What happens if we think about the explosion in literacy, in texts, in cultural production over the course of the twentieth century in particular as being the result of burning fossil fuels?

It was a great pleasure to able to present to the DAAD group online—I’m so grateful for the feedback! It’s especially nice to be in a community of Germanists again: I started out with a B.A. German, but then moved to Comparative Literature for my M.A., and moved from there into a doctorate in Scandinavian literatures. Although I have chosen a rather fickle path through literatures and languages, my interests for many years have circled round northern European landscapes and cultures, in particular the shared coastlines of the North Sea that were the subject of my first book. So in fact I never really left German literature behind me.

In the past few years, I have been researching literature and oil in the context of the North Sea oil industry. While Germany, Denmark, and The Netherlands each have a stake in the fossil fuels under the seabed in the North Sea basin, the largest shares of resources are extracted by Norway and the United Kingdom, and most of the texts I have been working on recently come from these two countries.

The connection between fossil fuels and climate change is easily made; between fossil fuels and aging perhaps less so, although fossil fuels are by definition very aged indeed (the clue is in the name!) and it is the misalignment between different temporalities—geological age versus human age—that creates the vexed problems of the Anthropocene. In my talk, drawing on the work of Imre Szeman, I explored the ramifications of thinking about the literature of modernity as being a product of an energy surplus. What happens if we think about the explosion in literacy, in texts, in cultural production over the course of the twentieth century in particular as being the result of burning fossil fuels? More specifically, as the result of burning biomass accreted and compressed over millennia in an intense momentary burst of heat and gases, which in turn will haunt generations to come?

The text that I found most useful in exploring these very big questions was a very small one —a long poem in two dialect variants of a minor language (Norwegian) —in which both fossil fuel extraction and human aging play a major role. Jimmen (2011) by the contemporary Norwegian poet Øyvind Rimbereid is set in the 1970s and unfolds against the background of the new oil industry in the North Sea off the coast of the Norwegian city Stavanger; its protagonists are an elderly working man and his working horse, Jimmen. They are the last old-fashioned refuse collectors who still go from house to house with a cart, collecting food scraps and night soil in pails. The juxtaposition of this old renewable energy system, which runs on horse- and manpower, with the explosive, disembodied, off-shored power of the new, is a recreation of a moment of transition that finds an echo in the formal qualities of the poem.

Presenting this poem in a short talk is always a challenge, because it is both long and linguistically difficult to access, but it is also a reminder of the value of difficulty and slowness. If the accelerated reading of petromodernity has habituated us to speed, smoothness, what Mark Simpson terms “lubricity,” then Rimbereid’s poem is its opposite—meandering, circular, full of obstacles. It speaks to the value of the literature of friction—of texts that get in the way and slow us down. As the world hurtles towards climate tipping points, being able to read at the pace of an old man and his horse, on circular routes up and down hills, over cobbled streets, stopping frequently, might be the resource that powers literary studies through the inevitable energy transition that is to come.