Beyond Eros and Thanatos: More Impulses of the Anthropocene in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

The 21st century has come to a new stage that teems with exceptional climate changes, and other planetary degradation. Geologists coined this geological epoch as the Anthropocene in which humankind has great toll on geological, biotic and climatic process of the Earth. Accordingly, literature in Anthropocene attempts to display anthropogenic changes in an apocalyptic scenario which is both fascinating and disturbing for the readers. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods is a good example in entangling the environmental changes with politics, psychology, eurocentrism, and techno-science. To illustrate, she displays a futuristic portrait of Earth as Orbus which is full of bio-enhanced people and non-humans, psychological disorders, perverts and destructions. Besides, nature, earth, culture, and even feelings are so commodified that people desire and consume in an infinite cycle. Concordantly, Orbus is operated under the control of MORE corporations, and they constantly impose a frantic consumption on people together with their lusty political endeavours. This greedy nature leads to the emergence of a new impulse which I call it “MORE” beyond Thanatos and Eros instincts like Freud named in the 20th century and this paper aims to explore this impulse in relation to Winterson’s cynicism towards late capitalism and extreme consumerism.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods, Anthropocene, Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, Consumption fetishism

The 21st century has come to a new stage that teems with exceptional climate changes, and other planetary degradation. Geologists coined this geological epoch as the Anthropocene in which humankind has great toll on geological, biotic and climatic process of the Earth. Accordingly, literature in Anthropocene attempts to display anthropogenic changes in an apocalyptic scenario which is both fascinating and disturbing for the readers. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods is a good example in entangling the environmental changes with politics, psychology, eurocentrism, and techno-science. To illustrate, she displays a futuristic portrait of Earth as Orbus which is full of bio-enhanced people and non-humans, psychological disorders, perverts and destructions. Besides, nature, earth, culture, and even feelings are so commodified that people desire and consume in an infinite cycle. Concordantly, Orbus is operated under the control of MORE corporations, and they constantly impose a frantic consumption on people together with their lusty political endeavours. This greedy nature leads to the emergence of a new impulse which I call it “MORE” beyond Thanatos and Eros instincts like Freud named in the 20th century and this paper aims to explore this impulse in relation to Winterson’s cynicism towards late capitalism and extreme consumerism.

Keywords: Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods, Anthropocene, Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, Consumption fetishism