Plants in Science Fiction

Speculative Vegetation

Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins, Jerry Määttä, Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins, Jerry Määttä

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786835611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en science-fiction

Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels and film. John Wyndham's triffids, Algernon Blackwood's willows and Han Kang's sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction, and its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large – questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries; erecting and dismantling new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.

PART 1

Abjection

1 Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale

Jessica George

Despite a recent surge of critical interest in the weird, and particularly in the fiction of the American short story writer H. P. Lovecraft, the genre (if that is what it is) eludes definition. The Lovecraft critic S. T. Joshi has wondered if ‘the weird tale’ exists as a genre only because ‘critics and publishers have deemed it so by fiat’, and genre theory often foregrounds the ways in which genres are formalised by communities of practice, rather than simply recognised.¹ In the words of John Rieder, genre is ‘messily bound to time and place’ through active interventions of naming and categorising.² Genres are socially and historically situated constellations rather than fixed categories: as Amy J. Devitt argues, genre is ‘a dynamic concept created through the interaction of writers, readers, past texts, and contexts’.³ Such a conception of genre allows us to identify a loose canon of weird texts constituted as such by writers, editors, scholars and fans. There are, of course, commonly held reference points for the weird, such as Lovecraft (1890–1937) and the writers he included in his personal, rather idiosyncratic, weird canon. Arthur Machen (1863–1947) and Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), whose work I will also consider here, both appear in Lovecraft’s 1927 study, Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he defines ‘the true weird tale’ against Gothic tropes derided as formulaic: ‘secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’.⁴ Although not consciously writing in a weird tradition, both Machen and Blackwood continue to be identified as writers of weird fiction because of their inclusion in influential studies such as Joshi’s The Weird Tale (1990).

Still, we must, as Roger Luckhurst suggests, ‘acknowledge the difficulty and elusiveness of the weird, a genre that dissolves generic glue, a category that defies categorization’.⁵ A more useful way of reading the weird tale may be a modal approach: mode, in contrast to genre, ‘implies not a kind but a method, a way of getting something done’,⁶ or ‘an inflection or tone’.⁷ If, as Veronica Hollinger writes, the science fictional mode is ‘a way of thinking and speaking about contemporary reality … integrated with other discourses about late-capitalist global technoculture’, what exactly do we think and speak about when using a weird modality?⁸

Lovecraft named as essential to the weird a sense of ‘dread of outer, unknown forces’ and of the ‘suspension or defeat of … fixed laws of Nature’.⁹ A similar definition is offered by Mark Fisher – who also views the weird as mode rather than as genre – in The Weird and the Eerie (2016). Something that is weird, Fisher argues, ‘is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist’, yet its very existence also challenges our taken-for-granted knowledge of the world.¹⁰ The weird, in his view, is ‘a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete’.¹¹ Its inflection is one of strangeness, of defamiliarisation. It is a way of thinking about the possibility that reality is not what we thought it was.

I emphasise the weird as a mode of thinking about the world in order to foreground its treatment of anxieties concerning the status of the human, particularly those generated by evolutionary theory during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Scholarship on the weird tale has been strongly influenced by the largely biographical criticism of Joshi and, more recently, by Graham Harman’s notion of ‘weird realism’ – the idea that a gap exists between the reality of an object and our ability to access it through the qualities we perceive. Such gaps, Harman argues, can be made visible by the speculative imaginings of weird fiction. Both the cosmic pessimism identified by Joshi and the ontological insights offered by Harman can yield productive readings of weird fiction, but these approaches have tended to elide how the classic weird tale returns obsessively to its concern with the nature and status of the human. Its challenge to anthropocentrism (never fully realised) both confronts and reinscribes attitudes concerning race and species that are endemic to Euro-American imperialism. This is particularly obvious in the portrayals of semi-human monsters and human transformations found in so many classic weird tales, but it can also be seen in the various ways that plants weave their way into weird fiction, creeping across the edges of species boundaries and uprooting comfortable conceptions of anthropocentrism. This chapter examines the role of plants in stories by Blackwood, Machen and Lovecraft, exploring the ways they weirdly destabilise anthropocentrism in the wake of evolutionary theory and anxieties around common descent, hybridity and degeneration. I argue that this is where value may be found in weird representations of plant alterity: such representations offer the possibility of resistance to the backgrounding and instrumentalisation of nonhuman life. Since the weird tale, however, foregrounds anxieties concerning the nature and status of the human – and in particular that of the white, educated, European or Anglo-American human – it can never quite, as Fisher claims, take ‘the perspective of the outside’.¹² The demolishing of anthropocentrism can only function as a source of horror from a human point of view – and it is usually a very particular, very Western point of view that is disoriented by the weirdness of plant alterity.

Plant Alterity

Dawn Keetley argues that plant horror is informed by the idea that plants ‘are the utterly and ineffably strange, embodying an absolute alterity’.¹³ Humans may (to some degree) acknowledge our relationship to animals, but the possibility of doing the same with plants has long been ‘foreclosed’ to us.¹⁴ Michael Marder’s work emphasises the inaccessibility of the plant to human knowledge: ‘The life of plants’, he writes, is ‘obscure, because it ineluctably withdraws, flees from sight and from rigorous interpretations.’¹⁵ This withdrawal from interpretation also evokes the inaccessibility of the object in Harman’s weird realism, wherein the gap between the reality of an object and human perceptions of it, and between the totality of an object and its qualities, renders ‘[r]eality itself … weird’.¹⁶ The ‘weird’ in weird fiction stems from how it recognises this resistance of objects to human attempts to know them. Plants, occupying their marginalised zone, make visible, if not comprehensible, the Other which resists.

Blackwood’s 1907 story ‘The Willows’ uses the titular willow bushes to create a frightening sense of the radical alterity of nonhuman, non-animal nature, but it also begins to draw attention to the possibility that this alterity exists within the human. ‘The Willows’ relates the frightening experience undergone by its narrator and his travelling companion on a canoe voyage through a marshy stretch of the Danube. This ‘region of singular loneliness and desolation’ is dotted with small islands overgrown with ‘a vast sea of low willow-bushes’, and it is on one of these islands that the travellers make camp on a windy night.¹⁷ After a series of bizarre events around the camp, including the suggestion that the willows have moved while they weren’t looking, the travellers become convinced that the region into which they have intruded is one where the veil between worlds is thin. They have inadvertently attracted the attention of vast, inhuman forces that require a sacrifice before they will withdraw.

Anthony Camara, reading ‘The Willows’ through the lens of cosmic horror, has argued that the story shows us a nonhuman nature that is radically Other, subject to ‘strange transformations and eruptions of novelty that cause nature to exceed humans’ limited conceptions and definitions of it’.¹⁸ Blackwood, he argues, refuses clear distinctions between the natural and the supernatural: rather, nature is ‘dynamically constituted by the un-grounding operations’ of ‘incomprehensible alien forces’ that render such distinctions impossible.¹⁹ ‘The Willows’ maintains that ‘nature always has an outside that cannot be assimilated’, and in doing so, the story thinks about nature in a way that ‘gives it the full freedom that should be accorded to it – namely, the freedom to violate itself’.²⁰ Camara ties this idea to the cosmic, to the way that ‘Blackwood’s great outdoors is continuous with an even greater outdoors, namely the starry expanses and abyssal depths of space’.²¹ Here I wish to explore this alterity in terms of an Otherness rather closer to home, and viewable as such in the narrative only from a human position: the radically closed-off (and thus inaccessible to humans) but radically open (to violations of known natural law) world of the plant.

The problematic status of the willow bushes, their resistance to categorisation as separate from either animal life or inorganic phenomena, is apparent throughout. In the narrator’s abundant descriptions of them within their ‘land of desolation’, the willows become one with the river, with ‘waves of leaves instead of waves of water’ and ‘green swells like the sea’.²² They are alliteratively aligned with the natural phenomena of the river and the weather, forming part of a ‘singular world of willows, winds, and waters’ in which the travellers are immediately ill at ease.²³ An opposition is set up here between nonhuman nature on the one hand and the humans who intrude upon it on the other. This works both to maintain a degree of anthropocentric separation between humans and the rest of the world, and to suggest the danger of its dissolution.

The characters have ‘trespassed … upon the borders of an alien world’ where they are ‘intruders’,²⁴ a world ‘remote from human influence’ and ‘tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows’.²⁵ These plants possess ‘souls’ and intent, but they are quite alien, even inimical, to the souls and intentions of humans. Though the beings the narrator glimpses through the thinning of the wall between worlds are not plants, it is to the willows and their intent that his fear attaches itself. They ‘represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us’;²⁶ they suggest ‘a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether’.²⁷ The scenes of wild nature to which the narrator has grown accustomed on his frequent travels are not threatening in the same way because they ‘link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions.’²⁸ The willows hold no such familiarity. The terror they induce cannot be explained simply by their geographical remoteness, then. Indeed, it is the points at which they encounter the human world, and not those where they diverge, that truly horrify. Again, these points of contact and separation both challenge and maintain anthropocentrism.

The willows, then, have their roots in a world radically different from the world inhabited by humans, but exist on the border between both. They are the intrusions of that world into ours, just as the narrator and his companion are trespassers from the human world into the alien, a narrative mirroring which suggests a kind of unsettling kinship with the plant Other. Were the strange souls of the willows to remain in their world, there would be no reason to fear them. Here they cross borders, and they also trouble categories, as all plants do. Animal imagery abounds: the willows are ‘monstrous antediluvian creatures’ and ‘gigantic sponge-like growths’.²⁹ Refusing the rootedness of plants, they shift their positions during the night, crowding in around the tent,³⁰ and the narrator is horrified by the notion that they move ‘of their own will’.³¹ We might here identify one of Harman’s ‘gaps’ between the reality of an object and its qualities, for the willows partake of the natures of both animals and inorganic phenomena, but are summed up by neither. The humans cannot fully know them.

At the same time that the willows represent an alien world, however, the radical separation – what Val Plumwood refers to as being ‘hyper-separated’ – between humans, animals and plants that has propped up ideas of human exceptionalism and supremacy is threatened with destabilisation.³² Michael Marder has argued that ‘plants are wholly other and foreign to us, so long as we have not yet encountered them, as it were, on their own turf’ (emphasis mine),³³ suggesting that the ‘gap separating humans from plants may dwindle … thanks to the discovery of traces of the latter in the former, and vice versa’.³⁴ Here, forced to encounter the willows partly ‘on their own turf’ (but never able to stand with both feet upon it), the human protagonists are confronted with both a terrifying alterity, and with the possibility that it may already be a part of the animal, and thus the human, world. The willows destabilise any solidly bounded sense of human identity, offering instead a vision of human entanglement within a world of alterity.

The inhuman forces they embody pose a physical danger to the travellers, but also a categorical danger to humanity as a whole. They undermine the constitutive distinction between human Self and animal/vegetable/natural Other that had already been called into question by evolutionary theory and the possibility of universal common descent. Plumwood has pointed to the ways in which ‘human/nature dualism [has] helped create ideals of culture and human identity that promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other’.³⁵ She has also discussed the problems posed for human exceptionalism by animal predation: it ‘threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery of the planet in which we are predators but can never ourselves be prey’, revealing instead ‘a shockingly indifferent world of ne...