In The Overstory, two characters spend several months living at the top of a giant redwood. Their presence protects the tree they call Mimas from the loggers clearing the forest. All around them, the speed of modern deforestation mocks the timescale of the forest, where trees ‘ten feet thick and nine hundred years old go down in twenty minutes and are bucked within another hour’.Footnote ¹ But for Nick and Olivia, a different kind of temporal distortion takes place on their first day in the tree:

In a tree so huge that it looks to them like ‘the Evolutionary Tree of Life’ (260), the close encounter with another species is an encounter with other timescales: both the lifespan of forests and the longue durée of evolutionary time.

The passage throws into sharp relief the trans-scalar potential of interspecies encounters. To encounter a thousand-year-old tree is to experience a double change of scale: a switch from the fast time of humans to the slow time of trees, and a switch from the individual scale to that of species and their intertwined evolution. However, the lines I have quoted also betray the representational challenge of the trans-scalar encounter: if time and space are so distorted that everything ‘feels the same size’, how can a nonhuman scale be experienced? If humanity climbs trees only to find in them the embodiment of figurative, dendromorphic theories, how can the encounter break new ground or stretch beyond the familiar scales of an imaginary already shaped by trees? This difficulty, inherent in figurative thought and aesthetics, is the epistemic and ethical challenge explored in this chapter. Trans-scalar encounters, as Zach Horton suggests, can be ‘catalyzing events that take place when an observer adapted to a milieu defined by a particular scale of typical events encounters structures and processes at a different scale’.Footnote ² Yet such encounters can also be reductive, absorbing difference into a form of pan-scalar humanism that ‘frames all trans-scalar encounters as either extensions of the human into analogous scales (collapsing scalar difference) or as [sic] the beneficent extension of the human lifeworld into frontier scales’.Footnote ³ In this chapter, I ask how multi-scalar narrative can negotiate that risk.

The Overstory (2018) and The Swan Book (2013) were both published in the second decade of the twenty-first century, at a time when the sixth mass extinction ceased to be discussed as a distant fear and instead became a present reality.Footnote ⁴ These novels bring human characters into contact with threatened species, on scales that are difficult for the human senses to perceive. I read these encounters through Deborah Bird Rose’s account of multispecies encounters as knots of time. Such knots stretch across different timescales because they are formed both by the encounter between species at a specific point in time and by the sequence of preceding generations, and those generations’ symbiotic relations to other species. For Rose, each interspecies encounter thus renders visible knots of ethical time that are shaped by all previous encounters. The Overstory and The Swan Book, I suggest, tell stories of unravelling knots between human and other species. These stories ask how relations of response-ability can develop over multiple scales: the timescales of a tree’s life or of climate change, as well as the physical scales of flock or forest. They also ask how the individual relates to their own species – a pressing concern for readers of the Anthropocene. The encounter with the other species is, inevitably, also an encounter with the self as species.

I begin by reading the trans-scalar encounters depicted by these novels as allegorical attempts to retie knots of ethical time. Allegory, as David Herman has theorised, is an important ‘method of multiscale narration’ where ‘a species or a population features as a person-like being’.Footnote ⁵ Taking Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) as an example, Herman points out that the gaps between meso and macro levels of life can be bridged by allegorical laddering, in which several intermediary rungs appear: London’s novel ‘engages in a double mapping: from the life history of Buck as an individual dog to the larger species history of canids in general, and then from the species history of canids to the species history of humans’.Footnote ⁶ At first glance, both The Overstory and The Swan Book lend themselves well to such hermeneutics. When Powers’s human characters decide to fight against deforestation, they represent a reparative direction for humanity’s relation to trees, and beyond them to planetary ecosystems. In The Swan Book, allegorical laddering bridges the differences in scale between a lonely girl, a single swan displaced by climate change, and all the forced migration of humans and nonhumans occurring on a global scale.

I suggest, however, that both novels cultivate a nagging sense of fracture between scales which undermines their analogical drive. This fracture is behavioural, as their main characters experience a growing estrangement from their species which weakens their ability to function allegorically. But it is also a spatial fracture because the damaged spaces that these novels depict – the swamp in The Swan Book, the clear-cut forest in The Overstory – are the ‘sacrifice zones’ of an extractive world economy: spaces so polluted or exhausted that their ecosystems cannot recover.Footnote ⁷ The logic of the sacrifice zone demands that a specific location be damaged to support large-scale prosperity, and this scale-bound logic jars with the trans-scalar analogies of allegorical reading. As I have noted in previous chapters, analogies between scales can become an epistemic hindrance, paradoxically obstructing the awareness they enable by assimilating the other to the same. Here, I draw attention to metalepsis as a narrative strategy that resists such assimilation.

This chapter compares the uses of allegory and metalepsis as tools for trans-scalar ethics. Allegory, I suggest, is a form of epistemic capture that erases difference between the human scale and other scales: this figurative approach relies on what Derek Woods calls the ‘smooth zoom effect’, the illusion of similarity between scales.Footnote ⁸ The Overstory and The Swan Book both exploit the capacity of allegory for storytelling ‘at species scale’,Footnote ⁹ and I do not suggest that this mode of reading can or should be discarded. However, I view the metaleptic energy of these novels as a corrective to their allegorical drive. Where allegory collapses difference, metalepsis draws attention to the shock of encounters between disjunct scales of life, and throws into relief the need for an ethical relation to the other scale. In other words, these novels’ metaleptic tendencies reflect the metaleptic structure of Anthropocene awareness, where, for the individual to relate to themselves as a planetary species or to the scale of the sixth mass extinction, strange loops must connect radically different scales and break habitual frames of perception. The frame-breaking energy of metalepsis thus works productively alongside allegory in these novels because it renders visible the ontological destabilisation of storytelling, and story-reading, at species scale.

4.1 Unravelling Knots of Ethical Time in The Overstory

The title of The Overstory: A Novel announces both analogy and metalepsis as key narrative modes, since it turns ‘overstory’, the term describing the highest layer of forest vegetation, into a narrative choice: telling the forest’s story is presented as an act analogous to telling the human story, but on a different narrative level. The novel’s publication followed a wave of popular science books, articles, and documentaries exploring the intelligence and communication of trees, among which Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015), Robert MacFarlane’s ‘The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web’ (2016), Ed Yong’s ‘The Wood Wide Web’ (2016), and Julia Dordel’s documentary Intelligent Trees (2016).Footnote ¹⁰ The Overstory also responds to the calls for non-anthropocentric stories of forests made by anthropologists Eduardo Kohn, in How Forests Think (2013), and Anna Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015). Powers’s descriptions of forests as dense entanglements of forms of life, each emitting different signals, resonates particularly strongly with Tsing’s call to describe landscapes as histories of ‘polyphonic assemblages’.Footnote ¹¹ But the novel tells this story through the lives of nine human characters, and the difficulty of decentring attention from the human is highlighted by many metanarrative observations. As one character remarks, ‘the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people’ (382–3).

What this metanarrative remark implies is nevertheless that the novel, as a form, might enable multi-scalar perception. The Overstory not only critiques clear-cutting and forest plantation but acts as a narrative corrective to their mono-scalar logic. As Tsing observes, capitalist forest management reduces forests to a single scale of organism – ignoring, for instance, fungal networks – and simplifies the complex timescales of landscape by performing a historical erasure. Modern forestry denies the fact that trees are agents of landscape by reducing them to a resource: ‘the way to manage a resource’, Tsing notes, ‘is to stop its autonomous historical action’.Footnote ¹² Powers’s prose acts as a reparative to this erasure: it restores what Tsing calls the status of ‘historical actors’ to trees by foregrounding their action over millennia of human history. The Overstory repeatedly emphasises the vast spatial-temporal scales of forests: not only are they ‘giants’ (134) whose networks spread across whole continents but they speak to the characters about ‘long time’ (355), a scale at which the Earth itself is viewed as an ‘organism’ unbalanced by deforestation (252, 454), and the ‘Tree of Life’ is revealed to be slowly toppling and threatening to ‘collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria’ (305). Alongside humans, the novel is attentive to destructive agents on all scales, including fungal diseases, chestnut blight and Dutch elm, adelgids, acid rain, mealybugs, scale insects, and the use of herbicides such as the infamous Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. The necessity of perceiving several scales at once is theorised by the three scientists in the novel: the biologist Patricia, who analyses links between microbiology, evolution, and macro-ecology; the sociologist Adam, who studies cognitive blindness on the scale of whole populations, to understand how a whole species can be so blind to its self-destruction; and the programmer Neelay, who will eventually develop algorithms capable of analysing global data at a speed that might enable planetary solutions. These characters highlight scale effects – those changes in perception that appear when a situation is viewed on a different scale – and the interdependence of different scales of life. Fascinated by Patricia’s book, the engineer Mimi appears as a model reader when she learns to see the forest as ‘[t]ight nets of tens of thousands of species knit together in weaves too fine for any person to trace’ (242). This emphasis on scales beyond normal human perception has led many scholars to view the novel as a successful experiment in trans-scalar cognition and emotion, which stages the ‘intellectual conflict involved when addressing an issue of such spatial-temporal complexity as deforestation’,Footnote ¹³ and enables ecological grief through an aesthetics of wonder.Footnote ¹⁴

I will suggest, however, that although the novel presents trans-scalar encounters as ethical opportunities, The Overstory’s analogical poetics are as much a hindrance as a help to its ethical agenda. The novel tells a story of failure: although several main characters unite to protect trees, little remains of their attempts. This narrative conveys humanity’s self-awareness as a failed collective in the Anthropocene. Marco Caracciolo suggests that the ‘uneasy analogy’ drawn by Powers between the human and the nonhuman shows ‘how human collectives fail to replicate the cohesiveness and efficacy of plant assemblages’.Footnote ¹⁵ But I aim to draw attention to a different kind of limitation: the fact that analogical thought alone fails to carry through a trans-scalar ethics.

The first section of the novel anchors its ethical project in a problem of scale framing. Here the family history of artist Nick Hoel is entwined with the story of the chestnut growing behind his house. Generations of Hoel men have ploughed the land and photographed the tree, building a slow memory of its growth over a century. During a Christmas holiday in the 1980s, Nick Hoel flips through the stack of photos, ‘watching for those decades’ secret meaning’ (17). This creates a slow-motion view of the growing tree, in a paradoxical superposition of human and nonhuman timescales where ‘[t]hree-quarters of a century runs by in the time it takes to say grace’ (18). The next day, Nick returns to the house to find his parents and grandmother dead, poisoned by the propane heater, whose gas has pooled ‘invisible underneath the ceiling that Nick’s father has so recently snugged up with extra insulation’ (23). This Anthropocene parable of invisible poisoning and unwitting suicide may well sum up, for a reader aware of global heating and deforestation, those decades’ ‘secret meaning’. And yet, the flip-book of photographs, where ‘everything a human being might call the story happens outside [the] photos’ frame’ (16), suggests that reframing is urgently needed: rather than the human story, the photographs focus on the overstory of trees promised by the title of the book. Through the character of the artist, Powers suggests that the role of art is to unframe or reframe our perception so that we become aware of more-than-human timescales, particularly those of environmental degradation.

The flip-book establishes the kind of trans-scalar relationality that Deborah Bird Rose calls knots of multispecies time. Examining interspecies contact from an ethnographic point of view, Rose argues that relations of co-evolution and co-dependency – for instance those between Australian flying foxes and the myrtaceous trees that they eat and pollinate – construct interspecies encounters as ‘both sequential and synchronous temporal patterns’.Footnote ¹⁶ These patterns combine the inherited behaviour of a sequence of previous generations with the synchronous time of meeting, when flowering eucalypts incite the foxes to congregate in the trees. An encounter between species is thus a knot of multispecies time where ‘[e]ach individual is both itself in the present, and the history of its forebears and mutualists’.Footnote ¹⁷ In The Overstory, the flip-book renders this kind of knot visible, bringing together the sequential time of generations of Hoels and the synchronous time of each observer’s encounter with the tree. But the lone chestnut tree is one of the rare survivors of the chestnut fungus that has devastated the forests of North America, and is increasingly isolated by accelerating deforestation. It dies shortly after Nick’s departure from the farm. I read this chestnut’s death as a case of what Rose terms double death, an individual death that speaks of species death, and that therefore participates not in a cycle of life but in an accelerating cycle of death where extinction breeds extinction. Drawing on James Hatley’s analysis of species extinction as a form of aenocide, or ‘murdering of ethical time’,Footnote ¹⁸ Rose argues that this murdering of future generations, and thus of sequential time, unravels multispecies knots of time. Seen in this light, the photographs of the Hoel tree are an unravelling knot of ethical time, witnessed by the timelapse of the flip-book. Nick’s later creations are all attempts to retie such knots. In one piece of landscape art, he uses dead trees to shape writing that can only be seen from the sky, spelling out the word STILL for the next two centuries. In another, he choreographs paint dropped from cars driving through Manhattan to leave pools of different greens that are spread out by the tires of passing cars, into the shape of a tree that can only be seen from high above. As ‘unwitting pedestrians […] paint with their shoes’ (457), the performance literalises and subverts the figure of the ecological footprint.

Art, Nick’s story suggests, may retie unravelling knots of ethical time by experimenting with scales of perception. To this end, The Overstory employs several of the strategies for ‘storytelling at species scale’ identified by Herman in Narratology beyond the Human: most notably, narrative speed and allegory.Footnote ¹⁹ Herman draws attention to variations in narrative speed, and particularly variations in duration – the ratio between the speed of events and the speed of their narration – as means of modelling species-scale temporalities. Herman thus links storytelling at species scale to the kind of changes in relative speed which, following Ursula Heise and Gérard Genette, I called anisochrony in Chapter 2. In The Overstory, such variations often occur within single paragraphs when the long lives of trees are contrasted with human perception. Variations in speed are particularly striking when they occur in individual sentences, as, for instance, when Douglas falls from a burning plane in Vietnam: ‘His scream pierces the air, and his body tumbles into the branches of the banyan, that one-tree forest that has grown up over the course of three hundred years just in time to break his fall’ (82). Two durations meet in this sentence: the human drama is contrasted with the slow time of tree life, but they are drawn together by the temporal clause ‘just in time’. The deceleration, or acceleration depending on the viewpoint, foregrounds the retying of a knot of ethical time, in this encounter laden with allegorical connotations: a falling human who recalls fallen humanity but who paradoxically falls into the tree of life, a ‘one-tree forest’ that stands for all the forests Doug has helped kill with Agent Orange. This overlap between individuals and species is typical of the novel’s multi-scalar aesthetics: experimenting with duration opens the way for allegorical connections between scales.

Each of the novel’s four sections – ‘Roots’, ‘Trunk’, ‘Crown’, and ‘Seeds’ – has a distinctive narrative speed. ‘Roots’ progresses swiftly through the characters’ formative years, in many cases from childhood to adulthood, spanning twenty to forty years of their lives and focusing only on the moments that forge their relation to particular trees – or how each one enters into a specific ethical knot. ‘Trunk’ slows down to narrate the encounters between the main characters and the eco-terrorist actions carried out by five of them. ‘Crown’ begins with the aftermath of Olivia’s accidental death during one of their missions, but soon accelerates in a few paragraphs that cover twenty years:

This change in duration marks a turning-point: as the passage makes clear, the narrative acceleration is matching narrative form to the sense of accelerating anthropogenic change and ecocide, which results in a disjunction between loss and human awareness. The usual duration of evolutionary narrative, where the telling is faster than the event, is turned on its head: now the telling of the story of life is too slow to keep up with the rate of its loss. The knots of time that bind humanity to other forms of life are unravelled by this new type of temporal discrepancy, where human narrative struggles to track mass extinction. The sense of a breaking-point in the novel’s temporalities echoes Anthropocene philosophy’s interest in tipping-points and other points of no return, but here the tipping-point is one of epistemic and ethical failure.

Those accelerations facilitate allegorical readings of the encounters between human characters and trees, where the novel’s characters offer a hopeful vision of humanity finally seeing and helping the forest. However, these tropes are complicated by the allegorical laddering whereby trees represent not only their own species but life itself. This laddering is most obvious in the opening page of the novel’s final section ‘Seeds’: here, in another radical acceleration, the history of life on Earth is narrated on a single page as if it occurred over a single day, so that ‘modern man shows up four seconds before midnight’ (475). This type of temporal compression is a classic narrative device in popular biology, particularly, as Herman observes, in time-lapse videos widely circulated online. Powers, however, emphasises the multi-scalar tropes of evolutionary discourse: after ‘a million million years of branching’, eukaryote cells appear; thanks to this acceleration, ‘countless new stems and twigs’ are formed, and soon animals start carrying around ‘whole worlds of earlier creatures’ in their guts. The tree of life metaphor is overlaid with a microcosmic imaginary, preparing for the metaleptic leap of the twentieth century, when ‘life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself’. These increasingly complex connections between different scales of life come to a hesitant conclusion: ‘By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.’ Using the evolution-in-a-day metaphor to lead us into the darkness of the Anthropocene, the final vision of monoculture contrasts with the previous profusion of life forms, and the vanished literal trees weaken the allegorical tree of life. This contamination of the tenor of the metaphor by its vehicle conveys the exponential acceleration of extinction rates, but also extends the sense of threat to the imagination itself: without trees, humanity will lose one of its main tropes for life.

The ‘tree of life’ trope is just one example of the many analogies that ultimately blur and dilute the specificity of each encounter. Throughout the novel, wonder is conveyed through analogies: these include anthropocentric images, where forests are ‘solar power factories’ (124), each tree a ‘spreading metropolis’ (102) connected by ‘fungal synapses’ (453), as well as family trees, the tree of life, the branching of artificial intelligence, or the human brain as a collection of ‘dendrites, those tiny spreading trees’ (93). These metaphors, and particularly the sections focalised through Patricia, draw on the dendromorphism of neurological terminology and the neuromorphism of ecological terminology, where the networked intelligence of forests is often described through analogy with the human brain.Footnote ²⁰ But these analogical poetics weaken the account of trans-scalar encounters as experiences of radically other scales of existence, since they collapse otherness into familiar metaphors. There is a contradiction between the novel’s project of multi-scalar narration, which answers Tsing’s call for descriptions of forests as ‘multiple time-making projects’ where ‘organisms enlist each other and coordinate in making landscapes’,Footnote ²¹ and the many analogies that erase the differences between these organisms and between their scales of action. Patricia’s formative encounter with the giant redwoods in the Western Cascades is a case in point:

The passage is steeped in Romantic aesthetics: recalling the nineteenth-century painting Cathedral Forest, by Albert Bierstadt, which featured on the cover of the novel’s first edition, the description progresses from classic sublime awe to close-ups of ‘gothic’ snags, and finally a paradoxically molecular sublime, where the compact layers of entangled life defy distanced observation.Footnote ²² The footprint trope is optimistically translated into a benign form of understanding, recalling Morton’s observation that when ‘I walk up a chalky hill [… b]illions of ancient pulverized undersea creatures grip my shoes’.Footnote ²³ The encounter is narrated as an ethical success, which acknowledges the long history of ethical knots between humans and forest in the mention of native understanding. The scene concludes allegorically, with Patricia addressing a speech of thanks and apology to the trees on behalf of humanity. An optimistic reading of this description would be that it effectively carries out the reparative work called for by Tsing, since it retraces the forest as structured by histories of encounter between life forms. But do passages such as this achieve anything beyond promoting a neo-Romantic communion with the other species? Do these descriptions manage, like the ‘clicks and chatter’ evoked by Powers, to disturb the hush of inherited analogies? If the human scale, as Horton argues, is a technique of assimilation and colonisation, then images like the footprint or the cathedral fall back into this epistemic trap. The issue is that Powers attempts to narrate the ethical jolt of encounters with otherness through prose that overflows with analogies. If we read the book as an argument, the effect is that the demonstration is weakened. If we read it as an allegorical tale of encounters between different scales of life, the allegory is blurred by the proliferation of analogies, until allegorical narrative itself is problematised.

This troubling of allegory may not be intentional, but I find it to be the most significant contribution The Overstory makes to Anthropocene narrative form: ultimately the novel is torn between its prolific analogies and a nagging sense of discrepancies between scales. While the human characters’ rebellion against deforestation reads as a hopeful allegory, both the individual-for-species trope and the forest-for-planet trope are weakened by insistent fractures between scales. Doug, for instance, decides to devote his life to trees on the day he realises that the ‘miles-long walls of Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir’ he sees along the Oregon highway are in reality only a ‘scrim’ hiding a ‘stumpy desolation’ where ‘[t]he ground bleeds reddish slag mixed with sawdust and slash’ (87). What Doug discovers is a sacrifice zone: a region where biological life is sacrificed to the productive logics of the industrial world. As Jason Moore has argued in his analysis of capitalist world-ecology, sacrifice zones work against ethical knots because they cut through what Moore terms the ‘web of life’, simplifying and reducing interactions.Footnote ²⁴ The devastation reminds Doug of the expanses of forest he sprayed with Agent Orange in Vietnam. To repair this past sacrifice, Doug decides to become a forest planter, and spends years climbing through ‘silent, slop-filled, sloping dead zones’ that amount to a ‘tangled graveyard’ (89), trying to fill the cuts by planting Douglas-fir seedlings. The planting of future generations of trees symbolises his attempt to retie a knot of ethical time, but since this knot depends on the scale of the species rather than of the individual, Douglas cannot retie it. After spending four years of his life planting fifty thousand tree seedlings, Doug learns that his work has only accelerated the practice of clear-cutting: as a stranger in a bar puts it, ‘[e]very time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut’ (186). His work ironically turns poisonous once it is scaled up into timber-focused forestry, his action perverted by his species: the very process that enables allegory – scaling up our perception from individual to species – defeats the repair offered by Doug-as-repentant-humanity.

Ironic scale effects thus weaken the forest-for-planet trope as well as the individual-for-species tropes, because they highlight the disjunction between individual reparation and species-wide effects. Doug’s trajectory in the novel is particularly significant in this regard as he reacts to these ironies by joining Nick, Olivia, and other characters in an eco-terrorist group. Through this trajectory, The Overstory diverges from the optimism expressed by Tsing, for whom the undoing of capitalist scalability lies in narrative attention to the unscalable entanglements that subsist in ruined landscapes. The Overstory asks how the individual might change the species, and pursues the allegorical logic to breaking-point. The activists give themselves tree names, and Doug becomes Douglas-Fir, an allegorical figure for the trees he has planted. He eventually attempts to sacrifice his own body during a face-off between activists and loggers, where he climbs a tree and cuffs himself around its trunk. After the police cut off his trousers and spray his groin repeatedly with pepper spray, Doug ends up ‘dangling from the cuffs’ (274), is carried down ‘like Jesus from the cross’ (275), and imprisoned. In this symbolic emasculation, the former planter of industrial seeds attempts to take upon himself the sacrificial role. Doug-as-repentant-humanity has become Doug-as-suffering-forest, but this allegorical action also fails when he is forcibly removed from the sacrifice zone he tries to personify.

Doug’s incapacity to act for either species highlights the allegorical impasse which divides the individual from the species in the Anthropocene. The many points at which the human characters apologise to or tie themselves up with trees constitute attempts at retying unravelling knots of ethical time. But the scale effects that defeat them lead them to experience a sharp fracture between themselves and their kind. While the trees in the novel continue to stand in allegorically for all trees, the human characters must split from their own species, which has become the unraveller of knots. If ethical time is repaired at all by their actions, it is a problematic repair, deprived of the sequential temporality of human generations. The only character who has a child, Adam, is estranged from his son by the five-year-old’s determination to become a banker. And the only character who succeeds in tracing a path for reparative generation is the programmer, Neelay, whose ‘children’ are algorithms that rewrite life itself (493). In the final section of this chapter, I examine the importance of such metaleptic dynamics.

4.2 Trans-scalar Contaminations in The Swan Book

The Swan Book, like The Overstory, connects unravelling of knots of ethical time to the logic of sacrifice zones, but Wright’s focus on Aboriginal populations reminds us that the location of sacrifice zones is determined by racialised environmental injustice. In the United States, lower income brackets, African American communities, and Indigenous populations are over-represented in zones most affected by exposure to toxic chemicals. The implication is that ‘fenceline communities’, who live immediately adjacent to heavily polluting industries, are deemed less worthy of protection than whiter, richer populations.Footnote ²⁵ For Naomi Klein, such inequality before extractive practices and pollution is inherent to the ‘original Faustian pact of the industrial age: that the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto the other – the periphery abroad and inside our own nations’.Footnote ²⁶ This offloading is less and less feasible as the sacrifice zone expands. But Indigenous rights remain the most vulnerable in the face of sacrificial logic: examining Canadian policy, Klein suggests that each new government fails to uphold them because ‘Indigenous rights, as defined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, include the right to refuse extractive projects’.Footnote ²⁷ A similar argument can be made for Australia, where the lands of Aboriginal communities are directly affected not only by extractive practices but by a military history of nuclear testing and nuclear waste storage. This overlaying of pollutions is satirically portrayed by Alexis Wright’s best-known novel Carpentaria (2006), where fears of nuclear contamination and viral infection blend into each other.

Wright’s following novel, The Swan Book, expands these poetics of contamination in a vividly dystopian setting. Set in the twenty-second or twenty-third century, this future Australia bears the burden of twenty-first-century political rhetoric, including references to ‘Closing the Gap’ policies and climate change politics. The novel ironically reflects Australia’s reluctance to engage in fossil fuel reduction – a reluctance visible in the fact that the Kyoto protocol, signed by Australia in 1998, was only ratified in 2007. In a disrupted climate, where Mother Nature has become ‘Mother Catastrophe’ (6), the novel revolves around an Australian swamp filled with rusting wreckage which the Army has removed from the ocean and dumped overnight. What the Aboriginal people remember as a lake has been transformed into a swamp full of ‘rotting junk’ (11), cut off from the sea by multiplying sandstorms. The local community has fled and returned decades later, only to be told that their Native Title no longer exists. Fenced in and guarded by the Army, the swamp people are despised by neighbouring communities, who fear the ‘radioactivity running about in the air in that place […] that poisonous no good place’ (93–4), which is ironically referred to as Swan Lake after the arrival of black swans. Climate upheaval has turned the swans into ‘gypsies’ searching for water (16). Their arrival is a surprise in a place whose inhabitants are constantly ‘staring at persistent drought, or having an accidental bomb fall in your face on a regular basis from the Army, or your spiritual ancestors dug up by miners and turning spiteful on you’ (68). With dark humour, Wright’s swamp thus overlays several different types of sacrifice zone: sites exposed to radiation because of military testing and storage, as the Maralinga area was in the 1950s and 1960s; sites polluted by fossil fuel extraction; and sites filled with the detritus of the industrial world – what Val Plumwood calls ‘shadow places of the consumer self’.Footnote ²⁸

In the novel’s descriptions of the swamp, knots of ethical time are both mourned and travestied:

This passage witnesses the unravelling of knots of ethical time between birds and vegetation – an unravelling which also affects the ‘stories’ of Aboriginal ontology, in which animal and human subjects are interconnected with ancestral beings and with the law embodied as land.Footnote ²⁹ The lost knots are parodied by new-formed knots of plastic whose life will last for generations of birdlife, and whose presence ties the swamp to the deep time of fossil fuels necessary to produce it. One vast timescale – the birds’ lifestyle over centuries – is ruptured only to be superseded by another – the longevity of plastic. When Bella Donna, an exile ‘from one of those nationalities on Earth lost to climate change wars’ (23), looks at the water, she marvels ‘over the slicks of pollution – the strange panorama of toxic waste swimming on the surface of the water’ (58). Pollutants live on in the swamp, both visible and invisible, and the locals suspect the swans of being contaminated by radioactivity leaking from old military boats.

Wright’s swamp is a portrait of what Michelle Murphy calls alterlife, ‘the condition of being already co-constituted by material entanglements with water, chemicals, soil, atmospheres, microbes, and built environments, and also the condition of being open to ongoing becoming’.Footnote ³⁰ The alterlife described by The Swan Book extends across temporal and physical scales: it includes the dance of plastic and cellophane, and the ‘life’ of radioactive or toxic substances within living organisms. The pervasiveness of pollution and contamination in these poetics invites a trans-scalar ethical awareness, linking the macroscales of species and global climate to the molecular scale of toxicity. I will argue, however, that The Swan Book deliberately sabotages the idea of writing at species scale, through a narrative focus on endlings and a specific, scale-distorting poetics of contamination which I identify as miasmatic.

At first glance, allegorical readings seem to be encouraged by the novel’s focus on the strongly contrasted perspectives of two Aboriginal children: Oblivia, a victim of gang-rape rejected by the swamp community because of her ‘polluting story’ (95), and Warren, a member of another arm of the same Indigenous nation whose history of cooperation with the Australian government distinguishes them from the swamp people. Oblivia is the speechless survivor of a traumatic past, whose story implicitly connects the swamp to the controversial intervention, in 2007, of an Australian military taskforce to deal with child abuse in Aboriginal communities of the Northern territories.Footnote ³¹ Warren is brought up by the opportunistic Brolga people as the voice of the future, in ‘a mixed marriage of traditional and scientific knowledge’ (107), and eventually becomes President. Oblivia grows up as an outcast while Warren becomes the emblem of inclusive leadership: ‘[h]e was post-racial. Possibly even post-Indigenous. […] Internationally Warren’ (122–3). When he claims Oblivia as a promised bride, their union is a marriage of opposites. He travels around the world and builds his career on ‘the protection of the Earth and its peoples’ (127), but his politics epitomise a globalised environmentalism whose ethics are worn thin: as Adeline Johns-Putra points out, his constant movement makes Warren ‘a signifier of the sheer portability and hence hegemonic power of an environmentally and socially destructive imperialist ideology’.Footnote ³² As he drives away with his new bride, he orders the evacuation and bulldozing of the swamp. In the city, however, Oblivia continues to identify with the outcasts of the world, the displaced animals, birds, and humans roaming the land and the seas. While Warren seeks to wipe out the sacrifice zone, Oblivia perceives its ubiquity. In these two perspectives, two conceptions of space enter into conflict: a cartographic approach structuring space through boundaries, in which the sacrifice zone may be contained; and a negation of boundaries closer to Aboriginal conceptions, where land is not divided into discrete locations but rather structured by ‘identifying centers from which a space with uncertain or ambiguously defined limits stretches out’.Footnote ³³

Warren and Oblivia can be read to represent, allegorically, two attitudes that humanity may adopt in relation to other forms of life: on the one hand, an anthropocentric hierarchy; on the other, an acceptation of the shared condition of exposure and finitude that Anat Pick has theorised as the ‘creaturely’.Footnote ³⁴ These contrasted attitudes appear proleptically in the trans-scalar encounters described in the first chapters of the novel. In their childhood, both Oblivia and Warren separately encounter a black swan. Warren thinks he is seeing the embodiment of an angel-like woman that has flown through his dreams. Convinced that he must save it, he pursues the swan along the river until he reaches a floating levee of accumulated refuse, and leaps ‘straight onto the summit’ of this ‘inflammation’ of ‘sticks, branches, tree trunks, old tyres and broken down motorcars’ (114). Reaching to free the swan from a tangle of fishing line, Warren is almost killed by the floodwater that suddenly crashes through the pile: ‘The swan was drowning for Warren Finch, and all the boy saw were pictures of Aboriginal spirits with halos of light, just like Van Gogh had painted. The boy had not known what struck him. He had been so excited about the swan that he had not heard the river shouting behind him’ (114). This passage announces the short-sightedness of Warren’s politics. His brand of saviourism – an idealistic, cosmopolitan blend of Aboriginal law and Western science – is the target of Wright’s biting political satire throughout the novel. Warren does not understand the flood or see the dying swan: the scene is, in effect, a failed trans-scalar encounter. His focus on his own heroic action prevents him from understanding the true scale of the danger or perceiving that he is as vulnerable as the swan: he is blind to their shared, creaturely condition. As a concept, the creaturely invites a renewal of ethics through the perception of shared precarity: instead of projecting human traits onto animals, it acknowledges a shared condition that may be less than what we have conceived the human to be. As Herman has argued, this negation leads to the ‘need to rethink any politics or ethics grounded on the assumption that vulnerability can be quantified, and allocated in different measures to different kinds of beings’.Footnote ³⁵ Warren’s position at the summit of the refuse heap embodies a hierarchy in which man is at the top, able to measure the vulnerability of the others beneath. The boy who ‘grows on his dreams of looking down on the world’ (110) becomes an adult convinced of obvious hierarchies between life forms. While the swamp people are being evicted by the Army, Warren’s team of experts go to count owls’ nests in the desert and pride themselves on their ancestors’ killing of rats that has allowed desert owls to thrive. These hierarchies deny the exposure and entanglement inherent in the creaturely. As Pieter Vermeulen and Virginia Richter have emphasised, the adjectival form of the concept ‘names a condition of being exposed that cuts across the boundaries of the individual’, because ‘[c]reaturely life is always affected by others from which it cannot fully shelter itself’.Footnote ³⁶ Glimpsed in the flood where the saviour is swept away with the saved, that shared exposure is what Warren’s brand of idealism works against.

Oblivia, by contrast, seems to represent humanity’s acceptance of creaturely vulnerability and the possibility of retying ethical knots in trans-scalar encounters. Her first encounter with a black swan is a ‘paragon of anxious premonitions’ (14). Unlike Warren, Oblivia experiences a heightened exposure when the first of the migrating swans to arrive over the swamp singles her out: ‘The sight of the swan’s cold eye staring straight into hers, made the girl feel exposed, hunted and found, while all those who had suddenly stopped eating fish, watched this big black thing look straight at the only person that nobody had ever bothered having a close look at’ (14). The stare reverses expected positions, turning the human into the ‘hunted’ and the swan into the guide of human stares. Whereas Warren saw himself as the sole agent of his encounter, Oblivia is the passive object of the swan’s gaze. In her confusion, she nevertheless recognises the swan as a fellow exile ‘searching for its soul in her’, and hears the ‘music of migratory travelling cycles’ and ‘the winnowing wings from other swans coming from far away’ (15). Whereas Warren fails to hear the roar of the river, Oblivia hears the pattern of migrations through generations and perceives the broader geographical and temporal scales on which those patterns are disrupted. Hers is a truly trans-scalar encounter which reties a tentative ethical knot between displaced birds and displaced humans: the lonely swan announces the arrival of large flocks of black swans, closely followed by truckloads of Aboriginal people who will be parked in the swamp-turned-detention centre.

Allegory thus connects the displaced humans to the swans thrown off their habitual paths by climate change. Oblivia grows up feeding the cygnets that cluster round Bella Donna’s boat, and later rescues wounded swans in the back lanes of the city. She shares with the swans a ‘longing for what was and had been, […] the deep yearning of those left in limbo’ (264). The Swan Book does not disguise the ‘species ventriloquism’ at work here.Footnote ³⁷ Oblivia has grown up listening to Bella Donna telling stories about swans, and Wright’s prose overloads the birds with extraordinary symbolic density, summoning up many tales and myths, and overlaying different cultural perceptions. The novel makes each swan carry with it a world of swans, an allegorical propensity to represent many other stories. At night, the flock dreams a recital of names, ‘collecting all of the country’s swans’ (76). The slippage of scales between bird, flock, and species is strengthened by their united behaviour in the face of danger, for instance after Bella Donna’s death when the entire swan population forms a ‘massive flotilla’ and moves like ‘one living presence that shared the same vein of nervousness’ (76). Each swan appears to act for all swans, just as Oblivia would represent all the silent, displaced Aboriginal people, and Bella Donna all the boat people of the world. In this reading, the encounter would enable a realisation of creaturely vulnerability, on a global scale which negates species’ boundaries.

And yet, the novel’s poetics of extinction and contagion undermine any smooth zoom between the individual and the scale of global populations. The terms in which the first encounter is narrated break the link between individual and species: the swan’s fascination for the girl tears it away from the flock, ‘as if the strings had been broken’ (19). This rupture matches Oblivia’s exclusion from her Aboriginal nation because of her ‘polluting’ story, and enhances the novel’s focus on isolated survivors. Similarly, Bella Donna is the only surviving witness of the boat people she once travelled with. In the winter of her death, the swamp swans lay only a single egg. Eventually, Oblivia carries an abandoned swan all the way home to the dried-up swamp, and ends up living there, her mind ‘a lonely mansion for the stories of extinction’ (333). Sensing that the swan ‘was waiting for the equivalent of one thousand years, an immense flock, one that was capable of overcoming all adversity’ (332), Oblivia tells it to stop hoping. The novel’s final pages emphasise their shared status as sole survivors, inviting the reader to see them as endlings – the last remaining individuals of a species.

Although Oblivia certainly represents ‘the violation of Aboriginal country, people, and ontology’,Footnote ³⁸ and her adoption links her to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations, the healing political allegory of her marriage and transformation into the country’s First Lady is sapped by the novel’s endling rhetoric. Oblivia never recognises herself in Warren’s ‘TV wife’. By severing the ties that link the individual to the ‘thousand years’ of its flock, the novel foregrounds interruptions in the sequential pattern of generational time. Where The Overstory portrayed unravelling knots of ethical time, The Swan Book mourns their severance through the companionship of endlings. Towards the end of her travels, a tentative retying of knots appears in the form of an Aboriginal man named Half Life, who offers Oblivia the protection of his nomad people:

Here the poetics of contamination combine different sequential times, in the form of different bloodlines, within a multispecies nexus of parasitism. Even the leader’s name, which evokes the half-life by which the persistence of radioactivity or chemicals is measured, turns toxicity into a life form. But Oblivia does not remain with the nomads. She returns to the destroyed swamp, where she pursues her own endling existence.

The novel’s suspicion of species-scale rhetoric works against the reductive violence of the Anthropocene paradigm itself. As Klein and others have argued, referring to an ‘age of humans’ implies ‘that humans are a single type, that human nature can be essentialised to the traits that created this crisis’.Footnote ³⁹ Against this reductive view, which is embodied by Warren’s ‘post-racial’ view of humanity, Wright constructs characters whose identities derive from parasitic associations and contaminations rather than from species boundaries. Oblivia is a girl driven by the ‘virus’ of nostalgia ‘talking in her head’ (332), carrying a swan who carries the same virus. The novel’s onomastics insist on toxicity within: the half-life of toxins, or the poisonous belladonna – deadly nightshade – who produces the virus of nostalgia and names the abandoned girl Oblivion Ethylene. This name links Oblivia directly to hydrocarbons, but in a gaseous, invisible form. Through her, the extraction of fossil fuels lingers on, in ‘a girl best suited dead, instead of returning like a bad smell from the grave’ (21). Also nicknamed igni fatuus – the will-o’-the-wisp lights produced by the oxidation of gases over a swamp – Oblivia is literally the noxious fume of the swamp. She is, in other words, a miasma: a term for noxious emanations which in ancient Greek described ‘a contagious and dangerous pollution […] due to transgression of a supernatural sanction’, and particularly the disturbance of the dead.Footnote ⁴⁰ Anthropologist Michael Taussig has suggested that the Greek notion of miasma is comparable to the Freudian concept of ‘holy dread’ associated with taboo-breaking.Footnote ⁴¹ Some of this ‘miasmic abjection’, Taussig argues, subsists in the more recent uses of the term to describe emanations from marshland. When a swamp’s contents are disturbed, they emanate in the form of miasma: ‘[t]hrough death erupting from the marsh, congealed life in petrified objects is awakened’.Footnote ⁴² What Taussig refers to as the miasmatic process is thus a process of de-petrifaction. I find this terminology particularly efficient to track the contaminating relation between scales in The Swan Book: Oblivia, as miasma, is the emanation of a trauma that her community would prefer to forget, linked through her name to the extraction of hydrocarbons.

Miasmatic emanations trouble relations between scales because they bring the scale of deep time into unpredictable encounters with the present. That which had been turned to stone is disturbed and brought back to life. In The Swan Book, this miasmatic energy is ubiquitous. When Oblivia first crosses the desert in the company of Warren, the dried-up salt lake on which they camp is described as containing the ‘salt-encrusted bodies of millions of grasshoppers, shoals of tiny fish bones, brine shrimps, larval fish like splinters of glass’ (190–1). But Oblivia only dreams of dead swans ‘forcing their spirits through films of salt to reach her’ (191). Her dreaming is tied, through her name, to the fossil fuel civilisation that relies on the extraction of sedimented life: oil, after all, is itself an ‘energy made possible by eons of fossilized death’.Footnote ⁴³ That energy haunts the swamp, in the water that ‘gleamed with blue and purple oxidizing colours’ (58), and through the boys who gang-rape Oblivia while high on petrol fumes. Miasmatic emanations connect the swamp to all the other polluted spaces in the novel. In the city, a passing woman warns Oblivia: ‘The air is bad here girlie’ (235).

Whereas allegory connects scales through analogy, the novel’s miasmatic poetics contaminate scales through unpredictable emanations and pollutions. Even Warren’s presidential role as the embodied body politic of Australia is eventually undermined by miasma. After his assassination, the country loses itself in grief and fails to make plans to bury him. While the whole nation flocks to the coffin, the city is overwhelmed by rubbish and overflowing sewers. After a month of ‘continual efforts to embalm the body to prevent decay’ (292), the coffin is sent on a national tour guarded by armed soldiers wearing gas masks. At first its route is that of food deliveries to supermarket chains, in a truck that carries frozen food as well as the frozen body. But soon the driver decides to save time by cutting the deliveries, and the contents of the freezer begin to rot around the body. In this grotesque de-petrifaction, the miasmatic processes of the overused land are parodied by the thawing food that surrounds the corpse. These different images – sewage, teargas, and rotting food – suggest the stink of the decomposing political body and the generalised contagion of miasma. When the exasperated lorry driver finally buries him, Warren is reportedly incapable of staying in his grave because ‘[h]e wanted to give his promised wife some gift. Oh! Yes! He still had power of eating the brains of politicians’ (333). In his miasmatic form, Warren has the same effect as the petrol fumes that led to Oblivia’s first rape, but one that spreads out on a national and international scale.

In The Swan Book, emanations from the swamp link the molecular scale of ethylene to the global fossil fuel economy, and the stink of a forgotten rape to the bad smell of Australian politics. These miasmatic processes traverse scales, producing a scalar indeterminacy that undermines allegory’s potential for storytelling on the scale of species. Instead, Wright emphasises the energy of contamination, between different scales of life and different narrative levels: the miasmatic, in other words, is a fundamentally metaleptic dynamic.

4.3 The Smooth Zoom of Allegory and the Ontological Disturbance of Metalepsis

Allegory, as Herman proposes, can be viewed as a modelling form of storytelling that has the capacity to ‘open up new ways of connecting the meso-level world of everyday experience with macro-level distributions of traits and trajectories of change, including trajectories introduced or accelerated by anthropogenic impacts’.Footnote ⁴⁴ To a certain extent, both The Overstory and The Swan Book engage in this kind of narrative modelling. As my reading shows, however, both novels express unease towards figurative leaps between different scales. In the terminology of scale critique, these novels’ multi-scalar poetics are troubled by scale variance: the idea that ‘the observation and the operation of systems are subject to different constraints at different scales due to real discontinuities’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Woods opposes scale variance to the misleading ‘smooth zoom aesthetics’ of tools such as Google Earth.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is the smooth zoom, in this analysis, that produces the mistaken assumption that humans are the subject of the Anthropocene, because amplifying the human subject too smoothly across scales masks the complexity of species-scale agency behind a magnified human subject.

The failed magnification of the human subject is precisely what undermines allegorical narrative in The Overstory and The Swan Book. In The Overstory, human characters do not recognise themselves in their species’ crimes. Writing down memories of his activism, Doug considers them a ‘Manifesto of Failure’, but his impassioned attempts to compose ‘the story of how he became a traitor to his species’ (385) leave the reader uncertain as to which species – humans or trees – Doug thinks he has betrayed. In The Swan Book, the trans-scalar poetics of parasitism and miasma undermine the smooth change of scale that would lead from individuals to species. Where Powers locates the quandary of Anthropocene awareness in the individual’s sense of alienation from humanity’s ecocidal tendencies, Wright highlights the epistemic violence of the Anthropocene’s essentialisation of humanity into a single figure, which obfuscates sacrificed zones and populations.

In the trans-scalar ethics explored by these novels, the smooth zoom from individual to species is problematic because it disguises a qualitative leap as a quantitative calculation. In The Swan Book, the ethical limitations of species-scale calculations are parodied by the three environmental scientists who accompany Warren to the swamp, recording information on their pocket-sized computers. While the Army tears apart the swamp community, Warren’s team enthusiastically slaughters desert rats and engages in minute measurements of snakes and birdlife: just as they have roamed the streets of the detention centre, ‘checking out the despair, mentally adding up the figures and checking it twice’ (115), they check each owl’s nest, and each egg is ‘examined for number and weight, […] held up like a diamond against the sun’ (180). In The Overstory, the difficulty of calculating effects on the scale of species is particularly visible in the passages exploring legal approaches to deforestation. When a judge ‘asks for numbers’ (283), Patricia opposes a qualitative ethics to the quantifications he requires: ‘if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can’t even measure, then be patient and let the forest grow slowly’ (284). Although the judge agrees, and suspends the cut and timber sales of public land, the opposing expert witness points out to Patricia that her local win is a planetary loss: the resulting costs for timber firms will only make every firm with private land or existing rights accelerate their cutting elsewhere. The judge’s ruling in The Overstory, like the scientists’ approach in The Swan Book, is grounded in smooth zoom, the premise that local measurement can tackle mechanisms at the scale of planet and species – that doing the maths is all it takes to determine the right path. But Powers’s characters in particular are repeatedly confronted with the failure of metricity. Individual choice and species-scale choice are incommensurable, not only because the subject of the Anthropocene is more than human but because the forest’s multi-scalar entanglement of life is not easily scalable, in contrast to the plantation’s. As a result, The Overstory remains torn between two conceptions of ethical relations across scales: on the one hand, the idea that the right choice is what makes sense when we zoom out to think at species scale; on the other, the acknowledgement that trans-scalar ethics defy calculation.

Powers repeatedly describes the encounter with the other species, or with the self as species, as a frame-breaking event. The action of framing is problematised in the first section by Nick’s family’s photographs of the chestnut tree, where ‘everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame’ (16). In their formative years, many of the human characters experience a revelatory moment that breaks through their frames of thought. For Mimi, this moment occurs when she reads Edwin A. Abbott’s novel Flatland and ‘reaches the part where the narrator, A. Square, gets lifted out of his plane into the expanses of Spaceland’ (39). For Doug, the extent of clear-cutting is revealed in theatrical terms, when he suddenly sees through the ‘curtain’ or ‘scrim’ of remaining forest (87) along an American road. The stage metaphor is also key to Ray’s metaleptic moment, when he acts the part of a walking tree in Macbeth and feels ‘[s]omething heavy, huge, and slow, coming from far outside’ (66), although he ‘can’t read the text on his banner […] written by a thing with five hundred million root tips’ (67). These revelations describe the moment of encounter as a movement of lifting or rising to a different level, and as a passage beyond a boundary. When Olivia electrocutes herself, ‘dead for a minute and ten seconds’, she feels herself passing through a tunnel into a clearing, where ‘presences […] let her look through’ (158). When Neelay suddenly notices the extraordinary trees lining a courtyard in Stanford University, he feels he has performed a ‘hyper-jump’ and come face to face with a ‘living hallucination from a nearby star system at the other end of a wormhole in space’ (109). In all these descriptions, the encounter with another scale of life is presented as a shift from inside to outside the frame, or from a lower to a higher level: it is, in other words, a metaleptic move.

These dynamics present species-scale agency as inherently metaleptic. The novel’s many textual metaphors describe human action as part of a larger story of which humans are not the sole authors. For Nick, ‘green has a plan that will make the age of mammals seem like a minor detour’ (292); for Adam, they have been ‘used by life’ (495). Metanarrative terms like those of the book’s title give those moments of disempowerment a metaleptic energy. Trees write the ‘text’ on Ray’s banner, just as they have ‘written all over’ Patricia’s father (119). Through the beings of light that speak to her, Olivia glimpses ‘a story so old and large she can’t wrap her head around it’ (178), and tells Nick she has ‘been assured this story has a good ending’ (293). In the typology established by Michelle Ryan, the glimpsing of messages and signals sent by trees to humans can be considered a form of rhetorical metalepsis, in which an illocutionary boundary is crossed by a temporary address, but these glimpses gradually build up into ontological metalepsis, which ‘opens a passage between levels that results in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination’.Footnote ⁴⁷ This ontological contamination is highlighted by the appropriately named Neelay Mehta. In his game Sempervirens, named after evergreens, players must solve the environmental crisis of a planet whose feedback loops are identical to those of Earth. Neelay’s games get closer and closer to reality, until he turns his programming powers to the creation of algorithms that will learn ‘what life wants from humans’ (489). The convergence of his game-worlds with the novel’s main story-world produces recursive metalepses: ‘violations of the “boundary” between the domains of the signifier/signified that exchange the domains involved – or fundamentally deny their hierarchical and logical relation’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Over the course of the novel, metalepsis thus progresses from occasional glitches to a generalised state of ontological instability, where the human subject is destructured by recursive loops across scales.

What my reading of The Overstory suggests is that metalepsis, because it creates a disjunctive connection between different narrative levels, can connect different narrated scales with a jolt that is quite different from the smooth zoom of allegory, and that this jolt has an ontological and ethical potential that allegory lacks. I agree with Paul Saint-Amour’s suggestion that ecological grief is ‘intrinsically metaleptic’ because the current ecological crisis ‘threatens to affect earth’s whole biosphere while at the same time registering the radical limits of our ability to model that totality’, and therefore the limits of realist narrative’s ability to model the planetary.Footnote ⁴⁹ But where Saint-Amour describes metalepsis as a narrative form which ‘shatters the habitual frames of grief, unboxing and ontologizing a mourning that can no longer be imagined as stadial or terminable’,Footnote ⁵⁰ I view it as a more enabling ethical tool. I find that The Overstory’s metalepses do not ‘unbox’ so much as highlight the existence of frames. Following Genette, for whom metaleptic games ‘demonstrate the importance of the boundary they […] overstep’,Footnote ⁵¹ many narratologists have emphasised that metalepsis depends on a boundary between distinct narrative levels or worlds. This is a crucial point for my argument because it means that metalepsis can work against the smooth zoom of allegory precisely by drawing attention to boundaries between different levels. The meso-scale of a character’s behaviour does not morph smoothly into the macro-scale of species; only transgressive moments, enabled by a near-death experience or a sudden vision of ‘aliens’, allow a character to glimpse another narrative level and scale. And that is precisely the value of metaleptic dynamics for trans-scalar ethics: because frame-breaking aesthetics register the shock of disjunction between different scales of life, they throw into relief the need for an ethical relation.

Whereas The Overstory employs metalepsis as a transgressive leap across frames and boundaries, The Swan Book develops the kind of diffuse metalepsis that narratologists describe as a contamination between story levels, or worlds.Footnote ⁵² Ryan uses this term to describe the effect of repeated ontological metalepsis. The contamination metaphor is particularly apt to capture The Swan Book’s imaginary of toxicity and virality. The third-person narration that composes most of the novel is a dense overlaying of different narrative threads and textures. The first chapter describes climate upheaval as a time when ‘people walked in the imagination of doomsayers and talked the language of extinction’ (6). These stories of extinction are juxtaposed with the stories that make up Aboriginal law and land, as well as all the songs and tales that Oblivia hears from Bella Donna and her friend the Harbour Master, about love, swans, running girls, and trees. The environment as perceived by Oblivia thus brings together story-worlds from around the globe, in which foreign stories have become tangled up with the Aboriginal narrative weave of ‘Country that had a serious Law story for every place’ (191). Boundaries between story-worlds barely exist: the swan stories blend into each other, until Bella Donna no longer distinguishes between the white swans of her memories and the black swans of the present. Listening to the old woman’s tales, Oblivia thinks a ‘plop’ she hears outside is ‘a fact that had slipped from her hypothetical love stories’ into the water of the swamp (46). At night, the ‘swamp music’ continues ‘telling the old woman’s love story through the girl’s dreams’ (46). These ‘slips’ between worlds extend beyond Oblivia’s dreams into her daily life: after she leaves the swamp, the ghosts of Bella Donna and the Harbour Master accompany her with endless storytelling, political analysis, advice, and scolding. As the main focaliser of the novel, Oblivia’s character enables a permeability of story-worlds – a form of horizontal metalepsis which she herself construes as a contamination.

In the opening pages, Oblivia is introduced as a recursive narrative persona. The novel’s ‘prelude’, which is subtitled ‘Ignis Fatuus’, is the only chapter narrated in the first person by Oblivia. This prelude describes the complex oikos of her brain: ‘Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut snake virus in its doll’s house. […] Inside the doll’s house the virus manufactures really dangerous ideas as arsenal, and if it sees a white flag unfurling, it fires missiles from a bazooka through the window into the flat, space, field or whatever else you want to call life’ (1). This opening image spatialises a postcolonial, post-traumatic consciousness as a nested landscape. The virus, Oblivia explains, has been identified by doctors: ‘it was just one of those poor lost assimilated spirits that thought about things that had originated somewhere else on the planet and got bogged in my brain. Just like assimilation of the grog or flagon […] The virus was nostalgia for foreign things, they said, or what the French say, nostalgie de la boue’ (3). Playing on the different meanings of the word ‘spirits’, Wright overlays the Aboriginal conception of a landscape inhabited by spirits with the intoxication of alcohol. The plague of colonial alienation is figured by swamp-like images: a ‘bogged’ spirit and a ‘nostalgia for mud’ – a French phrase originating in Emile Augier’s Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855), where it described the suffering of a duck unable to live with swans. Through these images of bog and mud, the virus is linked to the miasmatic emanations of the swamp. Oblivia resists by expanding her inner ‘homelands’, surrounding the virus with ‘mountainous foreign countries that dwarf the plains’ and ‘deserts where a million thirsty people have travelled’ (4). Her struggle for sovereignty over her brain takes the form of arguments with the virus, in which she tries to tempt it out into the world she has created: ‘I lie in the brochures that I send the virus,’ she explains, ‘saying I must come and visit, saying that I have blood ties in homelands to die for in the continents across the world of my imagination’ (4). But the virus remains ‘hidden somewhere in its own crowded globe’ in her head (4). These competing worlds form a recursive metalepsis reminiscent of M. C. Escher’s paradoxical Drawing Hands, in which two hands draw each other into existence. The landscape of Oblivia’s brain follows a Möbius loop where the self is simultaneously a writer, a protagonist, and a narrative environment. The title of the prelude seems to refer to the virus as a deluding spirit, but the first chapter switches tack, addressing Oblivia with the same term: ‘Ignis Fatuus – Foolish Fire. That’s you Oblivion!’ (7). This address permutates the narrator (Oblivia) and the character (the virus) of the prelude, as well as addressing the character of the first chapter (Oblivia) as if she were the reader.

These recursive, viral poetics construe competing narratives as embedded worlds with troubling ontological effects. In one of the novel’s central chapters, Warren takes Oblivia to the home of a white family he has lived with in the past. Inside the house, Oblivia follows a cat to a room partitioned into alcoves ‘that replicated in miniature scale nostalgic wintertime memories of foreign countries’ (217). Much like Alice, who follows the white rabbit and experiences a scale-changing experience in Wonderland, Oblivia finds a world she can shrink into. Like her virus, the scenes embody colonial nostalgia, and the ghost of Bella Donna immediately starts ‘walking among Christmas valleys’ and takes Oblivia with her, searching for swans in the miniature scenery. But the cat urges Oblivia along, advising her to not ‘get sucked into other people’s worlds’, where she sees ‘no miniature black girl such as herself in any of these depictions of humanity, no swamp world of people quarrelling over food’ (219). Oblivia’s position alternates between reader and character of these Christmas stories, and the depiction of competing histories as competing ‘worlds’ lends the metaleptic dynamic of the passage a strong ontological dimension. As a subject, Oblivia is negated by these representations at species scale, ‘depictions of humanity’ that leave out the sacrifice zone and the black girl. Like the synecdoches I analysed in Chapter 3, metalepsis has a critical function here, in the sense defined by Judith Butler: ontological metalepsis articulates a moment of epistemological destabilisation as a crisis of the subject.

Jean-Michel Ganteau observes that certain climate change fictions rework the Renaissance idea of the great chain of being – the scala naturae or stable ladder where parallels and correspondences connect living beings on each rung – into a flattened system of ‘warped correspondences’ where the scale of planet and of climate change may suddenly become visible in the smallest detail.Footnote ⁵³ The Swan Book participates in these poetics of warped correspondences through the miasmatic energy of metaleptic loops, where narrative agency is always already contaminated: the self is made of nested histories, and these histories are toxic agents that refuse to remain embedded. The nomad Half Life tells Oblivia that ‘[w]e are retarded people now because of the history of retardation policy mucking everyone up. Leaking radioactivity’ (315–16). These loops of literal and figurative toxicity signal the recursive nature of subject-construction in the face of anthropogenic extinction and pollution, where the subject is written/contaminated by an environment it cannot help writing/contaminating.

Where Powers uses the trope of under- and over-stories to figure life as a multilayered narrative with many nonhuman authors, Wright’s poetics construe ecocentric identity as a series of embedded, mutually contaminating story-worlds.Footnote ⁵⁴ Those different narrative levels and story-worlds resist the smooth zoom of allegory, but are connected instead by tropes that traverse scales: viral, nuclear, and miasmatic contaminations in The Swan Book; living networks in The Overstory. In the end, The Swan Book resists allegorical scalability more relentlessly than The Overstory. Wright’s ironic treatment of the symbolism invested in swans reminds the reader that trans-scalar encounters can be ‘a form of colonial capture, the imprinting of the dynamics of a socially engineered human scale onto another’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The epilogue of The Swan Book leaves the reader with the image of a single swan and a lonely girl, ‘sick of the virus thing talking in her head, and telling her that she and the swan were joined as companions’ (332). Through these endling figures, the Möbius loop of contaminated agency resists expansion to the scale of flock or species. The closing section of The Overstory, by contrast, reinstates a form of smooth zoom in the algorithms that Neelay sets loose, which will ‘learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things’ (496). In the final paragraphs, these learners read the word STILL that Nick forms out of dead trunks, thanks to satellites taking pictures from orbit: this word, which ‘life has been saying, since the beginning’ (502), enters the feedback dynamics of life understanding itself. Whereas Powers ultimately reverts to zoom aesthetics in this trans-scalar reconciliation of life forms, Wright prefers the Escher-like puzzle of a contaminated, toxic nature, where there is no zoom that would lead from swamp to world, or from swan to life itself.

Like the synecdoches analysed in Chapter 3, the metaleptic dynamics I have presented here are critical forms that highlight the ‘tear in the fabric of our epistemological web’ produced by anthropogenic planetary change, and particularly by the sixth mass extinction.Footnote ⁵⁶ Writing trans-scalar encounters as metalepses foregrounds both the ontological difficulty for the human individual in identifying with the subject of the Anthropocene and the ethical frame-breaking required to respond to other scales of life. In Chapter 5, I continue to examine metalepsis as ontological destabilisation, in novels which locate trans-scalar encounters within the body.