“Apt Invention” in the Anthropocene: Hyperobjects, Marek Hłasko, and Zero K

Anthropogenic climate change defines the contemporary global experience. Like finance and fascism in the ‘30s, world war and holocaust in the ‘40s, and cold war in the ‘50s, the sixth mass extinction event has emerged as the looming issue, the dominating Real, to which all other realisms are secondary. But unlike war and economic collapse, Anthropogenic climate change poses challenges that are generally mistreated, or avoided entirely. As Timothy Clark writes in Ecocriticism on the Edge, “the largely benumbed recognition of this reality has become one feature of life in the so-called Anthropocene, to use the currently still informal term for the epoch at which largely unplanned human impacts on the planet’s basic ecological systems have passed a dangerous, if imponderable, threshold.” (Clark x) The Anthropocene “evades normal categories of attention,” and is thus “frightening and intellectually liberating.” In the ‘50s and ‘60s the novelist Marek Hłasko, the so-called “Eastern European James Dean,” (Ufberg) developed a technique he called “apt invention” to write about his own existential threat of postwar totalitarianism. In his autobiography Beautiful Twentysomethings Hłasko wrote that the straight truth was incomprehensible to people, and only by surpassing the facts with “apt invention” could a writer render the reality of life in Soviet-occupied Poland on the page. In other words, “apt invention” is the act of mediated imagination that makes the gesture of realism possible, an idea at large today in the popularity of speculative fiction, weird fiction, slipstream, and other modes of genre-lucid literature. Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016), capitalizing off a popular tolerance for speculation in realism, employs various modes of 21st-century “apt invention” to explore death in an age of extinction, a genre-like surpassing of reality to communicate the Lacanian Real, the experience outside of representation, if experience is to be communicable at all.

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