Cause and effect ceased to have meaning: genres of the metabolic rift

The metabolic rift is a growing concern in environmental discourse. Environmental scientists, policy makers, and everyday citizens concerned with climate change struggle with how to communicate or represent the growing rift adequately. This article uses theory about the metabolic rift by thinkers like John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito alongside work on literary form by Rachel Greenwald Smith, Sianne Ngai, and Lauren Berlant to propose an emerging novelistic technique used to represent the metabolic rift. This technique – flail – places incompatible genres adjacent to each other in one text as the literary solution to this problem of representation. In closely reading Nell Zink’s 2014 novel The Wallcreeper, this article explores how readers struggle with novels that collage multiple genres alongside the productive tension such collage generates. Ultimately, this article understands Zink’s invocation of generic tension demanding a total reorganisation of socially reproductive life and her representation of this tension as an affirmation of the novel form’s elastic capabilities.