humanities, and the novel. His other areas of research include Anglophone modernism and the cultures of contemporary globalization. His first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016), explores how Victorian writers expanded the capacities of literary form to account for the ongoing violence of liberal modernity.
Hensley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse, with the following results:
Page 99 of Action without Hope comes in the second chapter, which uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights to describe the emergence of a modern way of life that's based on a relationship of extraction toward the nonhuman world. With others in the nineteenth century, she witnessed the slow process by which an exploitative and nonregenerative and therefore, in a way, doomed social order came to feel natural. The book as a whole makes the claim that this is the world whose ruins we live in today, "climate change" or the unraveling of earth systems being just one area where the outcome of this orientation is now palpable to us. Anyway in this chapter I'm arguing that Brontë's weird and still challenging novel suggests that this autodestructive way of life is not permanent or universal, but emerged at a specific historical moment. In this sense she departs from her sister Charlotte, who in Jane Eyre gave shape to the far more pacific view that bourgeois society could enable something like happiness or fulfillment. I write:Visit Nathan K. Hensley's website.Written twelve years after this letter [in which Charlotte refers to the 'spoilt' personality of a neighbor from a slave-owning family], Jane Eyre would expunge this spoilt demon [i.e. Bertha Mason] from the record, leaving the stain of the plantation complex behind in a pile of charred rubble so as to clear space for heteronormative futurity between white characters, such that (as Jane reports) “perfect concord is the result” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 519).19 “My Edward and I,” says Jane in conclusion, “are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise” (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 520).The Wuthering Heights chapter is crucial to the book because it helps frame my point (which is really Emily Brontë's point) that we currently inhabit a world whose normal order of operation is based, as Brontë puts it, on a principle of destruction. The fossil fueled imperialism of our present is in some ways a ghostly replay of the nineteenth century: the rapacious capture of the object world and the domination of subordinated peoples we see when we scroll through the news are in some ways hyperspeed versions of the social order Brontë watched gathering around her in the 1840s. So in that sense there is a representative quality to this passage, for sure. But the book also ranges further than this local argument about a gathering fossil capitalism and its afterlives. It's about how to inhabit systems that are dissolving and breaking and inescapable, and still find ways to elaborate new worlds out of those broken inheritances.
Emily’s view was darker. In a now-famous school essay she composed in Belgium, “The Butterfly” (1842), she wrote that “the universe appeared . . . a vast machine constructed only to produce evil” (178). As the semi-fictionalized speaker of the essay works through this insight, (s)he comes to see in the butterfly an image of how splendid beauty, “lustrous gold and purple,” can emerge from pure violence: nature “exists,” the narrator says “on a principle of destruction” (E. Brontë, “Butterfly,” 176).20 In Emily’s school essay, this principle is imagined as universal, valid in all times and all places.
Wuthering Heights would transform this grim metaphysics into a violent scenario many readers have mistaken for eternal. The tendency toward ruin in the novel appears to be a dynamic outside time. In fact it is rigorously dated, the book’s principle of destruction arriving along with its “suitable pair” of central exogamous characters (E. Brontë, Wuthering, 1). Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights in 1781, at the height of the Liverpool-based slave economy, and Lockwood arrives in 1801, at the dawn of a new, modern century: twinned advents marked with a slanted chronological specificity I will describe more below. In this way is the auto-demolishing character of accumulation by extraction marked as historically emergent and dynamic across time, the “convergence between progress and decay” structuring the book (Hiday 248) only one modality by which it investigates the intimacy between luster and ruin across the period of an aspirationally universalizing Atlantic capitalism.
That's a long way of saying that in some ways the Page 99 Test works for Action without Hope—I think. In fact one thread of the book is about just this question of parts and wholes: how a tiny detail can evoke a much larger configuration. As I try to say in the book, this synecdochal quality is a literary effect, of course, but it's also how all thinking happens. We develop emblems for larger concepts, images that feel vivid, but point to something beyond themselves. Observing this scalar and figural quality of all thinking leads me to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of the detail: what is a detail, how can small things matter, and what kinds of perceptual capacities do we need to appreciate both the texture of the small thing, and the dynamic ways it connects to the broader world of which it's only a partial evocation? This is the plot of Middlemarch, as I say in the book, and it's also why Action without Hope works on two levels: it's an argument for the quiet power of small, nearly insignificant activities, and also a manifesto for the kinds of reading that are necessary to appreciate those tiny things. I think people should look at page 151, too: that's my favorite one.
--Marshal Zeringue
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