In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, the novelist and climate activist Amitav Ghosh argues that writers of literary fiction have abysmally failed to address the great challenge of our age, the climate crisis. He challenges writers of ‘serious fiction’ to write more seriously about climate (9). For Ghosh, stories about ecological crises are not found in the esteemed ‘mansion’ of literary fiction but only in the ‘humbler dwellings that surround the manor house – those generic outhouses … called ‘“fantasy”, “horror”, and “science fiction”’ (24). Considered as literary criticism, Ghosh’s call, in 2016, for a wider and better imagining of ecological and climate disaster, was not new. But his book has prompted literary critics to think more seriously about genre and fiction-on-the-environment, to think about where, in what genres of fiction, we might find new imaginings of environmental crises, because for Ghosh new environmental fiction interrogating the weighty ecological dilemmas of our time only really exists in the lesser realms of populist, make-believe disaster-kitsch. And none of this storytelling, he believes, will get us any closer to thinking more seriously about ecological crises, and acting to alter climate change.
Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell’s book, Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene, presents a serious challenge to such limited thinking about where new imaginings on the environment, ecology and climate might be found. Bartha-Mitchell refuses to think in Ghosh’s genre-boxes. Or, rather, she refuses to restrict her investigation of new environmental imaginings only to ‘serious literary fiction’ or to cli-fi/sci-fi stories. Instead, her analysis of an eclectic range of contemporary narrative-prose texts from Australia is an attempt to break new ground, in relation both to ecocriticism and to the study of Australian literature.
What are cosmological readings? What’s wrong with terms like ‘environmental’ or ‘ecological’ or ‘Anthropocene’? Bartha-Mitchell is careful to background previous uses of the term ‘cosmological’ by writers and critics in other contexts. But in her analysis, engaging in cosmological readings in the age of climate crises is an invitation to consider a broader interconnectedness of ecosystems in literary texts, to consider human and more-than-human inter-relations and collectivities in narratives. We are invited, in this book, to read ‘beyond’ a ‘nature/culture divide’ that is too often imposed on readings framed as ‘environmental’ (3). And for Bartha-Mitchell, the main problem with the Anthropocene, apart from its propensity to universalise all humans as equally responsible for ecocide, is that it tends towards ‘passivity and despair’ (14). Thinking cosmologically, then, is more productive and transformative, as it helps one to think ‘beyond the Anthropocene prognosis of decline’ (3).
The six texts that Bartha-Mitchell chooses for her ecocritical study – based on a PhD thesis she wrote jointly at Monash University and Goethe University in Frankfurt – are not your usual suspects. Only two of the six stories are more typically environmental or climate narratives. Three of the six texts are written by Indigenous authors. The first of the case-study chapters examines Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, a novel published in 2005 but set in 1930s rural Victoria. The people who farm the land in this story are mostly out to exploit it for short-term profit. Despite the main character in the novel developing a sense of ‘environmental consciousness’ (77), the land ‘is not a place with a human and ecological history’ (72). In fact, as Bartha-Mitchell puts it, ‘Indigenous presence is completely annulled by the protagonist’ (72). The farmland of 1930s Australia in this novel is only brought to productive life, and potentially cared for, by white-settler colonial ingenuity. In the next chapter, as a literary counterweight to the colonialist extractivism of Everyman’s Rules, Bartha-Mitchell examines Tara June Winch’s The Yield (2019). Bartha-Mitchell concentrates in her analysis on the way language – in this case, a revitalised Wiradjuri language, which features prominently in the novel – can help to revitalise the land. Winch’s novel thus ‘points to the world-building and world-sustaining capacity of language’ (97).
The next part of Cosmological Readings shifts from a focus on the way land and the environment has been treated in the past-till-now, towards a focus on the future. Briohny Doyle’s 2016 novel, The Island Will Sink, deals with rising sea levels and sinking landmasses as well as intergenerational conflict over climate change. It parodies and critiques how expectations of climate disaster and an over-reliance on technology serve merely to paralyse agency and promote environmental violence in the here and now. But in Bartha-Mitchell’s reading, the novel also reproduces such narratives of paralysis and hopelessness (119). While it ‘contains glimpses of more holistic understandings of the environment’, it ultimately suggests that it is only via a human mastery over nature that the disastrous effects of climate crises might be averted. Bartha-Mitchell then examines Ellen van Neerven’s story, ‘Water’. In the speculative, futuristic world of coastal Australia, governments are trying to engineer an archipelagic home for Indigenous Australians. But a strange, newly discovered species of plant-like-people is holding up construction. The human protagonist of the story, Kaden, is meant to be aiding the government’s construction plans. But Kaden discovers kinship and deep connection with this plant-animal species: to destroy them would be to destroy oneself and one’s people. Kaden rebels. ‘Water’ is a story that ‘emphasises the bioethical principle to protect what cannot be completely understood’ (Bartha-Mitchell 136). In its queer ecology, it also ‘conveys the idea that what is loved will be protected’, and that it is through ‘pleasurable relationships that socio-environmental movements can become most effective’ (139).
Bartha-Mitchell’s final chapters focus on environmental justice and what the author calls ‘sovereign cosmopolitics’ (143). She concedes that the two texts examined here – Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains and Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip, both published in 2018 – are not ostensibly about the environment. But she argues they can be more broadly read as cosmological (as more than environmental), in the sense that the current ecological crisis ‘encompasses the increasing destabilisation of climate, environments and social orders. Refugee rights, land rights and sovereignty are traditionally understood as humanist’, as human rights concerns (143). Yet they need to be considered, also, as environmental concerns (143). Boochani’s largely non-fictional account of refugee imprisonment by Australian authorities on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea reveals the brutal, systemic repression of human rights enacted under the auspices of Australia’s offshore detention policy. Bartha-Mitchell focuses on Boochani’s tender and dignity-enabling connections with the natural world – with trees, beaches, animals, the stars – not only as sources of respite and sustenance, but also as agents of kindness and care in the otherwise oppressive tyranny of prison life. Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip is a story of First Nations community in rural Australia, in which humans become active and mobile in communion with the more-than-human world in order to re-animate life and justice in Country. A river becomes a central ‘figure’ in this story, not only in a literary sense (as a character in story), but also as ‘an animated lively being,’ materially and culturally (177). Bartha-Mitchell argues that the ‘acquatious characteristic of fluidity, movement and relationality also involves animals, encounters with crows, sharks and dogs’ so that it becomes clear, at least in Indigenous worlds, ‘that humans and animals are [already] interconnected through familial webs of relation, kinship, interdependency and responsibility’ (178).
Via these readings of contemporary Australian narrative prose, Bartha-Mitchell seeks to expand our ecocritical reading lens. This book introduces readers to new ecocritical stories, to a wider range of primary texts that might entice discovery of the ecological or the cosmological in places it has not been seen before. Where most ecocritical scholarship concentrates on stories set in a vulnerable future, Bartha-Mitchell’s book breaks with this temporal straight-jacketing by examining texts that – roughly arranged – examine ecological pasts, futures, and presents. To invoke Ghosh’s critique once again, that stories meant to rescue an ailing planet are not found in the mansion or manor house of literary fiction but only in the obscure, insignificant outhouses of sci-fi and fantasy, Bartha-Mitchell’s book reminds us, if we are ecocritical scholars, that we have not only been looking in the wrong outhouses: we have not been looking carefully enough in the various rooms within the mansion for ‘serious’ literary fiction that does appear to be doing the work of imagining cosmological futures, as well as pasts and presents.