부산대학교 도서관

As our planetary house burns down, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise – a demented state of affairs normalized partly by the ways we (don’t) talk about it. Ecocidal business as usual, that is, is normalized by discursive business as usual, the ways those in power talk about climate amounting, in Greta Thunberg’s acute analysis, to “30 years of blah, blah, blah.” What would it mean to repudiate that discursive business as usual? I read Peter Dimock’s recent novel, Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson (2021), as an important exploration of that urgent, overwhelming question, an exploration, I suggest, with important implications for how the category of “climate fiction” is defined in the first place. Recognizing that the “untold violence of a failing empire’s exterminatory exploitation of Earth’s limited resources” has produced a present in which “language itself becomes a casualty” (149), the book stages both the necessarily dumbfounding result of refusing the language of empire and the necessarily strange and estranging work of trying nonetheless to “speak without compromise from the ground of that refusal.” In this, it works to speak beyond blah blah blah.