Eco-Delirium: Realism in Environmental Excess

Abstract

This article describes “Eco-Delirium” as a historically situated theory of realism arising from the environmental crisis of the late-Cold War. Challenging the claims that postmodernism exhausted realism or made post-factual relativism possible, it argues that the exigent ecological conditions under the threat of nuclear proliferation and chemical toxicity fundamentally altered what realism could be. Environmental reality became systemic, delayed, and not primarily perceptible, surpassing sensory experience and distorting narrative sense coherence. This transformation gives rise to Eco-Delirium, the literary registering of this excess: paranoia, narrative overload, fragmentation and speculative projection function as realist strategies for registering an unassimilable environmental reality. Drawing on psychoanalysis and in particular the notion of the Real as that which resists symbolization, the article redefines realism not as the transparent depiction of an object but as the staging of representational failure. Literature does not leave the reality of ecological crisis behind; it is presented with a reality of traumatic excess. Through readings of the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo the paper shows how late twentieth-century literature registers environmental systems operating outside the bounds of cognition via disturbance, mediation, and affective disorientation. Eco-Delirium is established as a transitional, postmodernistic realism between postmodern skepticism and metamodern engagement. It keeps suspicion of totality, and refuses to be paralyzed, oscillating between critique and feeble hope. By foregrounding fantasy and disavowal as constitutive of lived reality, Eco-Delirium reforms realism as an adaptive critical paradigm in environmental-excess conditions.