Climate Fiction
and the Questions of Viability: An Exploration of Maja Lunde’s The History
of Bees
Jayakrishnan
R,
Assistant
Professor,
Department of
English,
MMNSS College
Kottiyam,
Kerala, India.
Abstract: Climate fiction, popularly known as Cli-fi, is a
category of novels that, while maintaining many of the generic characteristics
of science fiction from where it originated, experiments with new stylistic and
formative ways for effectively negotiating the representative challenges posed
by the spatio-temporal aspects of climate change. Academic scholarship that
studies climate fiction, while tracing its evolution and development, often
delve in two prominent overlapping critical lines – one that explore
expectancy, foregrounding what is expected of climate fiction from a critical
standpoint to effectively mediate the challenges of climate change and the
other that hinges on its limitations as a relatively new category, dependent on
the conventional tropes of fiction that has its roots in established generic as
well as Western humanistic tradition. This paper, by providing a brief overview
of these critical approaches attempts to explore how The History of Bees by Maja Lunde with its formative innovation
not only negates many of the common critical lines that question the viability
of climate fiction in addressing the crises of climate change but also offers
itself as a prototype demonstrative of the ways in which science and literature
can be effectively brought together without compromising the factual value of
science or the emotive capabilities of literature.
Keywords: Climate fiction, Cli-fi, Colony collapse
disorder (CCD), Maja Lunde, The History of Bees.
The rise of
climate fiction or cli-fi as a popular and academic category is inseparable
from the unfolding climate crisis of the 21st century. Though the evolution of
literary texts that deal with climate change can be traced back to The
Purchase of the North Pole (1889) by Jules Verne or the novels of J G
Ballard like The Drowned World (1962), a large repertoire of science
fiction novels, described by Jim Clarke using the label ‘proto-climate fiction’
(Trexler and Johns-Putra 186-187) often used settings of catastrophic weather
conditions as accidental fall out of scientific or technological attempts to
manipulate global climate for the better. Put differently, they were science
fiction texts that didn’t deal with the anthropogenic nature of climate change
(Goodbody and Johns-Putra 232). This is perhaps better exemplified by Robert
Macfarlane’s call in his article for The Guardian in 2005 demanding the
need of a new category of novels that would break away from the futuristic
apocalyptic science fiction tradition and address the issue of climate change
in terms of lived human experience.
A survey of scholarly
literature on climate fiction during the second and current decade of the 21st
century reveal exhortations for the departure of climate fiction from its
precursive affiliations with the conventions of science fiction and adopt forms
that result from inventive practices like blending of styles and blurring of
generic boundaries to adapt to the need of effectively negotiating climate
crises. Trexler and Johns-Putra, for instance, asserts this idea when they say
that climate change demands innovative plotlines and characterizations “that
participate in the global, networked, and controversial nature of climate
change”. They demand climate fiction to constitute the relationality of climate
change and human experience, to explore “how climate change occurs not just as
a meteorological or ecological crisis ‘out there’ but as something filtered
through our inner and outer lives” (196). Alison Sperling asserts this when she
says that “climate change compels us to reconsider the political underpinnings
of our understanding of the world, and therefore also the writing and reading
protocols used to narrate it” (13).
The function of
responsible writing expected of climate fiction is further reiterated by
Goodbody and Johns-Putra who argue that climate fiction needs new imaginaries
that could not only meet the challenges posed by climate change in terms of its
invisibility and scalar complexities but also bridge the gulf that divides the
scientific discourses of climate change and language of literature (229). Antonia
Mehnert echoes this notion when she argues that climate fiction can not only
represent scientific data in affective registers that offer insight into human
subjectivity in the conflicting contexts of climate change but can also shape
human understanding of the crises by offering “imaginaries for the unfamiliar
realm of the future” (8). Mayerson, in his empirical study of the impact of
climate fiction on readers, provides case-based evidence to support this
position. Making use of Kahneman and Tversky’s concept of ‘simulation
heuristic’, a psychological principle which argues that people’s ability to
imagine an occurrence condition their willfulness to perceive its
possibilities, he argues that climate fiction, by offering concrete images of
possible futures bring credibility to the otherwise vague data of science
(Mayerson 2018, 487).
The assertions
in favour of climate fiction’s ability to negotiate the complexities of climate
change and its utility to influence public opinion are contested. Craps and
Crownshaw, for instance, observe that climate fiction’s inclination towards
futuristic plots can distract public attention from the mundane, uneven
distribution of climate vulnerabilities (5). Shelley Streeby makes a vital
intervention in this context by pointing out how the imaginary of climate
fiction excludes indigenous communities and people of colour (4-5). Mayerson
concurs by observing that “the majority of characters in recent American
climate change fiction have been wealthy, American, white, cisgendered
heterosexual males…[who can be] more accurately described as the perpetrators
than the primary victims of the “slow violence” of climate change” (Mayerson
2017, 317). Caracciolo etal., remarks that climate fiction is generally
expected to address questions of “subjectivity, agency, personhood,
materiality, and embodiment”, but it fails very often to stand up to the
challenge, because of limiting the scope of text to merely using climate change
as thematic backdrop “while foregrounding relatively conventional characters
and situations” (8-9).
A similar
critical position questions the utility of apocalyptic tropes that are
frequently employed by writers of climate fiction. Mayerson notes that the
purported use of “post apocalyptic landscapes” to caution readers of climatic
consequences and thereby provoke ethical environmental responses can be
counterproductive as readers might simply ignore such tropes owing to decades
of exposure to apocalyptic scenarios offered by science fiction writers
(Mayerson 2017, 315). In his empirical study on the influence of climate
fiction on readers, Mayerson reinforces this idea by stating that the “disaster
frame” commonly used by climate fiction, which perpetuates the idea that
climate change “can only be addressed by loss, cost and sacrifice” can backfire
as it creates a sense of helplessness that disempower and demobilize the reader
from assuming a more responsive or proactive sociopolitical position to
confront the challenges of climate change (Mayerson 2018, 489-491). Whiteley
etal., while critiquing Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, notes that dystopian,
post apocalyptic plots that are telescopically placed in the far future can be
counterintuitive to the function of climate fiction as it offers no solutions
for “the challenges of living with the ravages of climate change” in the
present (35).
One of the most
arbitrated questions is related to the viability of fiction in representing a
phenomenon of vast temporal and spatial dimension like climate change. Tuhus-Dubrow, for instance, observes that the slow-time
human experience of climate change and its reckoning as a phenomenon that
implicates collective as well as individual way of living are not “conducive to
dramatic plot” (61). Trexler and Johns-Putra, while pointing out the
immensity of climate change’s temporality and spatiality, acknowledges that the
scientific premises of climate change itself involves a certain degree of
imprecision with respect to its extent and speed that contributes to “public
confusion, controversy, and skepticism, which is sometimes quick to construe
scientific imprecision as uncertainty and even conspiracy” (185). Goodbody and
Johns-Putra similarly speak of climate change as an unpresentable phenomenon on
account of its invisibility. Quoting Sheila Jasanoff, they observe that the
science of climate change, which depend on “techniques of aggregation and
deletion, calculation and comparison…exhaust the capacities of even the most
meticulously recorded communal memories”. This situates the writer of climate
fiction within what Timothy Clark calls the “Anthropocene disorder, a…demand to
think of human life at much broader scales of space and time” (234-235).
There are other
propositions that question the propriety of climate fiction in the context of
climate change. Craps and Crownshaw reveal a paradoxical position in climate
fiction’s seeming function of serving an ecological cause by situating the
origin of its parent form, the novel, within capitalism. Quoting Stephanie Le Menager,
they point out how “the novel has always been enabled by economic and
industrial systems of modernity and their resources” and climate fiction
therefore is the “materialization of the very environmental histories it
represents” (2). Sperling expresses similar misgivings about the
appropriateness of novel in the addressing questions of climate crises as she
apperceives it as a form that was “complicit…in processes that lead to climate
crises” (17).
An allowance for
these critical positions conceded, it shall be meaningful to perform an
analysis of how Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees (2015) mediates
questions pertaining to the efficacy of climate fiction in the context of
climate change. The first of the four novels, that constitute her climate
quartet, the others being The End of the Ocean (2017), The Last Wild
Horses (2019) and The Dream of a Tree (2022), (the years in
parenthesis correspond to the publication date of original titles in
Norwegian), the novel narrates three different stories, located in three
spatio-temporal settings, the story of Tao taking place in 2098, Sichuan,
China, the story William taking place in 1851, Hertfordshire, England and the
story of George, taking place in 2007, Ohio, USA. While these stories may seem
apparently disconnected from each other, they are connected by an invisible
thread that constitutes the history of apiculture, the mass disappearance of
bees due to what is termed as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (The History of
Bees75, 232) and the hope of their eventual return.
Lunde’s novel, right
from the outset, seemingly negates questions regarding the efficacy of novel to
address the vast temporal and spatial dimension of climate change by dividing
the plot into three spatio-temporal settings that cover a history (futuristic
projection included) of 248 years and spaces of England, USA, China and briefly
Australia. Tuhus-Dubrow’s skepticism that the slow-time human experience of
climate change and its reckoning as a phenomenon that implicates collective as
well as individual way of living are not “conducive to dramatic plot” finds
arbitration as Lunde, from the story of William in 1851, who overcomes a state
of depression and turns to apiculture having found inspiration from François
Huber’s New Observations on the Natural History of Bees (61) through the
story of George, a beekeeper with a respectable number of 324 hives (327), to
the story a Tao, who works as a hand pollinator in a world without bees (1),
traces a slow-time history of how bees, that were natural to world in the past,
are apparently tamed by humanity in the present, and owing to the excessive use
of pesticides dwindles in number, that too in a way inconspicuous to the human
eye, until the “mysterious colony collapses” as noted by George begins in the
southern states of USA like Florida and California, eventually culminating in
2045, when “there were no bees left on the planet” (291).
The observation
made by Craps and Crownshaw that climate fiction’s inclination towards
futuristic plots can distract public attention from the mundane, uneven
distribution of climate vulnerabilities and Shelley Streeby’s incrimination
that climate fiction excludes indigenous communities and people of colour are
effectively negotiated by Lunde as the brunt of the vulnerability question are
born by the people of Asia, represented by Tao, Kuan and their six year old boy
Wei Wen, who dies of the sting of a bee that makes reappearance after five
decades of absence. The consequences of Western agricultural practices that
rely on the heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides are faced by the
people of China as the declining number of bees pushes their existence to the
margins of survival. Lunde uses several instances to affectively register the
vulnerability enforced upon the Chinese, including the hunger of Wei Wen, whose
dietary needs are compromised (19-20), Tao and Kuan sacrificing their share of
plums for their child (68), the modest menu of the restaurant visited by Tao in
Beijing which serves only fried rice, the condition of the impoverished father
and son who runs it (180), the three teenagers who are helplessly pushed onto
the verge of cannibalism owing to their deprivation, yet are not completely
driven of their capacity for understanding and compassion (221-223) and more
importantly the general decay that has affected the civilization, marked by
decrepitude, depopulation and desertification. A notable instance is the way
Tao describes Beijing as a city that “had grown and developed to a certain
point, then…had come to a halt, and was now deteriorating. Like an old person
approaching death. More and more alone, more and more quiet, at a pace that
slowed with every passing day” (180).
It is
significant to note that descriptive words like ‘dry’, ‘barren’ (172),
‘deserted’ (182, 220, 224) etc. which makes several appearances in Tao’s story
are contrasted with descriptions of lush greenery and fruitfulness in both
William’s and George’s narratives. William, for instance, describes “The leaves
were an intense play of colors, clear yellow, warm brown, blood red…Nature was
brimming with fruit, trees laden with apples, juicy plums, dripping sugary
pears” (26) and George recalls “Blueberry bushes in bloom are beautiful
things…every time Maine greeted me with its white and pink knolls in May, I
just had to stop and look. It was so beautiful that books should be written
about it”. George’s further remark that “without bees, the flowers were just
flowers. Not blueberries, not bread and butter” (162) powerfully captures the
fact that what is lost for the future world of Tao is attributed to the
extinction of bees, due to the recklessness of the Western world. Lunde subtly
smuggles several hints that speaks of the drivers of global capitalism at work
in both George’s and Tao’s story, namely the appearance of the word ‘plastic’
(1, 172, 188, 218, 244), ‘helicopter’ (81), “a huge German SUV” (90), “the
cheap trashy electronics” (111), “a green pick up and a black SUV”, “a huge
Chevrolet” (233) etc., all meant to draw attention to the various vectors that
lead the world ecology to its progressive collapse.
Mayerson’s
skeptical inference that climate fiction’s frequent dependency on “postapocalyptic
landscapes” to caution readers of climatic consequences would be
counterproductive as the “disaster frame” would create a sense of helplessness
that disempower and demobilize the reader does not hold for Lunde’s novel as
the two-third of its narrative dwells in a more or less realistic past and
present compared to the one third of the story set in the future. As for Tao’s story
set in 2098, it is worth noting that Lunde discards the drama of apocalyptic
trope in favour of a matter-of-fact narration that relies mostly on the
imagined consequences of much anticipated and scientifically valid anxiety
surrounding Colony Collapse Disorder and the extinction of bees. The only
episode that fits the apocalyptic canvas perhaps is the one that deals with
Tao’s visit to Beijing to unravel the mystery of her son Wei Wen. But there
too, it is evident that Lunde remains focused on the consequentiality of a
world without pollination as images of desolation, deprivation and decay that
largely loom over the city are related to systemic failure of a political
economic framework built upon agriculture. For instance, Tao while recalling
her past makes a distinction between times before and after the collapse. The
world before the collapse is presented through a contemporary lens when
“technology had made everything available. Availability was the mantra of that
period” in stark contrast to the time after the collapse when “the democracies
fell…the world war…followed, when food became a commodity bestowed upon only a
select few” (22).
Finally,
Sperling’s misgivings about novel as a form that was “complicit…in processes
that lead to climate crises” and the consideration of Craps and Crownshaw’s
proposition that novel as a literary form originated from within capitalist
modes of production can also be negated as Lunde’s novel exhibits
characteristics of posthumanism by moving beyond questions of human exceptionalism
and attributing centrality or agency to the bees. Two critical posthumanist
ideas foregrounded by Caracciolo et.al. in their posthumanist survey of climate
fiction might be of help to clarify this position. On one hand they quote
Serenella Iovino’s proposal “to move “past the human,”…“not so much that of
debunking the human altogether, but rather that of discarding the dogma of
human exceptionalism”” and on the other hand Serpil Oppermann’s assertion of
the need for a critical standpoint that consider “the nonhuman (biotic and
abiotic) as already part of the human in the world’s becoming” (10). The
History of Bees is performative of these theoretical positions as bees
occupy a central position around which the lives of William, George, Tao and others
unfold and develop. George realises this dependency multiple times in the
novel, for instance he says that “agriculture”, the source of everyone’s
sustenance “didn’t have a chance without bees” (90) and later “without bees,
the flowers were just flowers” (162). A victim of the collapse, Tao recognizes
the agency of the bees better as she says “without bees thousands of acres of
cultivated fields suddenly lay fallow. Flowering fields without berries, trees
without fruit” (274). Towards the end, she reckons the humility of the human
subjective position within the nexus of inter-species relationship further when
she observes that “bees cannot be tamed. They can only be tended, receive our
care” (334).
To conclude, The
History of Bees is an epistemic exploration of humanity’s relationship with
bees, beginning with their anatomical curiosity in the insect, followed by
discovery of its economic value, attempt to domesticate them and eventually
driving them to the verge of extinction. Maja Lunde, blending facts and
fiction, effectively traces this genealogy using selective markers, beginning
with Jan Swammerdam, the Dutch biologist and microscopist, whose curious
exploration into the anatomy of the insect in his work Biblia Naturae
forms William’s entry as a young naturalist into the world of bees, followed by
the Swiss entomologist François Huber’s New Observations on the Natural
History of Bees, which inspires William with the idea that bees can be
domesticated (61-64), William’s pursuit at designing his own unique model of
hive and his correspondence with the Polish vicar and beekeeper Johnann
Dzierzon, his short-lived triumph of developing Savage’s Standard Hive (266)
and further disillusionment and death, Charlotte’s, his daughter, journey to
USA and becoming the great grandmother of George, thereby handing over the
beekeeping tradition, George’s confrontation with the Colony Collapse Disorder
and ultimately his son Thomas Savage’s fictitious book “The History of Bees”
published in 2037, (327)which inspires Tao, both to come in terms with her
son’s death as well as act as a brave mother, who embraces her son’s death as a
signifier of the return of bees, which gives humanity the hope of survival.
Maja Lunde, casting behind much of the criticism faced by earlier works of
climate fiction, presents The History of Bees as a prototype that offers
new ways of confronting the crises by finding a balance between the facts of
science and the affective possibilities of representing it in fiction.
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