Non‐Anthropocentric Narrative Strategies in Recent Experimental US Fiction

Abstract

AbstractThis article pinpoints a genre of contemporary experimental fiction that troubles normative ethical and representational demarcations between human and nonhuman life, aggregating in ecologically posthumanist, non‐anthropocentric perspectives. After offering an overview of current ecocritical debates around humanness and naturalness in the Anthropocene, the article considers two contemporary novels from the US that employ formal devices and self‐reflexive narrative strategies to disrupt the assumed primacy of the human. Addressing problems of human‐driven environmental disruption, biodiversity, and nonhuman personhood, Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions () and Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook () offer concrete examples of such strategies. Simultaneously deconstructive and reconstructive, these texts excoriate reigning Western discourses about Nature while imagining less deleterious sorts of relations humans might forge with the natural nonhuman world. Moreover, while the realist narrative strategies associated with traditional “nature writing” are largely absent in these experimental texts, their attention to concrete environmental risks and ethical quandaries diverges from postmodernism's purported treatment of the natural world as a mere arena of discourse subject to perpetual deconstruction. Instead, the self‐reflexive, antitotalizing, and contingent qualities associated most frequently with literary postmodernism and poststructuralist critique serve to unseat the presumptions of classical humanism, offering alternative ways of trying to know and relate to the nonhuman world – or even suggesting that not knowing constitutes an ecological ethos in itself. “Critical anthropomorphism” is a strategy and trope already present in the seminal ecological writings of Henry David Thoreau and discernible in Only Revolutions. Rather than re‐inscribing the centrality of humanness, it imagines the extension of personhood to nonhuman life. Meanwhile, in Dara's novel, the natural world figures as both radically other from, and inextricably connected to, the human: as such, the former stands in what Caribbean poet and critic Édouard Glissant would call “opaque relationality” to the latter. An ethos of opacity thus constitutes a second, radically non‐anthropocentric narrative strategy in this experimental fiction. Narrative opacity offers decentered, contingent accounts of human interactions with the natural world rather than hierarchically ordered or taxonomically precise ones, effectively troubling the presumptions of epistemological control and stewardship over the nonhuman that dominate in traditional nature writing.