From Control to Chaos

Lola Randl’s Der Große Garten (2019) exemplifies how recent literature often portrays gardening as a sustainable practice that fosters community and helps address climate change. The novel employs narrative fragments and formal elements to challenge ideological assumptions about gardening. Specifically, by exploring composting, the text adopts a distanced, sarcastic tone toward the gardening project; however, it does not diminish the practice per se. Instead, the story transitions from a semblance of order to an acceptance of chaos, with compost symbolizing the entropic material relationships that are essential for transformation. Donna Haraway’s concept of compost logic serves as a point of reference for illustrating how this shift is fundamental to change. Importantly, the materiality of composting, and gardening more broadly, fosters the creation of physical spaces for collective practices. Thus, the acceptance of ‘compost-chaos’ enables a communal experience of both gardening and literature: as composting generates new material by dissolving boundaries between individual substances, narration creates spaces in which new communities coalesce around the common goal of sustainability

Control (management) · Government (linguistics) · Narrative · Quality (philosophy) · Work (physics) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Literature and Cultural Memory