Interworldscaping Fantastic Ecological Crisis: Le Guin's Books of Earthsea and Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

12288829

Lucy Atkinson

Supervisor: Dr J. Diamanti

Thesis: Research Master’s Literary Studies

Word Count: 22999

Interworldscaping Fantastic

Ecological Crisis:

Le Guin’s Books of Earthsea and Miyazaki’s

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Abstract:

Ecocriticism today tends to explore climate realism when searching for world-system critique and ideas of futurity, in turn neglecting genre fiction and elements of the fantastic in all fiction. A fantastic focus would ease our struggle to move beyond passivity (away from climate anxiety) since, I argue, the fantastic inherently locates ways of living otherwise. My objects are Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle, itemised as a classic epic fantasy, published between 1968 and 2018; and Hayao Miyazaki’s epic fantasy manga

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, originally serialised through February 1982 and March

1994. Their respective timescapes navigate the political progression of environmental awareness from scientific discovery to climate denialism and crisis recognition. My project addresses the ecocritical problem by arguing how unfolding crisis-events in environmentally-charged epic texts employ the fantastical to radically imagine alternative futurities. I name this work interworldscaping: an untapped function, explaining why fantasy needs to be theorised anew outside of solely realist cli-fi, with focus on the ecoculture of various ecopoetics including the fantastic. I analyse interworldscaping by mapping the ecocultural and critical forces behind two under-explored fantasy epics that confront human-nonhuman interactivity and our affliction to operationalise crisis-events, leading to chronic crises and inactive futurity. How does interworldscaping steer these cultural objects towards a balanced ecoconsciousness that seeks imaginable futures beyond crisis?

Keywords

: fantasy, Le Guin, Miyazaki, manga, illustration, metalepsis, epic, ecocriticism, ecoculture, ecopoetics, crisis, climate crisis, futurity, alterity

Contents

List of Illustrations

………...iii

Introduction

………..…...…...1

1. Defining the Terms

1.1 Crisis………...5

1.2 Ecocultural………..10

1.3 Metalepsis………15

2. Transformations of the Fantastic Nonhuman

2.1 The Dragon’s Eye………..………17

2.2 The Ohmu’s Mouth……….…………..…………27

3. Real and Fantastic Crisis-scapes

3.1 Weaponising the Daikaisho………..………...38

3.2 Chronic Collapsing of Magic………….………..………...46

4. Critical Forces Toward Fantastic Futurity

4.1 Cloud-Watching Earthsea’s Horizon………...….54

4.2 Questioning Manmade Futurity in Nausicaâ………..…….63

Conclusion

………...…...….72

Works Cited

……….………iv

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1. “The Other Wind”, Earthsea, pp. 832-833

………..………19

Fig. 2. “The Valley of the Wind”, Nausicaä, vol. 1, pp. 80-81

………....30

Fig. 3. “Daikaisho”, Nausicaä, vol. 2, pp. 150-151

……….……...34

Fig. 4. “Catastrophe”, Nausicaä, vol. 1, pp. 468

………...…………...40

Fig. 5. “Catastrophe”, Nausicaä, vol. 1, pp. 472

……….…….42

Fig. 6. “A Wizard of Earthsea”, Earthsea, pp. 64-65

………..……..56

Fig. 7. “The Crypt”, Nausicaä, vol. 2, pp. 440-441

………...……….64

Fig. 8. “The Crypt”, Nausicaä, vol. 2, pp. 509

……….………69

Introduction:

I open this project by turning to Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an example of epic poetry defying genre boundaries. Ovid recounts how Jupiter and Mercury save Philemon and Baucis from ecological crisis, wrought by their divine hand: “When [Philemon and Baucis] were a bowshot distant from the top, they looked around and saw all the rest of their country drowned in marshy waters, only their own home left standing” (40). It transpires that this town did not open its doors to Jupiter and Mercury, offering no hospitality to the gods. Only Philemon and Baucis welcome the gods in disguise. In exchange for their hospitality, the couple ask only to be the gods’ priests and to die together, deciding their fantastic arboreal transformation: “Baucis saw Philemon beginning to put forth leaves, and old Philemon saw Baucis growing leafy too … The Bithynian peasant still points out the trees growing there side by side, trees that were once two bodies.” (41)

This passage from Ovid details a fantastic transformation into the nonhuman, with humans morphing into trees,1 and an ecological crisis that floods their community.2 These

fantastical elements, environmental dilemmas, and the complex interactions between human and nonhuman recur across the genealogy of what I call here intermodal fictions, and are key features of my objects of study. It is important to linger on the gods’ reason for sparing Philemon and Baucis: their hospitality. Showcasing ξενία has many didactic purposes in mythology but I read this from an ecocritical perspective. Philemon and Baucis’ cordiality towards unexpected visitors, despite their poverty, denotes the manner of “caretaking” which I expand upon in this project. I use the term “household” as a touchstone to evoke inhabitants, home, and environment. Here, Philemon and Baucis show the appropriate caretaking hospitality toward their wider household by greeting the gods,3 which enables their safety from

1 _{Miyazaki 2:143.}

2 _{The cultural memory of this myth lingers in folklore, for instance: Kai Roberts 480 Folklore of Yorkshire 2013.} 3 _{For further reading, see: Jacques Derrida 77 Of Hospitality 2000.}

environmental disaster. The moral behind the Philemon and Baucis myth reiterates the point behind understanding your own interdependent role within the larger biosphere.

This thesis tracks the cultural work of two fantasy epics: the Earthsea writings by Ursula K. Le Guin and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind where both texts defy genre limitations and thus magnify fantastic scope. I consider these texts in their epic function through the lens of metalepsis, a technique of epic fictions.4 Fantasy must extend the

ecological into epic form to amalgamate interrelational complexity in ecocultural texts. I explore the ecocultural and the critical angles of these objects. To do so, I examine their careful construction of extratextual landscapes that emerge through a critique of human-nonhuman interactivity and crisis discourse. The fantastic mode figures into this approach by offering a substitute counterworld to animate these performances. I claim that it is the fantastic element of these texts, in particular, that facilitates a certain reimagining and, by extension, reworlding of the current vision of our ecosphere.

I coin the phrase interworldscaping to describe the forceful work of both Le Guin and Miyazaki’s texts and how these forces converse with one another at the level of their modal logics. The inter- prefix delineates the interdependent and intersectional place of humans within the global system, -world- reflects how fantasy makes worlds that act as a base to imagine the real world afresh, while -scaping refers to landscaping the horizon into productive futurity. I therefore extend the analytic affordances of Arjun Appadurai’s influential treatment of the suffix -scape in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” where the disjunct between relational worlds— for instance, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes as the building blocks for imagined worlds (296)— produce unique postures amidst globalisation.

4 _{For study on how metalepsis functions through epic and arranges the counterconcepts of Christian and} pagan, consult: Manish Sharma “Metalepsis and Monstrosity: The Boundaries of Narrative Structure in ‘Beowulf’” Studies in Philology vol. 102 no. 3. For Ancient Greek reference, see: Irene J. F. de Jong “The Shield of Achilles: From Metalepsis to Mise En Abyme” Ramus vol. 40 no. 1.

Missing from Appadurai’s taxonomy of worlds is the ecologic mode of the planet itself: a “scape” all the more necessary to read with and for as we approach the climatic tipping points predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Interworldscaping is where various ecological imaginaries come to co-create worlds because the real world-system lacks established understanding of ecological interrelationality. This thesis argues that fantasy allows the reimagination of the world-system to activate fresh alterity. These texts’ capacity to interworldscape bases itself on their fantastic and epic modal functions, with transmedial metalepsis underpinning compiled layers of fantasy. I use the metaphor of “horizon” to ground interworldscaping as the horizons of the future platform imaginability. It is important to consider the terms of reimagination today because the contemporary outlook on the climate crisis is hampered by deep-rooted systemic structuring. Therefore, I separate interworldscaping work into two strands: ecocultural forces and critical forces.5 By claiming this manifold

affordance of reimagination, I do not suggest that fantasy is the only means of thinking otherwise. Instead, I believe a focus on fantasy is crucial to motivate ecocritical span beyond realism— especially on the grounds that realism is handcuffed to anthropocentric worldviews— and I judge fantasy as a mode acutely able to implement balanced interworldscaping.

The recent study by Gwendolyn Morgan in Resilience theorises Miyazaki’s manga and its interrogation of “how humanity can confront its unsustainable future” (173). I agree with Morgan and consult her statement alongside the under-investigated Earthsea. Both of these fantasy epics draw on the human place within the world-system and employ their own counterworlds to visualise a different form of interaction between human and nonhuman, human and environment. Absent in Morgan’s analysis, however, is the political crisis machinations that delimit that future and propel the world into cyclical chronicity. My project

expands on Morgan’s claim by combining an ecocritical perspective with an examination into crisis discourse, warranted by the frequent use of the term “climate crisis” by politicians and organisations alike.6 Now that humans recognise the planetary scale of this crisis, I map out

fantasy’s role in the cultural sphere and how it stimulates the imagination of a planetary future: one that is not in crisis and one that does not fear crises.

The first chapter outlines a definition of our key terms: crisis, ecoculture, and metalepsis. I chart the many features of crisis discourse from labelling to operationalisation. I then configure the world-system as a crisis state to further our understanding of ecoculture and the place of crisis within it. This subsection introduces the textual role as ecocultural forces and how these forces ease the counterconcepts of crisis-noncrisis. Metalepsis relates the layering of real and counterreal, merging worlds, and these intermodal narrative structures pressure conceptual horizons. Narrowing on metalepsis centres the epic techniques that critique human-nonhuman interaction and planetary management of crisis. The second chapter “Transformations of the Fantastic Nonhuman” focuses on how the fantastic can perceive otherwise without falling into the traps of total appropriation. This chapter points to transformations within the text where the nonhuman alleviates critical threat to humans. Following this is “Real and Fantastic Crisis-scapes” honing in on the central theme of a crisis-scape and offering an external view on both nonhuman and human responses to crisis. The first subsection on Nausicaä follows the consequences of operationalising crisis, while the Earthsea analysis observes the progression from operational crisis-scape narratives into chronic crises. Finally, “Critical Forces Toward Fantastic Futurity” looks to crisis-resolution and how sustainable futures are imagined and actioned by detecting the pitfalls of crisis discourse that impede the full visualisation of all potential futures.

1. Defining the Terms:

1.1 Crisis

To begin with, our central terms must be categorised into their uses for the means of this thesis. We must first analyse crisis as its loaded conceptual history sheds light on why we choose to name an event a “crisis” in its contemporary significance. German historian Reinhart Koselleck assesses the term in his “Crisis” study through its conceptual history, tracking the amelioration and deteriorations in how legal, medical, and religious backgrounds use the word. We must theorise crisis to fully gauge the word as an operational force. A crisis-event coordinates the critical foundation of the emergency to determine and necessitate appropriate measures in response. Naming an event a crisis is crisis-labelling, a call for drastic action that often leads to the operationalisation of crisis. But our understanding of crisis stands within and outside of the real because we use it as a mode of observation on a particular real event, therefore the crisis also plays out in our mental timescape. “Mental timescape” designates the interior experience of living crisis, while “extratextual landscape” affirms how the text construes crisis and its impact on the physical world. A critique of crisis is vital because it calls into question the rationale behind different processes reasoned by crisis. Such inspection promotes reflection on crisis-events in the real and, by analysing those in the fantastical, our conception deepens by utilising this fantastic, hypothetical but critical timescape. The parallel runs between living in a world of crisis and reading a fantastic counterworld of crisis. I argue that reading fantastic crisis encourages ways to think outside of the crises that harness our mental timescape in the real.7

The Greek root “κρῑ́νω” is “to separate” and, henceforth, crisis means to judge and decide (between these separations) or to quarrel (over these separations). Koselleck draws out how crisis becomes symbolic of a rationalised political order to the Greeks, an order that can

“be harmonized through appropriate legal decisions” (Crisis 359). In this way, we begin to perceive a crisis-event as an incident that warrants drastic decision-making to then disrupt the current “order” and construct a, perhaps more harmonised, balance. Whether these decisions do seek balance will be problematised throughout this thesis, for the outcomes warranted by a crisis do not always maintain the intended stability. As such, this project does not entirely view crisis from its ancient Greek political light, but rather looks to new iterations of the term that combine its many functions toward current (mis)handlings of crisis-events. The medical understanding of a crisis is the pivotal moment where a patient will survive or die, thus framing crisis as a crucial and decisive turning point, much as the legal background of the term designates a decisive separation and the intricacies that follow.8 This archive uses the term

“recovery” therefore to express worldly survival from continuing crisis.

The religious conception of the term “crisis” rings true to the framework of this project when Koselleck positions crisis within notions of the apocalyptic: “The tension resulting from the knowledge that because of Christ’s Annunciation the Last Judgment is already here even though it is yet to come, creates a new horizon of expectations that, theologically, qualifies future historical time” (360). This explanation of crisis in its religious usage suggests that a crisis-event reformulates our common “horizon of expectations” to then allow conceptions of the future – our futurity – to be felt in the here and now.9 What Koselleck terms “horizon” we

can consider in its broader framework as imaginability due to this orientation toward the future. An imaginable future, even if apocalyptic, finds presence on the horizon of expectations and so becomes a possibility rather than a potentiality10— because its futurity is already tested and

8 _{This thesis regards political crisis-events and it is not my intention to imply any interpretation of mental} health crises.

9 _{The horizon of expectations can also be understood by the term “episteme”, as in: Michel Foucault The} Archaeology of Knowledge 2002.

10 _{For the difference between possibility and potentiality, I refer to: José Esteban Muñoz 9 Cruising Utopia} 2009.

lived out in these religious teachings. A reformulated horizon of expectations can ground possible futurities because it is able to make space for that which is imaginable.

We will rest a moment on futurity here by looking to Mark Fisher, the British cultural theorist who picks apart the neoliberal There Is No Alternative (TINA) absolute to late-stage capitalism, expanding upon Fredric Jameson’s theories to do so. Capitalist Realism is Fisher’s most dedicated accomplishment to this critique as he platforms the inactive futures and dire un-imaginability that neoliberal capitalism breeds for any alterity beyond its imposed and flat horizon. Fisher deliberates the confines of TINA regulation in the following passage, writing in 2008 during the Great Recession crisis: “For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (8). Contextualising the horizon of expectations in the real, Fisher shows how monochromatic our active imaginaries have become. Neoliberal capitalism, by enforcing TINA, flattens our shared imaginable horizon to dull the proposal of any radical alternative to this system.11 The horizon then only reflects a capitalist future and

the concept of futurity slackens, for how can any society culturally envision possible ideas for its future and decide which alternate futurity is most imaginable (and sustainable) when there is only one option available?12 The sole occupation of capitalism on this horizon disqualifies

any radical futurity and this is why the climate crisis struggles to move beyond chronic passivity towards an active and functioning future. In the anticipation of total climate disaster and the terror of this apocalypse, the fantastic makes an effort to move away from factors that limit our imaginability because it is only radical alternatives that can take into account a stable future for the whole planet.

11 _{Though I distance my criticism from Bracke’s ethos of resilience and its ties to futurity, see: Sarah Bracke 70} “Bouncing Back” Vulnerability in Resistance 2016.

12 _{See also: Sarah Brouillette, Mathias Nilges, Emilio Sauri xvi “Introduction” Literature and the Global} Contemporary 2017.

Koselleck goes on to elaborate his grounding of “future historical time”: “The Apocalypse, so to speak, has been anticipated in one’s faith and hence is experienced as already present. Even while crisis remains open as a cosmic event, it is already taking place within one’s conscience” (Crisis 360). Therefore, crisis is already present on our horizon of expectations; Koselleck deems the apocalypse to be imaginable because its threat is already experienced in our mental timescapes through religious teachings. As this project assesses Miyazaki’s fictional post-apocalypse, it will become clear how crisis is already present because our common consciousness scrutinises it as though it were. Experiences through the lens of neoliberal capitalism and apocalyptic fear must settle on another shared notion of the world-system which does not threaten the mere potentiality of a future.

A common ecoconsciousness would reinforce the idea that a possible future for the entire planet is imaginable and still achievable.13 The blatant hope behind this ecoconscious

outlook drives home the needlessness of continuing in the same vein towards an inactive future, instead finding routes to balance the inequalities wrought by climate change and leveraging global resources to a more global effect. The imaginability of apocalypse weighs on these other kinds of positive futurities. For example this ecoconsciousness, that comes with the ecocultural force of a cultural object, pushes aside fears of eco-apocalypse during our experiences of a real crisis-event. In its place, the anticipation of radical futurity becomes possible. Importantly, in the fantastic, this is a shared experience outside the already present apocalyptic threat in the real. Futurity must be imaginable outside the formation of our current horizon in order to re-shape these expectations. This debate on crisis rhetoric and futurities populates cultural objects as well as religious teachings on the apocalyptic, but both work to permit a kind of imaginability beyond the crisis they confront. This thesis will work on the role of cultural

13 _{The term “ecoconsciousness” keeps in mind Black Consciousness and its connections with hope and futurity,} see: Steve Biko 114 I Write What I Like 1987.

objects in a crisis and how they too can anticipate14 overwhelming crises in a similar fashion.

Cultural objects are able to tease out impediments in different futurities, in order to prompt one that is imaginable. However, I argue that this project’s cultural objects can envision futures beyond the current horizon of expectations, whilst the apocalyptic vision as a global religious trait seeks to base itself on established grounding, inevitably leading to an unsustainable future. Pairing this theory with Koselleck’s “Asymmetric Counterconcepts” allows the positioning of crisis alongside noncrisis as counterconcepts, where: the first concept is put in opposition to the other with the aim to undermine the latter. Koselleck claims that really counterconcepts are: “supplementary concepts of varying magnitude, which are intended to mediate between the political tasks of the day and the general philosophical apprehension of the world” (Counterconcepts 167). Crisis and noncrisis exist in culture as mutual concepts; they exist as mediators between the political discourse and the lived reality of many global citizens, in other words, their horizon of expectations while managing the world-system. Still, the term progresses and regresses in common use, as Koselleck explains: “Experiential spaces shift their ground and new horizons of expectation open up. Linguistic possibilities develop or lapse into disuse … temporal sequence is just as irreversible in the usage of pairs of concepts, driving onward their unmistakable singularity” (159). Reading this text beside the “Crisis” paper expands on Koselleck’s “horizon of expectations” since crisis itself reforms our horizon, so can our usage of crisis decide that horizon by widening the dichotomy between counterconcepts and so reinforcing singularity. We must create a space for noncrisis future where anticrisis is the means by which we may travel to that radically different horizon.

Noncrisis points to a future without crisis, by suspending any future that promises critical threat. Janet Roitman makes a case for noncrisis narration in her book Anti-Crisis. As an anthropologist, her study does presume a human-orientated approach with focus on financial

crashes but it still observes the systemic whole. For instance, Roitman argues how a financial crash does not carry out as though the apocalypse were already present but instead:

The risk posed to capitalist accumulation, or the limits encountered by profitable private investment in its search for future capitalization, is only narrated once compound rates of growth are said to have reached historical inflexion points … always after “crisis” has been pronounced. Perilous risk is inevitably, and not very usefully, signaled after economic decline (73)

The inability to anticipate and to forestall crisis in a capitalist system, and the following incapacity to prevent crisis, shows why Roitman sees the world-system as characterised by crisis.15 Noncrisis narration is cast outside of this incapable shadow; hoping for a future which

both predicts and prevents any critical situation until there is no crisis to narrate in the first place. Analytically, this distinction is useful for the purposes of my archive because noncrisis is the radical future which fantastical texts move towards and their ecocultural force aims to ground our horizon of expectations in the real.

Due to this practical inevitability of crisis in the world-system as it stands, anticrisis ought to find involvement with our usage of crisis to decide on the route towards a more conceivable horizon of expectations. This is why the assessment of crisis is crucial in the contemporary real. The playing out of crisis and the ways in which we use the very word manages our imaginable expectations of the world-system and our future. The political manipulation of crisis links with our lived experience of it: mental timescapes shift the imaginable horizon for noncrisis while the inevitable political operationalisation through time only reinforces the binary of crisis and noncrisis. It is a planetary struggle between what we are told and what we can imagine.

1.2 Ecoculture

To place crisis within our two cultural objects, it is important to note that both the Earthsea writings and the Nausicaä manga depict their overarching crisis as ecological disaster overwhelming their respective counterworlds (ie. fictional world-systems). A consideration of crisis in combination with ecoculture therefore develops methods of moving beyond environmental crisis. If we pair the ancient Greek etymology of ecology alongside Koselleck’s conceptual backgrounds of κρίσις, we must acknowledge the ancient Greek stem for ecology which is οἶκος and which founds the English “eco-” prefix. Tying κρίσις and οἶκος together weaves the signification of both terms in conjunction. To explain, the ancient Greek οἶκος denotes the household: estate and family. A crisis of the οἴκου in its ecological sense would imply a planetary concern for the whole, with measures obligated by the calling of crisis but which observe the needs of both nonhuman and human inhabitants on the same level.

It is the humanist predisposition to conceive of our planetary home as a realm of the human and the human only, whereas the root οἶκος awakens this predisposition into accounting for the entire household— with the environmental estate and both nonhuman and human families. This project looks to consider ecology in its ancient Greek light to escape any essentialising properties, while still retaining a global outlook without overlooking members of the household nor the estate. By examining fantastic extratextual landscapes that form our common ecoconsciousness, this essay hopes to conjoin the ideas behind κρίσις and οἶκος so that there is no delimiting the totality of the climate crisis, as would follow in the ancient Greek political conception. The Greek political notion, that crisis measures are always appropriate, fails to recognise the systemic inability to take both nonhuman and human needs into account. Therefore, the addition of οἶκος allows a wider stance on how crisis operates globally, impacting both human and nonhuman residents and the estate itself.

Hubert Zapf proposes recognition of the work that cultural objects do for our ecological awareness in his book Literature as Cultural Ecology. Zapf grounds how ecocultural texts

function and so establishes this project’s basis. Zapf claims literature can function as cultural ecology and an ecological force: “it is a force which brings discourse “alive” by enacting complex dynamical life processes in the ecocultural biotopes of language and the text” (28). I streamline this thought with the term “ecocultural force” whereby radical (and often fantastical) imaginations critique the current world-system to visualise different human interactivities with the nonhuman. The fantastic counterworld enacts an alternative interactivity to stimulate alterity in the real world-system. The imaginary’s critique becomes a force because it works as “a vital movement of acting and reacting between signifiers, bodies, minds, selves, environments, chronotopes and, pervading them all, the fundamental interaction between culture and nature” (Zapf 28). I adopt Zapf’s notion of human-nonhuman interactivity and interaction16 because the “inter-” prefix reflects a more balanced understanding of both the

human and nonhuman role within our existing planetary order.

In addition, anthropologist Anna Tsing in her book The Mushroom at the End of the

World offers an ethnographic study on the Matsutake mushroom growing in human-developed

nonhuman environments, so Tsing focuses on how the nonhuman reacts to human interference. She also describes a prospective reason why we hold back on encouraging alternate human-nonhuman interrelationships: “until quite recently many people – perhaps especially scientists – imagined life as a matter of species-by-species reproduction. The most important interspecies

interactions, in this worldview, were predator-prey relations in which interaction meant wiping

each other out” (emphasis my own, 139). This loaded history behind a common worldview of nonhuman-human interactivity suggests that an alternative remains unimaginable because the recent perspective is so extreme. If inter-action has long been equated with potential annihilation, the threat still lingers despite a persistence of more affirmative interactivity. I rely on the “inter-” prefix to exhibit how we may step outside of such counterconceptual thinking,

where the nonhuman remains a threat despite its inter-relational and semiotic activity beyond this boundary.

As Koselleck remarks on asymmetric counterconcepts and how we understand this to work in the crisis-noncrisis dichotomy, Zapf utilises opposing concepts in an attempt to overcome their enforced boundaries. He formulates how literature tracks our ecocultural awareness and he argues that the text itself becomes “a force which transgresses boundaries of linguistic and social conventions, creating ecosemiotic energy fields in borderline situations between identity and difference, conflict and communication, distance and empathy, climax and denouement, crisis and resolution, language and silence” (28). In particular, the ecocultural force of literature eases the borderline situation between crisis and resolution so that movement from crisis, via anticrisis, toward noncrisis becomes imaginable.

We look for ways to move beyond reliance on Koselleck’s counterconcepts, until radical alterity can find imaginability. I equate Zapf’s “ecosemiotic energy fields” here with our argument on a text’s ecocultural force. This is because a text can imagine inclusive interpretations of our world-ecology and the signalling system it shares. This radical imagination creates a force, or field, within our shared cultural space. A force operating within cultural spaces can then approach the idea of establishing a more balanced view of interactivity in the ecosystem on our worldview or horizon. Ecocultural forces forge links between world-ecology and cultural spheres so that people’s many varying and conflicting political opinions on the world-system can garner a shared consciousness for the importance of a sustainable planet. One example: an ecology not dominated by the assumption of predator-prey murderous interrelationships. Another term for ecocultural force or ecosemiotic energy field, albeit more narrowed, is the realm of ecopoetics: how texts function in the ecological and cultural fields at the same time with a rough orientation toward more balanced ways of living for a sustainable future. I do not understand an ecosemiotic energy field to be an abstract “energy” deriving from

a charged (and individualised) political reading of a book, since I argue for the cultural force of the book’s imaginary alterity and how it kindles thoughts of living otherwise with the nonhuman. Such work manoeuvres a shared cultural space and so assimilates itself with various modes of thinking.

This note of alternate worldviews mirrors Janet Roitman’s understanding of crisis in

Anti-Crisis where “The concept of crisis is crucial to the “how” of thinking otherwise” (9).

Ecocultural forces shine a light on the political handling of crisis by playing out why interference, when based on individual priorities, complicates crisis. The force composes these machinations in the hope that one can look past hypothetical chronicity and envision balanced interactivities. Zapf also presents many other counterconcepts in the aforementioned passage and these also embody complexities in human-nonhuman interactivity, but it is conflict and communication with which I concentrate our attention. I argue that literary ecocultural forces do facilitate the transgression of boundaries to reimagine the dichotomy between crisis and anticrisis, yet I find that the counterconcepts of conflict and communication are more of a means to reach that resolution through their hope for an alternative. Ecocultural texts often grapple with our efforts to stabilise conflict through communication and Earthsea and

Nausicaä are no different. In fact, both texts drive on investigative grounds to reform our

horizon of expectations where resolution does not equate to conflict, but rather, we are able to visualise the solving of a crisis through communicative methods.

Amy Elias and Christian Moraru consolidate the concept of planetarity in their recent work The Planetary Turn, coming to terms with ecoculture and what it means when paired with the “planetarity” ambition. Elias and Moraru configure ecocultural routes toward an “ecumenically and equitably enjoyed, economic or sociocultural commonwealth. Such an ethical configuration of material planetarity is still to be adequately thought out and built, which is one reason a sufficiently consolidated ecoculture is still on the horizon” (xxv).

Therefore, to reach this equitable planetarity, we must deliberate and build on our notions of it as an imaginable future. To do so, ecoculture must transform our horizon of expectations so that this noncrisis future can find an imaginable hold. We now understand the reason for ecoculture and its function as a force in literature: when a text functions ecocritically, it delivers expanded environmental consciousness through exploration of imaginable futurities, by way of alternate interactivity. This project will experiment on whether this kind of ecocultural force could be a quality of certain texts and here the focus serves fantastical epics.

For instance, Lawrence Buell’s perspective on the complex futurities for ecocriticism draws together important notions on the productivity of ecopoetics. Productive and active futures are important since the current crux of the climate crisis is the ability to move forward and accept drastic change in order to quell impassive tendencies of climate anxiety. Buell assures us that if we “think inclusively of environmentality as a property of any text – to maintain that all human artifacts bear such traces” (25), this would prevent the general dependence on climate realism for critical representation. Whether there is an intrinsic environ-mentality to our texts is an overarching question and we will debate the perimeters of this ecoculture and its force upon sociocultural ecoconsciousness.

1.3 Metalepsis

This essay configures the metaleptic technique as a form of epic-writing. We will assess one specific type of metalepsis: where there is transgression between the counterworld of the narrative and the lived experience of the real. I relate metalepsis in the manner of Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek who expand on the airtight Genettian conception and converge the work of metalepsis with popular culture and in particular, its transmedial function within the fantastic.17 Their work shows how metalepsis arranges many layers of representation within

a cultural object which, to Klimek, can “create the impression of giving breath to the fictions

themselves, animating them, bringing them to ‘real’ life and drawing them into ‘our’ reality” (30). Klimek specifies how ascending metalepsis arranges layers between the fantastic and the real. Ascending metalepsis in fantasy is where the counterworld draws aspects of reality into its world to ground fantastic alterity. Studying metalepsis also finds connections in epic as a mode of storytelling and what an epic text is able to perform ecoculturally in times of crisis. Jeff Thoss defines metalepsis in his own study as “a paradoxical transgression of the line that separates the inside from the outside of a storyworld” (4) ie. counterworld. The paradoxical contradictions within metalepsis find inherent backing in many fantastic elements through all genres. Paradox and irony seep through fantasy to afford some sentiment of un-reality which is crucial when telling a fantastic story.

To thread this together, the metaleptic epic technique allows fantasy literature to operate more fantastically by implicating the real. Thoss continues extrapolating how metalepsis can be a representation of reality within the counterworld so that it fuses with the real world, he explains how:

this is a highly transmedial type of metalepsis because it revolves around narrative media’s basic capacity to represent worlds. Alternatively, a narrative can indexically acknowledge reality, that is, have characters in the storyworld by some means address or point to our world (178)

Thoss examines fiction, film, and comic books in his When Storyworlds Collide, yet I believe more attention needs to be paid to diverging forms in combination with fantastic elements.

Earthsea and Nausicaä make use of illustrative practice and the affordances of manga writing

in order to build upon the layers of their counterworlds and the work of the fantastic. It is fantasy that has most capacity in representing multiple worlds, so surely it is the fantastic that can express this most transmedial type of ascending metalepsis? If ascending metalepsis is an epic practice, including fantasy epics, how does it play into the discussion of crisis within these

texts? In this project, it will become evident how the crisis-events of the counterworld point to crises in the real. When this transmediality performs in an ecocultural text tackling crisis, this ascending metalepsis draws together the components that reimagine a radically sustainable future horizon. I argue that this is how a text’s ecocultural force translates into changes for the real world-system.

2. Transformations of the Fantastic Nonhuman:

2.1 The Dragon’s Eye

Imaginative literature has not been appropriately considered in ecocriticism. Though many critics find an important study of the genre crucial in expanding ecocritical scope, these critics do not dedicate their project to that single intention. One such critic is Lawrence Buell, who will come into play later in our analysis of fantasy and its ecoculture. Zapf also hopes for ecocriticism to widen its observation, claiming that nonrealist fictions have not “been explored as distinctive, semiotically condensed models of ecocultural critique and communication” (11). My project aims for this outline by seeing whether the force of fantasy epics encourage radical imaginaries. Does this different kind of imaginary promote strategic conflict that only propagates crisis, or does a critique of this crisis encourage alternate communicative methods? But to dive into the reasons why ecocriticism often overlooks the fantastic element, we must approach Christine Marran’s study Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World to better place the significance of fantasy when it works for ecoculture. Marran names a dilemma for ecocriticism in the platforming of humanist ideals of culture and imperialist notions of civilisation, rather than radical expressions of nature. This is why Marran works to envision ecology apart from culture, so that our cultural objects can address environmental concerns outside of a human-orientated worldview. In Marran’s words, “Cultural humanism, historically, has drawn on the material world for a constellation of metaphors to serve human

interest and to generate processes for human groups to master themselves through self-consciousness and historical action” (4). Marran frames human-nonhuman interactivity as historically weighted by human dominance, where the nonhuman is only perceived through its uses for human culture. Her indication of “self-consciousness” draws light on how the idea of ecoconsciousness eclipses the exclusivity of individualised cultural humanism. Paradoxically, certain cultural objects work against historical human-orientation by imagining the nonhuman as purposeful and intentional beyond capitalist need.18

I argue that ecocriticism underexplores the fantastic, in particular, because there is an inclination to foreground humanist realism during a time of crisis. The sense of urgency in a critical situation often dismisses any “non-serious” text so fantasy’s long association with reading-for-pleasure does the genre a disservice. It is also understandable that a time of crisis authorises the study of nonfictive human experiences that delve into this crisis’ impact on those humans living it. Nevertheless, Marran hopes for the inclusion of experiences beyond solely human experience. This essay makes the claim that fantasy literature fulfils these criteria whilst building upon them through interworldscaping. For instance, the fantastic works ecoculturally by reimagining alternate counterworlds through a fantastic lens to discover different perceptions to our own way of life in this present world-system. Marran shares this sentiment by drawing on the concept of representational worlds, which we understand as fantastic counterworlds: “Representational worlds can … imagine a world without us in order to imagine a world anew with us” (142). Alterity, through a fantastic optic, stages methods of anticrisis and works toward sustainable imaginability. A counterworld can represent its world-system from a nonhuman-orientation, allowing recipients of this counterworld to envisage their own world from outside cultural humanism. Considering hypothetical situations of a similar event,

18 _{For reflection on how capitalism organises human perception of the nonhuman, see: Jason W. Moore} Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism 2016.

from differing vantage points, can permit a more balanced point of view on what one experiences in the real. We must make clear how the fantastic steps beyond a human perspective of climate crisis and instead looks into the impression crisis leaves on the nonhuman and the nonhuman role in the world-system.

Rather than human experiences in the real, the fantastic posits human and nonhuman experiences of a nonreal crisis. This is another way in which fantasy literature is able to develop a text’s ecocultural work. One such example lies in Le Guin’s final novel of the Earthsea series:

The Other Wind. As the crisis comes to a head, the characters join the Dragon Council where

they decide their next action to tackle the crisis-event. A key event of this Council is when the attending dragon transforms into a human (see fig. 1). Illustrator Charles Vess’ style of boxing-in the background creates a comic book panel visual effect. This strategy positions the illustration within the text so that the two correspond and there is little distinction when reading. The character is in dragon and human form at the same time, so the drawing represents both

nonhuman and human figures. Dragons within Earthsea embody the nonhuman experience and, by taking a fantastic form, Le Guin sidesteps any essentialising attributes that arise with writing nonhuman perspectives. This is because the dragons are a fantastic nonhuman and so operate outside of our expectations in the real. Vess reflects the extreme fantasy of this dragon-human transformation by representing two different stages of the formation in mid-transition and thus two separate timescapes at once. The onlookers appear confused, though active, with castle guards hanging from balconies and holding weapons. To reiterate Tsing’s comment on the inclination to always revert back to the predator-prey relationship, the sudden transformation between nonhuman and human licenses the humans to attack this non-conforming living being with weapons poised.

Le Guin details the transformation scene through the omniscient narrator: “There was no dragon. There was a woman. She stood some ten paces from Tehanu and the king. She stood where the heart of the dragon might have been” (831). This description takes a nuanced approach to the transformative merging of human and nonhuman as the dragon becomes human. Le Guin writes that the dragon Orm Irian was no longer present and, instead, there was a woman named Irian, blending the human and nonhuman into one through direct fantastical conversion. To reinforce this, Le Guin locates the human in the place of the dragon’s heart, thus representing the counterconcepts’ complete assimilation into one being. The narrator also notes onlookers: “those on the terrace and in the windows of the towers saw the strangest thing they might ever see however long they lived in a world of sorceries and wonders” (831). The dragon-human transformation takes place on a deeper level of fantasy with a play on metalepsis, since those already inhabiting the fantastical counterworld still experience this strange event as un-reality; it is fantastic and the “strangest”.

Within Moraru and Elias’ study of planetarity comes Robert Tally Jr.’s chapter “Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World” which seeks to posit fantasy literature within the

planetarity model of the “world commons” goal, promoting bioconnective global relatedness, or, in other words, a balance of nonhuman-human interactivity in the planetary household. Tally Jr. finds that “the radical alterity of fantasy or the fantastic mode broadly conceived enables and promotes a projection of a world that can, if only provisionally, be mapped” (206). As such, the fantastic breeds alterity by radically imagining ways of living otherwise, mapping its own counterworld. The counterworld, representative of its name, serves the purpose of countering the real world-system by proposing provisional alternatives. Le Guin’s description of Orm Irian’s transformation into Irian expresses metalepsis by countering the counterworld from within itself: the change from dragon into human goes beyond the imaginability of the human onlookers. The transformation steeps their counterworld further into the fantastic by countering the fantasy world’s own imposed horizon of expectations.

Taking a leaf from metalepsis, Buell positions the inclination of ecocritical neorealists who “accord to dense representations of environmental facticity or appeal to existential immersion, narrative power, and ecological literacy as a means of suturing the divide between empirical world and creative artifact” (32). Buell suggests this tendency toward descriptions of environmental facticity “frustrates ecocritical engagement with non- and anti- realistic genres that are no less environmentally engaged [than realist genres]” (32-3). This analysis centres the role of the fantastic as environmentally engaged, for fantasy texts are just as capable in “suturing the divide” between (human-nonhuman) counterconcepts and distorting the fantastic imaginary with the real.19 The dragon-human transformation operates ecoculturally through a

fantastic lens by combining the nonhuman and human forms into one beyond the horizon of expectations for characters in the novel. The fantastic, as an anti-realistic genre, delves further into fantasy by experimenting with a blend of human-nonhuman through metalepsis.20 Here,

19 _{Koselleck 157 “Asymmetric Counterconcepts”.}

20 _{To study the racial and imperialist reasons why the human and nonhuman separated into counterconcepts,} read: Chris Kidd 10 Culture and Conservation 2016.

metalepsis functions as compiled layers of the fantastic. This is one effective way to distort our real horizon of expectations and envision a radical new formation of imaginability, by staging something unreal even to characters in the fantastic.

Following that description, Le Guin continues by outlining the experience of the bystanders and focalising the transformation through their human perspective:

Some of those who were at the Dragon Council said afterwards that if they looked straight at her she seemed only a tall woman standing there, but if they looked aside what they saw in the corner of their eye was a vast shimmer of smoky gold that dwarfed king and throne. And many of them, knowing a man must not look into a dragon’s eye, did look aside; but they stole glimpses too … a few councillors, not having rightly understood, wondered who the woman was, and when the dragon would be coming (835)

This showcases a human perspective of a nonhuman-human transformation and reaffirms an event that is unreal to the characters and still more unreal to the readers. A central note here is the human understanding that they cannot look into a dragon’s eye. In this, Le Guin implies that a human cannot fully confront the nonhuman perspective, let alone perceive or embody it. Only deeply fantastic beings in Earthsea, which assume both human and nonhuman forms, can do so because they inhabit the middle ground of the (imposed) dichotomy. The humans’ understanding that they should not look into the dragon’s eye presents the risk element in appropriating another’s gaze since it would shake the foundations of this interrelationship. Appropriation occurs because a human cannot claim to see the world through the nonhuman eye, doing so would trivialise the nonhuman experience and undermine nonhuman

expression.21 The transformation of dragon into human embodies the idea that there are other

ways of understanding the nonhuman than assuming one can stare into a dragon’s eye.22

From a closer reading of this Earthsea passage, the dragon’s transformation into human greatly undermines the human-imposed hierarchy, for the dragon “dwarfed king and throne” (835) and by implication, human civilisation. A dragon’s capability to morph into human form threatens the humans because this lies outside their understanding, with some refusing to believe that the woman Irian could also be the dragon Orm Irian. Vess’ illustration frames the transformation with layers of civilisation, the great buildings of the capital city occupying the forefront and midground range. The sky extends behind the dragon and outlines the top of the illustration. Irian’s transformation deliberates nonhuman-human interactivity by backgrounding the dragon in its associated element of the sky and the humans amidst their constructed city. Even though Irian performs a blending of human and nonhuman into a balanced whole, the human perspective perceives this stability as a threat to their individuality and their human-constructed horizon. The humans in the illustration still consider their counterworld an οἶκος only for human civilisation, refusing to incorporate nonhuman dragons within the planetary household. The human seeks to reinforce the counterconcepts of human and nonhuman, meaning that a conversion from one to the other is not fantastically possible in their horizon of expectations. That is, until Irian’s transformation. Reflecting on Tsing’s analysis, it is clear to see why the human immediately perceives a nonhuman-human transformation as a threat: the human worldview historically approaches interactivity with other species from a predator-prey basis. The memory of annihilation still manipulates balanced transformation into a threat towards humans.

21 _{Buell 7.}

22 _{For further study on anthropocentric anthropomorphism vs. anthropodenial, see: de Waal} “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial” Philosophical Topics vol. 27 no. 1.

I reflect more on nonhuman expression since this thought gives rise to alternate interactivity composites. For example, Marran notes that “obligate storytelling is invested in nonhuman forms of expression. The stone’s sweat, the expressive space between the mountains, the bird’s call … they all express something we humans have no idea about” (41). Our argument focuses on how cultural objects represent nonhuman expressions without falling into presumptuous appropriative problematics. The fantastic is one approach: Le Guin gives voice to the dragons so they can speak against the domination of human civilisation and the imbalance it breeds. Irian’s transformation embodies the movement between nonhuman and human forms of expression, hoping for a radical reshaping of our ecocultural horizon. This altered horizon would not be wholly based on human requirements for a civilised, capitalist future.

Le Guin details Irian’s speech at the Council on behalf of the dragons, reciting the words of the eldest dragon: “Kalessin said: “Long ago we chose. We chose freedom. Men chose the yoke. We chose fire and the wind. They chose water and the earth.” (836) Referencing Kalessin, Irian explains the human-nonhuman counterconcept as a choice and a separation of intentions. Dragons represent the fantastical nonhuman and Kalessin teaches that nonhuman and humans reinforce their counterconceptual binary through the choices both parts make. For instance, Irian has to transform from dragon into human before the human council will hear the dragons’ concern. It is crucial to realise, however, that these divisive choices are the symptom of a crisis-event, as Irian continues reciting Kalessin:

“Once we were one people. And in sign of that, in every generation of men, one or two are born who are dragons also. And in every generation of our people, longer than the quick lives of men, one of us is born who is also human … the bringers of choice. There will be no more such born to us or to them. For the balance changes” (836)

Kalessin, through Irian, educates the humans at the Dragon Council that humans and nonhuman dragons were once one whole. Therefore beings like Irian are emblems of that time, because they still inhabit both dragon and human form.

I argue that the division of human-dragon is a crisis event, a decisive turning point in their way of life that entails the continued asymmetry of human and nonhuman. Since Irian and others are still able to transform, they are the bringers of choice because they reflect hope in undoing that separation. Whilst the machinations of crisis require drastic change and heavy decisions, Kalessin points out that they still have a choice as to whether they should continue making that decision to separate. Their counterconcepts are not quite so divided as to be irreconcilable. Nevertheless, this speech at the Dragon Council signals that there will be no more human-nonhuman beings like Irian. The crisis at hand means that there is no longer an alternative to the dichotomy between dragon and human. The “balance” of the Earthsea archipelago changes and this critical stage further separates nonhuman from human, the symbol of this is the phasing out of dragon-human beings that once bridged that binary.

Balance within Earthsea is a key component to Le Guin’s world-building and it also speaks ecoculturally to the series’ consideration of the ecological crisis. The concepts “balance” and “equilibrium” join forces and reflect the ecological whole of the Earthsea archipelago; both human and nonhuman characters refer to a shift in this balance when trying to connote the extreme crisis they face. A shift, a change, or a break in the balance symbolises a crisis-event in their world-system, whilst a warping of the equilibrium as a whole usually denotes an enduring, chronic crisis.23 One manner in thinking how “balance” works in Le

Guin’s text is to pause on the idea of homeostasis, which denotes the relative equilibrium of all interactive agents in an ecosystem. Fredric Jameson’s “Magical Narratives” article ties

23 _{I encourage a further study into how this relation of balance and crisis coincides with Le Guin’s translated} text, note: Le Guin Lao Tsu: Tao te Ching 1997.

relevance here between fantastic metalepsis and upholding a balanced homeostasis in counterworlds.24 Jameson presents the umbrella term “romance” which encompasses fantasy

within its broad span. His debate on the genre reflects the reliance on realism in late-stage capitalism to seek salvational futures outside apocalypse. Jameson claims that “romance is precisely that form in which the worldness of world, reveals or manifests itself, in which, in other words, world in the technical sense of the transcendental horizon of our experience becomes visible in an inner-worldly sense” (98). To put it simply, by fashioning its own counterworld, the fantastic reimagines the world-making processes of the world-system, so that a radical re-shaping of our horizon of expectations is internally already present and therefore potentially imaginable.

Inserting the notion of balance, the fantastic reimagines different possible futures for a balanced world-system which takes the priorities of the entire ecosystem into account. If ecological homeostasis falls into imbalance, an inner-worldly reimagining of this world in crisis is vital to reassert that equilibrium. What compensatory changes could restore such a fine balance? The balance of the archipelago expresses human and nonhuman ecoconsciousness, so it will become increasingly evident that when a character refers to balance they consider the health of the entire ecological household, with neither the nonhuman nor the human on a higher hierarchical platform. Homeostasis reflects the balance of the whole, including all interdependent agents within that whole. For instance, Kalessin urges concern for the most disadvantaged of the human-nonhuman counterconcept: the human-dragon beings that exist between this binary and who remain unacknowledged. Kalessin urges human attention to the human-dragon beings’ plight at the Council by calling upon their shared hope for a sustainable balance. Kalessin also points out how intermediary beings, such as those that can take both

24 _{For analysis of Le Guin’s science fiction and the inescapability of capitalism, see: Jameson “World-Reduction} in Le Guin: the Emergence of Utopian Narrative” Science Fiction Studies vol. 2 no. 3.

nonhuman and human forms, signify choice because they represent a break in counterconceptual thinking. Le Guin pressures hope for equal interactivity by threatening the balance of the archipelago and the existence of the dragon-humans. Defining this crisis of “balance” and transforming the fantastic nonhuman, Le Guin formulates a way to address the need for everyone to care for the common whole.

2.2 The Ohmu’s Mouth

This project tracks how fantasy operates to an ecocultural end. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that this thesis does not work to platform the fantastical above science-fiction, nor non-realism above realism. This thesis only seeks to clarify the place of fantasy within pre-established debates in the field, so that a fantastic cultural object can be considered on par with its science fiction or realist companions.25 As such my project explores the ideational

affordances of fantasy, in particular, how fantastic elements function ecoculturally and in alternate timescapes of crisis. I encourage the study of the fantastical across genres, for ecocultural literary forces do not depend upon the publishing industry’s market cataloguing. Before I turn to track the transformative process of the nonhuman in another text, it is important to re-establish the groundwork for what we consider fantastical. Mendlesohn and James in their

Short History of Fantasy lay out this vital work. In their history, there is a reliance on

conceptions of impossibility and inexplicability in order to do this, because science fiction often considers only that which can be explained even if it seems impossible in the contemporary real (3). Mendlesohn and James reflect on the speciation of fantasy, for example quest fantasy which most orientates our cultural objects because: “Quest fantasies come to an end, usually with some kind of healing of the land, and either a restoration or dissolution of magic” (119). Mendelsohn and James later point out that “these [quest fantasy] books are epic

25 _{I suggest a study of science fiction which takes into account Gossin’s reflection on human reaction to alien} life in comparison to human perception of nonhuman life forms, Gossin 225.

and function best if understood as riffs on a theme” (123). Miyazaki’s epic series centres on the physical healing process of the Sea of Corruption, whereas Le Guin’s epic writings focus on a crisis of magic dissolution which threatens the archipelago’s balanced ecosphere.

This thesis facilitates cross-genre and transdisciplinary thinking which is vital for a properly fleshed-out ecocriticism, seeking to inform how we live with the nonhuman in the world-system. This conception benefits from a reading of Tally Jr. in a return to his fantastic contribution in The Planetary Turn, where he considers fantasy a “discursive modality” (195) rather than an institutional genre. I place the term “discursive modality” in relation to Zapf’s conception of literary “forces”, since Tally Jr. hopes to embody the interplay of a text’s cultural and social work within our common ecosphere. As I comment on the planetary household throughout this project, the “discursive modality” and the “force” of our texts can be read as the cultural discussion about restoring a more comprehensive idea of that household. These discussions take place within that household, so literary ecocultural work is a force for the planetary household because it operates as the caretaker.

Tally Jr. expands on the idea that fantasy works beyond the limitations of its own genre categorisation: “In theory and in practice, the alterity of fantasy makes possible new ways of seeing – and, by the same token, of interpreting and perhaps changing – the world-system forming the untranscendable horizon of all thinking today” (195). According to their nature, both Earthsea and Nausicaä navigate similar grooves on their ecological textual thread, where characters undergo an archetypal quest protecting the wellbeing of their counterworld households. The radical alterity that this quest compels becomes the foundation upon which these (human and nonhuman) characters are able to re-envision their counterreal horizon of expectations. This imagination in the counterreal thus prompts a reimagination of our contemporary real in a transmedial type of metalepsis. The counterworlds of these narratives work as caretakers for the sustainability of their planetary households, with characters

undergoing various quests to rid their world of unbalancing agents. On the other hand, reading counterreal caretaking prompts alternative attitudes to our own world-system and how one might contribute to sustainability in the real. This project does not solely focus on fantasy as a genre but rather fantastical elements; Le Guin and Miyazaki work fluently across genre with elements of the fantastic mode in both their science fiction and fantasy ventures.26 These are

cultural objects which collaborate with fantastic techniques to think ecocritically. This thesis does not claim that fantasy is the only genre able to do so, but rather, the traditional inclination to overlook fantasy has perhaps left a few critical blind spots worthy of note.

The ecoculture within Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä debates the nonhuman position within a human-dominated world by envisioning a counterworld which reverses that position.

Nausicaä seeks to establish the critical drawbacks in how humans perceive the nonhuman and

how this prevents a more mutually beneficial interactivity. The text pursues this effect by situating the Nausicaä counterworld in a post-ecoapocalyptic state, whereby humans function at the peril of a spreading toxic forest, the Sea of Corruption. The protagonist Nausicaä embarks on a journey to understand the nonhuman as she learns more about its part in their counterworld. In a manner akin to Le Guin’s dragons, Miyazaki’s Sea of Corruption and its resident giant insects take form as fantastic nonhumans so that human-nonhuman interactivity can be considered anew. As Tally Jr. finds that the alterity of fantasy grants new ways of seeing, the alterity of fantastic nonhumans prompts a reimagining of our nonhuman in the real planetary household and how we choose to interact with the nonhuman.

In the first chapter of the series, “The Valley of the Wind”, Miyazaki demonstrates how Nausicaä develops her understanding of the Sea of Corruption. Nausicaä conducts experiments

26 _{Consider the anime film directed by Miyazaki which operates on a science fiction basis but retains fantastical} elements from the manga: Studio Ghibli ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’ 1984. Also, Le Guin’s science fiction novel which fantastically charts oneiric alterity: Le Guin The Lathe of Heaven 1971.

with the Sea’s plants in an underground laboratory in order to better comprehend its biosphere (see fig. 2). In this scene, Nausicaä explains to her political ally, Lord Yupa, that if the

poisonous plants of the forest are placed in a controlled environment with water and air only from deep underground where these elements are clean, the plants do not radiate toxicity. Yupa is shocked to observe that this hypothesis works with perhaps the most toxic plant of the Sea of Corruption, the hisokusa.

As Yupa sees the hisokusa again for the first time in its nontoxic potential, it is useful to turn to J.R.R. Tolkien’s canonical “On Fairy-Stories” which sets the perimeter for fantastical fiction in an extension of Tolkien’s broad “fairy-stories” term. In this study, Tolkien discusses the force behind fantastic nonhumans:

We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheeps, and dogs, and horses - and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make … is a re-gaining – regaining of a clear view (57-58) Tolkien’s formative precis expands on fantastic transformative potential when reimagining the nonhuman. In Le Guin’s counterworld, the humans do permit small interactivity with the dragons. Therefore, the only fantastic reimagination of the nonhuman which would allow these humans to realign their view is the transformation of a dragon into a human being. In a similar frame, when Lord Yupa finds Nausicaä’s laboratory and sees plants from the Sea of Corruption in a nontoxic state, he is able to regain a clear view of their nonhuman potential. Reimagining fantastic nonhumans (from dragons and dragon-humans to toxic plants that can become nontoxic) permits a human reconciliation with the nonhuman so the dichotomy is a little less pronounced.

Tolkien proposes that critical “recovery” of nonbiased perspective on dragons extends until readers can look to their sheep and dogs from a new standpoint. Translating a better comprehension of the fantastic nonhuman onto the real nonhuman formulates the transmedial kind of ascending metalepsis, in that readers recover a clear view of their own world-system and its nonhumans by contemplating the nonhuman role in a fantastic counterworld. Ascending metalepsis therefore assists texts that interworldscape by envisioning the world-system with renewed eyes,27 debating interactivities and potential futurities through another

world. Miyazaki draws Nausicaä and Lord Yupa on the first panel on the first page (manga reads right to left) entirely framed by nontoxic Sea of Corruption plants (see fig. 2). This is the first time in which any character can immerse themselves in a nonhuman environment without wearing protective masks. Compare Charles Vess’ frame of the built horizon with only a

27 _{An affirmative instance of renewed understanding lies in indigenous claims that the nonhuman ought to be} granted legal status, see: Jacinta Ruru “Indigenous Peoples’ Ownership and Management of Mountains: The Aotearoa / New Zealand Experience” Indigenous Law Journal vol. 3.