Life, Rescaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance

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The pervasive crises of our current historical moment unfold across many scales. Think of the two most prominent global crises of recent years: climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are difficult to understand and respond to, in part, because of their scalar complexity. On the one hand, they are global in scope, crossing national and ecological barriers to touch the lives of all humans (and many non-humans). On the other hand, these massive crises are driven by physical, chemical, and biological processes below the threshold of perception: the release of carbon molecules and other pollutants in the case of climate change, and the spread of viral microorganisms in the case of COVID-19. A new collection of scholarly essays—Life, Rescaled: The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance, edited by Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine—takes an expansive, multi-disciplinary, and multi-genre approach to the scalar dislocations of the present. Made up of contributions from an international cohort of European and North American scholars, the collection examines the complex interchanges between scientific knowledge and cultural production in the effort to represent contemporary human and nonhuman life across a range of aesthetic forms. The essays place mycology, ecology, epidemiology, neurology, demography, and geology in dialogue with novels, comics, and performances in order to grapple with the epistemological and ethical challenges of the Anthropocene. The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic provide the collection’s organizing context; together, the essays inquire into the representational strategies we need in a rapidly changing world of many complex scales.

Life, Rescaled intervenes, broadly, in scholarly conversations about the relationship between scientific knowledge and literary representation. Previous science and literature scholarship has examined the rich interchanges between biology and literature in the Romantic and Victorian periods,¹ but Campos and Patoine’s collection extends these investigations to the contemporary moment. The editors note in their introduction that biology’s central narrative and imaginary tropes have shifted in recent decades; the evolutionary tree and the double-helix of DNA, which dominated the twentieth-century biological imagination, have been displaced by the “wood-wide web” of mycelial networks and the spiky COVID-19 molecule, to name a few prominent examples. What representational strategies, the contributors ask, have artists in a range of media developed to grapple with the new images and narratives furnished by recent science? However, Campos and Patoine caution us against the tendency to assume that influence flows only in one direction, from sciences to the arts. Drawing from N. Katherine Hayles, they encourage us to attend to the “cross-currents” that move between science and artistic practice. Rather than tracing how science influences art, the collection explores “interdiscursivity and the cross-fertilizing of imaginaries between contemporary artistic work, popularizations of the life sciences, and philosophy” (5). Culture responds to changes in science and science is shaped, in part, by cultural concerns.

 “Science fiction” is therefore not a central term in Life, Rescaled, although several of the essays analyze works with “speculative” elements. Derek Woods reads current representations of fungal life through Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014); Pieter Vermeulen examines the current “population unconscious” through Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014); and Rishi Goyal considers representations of empty pandemic cities through Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). The editors make it clear that the contributions do not privilege any particular genre; they do “not find one genre more suited to multi-scalar aesthetics than another. Rather than which genre, the key question is which forms may best attend to heterogeneous scales of life…and their disparate temporal scales” (21). Each essay attends to a particular interface between aesthetic form and biological scale. While some of the artworks under consideration speculate about future or alternative worlds, the collection’s unifying concern is faithful representation of the empirical world’s complexity. The works tend to be experimental, or to inhabit the limits and boundaries of established genres, as they grapple with the scalar conundrums of our crisis-ridden world.

The collection’s greatest strength is the range of geographies, genres, media, and scientific fields with which it engages. While no one reader will be riveted by every single essay, it has something to offer any scholar with even a passing interest in the environmental, medical, or scientific humanities. Life, Rescaled may be of the most interest to teachers because it gathers a wide range of texts, from speculative novels to popular-science comics and experimental performances. Collectively, the essays provide an illuminating cross-section of ecologically engaged contemporary cultural production in many genres and from many countries. The strongest essays—such as Woods’s analysis of fungi and Annihilation and Goyal’s exploration of pandemics through Severance—bring together pressing scientific problems and nuanced textual interpretations in ways that illuminate ongoing cultural conversations. The collection’s weaker entries, in contrast, can feel like catalogs of relevant artworks, such that analysis gets buried in summary. These essays may offer inspiration for a teacher constructing a syllabus, but they are thin on insight and interpretation. Most readers will probably find themselves hopping between the essays that interest them most, rather than reading the book from start to finish. Despite its few weak points, Life, Rescaled showcases the wide range of aesthetic responses to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and recent scientific innovations. It will expand any reader’s range of reference.

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NOTES

1. See, for instance, Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism and Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

Zak Breckenridge is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he teaches in the Thematic Option Honors Program. His dissertation project approaches the twentieth-century environmental movement through the history of science and the sociology of literature. His other research interests include documentary film, science fiction, and the history of materialist thought. His writing has previously appeared in The Common, Colloquium Magazine, and The Salt Lake Tribune.