Anthropocenic Affects and Ethics in Aaron Thier's Mr. Eternity

Anthropocenic Affects and Ethics in Aaron Thier's Mr. Eternity Mahlu Mertens (bio) Introduction In the discourse on ecological mourning, "the vulnerabilities [of marginalized groups] to climatic and environmental change" and the resulting ecological grief are often ignored or absent, because, as Ashlee Cunsolo points out, these marginalized bodies "do not usually matter within policy and discourse" (2017, p. 181). Similarly most climate change fiction focuses on (future) Western protagonists and all but ignores the people—predominantly in the global South—who are already experiencing climate change in their day-to-day lives. This links to arguments against the use of the term "Anthropocene": as, amongst others, Jason W. Moore (2016) and Manuel Marias Aldonado (2016) point out, the term erases the profound differences in responsibility and affectedness between people, because of its underlying notion of a universal humanity that implicitly uses Western people as a pars pro toto. Mr. Eternity (2016) by Aaron Thier, however, is a climate change fiction comedy that literally decenters the Western protagonist, and thereby his story and his experience, by making him a character in the stories of marginalized character-narrators that Western history usually silences, while at the same time highlighting the pervasiveness of the Western worldview. The novel consists of five alternating autodiegetic narratives set in 1560, 1750, 2016, 2200, and 2500 in several locations on the American continent. The title character, a mariner who lives for over a thousand years and goes by (various spellings of) the name Daniel Defoe, recurs in every story. Defoe's superhuman lifespan, in other words, roughly corresponds with the era of capitalism and allows him [End Page 157] to personally experience both the causes and the effects of climate change, which escape perception in a normal human lifespan. By contrasting Defoe's narrative with the mediated, pre-traumatic stress syndrome of a young American filmmaker in 2016 and the past and future embodied ecological grief of marginalized others—a former slave, an indigenous girl, and a princess in a patriarchal society—Mr. Eternity, I argue, explores how the different experiences of and relationships to environmental deterioration lead to different forms of environmentally induced stress. In doing so, the novel displays a postcolonial awareness of the limitations and exclusions of a privileged center's worldview and its accompanying stories that still dominate Anthropocene discourse and fiction. Failing to See the Bigger Picture A canonical work in Western culture, Robinson Crusoe "literally is the story of white male Western colonialism"; it is "the epic of [the] homo economicus" (D'haen, 1997, p. 196). Thier's intertextual reference of Daniel Defoe stresses the dominance of this particular privileged center's worldview as well as the central role of capitalism in climate change. It is telling that Thier names the long-living character after the writer rather than the protagonist of Robinson Crusoe, since, as Theo D'haen points out, Defoe was among the first commercial writers in English literary history, and the name itself is thus an "objective correlative for the commercial ideology of capitalism" (1997, p. 197). As a white American male writer, Thier himself can be considered an heir of the canonical literary tradition, but his ironic stance toward the author Defoe shows a self-awareness about this position, and the novel self-consciously tries to displace this dominant discourse of power. The attitude of Thier's character Defoe parodies a thinking that is more concerned with economic growth and personal freedom than with solving climate change: Defoe is self-absorbed, and his main concern is his personal quest to find his long-lost love Anna Gloria and the treasures that he buried throughout the ages. Although Defoe does acknowledge the link between climate change and capitalism, he positions himself as an outsider [End Page 158] who had/has no part in this ideology. When the 2200 narrator asks Defoe, "How did the world get so fucked [...] why didn't they stop it people are smart why didn't they think of something?" Old Dan answers: "Oh well [...] haha they just did not manage to do it in time they couldn't turn it around" (p. 241). Old Dan's use of the third person pronoun

Aesthetics · Anthropocene · Art · Character (mathematics) · Comedy · Environmental ethics · Eternity · Fable · Humanity · Literature · Narrative · Theology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy

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