Presence – Brenda Iijima

[University of Georgia Press; 2024]

One of the stickiest challenges for fiction writers in the time of permanent climate crisis has been to decenter the human. Because humans continue to manufacture this catastrophe with unrelenting zeal, we may have a lot to learn by centering the subjectivities of, say, cats or blobfish, and fiction is uniquely equipped to do so. A growing number of novels have accepted the challenge: a delightfully bizarre subplot in Suzannah Showler’s novel Quality Time (2023), for instance, follows a sisterhood of “trashpandas” (raccoons) that wreaks nocturnal havoc on Toronto and poses unsettling questions about city-dwelling, birth, destruction, and the will to survive. In a novel about the protracted dissolution of a relationship, it’s the trashpandas that wrench the soul. Henry Hoke’s Open Throat (2023) commits more fully to the nonhuman by ironizing LA culture from the perspective of a queer mountain lion. By contrast, Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018) tacks to a more conventional animal narrative: a dog (the titular friend) becomes a site on which the human protagonist projects grief and anxiety. And because the dog is more of a device than an agent, the dog in the end must die.

But this exercise can only go so far: animals, ultimately, make for boring literary actors. Their desires are biologically determined. They don’t regret their sexual encounters or analyze their own self-loathing in luxurious prose. They can’t compromise their morals because they have none, and what is the hallmark of the novel if not that protagonists must struggle against the morals of their societies? 

Given the challenge that animals pose to fiction, it would seem all but impossible for vegetal beings to ripen into subjects for narrative prose. At least animals move, kill, and emote. To the extent that plants move at all, they do so glacially, imperceptibly. Whether or not they have consciousness or “feel” pain is a point of impassioned scientific and philosophical debate, but the fact of such uncertainty speaks to their seeming impassivity. Cut a flower or pick an apple and no sensible sign of distress will arrest the human drive to appropriate the beauty and nourishment that plants so promiscuously present to us. Except as regional markers, as with Cather and Faulkner, or as inanimate props, like Mrs. Dalloway’s flowers, plants hardly seem good candidates for breakout roles in narrative prose.

This assumption is changing, and one of the latest novels to activate vegetal life is Presence by Brenda Iijima. Iijima is a poet, novelist, playwright, choreographer, and visual artist who has published nine books of poetry, and her interdisciplinary practices inform both the content and form of Presence. Like a tree with a network of heterogeneous but interconnected parts, the novel consists of over fifty short chapters that intertwine with one another, however tenuously. Much of the novel is loosely inspired by a set of immersive performances that occurred in 2008 on Treasure Island, an artificial island in the San Francisco Bay with a vexed history as the site of the 1939 World’s Fair, a naval station, a film set, and a repository of radioactive waste from Cold War military operations. In photos from the 2008 events, performers in starch-white hazmat suits and N95 masks appear as if they’re operating defunct gas valves and industrial dumpsters. They inspect rocks, lie prone on the asphalt, or seemingly do nothing at all. Iijima fictionalizes the performers, their backstories, and the various relationships they form. All six of the performers are queer and three are people of color, subject positions that, the novel works hard to show, influence their engagement with the environment. But Iijima is far more interested in performance as a praxis of environmental awareness than in “developing” characters or garnering emotional “investment” from readers—terms which nakedly betray the market-oriented origins of the modern novel.

Instead, the characters’ performances become a mode of radical, embodied noticing. The six performers in the novel are directed to let the sensoria of the artificially dredged and toxically polluted island guide their movements and their consciousness: “A rustle in the grasses might spur Laura on to engage a relationship with the plants that grow in the environment, for instance she might seek to establish a connection with the tall stems of wiry grass, parched and struggling to stay alive.” The hazmat suits jar against the landscape, but the performance itself is unassuming, a mood that Iijima reflects in her often simple, even didactic sentences. The performance doesn’t coerce attention so much as it unfetters attention from the relentless demands of what the attention studies scholars and activists D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt have recently called attention-fracking.

The results are duly astonishing: the performers’ rigorous embodied noticing precipitates an awareness of and even fleeting contact with a community of human-like beings who live millennia in the future yet materialize in a shared, co-occupied present. One of the performers, Laura, seems to briefly meld with this distant-future community of presences. In a section that she narrates (the narration is dispersed among many characters and unnamed narrators throughout the book), Laura reflects:

I was ensconced by the light . . . What I saw resembled protoplasmic streaming—presences moving in a thickness, either liquid or air, also jellylike, slow moving. Amoeba and other microbial creatures that have bloblike bodies were undulating. Their bodies were see-through. One body contained multiples, like rainwater filled with bacteria and other tiny organisms.

The quasi-utopian community of future beings, whom we meet in early chapters, does not, for the most part, distinguish between individuals and has little conception of bodily sovereignty, let alone private property. Intense embodied awareness, the novel argues, is a potent tool available to everyone. If rapacious capitalism depends on fracking our attention and selling it back to us, practices of radical attention can help us to imagine alternative forms of social relations and selfhood, forms which moneyed interests claim are either naive or undesirable.

If, as Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt argue, the survival of democracy depends less on literacy than on “attensity,” then plants may offer invaluable instruction. The queer temporal derangement that Laura and others experience has its vegetal correlation. Plants resist normative narrative temporality, which requires a desiring subject striving for an object and reaching climax in its attainment or loss. Instead, vegetal temporality unfurls through constant but barely noticeable change. One character reflects, “Vegetal life is a powerful converter of impulses, from the sun, of course, but also with breath, through absorption and decomposition. Plants share their energy and insight and insist on transformation.” Iijima deploys her performers as oracular noticers. Neglected or oppressed by dominant political and economic systems, they wield little more than their bodies and their attention in order to manifest less extractive ways of existing in a given place.

One particularly effective chapter shows a couple who live on Treasure Island: an ethnobiologist, Embla, and her partner, Ask. The couple serves as a transition between the distant-future community of the first chapters and the narrative present that follows. It’s a deliberate structural mechanism: in Norse mythology, Embla and Ask are the first two humans, and both names descend etymologically from trees. Iijima’s characters are finely, even impossibly, tuned into vegetal sensoria. We’re told that “Embla’s sense of smell had developed so that she could tell what month it was by the scents emitted in a specific environment, even down to the week.” Ask studies the sounds emitted by grasses in order to examine how humans respond to such stimuli: “His work demonstrated that grasses indeed give off low frequency hums and humans interact with these sounds in various distinct ways. Such capacities carry utopian potential.” Backgrounding literature’s typically most privileged sense—vision—the narrator says little about the characters’ appearances or those of their surroundings. Rather, sound, smell, and touch form an ecology of intimacy not only between the couple but between the couple and their environment. In fact, while the narrator calls them a couple, it soon becomes clear that this is the wrong word. Plants are as much a part of their relationship as each of them: “Embla laughed as she looked in on the intimacy developing between Ask and the planted tree blazing red. An intensity of feeling flowed. They were all in a circuit.”

But why does this sensory connection carry utopian potential? The novel sustains a strong current of Marxist thought, and no doubt Iijima has in mind a section from one of Marx’s early manuscripts in which he writes that “the abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities.” The military, real estate speculators, and commercial developers may appropriate both the land on Treasure Island and the laborer’s time, but a deep sensory attention to entities that so often go unnoticed like grass and weeds represents a small but powerful act of dissent. According to this argument, emancipating our deadened senses would be a step toward transcending capitalism and the environmental despoliation that is its lifeblood.

I’m all-in for emancipating our industrially bludgeoned and digitally fracked senses. Unfortunately, though, in its eagerness to advocate a political agenda, the novel often falls back on clunky over-explanations. The text yearns to convey the way in which a practice of embodied noticing (especially where the military does not want us noticing things) has subversive political potential, and I was excited at this idea. But rather than showing us how this premise plays out, the novel wants to explain it as a set of ideas. Presence often uses characters as mouthpieces for excursuses about the evils of European colonialism, capitalism, and white hegemony. One of the performers reflects that, “For a split second I look over to Darius and I record the alienation of the world. Western paradigms dissolve.” Which ones, exactly? Darius, who grew up on Treasure Island and now studies forestry and agriculture at Berkeley, takes the opportunity to deliver a mini-dissertation on Sylvia Wynter’s theory about the provisions plots of enslaved laborers as sites of resistance to plantation capitalism. Rather than deploying these ideas in the texture of the story, Iijima has Darius deliver a seminar room monologue.

In another section, a character named Charlene summarizes, over several pages, the story of a “contemporary philosopher” who writes a subversive book, is devastatingly banished by her profession, and then rediscovers her own inner vitality through connections with vegetal life. Though Iijima writes in the notes at the end that the philosopher is a composite figure, she strongly resembles the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, who describes this exact crucible in the hauntingly beautiful book, co-written with Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being. “The philosopher had gained a fluency with her emotions in a way that Charlene felt she had not yet been able to,” Iijima’s narrator explains, and this is precisely the problem. Because the novel is so eager to convey others’ theories, biographies, and philosophies without a clear way of attaching them to the narrative at hand, these sections often had the effect of making me want to set the book aside and take Wynter and Irigaray from the shelf.

Perhaps the most effective subplot is narrated by Darnell, a gay Black man in the Navy in the early 1950s, who develops a relationship with his commanding officer, Edward. After witnessing a nuclear bomb test in the Marshall Islands, they dock in the San Francisco bay, where they’re tasked with washing invisible radioactive material off of the ship’s hull. San Francisco’s emerging gay scene offers moments of sexual liberation, but the Navy soon finds out and sends the pair to a psychiatric hospital on Treasure Island, where they undergo relentless inhumane treatments. After an ill-fated attempt to swim across the bay, Darnell and Edward wash up on the shore of Treasure Island, where, incredibly, the community of future beings, dressed as flowers, find the nearly drowned men and give Darnell a mysterious leather-bound book as a gesture of transtemporal solidarity. It turns out that this book is a ledger in which they document their lives, and which also constitutes early portions of the novel we’re reading. Decades later, Darnell dies of AIDS and leaves the ledger to his niece, Aiysha, one of many Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) scientists whom we meet in the latter sections of the book.

A group of scientists established the AWG in 2009 in order to determine if we have entered a new geological epoch provisionally called the Anthropocene, and if so, when it began. After years of research, the Group proposed to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) that the earth has in fact entered a new epoch, which, they claimed, started with the 1952 test of a hydrogen bomb that forever changed the chemical complexion of the earth’s crust. With Darnell’s story, then, human and geological temporalities mingle. Darnell witnesses a 1954 nuclear bomb test that contributes to the alteration of the earth’s geology, he receives a ledger handed to him out of linear time, and he gifts it to his niece, an AWG researcher at Stanford studying the anthropogenic impact on sedimentary layers. This ecology of narrative, theory, and science haunted me in the way the best fiction does. The related sections in Presence propose new models of time, community, and history-keeping, but they do so subtly, like the roots of discrete trees that turn out to be interconnected in miles-long networks. Darnell’s all-too-human tragedy, it turns out, is the narrative vehicle to arrive there.

In March of this year, less than two months after Presence’s publication, the SQS voted to reject the AWG’s proposal that we have entered the Anthropocene. The Holocene, 11,700 years old, reigns. Geologists, for now, have failed to demonstrate definitively that we live on a humanly altered planet, but how can fiction writers most effectively make the case? Amitav Ghosh has famously criticized fiction writers (including himself) for engaging climate change “only obliquely” in their novels. Of contemporary fiction’s seeming failure to represent the climate crisis, he writes, “Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.” But obliqueness and subtlety are among fiction’s most piercing modes of social critique. Ghosh doesn’t allow that symptoms of climate anxiety and catastrophe may constantly erupt in contemporary fiction in ways we may not yet perceive. Presence is most affecting when it foregrounds human lives surviving the crucible of modern systems, and it flags when it most directly comments on theory and politics. Perhaps the challenge for fiction is not to decenter the human but to honestly and critically show the ways in which we have centered ourselves to such deleterious effect. After all, what could be more humanly hubristic than to will ourselves out of the starring role?

Nathan Motulsky is a writer based in NYC. His work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, the Antrim Literature Project, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing his MA in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.