Feeling Fictional: Climate Crisis and the Massively Multi-Protagonist Novel

Abstract:Many recent climate change fictions take the form of multi-plot ensemble novels: long fictions that split their narrative attention among several different protagonists. Though this ensemble form has long been a staple strategy of Western realism, this article explores what new affordances it might offer in the face of planetary crisis. In particular, multi-protagonist climate change novels put pressure on the representational capacities of fictional character. Such texts remain resolutely character-driven, but expanding the scale of the novel's narrative form drives peculiar fissures into fictional personhood. The novels I consider in this article often foreground a paired set of tropes that thematize the relationship between personal and planetary scales--the nonhuman reader and the excessively fictional character--in order to invite a unique form of identification with the very ontological premise of fictionality itself. Multi-protagonist climate change novels repeatedly contrast the nonhuman totalizing perspective with the highly situated lives of characters who experience their own membership in the human species as a phenomenon akin to fictionality, to being emplotted in a logic that they cannot full grasp and can never analyze from an external position. This narrative situation of feeling fictional follows from the increasingly common novelistic desire to reconcile character-driven fiction to the scales of environmental crisis.