The Plastic Bag Theory of Fiction: Narrative Plasticity and the “Mentality” of the Anthropocene

This article traces the relation of plasticity, ontology, and responsibility in Anthropocene novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Ruth Ozeki. Reimagining Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” as “The Plastic Bag Theory of Fiction” reveals Anthropocene fiction’s “plastic” resources – its play with form and language, the troping of space and temporality, its metafictional reflections on the narrative itself – to illuminate and problematize an ontological contradiction adhering to the term “Anthropocene.” Philosopher Catherine Malabou argues that conflating human-and/as-geological history creates an ontological rift, a “self-alienation” allowing for the “slumber of responsibility itself.” Narrative figurations of contradiction are rife in Anthropocene fiction: “narrative plasticity markers” register the accumulative ambitions of global capitalism as “the garbage heap of History,” while reflecting back the (self-)alienated subject of “anthropocenic history” through hauntings of long-forgotten memories, ghosts and shape-shifters, and alternate or hidden histories.