The narrative strategies of the current novels They offer numerous tools to address the different facets of ecological crisis.
in the novel Beirut, I love youZena el Khalil represents the violence of war and its exterminating effect on Lebanese towns and territories.
In Crematorium y On the shoreRafael Chirbes shows the two faces of predatory urbanism and mass tourism in the Valencian Mediterranean coast: that of skyline splendor of the coast and that of its backyard, a wetland where both the debris of coastal developments and the bodies expelled from history have ended up.
The Mediterranean is a region that accumulates many environmental problems. The exploitation of coastal resources, the contamination of aquifers, the deterioration of ecosystems or the dumping of garbage are some of them.
It is also a very vulnerable region to the consequences of climate change, as confirmed by international reports such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This region of the northern hemisphere is especially suffering from the increase in heat waves and droughts, and its waters are warming 20% faster than the global average, as stated in a report by the environmental organization WWF.
The environmental crisis is a complex phenomenon, as are the means to convey its importance and scope. This is one of the premises from which Aina Vidal Pérez, researcher in the Global Literary Studies (GlobaLS) group at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), starts in her thesis Global Mediterranean. Environmental poetics of the coast in the current novel.
Through the analysis of several current titles, including works by Zena el Khalil and Rafael Chirbes, Vidal analyzes what poetics it stimulates the environmental destruction of the Mediterranean in the current novel and to what extent this theme gains value in the international literary market.
Mediterranean ecological crisis
To develop his thesis, Vidal analyzed four main novels: Crematorium y On the shoreby Rafael Chirbes; Beirut, I love youby Zena el Khalil, and Earthly Remainsby Donna Leon, to which she added three secondary novels: The child who measured the worldde Metin Arditi; The wind brings butterflies or snowby Francesco Aloe, and The Island of Missing Treesby Elif Shafak.
«These novels imagine the practices related to the movement of flows of capital and bodies, of extractivist and genocidal neocolonialism, of waste and merchandise traffic and collusion between government, corporate and mafia structures,” says the GlobaLS researcher, a group attached to the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the Arts and Humanities Studies of the UOC.
Regarding aesthetics and ideology, they opt for diverse narrative solutions and support different critiques. What they have in common, Vidal concludes, is that in all of them «the Mediterranean transcends its mere condition of space in which the action develops and is established as a fundamental stimulus in the construction of the narrative form.
Furthermore, these novels appeal to a Mediterranean imaginary with landscape, sociocultural and historical forms that are known globally. When this Mediterranean nature is combined with the most conventional green thinking, a product is generated that gains value in the international literary market.
Sometimes, conventionality does not have to be in the novels, but in the way they are promoted. «The combination of this Mediterranean nature with the green discourse constitutes a value for the international literary market, which can end up doing conventional to the most critical narrative proposals,” explains Vidal.
Current novels contribute to understanding the ecological crisis of the Mediterranean
During the preparation of his thesis, Vidal turned to the aforementioned novels to detect and analyze the most recurrent phenomena when representing the exploitation of the Mediterranean coast.
«Accidents and attacks on industrial infrastructures; trafficking and dumping of toxic waste; disastrous rains, flooding and rising water levels; gentrification and tourism; massive urbanization, real estate speculation and the adoption of macroprojects of global integration,” the researcher lists.
All these problems made him wonder about the way in which very complex phenomena are narrated that have, in turn, numerous social and environmental consequences.
Vidal analyzed with what specific narrative strategies and mechanisms the novel reacts to these phenomena, how the Mediterranean environment conditions the aesthetic forms of the narratives or how the link between a local manifestation of the ecological crisis and its global implicationsFor example.
The key is in all the possibilities that the novel presents. «The novel is a malleable, protean genre, capable of bringing together resources of all genres. It is not a closed and established form, but rather it requires being reinvented at every moment,” explains Vidal, who wrote his thesis within the framework of the UOC’s Humanities and Communication doctoral program.
«In his attempt to give meaning to the world, the novel imaginatively displays the problems it tries to solve. In this sense, it offers the opportunity to address the ecological emergency through a structured argument and makes a phenomenon that is not very concrete and far-reaching imaginable,” he adds.
In this way, the development and organization of the plot, the construction of the characters, the narrative voice, the subjective experience, the movement or the recreation of environments and atmospheres They contribute to imagining and reimagining environmental transformations and their challenges.
«In my work, for example, I analyze The Island of Missing Treesby Elif Shafak, in which one of the narrative voices is a loaded with figsa fig tree “which explains the recent history of Cyprus in parallel to the impacts of the climate crisis,” exemplifies Vidal. Earthly Remainsby Donna Leon, is a noir in which “the first corpse found is not human, but rather the remains of bees that die en masse due to the high level of pollution in the Venetian lagoon.”
Another example is On the shoreby Rafael Chirbes, a novel in which the Olba reservoir (a fictional town) is presented as a contaminated place where the rubble of coastal urbanization has been disposed of, but also the bodies of the Republican army and suicide bombers from the financial crisis. And the list of examples in the form of novels goes on.
Understanding the ecological crisis of the Mediterranean
With this research, Vidal seeks to contribute theoretically, methodologically and critically to make perceptions more complex both of the current Mediterranean and of the narratives that represent the ecological risk in the region. “To do this, I emphasize the central role of the capitalist system as a project of land appropriation and exploitation of the environment,” he explains.
«I propose to know What versions of the ecological crisis in the Mediterranean are being told?“Do they consider precariousness, forced displacement, migrant labor, consumer technologies, (neo)colonial wars or their infrastructures as factors that intervene in the production and conception of space?” he asks. “The connection between novel, ecology and market cannot be made unproblematically.”
In a context in which the environmental emergency is only getting worse, Vidal exposes the need to perform a critical analysis of the ideologies, assumptions and biases that these fictions may display regarding how the environment is used, produced and constructed in the globalized era.