Nostalgia for the future's past: Tea Obreht's "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure"

There are two literary devices I sometimes think are overdone nowadays that Tea Obreht uses in "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure." One, the use of second person to tell the story, is becoming more and more ubiquitous, although I am usually not sure why it's being used. It's so common now, it's almost just another form of first person. This story didn't seem to call for its use, but fine. The second device, though, made absolute sense here, such that it was almost a necessity. Obreht opened with what I call the "Hundred Years of Solitude" opening, in which the narrator hurries ahead to the end of the story for a moment, but only to look back at the beginning of the story from the point of view of the end:

One evening almost thirty years later, a call from an unknown number. The ringing brings your husband out of the kitchen, ladle still in hand.... 

When you finally lift the phone to your ear...you get the wind knocked out of you.... 

It's Wade. Your Wade. So long-lost that his name overcomes you as first a sensation and then a smell before finally taking lettered form. Calling from some other lifetime, his voice as familiar as your own, saying: "Syl?" And then: "I knew you'd sound exactly the same." 

In a minute, it will hit you that of course you sound the same...

It's the perfect opening, because this is a story written here in the present about a future most people see coming, even though we hope it never comes. In that future, one of the favorite activities of people seems to be pining for the day before that future. Which is now. That's a little disorienting to summarize, and the opening accomplishes just the right combination of orienting and disorienting.

The not quite post-apocalyptic world of "Items Awaiting Protective Enclosure"

We don't know exactly what combination of environmental disasters led to the world the story inhabits, and it doesn't much matter. It's some version of what we in the real world are all being told today are the greatest threats to the environment. Over-consumption seems to be the chief culprit. In any event, human life doesn't seem to be on the brink of extinction just yet, but the world is changed. There are no animals, or at least none to eat. Trees seem to be somewhat rare, as well, although in the Bitterroot Mountains, where the story takes place, there are still enough woods to get lost in.

Society went through something called the "Posterity Initiative." It doesn't seem to have been a conservation effort or attempt to take one last-ditch shot at saving many of the species on Earth. Rather, it was more of a historical effort. The point was to save reminders of the past world so the future world could know something about what was lost. For Sylvia's father, that means collecting grass samples. For Sylvia, it means donating to the "Mammalian Gene Bank of the Rocky Mountains."

The nature preserve of the future doesn't host animals. It hosts the last relics of those animals. The man Syl is in love with, Wade, enters into these preserves to "poach" these relics. One gathers wood. Another seems to hunt the last of the quail in the world to serve in expensive breakfasts. Wade and his blackmarketeer friends see no harm in gathering up these objects. They refer to those who have too narrow a view of using the objects of the past as "wasters." It's an ironic inversion, as the ones using up the last of the remaining resources are calling the conservationists the ones wasting things. In Wade's case, though, he might have a point; what's the use in leaving the antlers of extinct Elk in the ground? The government intends nothing more for those antlers than to let them "reintegrate with the undergrowth."

The traffic in guilt

The black market traffic in relics isn't the only booming industry after Posterity. There's a good buck to be made in guilt. Syl says her father's whole life is ruled by guilt. He is subject to panic attacks, thinking about all the water he wasted in his life. (Side note: there is mention of a water shortage, but there seems to be enough water to grow crops. There are even non-essential crops, like coffee. Best not to look too deeply into it.)

For the guilty older generation who couldn't pass along bacon to its progeny, there is the expensive "reintegration" package to buy at the funeral home. You can elect to be planted into the ground inside a protective enclosure (roll credits!) that will give life to a tree. Your body will become the food to grow a new tree. This will offset some of your environmental bad karma.

Opposing nostalgias

While the generation older than Syl's is feeling guilty about what it didn't pass along to posterity and pining away for the old days, Syl in the "present"--meaning 30 years after the majority of action in the story, when she gets the phone call and remembers her own past--has her own nostalgia she's dealing with. Hers is sort of the opposite of the sadness that plagued her father, in which he felt guilty about his over-use. Syl's regret comes from having consumed too little of life. In her case, she never told Wade how she felt about him. There is the regret in "Items Awaiting" from living life too fully, and the regret of not having lived it fully enough. This is what gives the story its narrative drive and its pathos. It's a really intelligent narrative structure.

Humans are either doing too much or too little, which makes us out to be pretty good fools. "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" goes a terrible song that's been covered way more times than necessary. But the song is right. As a herd, we tend to take too much. As individuals, we are often too timid to take what joy is right there for the taking. Both as a herd and as individuals, we end up losing out on the best that life has to offer, either by destroying it actively or letting it go passively. This is why the set-up of the story as a memory from the future of a past that is the future of those reading the story right now in the present is so perfect. No time in this set-up is really home.

At the end of the story, there is one final elk left in the wild. It leaves one final set of antlers to posterity. It lives its elky life as best as the last elk in Idaho knows how. One day, there will be a last human wandering along somewhere. When it sheds its final memento of what we were for posterity, what will that memento say about the what has been lost?

This version of the song, however, is brilliant and utterly necessary for our times. 


Will humanity survive?

It's worth asking at the end whether humanity will survive. Syl, after never consummating her love for Wade, studied ecology. She now works on a "kelp-rig," whatever that is. She's still trying to do something to save the world. It's possible that Wade never told her how he felt because he realized that his particular form of "consumption" wasn't what the world needed, and he knew that. He wanted to tell Syl how he felt, but maybe he didn't because he isn't the right person for her future.

Wade's not bad for taking the antlers. He's the type of person who loves (and consumes) too much. Generally, society has a soft spot for a bon vivant. But it's not the right type of person for Syl's future. As pressure continues to mount on the planet, the person who lives life to its fullest might be an endangered species as well.

LINK: Check out Karen Carlson's take on this story. She does a bit about this being an "envelope" story that was extremely perceptive.