Washed Away: climate change, water & migration in speculative fiction

January 2022 | Cultural Construction of Europe | 9.0

Europe is no stranger to crisis. The European Union itself was born as a reaction to the Second World War and the ensuing crises of strength; for much of its history, and until this very day, it is characterized as a reactionary monolith that operates in the realm of crisis management rather than crisis mitigation. The term crisis is itself a complex notion, becoming a constant, both subjective and objective, feature in contemporary politics and society that works to legitimize (state) power or fuel (damaging) rhetoric, but also desensitize and normalise being in a state of crisis (Boletsi et al., 2020). Thus, besides the ongoing health crisis brought on by the enduring Covid-19 pandemic, three pressing issues in Europe today are three themes to be found in Maja Lunde’s 2017 work of speculative fiction, The End of the Ocean: climate change, freshwater shortages, and migration. Studying speculative fiction and dystopian works involves dissecting the social and political commentary proffered by the text, and this essay’s focus is to analyse the commentary of Lunde’s The End of the Ocean on migration in Europe during crisis. More specifically, how is Europe’s migration crisis defamiliarized, and what (new) perspectives does this offer? How does the novel link environmental crisis, particularly water shortage with mobility? How are climate change, migration and literature connected in the Europe of today? These questions and more are the foundation for this short essay.

Maja Lunde’s 2017 novel, The End of the Ocean, follows two journeys: the journey of Signe in 2017 as she travels back to her hometown via sailboat and grapples with the past and present of the environment as well as her love-life, and the journey of David and his daughter Lou in 2041 as they struggle to find fresh water as well as the rest of their family. The journeys entwine when David and Lou find Signe’s boat, dirty and hidden in a garden in France, as the reader learns the developments that brought her to France from Norway. The novel is structured in alternate, braided chapters, narrated in turn by Signe and David in their respective times. Signe’s opening chapter offers a glimpse into the Norway of her childhood, with enormous waters and a respect for the nature that she describes as disappearing, just as is the local glacier, over her 70-year lifespan. Her relationship with water is affectionate: she grew up around lakes and glaciers and rivers, and spent much of her life living and traveling on her sailboat Blue. She is an activist; her youth and adult life was spent fighting the inevitable development of a power station in her Norwegian town, which ultimately involved the damming of the local river and tunnelling the lake’s water away to the station. Her final act of protest is against the ice-mining of her community’s glacier, as she dumps the blocks off the cargo ship back into the lake, and sets off with twelve ice block containers in her own boat.

Twenty-four years in the future, the story of 25-year-old David opens as he and 6-year-old Lou have been separated from his wife and infant son while fleeing wildfires and a drought, in search of refuge and water. By the 2040s, water is a source of conflict between nations, its absence means the displacement of millions, and David’s relationship with water is one of tension and yearning. The dryness of Mediterranean France had forced many residents to relocate already, but David and family remained as he continued his work at a desalination plant. However, when the plant catches fire and the five-years-and-counting drought suffers the town to burn down with it, the family must run without stopping – despite the unintentional separation. Almost a month later, the pair arrives at an agreed-upon refugee camp over 400 kilometres north but even as the months pass, supplies dwindle, and deliveries halt, David and Lou stay in wait for Anna and August. Near the camp in Bordeaux, they come across Blue, Signe’s sailboat, stranded in a garden with no close proximity to any body of water. It becomes a haven for Lou to imagine and play, and a source of hope for David – as he discovers the long-dry canals of the region and a tractor to transport the boat, he only hopes for rain to be able to get the boat to the ocean. From this point, the two journeys become entangled over time: new questions – of how the boat got there, how the (social, political, and physical) landscapes have changed, and what the future holds – operate as drivers behind the novel’s exploration of climate change, water, and mobility.

The main topic of Lunde’s work is climate change and its effect on water (and people), as she builds a novel based on the speculation and exploration of a dystopian, elements-ravaged future. Signe’s chapters establish a series of causes, discussions of the choices and (profit-driven) priorities regarding the environment in 2017, while David’s chapters explore the effects of these kinds of choices and priorities in 2041. However, another main theme of Lunde’s novel, besides the relationship between climate and water, is the relationship between water and migration. This short essay thus centres around the theme of migration too, how the representation of the future defamiliarizes well known and ongoing crises in Europe.

Europe – as a continent, a political and economic union – is and has been familiar with the effects of both climate change and migration. Social and political narratives on both topics are divisive, controversial, and it’s inevitable that these themes of crisis should appear in works of dystopian and speculative fiction. Dystopian literature, a subcategory of speculative fiction, operates to “move readers to imagine alternative ways of being alive” in a world similar to ours, but not identical (Thomas 2013, 4). Given that art and society are connected, that politics and literature both shape and are shaped by each other (Lindburg 1968), dystopian literature is a literary genre well known for its intention of delivering societal critique. Described by key dystopian scholar M. Keith Booker, works in this category can be understood as a warning about the consequences of ‘arrant utopianism’ (Booker 1994, 3). He explains that dystopian literature is predominantly accepted as critique on a particular set of social conditions or political systems “through the critical examination of the utopian premises upon which those conditions or systems are based or through imaginative extension of those… into different contexts that more clearly reveal their flaws and contradictions” (ibid). In essence, dystopian and speculative fiction operates as a negotiation with utopian idealism, this interchange being the key to its social criticism, and utilizes defamiliarization – the literary device of taking something familiar and placing it in an unfamiliar context, such as the future, to foster a new or different perspective of the everyday (Hartman 2016) – as a strategy to underscore and amplify the problematic elements of the fictional society, in direct relation to the perceived societal problems of the author's reality. In the case of Lunde’s novel, the utopian idealism is centred around the prioritisation of profits over environmental health in Signe’s life, while the dystopian critique is evident in the chapters where David and his fellow refugees must deal with the effects of these choices.

There are two important motifs in The End of the Ocean, both literal and metaphorical, that are relevant to this essay and the theme of water and migration. The first is part of Signe’s journey: she leaves Norway with the stolen ice blocks onboard, heading towards Bordeaux, France, to deliver them to her ex-partner Magnus. Magnus and Signe grew up together and were a couple in young adulthood, but fundamental differences in opinion about environmental conservation and activism drove them apart. Signe knows that Magnus was one of those who signed off on mining the glacier, but in his retirement lives far from the damage being done. She sails across the ocean, through the English Channel, and down the rivers and canals of France, to dump the ice on his lawn in Bordeaux: she wants him to see it, feel it, and watch it melt away – slices of glacier never to be recovered. The links between water and economy are not new: financial terms such as liquidity and the literary discussions of ice as symbolic of financial capitalism (namely, fleeting, with limited beneficiaries, and bound to disintegrate with little to show) are notions that are visible in Lunde’s work (Bækgaard 2020). It is clear from Signe’s recognisable 2017 that water and its (mis)use is connected to climate change; the novel discusses the unsustainability of putting profit over conservation and its effects on ecosystems and wildlife. However, the water in Signe’s story is also symbolic of freedom and movement. With her sailboat and still-running rivers and canals, she is able to travel easily. On the profits of development in Norway, at the cost of damming the lake and rivers and of the diminishing glacier, Magnus is able to retire comfortably as a resident of France. Water, in Signe’s chapters, is a source of comfort and freedom, a symbol of life, while its status as a resource that can be depleted is still hypothetical. Most of all, water is security, and the migration that takes place in Signe’s chapters is goal-oriented and secure. Eventually, Signe makes it to Bordeaux to confront Magnus, and after an unexpectedly pleasant reunion, they bury the containers of now-melted glacial ice in the French garden. Blue is hoisted from the canal and put away in the garden too, and Signe’s journey is complete. The cause discussion of the 2017 world is sharply juxtaposed with visible effects in David and Lou’s 2041 water-starved world.

The second motif on the theme of water and migration is the way water, or more specifically, the lack of fresh water, drives insecurity: food insecurity, travel insecurity, and survival insecurity. The family is forced north to escape the drought but are entirely limited to where water is available. The northern ‘water nations’ are fighting to keep climate migrants out, and in the Bordeaux refugee camp, migrants from Spain as well as France seek asylum. The trip there from Argéles, in other circumstances a less than five-hour drive, takes David and Lou twenty-four days, presumably on foot as much of the country’s infrastructure has collapsed. Once at the camp, David experiences the stresses and frustrations that rations and shortages bring up in people without anywhere else to go. Water is a source of tension with no solution: everything has dried up, and the rain doesn’t come. Poor political management and the hypothetical mistakes of the past mean that many refugees there and elsewhere must go without clean clothes or showers, reserving only enough for a rationed amount of drinking water per person – and when a fire breaks out in the camp barracks, the unthinkable choice between no shelter sooner or dehydration later must be made. Interestingly, the fires in the novel (first in Argéles and later in Bordeaux) operate as ‘spectacular violence’ (Leppänen 2020) in opposition to the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2008) of the drought that facilitates the fire, the ‘slow violence’ of the consequences of environmental exploitation. The fires are devastating, of course, and allegorical to the climate emergencies that make the news a few times per year: Californian or Australian wildfires, or flooding in Germany – while the slow but constant human and corporate violence that facilitates the spectacular is less touched upon. Ultimately, when the Red Cross retreats and the supply drops cease, David and Lou leave the camp for a house they found nearby: a house with a garden and a sailboat hidden away. They discover that the muddy brown stretch behind the house was once a rushing canal, and if only the rain would come, they could take the boat to the ocean and survive using David’s desalination expertise. In the final chapters of David’s story, the boat is moved into the dry canal and the notion of water becomes a source of hope: prepare for the rain, prepare for movement, and hope to survive long enough to make it out of Bordeaux. Dehydration eventually begins to set in, the ever-elusive rains refuse to come, and hope dwindles as David accepts that Anna and August will also never arrive. However, Lou finds strange containers buried in the back of the garden, twelve containers of pure drinking water, and the dream of freedom, movement, and ultimately survival is reinvigorated.

What the novel does, especially in David’s chapters and with the tactful juxtaposition and entanglements of Signe’s story, is both humanise and defamiliarize the crises that Europe faces today. The crisis that sprung from a mismanaged reaction to migration from 2015 onwards is defamiliarized in the future, and refamiliarized in provoking the thought of plausibility (a ‘that-could-be-me’ effect). While climate migration now has been negatively characterised as a problem elsewhere or for later, through The End of the Ocean Lunde works to establish more pressing questions of what happens when there is no water: then no food, then no means to transport goods by ship, nothing to wash in, and importantly nothing to drink for human or other living things. Signe is represented as knowingly playing the role of ‘old hippy’ and ‘angry woman’ that are easily dismissed in the world of today when discussing climate change, and David and Lou are represented as relatable young Europeans that face the daunting struggles and tensions that emergency migration creates. Speculative fiction operates as a literary mirror that both reflects and informs society, and Lunde’s constructed dystopia of David’s 2041 is a cautionary tale of ignoring the Signe’s of 2022. Water is an important theme, of course, but it’s relationship to mobility – in that it facilitates freedom, movement, and survival – is what readers and scholars today must convert into action tomorrow, to mitigate crisis in Europe rather than simply react and manage. Now is the time to step away from (neoliberal) traditions, for example of profit over people, to ensure a less dystopian and more sustainable future for Europe and its global neighbours.

References

Bækgaard J.T. (2020) Ice-as-Money and Dreams-as-Ice: Christos Ikonomou’s “The Blood of the Orange” and the Critique of Liquidity. In: Boletsi M., Houwen J., Minnaard L. (eds) Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_13.

Boletsi M., Houwen J., Minnaard L. (2020) Introduction: From Crisis to Critique. In: Boletsi M., Houwen J., Minnaard L. (eds) Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi-org.proxy-ub.rug.nl/10.1007/978-3-030-36415-1_1.

Booker, M. K. (1994). Dystopian Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Hartman, J. (2016). The Defamiliarization of Death in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. The Hemingway Review 35(2), 120-123. doi:10.1353/hem.2016.0007.

Leppanen, K. (2020). Memory of Water: Boundaries of Political Geography and World Literature. European Review, 28(3), 425–434. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798719000541.

Lindberg, J. (1968). Literature and Politics. The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 22(4), 163-167. doi:10.2307/1346587.

Lunde, M. (2017). The End of the Ocean. London: Simon & Schuster UK.

Nixon R (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Thomas, P. L. (Ed.). (2013). Science fiction and speculative fiction: Challenging genres. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Official feedback: Thanks for a well-written and well-argued paper, Loura. i’ve read it with much interest and pleasure. Please see the handwritten notes for comments.* Great introduction! As for the conclusion: rethink that issue of “tradition”, I think there are other elements that you might have referred to at this point (e.g. capitalism, greed, mercantilism, etc.?)

Don’t forget to structure your text by means of paragraphs - it will ensure (even) greater readability of your text.

* source statements; some grammar; paragraph breaks (added here); nuance about effects on people; adding examples; more tie-in of novel with argument in conclusion

I wrote this essay quite quickly, in a day or so I think. I had spent a fair bit of time on the novel (almost 400 pages) and not really made notes, but knew more or less what I wanted to write about - we had submitted an essay pitch some weeks prior so the idea was already there. With a little more time, or at least a day to set it aside and come back for proofing and editing, most of the grammar and style points would've been resolved. While the other points about adding nuance and examples are valid, the size of this essay was its limitation. There is only so much you can fit in a 2,000 word paper, and already what I submitted was over the 10% margin anyway. A closer analysis and more nuance would've meant reducing the amount of plot review, which is hard when it feels necessary to explain for context. This is, however, something I'd like to work on in the future: being able to explain just what's important without over-explaining, and going as deep as needed on the analysis instead, seems like something that comes with practice.

I do very much enjoy writing this kind of content, the kind of work that deals with the connections between literature and politics; what conjoins art and life. I spent my whole BA thesis doing just that, and besides being enjoyable, I find it valuable to dissect the things we might consume somewhat casually to uncover the often more serious reflections on the state of the world. That said, I find it difficult to see this kind of writing as equally important or 'academic' as traditional essays or research pieces - perhaps worth exploring the source of those thoughts (is it me and my expectations of what fits in academia, or is it actually less important in academia?)

I could be because I find this writing to come quite naturally (and therefore find it 'easier') that it doesn't feel as challenging as 'more serious' research and essay writing. It's a lot of my own thoughts and interpretations stated academically and backed up here and there by other sources or theories and frameworks. But, maybe that's okay? Maybe it's fine that I'm the 'expert' bringing together the literature and politics, the art and academics, to produce this kind of research? I mean, my BA thesis took a lot of work, and I found that to be quite academic and something to be proud of. Perhaps I just need to spend more time reading published research on literature and art to see how that fits in the academic landscape, and from there I'd be able to better understand the place and value of my own work, for example.

We'll see!