Eileen Joy originally asked me to review this book in draft
for punctum. (I thought it was indispensable to both Shakespearean and
environmental studies – do consider adding it to your syllabi.) Some of what
follows reflects my original comments, but, true to the polyvocal proverb
Dionne details, different conversations ensued when I read it a second time. Thank
you for allowing me to share my thoughts.
I.
“[T]he proverbial clock is ticking” (16). If this line penned
somewhere underneath a Tokyo overpass sounds alarmist, that is because Craig Dionne intends it to be: “[a]t the time of this writing” (26), every day, the
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant leaks eighty thousand gallons of
radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. As the life-clock of the world
steadily and tragically ticks down like so many nuclear isotopes in half-life,
reading the “interpretation of cosmic decay and ecological catastrophe” (16) in
Shakespeare’s King Lear (1604-5) must
necessarily press on anthropogenic
shores: “How can we imagine doing the work of literary studies and not consider such an eco-materialist
context?” (27). Risking presentist critiques, Dionne unabashedly and uniquely calls
for enlisting the clock – the archive – of
proverbs while strolling these blasted beaches. In Asian archipelagoes or
elsewhere, he asks us to “liste[n] to the past” (25) and consider what its
telegraphic ticks tell us about shaping future worlds and commons to come in
this epoch known (debatably) as the Anthropocene. In short, he argues that
“Shakespeare … stage[s the] practice of speaking proverbs – collecting and
using adages – and showing us its therapeutic value as a form of collective
speech in times of stress” (18). The “posthuman” of his title derives from the
fact that these encapsulated maxims, acting like disembodied messengers from a
not-too-distant past, present themselves to the beleaguered human subject, who,
performing as a grammatical automaton, utters them for his or her short-term benefit.
The same animatronic subject then “speak[s] to the future” (25) by telegraphing
these wisdom receptacles across horizons of uncertainty, into time zones whose
citizens assuredly suffer from some sort of eco-catastrophic strife as well. In
one of his most memorable moments, he defines “[s]peaking proverbs” as a
hopeful exercise precisely because it does
not salvage the apocalyptic fatalism of Lear’s
final scene – again, we are to note nervously the ticks on Shakespeare’s
dissolving strand – but rather forces us to see such “proverbial reflex” as
part of the play’s “central existential questions (the meaning of familial
love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world) [all] in a new
relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits” (67;
150-1). His conclusion, and faith in, “repurposing fatalism” is admirably
catalytic, meant to inaugurate new possibilities for species’ creative acts of
self-invention: “Literary narrative should be part of our toolkit for the
sustainable future” (175; 154).
II.
Timothy Morton has recently claimed that “[g]eological eras
are nested catastrophes” (70), and, in
a strange coincidence, I had been
reading Dark Ecology: For a Logic ofFuture Coexistence (2016) while ruminating over Dionne’s book. I had already
appreciated the motley assortment of actors that “posthuman paramiology” stacks
up; I now had the opportunity to burrow deeper into trans-historical calamites
that defy past or present categorizations: Japanese
tsunami stones; Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”; Amitav Ghosh; seventeenth- and
twenty-first-century still lives; a nuclear waste storage facility in New
Mexico; various proponents of object-oriented ontology and the “critical
vitalist” new materialisms; cognitive science; evolutionary psychology; Renaissance
humanist literacies, especially Erasmus’s; and those haunting tablets of
survival – for whom, for how long – known as the commonplace
book. “Proverbs speak from a placeless time before” (63) and yet mnemonic
language nonetheless becomes emplaced, enmeshed in a given eco-material
environment, enveloped with all its encounters, “stored as vital traces of
world-being left for later us, like remnants in the fault lines and rifts of
striated rock sediments” (106). We all can think of our “nest,” our
dwelling-place, in similar ways; mine, in fact, is related to Japan, where each
week the same amount of force it took to atomically destroy Hiroshima is employed
in the mechanized removal (MTR) of the Appalachian Mountains. And on 23 June 2016
a so-called “Thousand Year Flood” devastated southern West Virginia. Almost ten
inches of rain fell in approximately half a day, killing nearly twenty-five. The
region is still reeling. I am not sure what proverbs were repeated when the
waters continued to rise, when a state of emergency was declared by Governor
Earl Ray Tomblin. I am sure they were; perhaps they repeated Lear’s Fool: “He
that has a house to put ’s head in has a good / headpiece” (3.2.27-8). I watched the footage of
fiery houses swept downriver through White Sulphur Springs, an absurdist image that
even a Fool must believe. The almost biblical pronouncement of
once-in-a-millennium fails when flash floods occur with greater frequency
(Louisiana). Reading Posthuman Lear around
the time of this posting, at least for me,
tried out Dionne’s hypothesis that “accessorizing” – the ability “to fit ourselves” – with proverbs is essential
– even ethically practical – in nested moments of climatic mess.
III.
One of the play’s most problematic lines, and one that just
so happens to be a proverb, has always haunted me: Lear’s retort to his “untender”
daughter Cordelia, “Nothing will come of nothing” (1.1.99). The king’s echoing
“nothing” is often construed as a hallmark of nihilism; it is a mnemonic mantra
we wish he (and we) would forget. The aphorism Edgar recites to his blind
father, Gloucester – “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the
worst’” (4.1.30-1) could be interpreted, then, as the antidote to Lear’s/King Lear’s acerbity: the only way is up. But this is a
troubling dichotomy, I think, for it reinforces two possibilities – up, down –
along with their moralistic valences, either salvation or condemnation. I usually critique such catechistic maneuvering
with my students, observing that one of the play’s few (heartbreaking) moments
of help – Edgar’s bracing “Up. So” (4.6.80) – is not a way to think about
redeeming the play, or of turning the down-turn of “catastrophe” (and the genre
of tragedy) into an up, but an instance in which our methods of recognizing the
world are themselves inverted. Gloucester believes, after all, that he has
fallen to his death: even existence-canceling nothingness is taken from him. If the characters stand, they teeter
on the brink; and yet they totter on: “I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.20). In
other words, when the up becomes down (and tumble, vice-versa), a way onward appears.
Dionne’s insight here is thinking that spatial-temporal advances actually
depend on their simultaneous retreats – that is, to say the strange saying from
other times and in others’ voices. Will providing someone with a pithy proverb
erase their trauma, or rebuild their floating, fiery home? No, but it may lessen loss and its lessons: it might not entirely refute
the “sad time[s] we must obey” (5.3.392), he argues, although it can ameliorate
them with feeling, by gauging “the weight of the pronouncement [in order to] move
forward in a way that preserves knowledge of the powerful loss, to remember the
past as if chiseled in stone, but in a way that protects us from our future,
life approving the common saw” (99). In my opinion, this book’s greatest
contribution is illustrating a middle space of up-down and social-ecological conjunctions,
and, furthermore, giving us its name: “a sympathy machine” – run on mottos and
emotions – that bespeaks adaptation with non/human beings as an ethical mode of
resilience. Let sympathy’s “contagion” continue to do its work (123), reader,
for it is a potentializing place to be, one definitely worth inhabiting. “Do we
really find an answer here about what defines us?” (129). Not really, and that is precisely Dionne’s point: that holding the
human in in-definition, mid-sentence, is also an onto-epistemological holding-open,
a means to re-make collectives linguistic and fleshed. Thus Edgar’s “[s]o” has
it: “so” take to the flat ontology known as the heath, also known as the world.
IV.
My parting proverbial thoughts turn to Lear’s very next line
after his proclamatory “nothing”: “Speak again” (1.1.99). While Lear might double-down
on his failing love test, his request to “[s]peak again” tests our own love for
a presumably doomed world: whether to stay (say) in it, extend our axioms and attempt
to stay afloat, offer a proverb to one who wishes to persevere. Posthuman Lear ultimately demonstrates how
words endure, and, in doing so, allows us to glimpse the world’s endurance. And
its losses – including acts of forgetting, of ignorance forced upon cultures or
inculcated over ages – in an effort to better understand why they happen at all.
Dionne’s study is itself an exercise in rhetorical resilience, a collection of
secular proverbs contra cynicism that
encompasses not only environmental experience (eco-tones under stress) but also
the academy (humanities on the edge). Reading his book evidences why reading
and writing remain important within anxious Anthropocene nests; why these
reflexive – and reactionary – skills at our disposal demand greater
inter-disciplinary and extra-periodization alliances; why we should check our
impulses to assume that everything is “rote” and confront our lingering fears
that “there is nothing left to say” (22). What is a “proverb” if not a forward doing as well as a speaking, a “put
forth” (pro-) “word” (verbum) of action? An event “on behalf
of” (pro-) an other, extensions over endings, futures over
foreclosures? We need not confine this “speak” solely to logos or the human
proverbialists’ handbooks, either; let us accessorize ourselves, the
more-than-human “us,” with adages that additionally communicate nonhuman
articulation. “Proverbial speech,” Dionne maintains, “has a positive value.”
“Thy life’s a miracle,” Edgar reminds his father after his fall, “Speak yet
again” (4.6.69). Proverbs re-define the world, even if “apocalypse sells”
(174): they did mine, “[yet] again,” and I promise they will yours.
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