The changing meanings of nature and its constituents (organic and
inorganic matter, and organisms) have largely emerged from the new materialist
interpretations of the naturalcultural reality as one of complex entanglements of the
human and the nonhuman realms made visible in the porosity of bodily natures,
trans-corporeality, and the interdependence of material and discursive practices. The
new materialist accounts of physicochemical processes in terms of their agentic
capacities and generative powers have also fundamentally changed our understanding
of the concept of agency. Taking the new ideas in the framework of
material ecocriticism, this essay will focus on the expressive dimension of material
agencies as ‘‘narrative agencies,’’ which are comprised of compound individuals, a
concept developed by the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne much before the
emergence of the new materialist paradigm, to explain the creativity, imagination,
and experience found in nature’s individuals such as atoms, molecules, cells, and
nonhuman species. Some are ‘‘low-grade’’ individuals, others, like animals, are
‘‘high-grade’’ individuals; but all have internal experience and are involved in a
meaningful process of interpreting their environment and making an effect on
surrounding entities, processes and flows of materialities. The argument presented
here is that in the ‘‘storied world’’ of living nature, which material ecocriticism
interprets as a site of narrativity, there is not only a capacity of agency but also an
expressive function, nature’s narrative ability.

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• Nature’s narrative agencies as compound individuals