© FRAME NO. 29.2 NOVEMBER 2016 | 71 – 90
Learning to Be
a Species in the
Anthropocene:
On Annie Proulx’s
Barkskins
BEN DE BRUYN
ABSTRACT
This paper examines how
contemporary literary fiction
responds to the climate crisis and
the attendant call for a seemingly
universalist “species view” of
human beings. What does it mean
to think of the human as a species,
how can we find traces of species
being in literature, and how do
they interact with other dimensions
of human lives? To address these
questions, the paper confronts
recent accounts of historical
context, animal characters,
and capitalist time with Annie
Proulx’s Barkskins (2016). As this
confrontation shows, Proulx’s novel
teaches its readers to be a species—
without ignoring differences of race,
class, and gender.
72
BEN DE BRUYN
Although thinkers continue to worry over the homogenising implications
of appeals to “the human,” and with good reason, several commentators
have argued that we need such a broad category if we are to address the
destructive impact of our species on the planet and its other inhabitants.
If we take the long view, processes like deforestation, global warming,
and species extinction are caused by all of us and impact all of us,
however unequally distributed the guilt and subsequent suffering, and
one of the questions we have to address is therefore simple, Dipesh
Chakrabarty has argued: “[w]ho is the we?” (“Climate of History” 220).
One strategy to tackle that question, he adds in an influential essay that
I will return to, is to learn to think of ourselves as a species, a collective
being with a geological force. This is a productive move, for literary
studies too, as Kate Marshall and Jesse Oak Taylor have shown. But
it is not uncontroversial, Chakrabarty concedes, and not just because
“the biological-sounding talk of species” brings to mind “dangerous
historical examples” (“Climate and Capital” 214). Ato Quayson has
asserted, for example, that this broad conception of the human ignores
“the complicating minutiae of lived experience” (367). You only have
to juxtapose the effects of climate change in southern Sudan with
those in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he notes, to see that
“[m]an-as-geophysical force … is the product of specific political,
social, cultural, and economic realities [that can be] so different as to
defeat the purpose of seeing them as similar” (369). Even or especially
in the face of climate change, we should not forget that humanity is not
one. Yet the “charge of depoliticization” in Bruce Robbins’s phrase (8),
does not make climate change go away. Nor should we forget that the
“slow violence” of its effects poses urgent threats to “poor communities”
especially, as Rob Nixon has demonstrated (16).
Both the universalising gesture and its socio-political critique have
important precursors. In Mark Greif’s account, intellectuals and writers
from the 1930s until the 1970s experienced a sequence of global
threats that included totalitarianism and capitalist conformism, and
they addressed these challenges to the rights of man by advocating a
new “humanism” or “[r]e-enlightenment” and inventing a new rationale
for human protection (23), believing that “[m]an must carry his warrant
within himself, like his heart or lungs” (12). Their efforts led to the
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 73
emergence of “crisis of man discourse,” a particular form of discourse
in which the direction of history, the impact of technology, the role of
classic literature, and the nature of “man” were tirelessly discussed.
In the realm of literature, this led to the “nove[l] of man” (122), a
particular type of work that often featured the word “man” in the title,
as in The Old Man and the Sea or Invisible Man (or, more relevant here,
Man in the Holocene). In such works, writers like Ernest Hemingway
and Ralph Ellison pitted these abstract questions about the human
condition against lived reality and thereby anticipated subsequent
critiques of this unmarked, universalising category, which passed over
race, class, and gender in trying to build a common cause. There are
strong continuities between “crisis of man” thinking and climate change
discourse, Greif’s conclusion notes, referring to Chakrabarty’s recent
invocations of the human. These continuities are particularly clear
in Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015). In his
short book on the new global crisis, Scranton explicitly asks “what
does it mean to be human?” (20) and professes his faith in “a human
community existing beyond any parochial identity, local time, or single
place” (24). He argues for “a new Enlightenment” (89) in which the
classics of cultural “memory” (95) figure prominently, and feels that
climate change forces us to embrace the stoic lesson that we have “to
learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization” (21). Because
“[t]he problem,” he notes, returning to the first person plural, “is that
the problem is us” (68). Bearing in mind Greif’s analysis, one might
also establish a lineage between earlier “novels of man” and a book like
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006): just consider the fact that the
protagonist responds to the question “are you a doctor?” with “I’m not
anything” (55), and tells his son that they are the “good guys” because
they “carry the fire,” yet another elusive foundation for human protection,
“inside” themselves (234). These continuities do not mean that the
components of “crisis of man” discourse have remained unchanged:
as Greif observes, the old problem of man has mutated into debates on
posthumanism, for instance (326). So one question for literary critics
now, seeing that earlier novels helped to rethink the previous discourse
of man, is how contemporary fiction addresses the new global crisis and
the new universalist conception of man as a species.
74
BEN DE BRUYN
This paper tackles that problem in two ways. On a theoretical level, I
return to Chakrabarty’s writings on climate change as well as to recent
publications on the historical novel, animal metaphors, and capitalist
time to arrive at a better understanding of human species being in
early twenty-first-century fiction. What does it mean to think of the
human as a species, how can we find traces of species being in literary
works, and how do they interact with other dimensions of human lives
and communities? Making things more concrete, my answers draw
on Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), a recent novel about the “taking
down of the world’s forests,” as the cover puts it. Spanning more than
three hundred years and seven hundred pages, there are three layers
to this epic story. First, Proulx’s novel follows a large cast of characters
drawn from two families, the rich Dukes and the poor Sels, who play
various roles in the timber industry, especially in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries along what is now the border between US
and Canada—a regional focus which implies that Barkskins fits into
Proulx’s larger project of what Alex Hunt calls “critical regionalism”
(2). Second, by charting the rise and fall of the Duke timber empire,
Barkskins illustrates the fact that globalisation is not only “that in which
expansion contracts and contraction enriches, it is also that in which
enrichment haunts” (“Globalit” 162), as Ian Baucom observes, for the
activities of the Duke company expand horizons (towards China, Brazil,
New Zealand) while concentrating wealth in certain zones (Amsterdam,
Boston, Chicago) and prompting haunting returns of cultural difference
(via the Mi’kmaw heritage of the Sel family especially). Proulx’s novel
not only highlights characters and capital, but also climate—as a dog
named after Hans Carl von Carlowitz already suggests (459). From the
start, when René Sel helps to cut the forests of New France, the novel
underscores the destructive impact of human logging: “[a]s he cut, …
the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals
[and] trees to flesh … shivered as each tree fell and one by one the
web strands snapped” (12). And the knowledge that everyone tampers
with this web, even native people who are forced to work in the lumber
camps, leads another character to see humans in a different light: “I
believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I
am sorry that I am one of them” (658). Environmental destruction is a
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 75
sign of power, but also of finitude: in the book’s penultimate page, the
sight of melting glaciers offers a glimpse of “human extinction” (712).
Addressing this crisis is “terribly important to all of us humans” (706),
another character concludes, again adopting the broad view alluded to
by Chakrabarty. Although it is not a typical cli-fi novel along the lines
studied by Adam Trexler, Barkskins is hence a good starting point if
we want to examine the conjoined histories of capital and climate and
the figure of the human as a species. Moving from eighteenth-century
literature and the start of the Anthropocene to twenty-first-century
fiction in the age of Amazon, my analysis of Proulx’s species thinking
does not focus on elegy and extinction, like Taylor’s and Marshall’s,
but on context, character, and time. These three elements of Barkskins
enable us to recalibrate our view of the novel and the human, and teach
us, not just to die as a civilisation, but to be a species.
Humans in an Extrahistorical Context
To understand human species being and its literary manifestations,
we first need to return to Chakrabarty’s influential series of papers on
climate change discourse and to consider Ian Baucom’s response in
a consecutive string of papers that adapts these insights for literary
studies. The first set of papers, especially “The Climate of History,” is
well-known, but it is worth revisiting the composite argument of these
publications before turning to Baucom. For all of these ideas shed light on
Proulx’s Barkskins, and its portrayal of the human in the Anthropocene.
Chakrabarty’s argument consists of four elements. The starting
point is that man-made climate change poses significant epistemological
challenges, by collapsing the distinction between slow natural history
(the purview of the hard sciences) and fast human history (the domain of
the humanities and the social sciences), and by revealing the difference
between manageable risks (as understood by policy thinkers) and
unpredictable uncertainties (as highlighted by climate scientists). An
interdisciplinary response to these issues, however successful, will not
escape additional moral questions, second, for climate change confronts
us with the uncomfortable truth that the freedoms of modernity, formerly
considered to be undisputed goods, were purchased at the price of
76
BEN DE BRUYN
turning to destructive fossil fuels. This also means that, turning to the
present, the global poor’s legitimate calls for improved living standards
may yield the undesirable result of a larger carbon footprint and a higher
average global temperature. A classic double bind, social justice comes
at a considerable environmental price. Third, climate change calls for
ontological revision. For our shared predicament as inhabitants of the
planet shows, according to Chakrabarty, that a postcolonial analysis of
capitalism and its Western roots should be complemented by a form of
“[s]pecies thinking” that unites human beings, “a universal that arises
from a shared sense of a catastrophe” (“Climate of History” 213, 222).
Without invalidating earlier approaches, we now need to consider “three
images of the human”:
The universalist-Enlightenment view of the human as potentially
the same everywhere, the subject with capacity to bear and
exercise rights; the postcolonial-postmodern view of the human
as … endowed everywhere with … differences of class, sexuality,
gender, history, and so on … And [finally] the figure of the human
… as a geological force on the planet, … a species, a collectivity
whose commitment to fossil-fuel based … civilization is now a
threat to that civilization itself. (“Postcolonial” 1-2)
In making sense of our present condition, we should consider human
beings as citizens bearing shared rights, as subjects characterised
by individual differences but also as one planet-wide force of natural
destruction. Learning to see ourselves in the latter light may help
to rethink our destructive ways, by invalidating pernicious forms
of anthropocentrism and by reconnecting us to the other animals
trying to make ever-smaller homes on our increasingly humanised
planet. But Chakrabarty concludes on a pessimistic note by returning
to the initial epistemological challenge, and underlining that the
combined activity of the human species and the resulting mixtures
of human and natural history can be explained, perhaps, but not
understood on an individual human level. In his view, “[t]here
c[an] be no phenomenology of us as a species” (“Climate of History”
220), and even the existence of “art and fiction” does not change
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 77
the fact that “we cannot ever experience ourselves as a geophysical
force” (“Postcolonial” 12). In the end, our conceptual tools are
inadequate to the task of addressing these epistemological, moral, and
ontological challenges.
Sharing Chakrabarty’s postcolonial background, Ian Baucom has
adapted these insights for literary studies, and his adaptation can be
summarised by returning to the different parts of the argument. On an
epistemological level, Baucom reiterates the observations that human
and natural history can no longer be disentangled, and that humanities
scholars should therefore rethink their methods in an interdisciplinary
fashion. Shifting the focus slightly on the moral and ontological levels,
he subsequently turns to the problem of individual freedom (rather than
global justice) and to the scene of a person thrown into a particular
historical situation (instead of the weather-changing spread of a
blundering species). This adaptation of Chakrabarty, Baucom clarifies,
is really “an expanded variation of the question of freedom that Sartre
inherits from Marx, the question of how we might … make something of
what our mixed, multiscaled situation is making of us,” the difference
with Sartre being that Baucom does not restrict that situation to the
single scale of human history but expands it to include conditions from
“the infra- and suprahistorical domains” (“Moving” 152): “[i]t is only
by accounting, simultaneously, … for the relation between … ‘historical’
time, and the infra- and suprahistorical domains of psychology,
physiology, biology, geology … that one can truly provide an adequate
account of the human dialectic of freedom and necessity, … of that
full range of ‘properties’ from which the human situation is composed”
(“History 4°” 130). To understand the situation of a particular human
actor, its biographical and historical dimensions need to be linked to
its “nonhuman” or “extrahistorical” components, zooming in on small
neuronal processes and zooming out to encompass large evolutionary
and geological constraints that are now directly intertwined with
individual human activities. Rephrasing this in Chakrabarty’s terms,
the description of our situation in the Anthropocene should include
the three figures of the human mentioned earlier and perform the
associated modes of historical and extrahistorical analysis (in terms
of citizen rights, subaltern identities, and climate-changing species).
78
BEN DE BRUYN
This argument seems compatible with Chakrabarty’s. But Baucom’s
conclusion is notably more optimistic. Thinking closely about our mixed
situation enables us to see, according to Baucom, that change remains
possible even though the planet seems to be altered beyond repair
already. At least in part, this optimism stems from Baucom’s belief,
contra Chakrabarty, that we can “[e]xperienc[e] our compound ways
of being human” by reading multiscaled works of fiction like Coetzee’s
Life & Times of Michael K and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (“Moving” 156).
For in these novels, Baucom shows, anthropocentric concepts of time,
nature, and the human are redefined by exposing human objects and
bodies to “species time” (“Human” 19) and by radically expanding
the makeup of fictional characters and their context to approximate
the multiscaled situation of the Anthropocene. The proper response
to present challenges is modelled, in short, in a new type of fictional
character as well as in “a new form of the historical novel” that Baucom
calls the “extrahistorical novel” (“Moving” 154). The newly complex
situation of “the human” is exemplified by the life of Sonmi-451, for
instance, a character from Cloud Atlas. As a clone, she is zoologically
linked to other Sonmis, but she also sees “petro-clouds” that confirm
the catastrophic geological blending of humans and weather (146),
and inherits, fuelled by “an intensive program of humanistic reading”
(147), the Enlightenment dream of freedom and personhood. In the
Anthropocene, in sum, the human inhabits a multiscaled situation
that connects biographical time to the extrahistorical timeframe of the
species. This composite view takes shared rights and different identities
into account, and hence alleviates fears over reductively universal views
of “the” human.
A first take on literary species thinking, Baucom’s argument reveals
how a novel like Barkskins opens up restricted understandings of context
and character. Consider one of its more prominent characters, Jinot Sel,
a mid-nineteenth-century descendant of René Sel and his Mi’kmaw wife
Mari. Jinot’s identity and situation are complex, to put it mildly, so it is
no surprise that this mixed-race character feels alienated from himself
at one point, as if he is “a hybrid creature” (400). Expert at cutting
trees, navigating timber-filled rivers, and recognising high-quality axes,
Jinot’s activities provide readers with a glimpse of different parts of the
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 79
timber industry. At the same time, he can read and write, knows the
classical figure of Hephaestus, and seems destined to transgress class
and race barriers by taking over an axe-making company (398). Yet
Jinot’s story ultimately fails to fit the template of the Bildungsroman,
in which a disenfranchised character gradually acquires more rights
and insight, and rather suggests that class and race boundaries are
insurmountable. When his employer dies during a joint journey to New
Zealand, local authorities mistakenly accuse Jinot of murder and force
him to return to the lumber camps, cutting short his climb on the social
ladder and even ending his life, as an untreated infection leads to his
premature death. Becoming a citizen with full rights (Chakrabarty’s
first figure of the human) proves difficult because of differences in
class and race (the second figure), not to mention gender (Jinot’s sexual
identity is complex too). And the novel frequently stresses the structural
injustice faced by Indian and mixed-race characters, not least in the
juxtaposition of its two families, only one of which grows rich off the
land. That humans are also active on a geological plane (Chakrabarty’s
third figure) is revealed in the ending of Jinot’s story, for his buried
body is subject to the devastating forces of “soil erosion” (480), in a
scene that links his individual narrative to a large, anonymous process:
“[t]he mountain streams, joined by other runaway water, raced flashing
down the hills carrying rocks, ricker slash, logs, gravel, soil, the old
cookhouse, and, disinterring Jinot Sel, swept his carcass out into the
Pacific” (441). Compounding the tragedy, not everyone is aware of this
destructive consequence of logging. As a head of the Duke company
is forced to ask: “what does happen to a hill with the trees removed?”
(552). And the fact that this entrepreneur is a woman ably struggling
against gender prejudices, making the reader root for her, only
underlines the complex moral situation of the Anthropocene, in which
human rights conflict with nonhuman environments.
Nor is the end the only moment in Jinot’s story when the impact
of humans on the landscape is revealed. Consider the apocalyptic
Miramichi fire, a real historical event that was caused by human
negligence and remains one of the largest recorded forest fires on the
North-American continent. Burning much of New Brunswick and
sweeping down on the lumber camp where Jinot is working in 1825, it
80
BEN DE BRUYN
forces humans and animals alike into the water: “[t]he teamster was in
the pool with his oxen, sharing it with several deer, a wildcat and a black
bear cub” (386). And if this forced alliance of humans and nonhumans
seems idyllic, consider the fate of the cub and its injured mother: “[s]he
died right there and the cub just kept on tryin[g] to suck” (391). Nor is this
fire a one-off event. In fact, the novel explicitly ties the natural disaster
to the larger capitalist system these characters find themselves in.
When Jinot first witnesses the production of axes, he notes that “it was
the Miramichi fire compressed into a bed of coals, the hurricane wind
blowing only at the command of the bellows” (399). Trapped by larger
forces, the novel’s characters are indeed like passive “lea[ves]” floating
on the wind (50, 203). So much for Enlightenment freedom. And
bearing in mind Baucom’s argument, the fact that Jinot dies because
of illness, like so many characters, especially native people confronted
with imported diseases, underlines the importance of small- as well as
large-scale factors in his historical “situation.” In Proulx’s novel, that
situation hence includes “extrahistorical” factors that appear to belong
to natural history, like erosion and smallpox. Zooming out, it could in
fact be argued that the many smaller stories comprising Barkskins’s
mosaic fit into three narrative templates that correspond with
Chakrabarty’s three figures of the human: a story of education in which
characters acquire rights, status, and knowledge, a story of identity in
which characters struggle with injustices related to class, race, and
gender, and a story of unfolding destruction in which forests disappear,
animal species go extinct, and precious soil erodes. A crucial thread
connecting these interlinked stories is the fact that native characters are
treated unjustly, presciently aware of ecological interconnection yet forced
to participate in environmental despoliation. If this suggests that Proulx’s
work evokes the cultural stereotype of the “ecological Indian”—a figure
that, despite modern critiques, plays a central role in native self-definition
past and present, as Joni Adamson and Annette Kolodny have argued—it
also reveals that a broad perspective on the human does not necessarily
imply a neglect of individual identities or socio-political issues. In this
novel, the story of climate change and the story of the poor are one and the
same. Placing people in an extrahistorical context reveals social as well as
environmental injustice.
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 81
Waves, Animals, and Other Humans
Although Baucom’s modification of Chakrabarty enables us to perceive
the multiscaled situation of fictional characters in the Anthropocene,
it could be argued that its composite picture of the human remains
too invested in the notion of individual characters to develop a truly
posthuman form of species thinking. Adding infra- and suprahistorical
constraints to a character’s historical situation enriches our picture of
the historical novel, to be sure, but there is no strong reason to single out
one dimension of this situation and call that a species perspective. What
is more, Chakrabarty himself already feels conflicted about the term:
he asserts that the word “species” is but “a placeholder” (“Climate
of History” 221), and invites us to call this mode of human existence
“a ‘species’ or something else” (“Postcolonial” 14, emphasis added).
These qualifications make sense, for it could be argued that a definition
in terms of species being is hard to reconcile with an emphasis on
geological force. That is why I will now examine and flesh out this
biological perspective on the human, bearing in mind Chakrabarty’s
observations that species are never fixed and that “personhood is
… no less of a reduction of [the] whole human being” than the term
“species” (“Climate of History” 215). Assigning animal characteristics
to other humans has been a dangerous rhetorical move, as Cary Wolfe
and others have shown, but their inspiring work in animal studies
proves that a species perspective may play a progressive role too, by
questioning boundaries between and among humans and nonhumans.
Such an approach provides an additional way of thinking about human
life in the Anthropocene. If we want to rethink our mode of existence
along species lines, how do literature’s animal images help us to adopt
this modified perspective?
Before we can locate this form of species thinking in Proulx’s novel,
we need to familiarise ourselves with two recent accounts of “character”
and “personhood” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature.
Certain differences notwithstanding, these analyses converge in that
they identify two competing conceptions of human life in the prose of
George Eliot and Laurence Sterne. First, Pearl Brilmyer has argued that
we should differentiate between two conceptions of fictional characters.
Critics have traditionally privileged the modern, humanistic notion of
82
BEN DE BRUYN
character typical of psychological novels, she claims, with an emphasis
on depth, individual interiority, and the narrative development of the
“round” character. Yet Eliot’s late turn to “the typological tradition of
the character sketch” complicates this story (Brilmyer 36), and hints at
the alternative, nonhuman view characteristic of natural history writing,
with its focus on carefully observed description and an externalised
view of “flat” characters and their “typical” behaviour:
Eliot’s naturalistic investment in describing people in terms of
the characterological traits they share with nonhuman animals
calls into question the human exceptionalism of novelistic modes
of characterization. Rather than craft characters as uniquely
psychological beings, her sketches put them on the same plane
as other creatures; like fish, sea lions, or even microscopic
vorticellae, human beings are conditioned by bodily frameworks
and habitual responses… (36)
Treating “the problem of embodiment as a (species-specific) universal”
(38), Eliot’s late work hence “situat[es] the human as an object of
natural-historical inquiry [and thereby] decenters and dehierarchises
the human within the scala natura[e] ” (45). Rather than narrate
the interior development of a unique human individual, her writing
catalogues the behaviours typical of varied forms of life, human as well
as nonhuman. This type of literature therefore offers a “natural history
of human life” (42).
Heather Keenleyside similarly distinguishes two conceptions of
human life. In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the fictional merchant
Walter Shandy upholds the view ascribed to John Locke, a “property
model of personhood” (“First-Person” 118) in which minds and bodies
are imagined to consist of building blocks that can be assembled and
taken apart at will, “effectively transform[ing] the person from a living
creature into a collection of goods” (120). By contrast, Walter’s son
Tristram and Sterne himself develop an alternative strain in Locke’s work,
Keenleyside argues, which does not model the person on a thing but on
“the living animal” (139), the fact that we share traits and sentiments
with family members and other members of the human species, not to
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 83
mention with other vulnerable creatures, who are often maltreated by
proponents of the property model of personhood. Against the idea that
we can separate biological and biographical life, Sterne reveals that even
the first-person form of life-writing has a generic, species dimension,
which can be captured by natural-historical description, “a form
familiar from nature television or field guides about, say, ‘the bobcat’”
(133). Keenleyside finds a similar logic at work in James Thomson’s
The Seasons, an influential eighteenth-century poem that muddies the
modern distinction between individual humans and generic nonhumans
via techniques of personification that promiscuously link trees, animals,
and humans, by mentioning unassigned “body parts that could belong to
any creature” (eyes, ears, hearts, and so on) (“Personification” 455), and
by “chang[ing] all kinds of beings into people (or, in Thomson’s various
terms, into “tribes, nations … or kinds”) rather than into persons as
individuals” (453). Like Sterne’s novel, Thomson’s poem raises important
questions: “If personifications change things to persons, then what is a
person? How does it differ from a ‘sensible being’ or from ‘animal life’?
Are persons always humans, and are humans always persons?” (450).
The net result is “an ontology that insists that one’s identity essentially
depends on the whole of which one is a part” (459), a view akin to “the
network of relations” (44) Brilmyer finds in Eliot. These arguments
imply that throughout literary history, writers have counteracted
anthropocentric understandings of character and personhood by adopting
an external, natural-historical view on the human animal.
Another way of approaching our species being is therefore to
consider dimensions of human existence we share with other creatures,
ranging from the threat of extinction I mentioned earlier to everyday
forms of bodily vulnerability, shared family traits, peculiar behavioural
quirks, and a bird’s-eye view of large human populations. When a
reader encounters such passages in literature, she is again encouraged
to abandon human privilege, to take up a distanced perspective on our
activities, and to learn to be a species. And this happens throughout
Barkskins, as the following series of descriptions shows (I provide
several samples, as their cumulative effect is important for my
argument): “[s]o many fish the river seemed made of hard muscle” (7);
“[he] pranced around like a rooster [and like] a rooster, his wet eye
84
BEN DE BRUYN
fell on the only hens in sight” (30); “[the] mouth [of Mari’s son], like
Mari’s, curled at the corners, and all who noticed this curving smile
thought of her” (161); “[a]s quick as an eel grasping its prey Captain
Strik himself ran onto the deck” (238); “the lady crows watch[ed] [the
males and their feathers] coolly, … measuring the presentation of every
point with critical eyes” (412); “like a salmon he longed to go back to
[the Atlantic]” (421); “she has the eyesight of that little bird that finds
invisible insects” (447); “the rich man’s daughter [has] come to see the
workin[g] stiffs like a zoo” (506); “a victim of dropsy that made her
legs swell to the size, shape and color of Boston harbor seals” (526);
“[h]is nose was a pulp and the swollen blackened features resembled a
boiled hog face” (565); “recovered from the Spanish flu that had killed
Chicagoans like chickens” (658); “she clung to his leg like a barnacle”
(681); “[r]ivers of birds on their great autumnal journeys—Hudsonian
godwits, whole nations of hawks, countless black warblers …—looking
like tiny men with their black berets” (22). As this catalogue of
descriptions indicates, Barkskins does not only feature characters like
Outger, Charley, and Sapatisia who are interested in natural history
and the traits of specific kinds of plants and animals, but also turns the
tables on its human characters, systematically inviting readers to adopt
a similarly external perspective on the Dukes, the Sels, and the other
creatures participating in its fictional world. Bodies are fragile, mortal,
and open to their environments, family members recycle features and
behaviours, humans as well as animals behave in characteristic ways,
and the perspective of the individual creature is often discarded
for a panoramic view of larger populations, “nations of hawks,” and
Chicagoans dead like flocks of “chickens.”
In fact, the novel frequently highlights human populations to
describe the fast and lethal spread of European settlers and their flora
and fauna across the North-American continent. These settlers are
described in the quasi-naturalistic terms of a flood—“as a great wave
sweeping over [native tribes]” (181); “billows of overseas white people
arriving in countless ships” (177); “[a] tide of agricultural-minded
immigrants” (538); an “overwhelming tide of men with axes” (645)—
and in related animal terms—“breed[ing] like mice” (213), they are
“human locusts” (363); “human birds of prey” (455); “like spring
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 85
geese heading north” (469); migrating “in numbers like … passenger
pigeons” (323), the latter being, not coincidentally, an extinct species.
Similar descriptions of humans have functioned in dehumanising
ways in the past, but here they level rather than erect hierarchies, in
posthumanist fashion, and are applied to the powerful rather than the
powerless, to migrants migrating from rather than to Europe. Again, this
literary technique defamiliarises our perspective on the human. It might
even explain why several reviewers of the novel have complained about
Barkskins’s characters, who are not brought to life from the inside but
described from the outside, and in numbers too large to process for the
individual human reader. According to one critic, reading the novel is
a bit “like strolling around the world’s largest ant farm” (Garner n.p.).
And that, I am suggesting, may be the point. Proulx is not the only
contemporary writer to use such strategies, moreover. You just need to
return to Scranton’s nonfiction book to find similar images of the human
species, these “clever, adaptable animals” (38) that can be seen as
“creatures of light” (115) but also as a “swarm” of honeybees (55) or
even as “a growth of carbon scum on a spinning rock in the backwater
of an unremarkable galaxy” (116). Developing the legacy of eighteenthand nineteenth-century writing, these naturalist descriptions of human
animals are hence a second way in which contemporary writing is
teaching us to be a species.
Real Time, Quality Time, Species Time
Recent accounts of the extrahistorical novel and creaturely life enable
us to identify two ways in which Barkskins hints at the species thinking
called for by Chakrabarty, namely by expanding the context impinging
on fictional characters and by expanding our conception of personhood
beyond the human. To conclude I will briefly consider Proulx’s novel
in terms of its reading experience rather than its plot or descriptions,
and that enables us to situate the work, however schematically, in
its contemporary socio-economic context. What does it mean that
Barkskins appears now rather than in the eighteenth or nineteenth
century, in an age characterised by the conditions of the Anthropocene
but also by the power of the online bookstore Amazon? Situating the
86
BEN DE BRUYN
novel in the contemporary literary field may seem a detour but it will
return us to climate and capitalism, and reveals one final way in which
Barkskins encourages its readers to adopt a species view.
In a characteristically insightful intervention, Mark McGurl has
recently proposed that Jeff Bezos’s “everything store” Amazon can now
be considered the primary condition of literary history, culminating in
a situation where “the entrepreneurial … ethos [and] temporality of
‘customer service’ might be taken as the dominant logic of contemporary
fiction” (447). After explaining the company’s philosophy and
operations, Kindle Direct Publishing especially, McGurl traces the ties
between three features of the Amazon mindset and the early twentyfirst-century literature it sells so successfully. First, the company’s
obsessive investment in “customer service” (453), an aggressive
submission to customer-kings, finds a striking parallel in the genre of
the billionaire romance made famous by E. L. James’s Fifty Shades
of Grey. Second, Bezos’s participation in projects like the Clock of the
Long Now reveals an interest in deep time that is less about a genuine
interest in the future of the “species” (468) than about a dream of
“corporate immortality” (468) on the part of a company that thrives on
epic feats of logistics and technocratic optimism, staple features of that
genre which specialises in future thinking, post-apocalyptic stories like
Hugh Howey’s Wool. Upon closer scrutiny, these two edgy genres are
hence “the organic expression of Bezosian billionaire consciousness”
(462). Third, whereas the new post-industrial economy exemplified by
Amazon inaugurates the “general condition of hurry” (462, original
emphasis) required by good customer service, this rapid “real time”
regime triggers a compensatory shift towards a slower “quality time,”
as experienced, notably, in the act of reading literary fiction, a genre
which does not aim for suspense but “finds its thematic substance in
the narrative dilation of human intimacy” (465). But this release valve,
McGurl argues, is “more compensatory than revolutionary,” as quality
time’s efficient pleasure maximisation is but the flipside of real time’s
customer-oriented hurry (466). Here too, “reader enjoyment” is the
“ultimate end” (456). Left, right, and centre, then, the literary field
is being recreated in the image of Amazon and the post-industrial
economy it represents.
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 87
Bearing these ideas in mind, Proulx’s novel seems easy to describe. A
long novel low on direct suspense, Barkskins is the type of work that
requires readers to slow down, take their time, and reflect on issues
that transcend the rat race (pun intended) of everyday life. There are
interesting complications, however. McGurl’s ideas encourage us to
notice, for instance, that this literary novel includes episodes akin
to the two forms of genre fiction typical of the age of Amazon. The
BDSM romance makes an appearance in the story of Posey, a “flying
tigress” (370) who bites and scratches her surprised husband (and not
only him), and traces of post-apocalyptic fiction can be detected at the
end, with talk of “dark diversity” (709) and “electromagnetic space
storms” (712). Most of the erotic and scientific action takes place offstage (the novel refuses to take us to the future, as if to underline its
rejection of techno-fixes), so these generic expectations are frustrated
too. But the novel nevertheless registers the author’s awareness of
contemporary tastes. More importantly, the reviews I mentioned earlier
suggest that this slow work of literary fiction actually proceeds too fast
to dilate human intimacy and deliver on its promise of a non-hurried
form of quality time. Barkskins acquaints us with various vivid lives but
its three-hundred-year sweep also brushes aside individual characters,
causing the book to hurry up as well as slow down. It might appear as
though the novel’s temporal regime is not real-time hurry or quality-time
dilation but rather the larger-than-human lifespan of the transnational
company. For despite its environmental message, CEO consciousness
is not absent from the novel, given its genealogy of the Duke empire,
its detailed evocations of board meetings and epic feats of logistics. Yet
the novel begins before the company exists and it continues after it is
sold off, disappearing as abruptly as the minor characters living in its
orbit. For all its fascination with boardroom politics, there is no dream
of corporate immortality here. When a company representative writes a
short history of the company, moreover, these “sixteen pages of company
fantasy bound in leather” (673) clearly fail to live up to Proulx’s seven
hundred pages of company reality. So the conclusion seems to be,
bearing in mind my argument about the novel’s expanded context and
animal people, that the novel’s temporal regime is species time rather
than company time. And the point is not that the book occasionally
88
BEN DE BRUYN
refers to the long timeframes of evolution and geology (though it does
that too) but that it tries to make its readers experience these long
durations in the reading process, through its high turnover of literary
characters especially.
The claim that this feature can be linked to species thinking
is reinforced by an important observation about animal characters.
Animals, as Ivan Kreilkamp has observed, are always at the risk of
being put to death, and their appearance in fiction is therefore typically
fleeting, short-lived, and unremembered, belonging more properly to
short sketches than to extended novels: “[a]n animal character is … an
incomplete or fragile character, one whose continuity over a long span
of time or pages cannot be guaranteed or anticipated, and one whose
presence in a long novel may implicitly challenge that very form’s
presumption that individual identity can be maintained over a long
duration” (84). As the latter part of this claim indicates, a similar fate
may befall human characters, with animal metaphors hinting at the fact
that they too will be quickly forgotten and their “individual identity,
personality and memory” might likewise be erased (85). In being easily
forgotten, these humans are like animals. And that is precisely what
happens to several minor characters in Barkskins, who are sometimes
introduced and killed off in the same sentence: “[A]t Odanak, Theotiste
had married and fathered a son, who died of measles in his third year,
two days after the mother succumbed to the same burning illness”
(159). More importantly, it could be argued that this is what happens to
all the other characters too, as they similarly struggle to be remembered
by the reader in the novel’s speeded-up succession of births and deaths.
This peculiar temporal regime is another way in which the novel hints
at species thinking. It could be argued that this more-than-human
pace constitutes a critical intervention, but it can be interpreted as a
compensatory mechanism too, species time helping to reconcile us to
company time much in the way that quality-time dilations help us to
accept real-time hurry. Nevertheless, Proulx’s work attempts to make
readers experience what it is like to be an unremembered animal, to
be a historical actor amid the competing claims of justice, identity, and
erosion, to be part of a group of animals moving among other vulnerable
creatures who are persons too. It teaches us to be a species without
LEARNING TO BE A SPECIES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 89
ignoring race, class, and gender, and enriches our conception of climate
fiction, and of the planetary problems that are a human crisis too.
WORKS CITED
Adamson, Joni. “Indigenous
Literatures, Multinaturalism,
and Avatar: The Emergence
of Indigenous Cosmopolitics.”
American Literary History 24.1
(2012): 143-62. Web.
Baucom, Ian. “Moving Centers:
Climate Change, Critical Method,
and the Historical Novel.” MLQ
76.2 (2015): 137-57. Web.
—. “History 4°: Postcolonial
Method and Anthropocene Time.”
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial
Literary Inquiry 1.1 (2014): 12342. Web.
—. “The Human Shore. Postcolonial
Studies in an Age of Natural
Science.” History of the Present 2.1
(2012): 1-23. Web.
—. “Globalit, Inc.: Or, the Cultural
Logic of Global Literary Studies.”
PMLA 116.1 (2001): 158-72. Web.
Brilmyer, S. Pearl. “‘The Natural
History of My Inward Self’:
Sensing Character in George Eliot’s
Impressions of Theophrastus Such.”
PMLA 129.1 (2014): 35-51. Web.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Climate
and Capital: On Conjoined
Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41.1
(2014): 1-23. Web.
—. “Postcolonial Studies and the
Challenge of Climate Change.”
New Literary History 43.1 (2012):
1-18. Web.
—. “The Climate of History: Four
Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2
(2009): 197-222. Web.
Garner, Dwight. “Review: Annie
Proulx’s Barkskins.” The New York
Times 16 June 2016. Web.
Greif, Mark. The Age of the Crisis
of Man. Thought and Fiction in
America, 1933-1973. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2015. Print.
Hunt, Alex. “Introduction: The
Insistence of Geography in the
Writing of Annie Proulx.” The
Geographical Imagination of Annie
Proulx. Rethinking Regionalism.
Ed. Alex Hunt. Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2009. 1-9. Print.
Keenleyside, Heather. “The FirstPerson Form of Life: Locke, Sterne,
and the Autobiographical Animal.”
Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 11641. Web.
—. “Personification for the People:
On James Thomson’s The Seasons.”
ELH 76.2 (2009): 447-72. Web.
90
BEN DE BRUYN
Kolodny, Annette. “Rethinking the
‘Ecological Indian’: A Penobscot
Precursor.” ISLE 14.1 (2007):
1-23. Web.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Dying Like
a Dog in Great Expectations.”
Animal Dreams: Representations
of Animals in Victorian Literature
and Culture. Eds. Deborah Morse
and Martin Danahay. Hampshire:
Ashgate, 2007. 81-94. Print.
Marshall, Kate. “What Are the
Novels of the Anthropocene?
American Fiction in Geological
Time.” American Literary History
27.3 (2015): 523-38. Web.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road.
London: Picador, 2006. Print.
McGurl, Mark. “Everything
and Less: Fiction in the Age of
Amazon.” MLQ 77.3 (2016): 44771. Web.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor.
Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.
Proulx, Annie. Barkskins. London:
4th Estate, 2016. Print.
Quayson, Ato. “The Sighs of
History: Postcolonial Debris and
the Question of (Literary) History.”
New Literary History 43.2 (2012):
359-70. Web.
Robbins, Bruce. “Prolegomena
to a Cosmopolitanism in Deep
Time.” Interventions: International
Journal of Postcolonial Studies
18.2 (2016): 172-86. Web.
Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die
in the Anthropocene: Reflections
on the End of a Civilization. San
Francisco: City Lights Books,
2015. Print.
Taylor, Jesse Oak. “Tennyson’s
Elegy for the Anthropocene:
Genre, Form, and Species Being.”
Victorian Studies 58.2 (2016): 22433. Web.
Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene
Fictions: The Novel in a Time of
Climate Change. Charlottesville: U
of Virginia P, 2015. Print.
BIOGRAPHY
Ben De Bruyn, b. 1982, is associate
professor of comparative literature
at Maastricht University. He is the
author of Wolfgang Iser. A Companion
(De Gruyter, 2012) and co-editor
of Literature Now. Key Terms
and Methods for Literary History
(Edinburgh UP, 2016). He has
published on environmental themes
in journals including Studies in the
Novel and Oxford Literary Review.