Cube-Shaped Planet

Abstract

References to the Anthropocene and the ontological shifts it has putatively wrought abound in humanities scholarship today. This essay looks at several works of fiction and criticism – chiefly Paul Bowles’s 1949 novel, The Sheltering Sky – in order to advance a series of claims about the difficulty of representing the relationship between nature as a domain of causality beholden to natural laws and another, nominally human or rational domain comprising actions, intentions, and variously justifiable or unjustifiable reasons. It is mainly interested in exploring the desires that motivate efforts to represent this relationship in contrastive ways and insists in the end on the central place of representation in rendering such dilemmas intelligible and their presuppositions contestable.