A Fragile World: Pandemics, Climate Change, and Bio-Threats in Sarah Moss’s Novels

Abstract

Some observers have delineated the coronavirus pandemic as an ‘Anthropocene disease’, thereby focusing attention to its connection with its new ecological era that is distinguished by the considerable pressure human activities are wielding on ecosystems and the consequences on society and environment. Techno-specific management of the living world precisely the underlying cause of deterioration of eco-systems and living conditions that created Anthropocene in the first place. Since environmental disasters and pandemics are largely man-made, the ultimate goal of eco-criticism may well be to decentralize humans, to attend what is suppressed and silenced in the Anthropocene epoch. Cold Earth (2009) and The Fell (2021) by Sarah Moss are complex novels dealing with the human nature and behaviour in the context of a calamity generated by a sudden and unknown disease. In other words, Moss’s fiction contributes to a poetics of the archive understood as a way to record and reimburse for the human loss and ecological apocalypse. The presence of a deadly zoonotic diseases (bio-engineered virus) has once again raised questions of how human invasion on animal species, both in supposedly wild species and the very tamed ones of industrial agriculture, threatens a global civilization (disruption of both human and natural systems). The relevance of reading these novels, when the entire humanity faced a terrible viral pandemic is obvious and helpful. The present paper aims to explore Sarah Moss’s novels from a combined eco-critical perspective emphasizing the interrelatedness of humanity, bio-engineered virus and surrounding environment. The main research questions of this study are: Why pandemic is considered as an Anthropocene disease? How does bio- engineered virus affect the environment as a whole? Justifying the eco-critical approach towards pandemic. Another aspect that this paper will touch is the matrix of mind and matter due to the difficulties they face during pandemics and the importance of emotion management in these extreme conditions. For the proposed analysis the following methods will be used: close reading, eco-criticism, Narratology.