| Abstract [eng] |
This paper examines the cultural imaginary of biospheric collapse in Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan’s novel The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020). Taking cues from the ecofeminist critiques of motherhood as an environmentalist ethic and Patrick O’Neill’s and Mark McGurl’s theoretical perspectives on the comic, I look at how Flanagan’s novel smudges the line between what appears to be comical and/or tragical to bring into relief the ruptures in the reciprocal relations between bodies, environment, and language as scales of the broken planetary commons. By cuing the narrative’s maternal figures to its satirical labour, I consider how the novel calls attention to its use of language, particularly metonymy, anacoluthon, and parataxis, as verbal manifestations of entropy in the age of the Anthropocene. As the satirical sting of Flanagan’s fiction punctures the human/nonhuman and nature/culture dualisms, I also attend to the ways it recalibrates material and ethical kinships, troubling the figural traffic between vulnerability and violence, care and cruelty, and life and (slow) death. The affective implications of the novel’s bringing of extinction events into conversation with social traumas, as I attempt to show, reiterate entropic satire’s tragical mirth as a form of mourning that is also an ethical provocation into thought about what passes as life in the breakdown of planetary commons. |
