Abstract
This article will explore how degrowth imaginaries inform the representation of social reproduction and environmental collapse in Jenni Fagan’s The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) and John Burnside’s Havergey (2017). It will argue that the two novels deploy the trope of the end of times to frame the unravelling of the world-ecology that binds capital and nature together in the Capitalocene, according to Jason Moore. They suggest that this is what makes possible, and necessary, a re-organisation of social reproduction and of the patterns of energy consumption or generation with which this is entangled. The first part of this article will examine the metabolic rift with which The Sunlight Pilgrims and Havergey are concerned, while the second part will delineate the ways in which degrowth imaginaries frame the representation of reorganised forms of social (re-)production. Drawing on disability studies and situating The Sunlight Pilgrims and Havergey within the disciplinary framework of Scottish literature, I will continue to consider how Burnside’s and Fagan’s novels feature narratives of disability and the nation. These may come across as marginal to the plot but function as the foci through which the politics of the degrowth communities represented come to the fore.
Highlights
Set in the midst of deepening environmental crisis and in its aftermath, respectively, Jenni Fagan’sThe Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) and John Burnside’s Havergey (2017) are concerned both with the damage inflicted on nature and society by capitalism and with attempts at organising social relations differently to survive its consequences
This article has argued that, in Havergey and The Sunlight Pilgrims, a degrowth imaginary informs the representation of how social reproduction becomes reorganised at the moment when the Capitalocene as a ‘situated, capitalist world-ecology’ (Moore 2016, p. 6) unravels
It has examined the ways in which this imaginary is expressed through the representation of communities departing from the modes of production, social production, and social reproduction of the Capitalocene as well as narratives of energy, disability, and the nation
Summary
Set in the midst of deepening environmental crisis and in its aftermath, respectively, Jenni Fagan’s. Both novels present the implosion of the Capitalocene as opening a way for building a new relationship with energy It is through representations of the relationships that bind communities and energy consumption or production that Havergey and The Sunlight Pilgrims deploy energy as the prism that makes visible ‘the material, social, and symbolic operations’ of the practices it enables 31) can only happen once this work ‘is not subsumed to the logic of capital accumulation, and we control the means of our reproduction’ (Federici and Vishmidt 2013) This is precisely the scenario Havergey and The. Sunlight Pilgrims chart through their representation of communities committed to, and faced with the necessity of, establishing a ‘world-ecology in which power, wealth, and re/production are forged in conversation with needs of the web of life, and humanity’s place within it’ (Moore 2016, p.11), at the end of times—and the start of a new epoch. The interconnection between nature and human beings is offered in the opening scene of the novel, as we witness human and nonhuman animals watching the parhelia—Constance, Stella, and Dylan alongside a blackbird (Fagan 2016, Sunlight, p. 2)
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