Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2 ]
virgin,” or comparing David’s coal obsessions all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see.
with those of Paul, the coal miner’s son in . . . ‘Well now,’” he mimicked, “‘I don’t know—
D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. We might maybe we shouldn’t get gas in that station. I
juxtapose Charles Dickens’s tallow-burning read recently in National Petroffious Petro-
leum News that this kind of gas has a great
characters with Shakespeare’s, or connect the
deal of O-O ctane gook in it and someone
dots between the fuels used for cooking and
once told me it even had semi-official high-
warmth in The Odyssey and in Gabriel García
frequency cock in it, and I don’t know, well I
Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. just don’t feel like it anyway . . .’ Man, you dig
I first became interested in literature’s all this.” He was poking me furiously in the
relation to energy when, piqued by America’s ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best.
energy extravagance, I picked up Jack Ker- (209; 3rd ellipsis in orig.)
ouac’s On the Road and wondered, how of-
ten do Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise stop Moriarty isn’t worried about the price of oil
for gas? As they criss-cross the country, do (or its Saudi and Venezuelan sources—a prob-
they worry about how much fuel they’re us- lem for American business in the 1950s) or his
ing or the price of oil? Or is this is a question own fuel dependency, but is Kerouac? Is there
for the twenty-first century, for a nation that an energy unconscious at work in this text?
survived the Arab oil embargo and the BP oil Paradise starts his trip in the midst of the un-
spill and may not survive global warming? By known and unsaid. He travels in the wrong
1950 America’s appetite for oil surpassed its direction (northeast) and stalls, “crying and
use of coal. By the 1970s America was con- swearing and socking myself on the head,” in
suming seventy percent of the world’s oil with “an abandoned cute English-style filling sta-
little thought about sustainability. In an era tion,” where he curses and cries “for Chicago”
of unprecedented material abundance, why (12–13). Are the gas station’s empty pumps a
should Paradise, Moriarty, or a host of other premonitory metaphor for resource anxiety,
car-mad heroes worry about gas? It seemed for what Pierre Macherey calls “that absence
as naturally there, as American, as the apple around which a real complexity is knit” (101)?
pie and ice cream Paradise eats “all the way Or is an empty gas station just an empty gas
across the country” (49). On the Road’s char- station—the halted traveler’s bad luck, the
acters rarely experience the material world writer’s reality effect? In Macherey’s theory of
as an impediment. For Paradise even cotton absences, “[w]hat is important in the work is
picking becomes a lark. After allowing Mexi- what it does not say. . . . What the work cannot
can American friends to finish his picking, say is important, because there the elaboration
Paradise feels “like a million dollars; I was ad- of the arguments is acted out in a sort of jour-
venturing in the crazy American night” (100). ney to silence” (87). But is this always true?
Even though Paradise avoids material Certainly Kerouac’s characters are gas
worries, On the Road is fascinated with clean aholics. Oil dependency created their world;
raw materials and their transformation into each city, suburb, truck stop, and bite of pie
dirty culture (“before me was the great raw depends on Standard Oil, Shell, Mobilgas, or
bulge and bulk of my American continent; Phillips 66. What happens if we rechart literary
somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New periods and make energy sources a matter of
York was throwing up its cloud of dust and urgency to literary criticism? What happens if
brown steam” [79]). Energy anxiety keeps we think systematically about how On the Road
popping up. Hitching a ride east, Moriarty and its sibling texts relate to energy sources
rants about bourgeois drivers obsessed with across time and space? Within the genre of the
1950s road narrative, what does it mean that our reading. Let me chart some coordinates for
John Updike’s Mrs. Maple gets excited when a an energy-driven literary theory. First, resource
muscular gas station attendant rocks her car as depletion is not new; it’s a repetitive fact. Native
he washes its windows (56)? What about Eliza- Americans living in woodland regions moved
beth Bishop’s “The Moose” and its antipastoral entire villages whenever nearby forest stocks
reminder that in the twentieth century sacred were depleted. A Jewish holiday is built around
sight must be carbon-based? an oil shortage and its miraculous cessation.
Second, energy sources have varied wildly
by craning backward, over time and space and include almost any-
the moose can be seen
thing that burns: palm oil, cow dung, random
on the moonlit macadam;
then there’s a dim
animal carcasses mounted on sticks. When
smell of moose, an acrid the biblical God declared, “Let there be light,”
smell of gasoline. (173) was oil from fish stocks or olives the source
of illumination?
We need to contemplate literature’s relation Third, energy use is uneven. The age of
to the raucous, invisible, energy-producing at- coal is not close to being over, is perhaps barely
oms that generate world economies and motor begun (fig. 1). Looking at the “ages” of energy
United States
Russia
China
Australia
India
South Africa
Colombia
Indonesia
interact. Describing China’s burgeoning econ- energy use between 1775 and 2009. Should we
omy, Clifford Krauss writes that look at each of these systems when we exam-
ine the culture they helped to produce?
China’s thirst for energy is leading it to build Fourth, thinking about literature through
not only coal-f ired power plants, but also the lens of energy, especially the fuel basis
wind farms, at a record pace, and to invest of economies, means getting serious about
in energy sources around the world, like oil
modes of production as a force field for cul-
fields in Sudan, hydroelectric power in Burma
ture.1 The stolen electricity at the beginning
and natural gas fields in south Texas. Beijing’s
ability to lift hundreds of millions of people of Invisible Man, the marching firewood in
into the middle class over the coming years Macbeth, the smog in Bleak House, the ma-
will be largely based on its ability to produce nure fires in Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths,
more energy, and its foreign policies can also the gargantuan windmills in Don Quixote
be expected to follow its energy interests. . . . would join a new repertoire of analysis ener-
45
40
35
Petroleum
30
Quadrillion BTUs
25
Natural Gas
20
15 Coal
10
Nuclear Electric Power
5 Hydroelectric
Power
Biomass (Wood, Waste, Ethanol, Etc.)
0
1775 1785 1795 1805 1815 1825 1835 1845 1855 1865 1875 1885 1895 1905 1915 1925 1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985 1995 2005
Fig. 2
Consumption of energy by source in the United States, 1775–2009. “As for the social, economic, and ecological consequences of evolving energy
sources, they are too deep and numerous to do more than give suggestive examples. One of the most significant is the shift between muscle and
machine power. Horses, mules, and other draft animals were invaluable prime movers well into the first half of the 20th century, and despite
increasing reliance on fossil fuels and the engines they powered, the number of draft animals in the United States continued to rise until about
1920. As late as 1870, draft animals accounted for more than half of the total horsepower of all prime movers. Their displacement by fossil-fuel
engines meant, eventually, the disappearance from city and farm alike of millions of animals, along with the vast stables that housed the city-
based animals, the mountains of dung they left on city streets, and many of the English sparrows that fed on the grain therein” (US, Dept. of
Energy, Energy Information Administration; “United States Energy History”; Annual Energy Review 2009; US, Dept. of Energy, Energy Information
Administration, 19 Aug. 2010; Web; 8 Feb. 2011).
gized by class and resource conflict breaking the political unconscious also describe an en-
into visibility. ergy unconscious? Without reverting to crude
Fifth, this inquiry about energy’s visibil- materialism, I want to suggest that energy in-
ity or invisibility might change our reading visibilities may constitute different kinds of
methodologies. The Political Unconscious has erasures. Following Jameson, we might argue
long been a bible for me, with its elucidation of that the writer who treats fuel as a cultural
three extended networks for examining texts. code or reality effect makes a symbolic move,
Fredric Jameson suggests that if we first come asserts his or her class position in a system
upon the text as a symbolic act or individual of mythic abundance not available to the en-
parole, we must also recognize it as an ide- ergy worker who lives in carnal exhaustion.
ologeme or social utterance that reconstitutes But perhaps energy sources also enter texts as
class conflict, as well as an “ideology of form,” fields of force that have causalities outside (or
a dream catcher that captures skirmishing in addition to) class conflicts and commodity
sign systems “which are themselves traces or wars. The touch-a-switch-and-it’s-light magic
anticipations of modes of production.” These of electrical power, the anxiety engendered by
systems represent “progressively wider hori- atomic residue, the odor of coal pollution, the
zons” for examining the ways in which the viscous animality of whale oil, the technology
text enacts imaginary resolutions of real so- of chopping wood: each resource instantiates
cial contradictions (76). Does this model of a c hanging phenomenology that could re-
200
180
160
Thousands of Barrels (31½ Gallons Each)
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900
Fig. 3
Consumption of sperm and whale oils combined in the United States, 1860–1902 (US, Commission of Fish and Fisheries; Part 28:
Report of the Commissioner for the Year Ending June 30, 1902; Washington: GPO, 1904; 204; Google Books; Web; 8 Feb. 2011).
LAURIE SHANNON
Hamlet, performing his self-styled madman’s 10). Reeky tallow would be replaced by the
script, forces his auditors to remember a dis- oil later commandeered by the large-s cale
turbing truth that is normally repressed: “A whaling industry emerging in Massachusetts;
man may fish with the worm that hath eat of stumping in Eng land for the United States
a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that whaling trade in 1785, John Adams vaunted
worm” (Ham. 4.3.27–28). The logic of circula- “the fat of the spermaceti whale” as yielding
tion in the line recalls the Pythagorean doc- “the clearest and most beautiful flame of any
trine of the transmigration of souls, a view substance that is known in nature” (308). Un-
often mocked in early modernity as equiva- til then, though, tallow was a cheap, readily
lent to insanity.1 But Hamlet’s line traces no available staple, the yield of small-scale, pre-
flight by the soul from one body to another. modern practices of animal slaughter that
Instead, it joins a traditional Christian per- were local and integrated into daily life. Sheep
spective on worldly vanities (a fortune’s-wheel overwhelmingly supplied tallow in a wool-
argument) to an insistence on the equivalently producing economy. Contemporaneous liter-
gross materiality of all flesh, from worms to ary contexts, however, persistently defy the
kings and back again. The economy of circu- official confinement of tallow as something
lation here charts not the routes of individu- derived from “all creatures else.” The most in-
ated souls but rather the disindividuating teresting tallow yielders were people.
paths of recycled energy.2 “We fat all creatures In Shakespeare’s environs, the ideal deer
else to fat us,” his speech declaims, “and we fat to kill was one “in grease” or “in prime or
ourselves for maggots” (22–23). In Hamlet’s pride of grease” (“Grease, sb”). The well-fed
recycling vision, fat is fuel—yet fat is (also) us. state of the herd in As You Like It provokes
To manage the disturbance this view their designation as “fat and greasy citizens”
presents between denominators of political (2.1.55). Yet even as deer are measured by
or entitled personhood and the commercial their commodifiable fat, their free motion and
metrics of exchange, we designate as “tallow” rightful claim to Arden’s woods earn them a
only the byproduct of nonhumans—of Ham- name that countervails their commodifica-
let’s “all creatures else.” Tallow consists of tion: “citizens.” Thus, early modern animals
“animal fat (esp. that obtained from . . . about resist wholesale reduction to usable matter.
the kidneys of ruminating animals, now Equivocations like this one, however, also
chiefly the sheep and ox), separated by melt- work in reverse. Persistent recognition that
ing and clarifying from the membranes, etc., human matter is fat, oily, grease-laden, melt-
naturally mixed with it . . .” (“Tallow, sb”). able, combustible, and consumable erodes
While fat spoils when raw, once processed tallow’s separation of animal fat from human
as tallow it becomes storable and portable, flesh.
a product used to seal boats, make soaps, The Comedy of Errors assesses Nell in tal-
dress leather, bind foods (like haggis), and, of low metrics: “she’s the kitchen wench, and all
course, provide light through combustion.3 grease, and I know not what use to put her
Tallow candlelight ranked beneath that of to but to make a lamp of her . . . I warrant
wax, which was pricier; Cymbeline disparages her rags and the tallow in them will burn a
“the smoky light / That’s fed with stinking tal- Poland winter” (3.2.93–99). Falstaff affords
low,” calling it “base and illustrous” (1.6.109– repeated blurrings of personhood and oily
“rascals,” quibbles make Falstaff a “fat ras- combustible as “all creatures else.”
cal” (i.e., a plump Yorkshire tea cake); a “fat- The literary apotheosis of the body-
kidneyed rascal” (indexing the place from candle metaphor comes in Charles Dickens’s
which tallow was drawn); and an “oily rascal” Bleak House with Mr. Krook, who combusts
(Wiv. 2.2.5–6; 1H4 2.2.5, 2.4.521).4 In The (appropriately enough) in a mercantile set-
Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is a beached ting among the inscrutable commodities of
whale whose oil might be collected (2.1.61– his rag and bottle shop. Soot falls “like black
62); “a barrow of butcher’s offal” (3.5.5); and fat,” and a “stagnant, sickening oil” leaves a
“the fattest” stag “i’ the forest,” who might “dark greasy coating on the walls and ceil-
“piss his tallow” (expend his fat or energy) in ing”; Krook’s death by “Spontaneous Com-
the exertions of “rut-time” (5.5.12–15), as the bustion” is “engendered in the corrupted
uncongealed metaphors undermine his status humours of the vicious body itself” (316–20).
as subject. As Wendy Wall specifies, “[T]he In Bleak House, this event presents a “dread-
play deflates [Falstaff ’s] bodily pretensions ful mystery” for a coroner (323). Combusti-
by making him into manageable domestic bility is no longer a familiar trope reflecting
goods” (116–17). Seeking Falstaff, Prince Hal palpable knowledge of the human body’s
shouts, “Call in ribs, call in tallow,” and Fal- combustible stores of energy. From the whale
staff enters to vivid insults climaxing with oil that lubricated the machines of the Indus-
“whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch.”5 trial Revolution (retrieved by ships whose
A tallow-catch Falstaff is a container of journeys recast notions of space and time) to
commodifiable fat. When called “a candle, particle physics and nanoengineering (which
the better part burned out,” Falstaff con- recast space and time again), Western culture
firms himself a “wassail candle . . . all tallow” has transitioned to forms of energy whose
(2H4 1.2.155–58). Noting the contempt that origins are opaque to ordinary perception,
makes a lowly Ben Jonson character “an un- whose material workings are comprehended
savoury snuff” (i.e., “a tallow candle quickly only by specialists, and whose business opera-
burning itself out”), Gail Kern Paster exca- tions are shielded and securitized. One result
vates the humoral economies enabling the seems clear. Literally visceral knowledge of
conceit (222). The trope of the human body where energy comes from, or what energy is,
as a combustible candle also had prominent has been substantially extinguished.
elite precedents. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
(1563) recorded the Protestant Hugh Latim-
er’s proclamation from the stake: “We shall
this day light such a candle by God’s grace in
Eng land, as (I trust) shall never be put out” Notes
(154). Elizabeth herself (decorously adjusting 1. See the Pythagorean “sanity” test crazily adminis-
the metaphor to wax but preserving the logic) tered to Malvolio in Twelfth Night (4.2.49–59).
2. For the related cycle from “dust to dust” in Hamlet,
claims, “I have . . . been content to be a taper see De Grazia, ch. 2.
of true virgin wax, to waste myself and spend 3. The Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers, char-
my life that I might give light and comfort to tered in 1462, ranks just below the wax chandlers’ company
those that live under me” (347). Both of these in the livery system. The present-day tallow chandlers, ac-
self-expending candles are imagined to burn cording to their Web site, “have . . . built up close links with
energy company BP, on the basis of a shared interest in heat
for public benefit. The trope thus works both and light” (Worshipful Company; emphasis mine).
ways, representing prodigal waste and public 4. For deer nomenclatures and full discussion of “ras-
self-sacrifice, just as it reveals what official cal Falstaff,” see Berry, ch. 5.
5. 1H4 2.4.110–11, 225–26, amending Bevington’s Elizabeth I. “Final Speech before Parliament.” Collected
“keech” to the First Folio’s “catch.” Numerous modern Works. Ed. Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth
editions follow earlier amendments of “catch” to “keech,” Rose. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 346–51. Print.
or lump; “chest,” “ketch,” and “cask” are other alterna- Foxe, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives. Ed.
tives but seem unnecessary (Clark and Wright 277). John King. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
“Grease, sb.” Def. 1b. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd
ed. 1989. Print.
Works Cited Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the
Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Adams, John. “To Secretary Jay.” The Works of John Adams,
Print.
Second President of the United States. Ed. Charles Fran-
cis Adams. Vol. 8. Boston: Little, 1853. 302–10. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shake-
speare. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Longman,
Berry, Edward. Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and
Social Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. 1997. Print.
Clark, William George, and William Aldis Wright, eds. “Tallow, sb.” Def. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Vol. 4. ed. 1989. Print.
Cambridge: Macmillan, 1864. Print. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and
De Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cam- English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge:
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and The Worshipful Company of Tallow Chandlers. Worshipful
Evans, 1853. Print. Company of Tallow Chandlers, n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2010.
Wooden Slavery
VIN NARDIZZI
“There’s wood enough within.” Projected time of shortage in Eng land. This resonance
from offstage, this response to Prospero’s has fallen off our cultural radar because, un-
summoning launches The Tempest’s Cali- like Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
ban into literary history (1.2.315). Its em- most of us in the global North no longer live
phasis on adequacy indicates that the slave in the “age of wood.”2 Were we to substitute
has completed his work, and its disgruntled “oil” for “wood” in Caliban’s debut line, we
tone stems from this sense of closure and would more readily comprehend that the
suggests an insubordination later elaborated line evokes a necessary energy source and
in Caliban’s plan to murder Prospero and that the extraction and use of energy sources
burn his books. Such acts of defiance have can cause environmental devastation. I sug-
made Caliban, as Jonathan Goldberg says, gest that thoughts about supply, source, and
“a byword for anticolonial riposte” (ix). But price may also have crossed the minds of The
what of the wood mentioned in Caliban’s re- Tempest’s earliest audience members when
sponse? In pursuing this question, which may Caliban offers this accounting of the island’s
seem slight when weighed against the heft of energy security.
empire and resistance to it, we discover that The age of wood is, I trust, an epochal
Caliban keys us into the indispensability of designation unfamiliar to literary scholars.
wood as the primary energy source under- In environmental history, it names a swath
pinning subsistence and manufacture in the of time that stretches from prehistory to the
preindustrial era.1 Moreover, the response en- second half of the eighteenth century, when
codes a fantasy of plenty articulated during a coal generally replaced charcoal (an energy
piles of lumber that had been charred) in in- to demonstrate the transhistorical force that
dustrial iron making and fuelwood in homes, the forest has exerted on the imagination. My
where it heated food and consumer alike. sense, however, is that “wooden-a ge litera-
Sometimes dubbed the wooden age (Warde 6), ture” tends to represent spectacular employ-
this ligneous era bursts the strictures of tra- ments of this energy source, from the funeral
ditional nomenclature for Anglo-A merican pyres of ancient epic to public burnings of
literary periods, outstripping epochs ret- presumed heretics, and eschews its routine
rospectively parceled into temporal units uses in hearth and home. When these mun-
(the [long] eighteenth century) or labeled for dane practices come into view, special cir-
cultural movements (the Renaissance), mon- cumstances frame their inclusion. Robinson
archies (the age of Elizabeth), or position in Crusoe remarks that he “found it absolutely
relation to other periods (the Middle Ages necessary to provide a place to make fire in,
and early American). To better apprehend the and fewel to burn” (Defoe 80), but although
sweep of the age of wood, we could do worse he is a meticulous recorder of everyday life, we
than to reflect on the life span of two of the never see him search for either on the island.
planet’s most mature organisms: Methuse- Instead, he mentions these matters in connec-
lah, a bristlecone pine in California, and Old tion with other events: his illness (106, 108),
Tjikko, a Norway spruce in Sweden. Dendro- his firing of pottery and first baking of bread
chronological research has determined that (132–34), and his discovery of a cave (182–83).
these trees are roughly 4,800 and 9,550 years Are his energy sources, despite being “abso-
old, respectively (“Swedes”). They are colossal lutely necessary” to survival, paradoxically
measuring sticks for approximating the age of not significant enough for literary represen-
wood’s breathtaking temporal reach. tation? Are they too prosaic to be described
The counterpart of the era’s mind- in their own right? Undertaking a project for
boggling temporal coordinates is its geo- fuelwood and charcoal as sprawling as Har-
graphic range. In a discussion of colonial rison’s might prove well-nigh impossible.
Brazil, Shawn William Miller observes that Caliban’s debut line is no exception to
“prior to 1800 one had almost no place to go this representational rule. Yet it does not ex-
but the forest to obtain a practical source of haust the presence of wood in the play: Pros-
heat” (3). Case studies of wood dependency in pero tells Miranda that they “cannot miss”
other preindustrial locales—colonial America Caliban because he “does make our fire” and
(Perlin), Easter Island (Diamond), Eng land “[f]etch in our wood” (1.2.312–13); Caliban
(Nef), Germany (Warde), Japan (Totman), and throws down a bundle of wood at the start
the Venetian Republic (Appuhn)—and com- of one scene (2.2), and Ferdinand, the play’s
parative accounts that start with the despoil- mock slave, hauls a log onstage in the next
ing of woodlands in the ancient and the early (3.1). This log is a synecdoche for the “[s]ome
modern worlds bear witness to Miller’s thesis thousands” that he must “pile . . . up” (3.1.10).
(Richards; Williams). In so doing, both kinds Why might this energy source have such stage
of environmental history have helped to color prominence? It may well be, as There Will Be
in the map of a global forest that once was. Blood (2008) and Avatar (2009) suggest, that
Given the temporal and geographic mag- energy sources—oil and “unobtanium,” re-
nitude of the wooden age and the diverse spectively, in these films—rise to a level of
expertise that its study entails, how do we detailed representation during times of en-
bring into focus the grain of literatures dating ergy insecurity. My larger project regards
from this era? Robert Pogue Harrison offers Shakespeare’s wooden Os—his playhouses—
as uniquely self-reflexive spaces for meditat- progress, “Evergreen Fantasies: Shakespeare’s Theatre in
the Age of Wood.”
ing on wood: its expense, its indispensability,
its scarcity, and its centrality to dreaming. In
this framework, The Tempest proves an imag-
inative record of an unprecedented wood Works Cited
scarcity gripping Shakespeare’s England and Appuhn, Karl. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Exper-
a complex response to energy insecurity. tise in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 2009. Print.
Prices for this staple good were accelerat-
Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Twentieth Century Fox,
ing when The Tempest was first performed 2009. Film.
(Williams 170), and polemics describing an Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Angus Ross. Lon-
unremedied shortage predicted ecopolitical don: Penguin, 1985. Print.
collapse.3 In a pamphlet contemporaneous Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
with the play, Arthur Standish articulates the Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005. Print.
Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. Minne-
potential fallout: “no wood no Kingdome” (2). apolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.
How might audience members affected by the Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civiliza-
scarcity have apprehended the abundance of tion. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print.
wood on The Tempest’s island, which could Miller, Shawn William. Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Con-
be put to various uses (from heating to ship- servation and Brazil’s Colonial Timber. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2000. Print.
building), and the fact that Prospero ships off
Nef, J. U. The Rise of the British Coal Industry. 2 vols.
to Europe without any of it? The Tempest’s de- London: Archon, 1966. Print.
piction of “wooden slavery” (3.1.62) may thus Pearson, Chris. “‘The Age of Wood’: Fuel and Fighting in
have stoked colonialist desire for restocking a French Forests, 1940–1944.” Environmental History
depleted resource long before Caliban spoke 11 (2006): 775–803. Print.
Perlin, John. A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and
on behalf of anticolonial resistance. From
Civilization. Woodstock: Countryman, 2005. Print.
our vantage, it also emblematizes a historical Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environ-
tendency to take essential energy sources for mental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley:
granted and simultaneously to mobilize them U of California P, 2003. Print.
in the exercise of power, as Prospero does. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason
Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. 3rd Arden Ser. Lon-
don: Cengage Learning, 1999. 139–286. Print.
Standish, Arthur. The Commons Complaint. London,
1611. Print.
“Swedes Find ‘World’s Oldest Tree.’” BBC News. BBC
Notes News, 17 Apr. 2008. Web. 12 Sept. 2010.
1. In this epoch, wood was also a primary building There Will Be Blood. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Ghou-
material (Williams). lardi, 2008. Film.
2. Pearson shows that petroleum cars can be retrofit- Totman, Conrad. The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Prein-
ted to run on wood. Youngs argues that the age of wood dustrial Japan. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989. Print.
has not ended, and wood’s ubiquity as a source of energy Warde, Paul. Ecology, Economy and State Formation in
in so-c alled Third World nations bears this proposition Early Modern Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
out. The matter of “energy simultaneity” is outside the 2006. Print.
scope of this piece. Williams, Michael. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory
3. I elaborate the likely causes of this shortage and the to Global Crisis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.
proposed solutions to it, which included colonial planta- Youngs, Robert L. “Every Age, the Age of Wood.” Inter-
tions in Ireland and the New World, in my manuscript in disciplinary Science Reviews 7.3 (1982): 211–19. Print.
KEN HILTNER
On a foggy morning in 1578, “greved and As John Evelyn noted in 1661, by mid-
anoyed” by the strong smell of coal smoke century a variety of species of local plants in
in the air surrounding Buckingham Palace, London had already become extinct because
Queen Elizabeth refused to travel into Lon- of coal smoke and the resultant acid rain (7).
don (Lemon 612). The immediate problem Similarly, by 1627 it was realized that acid
was easily resolved: invoking an ordinance rain was “tainting the pastures, and poison-
regulating the large-s cale burning of coal, ing the very fish in the Thames” (Bruce 270).
which had been on the books since 1307, au- London’s signature fog exacerbated the situ-
thorities quickly arrested and imprisoned ation, since it held sulfur dioxide close to the
a local Westminster brewer and dyer. The ground in a damp and deadly cloud, which
larger issue, however, would not go away. The affected more than just living things. Late in
reason was simple: as Edmund Howes noted the 1620s, Charles I realized that “the corrod-
in 1615, because there was a “great scarcity of ing quality of the Coale Smoake, especially
wood throughout the whole kingdom, and in moist weather,” was eating away the sur-
not only the City of London, but in all haven- faces of even stone buildings, including, as he
towns” (Howes and Stow 33), coal use was noted, Saint Paul’s Cathedral (Dugdale 134).
skyrocketing throughout England. While we London’s air pollution problem appears
might imagine that air pollution from fossil
in Renaissance literature as well. Although
fuels would not become a major urban prob-
the first work to take urban air pollution as
lem until the era of Blake or Dickens, it pre-
its principal subject, Evelyn’s Fumifugium,
ceded them by at least two centuries. In fact,
did not appear until 1661, a great many ear-
the first chimney sweeper’s song was penned
lier (as well as contemporary) texts refer to
not by Blake but by William Strode, in 1635.
the issue, if often indirectly. London’s coal-
By the time Milton was writing Paradise
smoke problem is alluded to in such canoni-
Lost, the problem was massive and deadly.
cal works as The Faerie Queene and Paradise
While collecting data for London’s Bills of
Mortality in 1665, John Graunt noticed a Lost, as well as in enormously popular poems
spike in London’s death rate when compared of the time, like John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill
with that of the countryside, which he quickly (Hiltner, What, ch. 5). Moreover, a range of
connected to respiratory illness caused by writers in the period, including Margaret
coal smoke. As he succinctly noted, people Cavendish and Kenelm Digby, considered
“cannot at all endure the smoak of London, the health risks of coal smoke, while the mas-
not only for its unpleasantness, but for the sive mining industry that procured all this
suffocations it causes” (394). Because Lon- coal appears in the writings of John Leland,
doners almost exclusively burned a noxious, John Taylor (“the water poet”), Celia Fiennes,
sulfurous form of coal known at the time as Milton, and many others. Even the choice of
“sea coal” and the population of the city was the word brimstone (which referred to sulfur
growing at an astonishing rate (perhaps as and coal) for the 1611 Authorized King James
much as tenfold from 1500 to 1700), Graunt translation of Hebrew and Greek words sig-
realized that respiratory illness caused by naling, respectively, “Jehovah’s breath” and
coal smoke was quickly becoming one of “divine incense” may have been because it
London’s leading causes of death. And the was thought that the most effective way to
danger was not limited to human beings. imagine hell was to allude to London’s hellish
air pollution. In countries where coal was not true that air pollution in nineteenth-century
used extensively, hell is rarely imagined with cities like Manchester (and Dickens’s ficti-
sulfurous air pollution. Dante’s Inferno, for tious “Coketown”) was largely industrial in
example, contains no such references. origin, industry is not the only possible source
When Milton writes about hell in Paradise of air pollution. The citizens of early modern
Lost, he invokes London’s air pollution prob- London caused it themselves by burning coal
lem in a variety of ways. First, he is critical of for cooking and residential heating, some-
the mining operation that the devils set up in thing that they had been doing for centuries
hell on a mountain that “[s]hon with a glossie before the Renaissance but now did almost
scurff ” (a sulphurous deposit) and “whose exclusively (since wood was largely unavail-
griesly top,” like a smokestack, “[b]elch’d fire able) and at a feverish rate. Because London’s
and rowling smoke” (1.674, 670–71), filling damp winters were associated with a range of
the air of hell with a sulfurous cloud. The air illnesses and a warm fire was believed to be
in Milton’s hell is so bad that when the devil among the best ways of fending them off, the
Beelzebub first learns of earth, he hopes trav- cheap appeal of coal proved irresistible. As I
eling there might “purge off this gloom” and have argued, this presented Londoners with
that earth’s “soft delicious air” might, for a dilemma. Knowing the health risks of the
those who “breathe her balm,” “heal the scar smoke but believing coal fires their best de-
of these corrosive fires” (2.400–02). True to fense against winter sicknesses, Londoners
Beelzebub’s speculation, when Satan first ar- kept a life grip on a practice that was killing
rives in Milton’s Eden he behaves like some- them (Hiltner, “Renaissance Literature”).
one from a “populous City” who has ventured Renaissance London’s air pollution may
to the countryside to freely “breathe / among also escape our attention because Eng lish
the pleasant Villages and Farmes” (4.445–48). writers were sometimes reluctant to confront
In setting up the description in this way, Mil- the issue directly, for fear of maligning their
ton nicely draws a parallel between hell and a capital city, which, some of them argued,
“populous City,” like London, whose air is so was quickly becoming the rival of Paris and
polluted that its citizens desire to leave it to Rome, neither of which had comparably pol-
breathe pure country air. The desire to leave luted air. Some went so far as to outlandishly
the smell and dangers of coal smoke to enjoy misrepresent the facts (even if they deceived
the fresh air of the countryside was not limited no one who had ever visited London, even
to Milton’s Satan and Queen Elizabeth; rather, today), as did Thomas Gainsford in 1618: “in-
as John Stow made clear in 1598, it was felt stead of foggy mists and clouds . . . you have
by thousand of Londoners, who, on holidays in London a sun-shining and serene element
and at other opportunities, would leave their for the most part” (qtd. in Manley 44).
homes to “recreate and refresh their dulled As ecocritics and historians are increas-
spirits in the sweete and wholesome ayre” of ingly making clear, a range of truly modern
the rural surrounds (127). environmental issues, such as large-scale ur-
Since so many Renaissance writers, in- ban air pollution from the burning of fossil
cluding Milton, mentioned the issue, it is fuels, first emerged in the early modern pe-
useful to ask why literary critics today are of- riod. With these problems came a number
ten unaware of early modern London’s coal- of questions that remain with us today. With
smoke problem. I suspect this is partly because respect to coal and to fossil fuels in general,
we tend to associate such environmental prob- the most important of these may be as rel-
lems with technological modernity and the evant now as it was then: how do we reduce
so-c alled Industrial Revolution. While it is our dependency on something that endangers
Blake not only because they set the stage for known as the big six Romantic poets, but that
the fully integrated, inescapably globalized formulation was never, for all kinds of rea-
world that we inherited from the 1790s but sons, very productive. We could just as easily
also because the transformations and dis- read Blake in a seventeenth-century context,
locations of human energy initiated in his in the company of antinomians and Ranters,
time have continued unabated into our own, or in a twentieth-century one, in the company
in ways that affect even the readers of this of futurists, vorticists, and anarchists. Liter-
journal. After all, the closest antecedents of arily, he is in many senses closer to T. S. Eliot
today’s academics and would-be academics or Wilfred Owen than to Charlotte Smith or
are arguably the English weavers of Blake’s John Keats; visually, he has far more in com-
time, whose training and skill meant noth- mon with Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch
ing in an age of steam-p owered machines than with Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua
yoked to de-skilled mechanics. The recently Reynolds (the president of the Royal Academy,
announced closure of several humanities de- whom he so ferociously despised); aurally, he
partments at the University at Albany, State is close, on the one hand, to Beethoven (an al-
University of New York; the elimination of most exact contemporary) and, on the other
the philosophy department at the University hand, to John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman,
of Middlesex; and the looming downsizing who ought, at face value, to have nothing to
of the humanities and social sciences in the do with him; philosophically, he is far closer
Eng lish university system are only the most to Benedict de Spinoza than to his contempo-
recent reminders that those contemplating raries Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; and
joining the ranks of the world’s last arti- politically he is the ally of Gerrard Winstan-
sans (specialized, more or less free to deter- ley rather than of Tom Paine. There is no real
mine their own hours and rhythms of work, way, given the traditional schema of literary
working in self-motivated or shifting cycles periods, to think through these kinds of re-
rather than according to an abstract insti- lations, even at the level of the literary, never
tutional schedule) must contend with the mind the visual and the aural.
continuing unraveling of a whole culture of The great theme running through Blake’s
academic teaching and research and its re- work is his engagement with the ontological
placement by a system of educational mass capacity of empire, its drive to organize time
production dependent on exploited tempo- and space and to situate human bodies in re-
rary and migrant laborers whose individual lation to them in order to most productively
skills and research interests are of little im- tap into and devour human energy—and,
portance to managers and administrators of course, he engages with the resistance to
(sixty-eight percent of university teaching that power, the refusal of those forms of or-
in the United States is now carried out by ganization, temporality, subjectivity, and, in-
transitory, non-tenure-t rack faculty mem- deed, history. Blake’s interest in what I have
bers [“Background Facts”]). elsewhere called “impossible history” has
Perhaps his radically destabilizing inter- precisely to do with his refusal to accede to
est in the ontological formation and deforma- the demands of the normative history deter-
tion of bodies, power, and human energy in mined by, and tied to, the ontological disposi-
relation to power is what makes it so difficult tions determined by power, and by the power
to locate Blake in the traditional schema of of global empire above all: the normative his-
literary periods, to which we have become too tory that structures and defines our under-
accustomed. It wasn’t until the 1950s that he standing of the past by framing it in terms
was drafted into the company that became of the conceptual and ideological categories
tence—the one we are confronted with today. tain, instead of being defined and contained
The struggle between powerful ontological by, literary studies), we ought, perhaps, to
dispositions of human energy and the con- start paying closer attention to what Giovanni
tinual resistance to them has been carried Arrighi identified as the long twentieth cen-
on from the fifteenth century to our time, tury—that is, the age of capital not merely as
though it intensified during the great trans- a world system but as a system that made the
formations that took place during Blake’s life- world recognizable as a world by globalizing
time. We need an alternative way of thinking it, largely in the pursuit of more and more effi-
through the history of the possible and the cient modes of devouring human energy, irre-
impossible, a different way of accessing the spective of the price paid by humanity. And in
past, and a different way of understanding that long, overarching period we will find and
our own temporality and historicity as well. connect together acts of resistance, works at
If I have focused on Blake in this con- odds with their times, and writers and artists
text, then, it is not because of my interest in who refused to go along with the triumphant
him on his own terms but rather for what his march of universal empire.
refusal of historical and periodizing norms Here, then, is a way to reconceptualize
teaches us about history and periodization literary history, in terms of the shifts and dis-
themselves. His work pushes us to consider locations of, and moments of resistance to, the
the processes of imperial investment in hu- extraction of human energy by global empire
man energy—rather than other modes of en- in the long twentieth century: a century that
ergy, from whale oil to nuclear power—and has outlasted its time and carried on into ours.
how those processes and their accompanying
forms of ontology and power (and, always,
the resistance to them) define and structure
history and periodization, including literary
history and periodization.
Works Cited
Blake’s example suggests the need to re- Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money,
Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso,
think the categories of literary (and other 1994. Print.
forms of) periodization in a way that can clar- “Background Facts on Contingent Faculty.” American
ify and bring to the surface the mystified im- Association of University Professors. Amer. Assn. of U
perial investment in human energy during the Professors, n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2011.
overarching transformation running from the Blake, William. The Four Zoas. The Complete Poetry and
Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New
fifteenth century to the twenty-f irst. For all York: Doubleday, 1988. 300–407. Print.
that we have heard of the long eighteenth cen- Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History
tury and the long nineteenth (formulations of the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.
Oil Spills
MICHAEL ZISER
Although coal and oil are chemically similar ing economic drivers. As a huge technological
and equally significant in the modernization leap, ubiquitous commodity, basis for new
of the West, their geologic and historical par- forms of wealth and power, and pervasive in-
ticularities have produced radically different frastructural context for cultural production,
meanings in culture and the arts. The mining oil is aesthetically and ideologically excessive.
of coal, which must be brought by brute force The earliest modern oil texts, like John J.
from seams buried far below the ground, McLaurin’s Sketches in Crude-O il (1896), a
epitomizes the zero degree of labor that so somewhat manic omnium-gatherum history
fascinated many nineteenth-c entury intel- of American oil exploration in the nineteenth
lectuals and underscores the ultimate depen- century, foreground the adventure of explora-
dence of even an advanced industrial society tion in a return to the mineral imperialism
on the input of human energy. Little wonder associated with earlier forms of resource co-
that many of the most profound depictions of lonialism. The film and television industries
physical labor (Émile Zola’s Germinal [1884], in particular have emphasized this dimen-
Baldomero Lilo’s Sub terra [1904]) and of the sion, regularly translating complex narra-
politicization of labor (Upton Sinclair’s King tives about the dawn of the oil age into more
Coal and The Coal War [1917, 1976], George conventional frontier dramas of primitive
Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier [1937], Da-
accumulation. George Stevens’s film adapta-
vid Peace’s GB84 [2004]) emerged from the
tion (1956) of Edna Ferber’s Giant (1952), for
pit. Oil, by contrast, is a liquid that in the
instance, preserves much of Ferber’s deeply
classic scenario flows to the surface almost of
researched detail concerning the transition
its own accord, gushing out in all directions
from a sun-based economy (cattle) to a fossil-
and proposing an entirely different relation
fuel one, but it also structures itself around
among labor, consumption, and the body.
the oil strike as a symbolic masculine pos-
Once struck, oil returns so much more energy
sessive climax in a way that belies Ferber’s
than is required to produce it that it becomes
an effectively costless substitute for human primary interest in complex side effects and
and animal labor. A “free gift of Nature to aftereffects. Likewise, Paul Thomas Ander-
capital” far exceeding what Marx (and other son’s brilliant film There Will Be Blood (2007)
nineteenth-century economists) thought it fixates on the ferocious exertion of the will
possible for a “raw material” to contribute to required to “bring in a well,” an emphasis
economic production, it would seem to justify largely absent from its source, Upton Sinclair’s
almost any degree of fetishization (745). At Oil! (1927). Sinclair’s novel is relatively unin-
present, oil dominates a fossil-f uel economy terested in the founding oilman; it focuses in-
that releases the energy equivalent of a quar- stead on the son, who represents the second,
ter sun to the earth every day, commanding inheriting generation of oil wealth. Sinclair
huge portions of the economic and political cannily saw that the greatest significance of oil
domain in the process. Oil fortunes, often lay not in the way it reiterated a classic pioneer
disconnected from the socializing constraints story but in the unexampled consequences of
that characterized older forms of labor-based the effortless wealth it brought: the chang-
wealth, likewise contribute to a new, looser ing landscapes created by the automobile and
set of possibilities governing the relation be- its necessary infrastructure; the tilt in sex-
tween the arts and literature and the subtend- ual mores that the car allowed, especially to
dressed in S-M leathers both husband and its problematic surpluses—economic, po-
squander diminishing supplies of gasoline. litical, environmental, sexual, aesthetic, and
Since the 1970s, the excessiveness of oil even religious—and to consider the human
has been associated not solely with wealth but effects of its eventual passing.
also with pollution and, most recently, cli-
mate change. As Gerry Canavan has begun
to document, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979,
together with the rising profile of the modern
environmental movement, helped inaugurate
Note
a new strain of dystopic futurism attested in I would like to thank the participants in my spring 2010
graduate seminar on petroc ultures, Will Elliott, Kelley
novels like Peter Brunner’s The Sheep Look Gove, Angie Lewandowski, Josef Nguyen, and George
Up (1973) and J. G. Ballard’s The High-Rise Thomas. They were the discoverers, producers, and refin-
(1975). Later novels, as well as recent docu- ers of many of the ideas outlined above.
mentaries and feature films, have taken up
this pessimistic vision of oil-induced apoca-
lypse under the specter of climate change and Works Cited
high-tech imperial warfare (Werner Herzog’s Canavan, Gerry. “The Sky’s the Limit: The 1970s vs. the Fu-
Lektionen der Finsternis [1992], Cormac Mc- ture.” Climate Change Culture I. Amer. Studies Assn.
Annual Meeting. San Antonio. 20 Nov. 2010. Address.
Carthy’s The Road [2006], and Reza Negares-
Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 3. New York: Intl., 1967. Print.
tani’s Cyclonopedia [2008], to name but a few
Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Politi-
of the best). All of these ask us to acknowl- cal Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Stud-
edge the connection between the oil age and ies 9.4 (2006): 449–64. Print.
continue to indulge in the fiction that energy novels, which seems not to be growing in size
surplus, an unrepeatable historical event, will despite the almost daily appearance of oil in
define daily life on into the future, without the news and its presence everywhere in our
major change or crisis. The fiction of surplus lives (as plastics, fertilizers, fuel for vehicles,
in which we subsist shapes not only the belief waste washed up on beaches, etc.).1
that there will always be plenty of energy to The dearth of oil in contemporary fiction
go around but also the complementary idea is not a structuring absence that haunts the
that easy access to energy plays (at best) a sec- whole of literature—an absence inescapably
ondary role in history by comparison with present through negation (standard tricks
human intellect and the adventure of prog- of the literary-c ritical trade won’t save us
ress; it is not just energy that constitutes a here). It seems to me that there is a simpler
limit but also our present understanding of and blunter explanation: instead of challeng-
its social role and significance. ing the fiction of surplus—as we might have
We expect literature to name the gov- hoped or expected—literature participates in
erning ideologies of an era, whether by an- it just as surely as every other social narrative
nouncing them in its narrative and formal in the contemporary era. Ever more narrative,
contradictions and antinomies or by attempt- ever more signification, ever more grasping
ing to puncture them (however incompletely) after social meaning: what literature shares
through formal innovation, subject matter, with the Enlightenment and capitalism is the
and so on. It is startling, then, to realize that implicit longing for the plus beyond what is.
our fiction of energy surplus appears to be so The fact that literature in the era of oil has
completely shielded from view as to be hardly little to do with oil doesn’t negate the value of
named in our literary fictions at all. A peri- energy periodization. On the contrary, one of
odization organized around energy assembles the most valuable functions of this schematic
literatures in new configurations: modernism, in our present moment—or, indeed, perhaps
for instance, either becomes a small subset of a even in the whole history of literature—is to
long period of oil literature (if we imagine this bring to light a foundational gap to which we
period as being kicked off by the “discovery” of have hitherto given little thought. This gap is
oil in the United States in 1859) or anticipates the apparent epistemic inability or unwill-
and participates in the birth of the hegemony ingness to name our energy ontologies, one
of oil (the decision by Winston Churchill, first consequence of which is the yawning space
lord of the admiralty, at the outset of World between belief and action, knowledge and
War I that the British naval fleet should be agency: we know where we stand with respect
powered by oil from the Middle East instead of to energy, but we do nothing about it. The
coal from Wales). Such a periodization fails to perverse outcome of the drama of individual
capture, however, the almost complete absence and collective maturity in which we have
of oil as subject matter (direct or allegorical) placed our hope since Kant is a perpetual
in the literature written during the era when present shaped by inaction and bad faith.
it is dominant. The exceptions are so few as This is where we find ourselves at the
to be notable, as Amitav Ghosh points out in present. What about literature and energy fu-
his landmark essay “Petrofiction.” Upton Sin- tures? If our primary interest in literature’s re-
clair’s Oil! (1927), Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities lation to energy lies in periodization, it makes
of Salt quintet (1984–89), Patrick Chamoi little sense to cast about for what might come
seau’s Texaco (1992), and Reza Negarestani’s after the present phase of oil literature. Af-
science fiction codex Cyclonopedia (2008) are ter all, how can one ever determine things to
come, especially with respect to literary style or the hologram or because it has been ren-
or form? Yet while predicting movements to dered secondary to the difficult task of staying
come or even national literatures to come alive. Contemplating energy futures prompts
might seem meaningless, prediction becomes us to reflect on what we desperately need in
oddly productive when one names literary our literary present: narratives that shake us
periods in relation to energy. We can’t help out of our faith in surplus (there will always
imagining that what come after oil are newly be more; things will always be better), not by
dominant forms of sustainable energy (wave, indulging in the pleasures of end times or fan-
wind, and solar power or more extensive uses tasies of overcoming energy limits but by trac-
of nuclear energy) or a fantastic new type we ing the brutal consequences of a future of slow
have, as yet, envisioned only in science fiction decline, of less energy for most and no energy
(the unobtanium of James Cameron’s Avatar). for some—a future that might well have less
In these futures, energy is clean, no longer a literature and so fewer resources for manag-
threat to the environment, and available in ing the consequences of our current fictions.
indefinite or even limitless quantities. Even
more important, the switch to it miraculously
does not threaten our way of life: we can con-
tinue to be who we are now. The possibility
that, say, a solar literature might take the
Note
place of oil literature would resolve the pres- 1. Peter Hitchcock’s “Slick: Geocultures of Oil in Fic-
tion” is a provocative and compelling analysis of petrofic-
ent gap between knowledge and action. In this
tion in film and literature.
hope, the promise of the future underwrites
and legitimizes the bad faith of the present.
What makes speculating about energy futures
productive is that it highlights all the more
Works Cited
powerfully the political fantasies in which lit- Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sam Worthington,
Sigourney Weaver, and Stephen Lang. Twentieth Cen-
erature currently indulges. tury Fox, 2009. Film.
What if after energy surplus comes defi- Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis
cit? How might literature respond to a future and Val Vinokurov. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.
of less rather than more? We can only specu- Fisker, Jacob Lund. “The Laws of Energy.” The Final En-
late, for even in the genre that deals with the ergy Crisis. Ed. Andrew McKillop, with Sheila New-
man. London: Pluto, 2005. 74–86. Print.
future—science fiction—there are strikingly Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction.” New Republic 2 Mar. 1992:
few examples of cultures of less. In much of 29–34. Print.
science fiction (e.g., the space opera), energy Hitchcock, Peter. “Slick: Geocultures of Oil in Fiction.”
is abundant, often because new sources were 12 Nov. 2009. TS.
discovered outside the earth, as was Camer- Munif, Abdelrahman. Cities of Salt. New York: Vintage,
1989. Print.
on’s fantastical fuel. Lack of energy is found
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anony-
typically only in postapocalyptic scenarios— mous Materials. Melbourne: Re.Press, 2008. Print.
cautionary tales about where our fiction of Sinclair, Upton. Oil! 1927. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
surplus might lead. In both contexts, litera-
ture has disappeared, whether into the screen