modernity's false dawn' : the rise and fall of the petro-capitalist illusion

Lucy Katz Petrofiction0910812 Graeme MacDonald

'Modernity's False Dawn' (Nixon 42): The Rise and Fall of the Petro-Capitalist Illusion.

In 1987, the sculptor Richard Wilson created 20:50, a room-sized, waist-high reservoir made

of sheet metal and filled to the brim with sump oil. A narrow passageway leads the viewer into the

centre of the tank, surrounding them with a glassy plane of oil that, to the casual eye, appears to be

a solid, reflective surface. The piece has been popular since its creation, and has aged well due to

the increasingly complex relationship with oil and oil-producing nations. The effect of 20:50

(named so after the viscosity grade of the oil in the tank) is reliant upon the contradictions and

subversions within it: the immaculate crispness of the oil's reflection of the room is at odds with its

toxicity and the filthy mess that would ensure if disturbed, the solidity and stability of its surface is

at once disproved if you bend down to blow delicate ripples on its surface, and your spacial

awareness is suddenly 'knocked off kilter' (Wilson, web) as your perception of the space augments

as you come to realise the deceptive mirage that the artist has led you into. In the context of petro-

modernity, a first reading of 20:50 confirms the notion that oil is everywhere, surrounding us with

an inescapable force and fuelling our lifestyles and the material things which fill them. When

installed in an oak panelled room at the Saatchi Gallery in County Hall, Wilson stated that he:

Carefully tuned the work so that from the end of the walkway you can't quite see the sky

above the buildings opposite, but it appears in the reflections [so] you should feel as if you

were falling out into the sky. (Wilson, web)

The reflection of an endless sky may symbolize the dizzying limitlessness of possibility that cheap

energy offers, but this sense of potential is little more than a trick played out upon the smooth,

fragile surface of the oil. The apparent cleanness, brightness, solidity and stability that 20:50

purported to the viewer is an illusion. We engage in the piece without touching, from a safe

distance, only able to peer downwards onto it, seeing ourselves reflected in its fragile exterior that

seems to be as pure and clean as water. 20:50 therefore, is a piece of art which embodies the kind of

modernity that a world addicted to oil has supported; a brittle illusion that is seemingly solid, one

that we dare not disturb by touching it for fear of dirtying ourselves. Nonetheless, we are so entirely

reliant upon oil in every facet of our lives that we often fail to notice it, as is the case initially with

20:50, but see ourselves mirrored back on its surface. The global oil situation and potential crisis is

not only difficult to accurately assess, but almost impossible to plan for on both an individual and

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international level. Roscoe Bartlett, former Republican Congressman and scientist has noted that:

'Oil is cheaper than bottled water [in the US] it is just about the cheapest liquid you can buy,

and while this remains the case, American's will go on consuming it' (ibid.)

Altering the manner in which individuals use oil extends far beyond a change of personal and

domestic habits. The way that we consume oil is informed by the structure of the social and political

fabric of the West; a change in the consumption of individuals requires therefore a change in this

fabric. Politicians, the necessary agents of national and global change of this kind whose power

surpasses those of NGO's and charities, are reluctant to make long-term decisions that harm their

own ambitions and aspirations; developing and implementing policy unilaterally across nations

does not necessarily have the political pulling power needed to keep them in office. Laurence Buell

has noted that 'to think 'environmentally' or 'ecologically' requires thinking 'against' or 'beyond'

nationness' (Ecoglobalist Affairs, 228), something that falls outside of the scope of many modern

politicians. In terms of popular opinion, oil is a contentious issue, commented upon by Amitav

Ghosh, in his seminal essay on the subject entitled 'Petrofiction':

To a great many Americans, oil smells bad. It reeks of unavoidable overseas entanglements,

a worrisome foreign dependence, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military

enterprises. (Ghosh, 30)

Ghosh encompasses here this unwillingness to look 'against or beyond nationness', to parts of the

world that are perceived as less civilized and developed, out of sync with the hyper-capitalist value

system of U.S society. The tail-end of the American era of oil production means it is inevitable that

'more and more oil is coming from less and less politically stable nations' (A Crude Awakening,

film), as they produce only 2% of the world's oil, and consuming a quarter of it. This is coupled

with the both increasing environmental devastation and the rapidly growing demand for energy in

China and India, resulting in a moment of tangled priorities and concerns on a global scale.

In 1956, M. King Hubbert made a prediction that during the early 1970's, U.S oil production

would peak and start to gradually decline, a moment that would be replicated some decades later on

a worldwide scale. Despite almost being laughed out of his profession for his theory, which became

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known as 'Hubbert's Peak', his prediction was proven to be true in 1971 (Deffeyes, web). In the

present day therefore, we find ourselves nervously positioned on liminal ground, awaiting the

moment where worldwide oil production will similarly peak and the end of the 'first half of the age

of more' (A Crude Awakening, web) will be upon us. Western society however, and American

culture especially, have always needed the possibility of limitless material accumulation. Indeed,

Imre Szeman comments on the inextricable link between oil and capital, noting that the:

Looming demise of the petrochemical economy has come to constitute perhaps the biggest

disaster that “we” collectively face. The success of capital is dependent on continuous

expansion. (Szeman, 807)

This attitude is deeply entrenched in the economic mechanisms and ideologies which govern the

development of Western society, and has become ingrained in the cultural attitudes of individuals in

the developed world. Environmental sociologist William Catton speaks of a 'faith in progress so

strong that the idea that mankind could encounter hardship that will not go away is […]

unthinkable' (quotation in A Short History, 278). In this vein it would seem that oil has nurtured

within society a sense of invincibility to the extent that failure and hardship are unimaginable

concepts; it is the vehicle which powers the belief of endless economic growth and prosperity. Yet

Hubbert's Peak must necessarily be approaching, if it has not occurred already, yet reliable,

independent estimates are rare and the International Energy Agency on which many governments

rely has long been accused of 'painting a too rosy picture' (Adam, web) of the situation. Whether or

not the peak has been reached, the growing interest in the process of extracting 'dirty' oil from tar

sands, especially in Alberta, implies that times are getting desperate for the West, as this would

require methods that are extremely 'energy intensive and cause three to four times more carbon

emissions per barrel than conventional oil' (Carrington, web), signalling what some scientists have

spoken of as 'game over for the climate' (ibid.). Buell speaks of a 'fossil-fuel culture' that can be

characterised as an:

'“Age of exuberance” –an age which is also, given the dwindling finitude of the resources it

increasingly makes social life dependent on, haunted by catastrophe. (A Short History, 278)

This duality between exuberance and catastrophe in relation to oil that Buell teases out in his essay

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is something that seems to be becoming ever more apparent as the strength of capitalist ideology

has been fractured in the financial crisis, with growing knowledge and understanding of

environmental devastation trying to press itself between the cracks and into the collective

consciousnesses of the West. In this sense therefore, the 'catastrophe' that Buell speaks of is

becoming less spectral and more of a potential reality. In Shah of Shahs, Rhyszard Kapuscinksi

speaks of the delusions that oil perpetuates within society, it is worth quoting in full:

Oil created the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a

resource that anaesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts. People from poor countries go

around thinking: God, if only we have oil! The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal

human dream of wealth achieved through a lucky accident [...] in this sense it is a fairy tale,

and like all fairy tales a bit of a lie. (Kapuscinksi, 152)

If oil is a lie, it is one which has been so knowingly bought into as to have fuelled and sustained the

growth of an entire civilization operating under a petro-capitalist ideology; one that depends upon

the submission of the individual and the seeking of the rewards of capital accumulation that greed

and corruption can acquire. The illusion of a changed and free life that cheap energy sustains is a

falsity that has resulted in a kind of modernity that cannot be sustained forever. In his book Slow

Violence, Rob Nixon writes on the inattention to the lethality of environmental crises, when the

attentions of the public are constantly fought for by the spectacle-driven sensationalism of the

mainstream media. He describes:

A violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is

dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as

violence at all. (Nixon 2)

This is especially true within the context of the oil industry, and particularly in terms of U.S oil

consumption. The production and transportation of oil is displaced to less developed and stable

parts of the world, and has been for such extended periods of time, that it is difficult to represent the

full force of such violence, as it fails to offer the glamour of the emotionally charged media-

spectacle we are so frequently offered. What we are left with therefore, is a kind of modernity that

has developed and is still developing in an asymmetrical fashion across the globe, and especially

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within communities rich in resources that are exploited by outside forces. As Nixon goes onto note:

As a community contends with attritional assaults on its ecological networks, it isn't granted

equitable access to modernity's basic infrastructural networks – utilities that might open up

alternatives to destitution. (Nixon, 42)

The overwhelming profit-motive that drives 'Big Oil' companies into ignoring the interests and

sustainable development of the communities that they penetrate results in a false and lop-sided

dispersal of the benefits of modernity. In reference to the oil flares that occur frequently from the oil

pipelines in the Niger Delta, Nixon comments how, for those who live there it is 'too dark for

education, too bright for sleep', an effect which produces 'modernity's false dawn' (Nixon, 42). This

'false dawn' however, applies not only in a literal sense to those in the Niger Delta, and others

around the world who are being displaced and damaged by environmental destruction, but it also

applies to the 'civilized' petro-economies of the West, whose modernity is only possible due to this

phenomena of 'slow violence' abroad and the bubble created by petro-capitalism. Given this, the

aforementioned illusion or 'fairy tale' that the predominance of oil sustains is wholly reliant on both

the successful suppression of appalling violence in other areas of the world and capitalist ideology,

yet as the global oil situation becomes tenser, this sense of catastrophe can no longer be contained

elsewhere. This is especially significant in America, and Nixon succinctly identifies their tendency

towards 'superpower parochialism', something which he claims has been 'shaped by the myth of

American exceptionalism and by a long standing indifference – in the US educational system and

national media- to the foreign' (Nixon, 35). How therefore, is America dealing with the possibility

that this 'age of exuberance' is nearing its close, with the 'catastrophe' that was once displaced now

looming ominously over the other side of Hubbert's Peak? To what extent can petrofiction, and

more explicitly petro-dystopian fiction, educate, prepare or spur into action an entire nation of

people whose lives are dictated by oil consumption? In The Road, Cormac McCarthy presents us

with a post-apocalyptic wasteland, which we are led to assume was America, with an unknown

event causing the world's population to fall to just above extinction as an unnamed father and son

travel across the desolated landscape on foot. However, The Road is that not entirely a post-oil

novel, in both a literal and cultural sense, highlighting the difficulties inherent for modern American

writers to imagine a space in which fossil-fuels are entirely unavailable. If McCarthy is attempting

to portray a landscape where the petro-capitalist illusion has fallen and shattered, exposing the

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fragility of both humanity and the narrative form, then the seeds of this illusion were embedded in

fiction much earlier in the twentieth-century, which celebrated the initial sense of petro-culture's

exuberance. Lolita, written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1955 is most famous for the controversy which

has always surrounded it; the tale of a hebephilic Humbert Humbert, and his sexual relationship

with sexually precocious 12-year-old Lolita, is a compelling story that is deeply embedded in our

cultural consciousnesses. Yet the story is only made possible as a result of the 27,000 miles that

Humbert drives in the Haze car during the course of the book. Do the early signs of resource

anxiety feature in Nabokov's text? Is there an unconscious fear over the oil supply which permeate

through the work? Indeed the type of landscapes described, especially the suburbs, only exist as a

result of mass car ownership and the cheapness of petrol in the 50's. As well as being a narrative

form that is literally driven by the consumption of oil, Lolita remains a fascinating study of desire,

greed, and the fetishization of an illusion; characteristics which can be applied to an oil obsessed

culture. Whilst McCarthy is the only American of the pair, both The Road and Lolita are texts

informed by the American relationship with and an exploration of the illusions created by the

advent of the 'age of exuberance'. Both the rise and fall of America's 'false dawn' of modernity can

be charted through the examination and comparison of these texts, yet the extent to which they offer

a sustainable alternative to petro-capitilasim is a questionable suggestion.

As well as dictating the way in which we consume, travel, live and work, oil has also come

to dictate a new relationship with our own bodies; it is a catalyst for metamorphosis not only in

terms of society but in terms of the body itself. Fredrick Buell notes that after WW2:

Bodies became literally oily, in what they ate, and in the cosmetics and clothes they put on;

pharmaceuticals began doing the same thing for minds. (A Short History of Oil Cultures,

290)

As well as fuelling our transportation, the use of petro-chemicals in food production -in the

manufacture of fertilizers, for example- is literally fuelling and 'fixing' our bodies too, with modern

medicine advancing rapidly with the use of petro-chemicals in pharmaceutical manufacturing. The

potency of such pharmaceuticals is most clearly seen when Humbert produces a 'vial of violet blue

capsules' (Lolita, 94) which forces Lolita's body into a deep, synthetic sleep that he hopes will give

him the chance to have sex with her; highlighting the ability of petro-chemicals as a means of

providing an easy catalyst for immoral deeds. The excessive way in which we eat today also mirrors

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the way in which we have excessively consumed cheap energy; the by-products of this 'culture of

more' legitimised by oil consumption undoubtedly relates to the appalling amounts of food wastage

and obesity. In Lolita, Nabokov's unreliable narrator Humbert constantly reports on Lolita's

excessive intake of cheap, sickly and unhealthy food, often with an emphasises on its bloated size.

'A huge wedge of cherry pie' (Lolita, 121), is served to her at dinner on the first night she spends

alone with Humbert, as she gorges her way through the novel on sweets and ice cream. Food in the

novel is never fresh or natural, restaurants are said to smell of 'fried food and faded smiles' (Lolita,

120), and food is meant to temporarily satisfy rather than nourish; a sentiment mirrored in the way

in which petro-modernity grows excessively but not sustainably. Indeed for McCarthy, the body

becomes a site on which the mechanics and politics of energy conservation can be played out as we

are made acutely aware of the the tedious relationship between food consumption and

corresponding energy release; a relationship which is frequently not comprehended with the high

energy release of oil. The body as a machine needs to be fuelled, and McCarthy makes us aware of

the illusion of energy-for-little-effort that oil has perpetuated. The Road is a study of hunger; hunger

for a future, for food, for a life that has passed, and for the final drops of oil that is still presented as

the only conceivable fuel for progression. Their constant preoccupation and struggle for food

reminds the reader that life can only exist on the condition of an energy source, and it is the

primitive, continuous search for food that binds the narrative together and provides with

momentum.

As well as just fuelling the body, the rapid onset of technological petro-modernity has had

significant ramifications on the way the human body interacts with the world on a cognitive level;

we seem to trust less upon our instincts and immediate sensations, using the accoutrements of petro-

capitalism to help us relate to our environments. Nixon comments that this 'high-speed planetary

modification has been accompanied by rapid modifications to the human cortex' (Nixon, 12),

implying that our consumption of oil has irrevocably affected our cerebral makeup and ability to

engage with the wider world. In Lolita, Humbert comments that he knows the sun is shining

'because my ignition key was reflected in the wind shield' (Lolita, 95). This eschewing of the

immediacy of physical sensation is symptomatic of an obsession with technology, as petro-

modernity has alienated us from the ability to trust our own bodies and engage with natural

conditions. This is a relationship which the characters in The Road forced to redefine. Despite

positing a difficult relationship with the natural world, McCarthy does offer a new reliance on the

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body, with survival only made possible through a reliance and trust in physical faculties; fires are

made by hand for example, and the direction of the wind is tested through using a finger. In

stripping away the paraphernalia of petro-modernity, the body becomes once more a mechanism for

progressive, life sustaining action. When holding the sleeping boy in his arms, the man notices that

he is able to feel 'warmth and movement. Heartbeat' (The Road, 123). McCarthy implies therefore,

that we need to listen once more to the mechanism of the body, and the focus put on it as a positive

life force, even within the bleakest post-apocolyptic landscape; in stripping away the barriers

between the body and nature, forgoing the technological surrogates that we put our faith in, the

human body can once more become a valued energy source and agent of progression.

In A Crude Awakening, a 1950's informational film shows several active nodding donkeys,

silhouetted against the sunset, as a voice over informs us:

The pump does not know when midnight comes. Days are the same to it and each day, every

day, it brings us another twenty four hours of progress: building our nation, guarding our

security, ensuring the future of America. (A Crude Awakening, film)

This anthropomorphic rhetoric is significant in exposing the extent to which the extraction and

processing of oil, as well as its consumption, is not rooted in traditional conventions of time, and

consequently warps the human perception of time. Buell reports how Rockefeller famously told his

colleagues 'give the poor man his cheap light, gentlemen', thus removing 'the ancient organic

constraint of darkness […] and the lives of the poor were “lightened”' (A Short History, 284).

Although it may have appeared that time was no longer a constraint on humanity, a new kind of

temporality emerged, a 'false dawn' which again disrupted the natural and established rhythm of

humanity. Nixon writes of the 'attosecond pace of our age' (Nixon, 8), and its effect of diverting our

attention, capturing us in a continuous restlessness, a politics of speed and an unnecessary sense of

urgency that makes us feel as if we are going nowhere despite constant movement and action in the

name of 'growth' and 'progress'. The breakdown of time has resulted in a restless inertia where any

real possibility of social or economic development is difficult to slot in to a world in constant,

uncontrollable motion. As well as working to its own rhythm, petrol-fuelled transport has had the

effect of collapsing space, making distance no obstacle and sustaining the illusion of a smaller,

more accessible world. Space becomes contorted beyond recognition, and Walonen comments on

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the 'destruction of traditional spacial orders' (Walonen, 57), which could be interpreted both in terms

of between nations and communities, and within them, which does as much to atomize people as it

does to connect them. Ghosh goes further in assessing the spatial dynamics of petro-capitalism:

The experiences associated with oil are lived out within a space that is no place at all; a

world that is intrinsically displaced heterogeneous, and international. (Ghosh, 30)

Not only is this problematic for writers and artists who attempt to ground their work with a sense of

place, but the traditional limitations associated with space are complicated further due to the wholly

international nature of the oil industry. In Lolita however, Nabokov manipulates the American

landscapes he writes of, collapsing vast spaces with a fast paced prose style that mirrors the speed

of their journey. In a particularly windy passage in the text whereby Humbert describes their travels

in depth, he logs their progress as '27,000 miles in 150 days of motion' (Lolita, 175). In a lengthy

description of their car journey, the enormous spaces seem to fold in on themselves and become

indistinct; experiences become blurred and are punctured only by descriptions of roadside

establishments that are to be experienced only fleetingly as familiar points of reference. Several

states thousands of miles are apart are mentioned in the same paragraph, and their journey is full of

excesses, as the gallons of petrol they would have needed is consumed as a given, without even

seeming an unconscious concern. Humbert and Lolita consume the landscapes in the same manner

that they consume the energy that fuels their travels. 'Distant mountains. Near mountains. More

mountains' (Lolita, 156): this phrase captures their attitude to the landscape as something to be

consumed, quickly, for the sake of it. The neatness of the pattern of three with the final thud of

'more' emphasises the unquenchable desire to conquer the landscape indefinitely, something that is

possible with petrol-fuelled transport. In spite of this unstoppable devouring, Humbert comments

that Lolita and he have 'been everywhere' yet 'seen nothing' (Lolita ,175), an admission that seems

symptomatic of a world the values speed so highly; a 'quest for quicker sensation' (Nixon, 8) that

results in a type of travel where engaging with the space on a meaningful level is sacrificed in order

to just consume more of it. This mindless consumption of the landscape as a result of car

transportation forms part of the petro-illusion, as when space no longer appears to be an obstacle, it

becomes impossible to comprehend a true sense of scale. In The Road however, a world without oil,

or transportation other than by foot, reinstates these barriers; time and space seem initially to have

been fractured to the point that they are unable to offer the father and son any gravity in the

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apocalyptic wasteland. The man speaks of how every moment feels isolated, with the day

'providential to itself. The hour. There is no later' (The Road, 56). In a post-oil world, the characters

feel outside a continuous sense of time, which impinges on their ability to establish a sense of self;

they are unable to envisage a future or have any meaningful connection with the past. Rather than

collapsing landscapes, making them seem deceptively small, space in The Road is a mass without

form or structure, a 'blackness without depth or dimension' (The Road, 71). Far from the hasty

traversing of the country in Lolita, McCarthy suggests that space can only be comprehended when

one could travel across it quickly; it was oil which gave space structure, something that the absence

of resources has unravelled. Despite this, a sense of time and space still remains, albeit separated

from the contorted versions of petro-modernity. Days may go uncounted and blur into each other,

but seasons are remembered and tracked throughout the text. Similarly, the oil map which they

obediently follow may become redundant by the novel's close, but the father and son still orientate

themselves independently of this through the the compass points as they attempt to head south.

McCarthy posits therefore a more fundamental conception of space and time, one that is tied more

closely with the natural world, rather than the now defunct illusions created by petro-capitalism.

By the mid twentieth-century, American's were in the throws of a driving culture that

seemed to provide new freedoms to the people, as mass car-ownership began to change the social

and physical landscape of the nation, as well as individual changes in the way the public conducted

their lives, work, leisure time and even sexual encounters. Car-ownership and driving is especially

entrenched in U.S culture, highlighted by Humbert's admission that he has a 'European urge to use

my feet whenever driving can be dispensed with' (Lolita, 213). Indeed a 1950's film excerpt in A

Crude Awakening informs us that:

More than any other country in the world, America is a nation on wheels, we can drive

anywhere we want to, at any time, for any reason, including fun! (A Crude Awakening, film)

Driving provided not only liberation, but a new kind of recreation that was easily obtainable with

cheap, easily accessible petrol. This era did contain within it however, a sense that it was all 'too

good to be true', yet this did little to halt the onset of petro-culture, and it continued to grow despite

a wilful ignorance of the consequences of such growth. A 1960's Ford advertisement, shows

glamorously dressed party-goers suddenly spot a shooting star in the sky. When the star hits the

ground, it transforms into a beautiful shiny white Ford, around which all the guests congregate in

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amazement. This clearly embodies the lack of recognition of the negative aspects of mass car use

and the fuel consumption that accompanies it; the 'fairy tale' of oil in American society suppresses

the often negatively transformative realities of petro and driving culture. Yet despite the exuberance

seized upon during the advent of this culture of driving, the pleasure came at a price. LeMenager

notes:

Cars made the human body more valuable, pleasurable, and fun. They also caused, and still

cause, more human deaths per day than any single agent, forcing questions about human

consumption, the price of the mediated self made possible by cheap energy. (LeMenager, 73)

The sense of possibility and exploration that cars offer is frequently undercut by the catastrophe that

they can cause; the fragile human body may experience an untapped sense of power and speed, but

this invincibility can just as easily be subverted by the gory horror of car accidents, as pleasure and

tragedy become intermingled. In Lolita, Humbert describes how one of their 'very best moments'

was starring at some 'smashed, blood bespotted car with a young woman's shoe in a ditch' (Lolita,

211), as they drove past, upon which Lolita comments that she wants pair of shoes like that herself.

This inability to react appropriately highlights both the spectacle and exuberance that is integral to

the catastrophe within petro-culture and its effect on reactions of human destruction, as well as

illustrating the disregard and detachment that a child can have for such a tragedy; appalling violence

becomes normalised yet responded to inappropriately with the illusion cast over the world by oil. In

the world of The Road however, cars and petrol fuelled transport are a phenomena sealed in the

past, and their carcasses provide nothing more than night-time shelter for the father and boy; rather

than a mode of transportation or exploration.

The development of the road system in the US, in its scale and scope, changed the way

American's interacted with their landscape and conducted the daily business of their lives. The

earliest roads that were built were 'extraordinarily wide' and elaborate affairs that 'were seen as

extensions of the developing park system, intended to provide a pleasant pathway from one open

space to another' (Kenneth T. Jackson quotation in LeMenager, 29). Despite initially being

something that was meant to connect people and pleasant places together in a functional

infrastructural system, roads have developed their own questionable cultural and moral existence

that runs alongside a sense that they can encourage instability, without offering real direction or

progress. During Humbert and Lolita's criss-crossing of the USA, Humbert admits he tries to give

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only the impression that they are 'going places':

Of rolling to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. […] Voraciously we

consumed these long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance

floors. (Lolita, 152)

Rather than connecting open spaces for leisure time, roads themselves become sites for pleasure and

entertainment. Humbert enjoys driving on them as he enjoys dance floors, as they offer the ability to

be non-committal, eschewing responsibility or morality as roads encourage corrupt behaviours and

constant travelling enables Humbert to isolate himself and Lolita off from the rest of the world, as

they are able to travel indefinitely, with Humbert perpetuating his self-delusions and deceit. Despite

flickers of European disgust at auto-mobile culture, for example when he is faced with 'a row of

parked cars like pigs at a trough' (Lolita, 117), Humbert is equally drawn into it as it allows him to

sustain his exploitation of Lolita for so long. As the novel progresses, his relationship with the roads

become more mystified, just as the reality of his struggle with Lolita becomes more urgent:

No matter where and how we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical,

mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. (Lolita, 219)

The road takes on an almost spiritual quality with a potentially transformative 'magical' power and a

sense of endlessness and infinity. His personal relationship with the road is symbolic of societies

relationship with oil at this time; its plentiful nature and spiritual connotations meant that a

disregard for the environment was established, as well as the expansion of a consumer culture and

the thoughtless imperative to spend for the sake of doing so, without reaching any endpoint. This is

a sentiment cruelly parodied by McCarthy, when the father utters to his son in his dying moments

'you don't know what might be down the road' (The Road, 297). Inherent in this is the remnants of a

blind faith in 'the road' as a symbol for exploration and progression, despite the fact that 'the road' in

the rest of the novel is a bleak and dangerous place to be. The road as a motif, as a symbol of

progression, of forwardness and impetus for action, is something that is integral to the structure of a

road novel, and it is inverted by McCarthy. LeMenager writes that:

Road fiction invites a confusion of driving and narrative itself as modes of movement and

the enactment of time, as if driving were a fundamental cognitive process, like narrative, as

well as a fundamental physiological experience of being human, in time. (LeMenager, 71)

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With Lolita, the style of the prose in terms of the way that images are stacked on top of each other

and then flippantly disregarded mirrors the visual perspective one has when driving at speed. In

terms of the confusion between driving and narrative, the physical car journey sustains the

psychological and physical abuse which Lolita is subject to; ultimately the pace and excesses that

petro-culture propagates is mirrored in much of the prose, especially the episodes where their

physical journeys are being described. Road's are clearly just as integral to the plot of The Road,

and their physical state in the novel is reflected in the format. In the first few paragraphs of the story

we are told that the road they follow is fragmented and treacherous, a 'broken asphalt' (The Road, 5)

path that at no point in the novel smooths out, providing a clear, unhindered path. The 'road' that

they insist on following is an embodiment of the petro-capitalist system that governs us; it is a

course set out for us from which no deviation is possible, with any progress away from it both

unimaginable and unthinkable. Mark Fisher notes that 'capitalism occupies the horizons of the

thinkable' (Fisher, 8), and this sings true for McCarthy; at one point in the novel, the father and boy

are confronted by horrific mummified corpses, half buried by the road with 'black skin stretched

upon the bones and their faces split and shrunken on their skulls' (The Road, 204). This graphic

description of human destruction exposes how there is no alternative or deviation is possible, even

when 'the road' ceases to be fruitful and causes devastation. 'We're going to keep going down the

road' (The Road, 92), the father says to the boy at a particularly low point in the story, encapsulating

both the misplaced faith in, and the desperation that is associated with 'the road' as a symbol of

progression even when the petro-capitalist society which once gave it value has disintegrated.

Indeed the dangerous and unstable quality of the roads in McCarthy's text are likewise

mirrored in the book's structure if we understand the narrative journey as a road or path. Just like

the physical road that the characters follow, the narrative form is broken and unclear, and following

it can be a treacherous task due to the narrator's frequent disintegration of streams of thought, as

well as the unsteady jumps between reality and dreams. The narrative voice is distractable and

changeable in regards to priorities: 'mostly he worried about their shoes. That and food. Always

food' (The Road, 16), this stream of consciousness jumps three sentences later to imagined belldrum

beating and a comment on the wind as the breakdown in the structure of society is mirrored in a

breakdown in the thought processes of the individual. If in Lolita, it is the act of driving and the

excessive consumption of oil which fuels Nabokov's elaborate and rich use of language, the lack of

oil in McCarthy results in a sparse and slow prosaic form, where aesthetic elaborateness is forgone

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in favour of economical use of language which literally 'saves energy'. It is as if the end of oil

means that the writers and characters must become sustainable with their language too; eschewing

expansive vocabularies and stylistic niceties to the point where even punctuation becomes a luxury.

The petro-capitalist illusion has been stripped away so as to reveal a type of writing that deals only

in the basics of sentence structure and punctuation, it is as if McCarthy is attempting to 'start again'

in regards to writing.

The kind of landscapes that was created by the advent of petro-capitalism in the US, and the

kind of lifestyles they bred, are the backdrop against which Humbert is able to conduct himself the

way he does in Lolita. Stephanie LeManager coins the term 'petrotopia' to describe the contextual

backdrop of 1950's and 1960's America:

As utopia, petrotopia represents itself as an ideal end-state, repressing the violence that it has

performed upon […] petrotopia represses the dialectics of social and ecological process, it

foregrounds a temporal schema that serves its goals. (LeManager, 65)

As LeManager states, 'petrotopia' requires a repression of progressive processes or forward

thinking, it assumes that an optimum level has been reached and can be sustained indefinitely. In

Spaces of Hope, David Harvey writes of utopia that 'no future needs to be envisaged because the

desired state is already achieved' (Harvey, 160), a state only possible as a result of a 'stabilized and

unchanging social process' (ibid.). This leads us to a frightening conclusion, when we place

Harvey's concept alongside 'petrotopia', as petro-capitalism relies upon indefinite growth and

expansion, something that must necessarily change social and ecological processes too. Petrotopia

as a type of utopia therefore, may capture the ideal values of a particular socio-historical moment,

but utopianism is a concept that relies upon solidity, and is thus wholly incompatible with petro-

capitalist ideologies. Furthermore, LeManager's notion of 'repression' suggests that this petrotopia is

the result of the illusion created by plentiful oil, an illusion that can not go on indefinitely, yet has

informed much of the architecture and construction of the US landscape that still exists today. Buell

notes that:

The cultural construction of suburbia in the U.S […] has drawn heavily upon pastoral

imagery and values: envisioning safe and clean communities, ample residential and public

spaces (Toxic Discourse, 347)

Yet this is at complete odds with the material conditions of its existence; the slow violence inherent

14


in oil means that these 'safe and clean communities' cannot be maintained. Suburbia is a course

imitation of the pastoral ideal, as it mimics nature rather than propositioning a healthy relationship

with it. Suburbs exacerbated urban sprawl, and are only possible through the mass car ownership

that German architect Reyner Banham said made LA into an 'autotopia', made with an 'architecture

of commercial fantasy' (quotation in LeMenager 66). Although not set in LA, much of the

architecture, and especially the construction of suburbia, is built with the intention of feeding on the

hyper-consumerist compulsion to buy things excessively. This warped kind of 'fantasy' is persistent

in Lolita; a masked pastoral idealism that is in tension with petro-capitalism's characteristic capital

gain. The cheap artifice of petro-capitalism's paraphernalia is constantly made apparent; the key to

Humbert's secret door, for example, is hidden 'under the expensive safety razor I had used before

she bought me a much better, cheaper one' (Lolita, 93), illustrating the triumph of the efficiency of

the mass-produced over the idiosyncrasies of tradition and quality. Two establishments in particular

– the motel and the gas station – that are synonymous with the growth of US petro-culture and have

significant cultural connotations are present at the novel's most pivotal moments. Humbert and

Lolita stay at several motor homes that proclaim 'their vacancy in neon lights', attracting the corrupt

and criminal as Humbert considers 'what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your

impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as

transparent as boxes of glass!' (both Lolita, 116-7). Not only do motels encourage corrupt and

immoral activity, in which Humbert is complicit, but they also encourage separateness and isolation

that is emblematic of capitalism's greed and rampant individualism. Humbert continues later in this

vein:

A prison cell of paradise with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning

illusion of Venice and sunshine, when it was actually Pennsylvania and rain (Lolita, 145)

Motels represent a forced pleasure and sense of entrapment; the architecture of petro-capitalism,

they sustain its paper-thin illusion of faux-pleasure and the exotic, but with a carceral edge that fails

to invite deeper engagement. Gas stations are significant also as Humbert claims that they are

always 'points where my destiny was liable to catch' (Lolita, 211) and LeMenager notes that:

Gas stations are crucial switch-points in Lolita [generating] ekphrastic moments where the

novel pauses to reorganize itself around the architectural information of what pop theorists

recognize as the most universal commercial structure of the twentieth century. (LeMenager,

15


72)

As 'switch points', time spent in gas stations are moments where the momentum of the narrative

pauses as the driving stops, allowing a chance for the plot to readjust and the characters to reflect;

Lolita for example, goes to the toilet in a gas station after the first time she has sex with Humbert,

and later in the novel runs off to make a secret phone call. The trappings of gas stations are

significant for Humbert, as he claims they ground and inspire him 'whilst lost in an artists dream I

would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline pumps against the splendid green of oaks'

(Lolita, 153). Not only does petro-culture's equipment jar starkly with nature here, but despite the

toxic liquid they contain, Humbert finds them of aesthetic, even creative, value. For Humbert, gas

stations provoke reflection on his sexual immorality as he says the 'whitewalled tiles', 'bright cans of

motor oil' and 'red icebox' are 'such fateful objects […] carefully chosen by the gods to attract

events of special significance' (Lolita, 211). To him, they are 'stationary trivialities that look almost

surprised […] to find themselves in the stranded traveller's field of vision' (Lolita, 211). It is curious

that gas stations are such a grounding for Humbert, yet his comment that they look surprised to be

in his field of vision betrays a sense that the accoutrements of oil consumption, and indirectly oil

itself, are not designed to be looked at or considered; gas stations may be highly recognisable, even

comforting, but what they actually contain is never designed to be comprehended in the same way

that the damaging properties of mass car-ownership was never emphasised either. Petro-capitalism

uses bright artificiality to capture and divert attention away from the fact that the kind of lifestyles

and culture they perpetuate is an illusion with very little substance underneath.

Humbert's desire for, and ultimate exploitation of Lolita is potentially symbolic of the way

in which American society in the 1950's pursued with such vigour the instantaneous exuberance and

artificial thrills that cheap oil afforded. Humbert loves Lolita for her 'nymphish' ways; a 'love'

driven by her beauty and tender youth that blooms whilst she is poised on the brink of pubescence.

Yet he is under no illusions about what this kind of 'love' is:

I know I had fallen in love with Lolita forever: but I also knew she would not be forever

Lolita […] the word 'forever' only referred to my passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in

my heart. (Lolita, 65)

Her youth is transient, and the beauty that he sees in her is nothing more than a temporary illusion

that will cease to exist as her body starts to change; an illusion, however, that he wilfully succumbs

16


to with the knowledge that his passion will never fade. It is in this reading of the novel, that

Humbert's love for Lolita becomes an allegory for 1950's America's desire to consume cheap

energy. Although it is never made explicit in American culture, the ferocity with which the nation

embraces petro-modernity betrays a sense of panic and anxiety over whether this exuberant state

will last. The gratification the Humbert finds in his sexual relations with Lolita are instant but

fleeting, predicated on violence and exploitation that he never appropriately addresses. The same

applies to the consumption of oil and the cheap thrills of petro-capitalist consumerism, as violence

and exploitation are similarly pushed aside in favour of belief in the fragile 'commercial fantasy'

that creates the fragile fairy-tale of petrotopia.

If Lolita offers us a portrait of petrotopia, The Road offers a portrait whereby the illusions it

sustains have been broken to devastating effect, as 'the frailty of everything [is] revealed at last'

(The Road, 28). McCarthy imagines a world that is not quite dead, not entirely post-oil, and where

the search for fossil-fuels still shape the course of their journey as they drain the last drops from

every source they find. Szeman comments how 'the discourse of eco-apocalypse understands itself

as a pedagogic one, a genre of disaster designed to modify behaviour and transform the social'

(Szeman, 316). Yet is McCarthy's approach a pedagogic one on which we can start to change our

ways? Or does he offer only an illustration of how fragile petro-capitalism is and our dependence on

it so strong? Szeman goes onto note that 'oil capital will not end until every last drop of oil [...] is

burned and released into the atmosphere' (Szeman, 320), yet in The Road, this state has not

occurred, implying that McCarthy's intentions may be to create a world in the final desperate throws

of petro-capitalism and illustrate what lies just beyond the illusion that it has sustained, rather than

serving a pedagogic function. Indeed the 'old world' ghosts the text, and the desperation for

resources that still remains is made evident at the novel's opening, when the father and son approach

an old gas-station in a cruel parody of the primary coloured gas-stations of Lolita. The man

'dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale' (The

Road, 5). Oil is still heavily fetishized as the man tries to get a sensory reaction from it, but all that

is left is the abandoned architecture of its dispensation, the familiarity and comfort that it once stood

for has been emptied as it stands as a symbol of a broken illusion. Regardless of this, the oil-fuelled

lamp they use creates a thin link to the past, and is another cruel parody of Rockafeller's desire to

'give the poor man his cheap light. Szeman goes onto note:

Eco-dystopians and techno-utopians alike take the current configuration of the political and

17


economic as given. Because of this, it seems impossible from these perspectives to envision

a systemic revolution. (Szeman, 324)

More than this however, is the fact that current economic and political conditions have been

powerfully internalised by the individual, to the point that belief in a positive future, new social

order, or any kind of meaningful progress has stalled forgoing the possibility of a 'systemic

revolution'. The man says that he is unable to 'enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in

his own' (The Road, 163); suggesting that the end of oil heralds the end of the ability to pass on

inspiration imagination and creativity. The end of abundant resources seem to have stunted

American's proud belief in the fertility of their land. Buell notes:

In US history, an important strand of this [environmental] imagery has been the vision of a

vast land of abundant resources whose natural advantages promised an inexhaustible

opportunity for settlers and a guarantee of future national greatness (Ecoglobalist Affairs,

229).

It seems, however, that the father and son are attempting to re-establish a fresh relationship with

nature in their journey towards some unknown future; potentially a new kind of American Dream,

whereby heading south is an attempt reconnect with nature, a migration that heralds a new

dependence on the 'Global South'. Whatever future that is to come, the novel offers no concrete

clues about what it is to hold. The boy plays a song on his flute that the narrator comments that it is

a 'formless music for an age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth' (The Road, 18). A future

may be difficult to imagine, it may at present be 'formless', as the moment The Road captures is one

where a journey takes place separate from the past or future. In spite of the man's death, the

narrative does not die with him despite the fact that he has been its focus; the narrative form

embraces the new generation as the 'rescuing' of the boy means that the novel's end is not entirely

desolate.

The world of The Road is startling recognisable despite its genre as 'post-apocolyptic'

fiction; the 'ice cold drinks and gift shops' (Lolita, 145) that Lolita lives for may belong to another

world, but one of the last Coke's in existence is still left to be drunk by the boy of The Road, as this

icon of American culture is reduced into a relic of a dead world, lacking value when disconnected

from capitalist culture. Similarly, billboards still remain on the side of the road, hawking their wares

long after the consumers that bought them have perished; the aggressive power of advertising and

18


consumer society is presented as so forceful that it can outlive humanity. The inspirational faux-

positivity that pervades petro-capitalist culture has left little room for a platform on which a new

order can be forged as the dreams of those that have died lie 'ensepulchered within their crozzled

hearts' (The Road, 264), implying a sealing off of the values of the past. The world of the text

however, has been denied the dignity and cleanliness of of a sudden death as we are presented with

a bleak landscape where the dust has not settled; rain, ash and smoke swirl constantly around the

characters on the journey they undertake. Towards the end of the novel, the man forced a thief to

give up his clothes and food, forcing him into a slow and painful demise in a moment that parallels

the fate of the earth unless environmental concerns are taken more seriously; the world is slowly

unravelling as 'slow violence' reaches its climax and the illusion finally evaporates.

If it is true that 'American's set themselves against the grain of nature' (Walonen, 70),

through their exploitation of its resources, then the novel charts an attempt to undo this mistake as

the father and son reject the city and return to a nature that has been raped and destroyed. It is

described straight away as 'baron, silent, godless' (The Road, 2). The implication of 'godlessness'

implies that a world without oil removes spirituality or faith in anything, and is reminiscent of

LeManager's notion that 'the spectacle of [oil] gushing from the earth suggests divine or Satanic

origins' (LeMenager, 73). Despite the physical labour put into its extraction, the religious

connotations attached to oil imply that belief in a higher power dies in its absence, leading us to the

dangerous suggestion that religion is an illusion only sustained within a petro-culture. 'Where men

can't live gods fare no better' (The Road, 183), implying that if men cannot live without oil, then

petro-capitalism must have been our collective religion; the system into which all our faith was

gathered.

The illusion that oil has created, this bright but fleeting false dawn of modernity is part of an

'age of exuberance', whereby a 'new dynamic system sought stability in change' (A Short History,

284). It is this desire for change – for limitless progress and expansion – that is at odds with the

establishment of social and political structure that could offer a sustainable future. Is it down to the

writer therefore, to portray this illusion in order to spark a dynamic renewal of the society in which

they write? Ghosh suggests that 'the craft of writing […] is responsible for the muteness of the oil

encounter' (Ghosh, 30), and it is true that writers and artists too, are just as embroiled within petro-

capitalism, as petro-chemicals are the substance with which their work takes physical form; even

the words on the printed page are, words that 'direct [one's] imagination and activate [one's] senses,

19


[are] largely a mixture of petroleum-based resins and oils' (LeMenager, 64). Oil traps modern

people, artists included, in its 'numerous cultural infrastructures' (A Short History, 284), therefore

we must question what writers can do to loosen themselves from oil's illusory grip. Both Lolita and

The Road are firmly rooted within this tradition of petro-capitalism, and yet both writers are

successful in exposing the illusion that it creates and the dangers inherent in submitting to its fairy-

tale; yet neither posit a strong sense of future direction or an alternative social or economic system.

If the oil encounter is 'mute', the Nabokov and McCarthy make visible the illusions that surround it.

Art thrives upon innovation and the re-imagining of established forms, and a sense of limitless

possibility which petro-capitalism also engages in. Kate Soper suggests that we need an 'erotics of

sustainability, an affective intensity attached to limited growth, or no growth, that might rival, say,

the embodied intensities of petromodern consumer culture' (LeMenager, 61). If this 'erotics of

sustainability' becomes employed by artists, then this has the potential to reinvigorate change within

society as a whole. This is a tactic already engaged in; as, for example, Wilson's striking installation

20:50 is made from entirely recycled oil, highlighting that art of high aesthetic value can be created

from that which is pre-used. Whilst Lolita remains the antithesis of this 'erotics of sustainability',

indulging America's 'superpower parochialism' yet exposing the dangers of their excessive

consumption and submission to the oil illusion, McCarthy shows us our world on the brink of total

extinction; a stark warning for what awaits on the other side of Hubbert's Peak unless environmental

awareness sparks action. The petro-capitalism that we have may 'occupy the horizons of thinkable',

but this does not mean, as Rob Hoskins notes that:

The imagination and ingenuity that got us up to the top of the peak in the first place is going

to disappear when we have to start figuring out how we’re going to get down the other side.

(quotation in LeManager, 59)

We may no longer be able to live in our oil illusions once the Peak has been reached, but from it, we

may begin the establishment of a new, sustainable kind of modernity, one where social

responsibility and an alternative to capitalism becomes apparent. By being forced into an

awareness of the true nature of our 'age of exuberance' that has characterised the accession of

Hubbert's Peak, our decent of it can likewise by characterised by an 'erotics of sustainability', if

writes and artists chose to employ it.

Words: 8872

20


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modernity's false dawn' : the rise and fall of the petro-capitalist illusion

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