Maintenance Work: Climate Fiction and Process Biology

Abstract

“Maintenance Work” asks what it means to be living through crisis. In attending to representations of cooking, cleaning, and caring in climate fiction from the last five years, I recast the descriptive processes of realist novels as crucial to the imaginative work of maintaining a livable world. Process biology, an approach to life science that asserts that stable formations are not necessarily static ones, offers surprising resources for this reconsideration of domestic writing. Drawing on recent developments in metabolic and epigenetic thought, I revisit some of the most “static” devices of the realist novel: description, listing, and metonymy. I also draw out the tensions between preservation and change implicit in the notion of sustainability. My first chapter reads Richard Powers’ The Overstory alongside biological discourses of “self-sustaining” systems, generating an ecologically-attentive reading practice I carry through the subsequent chapters. The second, on Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, reads the novel through metabolic science to provide an account of the digestive processes of everyday life. In chapter three, I take the grocery shopping subplots of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God alongside theories of epigenetic heritability to make a case for the value of the habitual in attempts to represent the future. My final chapter builds on this thesis, reading Lucy Ellmann’s domestic opus, Ducks, Newburyport, as both grappling with new molecular scales and experimenting in collectivity-via-anxiety-management. Taken as a whole, “Maintenance Work” presents an account of “process” as a crucial supplement to the recent critical turn to “form.”