Torsa Ghosal is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative. Alison Gibbons is a reader in contemporary stylistics at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is the author of Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature and the coeditor of several books, including Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism. Their newest book, Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, was published last month.

Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the multimodal relationship between fictionality and factuality. The contemporary discussion about fictionality coincides with an increase in anxiety regarding the categories of fact and fiction in popular culture and global media. Today’s media-saturated historical moment and political climate give a sense of urgency to the concept of fictionality, distinct from fiction, specifically in relation to modes and media of discourse.

At the turn of the century, troubled by global warming, climate scientists began to speak of our present geological era as “the Anthropocene,” signaling the environmental damage wrought by humans (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Popular recognition of global warming has since grown, with a profusion of cultural products—from architecture and art to film and literature—engaging with environmental issues. Adam Trexler refers to novels about climate change as “Anthropocene fictions,” noting that they form “a significant archive” (2015, 8). Despite increasing public awareness, Andreas Malm challenges what he sees as contemporary malaise, whereby the “ontological status of global warming is that of an idea” (2018, 24; original emphasis). He thus advocates for the urgent need to understand climate change as unequivocal fact: “global warming is not a discourse. It trivialises the suffering it generates to see it as a text. The excessive temperatures are not a piece of rhetoric” (22). In this chapter, I investigate how contemporary novelists and artists (primarily photographers)—namely, Lance Olsen, Jeff Jackson, Marina Vitaglione, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Mandy Barker—use multimodality to imagine the consequences of global warming. Although poetic license is inevitably employed in fictionalizations, these texts do not diminish the reality of climate change. Rather, their multimodal ontological distortions raise readers’ consciousness and consciences of the precarious environmental future.

In the next section, I contextualize my project as a contribution to Anthropocene narrative theory (James 2020, 2022; Caracciolo 2019) and in relation to the conceptual paradigm of the nonhuman turn which “is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technology” (Grusin 2015, vi; see also Zylinska 2017). I also introduce my methodological approach, which combines the storyworld model (Herman 2002) with text world theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007). Subsequently, I explore the role of images in climate change discourse generally and Anthropocene fiction specifically. As well as referencing the field of nonhuman photography, I cite frameworks from multimodality studies and narrative scholarship that I use to examine the ontology of photographs. My ensuing analyses focus on two devices: the inclusion of photographs, particularly of place; and the multimodal practice of cataloging (invented) species, which can include photographs and/or illustrations. The chapter ultimately makes three significant contributions: first, it shows that a combined worlds model, including the storyworld and text-worlds, can enhance Anthropocene narrative theory’s account of ontological complexities; second, it provides an explicit account of the worldbuilding capacities of photographs in text world theory through a new analytical synthesis using frameworks from multimodality studies and narrative scholarship; third, it demonstrates that multimodal features and fictional/referential distortions can be integral in Anthropocene fiction in terms of prompting readers to engage with the realities of climate change.

Anthropocene Narratives and Worlds

Pieter Vermeulen suggests that there are four features of narrative that make it an ideal vehicle for readers’ comprehension of the Anthropocene (2020, 20–29): centrality, whereby narrative structures make sense of scientific insights and impose “patterns and order on an unruly reality, such as the reality of a planet spinning out of human control” (21); affective properties, prompting “sensory discomfort and affective unease” in readers, “to attune us to the emergent realities that have not yet been consolidated as concepts” (23); imaginative worldbuilding, which “shape fictional realities that add unanticipated possibilities to the world in which these fictions emerge” (24); and textuality, which recasts writing as agency that is not exclusively human but distributed between human, nonhuman, and technological forms and subjects (28). This latter affordance of Anthropocene fiction is pertinent to the nonhuman turn and has, in narratology, primarily emerged in relation to nonhuman narrators (Bernaerts et al. 2014; see also James 2020, 187). Such figures, according to Lars Bernaerts et al., are “counterontological entities” (Zunshine 2008, 75; original emphasis; Bernaerts et al. 2014, 71), a descriptor that implies fictional/referential blurring or, as Lisa Zunshine phrases it, they are “entities that resist ontological closures” (2008, 67). Bernaerts et al. argue that such ontological ambiguity is understood by readers in terms of a conceptual blend, a “‘double dialectic’ in readers’ engagement,” with nonhuman entities imbued with human traits and skills, and experienced as an amalgam of “defamiliarization and empathy, human experientiality and the (un)natural” (2014, 72).

Vermeulen’s (2020) four features intimate that blurring the fictionreality distinction is a dominant feature of Anthropocene narratives. This resonates with Trexler’s summation that Anthropocene fictions “successfully reconfigure the historical relationship between fiction and truthtelling” (2015, 16). Studying the creation of blurred ontology alongside narrative worldbuilding in Anthropocene fiction, though, requires an approach attuned to narrative devices, compositional forms, and the cognitive operations of readers’ imaginaries. To perform such a task, Erin James advocates, initially, econarratology (2015) and, subsequently, Anthropocene narrative theory (2020, 2022). In both, James draws on David Herman’s concept of “storyworlds,” which he defines as “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate” (2002, 5). This allows James to interrogate the imaginative worldbuilding of ecofiction and Anthropocene fiction, a dimension she sees as vital since—through readers’ psychological projections into alternate cultural spaces, personal perspectives, and anthropogenic worlds (2015, 208; 2020, 188)—these narratives “provide us with safe contexts in which to study the worldmaking processes that define this epoch. We thus stand to understand our destructive role in the latter by grappling with the worldmaking power of the former” (2020, 188). The storyworld dimension of James’s approach is important since it is grounded in cognitive narratology and thus is well-placed to consider readers’ imaginative engagements. However, Herman’s storyworld ultimately signifies a holistic model of a narrative’s textual universe. That is, although it includes temporal sequences and spatial constellations, the storyworld is a totalizing construct. In Herman’s own words, storyworlds are “global mental representations” (2002, 5, 10; 2009, 72; my emphasis) that allow interpreters “to frame inferences about the situations, characters, and occurrences” (2009, 72–73; my emphasis). To explore the varying degrees of fictionality and referentiality at work within Anthropocene fictions, I argue that it is vital to also explicate mental models within an overarching storyworld. Rebecca Evans’s (2018) discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson’s cli-fi trilogy Three Californias (1984–1990) can be seen to justify my claim. Three Californias “is structured as three distinct, parallel possible environmental futures for California’s Orange County, each told in a different speculative mode: apocalypse, dystopia, and utopia” (Evans 2018, 507). Installed in different temporalities—2047, 2027, and 2065—they nevertheless feature overlapping content, using “repetitions of characters, circumstances, places, and even particular phrases and references to transform the boundaries between apocalypse, dystopia, and utopia into spaces of intellectual comparison and movement, rather than silos” (Evans 2018, 510). Evans proposes that this structural conceit “creates the possibility for reflection on the intersections among apocalyptic, dystopian, and utopian futures” (510; original emphasis). In other words, the three books are interpreted as both separate and part of a shared storyworld. This means, I assert, that readers necessarily construct discrete local mental models—distinct in time, space, epistemological and ontological grounding—as sites within a global storyworld. Evans’s study thus shows that Anthropocene narrative theory needs to refine its approach to worldbuilding to also capture intra-storyworld relations as part of readers’ experiences of the ontologies of Anthropocene fiction.