Polymeric chains and petrolic imaginaries: world literature, plastic, and negative value

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Adam Dickinson’s poetry collection The Polymers, artist Marina Zurkow’s The Petroleum Manga, and Rana Dasgupta’s novel Solo use experimental aesthetic forms to grapple with the temporal and spatial distensions of the polluting effects of plastic, an oil-derived product. Mobilising a comparative analysis of petro-plastic works, the discussion examines how plastic, a mundane material removed from its origins in crude oil, briefly loved, quickly discarded, and exacting unknown toxic consequences, is at the conceptual and imaginative margins of eco-critical aesthetics and materialist theory. By juxtaposing works from Canada, United States, and Bulgaria, the analysis suggests that if plastic is a global ‘rock’, its local articulation is bounded by recurring narrative forms, complex scales and interdisciplinary knowledge, that enliven a materialist and relational approach to plastic’s unevenly felt trajectory from ancient oil to eternal waste.

KEYWORDS:

• Plastic pollution
• petro-modernity
• world literature
• world-ecology
• ecopoetry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Meikle’s account of Bakelite Corporation’s 1937 industrial film The Fourth Kingdom (1995, 114).

2. Plastic now pollutes the remotest recesses of life: the Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area nearly three times as large as France (Lebreton et al 2018, 1), and plastic has been found in Arctic oceans and deep sea troughs (Barnes et al. 2009, 1985-1998). In water it attracts surface floating contaminants like DDT and pesticides which are then biomagnified up the food chain.

3. Originally the non-conducting, heat resistant and insulating properties of plastics like thermosets were what made them a valuable replacement for natural materials such as gutta percha and shellac in the early twentieth-century. But these self-same qualities make widely used plastics like PET bottles, bags, and fishing nets, resistant to decay (Geyer, Jambeck and Law 2017). There are two major categories of plastics, thermosets and thermoplastics. Thermosets are rigid plastics ‘set’ by heat which cannot be recycled, while thermoplastics retain their polymeric bonds when heated, and can be melted and reused, and thus recycled. However, given the toxic additives used in both and the emission of some chemicals and polymers during the recycling process, thermoplastics do not offer a solution to plastic toxicity. Only reduced or no plastic use will greatly improve environmental conditions.

4. Plastic is an index of oil-modernity given that it consumes approximately 6% of global oil outputs, (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2017 12, 20).

5. The world literary method deployed here seeks world-systemic links between literature, oil and its by-products. I derive this concept of world literature from the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) account of world literature as that of ‘the (modern capitalist) world-system’ (2015, 20), and Mike Niblett’s related argument that world literature’s horizon is that of the world-ecology, since ‘ecological regimes and revolutions […] organize in fundamental ways the material conditions, social modalities, and areas of experience upon which literary form works’ (2012, 20).

6. See Malm’s critique of how agency shifts in new materialist accounts to devolve causality onto objects rather than political systems (2018, loc. 182.6). See also Benjamin Noys’ account of new materialism’s abstraction of objects from social relations, and tendency to transcendence (2016).

7. See Max Liboiron’s account of plastic’s unique polluting qualities which exceed traditional theories of pollution because it has ‘high effects at low doses’, blends with ‘other systems, including ocean ecosystems and endocrine (hormone) systems in bodies’, and has ‘correlative’ rather ‘than causal’ ‘mode of influence’ (2016, 95).

8. Moore’s the ‘Capitalocene’ (2015) here seems an apt substitute for ‘Anthropocene’ given its reference to the iniquitous social systems through which fossil fuels are extracted and used.

9. Dickinson’s conceptual poetry, with its highly imaginative references to polymeric chemistry and mass culture also intervenes in debates on ecopoetry as a more critically engaged category than nature poetry with which to narrate the complex interactions between human and extra-human natures. See Keller’s summary of the term (2015, 870 fn., 2).

10. This use of form to force content is akin to that of procedural poetry like ‘flarf’ or ‘junkspeech’, which confines poetic composition to particular rules. This contingent way of building poetry is akin, Dickinson argues, to how functional molecules attach to polymers (see Queyras and Dickinson 2013).

11. Evelyn Reilly’s collection Styrofoam (2009), with its focus on non-biodegradable plastics, inclusion of molecular graphs and highly enigmatic poetry, is an important precursor to Dickinson’s collection.

12. Dickinson’s latest collection, Anatomic (2018), continues this rich engagement with industrial pollutants, complex poetic forms and molecular maps, examining how industrial chemicals are bound up with the regulation of our moods and hormones.

13. On the Germanic origins of Ulrich’s name and its reference to the main protagonist of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, see Deckard (2016).

Additional information

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Treasa De Loughry

Treasa De Loughry is a Lecturer in Global and World Literatures at the University of Exeter. Her research intersects world literature, world-ecology, postcolonial studies and environmental humanities, and she is especially interested in global cultural registrations of oil, waste, and pollution. Treasa currently has articles published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and chapters in various edited collections. Her monograph, titled The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives, examines how novels by Salman Rushdie, Rana Dasgupta, David Mitchell and Rachel Kushner evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. She is a founding member of the World Literature Network.