Affective Ecocriticism by Kyle Bladow & Jennifer Ladino

Author:Kyle Bladow & Jennifer Ladino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC052000 Social Science / Media Studies, NAT010000 Nature / Ecology
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska

This passage hinges on how different affective dispositions radically shift perceptions of our surroundings, our environment. Thus the second and third paragraphs begin with ordinary declarative sentences that ring oddly here, estranging normal life. The default affective disposition of capitalist America is denaturalized and instead proves significantly dependent on context, not universal, not inevitable.

Price, cursing “all this,” signals the challenges of reintegration, challenges testified to most dramatically at other moments in the collection when he discusses the problem of veterans’ suicides.51 But—and here again is this chapter’s central intervention—the rejection of “all this” also shows that developing a new affectivity in war provides a distinct, informative perspective on ordinary life. Although it is difficult to unlearn what you learn in the environment of war, that is not an entirely bad thing. The understandings and even the skills developed there remain about the person as a kind of affect, a kind of potential. The powerful sense of solidarity with others, the value of purpose, the exposure of consumerism as blasé—all these perceptions resemble other cultural critiques, making possible surprising solidarities with veterans and others.

However, little of this wider potential appears in Klay’s stories. They remain too sharply focused on the immediate time frame around combat. When Klay does show the translation of wartime selfhood into stateside action, it therefore tends to remain suffused with trauma. The dog Vicar provides a somewhat gruesome example. When his pain grows excessive, Price and Cheryl agree it is time to put Vicar out of his misery. Cheryl proposes to “take care of it.” Price responds, “You mean you’ll pay some asshole a hundred bucks to kill my dog.”52 Thus the opening of the story—“we shot dogs”—comes full circle, and the narrator recognizes that it is his trying task to kill another dog. He thinks, replaying memories of his resistance to killing in Iraq, that “something in me is going to break if I do this. And I thought of Cheryl bringing Vicar to the vet, of some stranger putting his hands on my dog, and I thought, I have to do this.” Thus, steeling himself to the undertaking and bearing keenly in mind his training, he thinks, “Got to do it right. Hammer pair to the body. A final well-aimed shot to the head.”53

The point of this specific technique—rapidly firing three carefully placed rounds—is mercy, however brutal it sounds; it is a killing that happens too quickly for pain. The story ends with the task completed but with a new form of disorientation, as the narrator thinks, “I couldn’t remember what I was going to do with the body.”54 Here again we have, as we do throughout the story, synecdoche, part for whole, in which Price’s disorientation about what to do with his dog’s corpse stands in for his larger disorientation, bearing a subjectivity that knows how to kill quickly and is able to do so. How can that affective disposition be redeployed stateside? This story and the other stories in the collection do not have ready answers.

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