From the museum of civilisation to The Octopus Museum: curating the anthropocene in contemporary literature. Issue 9 (2nd September 2022) - Caracciolo, Marco
ABSTRACT: This article argues that the museum is a significant trope in contemporary literature that engages with the climate crisis. With its destabilisation of relations between human communities and the nonhuman world, the Anthropocene – Paul Crutzen's influential (if controversial) name for the current geological period – troubles conceptual binaries and epistemological categories that are central to Western modernity. Through two case studies, Flights (2007), by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and The Octopus Museum (2019), by American poet Brenda Shaughnessy, I explore how these works use the space of the museum to chart the intellectual, affective, and ethical tensions that underlie our climate-changed times. In these literary figurations of the museum, the things on display – whether they are anatomical parts (in Flights ) or textual fragments (in The Octopus Museum ) – become the site of radical uncertainty, as well as a probe into the agential efficacy of the nonhuman world. This approach destabilises anthropocentric hierarchies and pushes back against a widespread perception of the post-Enlightenment museum as an institution imparting stable, taxonomically organised knowledge. A comparison with the Museum of Civilisation featured in Emily St. John Mandel's postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014) allows me to bring into view the originality of Tokarczuk's and Shaughnessy's experimentations.