Against Anthropocentrism: A Stray’s Quest in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the representation of an ecological collapse in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020) in the context of the interrelated concepts of straying and stray ethics, proposed by Barbara Creed in her work Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017) as the new ethical paradigm for the Anthropocene era. Drawing upon the definition of straying as a process of identity (re-)formation, we discuss Cook’s narrative in terms of its socio-political engagement with the reality of the climate crisis from the perspective of a stray, identified in our analysis as a liminal abject figure that transcends species boundaries. By positing stray ethics as the novel’s interpretative pivot, we propose to read the experience of becoming a stray through the lens of its implicitly disruptive but also transformative potential, engendered by the essentially sympoietic, non-anthropocentric relationship between human and non-human animals.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Timothy Morton deals critically with the current world conjuncture through his concept of dark ecology, which claims that “ecological reality requires an awareness that at first has the characteristics of tragic melancholy and negativity, concerning inextricable coexistence with a host of entities that surround and penetrate us” (160). In a similar vein, Donna J. Haraway also accentuates the need to relinquish the binary attitude and adopt sympoiesis, that is “worlding-with, in company” (58). Val Plumwood, through her emphasis on deep ecology, invites us to revisit the definitional dichotomous categories and taxonomies because it “provides a distorted framework for perception of the Other and the project of mastery it gives rise to involves dangerous forms of denial, perception, and belief which can put the centric perceiver out of touch with reality about the Other” (141; emphasis original).

2. Caracciolo makes an astute observation of Cook’s novel’s ambiguous generic status in reference to other popular contemporary genres, such as YA dystopias or “weird fiction”: “If the survivalist premise of The New Wilderness recalls young adult fiction, such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, or ‘weird’ fiction, such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (itself part of a trilogy), the execution is profoundly different: there is little sensationalism, violence, or horror in Cook’s work, which encapsulates the drudgery of technologically unaided living – the long treks in the desert, the frustrations of hunting and crafting usable tools from dead animals, and so on” (“Child Minds” 154).

3. For discussion of terminology associated with the Anthropocene, see, for instance, Neumann, “Narrative Forms;” Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions; Vermeulen, Literature and the Anthropocene.

4. By virtue of its all-encompassing scope, climate crisis “remakes basic narrative operations” (Trexler 233), necessitating new modes of writing that broaden generic boundaries. Trexler thus makes a valid point by arguing that “the narrative difficulties of the Anthropocene threaten to rupture the defining features of genre: literary novels bleed into science fiction; suspense novels have surprising elements of realism; realist depictions of everyday life involuntarily become biting satire” (14). For a more detailed delineation of thematic and generic categories of Anthropocene literature, see Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions; Vermeulen, Literature and the Anthropocene; Reno, ed., The Anthropocene. Approaches and Contexts for Literature and the Humanities.

5. The issue of literature’s relevance in describing the Anthropocene is a contentious one; as Astrid Bracke contends, “[a]n argument has developed in the environmental humanities that the Anthropocene requires new narratives: new ways of imagining and depicting the world that move ‘environmentally oriented thought into the future’, rather than ‘shackle environmentalism to outdated templates’ by relying on older imaginations of nature such as that of the pristine wilderness” (88). For a comprehensive summary of the discussion on the (in)significance of literary representations of the Anthropocene, see Neumann, “Narrative Forms;” Bracke, “The Novel.”

6. For Trexler, “[t]he best Anthropocene novels are not solely ‘character-driven.’ … Instead, they explore how things like ocean currents, tigers, viruses, floods, vehicles, and capital relentlessly shape human experience” (26).

7. “I like thinking about the natural world, animals in particular, and how we are separated on the spectrum of existence,” Cook asserts. She further points out the following: “We’re all animals, but we were designated as somewhat different from other animals” (Cook “Eco-Horror”).

8. In addition to the influence of nature writing on her fiction, Cook mentions diverse inspirational sources, such as Aimee Bender, whom she describes as “the first writer [she] read where [she] really began to understand this impulse within [herself] to make things stranger. Or to play with the realities of the world around [her] to get at meaning or to get at an idea,” as well as Henry David Thoreau, George Saunders, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“They’re People”).

9. Tara K. Menon points out that, though “America is never named” in the novel, “it can be identified by the wildlife that populates the landscape: hawks, cougars, wolves, elk, moose, and buzzards. In the acknowledgements, Cook mentions eight Native American tribes ‘whose ancestral lands provided inspiration for where these characters lived and walked’” (149).

10. Cook further comments on the pivotal position of the female protagonists: “It was interesting to put my female characters into a life and death situation and watch them thrive. In a lot of animal groups, the females are the leaders. That’s not an accident. I wanted Bea and Agnes to be leaders” (“Beautiful”).

11. Accordingly, Cook comments on her novel as a “book of survival”: “The novel is about people who live in the wilderness in a very extreme way as nomadic hunter gatherers, but they’re people like you and me. They’re modern people who have decided to give up everything and live in the woods. It’s a speculative novel, so it’s a future world where things are bleak, but it’s not post-apocalyptic yet. It’s extreme survival, but they do it because they think it’s worth it” (Cook “They’re People”).

12. In a similar fashion, even though the Community are left to fend for themselves in the Wilderness State without the so-called benefits of civilization, their sense of security is symbolized by a human-made object, a teacup: “The teacup, though, was truly a delicate thing, and it would make each of them delicate when it passed into their possession” (Cook, New Wilderness 21).

13. In the discussion of the theme of motherhood in her novel, Cook describes the characters of Bea and Agnes as “magnets” that “have this attracting and repelling quality”: “Bea and Agnes love each other fiercely, but they’re different people who become even more different through the course of the book. They lose each other over and over again, emotionally and physically, just by being who they are. In the beginning I was thinking about being a daughter and exploring that. My mom died over ten years ago, so I started the book thinking about having lost someone who could no longer answer the questions that I now found myself wanting to ask, like how she felt about being a mom” (“Our humanity”).

14. Cook mentions that she “spent a lot of time in the high desert in the West, mostly in Eastern Oregon, at the edge of the Great Basin … . It really affected [her], this huge empty space, even empty of trees for the most part, and it felt like such a huge contrast to the density of the city [she] was used to” (“Our humanity”).

15. Carolyn Merchant observes that “[c]entral to the organic theory was the identification of nature, especially the earth, with a nurturing mother: a kindly beneficent female who provided for the needs of mankind in an ordered, planned universe. But another opposing image of nature as female was also prevalent: wild and uncontrollable nature that could render violence, storms, droughts, and general chaos” (2).

16. Kylie Crane asserts that “[m]aps have been, and continue to be, instrumental in colonial projects. They mask over other interpretations or uses of landscapes, always foregrounding specific meanings, in particular as embodied through place naming. A map has a legend that may be explicit in a list of keys or symbols, used to represent items of the landscape. Such symbols are often included at the cost of scale – a church, or road, for instance, seldom occupies the same scale of space on the map as it does in the reality it ostensibly represents. The myths of wilderness are like such legends, specific keys, or metaphors, with crucial slippages involved in representation” (1–2).

17. In her discussion of Haraway’s relational ontology, Puig de la Bellacasa points out that “[r]elations of ‘significant otherness’ are more than about accommodating ‘difference,’ coexisting, or tolerating. Thinking-with nonhumans should always be a living-with, aware of troubling relations and seeking a significant otherness that transforms those involved in the relation and the worlds we live in” (83).

18. As Puig de la Bellacasa argues, “relations of thinking and knowing require care and affect how we care. In tune with a nonnormative approach to care as a speculative ethics, the grounds of this premise are ontological rather than moral or epistemological: not only relations involve care, care is relational per se” (69; emphasis original).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by TUBITAK BIDEB (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye) under Grant 2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program; Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu [2219];

Notes on contributors

Marta Komsta

Marta Komsta is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her research interests include representations of utopia and dystopia in film and literature, cultural semiotics, and ecocriticism. She published in Studies in American Fiction and Utopian Studies, among others. She is the author of Welcome to the Chemical Theatre: The Urban Chronotope in Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction (Peter Lang, 2015) and the co-editor (with Justyna Galant) of Strange Vistas: Perspectives on the Utopian (Peter Lang, 2019).

Emrah Atasoy

Emrah Atasoy, an Associate Professor of English, served as a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English Language and Literature between September 2021 and September 2022 as a recipient of the TUBITAK 2019 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Grant. He is the author of the monograph Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia (Nobel, 2021). His work appeared in journals such as Studies in the Novel (with Thomas Horan), Utopian Studies, Librosdelacorte.es, Literary Voice, Methis. Studia Humaniora Estonica, SFRA Review, and Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He also contributed chapters to The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia: Intersectional, Feminist, and Non-Binary Approaches in 21st-Century Speculative Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2021) and Speculations of War: Essays on Conflict in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Utopian Literature (McFarland, 2021).