Spring and All’s Anthropocenic Collage: Compressed Time, Deep Time, and the Urgency of Imagination

abstract:This article argues that Williams’s Spring and All vacillates between two contradictory temporalities indicative of the Anthropocene 1) the disorienting experience of rapid technological and environmental change, what we might call compressed time, and 2) a deep-time-awareness of the human species as geological agent whose extinction will one day be measurable by the products of our imagination recorded in the fossil layer (increased CO2 and plastics, for example). The imagination accounts for our greatest failures and our only hope, and “This is its book” (CP1 178), Williams tells us. As he employs his reader’s imagination to consider a variety of contradictory temporal scales, he anticipates the condition of the Anthropocene where the blink of an eye and millions of years clash, and humans-as geological-force determine the livability of our planet for both our ancestors and future kin.