The Misanthropocene in California: Susan Straight’s Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights and Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes to label the current moment, characterized by biomass loss and global ecological catastrophe, as “the Misanthropocene,” and it presents two literary examples in which misanthropic attitudes are found. It focuses on Susan Straight’s Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights (1994) and Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), comparing their representations of California and its characteristic elements such as the jacaranda tree or the state’s symbol, the poppy. Following Kantian discussion of the concept, misanthropy is understood as a negative assessment of (and not an emotional attitude toward) humanity’s moral shortcomings such as racism, greed, or deceitfulness. Finally, the conclusions present the resolution of the misanthropic attitudes in the light of Michael Marder’s vegetal ontology, arguing that while Didion offers a partial solution of the misanthropy she portrays, it is Straight’s novel that suggests a way beyond the impasse of the Misanthropocene by thinking with plants. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. For instance, in Blue Nights, an autobiographical text in which Didion movingly writes about her daughter’s death shortly after losing her husband, she asks, “Could I seriously have construed changing my driver’s license from California to New York as an experience involving ‘severed emotional bonds’? Did I seriously see it as loss? Did I truly see it as separation?” (11); to which questions she does not, characteristically, provide a straightforward answer. My point here is that even in a text ostensibly focused on a deeply personal and traumatic event, Didion writes about her home state: a return to the topic that even she questions.2. “The ‘Anthropocene’ has emerged as a popular scientific term used by scientists, the scientifically engaged public and the media to designate the period of Earth’s history during which humans have a decisive influence on the state, dynamics and future of the Earth system. It is widely agreed that the Earth is currently in this state” (http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/).3. “For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia” (2002: 23).4. “the Capitalocene does not stand for capitalism as an economic and social system. […] Rather, the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology” (2016: 6).5. Donna Haraway: “The Plantationocene continues with ever greater ferocity in globalized factory meat production, monocrop agribusiness, and immense substitutions of crops like oil palm for multispecies forests and their products that sustain human and nonhuman critters alike” (2016: 206 n5).6. “Maybe, but only maybe, and only with intense commitment and collaborative work and play with other terrans, flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages that include people will be possible. I am calling all this the Chthulucene – past, present, and to come. (…) It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. (…) One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-politicaltechnological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses” (Haraway 2015: 160).7. I discuss this point in detail in my monograph, California and the Melancholic Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden (Routledge, 2018).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Uniwersytet Wrocławski [BPIDUB.4610.240.2022].Notes on contributorsKatarzyna Nowak-McNeiceKatarzyna Nowak-McNeice is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies of the University of Wroclaw, Poland, where she teaches American literature. Her scholarly interests include California literature, vegan studies, and critical posthumanism.