‘Love is an intervention,’[1] Jeanette Winterson writes three times in the face of environmental collapse in The Stone Gods; ‘[n]ot romance, not sentimentality, but a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what will be’ (p186). But is it an intervention that works?
In the novel, Billie/Billy and Spike/Spikkers (for simplicity, Billie and Spike when referred to as a couple in this article) are reincarnated across three space-times, repeatedly forming a queer, sometimes transhuman, bond until they are separated by death against the backdrop of ecological disaster. The Stone Gods has been frequently analysed as, if not outrightly a text about the Anthropocene,[2] one that critiques the destructive behaviour of humanity as a species at a planetary scale.[3] Winterson’s ‘love’ is broadly interpreted as a symbol of hope and change not only in ecocritical debates about the possibility of historical change[4] but also in discussions of concepts such as techno-escapism,[5]queer transhumanism,[6] or sustainability.[7] Few of these analyses, however, have looked into what the novel actually says about human agency in the face of total environmental destruction. Specifically, can people intervene meaningfully in the trajectory toward ecological collapse?
I will argue that despite The Stone Gods’ proposal of love as a corrective, the novel harbours a deep pessimism about the power of individuals to direct humanity as a species towards a more hopeful future. This pessimism is rooted in the novel’s sense of scalar disconnect; that an individual life, its perspectives and its actions, reside in a personal, human-sized scale and cannot directly impact the much larger, planetary scale of the species. In other words, the dynamics through which individual humans interact with each other (in this case, Billie and Spike’s demonstrations of love) have no power in steering the whole of the species to behave in one particular way or another.
To illustrate this, I’ll show how the novel’s use of alien, monstrous imagery to depict the magnitude of humanity’s destructive tendencies points to a Lovecraftian incomprehensibility[8] in who we are as a species: a collective whose scale cannot be grasped or understood by an individual’s limited perspective in the first place. Then I’ll explain how the novel’s use of eternal return presents a world where large-scale cycles are indifferent to even the noblest of individual actions.
Humanity as an Alien Monstrosity
Gry Ulstein has written about the use of alien monstrosity in weird fiction to conceptualise scalar and temporal realities which undermine human subjectivity to express environmental anxieties. According to Ulstein, the Lovecraftian heritage of weird fiction ‘tend[s] to undermine human subjectivity via encounters with monstrous, impossible events that violently encroach upon reality,’[9] where the monstrous is ‘something essentially elusive, absurd, impossible, but at the same time desperately urgent and claustrophobically all-encompassing.’[10]
The same use of the monstrous to express the absurd and impossible destruction caused by humanity as a species is found in The Stone Gods. The novel sets up Billie and Spike as observers of human-settled planets in various degrees of environmental degradation, anchoring the reader to a platform from which to observe the behaviour of humanity through swathes of space and time. And it is a mind-boggling view, one that presents humanity as a grotesque, resource-consuming species stripped of familiar social coordinates, repeating its predatory behaviour for millions of years on different planets. Orbus, where the novel begins, is being slowly covered in red dust, turning it into Planet Red, doomed to become Planet White. In turn, Planet White is pumped with so much carbon dioxide that it turns into a greenhouse planet, ‘wrapped in its own death,’ its atmosphere ghostly as if ‘every solid thing had turned to thick vapour…the air…was like paste.’ (p56). What remains of the civilisation that had once flourished on Planet White is found in the landfill site, thousands of miles deep and high, the ‘molten but not melted’ horror of the Crypt:
[l]ike an elephant’s graveyard, the Crypt was stacked with the carcasses of planes and cars that continually melted in the intense heat and then re-formed into their old shapes, or shapes more bizarre, as the cars grew wings, and the planes compressed into wheelless boxes with upturned tails. (pp57-9)
In the inhospitable Dead Forest of the world known as Post-3 War, ‘The soil itself was poisoned;’ it was like ‘walking into a corpse, only the corpse wasn’t dead’ (pp169-70). This connection with the undead is repeated in the description of the people living there:
They bred, crawled out their term, curled up like ferns, died where they lay, on radioactive soil. Some could speak, and spat blood, each word made out of a blood vessel […] There were children holding hands – or what stumps and stray fingers they had for hands – limping club-footed, looking up from the hinge of their necks, uncertain of their heads, wrong-sized, misshapen, an ear missing, a nose splayed back to a pair of nostril holes. Some no holes at all. Breathe through your mouth like a panting animal – pursued, lost, find a hole, live there, rot there…the skin so burned that the muscles underneath were on show like an anatomy textbook: deltoid, rhomboid, trapezius, veins leaking like a crucifixion. A man with skin to his knee and not beyond – a skeleton walk, a thing dug up from the grave, but not dead, alive. (p199)
Winterson also invokes a foreignness to them, saying ‘they sat by their fires and ate, creatures on another planet – from another planet, lost on this one’ (p200).
Planet White and the Dead Forest, the two conclusions of environmental degradation, are wastelands not simply in the sense of the decaying but ultimately habitable wildernesses but lands that are unknowable and hostile to human life. Now, these monstrous visions of the destiny of human-settled environments may not be direct depictions of humanity but as Nicole Merola points out, the novel’s ‘looping, intra- and extratextually intertextual structure…dramatize both the very distant past and the future that awaits any planet that humans occupy.’[11] If this circularity of behaviour can be seen as pointing to particular impulses and tendencies embedded in humanity,[12] then couching its presentation in the language of an alien monstrosity suggests a disconnect. As per Ulstein, it’s an unrecognisability of what we are on the level of a larger, planetary scale, and, by implication, questions the ability of the individual to accurately perceive the species in its entirety.
Interestingly, the novel does not have individual antagonists, only collective ones. Whether this is a conscious narrative choice is unclear, but it points to how scale is a factor in the spectrum of human villainy in the novel. Characters in the novel who behave in a less than savoury manner are viewed as people who are part of the systems that perpetuate the destruction of their habitats, but they are never painted as individual villains. Some of them, in fact, are drawn sympathetically: Pink McMurphy’s grotesque obsession with looking like a girl of twelve stems from an insecurity about her husband’s inclinations towards schoolgirls. Captain Handsome, who heads the colonial expedition to Planet Blue that Billie is blackmailed into joining, attempts to redirect an asteroid to decimate the planet’s dinosaur population and make it more inhabitable for humans, but is portrayed as a thoughtful, poetry-reading pirate who teaches Spike about love. The Bird Man seems to be a more straightforward villain, ruling Easter Island with a mob and ordering the felling of the last tree on the island, but he exists as a political position, not a person, and is replaced every year by a new leader based on the winner of the annual Egg Race. The role of antagonist, then, is given to collectives such as the Central Power and MORE-Corporation, whose militaristic, fascist-leaning depictions are much less nuanced. In the novel, ascending scales cast humans under a progressively monstrous light, until it reaches the level of humanity on the planetary scale, whose legacy is a trail of ruined planets where a sense of an ordered universe has fallen apart.
Eternal Return and the Failure of Intervention
Across their tour of planetary destruction, Billie and Spike faithfully build a life-affirming bond in every space-time, serving as a foil and site of resistance to environmental degradation and as the subject of Winterson’s exhortation of love as intervention. The paradox, of course, is that an ecological apocalypse nevertheless repeats itself in every space-time, unchanged by Billie and Spike’s efforts at love or at re-imagining society. When musing about why human history has never swung towards an alternative route, Billie gives a few scant explanations: ‘we who are the intervention don’t know what we are doing’ (p186), and though love may be an intervention, ‘why do we not choose it?’ (p209) Billie’s statements, however, are contradicted by what actually happens in the novel – they do choose love in every space-time, and given the radicality of their love for Spike in contrast to the social order found in every narrative, presumably ‘knows’ what they’re doing – and yet every narrative still ends with one of their deaths and with the resumption of the same ecological collapse. Of course, a fictional death does not necessarily mean closure, but it is difficult to read anything resembling hope about historical change when neither the relationship they have nor the cutting short of this relationship in every space-time makes any difference to the behaviour of other humans around them, let alone the behaviour of humanity as a whole. There is a clash here between the novel’s suggestion of a love-based intervention and the gloomily repetitive outcome of each narrative.
The novel provides no overt explanation for this clash, but current analyses about the nature of Billie and Spike’s relationship seem to locate the redemption provided by their love merely at the smaller, human-sized scale. Susana Onega sees love as having the power to break up dualistic thinking (in this case, the human/robo sapiens binary) and to ‘reconfigure reality from the harmonious and ethical basis of unbounded love,’[13] a notion echoed by Hatice Övgü Tüzün when she writes that cultivating emotional connections with all sentient beings allows human beings to transcend limited ways of thinking or feeling.[14] Alina Preda believes moving to a posthuman state would lead people into becoming ‘less anthropocentric’[15] and would urge them into considering wider issues of responsibility, while Abigail Rine sees that a love ‘radical enough to let the other exist fully and autonomously’[16] can intervene in the repetition of a rigid, non-inclusive social order.
Note how these solutions do not address love’s role in the arena of large-scale ecological disaster. Other critics who have written about the failure of intervention in The Stone Gods also imply separate realities that exist on a larger scale. Merola writes that the novel’s use of repetitive scenarios ‘forecloses the possibility of love as a large-scale socioecological intervention,’[17] particularly because ‘Winterson implies that advanced carbon-based life is materially determined, doomed by its very molecular structures to reorganize in the same destructive patterns […] It has been too late since the emergence of carbon-based life.’[18] Similarly, Adeline Johns-Putra writes that Winterson’s use of repetition, ‘perhaps unwittingly’[19] reveals something about human desire: ‘its propensity for sustainability in its conservative rather than revolutionary sense, emanating from its profound dependence on the familiar.’[20] In contrast to this, Martin Riedelsheimer admits that the novel’s repetition seemingly points to determinism but believes that the novel’s ‘openness to change as much as a refusal to end’[21] and its emphasis on literature and the act of reading imply a re-imagining and re-writing that may potentially disrupt the circularity, ‘and the implication is that the agents of this change are the readers [of Winterson’s novel].’[22] This interpretation problematically spirits the solution that the text suggests out of the world of the text, while its own protagonists, who have re-read literature and re-imagined society during the course of the novel themselves, repeatedly fail to break that circularity.
Winterson’s own assessment of the novel as ‘[a] dystopia with a happy ending?’[23] – qualified by her own question mark – points to an ambivalence regarding the contradiction of love being an intervention and its failure in the novel. However, one may better parse what Winterson says if it were viewed in terms of the subjectivity of scale. The end of the novel is filled with pastoral imagery as the spirit of Billie of Post-3 War leaves her dead body in Wreck City and encounters the idyllic homestead that the Billie of Orbus had resided in. She opens the gate to reunite with the mother who had abandoned her, the wound from which experience Billie of Post-3 War had been carrying throughout the story, and which is now about to be healed. This certainly implies a ‘happy’ ending but it is one that Heather Hicks calls ‘resort[ing] to a deeply personal resolution.’[24] It is, of course, perfectly possible to have a happy, personal moment while the Arctic icecaps melt and Iranian wetlands dry up; love can certainly be an intervention at a personal scale and still have little effect on the larger, collective scale. In the same way, the last line of the novel – ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was’ (p210) – at first glance seems a pleasant enough line as it accompanies Billie as she meets her mother, but when freighted with the memory of the repetitive scenes of destruction in the novel, takes on a much more ominous meaning.
Winterson has said that in writing The Stone Gods she used ‘both Nietzsche and Ouspensky and the idea of eternal return – not in the Buddhist sense, but in the sense of endlessly making the same mistakes.’[25] As Billie says, ‘Human beings aren’t just in a mess, we are a mess. We have made every mistake, justified ourselves, and made the same mistakes again and again’ (p185). The inherence of species-wide folly, made incarnate by the novel’s repeating events, shifts the conventional novelistic focus from the unfolding of events to the certainty of their recurrence. Death and ecological collapse then turn into the narrative cue for the story to begin again. In The Stone Gods, then, the circularity of human history rather pointedly prevents any kind of personal intervention from piercing beyond scalar boundaries and effecting change past the personal scale.
The Stone Gods disrupts the unilinear, progress-oriented view of human history and turns it into something unmanageable. The repetition of narrative in each of the novel’s space-times, amplified by the characters’ own overt musings about the world being a ‘repeating story,’ casts the two protagonists as not so much historical agents as passengers of human history, counting for very little in history’s turning. Their repeated reincarnation adds insult to injury, highlighting the gap between individual capacity and events residing on larger scales, as they once again must find themselves in yet another era of environmental devastation.
Challenging the primacy of human agency is hardly new to Anthropocene discourse; the role of non-human actors in relation to modern environmental concerns is often and extensively discussed. The Stone Gods, however, adds another dimension to that challenge by introducing the gap between the personal and the planetary, portraying a world where individual actions and intentions find little purchase outside their own scale.
Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila, Philippines and is currently a lecturer in Hong Kong. Her short fiction has been published in various venues, including Interzone, Lightspeed Magazine, and The Apex Book of World SF 3. She has a forthcoming publication in The Future Fire. She can be found on Instagram @anewartistry, Bluesky @crystalkoo.bsky.social, and http://cgskoo.wordpress.com/publications.
Bibliography
Andermahr, Sonya, Jeanette Winterson, New British Fiction (Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Arvay, Emily, ‘Ecocide and Empire in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, Green Letters, 24.3 (2020), 277–90 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2020.1852947>
Hicks, Heather J., The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545848>
Johns-Putra, Adeline, Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel, 1st edn (Cambridge University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162>
———, ‘The Unsustainable Aesthetics of Sustainability: The Sense of an Ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods ’, in Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham, and Louise Squire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 177–94
McCulloch, Fiona, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
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Riedelsheimer, Martin, Fictions of Infinity: Levinasian Ethics in 21st-Century Novels (Boston: Lindsey Griffith, 2020)
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Tüzün, Hatice Övgü, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Anthropocene: Dystopian Cityscapes in (Post)Apocalyptic Science Fiction’, American, British and Canadian Studies, 30.1 (2018), 171–93 <https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2018-0010>
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Winterson, Jeanette, The Stone Gods, Kindle (London ; New York: Penguin Books, 2013)
———, ‘The Stone Gods - March 5, 2016’, Internet Archive, 2016 <https://web.archive.org/web/20160305102720/http://www.jeanettewinterson.com:80/book/the-stone-gods/> [accessed 29 April 2022]
Notes
[1] Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods, Kindle (London ; New York: Penguin Books, 2013), pp. 76, 186, 209.
[2] Nicole M. Merola, ‘Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene’, The Minnesota Review, 2014.83 (2014), 122–32 <https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-2782315>; Emily Arvay, ‘Ecocide and Empire in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods’, Green Letters, 24.3 (2020), 277–90 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2020.1852947>; Mertens and Craps.
[3] Heather J. Hicks, The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545848>; Alina Preda, ‘An Agential Realist Approach to Posthumanist Relational Subjectivity in Jeanette Winterson’s “The Stone Gods”’, Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 4.1 (2018), 22–38 <https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2018.5.02>; Susana Onega, ‘The Trauma Paradigm and the Ethics of Affect in Jeanette Winterson’s the Stone Gods’, in Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, DQR Studies in Literature, 48 (Amsterdam ; New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 265–98; Hatice Övgü Tüzün, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Anthropocene: Dystopian Cityscapes in (Post)Apocalyptic Science Fiction’, American, British and Canadian Studies, 30.1 (2018), 171–93 <https://doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2018-0010>; Martin Riedelsheimer, Fictions of Infinity: Levinasian Ethics in 21st-Century Novels (Boston: Lindsey Griffith, 2020); Fiona McCulloch, Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fiction: Imagined Identities(Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
[4] Hicks; Riedelsheimer; Adeline Johns-Putra, Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel, 1st edn (Cambridge University Press, 2019) <https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108610162>
[5] Arvay.
[6] Abigail Rine, ‘Jeanette Winterson’s Love Intervention: Rethinking the Future’, in Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, ed. by Ben Davies and Jana Funke (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), pp. 70–85 <https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307087_5>; McCulloch.
[7] Adeline Johns-Putra, ‘The Unsustainable Aesthetics of Sustainability: The Sense of an Ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods ’, in Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra, John Parham, and Louise Squire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 177–94.
[8] For those unfamiliar, H.P. Lovecraft contributed to and developed the genre of ‘cosmic horror’ in the early twentieth century with stories of ancient, alien monsters that drive his protagonists insane. He is regarded as one of the most influential authors of supernatural horror fiction.
[9] Gry Ulstein, ‘“Age of Lovecraft”?—Anthropocene Monsters in (New) Weird Narrative’, Nordlit, 42, 2019 <https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5004>, p. 51.
[10] Ibid. p. 57.
[11] Merola, p. 128.
[12] Tüzün.
[13] Onega, p. 298.
[14] Tüzün.
[15] Preda, p. 36.
[16] Rine, p. 83.
[17] Merola, p. 125.
[18] Ibid., p. 129.
[19] Johns-Putra, ‘The Unsustainable Aesthetics of Sustainability: The Sense of an Ending in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods,’ p. 192.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Riedelsheimer, p. 139.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Winterson, ‘The Stone Gods - March 5, 2016’.
[24] Hicks, p. 102.
[25] Sonya Andermahr, Jeanette Winterson, New British Fiction (Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 131.