Temporality in the Anthropocene: Revisiting Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Over the past two decades, since the term Anthropocene was coined by Paul Crutzen in 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has attracted the attention of many contemporary authors. It is a phenomenon that is hard to totally grasp and only distinguishes itself through evidence such as climate change and other environmental disasters. The Anthropocene challenges the concept of temporality because as it is so enormous in range it resists representation within a specific time. In order to narrate the Anthropocene and its devastating impacts on human and nonhuman worlds through literary texts, the Anthropocene authors need to deploy new narrative techniques that make possible the image of such vast scale issues. In The Stone Gods, Winterson utilizes nonlinear structures of time to portray the story of a planetary catastrophe as a form of a continuum that influences different time periods from past to present and definitely the future. She skilfully reconstructs the concept of time to create alternative worlds that allow her to imagine ecological collapse in different times and locations. With its three interrelated sections, The Stone Gods narrates the story of the Anthropocene as a continuous thread of degradation which occur throughout history in parallel with the destructive activities of humanity on Earth.