Planetary Drift: Flotsam as Empathic Medium in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being
Document Type
Presentation
Date of Original Version
3-6-2024
Abstract
Ruth Ozeki’s semi-autobiographical novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) appeared just two years after the historically unprecedented Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Northeast Japan, amassing a death toll of nearly twenty thousand and ravaging the region’s economy in the years to come.
Ozeki’s narrative combines parataxis and irony with innovative exposition in first and third-person to dramatize the empathic relationship between protagonists whose lives become enmeshed through the appearance of a specimen whose sedimented histories unravel across the novel. The presence of this material yet spectral object enables readers to trace affective and ethical possibilities between differentiated human lives and planetary ecosystems spanning the Earth’s complex metabolism. Building on a wide range of analytical frameworks, namely, post-human narratology, critical ocean studies, and cognitive literary criticism, Bowden’s presentation treats A Tale for the Time Being as a viable test case for discussing modes of narrative empathy or recognition which simultaneously exceed and subsume the “human” during our catastrophic era known as the Anthropocene. Moreover, it aims to contribute to ongoing debates regarding the problem of empathy and literary production (as well as reception) by foregrounding an alternative narrative ontology of the present which hinges upon the changing temporal relationship between “humans” and their environments.
Bowden’s presentation is a chapter within his dissertation project entitled, “Textual Sediments: Genre and the Planetary Novel,” where he investigates the stakes of competing temporal frameworks in coming to terms with narrative portrayals of climate change, nuclear catastrophe, and ocean acidification. Bowden’s presentation anticipates an April 11 talk by Ozeki herself at URI’s Spring Humanities Festival.