When the levees break: global heating, watery rhetoric and complexity in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

Abstract

Flood narratives are potent cultural forms that signal the urgency of global heating. Although in Paolo Bacigalupi’s science fiction novel The Windup Girl the flood only happens near the end, flooding is omnipresent as a rhetorical figure, a complex process, and an anticipated event. This paper argues that by drenching the narrative discourse in floods and flows, the novel summons forth a watery kind of thought—an alternative to the dominant land-based concepts of ecocriticism. Instead of transporting meaning from one domain to another as mere resource, watery rhetoric blends meaning. This rhetorical work resonates with the narrative, in which a variety of economic, migratory, viral, and other flows come together. The novel renders in literary form the insights from complex systems theory that forces are not confined to the domains accorded to them by academic disciplines—they spill over, and seemingly insignificant changes in one system can have massive consequences for another. The novel thus allows an experiential understanding of runaway global heating.