(top of the hourglass)
I am examining the concept of place as it functions in fictional worlds, in particular, fictional worlds that are unsettled by earthquakes. While this focus is motivated by my own physical and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest, this project bridges a variety of disciplines from the humanities to the physical and social sciences and has the potential to be significant to discourses both inside and outside academia. The literary component of this project considers questions such as: what is the purpose of literature? how is literature informed by its context? and how does fiction attempt to alter the lives and worlds of its readers? I am considering specific pieces of literature as actors within the complex networks of disasters that entangle earth systems, human infrastructures, governmental decisions, and individuals in dialogues of crisis and response.The project speaks to the networks involved with creating art and the nebulous border between ‘reality’ and fiction. To this end, my framing question is: What power does literature have to act upon cultures unsettled by risk of disaster?
There are two key theories under which my project operates. The first is Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin 1984) which considers fiction as a piece of human technology akin to a container. Le Guin employs the carrier bag metaphor to fiction and argues that fiction has the power to hold “things in a particular, powerful relation to one other and to us.” Le Guin’s theory establishes the unique cultural function of stories and demands that fictions be treated as conveyors, creators, and containers of evaluative and emotional knowledge. She foregrounds the importance of form, such as narrative structures, plot devices, and metaphors, as aspects of art that contain just as much meaning as the contents within that form. Secondly, in examining the role of place in fiction, transportation theory as developed by Green & Brock and Bussell & Bilandzic describes fictional worlds as defined places unto themselves, distinct from the worlds that readers inhabit. As the name of the theory suggests, reading itself becomes a practice in transportation from the physical world of the reader to the imagined world of the text, created through mental models in the reader’s psyche. This illusion is powerful and allows for worlds to exist and be believed that break the rules of the ‘real’ world (Leitch). This has the potential to expand the possibilities of the ‘real’ world by allowing people to simultaneously exist within and understand the specific rules of many different worlds.
As mentioned previously, this project bridges many different disciplines and has the potential to contribute to each. Ecocriticism is a strain of literary criticism that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s in response to classic environmentalism. To some extent, ecocriticism still functions under the frameworks of classic environmentalism which are largely apocalyptic, fearful, and romantic (Buell 2001) and don’t often contend with ‘natural’ disasters. The disasters represented in ecocriticism are largely anthropogenic, such as climate change and chemical contamination, and ‘natural’ disasters are under-represented. In this way, my endeavor to connect earthquake literature to environmental studies broadly also attempts to broaden and critically examine the scope of ecocriticism. My project also makes a foray into the world of science fiction and its criticism. Science fiction often utilizes narrative to create imagined futures (often known as speculative fiction), but the very label itself implicates a relationship between science and fiction. This relationship varies widely depending on the specific works and their intentions. Because earthquake discourse are largely scientific (geology, physics, engineering, public health), the specific relationship between science and fiction in science fiction is an important concept in my project. These are two of the disciplines in which my project is situated.
(middle of the hourglass)
In order to answer a piece of my framing question, I am situating my research in earthquake fictions of the Pacific Northwest and Japan. While each of these places have very specific and variant earthquake cultures, they share an important physical connection: the Pacific Ocean. Japan and the West Coast are on either side of the Pacific Plate, each situated at active subduction zones where some of the largest earthquake on earth originate. In fact, the history of the Cascadia Subduction Zone has only been able to be known to contemporary scientists because of cultural and scientific data from Japan (Atwater et al, 2015). As Japanese infrastructure and disaster preparedness exceeds that of the Pacific Northwest due to the immediacy of recent seismic events (1923, 1995, 2011), the Pacific Northwest may be able to engage with the Japanese earthquake culture on many different levels in order to prepare for the future Cascadia events. Because these two places face similar seismic risks due to their geologic location, because their human histories have created such radically different earthquake cultures, and because aspects of earthquake culture seem to flow between them (scientific knowledge, tsunami waves, non-seismic disasters), I have chosen to examine the literature of each under the frameworks outlined above. To this end, my research question: How and why does Japanese and American literature render earthquakes and earthquake cultures?
(methods)
My chief method of analysis is a close reading (New Criticism) of 4-6 texts and a content analysis of author statements. In order to find texts that represented earthquakes, I utilized search engines and lists such as this one compiled by the LA Times. From a wide array of choices, I decided to pursue contemporary fiction representing earthquakes and earthquake-prone regions that are scientifically and historically accurate. I have chosen to examine a literary component to real seismic events that either have already happened or are predicted to occur in the future. My analysis of these contemporary and semi-realist pieces has the benefit of historical context to construct earthquake cultures, of accessible scientific and popular coverage of the same events, and of living authors to speak with authority towards the specific motivations and circumstances that lead to the production of the works. By “literary analysis,” I mean the examination of the function of specific components of the texts such as narrative structure, genre conventions, metaphors and other figurative language, tropes, characterization, and etymology. I examine how the earthquake events themselves are represented through these textual devices and how the characters within the stories respond or reckon with the events. The other component of my textual analysis is to collect statements and interviews from the authors to create context for why and how each work was created in response to seismic events. I will compare author statements to the theories guiding this study. The methodology of collecting author statements is inspired by Satterfield and Slovac’s study What’s Nature Worth?: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values.
(data)
[table]
Text, Author, Date, Nation of Origin, Event
after the quake, Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin), 2002, Japan, 1995 Kobe Earthquake
after the quake, Adapted for the stage from Haruki Murakami’s stories by Frank Galati, 2005, United States, 1995 Kobe Earthquake
A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki, 2013, Canada (British Columbia), 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami
After the Big One, Adam Rothstein, 2016, United States, Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake and Tsunami (Predicted)
[/table]
(other texts that may be included for context and supporting content: March Was Made of Yarn (2012), I’m With the Bears (2011), Tokyo Magnitude 8.0)
(results)
after the quake by Haruki Murakami is a collection of five short stories published in 2000 in response to the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The earthquake itself is peripheral to the stories, only appearing on the television and through indirect reference, but it simultaneously establishes the particular tension of each piece. Marukami’s style is incredibly self-reflexive and aware that the act of writing fiction is not real life. In an interview with The Paris Review, he admits “I don’t want to persuade the reader that it’s a real thing; I want to show it as it is. In a sense, I’m telling those readers that it’s just a story—it’s fake. But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real. It’s not easy to explain” (Murakami in Wray 2004). There are components of this fictional self-awareness in each of these stories such as the narrative style of “Honey Pie” where the figure of the writer is a character, the magical realism and comical elements of “Superfrog Saves Tokyo” which draws attention to the profound importance of believing the unbelievable and the amazing passage of “All God’s Children Can Dance” excerpted here which connects the artistic movements of dancing with the unsettling truths of instability in the experience of earthquakes:
And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumblings of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounts of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth (Marukami 2000, 79).
What Murakami achieves by drawing attention to fakeness of fiction is to make a statement to the power of that form to make salient the stories and lives of post-1995 Japan. He is motivated by his own drive to correct a personal abstraction from Japan that he felt after his self-sanctioned exile in the early 1990s in the wake of fame. Yet, this intention to use writing, fiction, and craft for this end also may serve the same end for his readers. Since, he has been vocal about the power of art to grieve, process, and reckon with disaster in different ways (see his speech “Speaking as an Unrealistic Dreamer” delivered in July 2011 after triple disaster of March 11.) Murakami’s art and philosophy argues that writing fiction has the power to make disasters real, salient, and meaningful in ways that news reports cannot, even if that writing makes the disasters themselves comic, magical, unrealistic, or subtle.
Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of Marukami’s after the quake in the arena of American theatre highly emphasizes the contours of Murakami’s narrative structure. In fact, the characters within the stage production take turn with the character of the narrator to interject narrations into the performance. Even further, the figure of the writer in “Honey Pie” is embedded into this structure as the other stories in the collection are performed as if they are being written or told by the writer character. This tactic can be visualized in this scene. The characters of the stories are also their audience and creator. Besides greatly emphasizing the process through which stories are told and received, this model is fundamentally unsettling, confusing, chaotic, even difficult to follow. To draw upon Le Guin’s theory on the importance of form, the play is a series of interior containers or narrative each spilling into one another and into the audience. Importantly, the most interior narrative embedded within the layers of other narratives is that of “Superfrog Saves Tokyo” and within that, the myth of the earthquake-causing malicious Worm. By placing the actual event of an earthquake (though notably this earthquake is a prospective, anticipated event as opposed to the Kobe event to which the stories respond) at the very center of the narrative structure, Galati as the playwright reminds us that despite the details of love, sex, ambition, and the structures of fiction, the unsettling and fear-invoking event of an earthquake remains at the heart of the art.
While I am considering after the quake as my central artifact of Japanese contemporary earthquake culture, I am also considering the collection of stories March Was Made of Yarn as an important component. March Was Made of Yarn is an artistic response to the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown) of March 2011 that was sold as a philanthropic effort to raise money for disaster relief. In this way, the art of fiction acts as a commodity which can actually be a source of profit generated for the social and physical systems harmed by natural disasters.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is an artifact of the earthquake culture in the Pacific Northwest per its nation of origin, but actually contends with the earthquake culture of Japan and the connection between the two coasts. The novel beholds the discovery of a diary from Japan that may have floated over from the tsunami by a woman in British Columbia. Like Marukami’s stories, Ruth Ozeki’s narrative structure is a marked statement towards the relationship between ‘reality’ and fiction. Not only does she put herself into the novel as the character who discovers the diary (complete with husband, cat, and home in British Columbia), but the voice of the diary is fully aware of the power and limitations of writing. The power is magic: being able to reach through time and space and make a human connection. The limitation: the fear that the reader will never be found and the connection will never be realized. But further, Ozeki’s novel reinforces transportation theory and Marukami’s philosophy in its assertion that fiction has the power to transport, make real, and cause readers and writers alike to contend with the unsettled world in an emotional and sympathetic way. Ozeki grapples with the question of how, as a fiction writer, she should respond to a catastrophe such as Fukushima, even as it was still unfolding. She claims that she writes to understand the things of which she is fearful and uncertain, but without a political agenda. Both her fictional style and her philosophy reinforce and bolster the theoretical frameworks of transportation by blurring the boundaries between ‘reality’ and fiction in order to foreground the very real potential of fiction to create sympathy. Her work also emphasizes the global scope of this potential as she emphasizes the shared border of the Pacific Ocean which is both a force of destruction (tsunami) and a conduit for connection. Not only does Ozeki blur the containers of fiction and ‘reality’ but she also blurs the distinctions between different earthquake cultures within my study.
While Ozeki and Murakami each write to reckon with disasters that have already happened (and continue to be felt), Adam Rothstein’s piece After the Big One is actually written before “The Big One” as a series depicting the anticipated fallout of the Cascadia event on Portland, Oregon. Published on Vice’s science platform Motherboard, After the Big One is a 5-part series outlining in great detail the fate of the city of Portland after the predicted earthquake hits. Rothstein describes the piece as “speculative fiction” engaging with a possible (likely) future, but takes great care to represent the host of statistics and scientific data-points in a narrative to translate the earthquake culture of the government officials and scientists for mainstream audiences:
I will seek to translate the host of official stories from mathematical possibility into narrative, by using speculative fiction. This is fiction because it has not happened. And it is speculative, because I am collapsing the mathematical probabilities in the official reports, to say something approaching definitive. This is, clearly, a narrow path to walk. This story must re-mold statistics and possibilities into speculative building blocks, to pave a road forward for us, towards a future that will ultimately, one way or the other, be very real. (Rothstein 2016)
Rothstein is very aware of his chosen medium of fiction and of the hope he bestows in the instrumental possibilities of this medium. He uses fiction to “escape” (Rothstein 2016) the nightmares of disasters by in fact replicating, predicting, and experiencing that nightmare first hand, close to home. The status of this piece as fiction invites a collaboration between scientific fact (as truthful as they can be) and the fundamental falseness of fiction to bring the future into the present. He relies on vivid, factual descriptions of the fate of structures, of mountains, of neighborhoods, of waterways that are only fictional because of the tenses of the verbs which create the illusion that it is currently happening or have already happened.
Rothstein’s piece is inherently prospective while Murakami, Galati, and Ozeki each engage retrospectively with the event of seismic disaster (although Murakami’s stories contain an important aspect of prospective fear and perhaps recognize the cyclical, repetitive circumstances of earthquakes). This is certainly related to the place-based histories of each work: the lack of recent seismic history in the Pacific Northwest, the significance of disasters in the 20th and 21st century of Japan from 1923 and World War II onward to the earthquake disasters of the last twenty years. Each author admits that the stories channel the energy of their grief upon hearing the news of the events that inspired each piece: Rothstein’s fear, Ozeki and Murakami’s mourning. In this way, the social wounds, the geological histories of each place, and the distance from the event both in space and time impact the intent and the stylistic form of each work.
On the other hand, the authors’ philosophies indicate that their chosen form of writing fiction and the specific choices they make within that form has a purpose beyond the text. Rothstein’s writes to make salient the great suffering and uncertainty that lies ahead for Portland. Ozeki writes to meditate on the unfolding of 3/11 disaster with sympathy and spiritual wisdom and to contend with the various containers which separate us: fiction, continent, diary, lunchbox, body. Murakami writes to give authenticity and respect to his nation of Japan in the wake of disaster and to take up artistic responsibility in response to contemporary social issues. In their own styles and in responses to the needs of the earthquake culture of each, these artists all write with social intentions and theoretical motives. Their theories are consistent with the theories that frame this study, making this situated research project ripe material for probing the power and function of literature, art, and fiction within the field of environmental studies.
(bottom of the hourglass)
This project considers the hybridity of a piece of fiction as an object and an actor enmeshed in the networks of disaster and of art. In this way, the results of this study are relevant both to disaster studies and to artistic/literary studies. Regarding disaster studies, these fictions reveal an important place of stories for disaster communication that expands upon the sensational and “banal” (Murakami in Lewis 2013) news coverage common to such events. As demonstrated by both Marukami and Rothstein, the narrative form can make disasters far in temporal and geographic space seem present, significant, and salient. This study finds that literature has an power to both facilitate and channel grief on the individual level of the author and on cultural or national levels. Marukami and Ozeki demonstrate this. Rothstein demonstrates the power of literature to potentially incite some change within the readership, akin to changing the earthquake culture of a place like Portland. Rothstein’s purpose is to inspire preparation and instill the seriousness of the event forthcoming, not to incite fear or panic. This purpose is evident in his measured, scientific, and calm tone. Marukami’s purpose is to incorporate the cultures of disaster from Japan into his writing as a claim of artistic responsibility, but not necessarily to create a worldwide feeling of sympathy for the victims of the 1995 disasters. By considering disaster literature in conversation with scientific discourses as Rothstein does explicitly, this study demonstrates how fiction can inspire scientific engagement that accounts for social and emotional aspects. This has the potential to assist in scientific communication and application which is necessary for effective disaster relief, response, and preparation.
Artistically, this study demonstrates the permeable borders that attempt to separate the category of art from the categories of science, nature, and other big words reminiscent of classic environmentalism. By considering disaster literature within the scope of ecocriticism, this growing field must contend with other kinds of disasters that are not in an imagined future, but are among our cultures in very place-based and emotional ways. While this paper argues that natural disasters complicate the classic environmentalist viewpoints of environmental literature, the lessons learned about the relationship between prospective and responsive viewpoints as important indications of cyclical risk perception, author intention as application of theory, the unsettling of place as a motive for and result of writing fiction, global connection demonstrated by Ozeki’s and Murakami’s citizenry and the flow of knowledge regarding Cascadia may serve to inspire, inform, and bolster both literary and scientific campaigns regarding other types of catastrophes or fears. Importantly, this paper conceives of literature as an actor in a complex network of reader and writers in an unsettled seismic world. This literature is both a product of that unsettled world and produces it.
References
Ozeki, Ruth. 2013. A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel. Penguin Books.