Exhaustion as Affective Alignment: Social Justice Work in Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven

Abstract

This article uses Denise Giardina’s 1987 novel, Storming Heaven, as a case study to look at how labor is represented aesthetically in fiction for political ends. The narrative depicts the theft of an Appalachian pastoral scene, which quickly devolves into mine work, abuse, and death. Mine labor is described vividly, and it is performed under the steady eye of mine guards who use threats, intimidation, and weapons to quash strikes, kill strikers, and keep miners working and living in fear. Giardina’s novel is a political novel that challenges unfair working conditions and neoliberal exploitation. She uses her work to create a sense of exhaustion through aesthetic and narrative choices. Exhaustion, with its resonances of hard work and honest labor, helps Giardina shift the Southern Appalachian structures of feeling from past political and social loss toward an alignment of political activism and futurity. Excerpts from reviews of the novel show how readers process their sense of exhaustion and the novel’s political aims. Giardina’s style is effective for getting readers to sympathize with her labor politics by using a familiar, anti-cathartic staying-power, although this style seems to lack a sense of sustainability and risks making readers feel manipulated or politically fatigued.