The Great Chain of Vibrancy: Scalar Remanences in Contemporary Climate Change Fiction

Abstract

This article provides a reading of Cynan Jones’s The Long Dry (2006) in the light of one of the topoi most closely associated with the Renaissance’s, i.e., Tillyard’s great chain of being. Starting from a consideration of what can be considered as the novel’s neo-baroque aesthetics displaying a strong taste for correspondences, it shows how the hierarchical system of the times is replaced by a more horizontal one in which human exceptionalism is shown to be problematical in the context of a period dominated by neo-materialist, post-human considerations. It goes on to address the sense of bafflement inherent in the revision of our conception of scale in the singular so as to reveal a plurality of scales as an evocation of a neo-sublime evocation of the Anthropocene and its attendant hyperobjects. It concludes on the prevalence of interdependences between human subjects and their natural and cosmic environment, promoting a vision of the living world as radically embedded and submitted to the material experience of transcorporeality.

Keywords

• Cynan Jones
• The Long Dry
• Anthropocene
• climate change fiction
• correspondences
• embeddings