The Design Unraveling

Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) imagines a future in which an evolutionary crisis threatens humanity. Bacteria released from melting permafrost have caused fauna to regress to past evolutionary stages, and human beings are either miscarrying or birthing “previous hominins.” Members of the novel’s older (wealthy, white) generation decry the crisis as the end of the aesthetic: “There goes literary fiction!” For them, evolutionary atavism can only lead to stunted artistic projects. Erdrich’s protagonist, Cedar, a newly pregnant Ojibwe woman, believes that her pregnancy with a likely nonhuman child portends not the end of the world but a fruitful new beginning for forms of life—and, by extension—forms of art. This paper considers how and why Erdrich depicts the baby as allegorizing the aesthetic, tying the future of the (non)human to the future of the literary. Throughout, Erdrich portrays Cedar’s pregnancy as linked to her handwriting the epistolary novel. Her body is also described as having been “coded” with long-forgotten evolutionary information. Pregnancy, in the novel, is presented as haphazardly salvaging something biologically valuable from the past and repurposing it for the future. Central to this paper is the argument that Erdrich’s novel formally mimics the biological recycling she thematizes, positing altered forms of disorderly, literary beauty for a nonhuman (and notably nonwhite, anticapitalistic) future.