Abstract
Asbestos has long been a staple lesson for the precautionary principle. As a toxic material, it is often something people hope not to encounter. But before this, it often appeared as a substance of hope, carrying the promise of safety and economic rewards. This article uses these conflicting accounts of asbestos’s hope as a starting point for thinking about the conditions of hazardous hope. Turning to a vignette about an asbestos facility in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016), the article considers how stories of hazardous hope may produce a diminishment of hope. Rather than dismiss this as insufficiently hopeful, however, the article addresses the form of the novel as an exemplar of accessible experimentalism, suggesting it models new ways of communicating complex problems. If narrativizing hope demands an openness to multiple possible futures, then the form of such hope might need to defer resolution in much the same way as that adopted by modernist writing.
Introduction
Asbestos has long been a staple “late lesson” for the precautionary principle, which aims “to reduce potential hazards before there is strong proof of harm.”1 First thought to be a miracle mineral, whose fabulous qualities as a fire retardant and an insulator made it a prized part of modernist infrastructure, it gradually became a bête noire in twentieth-century histories of science, a killer dust whose deleterious effects on workers were compounded by an industry that willfully obfuscated its dangers.2 At first glance, then, asbestos presents a better example of hope’s hazards than of hazardous hope, since the technoscientific optimism that drove its early use ultimately proved so detrimental to those that used it. These detriments—the asbestos-related diseases asbestosis, pleural plaques, lung cancer, and mesothelioma—have dictated the pedagogy of asbestos’s “late lesson”: the unforeseen effects of dangerous substances need to be anticipated and guarded against, the predatory capitalism of large corporations needs to be closely watched, and the science that addresses future health concerns needs to be freed from its dependence on financial interest.3 However mangled in practice, policymakers, when faced with a new technology with risks that are not easily calculated, are expected to err on the side of caution rather than hope.4 Asbestos seems more of a stumbling block than an aid to thinking about hazardous hope, understood in this special section as “stories of resilience and resistance as well as to hope [that emphasize] ways of narrating our toxic lives beyond victimhood” with “the potential to promote agency and emotional health for affected communities, activists, and engaged scholars.”5 Introduced to resolve fears about, and risks from, fire, asbestos offers a cautionary tale about panaceas and quick fixes to problems that threaten communities, closer to “cruel optimism” than hazardous hope.6
Still, the presence of asbestos creates exemplary “dangerous, even toxic settings” in which forms of hazardous hope might emerge. Single resource communities, once responsible for mining, milling, and manufacturing asbestos, balance ongoing efforts to remediate toxic sites with the need to reinvigorate stagnant economies and so ensure their survival as a collective.7 People with asbestos-related diseases or histories of exposure accommodate their anticipation of the future to the vicissitudes of a substance that, when “activated,” may kill them in less than a year.8 Individuals faced with decaying asbestos-laden infrastructure in and around their homes and workplaces balance the risks of removing asbestos or containing it, in the hope they avoid such a fate.9 Asbestos’s dangers change materially across these settings, as does the element of chance; what these different parties hope for also varies from person to person and place to place. These settings manifest the asbestos hazard differently and so demand different, sometimes conflicting forms of hope.
This article contemplates what lessons asbestos might teach in discussions of hazardous hope and, reciprocally, what hazardous hope might bring to an emerging scholarship increasingly focused on living with asbestos legacies.10 It attends to this task by refining what is meant by hazardous hope and considering how such hope might be amplified or diminished when retelling a typical asbestos story through an explicitly literary form.
My own understanding of hazardous hope involves both feeling and acting. The scenes of exposure sketched above share a sense of hope as an “anticipation of Not-Yet-Become,” which Ernst Bloch approaches not only “as emotion, as the opposite of fear (because fear too can of course anticipate), but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind (and here the opposite is then not fear, but memory).”11 This “ontology of the not-yet” enshrines asbestos encounters, weighty and deterministic as they are, as “incomplete, still unfolding realit[ies],” engendering “entirely new determinations.”12 Latent in these encounters is the possibility they might turn out better than expected. Such potentialities, which Jonathan Lear and Byron Williston identify as “radical hope,” might be events we desire even as we lack confidence that they will come to pass.13 One way of inspiring and sustaining this openness to newness may be through what Christof Mauch calls stories of “slow hope,” stories “inspired by anticipation and driven by the idea that things can be different.”14 Such stories do not simply have the effect of imagining and striving for different worlds; they also escalate “the disposition of hopefulness,” “a disposition,” in Ben Anderson’s terms, “that provides a dynamic imperative to action in that it enables bodies to go on.”15 Hope expresses itself in “a moment of discontinuity in which a threshold is crossed through the creation of an intensified connection with life (the ‘glimmer’ or ‘spark’ of hope).”16 To be hopeful is to be reinvigorated.
But, Anderson warns us, “becoming hopeful” always has “a point of danger, or hazard” folded into it.17 Recalling Gabriel Marcel’s observation that “the conditions that make it possible to hope are strictly the same as those that make it possible to despair,” Anderson stresses the role “diminishment,” or adversity, plays in calling forth “an imperative to hope” and providing the grounds for its frustration.18 The varieties of such diminishments mean that “neither the need to hope nor the capacity to cultivate [it] are evenly distributed,” which, in turn, gives rise to different forms of hopefulness, and, by extension, different space-times of hope.19 All hope is, in a sense, hazardous. The manifestly different conditions facing people with an asbestos-related disease, people with a history of occupational or environmental exposure, and communities with historical or ongoing sites of contamination ultimately determine the form taken by a narrower notion of hazardous hope.
Faced with a terminal diagnosis, hope means a few more years, through a remission or a good response to therapy.20 Living with exposure makes hope’s target a continued absence: of disease or its signs and symptoms.21 For communities hope is the survival of the collective, made possible through economic investment, on the one hand, and successful remediation or, better, elimination of areas of concern, on the other.22 These divergent responses each yield their own space-times for individuals and for the groups they constitute, since the times and the spaces they project themselves across vary in scale and in intensity of focus.23
Across these cases, hope (1) names both a feeling and an intentional act, (2) is experienced in the now and directed toward a yet undetermined future, and (3) allows people to cope with the world as it is and to desire it to be different even if (4) the hopefulness it manifests varies greatly in content and remains risky. While degrees of exposure and scales of focus lead to different manifestations of hazardous hope, hope itself retains a certain generic consistency. Accordingly, to understand hazardous hope we must mediate between the specific historical circumstances of its emergence and a certain underlying generality or continuity of form that articulates it across these different sites.
In this article I use a vignette about an asbestos conversion plant in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) as the vehicle for articulating hazardous hope. The novel, which runs as a single, unfinished sentence from its midpage opening to its midpage closing, follows the thoughts of Marcus Conway, an engineer for the council and the novel’s first-person narrator, between the noon Angelus bell and the time signal for the one o’clock news, as Marcus comes to terms with his own death some eight months earlier. The vignette in question is based on actual events: a plan to build an asbestos handling plant in Killala, County Mayo, Ireland, abandoned in 2005 because of strong local opposition. The novel’s treatment of this and other stories of environmental damage and protest err rather closer to Anderson’s ideas of diminishment or Williston’s rather dour “radical hope” than Mauch’s stories of “slow hope” or Graeme Wynn’s “ecology of hope.”24 But the actual events at Killala may well “provide us with alternatives to narrowly defined pathways” and “envisage other, better ways of being in the world” that Mauch and Wynn find in stories of slow hope and traditions of thinkers and resistors.25 Here I want to put the novel and the history into productive tension, looking to the latter to inspire hope while finding in the former the means to articulate it. For Mauch, stories of slow hope provide “ideas than seemed unimaginable before they were voiced and . . . paths that seemed unwalkable before they were walked.”26 If this is to be workable we must also appreciate that the ways these ideas are voiced and paths are walked—the way, in other words, a story is told (its syuzhet)—will be at least as important as the story itself (its fabula).
Stories of Diminished Hope
Near the beginning of Solar Bones, Marcus opens his newspaper to read “another story of how / a large, abandoned industrial facility in the north of the county is being assessed as a possible site for an asbestos conversion plant which will form part of a massive toxic dump to process industrial and medical waste from the rest of the province.”27 Despite the blasé repetition implied by “another story,” the assessment seems to offer a source of hope for an economic revival in the region. “If economic studies and environmental assessments prove favourable,” Marcus summarizes, it “could come online in a few years’ time with the promise of jobs and subsidiary investment across the county.”28 This will repurpose a site that has become “a monumental example of industrial gothic,” “sheathed” as it is “in asbestos, walls, roofs and ceilings, acres of it and with a projected cost of dismantling it in accordance with EU environmental code calculated to run at close to 10 million euro.”29 The new development, we might infer, will not only bring new hopes to the county; it will expedite the cleanup of the facility itself, “lest it shed its lung-corroding fibre over the whole of North Mayo.”30 As a case study, McCormack’s hypothetical facility promises to contribute to the increasingly fetishized circular economy, focused on “closing material loops, extending product lifecycles, and virtualizing products.”31
Sandwiched between Marcus’s descriptions of the plan to convert the site and of its current dilapidated state comes a page-long meditation on the facility as it was, which he describes as “something out of the past.”32 This memory presents “a psychic link which dates back to my childhood when / my father worked on its construction . . . when, with a similar promise of prosperity, it was spoken of as if it were a cathedral or a temple . . . such a beacon of industrial progress.”33 The promise offered by the asbestos conversion plant is not, then, a new one; it signals the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalist investment. Nor are the threats it poses: for, while the purpose of the facility as originally conceived was to manufacture “acrylic yarn and fibre, an end which initially disappointed me as it seemed such a puny thing considering all the hope and effort invested in it,” the presence of “a highly toxic compound called acrylonitrile” recast “the whole project in a more credible apocalyptic glow.”34 If neither the promise nor the threats posed by the updated facility are entirely new, its economic basis is, depending as it does on shifting “regimes of accumulation” from linear lines of production to circular economies. Waste moves from being an output to manage to being “a resource for economic development.”35 The new facility proposes to make money by cleaning up the asbestos waste produced by a prior phase of industrial development. Marcus remains skeptical about the hopes this change offers, since his “reveries” on the facility, its past and its future emerge from, and return to, “the collapse of our banking system and the economy . . . as if / something that never was has finally collapsed / or revealed itself to be constructed of air.”36 Indeed, Solar Bones subordinates this brief interlude about asbestos and deindustrialization to the 2008 collapse of, and disillusionment in, the Celtic Tiger, the term given to the Republic of Ireland during its rapid economic growth from 1994 to 2007.
McCormack’s vignette about the plant neatly illustrates how asbestos, when mentioned in cultural products of the past thirty years or so, tends to appear as a generic referent for the risks created by decaying industrial infrastructure.37 Still, in expressing a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, Marcus’s asbestos story raises the possibility for a nonconfident imagining of things otherwise. This is by no means straightforward: the novel expresses some skepticism to the possibility of hope. Marcus, for instance, dismisses or diminishes hope whenever the novel explicitly mentions it. To read hope’s possibilities in the novel, it seems, one must resist those instances where characters foreclose these possibilities. One promising way of doing this might be to read such moments counterintuitively, as positing a form of radical hope amid their apparent “eco-miserabilism.” Following Mathias Thaler, such a reading might find in Marcus’s anecdotes “a bleak narrative . . . according to which it is already too late to avert the catastrophic breakdown of human civilization or the earth system altogether,” while ameliorating this reading by recognizing that it anticipates, in Jonathan Lear’s terms, a “good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”38 For Thaler, eco-miserabilists find in “the demise of an old order” the possible “emergence of a thoroughly new one” and, by extension, a possible way “to work through the blockages that incapacitate established patterns of thinking and acting.”39 The novel, narrated by a dead man, in what McCormack has called its “stream of post-consciousness,” lends itself to being read through such a postcatastrophic lens, where local tribulations recalled after the moment of Marcus’s death become a cipher for Earth- and species-encompassing dilemmas.40
Insofar as existing readings of the novel have approached an implicitly eco-miserabilist stance, they have done so by highlighting its use of modernist form to address material concerns in contemporary Ireland. Certainly, this latter line of thinking has characterized many of the academic responses to the novel, both those concerned with it as a literary text and those who use it to illustrate other concerns. Michael Rubenstein, for instance, finds “Irish water” formalized in the novel’s single sentence and insists “it is water infrastructure, in particular, that drives the plot of Solar Bones.”41 It has introduced discussions of, inter alia, toxic asset management practices, uneven development in urban and rural Ireland, and cultural responses to speculative urbanization.42 Thus far, however, the admittedly marginal role played by asbestos has been overlooked, as has the significance of hope. But what if we held asbestos and hope in focus? To do so, let us return to the historical referent: the asbestos facility at Killala, County Mayo.
In 2004, the company Irish Environmental Processes Ltd. proposed to construct an asbestos disposal plant on the site of the former Asahi Chemical Industry factory, which had manufactured synthetic fibers.43 As in McCormack’s account, the factory opened in 1978 and closed in 1997 with the loss of 315 jobs.44 What McCormack does not say is why, by the time of the novel’s events in 2008, it had become anachronistic to talk about the asbestos disposal plant at Killala: the plan had been successfully stymied by a combination of people’s marches, expert testimony, environmental impact assessment, and general discontent. By October 30, 2004, concerns were already being aired about “a proposal to locate an incinerator for the disposal of asbestos at Killala, Co. Mayo.”45 A public meeting on November 2 saw some 350 members of the local community state their opposition to the plans.46 The same evening, Fine Gael leader and Teachta Dála for Mayo Enda Kenny raised the issue in the Dáil Éireann.47 At a second public meeting, on November 9, over one thousand people listened to a statement signed by twenty family doctors from the surrounding area that stressed concerns “about the carcinogenic effects of asbestos.”48 Despite efforts by company representatives to dispute the health issues as “scaremongering,” further questions were raised about the company’s projected job numbers and its commitment to ensure that only asbestos originating from Ireland would be treated.49 The succession of public meetings led to the formation of a special interest group called the North West Alliance Against Asbestos (NWAAA). That Sunday, November 14, the town’s children led a march, variously reported as 1,400 and over 2,000 people, to the proposed site, waving placards with messages like “KEEP YOUR DIRTY ASBESTOS JOBS.”50 By December, prominent members of both the Catholic church and the Church of Ireland had lent their voices to the protests.51 Finally, the Irish Independent reported on May 7, 2005, that the owners of the site had decided not to sell it to Irish Environmental Processes.52 The community action had worked.
We should not overestimate the importance of this protest, which appears as a form of NIMBYism, the sentiment that unsafe practices only become unacceptable when they occur “In My Back Yard.”53 After all, the protests were not aimed at a larger scale examination of asbestos disposal, in which asbestos produced in Europe is often shipped to low- and middle-income countries for “management.”54 Media reports do not connect this local struggle with larger, international efforts to eliminate the trade in asbestos and its traces in the built environment. Still, we should reckon with McCormack’s decision to bypass what political action there was when recounting the story in Solar Bones. This makes narrative sense for a book that generally takes a dim view of the local corruption, infrastructural fragility, and failures of collective governance that plague Marcus’s work and family life, the more so if the book is read as a work of fictional eco-miserabilism. But was it also a missed opportunity to engage more fully with hope as something other than an economic or technological fix?
When the facility is mentioned, the novel recalls the economic hopes of the Asahi factory that preceded it. Later, hope, or lack thereof, will reappear in the form of a disassembled wind turbine, a “sorrowful sight” Marcus recognizes as “a clear instance of the world forfeiting one of its better ideas, as if something for which there was once justified hope had proven to be a failure and the world had given up on some precious dream of itself.”55 The wind turbine, a placeholder for renewable energy, now forfeited, failed, given up, produces a sense of diminishment as it is carted away in disappointment. Seeing the turbine disassembled also recalls the anxiety eight-year-old Marcus feels when he walks into his father’s shed to find their farm’s tractor taken to pieces: that its potential to be taken apart by an open-end wrench presages the potential undoing of “the universe itself.”56 Marcus apprehends the abandoned hopes of the turbine through its juxtaposition with the tractor. If the tractor represents “the beginning of the world, the chaotic genesis which drew it together and assembled it from disparate parts,” “the wind turbine was its end, a destiny it had been forced to give up on, a dream of itself shelved or aborted or miscarried.”57 Here the beginning and end do not simply index mechanical possibility brought low. Rather, tractor, turbine, and the conversion facility present three symbolic phases in Ireland’s economic development: from rural agricultural economy through (unsuccessful) industrialization to the misplaced optimism about renewable energy. Like the conversion facility, the wind turbine has been an investment of “hope and effort,” and, as the repeated references to the 2008 crash remind us, investments are experiencing poor returns in Marcus’s Ireland. This investment has not only been economic; it presents an end point for Marcus’s frustrated relationship with technological utopianism.
If Marcus dismisses hope based on economic or technological development, he is even more scathing about the possibilities of art or collective action to anticipate the “Not-Yet-Become.” When he and his wife, Mairead, visit Galway to attend his artist daughter Agnes’s first exhibition—a trip that coincides with Mairead’s exposure to the parasite Cryptosporidium, and her resulting cryptosporidiosis—Marcus is overwhelmed with shame at what Agnes has done. Agnes’s exhibition, fittingly named The O Negative Diaries, consists of journalistic and legal accounts of the community’s infractions, written on the gallery wall in her own blood. When Marcus realizes the medium that Agnes has used, he takes himself to be the “force beneath” the exhibition and its final cause.58 “Never,” thinks Marcus, “had the consequences of fatherhood and everything it entailed weighed so completely on me than at that moment.”59 Rather than understanding the exhibition as a feminist attack on the ideological connections between blood, citizenship, and legal personhood and thus as a starting point for imagining other forms of belonging, Marcus foregrounds his own, patriarchal perspective.
Sharae Deckard notes that Agnes lives up to her brother’s nickname for her, Anagnorisis, since she provides Marcus with moments like the exhibition to undergo realizations or reversals about his opinions.60 This reduction to a function conforms to other problematic moments in the novel where, as Orlaith Darling has argued, Marcus imposes on the female body “his obsession with engineering a social order.”61 The radical possibilities of The O Negative Diaries—to “disrupt mainstream socio-political narratives”—are truncated as Agnes “becomes increasingly bound in a representational mode.”62 Agnes’s second exhibition makes this particularly clear. As protests about the contamination culminate in a carnivalesque performance through Galway, a naked Agnes throws herself from the civic center building, thereby turning “spectacle into a coherent act of political protest.”63 The coherence of this act relies upon Agnes turning herself into “a symbolic pillar of the body politic.”64 Instead of encouraging hopeful images of other possible worlds, Agnes’s art practice deconstructs the certainty Marcus finds in documents and documentation.
The protest is the closest that the novel comes to describing collective civil action. It develops as a response by the citizens of Galway to the Cryptosporidium that contaminates their water supply, an event that, like the asbestos facility, has its historical referent in an actual outbreak of cryptosporidiosis that occurred in Galway in 2007. But again this protest engenders no hopeful utopianism. Rather, it voices a sense of impotent anger as people feel “no blame or responsibility gathering anywhere.”65 The civic authorities fail to find the exact cause of the disaster, realizing instead that its source was in “the convergence of adverse circumstances—decrepit technology and torrential rains, overdevelopment and agricultural slurry.”66 Instead of political accountability the people are left with “a kind of dreamtime” for which Agnes’s performance will be the culminating event.67 The carnival that ensues, a display of the city “politically at its wits’ end,” could not be further from the practical succession of people’s meetings and marches that constituted the events in Killala.68 While Agnes’s leap is meant to be the act that turns the carnival into a coherent political protest, it leaves both Marcus and Mairead unsure as to its political significance. “I hope she calls today,” Mairead says, “she might explain it, perhaps they hope it will be the sort of inspiring image or event that will rouse the city to more urgent protest.”69 Hope, here, is limited in its desires. At best Mairead’s hope expresses the desire for some kind of clarity about the action, which itself aims to provoke more spectacle. Instead of providing avenues for hope, art and politics offer little more than the grounds for their own self-perpetuation.
Hope, then, remains an etiolated category in the novel. The activist movement at Killala gestures to the greater potential for alliance that emerges when an object of harm is kept underdetermined, or taken to produce an effect that is self-evident, while the shared target for an alliance, like the rejection of the factory development, is overdetermined, or made possible for multiple, sometimes conflicting reasons. Likewise, Solar Bones uses asbestos as a unit of toxicity, leaving the actual circumstance unexplored, the better to link the Killala incident to other circumstances of toxicity under neoliberal governance and thus bring more and more people into alignment with an overdetermined understanding of such governance. Asbestos, for both, is underdetermined, while their diverse targets are overdetermined. This is politically and aesthetically expedient for the novel but demands a supplementary observation when related to hazardous hope: that people in sites of continued asbestos exposure often rally together in and through acts that collectively determine what asbestos is and means, and by connecting this determination to other sites of toxic dis-ease.
By contrast, the novel appears to question this emancipatory possibility. Moments of hopefulness are attached to diminished economic, technological, artistic, or political ends that seldom justify their means. Even events that did bring about political change—the protests at Killala, for instance, or the actual interventions during the Galway Crypto outbreak—seem to be scrubbed of their political importance. If anything, the novel purposefully undermines hope in its political sense. Still, emancipatory possibilities may be lurking in the novel’s form. This is not to suggest that its form is somehow divorced from its content: they are better thought in productive tension with each other. Indeed, the novel’s use of modernist technique “as a tool” presents a form for the nonconfident imagining of things otherwise, even if this formal quality remains in tension with the ways the novel demurs on hope in its plot. Solar Bones’s contribution to our understanding of hazardous hope may well be the form it presents for hope’s unfolding.
“An Accessible Experiment”
Deckard opens her 2016 review of Solar Bones by calling it “that extraordinary thing, an accessible experiment, whose posthumous, first-person narration is virtuosic, yet profoundly humane, unfolding in one long sentence with an ease of voice that belies the technical difficulty of its execution.”70 Two literary devices in particular preoccupy its critics: its juxtaposition of multiple stories and its single unfinished sentence. In this section I examine these devices to explore the novel’s “virtuosity” while keeping an eye on its “accessibility.” Ultimately it is the novel’s success in making the experimental accessible that makes it such an appealing model for disseminating stories of hazardous hope.
Immediately preceding the asbestos story, Marcus reads “the story of / an environmental campaigner who has begun a hunger strike against the energy consortium planning to run a pressurised gas pipeline through her particular part of North Mayo.”71 The story produces its own cascade of associations, first with the Mayo-born IRA hunger strike victims Jack “Sean” McNeela (d. 1940), Michael Gaughan (d. 1974) and Frank Stagg (d. 1976), and then with an unnamed Mayo-based hermit whose abstentions lead her to conclude that “hell is real and it’s not empty.”72 These examples create a tradition of people from Mayo “starving and mortifying themselves for higher causes and principles” to see “a world beyond themselves.”73 The context for this observation, the story before that of the environmental campaigner, is the 2008 market crash, when, on the night of September 29, “the whole banking system almost collapsed and the country came within a hair’s breadth of waking the following morning to empty bank accounts.”74 The environmental campaigner, hunger strikers, and hermit provide a needed corrective to the “fault-finding and analysis” of the financial “prophets,” their “deranged” positions more appropriate to the catastrophe unfolding and their messages plainer. The effect of these juxtapositions is to hint at something missing in each vignette, something that the subsequent vignette will come closer to describing. This anticipation of greater elucidation, possible but Not-Yet-Become, orients the reader to a future moment in the novel where all will be revealed, even if the circumstances deny any assurance that revelation will come to pass. Reading the novel demands a certain kind of hopefulness on the part of its reader.
In conversation with Treasa De Loughry, McCormack describes the novel’s exposition as “riverine,” “its meanders loop round on each other, but it is always heading towards the sea.”75 McCormack clarifies these loops as the novel “circling back just to move slightly forward” in “a rising spiral.”76 In practical terms, the spiral is constituted by a series of vignettes, some a single paragraph, others running pages, about Marcus’s life, the contemporary arts and culture scene, Ireland’s recent and not-so-recent history, and the politics of infrastructure in County Mayo. The story about the financial crash turns into stories of protest, which lead into the story of the asbestos conversion facility. Implied in these transformations is a development, a direction (“towards the sea”), on which the spiral effect turns. The hunger strikers do not just anticipate the forms of austerity that financial collapse portends; their example also demonstrates the degree of spectacle required if people are to sit up and take notice. By contrast, the financial forecasters fail to adopt the appropriate “tone” to “hold our attention.”77 When the asbestos conversion facility comes up, it returns to the failed economic hopes that anticipate the crash. But it has been subtly altered by the discussion of prophets and hunger, which ended with “no mention . . . of the redeemer having passed this way on his mission of mercy or forgiveness.”78 The hopes represented by the facility, either in its first incarnation or in its second, are therefore theologically inflected by a world where salvation is absent and all that remains is suffering.
By the time, some pages later, the reader is introduced to the disassembled tractor that a young Marcus will take as a symbol of the unmade world, Marcus has incorporated theological mysticism with engineering to become what Deckard calls a “new archetype, the Metaphysical Engineer.” De Loughry, reflecting on the significance of the tractor vignette, observes that the novel repeats these concerns with assembly and disassembly in a “compositional rhythm of ravelling and unravelling.”79 McCormack responds with the spiral. But the word that Marcus uses most often to describe this process is gather, which, given McCormack’s own stated interest in Martin Heidegger, implicates the vignettes in successive efforts at “enframing” (Gestell).80
“Enframing,” “that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology,” describes how our understanding of the world is ordered through a technological lens.81 As the natural world comes to be understood through a technological perspective, so it is revealed as a setting-upon that challenges, rather than as a bringing-forth through occasioning. Simply put, this means that land, wind, and water come to be seen as resources that stand in reserve (Bestand) to expedite something else. Crucially, “modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing.”82 By observing nature, humans are challenged “to approach [it] as an object of research,” which reinforces the sense of its standing-in-reserve.83 Marcus describes approvingly his own role in responding to the challenge of setting-upon a world standing-in-reserve when he calls himself “an engineer, whose life and works concerned itself with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying so that the grid of reason and progress could be laid across the earth, gathering its wildness into towns and villages by way of bridges and roads and water schemes and power lines—all the horizontal utilities that drew the world into settlements and community—this was my life, an engineer’s life.”84 And yet, as the scene with the tractor and the wind turbine show, his agency in this “gathering” process is somewhat overstated: the gathering is possible because he already sees the “wildness” as a standing-in-reserve.
If these vignettes mark out Marcus’s “enframing,” their ordering offers a more hopeful possibility: that, as we read the novel, the network of associations that build between the vignettes act less as a standing-in-reserve than as facets that shift and alter our impressions of him and his life. The protests, for instance, inflect the vignette about the asbestos facility, so it carries spiritual as well as economic connotations. These alterations affect our understanding of the novel as it develops, turning it into a dynamic system of interlocking parts. Read in this light, Marcus’s own dour attitude to hope finds its formal antithesis in the novel’s juxtapositions, which reveal the vignettes’ meaning to be in flux, deferring their final interpretation to some yet undetermined future point: a performance in hopeful reading, if not quite hazardous hope.
This deferral of meaning is realized through the novel’s sentence, which never concludes and, by extension, never seals or closes its meaning.85 Pragmatically, of course, the vignettes do begin and end, but they fit into longer, continuous prose, which, lacking a full stop, leaves open the nonconfident possibility that Marcus’s response might change. If hope expresses an “ontology of the not-yet” as an “incomplete, still unfolding reality” that engenders “entirely new determinations,” then the grammar needed to sustain such an ontology might well be a never-ending sentence. If, on the one hand, a single, unending sentence offers an enjambment in extremis, a never-ending deferment of its “final” significance to some future point, on the other, it also enacts a form of language wherein the “not-yet” can be performed and its meaning articulated.
Certainly the novel does not try to maintain this tension around meaning indefinitely. Just as attempts to feel expressly and intensely hopeful for any length of time are exhausting, so too are efforts to negotiate meaning from texts. Although the novel’s final meaning is deferred to an undisclosed end, its clauses frequently produce contingent explanations within a few lines or so.86 They do this through enjambment, the use of the run-on line found most often in poetry, which describes circumstances where there is incomplete syntax at the end of a line break. In meaning-making, there is pressure to complete the sense of a sentence by identifying the actions and objects involved. In cases of enjambment, “the line-ending interrupts the onward pressure of the syntax, creating a kind of tension that is released” when these are identified.87 Take, for example, lines quoted previously, noting in particular how they break along nuanced movements across diegetic levels: “promise of jobs and subsidiary investment across the county and / something out of the past / a psychic link which dates back to my childhood when / my father worked on its construction / he fucking did / worked on it at a time.”88 Managerial rhetoric abruptly gives way to the narration of a memory experience, whose causal explanation turns into context, briefly interrupted, before resuming the vignette. Analogously, the not-yet expressed by the “promise of jobs” is stabilized by historical antecedent, connecting the jobs-to-be to construction work of the past.
Hope is demanding. It needs moments of respite. Hopeful reading, too, demands moments of respite, which the novel offers in the shorter lines that connect its vignettes, holding the eye and serving as foci for the reader’s attention. Adam Mars-Jones calls these lines pseudo-paragraphs, observing how they punctuate the novel by “promis[ing] the eye an opportunity to take the equivalent of a breath, though a voice reading the book aloud would be cued to carry on across the gap.”89 More importantly, the pseudo-paragraphs often act either to bridge longer vignettes or to signal a change in the modes of address. Instead of evoking a vocality, as “breath units,” McCormack’s pseudo-paragraphs present visual cues for the relaxation and contraction of narrative focus. A more appropriate metaphor, then, may be to read them as the diastolic and systolic stages of the heartbeat: a timing whose arrythmias become more pronounced as we approach the moment of Marcus’s cardiac arrest but also permit readers moments of narrative “relaxation” needed to make the novel “accessible.”
So, while “the conventions of the book seem to forbid any interruption to the experience of reading,” actual readers, taking up the book after a break, quickly reorient themselves by locating these shifts in mode.90 Despite the unremitting stream of prose, most reviewers remark on how readable it is. It is perhaps the very readability of this so-called experimentalism that helps to imagine this as a viable writing practice for activist thinking. Eliminating the backstory while reengaging the ways in which it fits together enables McCormack to take as given what asbestos itself is while interrogating how it fits together with the other detritus of industrial capitalism. The novel’s form models a form of hopeful reading, relying on a readerly anticipation of the Not-Yet-Become.
Conclusion
The novel’s “experimental” use of a single, unfinished sentence suggests the means for creating formal continuities between causes and effects taken from multiple scales of time and space, while its juxtaposition of different vignettes challenges the reader to infer parallels between them. In both cases, the novel’s form projects the possibility of a resolution in a yet undisclosed future, even though this resolution has already been achieved in the story (Marcus is already dead) and its themes (where hope’s possibilities are always in retreat).
Both the travails of the facility and the outbreak appear to be inevitable consequences of the kinds of politicking that bedevils the regional planning office where Marcus works, wherein the private interests of politicians, farmers, and construction firms, determined by five-year election cycles, collide with the decisions of engineers, which “need a longer lifespan that that.”91 Read in these contexts, the novel produces a telling indictment of waste-based economics, wherein the circularity of these economies is lauded as sustainable while disavowing the infrastructural vulnerabilities that attend their politicization, monetization, and mediatization. It achieves this not, I should add, by tracing the exact connections between these sites but rather by indicating a common pattern in their cycles, a pattern that the reader discerns in Marcus’s own habitual reflections, marked as they are by line breaks that signal when the interior monologue shifts from context to reflection and vice versa. What the novel offers, then, is a much more sophisticated form of what Steve Schwarze calls “eco-speak.” Examining asbestos activism in Libby, Montana, Schwarze demonstrates how important juxtaposition was in “drawing sharp dichotomies between perpetrators and victims, between abstract explanations and lived experience, between official rhetoric and material reality.”92 Here the possibilities of the line break offer us ways of imagining how such juxtapositions might be made more immediately apparent with a broken line.
While the novel may be said to miss an opportunity to highlight the activism of the Killala story, it does so in service of narrative devices that model a more hazardous hope. The Killala protest is suggestive, I argue, of the ways that responses to asbestos might provide a model for larger concerns about planetary health, mass migration, climate change, and plastics pollution, even if this stems less from the immediate concerns or rationales of the community and more from their unconscious placement within a larger, international anti-asbestos movement. Such a placement demonstrates how asbestos’s hazardous hope does not simply refer to defensive optimisms about the survival of individuals and communities; it now also finds a more concrete reality in the global network of committed, successful activists, the comprehensive jurisprudence that deals with complex forms of causation and compensation, and the established tradition of medical and epidemiological research that makes such exposures increasingly less likely. But to see the Killala protest thus enframed, we must engage in projects of juxtaposition and conceptual deferment, enjambment and gathering, formalized in McCormack’s novel. If the hazards of tomorrow seem insurmountable, then asbestos activism models the solidarity needed to respond to these hazards with hope, and formalism shows what such hope might look like.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the debt this work owes to participants at the “Hazardous Hope” conference, to the thoughtful comments of Ayushi Dhawan, Simone M. Müller, Treasa De Loughry and the anonymous reviewers of Environmental Humanities, and to ongoing conversations with communities living with the legacies of asbestos. This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust (217879/Z/19/Z). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.
Notes
Dhawan and Müller, this issue.
See Sandra Kellett’s testimony in “‘Uncertainty and Ignorance.’”
See, for example, Marpal, “Should I Remove or Encapsulate Asbestos?”
See Mazzeo, Dust Inside; Trimbur, Grassroots Literacy and the Written Record; van Horssen, “International Agency over Local Land.”
See Rose, Asbestos.
Flynn, “‘Stream of Post-consciousness.’” See also Harrison, “Mike McCormack’s Style”; Jarząb-Napierała, “Retromodernism.”
Aitken, “Afterlives of Global Capital,” 553; Bresnihan and Hesse, “Political Ecologies,” 792; Workman, “From Chimera to Catastrophe,” 270.
On the development of such forms of environmental justice, see McGurty, “From NIMBY to Civil Rights,” 307–9.
On the matter of asbestos waste management, see Gregson, “Asbestos,” 264.
