gessner, 26.

13 LeMenager, 193.

14 Berg and Dasmann, 218.

15 Barthes, 240.

16 There is obviously some truth to this view of hydrocarbons, but it just as clearly obscures the necessity of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

17 All of the citations in this paragraph come from Kapuściński, 35.

18 Klein, 342.

19 Klein defines extractivism as “a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth” and with other human beings (ibid., 169).

20 See Welling.

21 Quoted in Klein, 393.

22 Ibid., 396–7.

23 Ibid., 399.

24 On Marc Augé’s theories of “non-places”, see Buell, 69.

25 LeMenager, 104.

26 Gessner, 28.

27 Ibid., 106.

28 Morris.

29 Gessner, 3–4.

30 Staels, 162; photographer David Freund, as quoted in Sadof.

31 Gessner, 3–4.

32 Quoted in Gessner, 5.

33 Ibid., 54.

34 LeMenager, 24, 27.

35 Ibid., 20.

36 Ibid., 6.

37 Ibid., 11.

38 Ibid., 1.

39 I heartily agree with LeMenager’s claim that, in car-centred “autopias” like Houston, Texas, “Pedestrianism becomes political action and therapy, a means of moving (literally, physically) against the melancholy of oil dependence.” (ibid., 141).

40 Ibid., 193.

41 Thayer, 67–8. The way Thayer treats “reinhabitory” as a synonym for “invested in the future” is interesting, because it reminds us that carefully historicized work like LeMenager’s can be more future-oriented than the “futuristic” petronarratives, like the myth of Energy, that are actually ruining humanity’s and most other species’ chances of future survival.

42 Gessner, 36.

43 Ibid., 263.

44 Ibid., 65.

45 Ibid., 68.

46 Whether or not Gessner is thinking specifically of Chevron’s “Power of Human Energy” campaign (which began in 2007, well before he began working on his book), he is clearly very familiar with the oil and gas industry’s vision of “human energy”. See Chevron.

47 Merchant, 226.

48 Thayer, 67 (emphasis added).

49 Gessner, 47.

50 Ibid., 156.

51 Ibid., 250–1.

52 Szeman, 813.

53 Merchant, 226.

54 LeMenager, 144.

55 Gessner, 7.

56 Naím.

57 Gessner, 135.

58 Ibid., 9; emphasis added. Admittedly, Gessner does flirt at least once with satanic imagery (see page 23), and the stance he takes towards the fossil fuel industry, like Naomi Klein’s, is generally hostile. But he consistently takes responsibility for supporting the industry with his gas dollars, and pins the blame for the Gulf spill not just on BP but on the larger extractivist culture of which he is a conscious part.

59 Ibid., 269.