Plastic Like Jellyfish

Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being considers bullying at different scales—from individual experience to international and interspecies relations. I will study how the novel portrays the great Pacific garbage patch in order to attend to waste—as bullied and rejected matter—and to further an ethics of entanglement where we are always in the process of being constituted through what we might want to reject. Entanglement is hard to conceptualize at a human scale because it largely exceeds its scope. I argue that this novel functions as a discursive instrument by which immense and minuscule scales of being—from the thousands of years it can take for plastic to biodegrade to the few months a jellyfish is expected to live—can be engaged with from the narrative’s human scale. This engagement allows readers to cultivate intimacy with and responsibility for what exceeds them rather than participating in a culture of bullying. I conclude by exploring the alternatives that the novel proposes to bullying which are the Zen Buddhist principle of not-knowing as well as practices of mourning for human and more-than-human losses.