Page 98 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

who have lived on this continent for thousands of years and for whom the wind has

always been a living presence. Before being sucked into lives shaped by materialism

and objectification and capitalism, our own ancestors lived tuned to the natural world. If

we now live outside of indigeneity, and even outside of deeply local land roots, how do

we acknowledge these in our writing? You might say that contemporary industrialized

culture’s fetishizing of the human to the exclusion of other forms of life perpetuates its

own ongoing fiction: wind and weather actually have more agency over us than we allow

them either in our perception of our lives or in our literature.

How do I make the natural world a living presence in a novel without sounding

sentimental, nostalgic, without gesturing towards a pastoral and nonurban past? What I

want to evoke is a here and now, where wind moves through cities as well as the

country. This here and now also pushes my characters as it pushes us, towards a future

confrontation with disaster and possible extinction. How do I counter inevitable despair

with something else?

I want to mention a few novels that I feel embody the interconnectedness of human and

nonhuman presences and give a sense of a fully animated world. First, to underline my

sense that what I’m calling for is not inherently new, I’ll point to French novelist Jean

Giono’s Colline (1929), recently republished in English as Hill (New York Review Books

Classics, 2016). In Hill, French peasants respond to their landscape as a living body and

are terrified by it; nevertheless, Giono’s metaphor-rich prose insists on the depth and

profusion of the interconnection. The omniscient narrator of American Kathryn Davis’s

novel The Thin Place (Little Brown, 2006) acknowledges the deep time of the geological

past and briefly inhabits the points of view of beaver and lichen as well as various