Today’s storytelling is often on the lookout for material in the time of the Anthropocene – the current human epoch. Material that includes both humans and non-humans on planet earth. This often involves brining “nature” into the narrative. But this word makes us think of an abstract and separate entity with preordained values and meanings attached to it. Nature becomes a secluded enclave containing aesthetic shapes that must be enjoyed from a touristic distance.
This perception grants a free licence to our species to exploit planetary resources and tap “nature”, because it is so separate from us. Some of the consequences, which might sound repetitive, are more than palpable today: global warming, untimely monsoons, delayed winters, lethal pollution, the attack of unknown viruses… the list does not seem to end.
A new narrative
What kind of stories do we want in such intense times? Simply put, stories that can be meticulous in depicting the more-than-human worlds around us. A sense of foreboding has made us believe that human discourses and cultures are only effective at reproducing structures of power, and these structures prevent us from engaging with non-human entities. This is why new modes of storytelling are necessary. We need stories that can foreground the non-human worlds, observe their agencies and their entanglements with human worlds, and show us how these worlds acquire meanings through these interactions.
Christine Marran, a professor at the University of Minnesota, has argued that storytelling should be seen as a relationship: one that foregrounds material relations as fundamental to the narrative. She calls this approach “obligate storytelling.” The word “obligate” means “by necessity” in the biological sense of the term: an obligate parasite exploits a host, an obligate speaker needs a listener, and so on.
Traditional narratives are mostly seen to restrict the semiotic potential of the non-human. These narratives often push the non-human into being a passive backdrop to the creative genius of a writer. They are stripped of their agency and of their abilities of becoming independent of human impositions.
Obligate storytelling emphasises, as Marran says, the bonds between one being and another, at the level of care and substance, of thought and matter. It rejects the old humanist writing traditions and its attendant institutionally privileged language, and produces a deep sense of relation among its diverse subjects.
Relations and networks
This type of storytelling also considers narratives at a trans-corporeal level: the indispensable relations between one body and another or, between one organ of the anatomy and another. For example, we can think about how toxins travel from one part of the body to another, gradually weakening the entire system. These events are not spectacular, but they certainly call for attention.
The body, in fact, has many stories to tell, as it also apparently exposes the political nature of our anatomy – its relations with the state, with multinational industrial corporations, with the ecologies we occupy, and with the numerous species we share our habitat with. In this line of thought, the world is nothing but a dense network of agencies – human or non-human, animate or inanimate.
Of course, stories that enable us to realise our interconnectedness with other elements catch us off guard. Reading or hearing them often creates a sort of epiphanic moment when fiction no longer remains stranger than the truth. In this moment, we can visualise how one story also leads to many other connected stories. Quite similar to the realisation that the elimination of one species can mean huge losses for other species as well.
Stories that attend to the stakes of survival and pay close attention to the improbabilities and uncertainties in our age of catastrophes are increasingly necessary. The novel, as Amitav Ghosh reminds us, pushes aside the improbable and functions by inserting the everyday as the foreground. It hardly has any room for catastrophes that impinge on landscapes and inhabitants at unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways.
Modes of storytelling which recognise the proximity of the non-human interlocutors in our lives have therefore become imperative. Additionally, and most crucially, desirable stories at this stage are those that focus on the crises of our late liberal times, when we witness the chasms between unchecked economic growth and individualism on the one side and climate change and unfair distribution of resources on the other.
This is why we need more stories that can zoom in on the “otherness” and the agency of the more-than-human worlds around us. Stories that are non-representational and emphasise lived experiences with non-human entities – contrary to the focus on human discourses and representations of cultures and ideologies. Stories that can find a way out of our current historical position to envisage a future of demographic crises and anxieties. Stories that depict a shared sense of catastrophe among species, and remind us of our limits in this epoch.
Dhrijyoti Kalita teaches English Studies at the Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He is also completing his doctoral studies in South Asian Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, US.
