"A desert deserted": Hydrofictionalrelationality in Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015)

Abstract

[eng] This paper considers climate fictions as narratives that interrogate the present by analysing Claire Vaye Watkins’ 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus. It proposes to read the novel as an example of hydrofiction, a subgenre of climate fictions, to argue that Watkins’s work critiques discourses that frame water as nothing more than a resource to be yoked to anthropocentric desires. It contends that climate fiction, and hydrofiction in particular, is uniquely situated to interrogate how the rejection of relationality, in particular the (lack of) engagement with water as an agential being, can be read in conjunction with the environmental (and other crises) epitomised by the desiccated landscape in the novel, as represented by the agentic potential of the newly-formed desert.