Elliott 1 William D. Elliott UC Davis English welliott@ucdavis.

edu ASLE 2011 Panel: The Politics and Aesthetics of Global Waste

Toxic Impasse: Material and Textual Insolubilities of Waste in A. R. Ammons and Rick Bass ABSTRACT: The oft-cited tension between aesthetic sophistication and political efficacy is intensified when we examine the literature of pollution and waste. Both materially and conceptually, waste refuses to stay where it belongs rendering waste a problematic object for literary representation, and therefore an excellent test case for crux questions of environmentalist political aesthetics. Recent ecologically-attuned fiction and poetry have responded to these difficulties by offering formally complex texts about pollution, which incorporate textual waste at multiple levels. My paper examines the literary form of two approaches to writing waste, in an effort to identify the political limitations of each aesthetic for practical environmentalisms. Beginning with A. R. Ammonss book-length poem Garbage (1993), I argue that the poem places its narrative and textual garbage into a precarious balance between abjection and integration and I evaluate whether this balance is too fine to be applied as a model for public attitudes toward waste on the global scale. I then turn to Rick Basss short story Pagans (2006), and its uncharacteristically ambivalent depictions of a Texas Gulf Coast river so polluted by oil refinery waste that its surface literally burns.

Elliott 2 Like Ammons, Bass writes a delicate line between forgrounding the toxicity of waste, and transmuting that waste through literary figuration into something less pollutive. Reading his river in the context of the recent British Petroleum spill and of Basss other work on oil, I argue that formal elements like the storys unconventional plot structure, and its lyrical, ambivalent figurations of toxic petrochemicals, pose an implicit answer to the aesthetic and political impasse that Bass phrases elsewhere as I cant go on, I must go on as an artist in the face of environmental crisis (Why I Came West, 219). I situate my argument within an understanding of waste following pollution theorists like John Scanlan who emphasize the categorical indeterminacy of waste over the possibility of constructing a systematic waste theory, such as David Trotter and David Thompson have attempted. This places my reading of waste at odds with critics like Loraine DiCiccio or David Evans, who focus on the transmutability of waste into cleaner forms (energy, capital), rather than on its stubborn, material pollutiveness. It is from this perspective that I argue Ammons imagines waste as a particularly stubborn, persistent materiality, one that is always political in its inherent resistant to global capitals emphasis on the clean, immaterial liquidity of flows like information or wealth. The phrase aesthetics of waste implies a certain artistic and critical distance from aestheticized waste objects. One toxic substance, however, readily challenges the distinctions between privileged subjects and distant objects. This is petroleum, ubiquitous in our petroculture, from the synthetically fertilized foods we consume to the changing climate we inhabit. It is in the context of this imbrication, and of recent work on Bass and postmodern ecofiction by O. Alan Weltzien, Paul Wise, Kate Rigby, and Greg Garrard,

Elliott 3 that I attempt to define the political implications of Basss aesthetic of oil waste in particular. Ultimately, I suggest that the texts formal complexities succeed in representing many of the indeterminacies and paradoxes that waste embodies. While this somewhat rarified success seems likely to have limited public applicability for example, in the way that other texts have been appropriated by environmental movements to generate awareness and model action I contend that they are nevertheless helpful counterpoints to the false certainty with which waste is often narrativized by national politics and media.