5
Seasonal Feelings
Reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup
Girl During Winter Depression
Kaisa Kortekallio
In Helsinki, November 2017 has been exceptionally cloudy and rainy.1 I
have been reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s climate fiction dystopia novel The
Windup Girl. The narrative weaves together the societal and ecological
crises of a future Bangkok, generating an atmosphere of fear and violence.
During the two weeks of reading, feelings of anxiousness and tension have
gathered in my body, intensified by the resonance between the weather and
the novel.
The day after finishing the novel, November 15, brings with it a partial
resolution of the tension. After weeks of heavy skies, the cloud cover parts,
revealing a harsh white winter light. I walk the early afternoon streets in
a quiet old district of Helsinki, Kruununhaka, and cry. At the moment of
crying, my bodily experience is still permeated by the tensions and intense
affects of the novel. I become aware of my body as a unified material thing,
a block of flesh that carries itself along the streets. My perceptual awareness
of the physical space is heightened, and along with the awareness comes a
feeling of bodily porousness: the harsh afternoon light not only surrounds
me but enters me, my whole body is weighed down by the pull of the earth
and the cold weight of the nineteenth-century stone and brick buildings. The
muted colors and ornate details of the buildings impress me with unusual
force.
In this chapter, I propose that crying on the street after reading a climate
fiction novel is a moment that opens up to both New Materialist and
phenomenological analyses and that the experience can also loop back to
literary interpretation in the cognitive-narratological vein. My affective
response emerges from the interaction of human and nonhuman forces: the
clouds, the light, the novel—and the theory. Under the influence of New
Materialism and cognitive narratology, I pay more attention to my bodily
feelings and to the nonhuman forces present in the situation.
The experience of reading a novel is, however, not yet an interpretation
but a complex tangle of thoughts, feelings, impressions, and associations
that does not follow any particular theoretical model. In describing and
analyzing the act of reading the novel, including the crying episode that
immediately followed, I aim to retrospectively and partially explain the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003181866-5
90 Kaisa Kortekallio
cognitive and affective dynamics involved. The chapter discusses how
reading a novel participates in embodied experience and asks whether an
affective response such as crying could be employed as part of literary
interpretation. I propose that in the crossroads of New Materialist and
enactive perspectives on literature, the reading body can be considered
as an affective being that makes sense of its environments through bodily
feelings (cf. Colombetti and Thompson; Neimanis). As an embodied being
constantly adjusting to and conversing with the surrounding materialities,
the reader may creatively involve many kinds of events and things, human
and nonhuman, into the reading experience. As a scholarly subject, the same
reader can analytically describe the threads and knots that form this everchanging tangle.
While the focus of this chapter is on the phenomenology of reading, I
will also attend to the formal features of the novel that participate in the
affective experience—descriptions of material things and forces, as well as
the structure and pace of narrative events. I suggest that during the course
of reading the novel, affective responses to these features accumulate and
give rise to bodily feelings of anxiousness and tension that play into the general depressive mood generated by the seasonal darkness of Finnish winter.
Building on both cognitive reading studies and New Materialist philosophy,
I call this effect reciprocal amplification (cf. Kuzmičová “Does It Matter”;
Neimanis).
Reading climate fiction in the year 2017, one cannot dismiss the physical
environment. The weather is increasingly strange: even in Southern Finland,
which tends to have a moderate climate, the fall of 2017 is characterized
by freak storms and unusually high temperatures. To read in November
is to read during heavy rains and rapidly decreasing sunlight. The
darkness, while not dependent on the weather as such, is made unusually
depressing by the heaviness of the cloud cover and the lack of snow. In
some parts of Finland, including Helsinki, the cloud cover does not break
for three consecutive months. In an autumn this dark, the symptoms of
seasonal affective disorder are exceptionally severe too. In this chapter,
I describe my personal experience with seasonal affective disorder as a
“space of possibility” (Ratcliffe 358) that shapes my affective encounter
with the novel.2 In my view, the seasonal mood should be considered an
environmentally emergent phenomenon rather than merely an “inner” state
of an individual experiencer.
In adopting an approach that considers both mood and physical environments as part of the reading experience, I take a critical stance toward the
common literary-theoretical metaphors of transportation and immersion.
In analyses and theories of reading that apply these terms, the reader’s consciousness is figured as carried away to a fictional realm, “not only assumed
to engage in mental travel into distant imaginary worlds, but also become
temporarily decoupled from their own world as part of the same process of
transportation” (Kuzmičová “Does It Matter” 291).3 In the metaphorical
Seasonal Feelings 91
model of transportation and immersion, physical environments are mostly
treated as distractions that hinder a fully immersive aesthetic experience.
This chapter considers what happens when the reader’s consciousness is not
decoupled from the world but rather allows the physical environment to
enter and shape the reading experience.
Enactivism and New Materialism
The enactive approach to literature and cognition focuses on the reciprocal
dynamics between environments and reading minds. Enactive theory
draws from cognitive sciences, systems biology, ecological psychology,
and phenomenology, building on to the notion that cognition is embodied,
situated, and co-emergent with the cognizer’s environments (Varela et al;
Noë; Thompson). The approach centers on the hypothesis that cognition
involves skillful activity—perceiving, for example, “isn’t something that
happens in us, it is something we do” (Noë 216). Crucially to the main
theme of this chapter, the theory also views affect and emotion as aspects of
cognitive activity (Colombetti; Colombetti and Thompson).
From an enactive perspective, reading a fictional narrative is a “skillorientated interaction between a reader’s embodied mind and the literary
object” (Polvinen 140). Focusing on imaginary environments, enactivist
literary research has discussed the “presence” of the reader in terms of virtuality: when encountering fictional environments, the reader experiences
something like bodily echoes or traces of actual events, movements and feelings, creating mental images based on both the cues provided by the narrative and their personal experiential backgrounds (Caracciolo “The Reader’s
Virtual Body”; Kukkonen; Polvinen). This focus already acknowledges that
actual environments participate in the reading process but discusses them
on a rather general level. However, as demonstrated by Anezka Kuzmičová
(“Presence,” “Does It Matter”), the theory also allows for a mode of thinking that puts more emphasis on the particularity of actual environments.
New Materialist perspectives provide means for considering the particularity and materiality of actual environments more closely. Moreover, they
propose practical techniques for materialist reading. Some New Materialist
thinkers have suggested that conscious orientation toward nonhuman material agencies—and toward embodied experience as an interface between
the human and the nonhuman—can be employed as a means of developing posthumanist sensibilities (e.g., Coole and Frost, Neimanis). In New
Materialist ontology, material things are considered as dynamic and active:
in friction, movement, growth, and breakdown, they generate difference.
Matter refers to “phenomena in their ongoing materialization” (Barad 151).
The focus of New Materialist analyses is thus on the dynamicity of material
processes, including processes that involve humans.
Reading can also be considered as a material process. In their formulation
of material ecocriticism, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann propose
92 Kaisa Kortekallio
that a New Materialist approach to reading can “focus attention on bodily
experiences and bodily practices (where ‘body’ refers not only to the human
body but to the concrete entanglements of plural ‘natures,’ in both human
and more-than-human realms)” (Iovino and Oppermann 76). They also
propose that material-ecocritical reading has “the ethico-cognitive potential
to upgrade our sensorium” (Iovino and Oppermann 87). I appreciate their
assessment and suggest that the ethico-cognitive potential could be explored
and developed with the help of the enactive approach. Instead of subscribing
to the transhumanist term “upgrade” that metaphorizes the sensorium as a
technological apparatus undergoing linear improvement, I would suggest
that the potential can unfold in countless directions. If different dance styles
and musical preferences “cultivate different forms of bodily awareness”
(Colombetti 164), our reading habits can have similar effects as they inform
our bodily patterns of response (see Warhol; Caracciolo “Perspectives”).
I begin the main part of the chapter with a brief discussion of moods
evoked by seasons and narratives, outlining how moods are constituted
through bodily feelings as part of environmental experience. I consider
how my affective responses to Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl
both resonate and clash with my seasonal mood and analyze the affectivity of descriptive passages in the narrative. I explain how the notions of
environmental propping (Kuzmičová, “Does It Matter”) and amplification
(Neimanis) can help articulate the experiential dynamic of materialist reading. In conclusion, I suggest that materialist analyses of this kind can make
the more-than-human affectivity of both environments and literature more
readily available to perception.
Seasonal Mood, Bodily Feelings, and
Affective Responses to Narratives
An embodied subject is always in a mood of some kind (Ratcliffe 362).
Discussing depression in particular, Ratcliffe stresses that deep moods—
or existential feelings, as he terms them—give shape to the possible
engagements with the environment: sadness, for example, is “how one
finds oneself in the world rather than an emotion that one has within
the world … [one] cannot see outside it” (360). Mood is also often theorized through weather analogies (see, e.g., Colombetti). Sadness, like rain,
envelopes the experiencing subject completely—in a specific location, or
a specific body, there is no “outside” to either mood or weather. Whereas
affects and emotions are episodic, like bouts of rain or gusts of wind,
moods are considered in terms of cold or warm fronts or climate fluctuations. An anxious mood generally lasts for longer than an episode of fear,
and whereas fear targets a specific object, say a speeding car, anxiousness
generally does not have a specific target. Anxiousness can also be “in the
air,” outside of individual bodies rather than emerging from them, a collective phenomenon (Colombetti 77–82). The notion of mood can thus be
Seasonal Feelings 93
very close to the notion of atmosphere—it is somewhere between feeling
and environment, an affective relationality.4
Ratcliffe emphasizes that moods should be considered in terms of bodily feelings. This does not mean that moods should be conceived as feelings internal to the body or even experienced as associated with the body.
Rather, the body can be something through which we feel something else or
relate to the world (363). In the case of seasonal affective disorder, seasonal
and meteorological conditions are experienced through long-term bodily
feelings, such as fatigue or heightened sensitivity to light.5
Weather-related moods are common folk-psychological knowledge, and
for art and literature, the connection is described often enough to have
become clichéd.6 Clinical-psychological research also strongly suggests
that weather affects mood—differently depending on the individual but
significantly nonetheless. Seasonal affective disorder is associated both with
personal vulnerabilities (retinal sensitivity, genetic variations, hormonal
levels, attitudes) and environmental conditions (the availability of natural
light, weather patterns), and it typically presents itself during the dark winter
seasons of Arctic areas (Rohan and Rough). The phenomenon of seasonal
moods highlights not only the embodied nature of cognition but also how
the mind-body is constituted in systemic interactions with its environments.
The severity of the symptoms of winter-type seasonal affective disorder—
most typically, fatigue, depressed mood, and anhedonia—tend to vary from
winter to winter, and even if there is no consensus about the exact reasons
for the variation, the Oxford Handbook overview points to “climatological
variables”—i.e., changes in weather (Rohan and Rough 256).7
Even though seasonal moods are not necessarily as deep or persistent
as the depressive states Ratcliffe discusses, they too envelope subjective
experience, including the experience of reading fiction, affecting one’s
expectations, judgements, and affective responses. We can thus assume that
mood, and the link between mood and physical environment, matters to
reading. But how can we describe the interplay between seasonal moods,
on the one hand, and the affective responses evoked by a narrative, on the
other?
Building on Ratcliffe’s notion of moods as bodily feelings, Marco
Caracciolo has argued that narratives can elicit moods through evoking
emotional responses (“Perspectives”). Caracciolo argues that “mood is
not just a function of narrative contents—the situations and characters
represented by a text, and the circumscribed emotions they elicit—but
of narrative style and structure as well” (18). I share this view and seek
to demonstrate in my reading how a number of factors in the text work
together to elicit bodily feelings—specifically, tension and anticipation—
and how these feelings mesh with seasonal mood.
Viewing mood as part of environmental experience calls for a conception
of feelings as something else than manifestations of interior emotions—a
model that allows factors external to the body, such as weather and fiction,
94 Kaisa Kortekallio
to play into the formation of feelings. Robyn Warhol has mobilized such a
model in the context of feminist narratology, considering feelings as performative rather than expressive. In the performative model, the body is
understood “not as the location where gender and affect are expressed, but
rather as the medium through which they come into being” (10). According
to Warhol, literary criticism and film theory have tended to use the expressive model and thereby “granted privilege to the idea that every person harbors ‘real’ feelings, whether consciously or subconsciously expressed, and
that literary texts tap into those feelings in more or less legitimate ways”
(14). Warhol links this claim to the modernist prejudice against popular
forms that “so readily and mechanically arouse emotion: it’s too easy; it
must not be ‘authentic’” (35). In the performative model Warhol advances,
feelings are always socially and culturally constructed to some extent, and
bodily events such as crying over a sentimental novel are considered in terms
of generating rather than expressing feelings.
The role of narrative form in this model is somewhat technological.
Resonating with certain enactivist views of narrative (Polvinen), Warhol’s
view considers narrative structures as “devices that work through readers’
bodily feelings to produce the physical fact of gendered subjectivity” (24).
Crying, in such a view, is a response that generates bodily feelings in a
pattern typical to the narrative form in question—the marriage plot, the
family drama, or in the case of the act of reading described in this chapter,
the catastrophic structure of a climate fiction narrative. Even if the exact
constituents of mood are difficult if not impossible to pinpoint on the
textual level (Caracciolo, “Perspectives”), Warhol’s work suggests that one
fruitful way to proceed toward an analysis of the constitution of mood is to
conduct analyses of how bodily feelings are generated in response to specific
textual features.
Seasonal Mood as a Space of Possibility
The Windup Girl is usually characterized as climate fiction or dystopia.8 It
envisions a twenty-third-century Thailand based on contemporary climate
science scenarios. In the storyworld, global warming has raised the sea
levels, fossil fuel sources have become depleted, and an ecosystemic collapse
has occurred on a global scale. People and crops alike have been decimated
by recurring pandemics. Weather has become unreliable, as the dry and wet
seasons do not follow each other in a predictable pattern. The plot of the
novel follows the development and outbreak of a societal crisis in Bangkok,
entangling human life projects with political and ecological events.
In November 2017, I read The Windup Girl in the affective context of the
immediate physical environment of reading. On most days, I read on the top
floor of the university library, with a view over the roofs of Kruununhaka
and the shifting masses of rain clouds. Every day around 2 PM, the sky starts
turning dark. During reading, I write notes that track both my frustration with
Seasonal Feelings 95
the novel’s manipulative narrative techniques and my affective responses to
the season.9 In them, I recognize the structure of feeling that characterizes the
novel: tension is first created and accumulated through affective descriptions
and plot events (the details of which I will not discuss here) and then resolved
through fast-paced and violent narrative events.
It isn’t just the characterization, it is the narrative structure too: the
rhythm, the cues. The first bloodletting. Manipulation of affect. I feel
constricted by these devices, more so than when reading PB’s short
stories.
I yawn; my eyes water. I am tired under the fluorescent lights, in the
whir and hum of the snack cooler in the corner of the reading hall.
(Kortekallio 9.11.2017)
The note mentions some of the typical expressions of seasonal affective
disorder: increased sensitivity to artificial light and sound and a feeling of
being constrained. It also records a feeling of irritation with the narrative
structure of the novel and with the obviousness of its techniques. At the
time of reading, I recognize the pull of the narrative as an invitation for a
particular kind of excited, forward-leaning engagement typical to thrillers,
and yet my prevailing mood does not provide a possibility for such
excitement. I continue to feel the affects particular to individual scenes in
the novel, which I will describe more closely in the following section. The
violence of the scene I refer to as “the first bloodletting,” in which the Thai
Environment Ministry officials terrorize the streets in vengeance of the death
of their popular leader, still causes my throat to tighten in fear and disgust. I
recognize this feeling as a response proper to the design of the narrative and
the scene as the first mark of the turning of the narrative’s atmosphere: the
accumulated tension of weather and political climate begins to crack, to be
resolved in the ending climax.
Anezka Kuzmičová has discussed the ways in which literary imagination is affected by physical environments (“Does It Matter”). She calls this
process environmental propping (299). In her example: when reading Heart
of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, your mental images of the fictional Congo
River could be affected by the sound of water from a nearby fountain, and
the author’s descriptions of the Congo can in turn make you more acutely
conscious of the sound of water in your own immediate environment
(296).10 Kuzmičová also mentions that physical environments may shape
mental imagery more intensely in the case of affective genres such as horror
fiction or thrillers (298). Fiction that foregrounds environmental affects, as
climate fiction does with its descriptions of weather phenomena, could arguably also provide more cues for environmental propping.11
This reciprocal model of environmental propping helps to articulate
the attentional and affective dynamics of my reading experience. The
fictional environment of The Windup Girl and the actual environment of
96 Kaisa Kortekallio
my reading are partly juxtaposed—the novel portrays a busy city during
a hot and dry season, whereas Helsinki in November is chilly and rainy
with very few people on the streets. However, there are some shared aspects
to the experientiality of these environments, primarily the weather-related
anxiousness and increasing bodily tension described above. The experiential
similarity of these affects serves to amplify the overall experience of
anxiousness and bodily tension.
Within the space of possibility created by a weak and persistently tired
mood, I am not capable of feeling the thrill proposed by the novel. Rather,
I grow weary of the affect.
Chapter 40: excessive violence and destruction. I am almost completely
desensitized. My feelings are all meta: I am frustrated by the novel. I
doubt its merits. Very little immersion here. Maybe it was different the
first time.
(Kortekallio 13.11.2017)
In the second note, written in forced, short-worded bursts of effort, feelings
of fatigue and frustration clash with the affect suggested by the narrative, as
its pace and intensity increase toward the end. In my seasonal mood, I have
no interest or strength for encountering the novel’s intensities—whether they
are violent, as in the climax of the novel, or liberating, as in the epilogue in
which the slave girl Emiko finds freedom in the flooded city. The ending of
the novel falls flat.12
Environmental propping and phenomenology of mood help to explain
how the affects of anxiousness and bodily tension are amplified in the
reading experience. To describe the dynamics of this event more closely, I
now turn to a textual analysis of the affective descriptions in the novel.
Building Tension Through Affective Descriptions
In The Windup Girl there is no single protagonist, nor a hero; rather,
the storyworld and its events are explored through a number of prejudiced, traumatized, profit-seeking characters from many walks of life.
The individual perspectives also represent different sectors of the future
Thai society, reiterating popular character types: the spy, the action hero,
the sly Oriental merchant, and the artificial girl. Bacigalupi’s formulaic
characterization does not invite me to engage with the characters as individual personalities, to whose goals and aspirations I would emotionally
commit. It does, however, offer many opportunities for attuning to bodily feelings, as the characters move and act in their surroundings. The
emphasis on bodily feeling and action is so prevalent that it seems more
appropriate to refer to these constructs as “fictional bodies” rather than
“characters.”
Seasonal Feelings 97
Due to this formulaic yet robustly corporeal style of characterization,
the focus of my reading is on the affective responses elicited by the material
aspects of the narrative rather than the emotional responses Caracciolo discusses (“Perspectives”). The affectivity of narrative contents and style, such
as the glare of a fictional sun or the fast pace of action sequences, is experienced as sensory and kinesthetic but not necessarily as emotionally valenced.
I veer away from conceptualizing the characters primarily as fictional personae who the reader is supposed to encounter primarily through social and
psychological schemata. Rather, I consider the fictional bodies and experiences in terms of their material affectivity, which is comparable to the affectivity presented by the fictional nonhuman forces and things (e.g., sunshine
and windup springs) and the materiality of narrative style (e.g., the pace and
rhythm of the text).
In spite of their variation, the fictional bodies are fairly similar: the prevailing tropical heat wave affects all of them in visceral ways. All bodies
are objects to this nonhuman force. In the story, the yearly monsoons are
months late, and the heat and drought are becoming intolerable. Bacigalupi’s
Bangkok is a city below sea level, and a great dike and a system of pumps
protect it from the rising water. The presence of the blocked water of the
Chao Phraya River emerges as both a threat of destruction and a hope of
relief:
The heat of the Yaowarat slum is full of shadows and squatting bodies.
The heat of the dry season presses down on him, so intense that it seems
no one can breathe, even with the looming presence of the Chao Phraya
dikes. There is no escape from the heat. If the seawall gave way, the
entire slum would drown in nearly cool water, but until then, Hock
Seng sweats and stumbles through the maze of squeezeways, rubbing
up against scavenged tin walls.
(99)
In the first sentence of this passage, it is heat that is full of shadows and
squatting bodies—not the slum. Heat is thus subtly positioned as the
encompassing condition—or a space of possibility—for the described
events. The word heat is bluntly repeated in three consecutive sentences,
underscoring the inescapability of the seasonal weather. Moreover, the
affective imagery of the passage consists of phrases that point to heavy,
constraining forces above and around the experiencer: “the dry season
presses down on him,” and “the looming presence” of the dikes evoke a
feeling of oppression from above, and the “maze of squeezeways” through
which the focalizer “sweats and stumbles,” “rubbing up” against the walls,
evoke a feeling of being constrained from all sides. The potentiality of the
flood, the “nearly cool water,” emerges as the force that could wipe away
all these oppressive constraints.
98 Kaisa Kortekallio
Descriptions of this kind are frequent in the novel. My bodily feelings attune
to the descriptions of oppressing heat in which the sun “glares down” (171)
and “hammers down” (147), “no breezes blow” (125), and “nothing with any
intelligence is moving” (125): the characters sweat, their “lungs burn” (147)
and they “breath shallowly” (147). Through these simple descriptions, formulated with consistent wording and tone independent of the particular focalizer,
the affects of heat and sweating under the sun become present as experiential
traces that enable sympathetic attunement to the fictional bodies in the novel.
I feel their need for fresh air and water, their fatigue, and the intensity of waiting for the rains. As mentioned above, this is an effect linked to the affective
descriptions, not so much to characterization or narration.
To highlight the more-than-human aspect of this bodily response, we
can compare it to response elicited by the affective descriptions of nonhuman bodies: iron springs and working animals. A particularly forceful
description of materiality in the first chapter of the novel accounts for the
winding of a large iron spring used to kinetically store the energy with
which factories and electric devices are run. The spring is “tortured into
its final structure, winding in on itself, torquing into a tighter and tighter
curl, working against everything in its molecular structure as the spring is
tightened down” (15).
As with the above passage, the affectivity of the description rises from the
blunt repetition of a keyword (“tight”) and to indicators of motion (winding
in on itself and tightened down, suggesting a gradually spiralling motion).
The structure of the sentence also plays into affectivity by way of cranking
out phrase after phrase before ending to a full stop—the iterative rhythm
of the sentence matches the feeling of eager anticipation or the increasing
muscular tension experienced when completing a heavy physical task.
The “tortured” metal of the springs is wound by giant bioengineered
elephants, “megodonts,” that “groan against spindle cranks, their enormous
heads hanging low, prehensile trunks scraping the ground as they tread slow
circles around power spindles” (11–12). Note, again, the constrained and
downward motions. I feel the kinaesthetic echo of the physical tension in
both the springs and the megodonts’ muscles as a tension in my neck and
jaw. In this affective response, I experience the materiality of fictional human
bodies in a similar manner as I do the materiality of fictional nonhuman
bodies, animate and inanimate alike.13
During the act of reading the novel, the increasing tension affects the
reader both through singular descriptions, such as those above, and through
the dynamics of narrated action. The accumulation of affective responses
can evoke an anxious or constrained mood in the reader, depending on the
reader’s previous experience with actual constraints, such as forced labor
or distressing weather.14 In this way, the fictional environment affects my
reading body by calling up bodily memories of previous experiences of
weather and material things and by evoking more general bodily feelings
of tension and movement. Before reaching the end of the novel, such bodily
Seasonal Feelings 99
feelings can accumulate into a considerable mood-amplifying force. Robyn
Warhol has discussed this kind of accumulation in the context of watching
soap-opera television as a daily routine.
For some viewers, the intensities are a form of background noise in a
life otherwise detached from the concerns of the soap-opera plot; for
others—particularly those who are moved enough by the story line
to want to write about it online (or, in my case, in this chapter)—the
intensities are more present, more vividly a part of daily consciousness.
To watch every day is to be carried on that wave of intensities, to
experience the build-up, the crisis, and the undertow of response as one
of the structuring principles of daily life.
(118–19)
Warhol discusses this dynamic in the context of gendered feeling, but her
insights can be applied more generally to other patterns of feeling. While
Warhol argues that the soap-opera viewer is “continually regendered as
effeminate, whether you are male or female” (119), we can argue that
continued engagement with affective narratives of any kind plays into the
patterns of feeling performed by the reading/viewing body. However, from
a New Materialist perspective, we should also consider how other factors,
such as seasonal conditions, play into these patterns.
Conclusion: Reciprocal Amplification of Affect
In this chapter, I have considered mood from the phenomenological
perspective put forward by Matthew Ratcliffe, as bodily feelings. I have
shown how a seasonal mood in particular opens up to phenomenological
analysis. However, as seasonal mood is so prominently dependent on
environmental factors, other perspectives are also needed in considering it.
From an enactive perspective, seasonal mood is an emergent phenomenon
arising from the interactions of human bodies and environmental conditions.
In New Materialist terms, seasonal mood is generated in the entanglement
of the material forces of weather, human embodiment, and literature.
In my reading of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, I considered how
affective responses to descriptive and narrative techniques can accumulate
bodily feelings and evoke moods. By using kinaesthetic and spatial language,
Bacigalupi’s descriptions of material forces call up experiential traces of previous embodied experiences, generating bodily feelings of tension, weight, constraint, and movement. During reading, these feelings add up to a considerable
mood-amplifying force. The experiential dynamic of mood is further amplified
by mutual environmental propping between experiencing the dark season and
the imaginative rendering of the fictional bodies and spaces.
Based on this instance of reading The Windup Girl, it appears that focusing one’s attention to bodily feelings and experiential patterns tends to
100
Kaisa Kortekallio
either enhance or entirely deflate their intensity. In both cases, the bodily
feelings are more available to consciousness than in casual modes of reading. Kuzmičová’s notion of environmental propping begins to articulate this
dynamic of reciprocal amplification, and New Materialist perspectives on
experience may help theorize it further. Reciprocal amplification may provide a way for cultivating posthumanist forms of experience (cf. Iovino and
Oppermann). New Materialist scholar Astrida Neimanis has suggested that
artworks and scientific findings can amplify our experiences of nonhuman
forces and entities, serving as “mediating prostheses that open certain experiences for us, but foreclose or restrain others” (Neimanis 61). When this
line of thought joins the thread of enactivist philosophy, we can articulate
the experience of crying on the street after reading a novel as an instance of
embodied and environmental sense-making.
On November 15, I walk the streets of Kruununhaka and cry. The
physical act of crying can be described as something of a cognitive epiphany,
enmeshed in what Ratcliffe describes as a temporary shift in deep mood
(366–67). My seasonal mood breaks, unveiling a moment of silent clarity.
If there is a convergent pattern connecting my moods and the weather, it
is only fitting that epiphany emerges on the one bright day after weeks of
watching rain clouds shift and roll.
Within this epiphany, the realization about the novel—the beginning of
a new interpretation—comes through an experiential analogy. Walking the
momentarily bright streets, the fatigue and tension gathered in my body
present themselves in their full weight. I feel permeated by both the bleak
affect of the novel and the darkness of the past weeks’ weather, muscles and
intestines heavy with fatigue. The oppressiveness of the weather is matched
and merged with the oppressiveness of the novel. In analogy, the novel is
a material force, not unlike the clouds and the light. I live with it like I live
with the weather, feeling the shifts and weights in its affective patterns. It
affects both my momentary bodily feelings and my general mood.
In a New Materialist vein, the literary artifact The Windup Girl can
be considered as a mediating prosthesis that amplifies my awareness of
nonhuman materialities and sensitizes me to their effects. On the other hand,
my physical surroundings, including the season and weather phenomena,
provide environmental propping that guides my attention to the affective
cues of the novel. Through attending to the shifts in bodily feelings, we
can begin to make sense of the reciprocal amplification of affect that is
generated in the entanglement of human bodies, literary artifacts, and
physical environments. In deliberate experiments such as this, the material
and nonhuman aspects of lived experience are made available to perception
in a striking way. However, those aspects inform our experience all the
time, in modes subtler than epiphany. I suggest that attending to bodily
feelings and carefully articulating them—not as peripheral but as integral to
both New Materialist and enactivist approaches to literary interpretation—
develops a richer sense of the material dynamics of bodily reading.
Seasonal Feelings
101
Notes
1 This chapter was written during a research period in the consortium project
Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical
Narrative Theory (2018–2022), funded by the Academy of Finland (no. 315052).
It has been constructed from a pile of notes with the generous and significant help
of the editors of this volume. I want to thank all of them, and Marco Caracciolo
especially, for guiding me to the work of both Anezka Kuzmičová and Robyn
Warhol.
2 Ratcliffe grounds his idea of moods as “spaces of possibility” in Heidegger’s
notion that mood is a “background sense” of belonging to a world (rather than an
intentional state in itself). In different moods, different objects in the world matter
to us in different ways, and we experience the world as offering different kinds
of significant possibilities. “Mood constitutes a phenomenological background in
the context of which intentionally directed experience is possible” (Ratcliffe 357).
3 See also Gerrig; Green and Brock.
4 Ahmed argues that moods can define the borders of collective bodies, producing
both in-groups (the ones who share a mood) and “affect aliens” (the ones who
do not). In popular media and academic accounts, epochs are often defined in
terms of a dominant public feeling: an emotion that when named expresses
something about what it feels like or felt like to live in that particular period. For
example, the Cold War 1950’s in the USA and UK was called a time of paranoia,
and our current epoch has been characterized as “the age of anxiety” or “the age
of fear” (Anderson 107–108).
5 As the examples demonstrate, bodily feelings should not be equated with
emotions. Bodily feelings vary from emotionally neutral sensations to deeply
emotional bodily experiences. Bodily feeling and affect can be used as partly
overlapping concepts, but whereas bodily feeling is tied to an individual body,
affect can be considered as a collective or cultural phenomenon that informs
feeling (cf. Ahmed; Seyfert; Vermeulen).
6 To mention a few examples: seasonal moods and atmospheres play a significant
role in Victorian and Gothic imagination (the mists and storms in Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre), in magical realism (the immobilizing dry season in Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude), in speculative fiction (the
psychologically warping effect of the flooded tropical areas in J. G. Ballard’s
The Drowned World), and in contemporary climate fiction (the hopelessness of
a parch-dry Earth in the film Interstellar).
7 The overview also stresses the relevance of other factors, listing “the time of year
assessed, length of residency, acclimatization, sociocultural factors, and withintime zone longitude, which affects wake time relative to sunrise” (Rohan and
Rough 256).
8 The reading of The Windup Girl that I describe here is not a first reading—
rather, it is an experimental exploration of a narrative I already know well. The
Windup Girl is a climate fiction novel that features plenty of descriptions of
bodily experiences connected to weather phenomena. Reading these descriptions
during the darkest time of the year, during which seasonal affective disorder
always reliably affects my bodily experience, is a choice that deliberately
amplifies the situational aspects of a singular reading.
9 The reason for citing my original notes rather than just paraphrasing them lies
in their communicative force. I believe that the particular phrasing and rhythm
of notes written during the reading event carries traces of the feelings of that
time and that those traces can evoke experiential echoes in the readers of this
essay—much in the same way as fictional texts can. The notebook entries thus
contribute to my communication of the reading experience.
102
Kaisa Kortekallio
10 As Kuzmičová notes, this scenario is atypical in its clarity: in most natural reading situations, imagination and stimuli would mingle in less clear-cut ways.
Kuzmičová also discusses instances of epistemic awareness in which the environmental stimuli (e.g., the sound of running water) are not consciously perceived
but still affect the formation of mental images (Kuzmičová, “Does It Matter”
296; see also Schwitzgebel).
11 Material ecocritics have suggested that nonhuman entities—such as rivers—can
participate in the writing process through affecting and impressing the writer’s
human body (Iovino and Oppermann). The cognitive aspect of this kind of
material-creative dynamic could also be discussed in terms of environmental
propping. For critical work that combines material ecocriticism and cognitive
theories of affect, see Weik von Mossner.
12 Were this a clinically depressed mood, the desensitization could become habitual,
making it difficult or impossible to feel with the novel altogether. In the case of
seasonal affective disorder, however, the mood can shift and fluctuate with the
weather.
13 The winding movement is evoked as both a component of and a metonym
for the societal tensions. Within the tension, there is the promise and risk of
release: controlled release brings success, uncontrolled release causes violent
destruction. In the first chapter of the novel, one of the working megodonts
goes mad and wreaks havoc in the factory, foregrounding the chaotic release of
long-wound societal tensions that takes place at the climax of the novel. The
central image of windup springs is also foregrounded in the title of the novel,
emphasizing the importance of increasing tension as a central kinaesthetic
motif.
14 This experiential dynamic has been theorized extensively in the enactive approach
(see Caracciolo, Experientiality, for an overview and a theoretical model and
Kortekallio for a provisional method).
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