From Elegy to Apocalypse

Ben Smith’s debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industrial environment with strong ethical implications. Set in the near future, the novel stages an old man and a boy who work for a mysterious corporation in a wind farm in the North Sea. On the one hand, with its marine setting and ghostly atmosphere, Doggerland manifests an elegiac obsession with loss and mourning. On the other, the narrative overarching organisation presents occasional incursions into a deep geological timescale concerned with the changing nature of Doggerland, the mainland that once connected England to continental Europe. Starting from this premise, my essay illustrates how Smith’s novel ties in with Judith Butler’s categories of “precariousness,” “grievability” and “dispossession.” By focusing on its fragmented and hybrid generic form and on its disarrayed temporal frame, I intend to emphasise how Doggerland not only promotes attentiveness to bare life and bare nature but also favours an ethical encounter with relationality as a potential to move away from the obsession with frailty and grief, thereby expanding on Butler’s conceptualisation of grievability.