Lucy Ellmann’s expansive Ducks, Newburyport (2019) is pervaded by frequently gendered tensions, for instance related to motherhood and domestic labor, the role of the individual in the collective, as well as abundance and middle-class consumption in an age of extinction and scarcity. The majority of the novel comprises a single sentence, well over nine hundred pages long, which presents the associative stream-of-consciousness musings of an unnamed Ohioan mother as she performs her daily tasks. This sprawling sentence comprises lists, tangents and snatches of lyrics and is punctuated by the repeated phrase “the fact that” which introduces each new turn of thought. Other interruptions include a section typographically presented as free verse, and the stylistically more conventional third-person narrative centered on a mountain lioness which appears in several parts.
In this presentation, I consider the manner in which the angry, rambling first-person sentence functions as a narrative of accretion that both represents and reproduces the “infowhelm” identified by Heather Houser as characteristic of Anthropocenic information overload. Through the seemingly unordered accretion of information or “facts”, the first-person narrator explores her entanglement in multiple spheres, including motherhood, domesticity and family life, American history and contemporary politics, and environmental crises. This relentless accretion also creates a sense of overwhelming Anthropocenic entanglement. However, the highly gendered subjectivity and lived experience of the narrator, coupled with her outrage at the state of the world and relative political impotence, result in a notion of entanglement that is at odds with the often-valorized entanglement of new-materialist becoming. Although some aspects of the entanglement experienced and described by the narrator are empowering, as indicated by the overall narrative parallel between the human mother and the mountain lioness, entanglement is instead regularly associated with entrapment and involuntary complicity in anthropogenic crisis.