Life Writing in the Anthropocene

Jessica White, Gillian Whitlock, Jessica White, Gillian Whitlock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367704360
• eBook ISBN: 9781000396836
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Botany
• Index: Literature

Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet's biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.

In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Writing the Lives of Plants: Phytography and the Botanical Imagination

By John Charles Ryan

ABSTRACT

Phytography refers to human writings about plant lives as well as plant writings about their own lives. The author conceptualizes phytography in terms of vegetal intelligence, behavior, corporeality, and temporality. Narrating the complex worlds of plants, phytography uses a variety of formal strategies to advocate new possibilities for human-flora relations.

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it.

— Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript.

Introduction

Recent popular botanical nonfiction nourishes a long-standing public fascination with the mysterious inner worlds of plants.¹ Weaving between scientific exposition and narrative reflection, forester Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, published in English in 2016, appraises the occurrence of friendship, language, love, and communication in the arboreal domain.² Organized around recurring visits to twelve tree personae, moreover, biologist David George Haskell’s The Songs of Trees foregrounds the complexities of sonic expression within forest communities. Framing vegetal cognition as intrinsically networked, Haskell claims that “part of a plant’s intelligence exists not inside the body but in relationship with other species.”³ Indeed, the appearance of these and other examples of botanical nonfiction parallels the development—particularly over the last fifteen years—of the field of plant cognition and behavior.⁴ An upshot of this increasing interchange between botanical science and narrative is the unabashed characterization of plants as “intelligent” by Haskell, Richard Mabey, Wohlleben, and other nonfiction writer-naturalists. Nevertheless, interlinked generalist and technical interest in the percipience of vegetal life—beyond its instrumentalization as food, fiber, and medicine—is nothing new. An infamous case in point is The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973 by journalists Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Partly an elaboration of biophysicist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s experimental work in the early twentieth century, the popular though controversial account—deemed spurious and esoteric by many scientists—later became a documentary featuring a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder.⁵

For Bose, the possibility that plants signify their lives through forms of language was more than metaphorical. In an address delivered in 1911, he postulated that vegetal “script”—disclosed through technological innovations—would reveal the interior worlds of plants that otherwise would remain concealed from human awareness.⁶ To be sure, Bose’s scientific writings intersect with some contemporary botanical nonfiction through a shared belief that elusive vegetal lives can be unraveled and, thus, rendered transparent. The development of instrumentation—for instance, Bose’s crescographs—and the enactment of reductive modes of thinking about plants constitute the means to decipher vegetal being-in-the-world. A prominent aspect of the marginalization of individual botanical lives in these nonfiction accounts and others is the collectivization of plants’ percipient faculties. In The Songs of Trees, for instance, the individuation of the balsam fir serves as a framing device for the larger scientific narrative of the species and its ecological relations.⁷ Toward a view of plants as networked memes with transcorporealized intelligence, Haskell even summons Virginia Woolf’s assertion that real life is “the common life, not the ‘little separate lives which we live as individuals’” and, moreover, that “common life is the only life.”⁸ In response to Haskell’s assertion, in this article, I ask the following: Where are the singular lives of plants in botanical prose and poetry? The problem, as I understand it, is that Haskell and other plant writers, at times, cannot see the trees for the forest. My intention here is neither to trace nor deconstruct this problem philosophically, as plant-thinker Michael Marder has already done,⁹ but instead to delineate phytography as the writing of plants—as our writing about their lives and their writing about themselves and, possibly, about us and us in relation to them.

In conceptualizing phytography in terms of posthumanist life writing and proposing its main tenets, I examine nonfiction and poetry that I believe counter a tendency in contemporary botanical writing to privilege plant communities and networked intelligence over individually percipient—and sentient—personae.¹⁰ Cultivating careful and strategic forms of anthropomorphism,¹¹ these phytophilic writers—from Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century to poet Wendy Burk in recent years—echo Marder’s assertion that “the plant is at once the most singular and the most general being.”¹² Their work offers insights into the complex lives of trees, shrubs, and herbs through various focal points. These include particularization (attention to individual plant characters), percipience (plants as intelligent, responsive, and agentic beings), corporeality (plants as embodied individuals located in time and space), temporality and seasonality (the changeability of flora over time and seasons), emplacement (the influence of place on plantness and vice versa), language and signification (the interpellations, interpolations, and communicative modalities specific to vegetal life), historicity (the intertwining of botanical and human histories), and mortality (the decline and demise of plants as meaningful events prompting human mourning, memorialization, and elegy). Within the overarching phytographic frame, I put forward two posthumanist life-writing principles relevant to the dialectic of auto|biography: writing-with and writing-back. The first term denotes more-than-human life writing composed in dialogue with living plants, whereas the second signifies the ways in which plants write their own lives—sensorially and materially—irrespective of human mediation. The article then concludes with an overview of my ongoing experiment in field-based poetic composition, “Gorge: Scriptorium | Tree | Excubitorium,” carried out in conjunction with the lively flora of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. In “Gorge,” collaborative human-botanical script hinges on writing-with plants while allowing their writing-back—their own expressions, utterances, gesticulations—to suffuse the poetic text.

Life Writing and the More-Than-Human: Theoretical Perspectives

Writing botanical lives involves negotiating various compositional hurdles originating in commonplace discourses about, and perceptions of, plants. Of course, in contrast to humans, mammals, and birds, vegetal life is mostly sessile and, therefore, difficult to perceive on an everyday basis as doing anything noteworthy, except when flowering, fruiting, or dying. Traditionally regarded as mute and passive—“they hardly move and make no noise”—plants adhere to temporalities sharply divergent from mobile creatures.¹³ They orchestrate evolutionary processes, such as photosynthesis, essential to the biosphere yet grossly underappreciated by humankind.¹⁴ Machinic and aesthetic tropes, moreover, dominate ways of thinking about plants, reducing their inner workings to “control circuits” and likening their outer forms—leaves, trunks, roots—to “beautiful objects.”¹⁵ Confronted by the formidable otherness of vegetal beings, we attempt to exert linguistic control over them through taxonomic designators (species, genera, families, varieties), sexually-fixated metonymies (flowers, blossoms, blooms, fruits), and reductive scientific terminologies (specimens, samples, compounds, active ingredients). What is more, a prevailing instrumentalization characterizes most human relations to flora, formalized in the paradigm of economic botany, or the “biology, culture and utilisation of plants and plant products.”¹⁶

The prevalence of utilitarianism, instrumentalization, and reductionism in our dealings with plants constrains the emergence of more-than-human life writing attuned to their intelligence, sentience, and other complexities, as demonstrated to an increasing extent by scientific research.¹⁷ Notwithstanding their opaqueness—at least from a human standpoint—individual plants should be regarded as meaningful narrative subjects in their own right. My contention here reflects the most inclusive and biocentric sense of life writing as “writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s [including an animal’s or plant’s], as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical.”¹⁸ Instead of narrowing plants to their uses and appearances—and so negating their diverse capacities—phytography engages “the botanical imagination” as the relational, intercorporeal, and dialogical opening of narratives to vegetal being.¹⁹ As we envision plants as auto|biographical subjects, so they imagine us back in an interplay of imaginings; as we write the lives of plants, so they write their own lives—and ours. Plants write-back into auto|phytographical accounts as their unique articulations weave into the fabric of diverse shared narratives.²⁰ This posthumanist view shifts phytographical writing from concerns of textual representation toward the interbraiding of the authorial (human) self with the creative agencies of vegetal lives.²¹ Writing-with plants necessitates openness to their material-sensorial significations—their feedback, edits, and criticisms, if you will—which troub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• The Process
• Essays
• Forum: Writing the Lives of Other-than-Human
• Forums
• What’s Next?
• Artist’s Statement
• Index