Fiction of Our Climate: On Joy Williams' "Harrow"

Joy Williams | Harrow | Knopf | 2021 | 224 Pages

Where are the great climate novels? Where are the novels that, looking back a century from now, will have given the crisis its due, instead of participating in what Amitav Ghosh calls in The Great Derangement (2016) our “modes of concealment”? Ghosh blames modernism for falling in step with the illusion of scientific and moral progress as it strived for freedom unconstrained by the material world. Yet instead of setting the terms of the future, the avant-garde was blind-sided by the catastrophe of accelerating carbon emissions. Ghosh draws a parallel between Updike’s definition of the novel as “individual moral adventure” and our current “Protestant” vision of political activism divorced from actual governance. Such fiction, Ghosh argues, has become “a form of bearing witness, of testifying, and of charting the career of the conscience” rather than “the imagining of possibilities.” When it comes to the disasters of climate change, this imagining has been left to the “otherworldly” and so-called “lowbrow” realm of science fiction. Meanwhile, climate disasters are occurring here and now. How, Ghosh asks, might the literary novel adapt to acknowledge:

a) nonhuman characters and relationships

b) the cataclysmic forces that threaten our preferred mode of introspection

c) not just the future but the past and present (specifically the role of colonialism in shaping an “extractive” mindset)

d) the collective beyond “the individual imaginary”?

Six years after his publication, novelists have picked up this gauntlet. It may be that they simply needed time to catch up. Novels, unlike blogs, tend to run behind the times. They need years to gain perspective and develop a historical sense—to discover the “story” in the “situation,” to adopt Vivian Gornick’s terms. They are works of hindsight. Coincidence or not, current climate fiction seems highly conscious of Ghosh’s critical framework, as if the elements he identifies—the nonhuman, the cataclysmic, the extractive mindset, and the collective—were the trellis supporting their reach toward the sun. 

In the coming months, I will consider four recent candidates for great climate novels: Joy Williams’ Harrow, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Responding, intentionally or not, directly to Ghosh, each gives the climate emergency its due and acknowledges the struggle for political efficacy. 

In The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) David Wallace-Wells draws upon Ghosh in a chapter entitled “Storytelling.” He proposes that “the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with . . . conventional novels, which tend to end with uplift and hope and to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate.” Joy Williams’ Harrow, a blithely unhopeful novel, makes its bed in this miasma, giving the environmental crisis its due by letting it upend our desires for interiority and narrative coherence. Ghosh might argue that Williams’ vision of a sterile, inert, denatured nature gets the climate crisis dead wrong: our “taming” of nature has unleashed uncontrollable forces of fire, wind, mud, and water. But Harrow’s gambit is counterfactual, an imaginary space in which humans have been granted the dominion promised them by a Judeo-Christian framework. 

Harrow opens with a prologue of disembodied dialogue that directly evokes purgatory. (“They abolished [purgatory] but that doesn’t mean we’re relieved of the necessity of going there,” one character explains church doctrine to another.) The speakers are being transported on a bus labeled The Great Journey, around what later events will help situate at a moribund lake named Big Girl, and they sound and act like (doomsday) tourists:  

I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.

You are not our guide. You shouldn’t talk like you’re our guide.

I do like some of the guides better than others.

Some of them are nicer.

Death’s angels. They’re death’s angels, the nicer ones.

With such grimaces of nihilistic hilarity, the novel pursues its argument to absurdity: How else do human beings (in affluent, consumerist societies) behave but as tourists on this planet? Brash with ignorance, pursuing pleasure alongside some vague idea of self-improvement, relying on self-serving stereotypes and haphazard recommendations, living in denial of mortality, setting themselves apart from the environmental destruction they observe, as if they have somewhere else to go home to—such is the mirror Harrow’s characters hold up to readers. 

Readers, too, led by narrators, escape from reality into the comfort of passivity. 

The guide of Harrow is a girl named Khristen, remarkable only for the fact that she momentarily stopped breathing as an infant and her mother thinks she might have access to “the life we are unaware of.” The Christian overtones of her nickname, Lamb, and her Christ-like name—spelled with a “K” no doubt for Kafka, the novel’s patron saint—suggest that she is the “death’s angel” harrowing hell on earth, opening a path for the righteous to reach salvation. But she more resembles Lewis Carroll’s Alice, exclaiming with surprise or trying to do as she is told, stolid in her sincerity and purposelessness. “I don’t have a destination, really,” she tells a retired professor, who replies, “Probably because there aren’t any. To have one was always rather a luxury.” 

We follow Khristen through four phases in her life: first as an infant of divorcing parents; second as a girl sent to an unnamed boarding school the book’s title can’t help but loom over; third as a young woman looking for her mother and happening upon an institute run by a director who protests it is “not a suicide academy or a terrorist hospice”; and finally as an older woman who, in what we suspect is the afterlife, has a conversation about Kafka’s story-fragment “The Hunter Gracchus” with a judge she previously met as a 10-year-old boy. Jeffrey, first seen spouting phrases of tort law, is now presiding over a courtroom that suggests a hapless, incoherent harrowing. They discuss Kafka’s themes of guilt, purgatory, and the desire for coherence. 

The only spoiler is that there can be no spoiler: the pleasures of Harrow don’t hinge on suspense. 

The novel’s “post-apocalyptic” setting gives the sense that the apocalypse was disappointingly mundane: the revelation of our complete denaturing of the natural world through our conflation of the spiritual and material. Birds appear repeatedly as absences; even a plastic inflatable swan impossibly, inauspiciously vanishes. Obituaries are “a thing of the past.” The image of the harrow is graffitied everywhere, but it’s already faded, old news, without the intrigue of Pynchon’s muted post horn. It seems to stand for who succumbs and who lives: a symbol of the pandemic, then, but more generally of the mass extinction of the Anthropocene. The book is full of lines like: 

“The old dear stories of possibility. No one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them.” 

“It was over and now it could begin, was the way those on the outside justified their refreshed complacency.” 

“Everything obliterated to make room for something else.” 

“I wasn’t the kind of being the earth required.”

There is something fractal-like about Williams’ writing, her periodic sentences serving as a microcosm of characters’ briefly drawn fates and the novel itself. They strike out boldly, dangling possibility until their intentionally bathetic landings fold us into foregone conclusion.

Full of invention, perfectly crafted sentences, and satirical high jinks, the local scenes are to be relished. For instance: Jeffrey’s birthday party at a bowling alley named Paradise Lanes, where intent bowlers—“hefty, of a tribal disposition and with themselves well-pleased”—bowl in jackets with the words “Good News Exterminating” whorled across their backs: “After they released the ball they held the afterward of their poses for a vanity of time.” 

Yet that “vanity of time” haunts the narrative, which chooses to ignore the forward propulsion of plot suspension or character development. Sudden short paragraphs jolt us past dramatic events; characters appear, disappear, reappear, and never seem to age. Halfway through a Williams (or a Kafka) novel, I experience a low-level tedium that I never feel with their stories or parables, or in any scene taken in isolation. I do not really have hope that the novel’s abandoned children will find their parents, that its aging characters will redeem their wasted lives, or that the mystery surrounding the image of the harrow will be revealed. 

Williams’ characters often find themselves in need of a dictionary. Khristen tries asking for one in the hospital where her father is dying and is told, “Not in this place, dear”; a woman with dementia wonders whether it is “perimeter” or “parameter” of death; others consider etymologies and struggle over how to pronounce “detritus” and “denouement.” When I look up “harrow,” I learn that what was once an expression of surprise or delighted discovery, like “Weloway!” or “A ha!”, has since come to mean “to plunder.” It is related etymologically to hearse—the coffin conveyance, but also the harrow-shaped candle holder used for the Christian Tenebrae ceremony whose candles are gradually extinguished in the three days leading up to Easter. I suspect the resounding crack near the end of the novel (the last tree brought down like a judge’s gavel) is meant to evoke the end of that ceremony, in which the strepitus (“great noise”) made by slamming shut a book evokes the earthquake after the crucifixion and provides the cue for worshippers to depart.

I find myself wondering, as I dig deeper into the harrow, if the urge to extract meaning from a word or a text is akin to the mentality responsible for plundering the earth. As an adjective, as in “the harrowing effects of climate change,” the titular word suggests we once had such empathy with the earth that we felt its pain when raked by a harrow. But all associations are overshadowed by Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” in which a torture device known as the Harrow employs a set of needles to inscribe a condemned man’s sentence—the law he has violated—into the flesh of his back. The condemned man has had no trial, no defense—“Guilt is always beyond a doubt”—and is never told his sentence.

We will suffer, the book is clear, whether we accept blame or not.

Harrow is so clearly of our time that it asks not only what it means to be human in the face of what we have done to the planet, but also what it means to be a first-generation American leftie, or of the Judeo-Christian tradition. What does it mean to be concerned with suffering and inequity? To place one’s hope in the law, while being aware of one’s complicity and inefficacy? Williams’ satirical answer both to the trope of the white liberal who readily accepts guilt but not punishment, and to the Christian doctrine of original sin and man’s dominion over the earth, is Peter Paul, son of an aging hippie. First met as the nameless babysitter under whose watch Khristen stopped breathing, he remakes himself as a first responder named Nolo, short for nolo contendere: He accepts the punishment but not the guilt. 

Amid a cast of disinhibited characters, dying and reluctant to die, incapable of learning and reluctant to act, delivering deadpan lines that are disturbing or offensive, regaling us with macabre stories; and against Khristen’s “blank expectancy of an extremely young individual,” it is Jeffrey who brings the most energy to the page. He loves the grandfather his father killed, he has an ambition to be a judge, and he forms an inexplicable attachment to Khristen. He manages, in a purgatory of the absurd, to be human. Wishing to go by the name Enoch, for the Biblical man “translated” without dying, he remembers how, as a child, “He had harbored the notion that when someone you were fond of died, it was yourself who disappeared . . . and you were never that person again.” 

It is one of the few moments when the novel drops its mask of irony, taps into human need, and lets us acknowledge what we are missing. Another, sister to this one, occurs during a meeting of the institute’s eco-terrorists: 

I miss… Khristen thought, I miss… She felt transfixed, impaled, untranslated. She’d changed so much so as not to miss it even more, for that’s how you change—by missing something too much and pretending not to.

It’s these elliptical moments that hook me, like the fish Jeffrey holds up to his mother, who warns him against empathy: “You can’t start thinking that fish has a story…” They provide glimmers of someone letting themselves feel what is called ecological (or climate) grief, a sense that our wellbeing is inextricable from that of the earth and its other living creatures. 

The opposite of being a tourist is getting to know the story of each being on earth, each element and how it changes. Beneath and alongside seismic change, there is pathos on the scale of a human life, whose daily weather and patterns likewise take a lifetime to emerge. Harrow’s counterintuitive sense of possibility comes from what it denies us, from what it makes us aware that we have lost and will continue to lose unless we acknowledge that the fish, too, has a story.