리차드 파워스의 『당혹』에 나타난 행성적 상상력과 어두운 생태계

초록

This essay examines Richard Powers's Bewilderment (2021) as a climate-change novel that weaves together planetary crisis, affective vulnerability, technological mediation, and ecological mourning. Central to the analysis is Robin, a neurodivergent child whose intense emotional responses to ecological destruction resist reduction to individual pathology. Drawing on Timothy Morton's concepts of hyperobjects and dark ecology, the essay argues that Robin's anxiety and grief constitute a profound affective response to the hyperobject of climate catastrophe which is one characterized by viscosity, nonlocality, and interobjectivity. His suffering is not aberrant but symptomatic of a world structured by extinction, denial, and political violence. The essay further analyzes the novel's treatment of decoded neurofeedback and artificial intelligence. Though neurotechnology initially enables Robin to internalize the affective patterns of his deceased mother, Alyssa, thereby mediating memory and intersubjective connection across the boundary of death, the novel ultimately frames technology as deeply ambivalent. It can facilitate empathy and sympoietic relationality, but it cannot resolve the structural violence of ecological collapse, authoritarian politics, and capitalist instrumentalization. The forced termination of Robin's treatment by right-wing political forces — and his subsequent death — enacts precisely the dark ecological logic Morton describes. Drawing on Donna Haraway's concepts of symbiosis, sympoiesis, and kin-making, the essay also reads the novel as an exploration of multispecies relationality. Robin's sense of kinship with endangered animals, rivers, trees, and even the dead challenges anthropocentric ethics and gestures toward a more expansive ecological community. Yet Bewilderment refuses redemptive environmentalism. Instead, it enacts a form of dark ecological mourning — one that does not promise salvation from planetary catastrophe, but asks how human and nonhuman beings might continue to coexist, grieve, and care within a damaged planetary mesh where life, matter, memory, and death remain inseparably entangled.

키워드