Turning Off the Light: Choosing Darkness on Our Path Into the Anthropocene

Molly Johnson

Turning Off the Light

“The frog stopped singing as soon as it knew it was being hunted; I turned off the light so it would start to sing again, and then, in the darkness, I saw its eyes, I mean, the two silvery half-moons, moving in front of me.” -Mayra Montero, In the Palm of Darkness, 1997^[1]

"Treating gut bacteria and cyborg communication as morally important misses the point, and opens space for forgetting the special dignity of human beings. Because history shows how fragile that dignity is, this philosophical mistake is not a casual matter.” -Jedediah Purdy, "After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene,” 2015^[2] 

To acknowledge the Anthropocene is to acknowledge the indelible effect of humanity on the non-human elements of the planet. There is something different about us, we are saying. There is something different, and if we can’t quite pin down the difference itself, what we can do is point to its ramifications. And yet, when an artist approaches the natural world with the desire to better understand it and therefore better wrestle it out from the tight vise of our epoch, they will inevitably find that the tools they have to do so are frustratingly human. When a person looks at a tree, or a frog, or for that matter even a tree frog, their perspective is limited by the difference that is so difficult for us to name.

How do we engage with nature in a way that helps us wrap our minds around the place of both human and non-human entities in the world? How do we “turn off the light” of human intrusion in order to better see the other forces at work? Is it possible to accomplish these things without losing sight of our own “special dignity”?

By taking a close look at three literary texts and the choices made by their authors, we’ll see how various artists are using literature to both ask and answer these questions. We’ll focus on three methods of “turning out the light” as a way to engage with the humanity-nature relationship.

1.  Mystification

        On the whole, humans are fond of certainty. Our tolerance for unanswered questions tends to be extremely low, and often for good reason—many lives have been saved and many disasters have been averted (or mitigated) by the rapacity of our desire for understanding. Still, when we can acknowledge the usefulness of uncertainty, we’re often able to generate a type of knowledge that might be unattainable through hard-headed research.  

“The cause of the failure is unknown.” -Mayra Montero, In the Palm of Darkness, 1997^[3]

In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero is a novel entirely structured around uncertainty. Victor and Thierry, Montero’s two narrators, seek a frog that is not only rare, mysterious, and mythologized in Hatian culture, but whose elusiveness is due to a large-scale phenomenon that neither main character knows the cause of. Better still, Montero follows each of Victor’s narratives with nonfictional descriptions of real-life frog species disappearances, all of which are inexplicable.

Montero’s determination to work within mystery challenges the standard structure of a story. Victor’s goal is to capture the last specimen of the grenouille du sang, and while he has no hopes of propagating the species, he wants to document and study the creature. When he finally does find, and immediately kill, the grenouille du sang, readers believe for just a moment that he has succeeded—until he, Thierry, and the frog are lost at sea. This cements the secrets of the grenouille du sang as secret. It will not be studied, and it will not be known. By mystifying the frog in this way, Montero confers it with its own kind of “special dignity.” To know a thing is in some sense to conquer it, and by the end of In the Palm of Darkness, we as readers find that we remain in the dark.

“I could have squashed it if I wanted to, or put it in the jar and kept it for Papa Crapaud, who would have given anything to see it, but it occurred to me that maybe bad luck came with the grenouille du sang because everybody killed it.” -Mayra Montero, In the Palm of Darkness, 1997^[4]

        Montero foreshadows Victor and the grenouille du sang’s mutually assured destruction very early on in the novel. The Hatian people believe it is bad luck to see the frog, and in a moment when he sits in the darkness listening to the frog’s voice, Thierry connects that bad fortune to human violence, speculating that perhaps the two evils are intertwined. To view a frog as a powerful entity that has the capacity for retribution is perhaps not a natural thing for many readers, and yet this is an incredibly apt metaphor for the Anthropocene. The more we destroy, the more destructive our environment will become, but it can nonetheless be difficult to picture how the loss of a species that is not actually used by most humans for food or recreation will affect us in a meaningful way. By posing the frog as a mythical threat as well as a scientific riddle, Montero shows readers that what we cannot know will hurt us if we attempt to subjugate it.

        Of course, Montero had little choice but to be comfortable with the mysteries around which she structured her story, since In the Palm of Darkness is based on true events, and there was no scientific consensus on what was causing frog species around the world to disappear at the time she published her novel. However, since then, human research has at last succeeded in lifting up the rock and illuminating the answer hidden away underneath: we’ve discovered that decline in frog populations is largely due to a disease-causing fungus. The fact that this particular mystery has been solved does not negate the effectiveness of Montero’s method of mystification as a way of engaging with nature in a different way than we’re accustomed to; we can, and should, still appreciate the respect and fear that this vantage point offers.

Even so, mystification cannot be our only way of “turning off the light,” because so often, someone finds a way to turn the light right back on.  

2.  Erasure

"Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns--and even convictions." -Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902^[5]

“sea.” -Yedda Morrison, Darkness, 2011^[6]

        When faced with the most negative, destructive consequences of the Anthropocene, one possibility is to imagine the earth completely without the presence of the human. Yedda Morrison’s Darkness, a work of erasure poetry on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, does just that. It is possibly the most literal example we could find of literarily “turning off the light,” because Morrison actually excises all words in the original novel that are not related to the natural world.

Heart of Darkness has a famously troubled view of nature. While Marlow, the main narrator, is able to recognize the destruction of the natural world and the violent subjugation of the Congo’s native people as ugly, disturbing things, he does not propose an alternative to the destruction. He pushes on through the Congo, lured by the elusive voice of Mr. Kurtz and propelled by his own sense of inevitability.

In removing all trace of the human from Heart of Darkness, Morrison challenges this idea of fated devastation by questioning the authority of the written story to remain unaltered. Traditionally, we analyze novels as their authors present them to us, but Morrison proposes an alternative. In Darkness, she picks the natural bones of the story clean of all human presence, creating a poem that highlights the beauty that exists apart from the human.    

“towering trees, immense matted jungle, blazing little ball of sun hanging still—” -Yedda Morrison, Darkness, 2011^[7] 

Erasure as a method does come with its own set of risks. Some of the most beautiful passages in Darkness come from moments that are tense, awful, or violent in the source text, which engenders a more peaceful effect by obscuring the murky tension that makes Heart of Darkness a compelling story. A reader approaching Darkness in a vacuum might have trouble locating a sense of meaning, and even a reader with full knowledge of Heart of Darkness might bristle at the idea of literally “turning off the light” like this. Removing the human creates something new, but not a new story—or at least, not a story that can exist apart from its own context as a work of erasure.

Disturbing as it is, Heart of Darkness depicts real human suffering as well as real human exploitation, and to forget this suffering would be incredibly dangerous. When “the bond of the sea—in other words, the sense of community built around a natural entity, which can be both beneficial and harmful—becomes simply “sea,” we lose a piece of knowledge about how humans form attachments to natural environments that we sometimes use to justify hurting each other.          

3.  Characterization

When an author applies the method of characterization, a very human concept, to an animal or a natural setting, it’s a different act of creative framing than writing a human character. It requires both the author and the reader to think about the varied motivations and agencies of non-human creatures, and also to consider the inherent limits of their own imaginations in this area.

In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh manages to characterize several natural entities while always writing from a human character’s perspective. He does this by allowing his human characters to ascribe interiority to the animals, which makes readers consider whether they agree with the fictional humans’ assessments of the animals’ agency. Ghosh never demands that readers accept the idea that a tiger might have a morally complicated consciousness, but he poses the question, and offers it time and time again from different narrative angles. The animals are never merely metaphorical representations of the humans’ problems.

“He says that when a tiger comes into a human settlement, it’s because it wants to die.” -Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 2006^[8]

Whether or not readers choose to believe that animals in Ghosh’s story (and in reality) have interiority, there’s no question that they have their own motivations. Of course, the human characters sometimes disagree bitterly on what these motivations are. Piya, one of the two main narrators, spends the majority of the novel on her quest to understand the river dolphins’ behavior, gathering data and observing their movements. Yet when Fokir, a man native to the region who assists her research, expresses a belief that tigers who venture into human towns do so suicidally, Piya is incensed. Though Fokir’s belief is based on his own observations (as well as on culturally produced knowledge), Piya takes issue with this evaluation of the tigers’ behavior and with the violence such an interpretation calls upon humans to commit.

"Individuals’ environmental attitudes do not spring fully formed from their heads...People learn to value nature by interacting with the world in which they are born and grow up.” -Jedediah Purdy, "After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene,” 2015^[9] 

        Though the human characters’ arguments are easily traced to elements of their own characters (Fokir’s life in an environment where tigers were a real and constant threat, Piya’s background in a Western culture that claims to value conservation), the tiger about which they argue becomes a character because the question is not only “should the tigers be killed?” but also “what does the tiger want?” Considering the tiger’s desires might make it easier or more difficult to kill, depending on one’s perspective, and this is what makes Ghosh’s story so much more complicated than a traditional conservation narrative that positions animals as helpless victims and humans as violent conquerors. That simple picture is certainly an accurate one in some cases, but not here—unlike a prop or a piece of setting, a character can be an antagonist.

“He opened his eyes and there it was, directly ahead, a few hundred feet away. It was sitting on its haunches with its head up, watching him with its tawny, flickering eyes. The upper parts of its coat were of a color that shone like gold in the sunlight, but its belly was dark and caked with mud. It was immense, of a size greater than he could have imagined, and the only parts of its body that were moving were its eyes and the tip of its tail.” -Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, 2006^[10] 

Like Morrison’s work in Darkness, Ghosh’s story plays with the idea of what it might mean to “turn off the light” on humans in a literal sense, to allow the tigers of the Sundarbans free reign to hunt and kill. Ghosh, however, keeps the human desire for life in the equation. He describes not just what it is like to look at a tiger, but what it is like to be looked at by a tiger, how it feels to be observed by something with the power to tear you limb from limb. Unlike the frogs in Montero’s story, the tigers in The Hungry Tide pose an immediate, non-mythical threat. In answer to the question of whether we ought to protect the animals whose environments we share or prioritize our own safety, Ghosh asks whether it would even be possible for us not to clash with the creatures that threaten us. Though he heightens the stakes of these questions by characterizing the animals in his story, Ghosh never loses sight of the fact that humanity is defined by its own struggle to live and thrive.

Seeing in the Darkness

“Human exceptionalism blinds us. Science has inherited stories about human mastery from the great monotheistic religions. These stories fuel assumptions about human autonomy, and they direct questions to the human control of nature, on the one hand, or human impact on nature, on the other hand, rather than to species interdependence…What if we imagined a human nature that shifted historically together with varied webs of interspecies dependence?” -Anna Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,” 2010^[11] 

        What we want moving forward, of course, is a toolkit. We need to have a collection of ways to think about the world that will help us save ourselves by saving our environment, and we need it as quickly as possible.

Montero, Morrison, and Ghosh each offer a way to “turn off the light” on human exceptionalism, and just as literally turning off the lights forces us to focus on our other senses as a means of interpreting the world, each of their methods allows us to stretch our minds in new ways of engaging with nature. Their work shows that to avoid obscuring ourselves entirely while still giving nature room to breathe is a constant and delicate balancing act, both in literature and in the actual changing landscape of the earth’s human epoch.

Still, none of these methods are perfect. No amount of literary mystification, erasure, or characterization can fully put us in the paws of a tiger or give us a healthy enough fear of the power of frogs to completely jolt us into a “web of interspecies dependence.” A strong dose of self-awareness is necessary even as we look for ways to expand beyond an absolutely human-centric way of knowing the world.

Darkness, as it turns out, can be extremely useful when it blinds us to the right things. The further we get into the Anthropocene, the more carefully we will have to consider what to obscure and what to illuminate.