Polar Bears and Butterflies: Allegory, Science, and Experientiality in Climate Change Fiction

Abstract

According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, climate change is a phenomenon that is open “as much to science and technology as to rhetoric, art, media, and arguments and conflicts conducted through a variety of means.” Apparently, climate change has begun to make its way into the cultural imagination, and yet popular fictions still utilize conventional, human-centered narrative strategies in the face of something that presents a huge challenge to the very future existence of human and nonhuman species. While a popular topic in science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, movies, and documentaries, climate change has been an issue rarely grappled within the mode of a realist or conventional novel. Arguably the best-known climate change novels so far, Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), still fall in the category of the realist novel despite their metafictional and allegorical dimensions, in the sense that they are “set in the here, the now, and the local,” as Patrick Murphy has it. In this paper, I also try to read the presence of nonhuman animals in these two novels, which remain more or less human-centered narratives. David Herman suggests that it is part of the nature of narrative to focus on the impact of events on experiencing minds and embodied consciousnesses. In his Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (2018), Herman is interested in the interplay between nonhuman agents and their surrounding environments, arguing that human as well as nonhuman minds are embedded in those natural and social environments in which they act and interact.

In McEwan’s Solar, the polar bear, living or dead, functions as a recognizable icon or symbol of global warming to those familiar with the history of environmentalism and its rhetoric, but its meaning escapes McEwan’s arrogant protagonist, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Michael Beard. “Flight behavior” in the title of Kingsolver’s novel not only refers to the migration of millions of orange Monarch butterflies from Mexico to North America, because of climate change, but also to the main character Dellarobia’s own flight behavior in her love life, at least in the eyes of the conservative Appalachian community she lives in. As I argue, narrative fiction typically emphasizes human experientiality or allegorical storytelling; indeed, it is through narratives—including metaphors, symbols, and allegories—that the complex problem of climate change can be rhetorically offered to the larger public imagination. As Ursula Heise argues in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008), perceptions of climate change and other environmental risks are shaped by narrative modes and rhetorical tropes, which serve as a means of “organizing information about risks into intelligible and meaningful stories.” Consequently, classical figures, tropes, and allegorical story models, such as pastoral, apocalypse, irony, tragedy, and comedy, retain their vitality when novelists and other artists try to come to terms with climate change. While polar bears and butterflies function as icons and symbols of climate change in these two novels, they are finally marginalized in human-centered stories. But they still have their disturbing effect: the living polar bear’s traces on the snow are like prints on the paper, and the dead polar bear is a motif that launches the narrative in Solar. In Flight Behavior, the appearance of millions of Monarch butterflies destabilizes the lifestyle of a human society, and everyone is interested in giving their specific interpretation of the event. In these two climate change novels, nonhuman animals, such as polar bears and butterflies, are used as allegorical figures, as mirror images of devastating human actions in the age of the Anthropocene.