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Short abstract:

Metabolism offers a surprising narrative resource for telling more-than-human stories. Through a case study of Aminatta Forna’s 2018 novel Happiness, this paper argues for the trans-scalar and trans-species affordances of metabolic description.

Long abstract:

The problem of environmental storytelling is a problem of scale. Stories, after all, are “grounded in and adapted to a human-scale lifeworld” (Herman 258). We are good at telling stories about people falling in love, about the drama of a dinner party, even about intergenerational family trauma. It is harder to tell stories that happen at temporalities beyond the scale of the human: about mayflies, or climate change, or fungal fruiting. This paper looks to metabolism as a surprising narrative resource for telling more-than-human stories. Using Aminatta Forna’s 2018 Happiness as a case study, I turn to the novel’s careful attention to ingestion, disintegration, and excretion of matter as model of metabolic description. Happiness, which centers a Ghanaian trauma psychologist and an American wildlife biologist, is frequently read as a fantasy of liberal cosmopolitanism—the kind of story where smooth global exchange is enabled by exceptional individuals. But attending to Forna’s depictions of photosynthesizing plants, pigeons eating meat pies, and London’s complex waste and energy infrastructure reveals a profoundly anti-individualist materialism. Metabolism’s conceptual affordances, in other words—its ability to mediate scales, link species, and foreground the dynamism in apparently static contexts—provide a mechanism for narrating beyond the scale of the human. As such, critical metabolism studies might be put in productive dialogue with the emergent and overlapping fields of climate fiction and the environmental humanities.