Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman (Palgrave Gothic) 3030818683, 9783030818685

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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

Haunted Nature Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman Roberts EditedLuke by Sladja Blazan

Palgrave Gothic Series Editor Clive Bloom Middlesex University London, UK

Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a designation for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatisfied with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the Gothic was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the emergent film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident throughout contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television programmes, Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre, ghostly tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented online. It is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influence in popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation. This series offers readers the very best in new international research and scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and diversity of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to the eighteenth century, the Palgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new discussions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities emerging in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of obsolescence. Editorial Advisory Board: Dr. Ian Conrich, University of Vienna, Austria Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK Professor Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA Professor Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK Dr. Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK Dr. Alison Peirse, University of Yorkshire, UK Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Professor William Hughes, University of Macau, China Dr. Antonio Alcala Gonzalez, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico Dr. Marius Crișan, West University of Timişoara, Romania Dr. Manuel Aguirre, independent scholar, Spain More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14698

Sladja Blazan Editor

Haunted Nature Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman

Editor Sladja Blazan English and American Studies University of Würzburg Würzburg, Germany

ISSN 2634-6214     ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic) Palgrave Gothic ISBN 978-3-030-81868-5    ISBN 978-3-030-81869-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 Chapter 6 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Credit: Daniel Osterkamp This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This project began before the global pandemic struck, when the threat of global catastrophic change was all pervading, but still somehow intangible and indefinite. Something terrible was imminent, but what form it would take was not yet sure, like a monster that has not yet chosen its earthly form. To address this urgent, omnipresent yet inexpressible feeling, I assembled a group of theorists and writers to examine ways we might use gothic and horror to address fears of climate change, environmental collapse, and related threats. Is this not what the gothic has always expressed so well— unknowable, inescapable doom? Now the world has changed. The pandemic is here and the world will keep changing. I began with a co-editor, whose work in this field was one of the reasons I was keen to embark on this writing adventure. She got lost, consumed by forces of the pandemic. So did four other contributors. It has been a strange and testing journey. If it wasn’t for the many interesting, supportive, intellectually stimulating people travelling with me, it would have been impossible to persevere. To begin, I’d like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for supporting this project and for their helpful suggestions. Lina Aboujieb and Asma Azeezullah are the most wonderful and supportive editors that have accompanied the publishing process from beginning to end. Thank you! The seeds for this topic were sown during a graduate class I taught at the University of Würzburg in the winter of 2019. I want to thank my students, whose curiosity and often surprising perspectives keep me not v

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only intellectually engaged, but they give vital meaning to this work. My students kept reminding me that every little step matters. Thank you for being who you are! The next step that mattered in this project was a symposium I organized at the University of Würzburg in the same winter. I want to thank all the presenters, some of whom became contributors to this volume. I’d like to thank Sandy Alexandre, an always engaging intellectual partner, whose friendship has brought me through many loops, Dawn Keetley for her thought-provoking new ideas and tireless support, Elizabeth Parker for pointing out that too much water is used to make films about the shortage of water, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet for reminding me that things are sometimes just the way they seem, Justin D. Edwards, Johan Höglund, Alexandra Hauke, Catrin Gersdorf, Elisabeth Scherer, Elmar Schenkel, Annemarie Mönch, and many more. I’d like to thank all of the participants for the discussions, their questions, and their support and all of the people at the American Studies department at the University of Würzburg. And special thanks to Hannah Nelson-Teutsch and Matthew McGinity for a marvelous poster that will always remind me of how beautiful haunted entanglements can be. To all the people in my family who endured living with a writer and editor in  lockdown, thank you. I promise to cook something nice really soon. Special thanks goes to Eva Hedrich, Rebecca Grözinger, Marie Beckmann, and Nina Wintermeyer for making sure that there was a forum for discussion to begin with. Last but not the least, this project would not have existed without the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen-­ Foundation. I want to thank all involved in making this possible.

Contents

1 Haunting and Nature: An Introduction  1 Sladja Blazan 2 Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature 21 Davina Höll 3 Black Mold, White Extinction: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” 43 Dawn Keetley 4 Vegetomorphism: Exploring the Material Within the Aesthetics of the EcoGothic in Stranger Things and Annihilation 67 Sladja Blazan 5 An Ecology of Abject Women: Frontier Gothicism and Ecofeminism in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle 91 Alexandra Hauke 6 Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene115 Johan Höglund vii

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7 Haunted Technonature: Anthropocene Coloniality in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City135 Rebecca Duncan 8 Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees, Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme159 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet 9 The Global Poltergeist: COVID-19 Hauntings181 Simon C. Estok  Correction to: Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the CapitaloceneC1 Johan Höglund Index197

Notes on Contributors

Sladja Blazan  is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2005. Recently she completed a manuscript that explores the intersection of spectrality and morality under the title Ghosts and Their Hosts: Spectrality in Early U.S. American Literature and Culture. This publication is currently under review. Previous publications include American Fictionary: Postsozialistische Migration in der nordamerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006); an edited collection with Nigel Hatton, Literature and Refugees (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018); with Avital Ronell, What Was I Thinking: ACriticalAutobiographyandSpectralColloquy(Berlin:Hauptstadtkulturfonds, 2011); and Ghost Stories and Alternative Histories (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Her areas of research include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, critical refugee studies, and migration as a literary topic. Rebecca Duncan  is Crafoord Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (Sweden). She is the author of South African Gothic (University of Wales/University of Chicago Press 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith prize. Her recent work includes articles for ARIEL and Science Fiction Film and Television and the co-edited projects Patrick McGrath and his Worlds (Routledge 2020) and “The Body Now” (2020), a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. She has research interests in world literature, political ecology, speculative fiction, and decolonial thinking. ix

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Simon  C.  Estok is a full professor and senior research fellow at Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea). Estok teaches literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. His award-winning book Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011 (reprinted 2014), and he is co-editor of three books: Landscape, Seascape, and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016), International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013), and East Asian Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013). His latest book is the much anticipated The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018; reprinted with errata as paperback in 2020). Estok has two co-edited collections coming out through Routledge (Mushroom Clouds: Ecological Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia, forthcoming March 2021, and Anthropocene Ecologies of Food, forthcoming December 2021), and he has published extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA, Mosaic, Configurations, English Studies in Canada, and others. Alexandra Hauke  is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Passau, Germany, where her research and teaching focus on indigenous studies, folk horror, ecofeminism, digital cultures, and American popular culture. She has written on law and legal cultures in Native American detective fiction, American ecofeminist gothic fiction, blackness in horror film, utopian idealism in dystopian literature, and self-branding on YouTube and has co-edited essay collections on Native American survivance, twenty-first-century Canadian literatures and politics, as well as the post-truth era in the United States. Johan Höglund  is Professor of English at the Department of Languages and a member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. His research focuses on the relationship between popular culture, the climate crisis, and Empire as they manifest during different eras and in different media. Johan Höglund is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (Ashgate, 2014) and editor of Gothic in the Anthropocene (with Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Nordic Gothic (Manchester UP, 2021), B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (with Justin D. Edwards, Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (with Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). His works have been published e­ xtensively in journals such as Game Studies, English Literature in Transition, Continuum, and The European Journal of

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American Studies. He is working on the monograph Militarizing the Capitalocene: Militant Futures and the Climate Crisis Narrative. Davina  Höll  holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in European and German Literary Studies from the University of Marburg and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Mainz. In her PhD Project “Politics and Poetics of Cholera in nineteenth-century Literature” that she was researching as a member of the DFG Graduate Program “Life Sciences  – Life Writing” she explored the (im-)possibilities of narrating traumatic pandemic experience. She is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Controlling Microbes to Fight Infections” (CMFI) at the University of Tübingen, where she works on a project that investigates the historical, epistemological, and ethical implications of an anticipated paradigm shift concerning human microbes in the wake of the antibiotic resistance crisis. Focusing on but not being limited to the field of Medical Humanities, she is very much interested in how textual and extra-textual worlds intertwine. She passionately engages in interdisciplinary exchange, for example, while teaching medical students or collaborating with bio artists. Dawn Keetley  is Professor of English, teaching horror/gothic literature, film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her works have most recently been published in the Journal of Popular Culture, Horror Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Popular Television, Journal of Film and Video, and Gothic Studies. She is editor of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press, 2020) and We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014). She has also co-edited (with Angela Tenga) Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave, 2016), (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) The Ecogothic in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017), and (with Elizabeth Erwin) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018). Her book, Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet  is Professor of English at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and head of the American Studies section. Her areas of specialization are cultural studies, gender and queer theory, and the emotional and political work of genre (including melodrama, horror,

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American gothic, and adventure). Soltysik Monnet has a background in film studies as well as visual culture and literature. In recent years, her research was focused on the role of genre in the affective and ideological role of narratives about combat and warfare, and her monograph on the subject: Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture (Lexington, 2020) has just been published. Her previous publications include a monograph on American gothic in the nineteenth century (2010), an edited volume on The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (2014), and an edited volume on Neoliberal Gothic (2017). A recurring question that motivates her research is how art, literature, and language can be used to promote social justice and a more sustainable future.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Mold and then bubbles spread over Lily’s arms, just as on the wall Fig. 3.2 The red room overrun with black mold (ep. 10) Fig. 3.3 One of the dead in Haunting, covered, like the walls, with black mold (ep. 10) Fig. 3.4 The opening panel of “Gray Matter,” juxtaposing a hurricane and population anxiety Fig. 4.1 A demogorgon surrounded by spores in the Upside Down Fig. 4.2 Will Buyers rotting in the Upside Down with a tendril inside his body and on his face Fig. 6.1. Dashboard Fig. 6.2. The family home Fig. 6.3. The crawlspace Fig. 6.4. Bannon’s gas station Fig. 6.5. Nature has entered the living room Fig. 8.1 The Happening shows invasive human populations and pollution, such as these nuclear reactors looming over a suburban neighborhood. (Screenshot by author) Fig. 8.2 Cover of The End, by Zep (Philippe Chappuis). (With permission by Rue de Sèvres) Fig. 8.3 The Day After Tomorrow ends with a clear new day, as the US military rescues survivors, and the protagonists are reunited for a post-apocalyptic “happy ending.” (Screenshot by author)

48 49 50 55 72 74 124 125 126 128 129 163 167 174

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CHAPTER 1

Haunting and Nature: An Introduction Sladja Blazan

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

In Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence,” a parrot complains about humans and their desperate search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Busy looking into outer space, they fail to recognize what is right in front of their eyes. The bird-narrator sighs: “We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?” (Chiang 467–8). This rhetorical question is ever more poignant, the parrot informs us, given the imminent extinction facing its species, for which humans are to blame. Chiang’s story is representative of a growing body of work that engages speculative fiction to address questions of the Anthropocene.1 As the designation for an epoch in which humans became a significant geological force in heretofore unprecedented ways, the Anthropocene certainly invites speculation.2 In relation to her own writing, Margaret Atwood narrowed the definition of speculative fiction down

S. Blazan (*) English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_1

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to a semi-realistic narrative mode that restricts itself to “things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books” (6). Similarly, Jewell Gomez writing about her vampire fiction explains the reason for her preference for this designation: “whether used in connection with prose or poetry, the term speculative fiction indicates work that postulates a time and circumstance as yet unknown” (949). This grounding in reality instead of fantasy and futurity instead of the past gives the speculative mode a particular resonance in the context of environmental concerns that can be applied to most genres that this umbrella term contains: “fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more” (Oziewicz).3 The Anthropocene heralds a time of planetary-scale upheaval unprecedented in its pace. We live in a world that feels increasingly out of balance, a shifting of foundation and firmament pervaded by an unrelenting awareness that things will never be the same again. Consequently, there is a growing cultural interest in “things that could happen” but “haven’t happened yet,” and many of these possible futures, it seems, are most readily expressed in the language of horror.4 Mass extinctions and zoonotic pandemics, crop failures and water shortages, extreme weather and titanic storms, endless droughts and “megafires,” as well as other horsemen of the Anthropocene dominate the cycles of news and media. As Sara L.  Crosby expressed it: “Horror is becoming the environmental norm” (514). The present collection examines how post-millennial Anglo-American film and literature engage horror and the more general gothic mode to address questions of the Anthropocene by focusing particularly on the entanglements between the human and nonhuman. A distinct turning of the gaze away from alien worlds, cosmicism, and outer space toward our own habitats is noticeable in current narratives. Looking inward exposes gothic and horror landscapes and human uneven entanglements within those. This book highlights, in particular, the attention given to the possibility of nonhuman sentience inscribed into these landscapes that are presented as endowed with intelligence, consciousness, agency, and intention, a mark of potential for communication and cooperation, as well as for feeling, needing, and plotting. As demonstrated in the here collected essays, nonhuman sentience intersecting with humans is often represented in terms of haunting, which is why special emphasis is placed on ways in

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which this classic gothic trope came to matter in this moment in time, stretched at the crossroads of colonization, decolonization, globalization, capitalism, and climate change. Given their planetary staging, the forces of the Anthropocene are seldom directly perceptible on a human scale, an intangibility expressed in such neologisms and new theories as hyperobjects, heliotrope, planetarity, Gaia, or Great Acceleration versus Slow Violence, to name only a few.5 These new concepts seek to do justice to a globalized world that advances with—or possibly without—the human in transformative ways that resist representation. As a mode that has traditionally sought to express what cannot be rationalized, the gothic mode and the related horror genre are uniquely positioned to address such unfathomable forces.6 Eugene Thacker proposed after concluding that “the world is increasingly unthinkable,” horror needs to “be understood as being about the limits of the human as it confronts a world that is not just a World, and not just the Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us)” (17). What’s more, Aspasia Stephanou claimed, “inhuman materiality”—the phrase she uses to refer to anything indifferent and unreadable to the human—is at the center of current gothic productions (4). Consequently, the present collection explores this telling intersection of worlding and (gothic) horror with respect to the concept of “Nature” through the lens of haunting. The result confirms that no new ghosts or monsters are at the center of our current struggles with Nature but rather very familiar struggles over race, class, and gender. All collected essays confirm Sylvia Wynter’s predicament that future cultural struggles will be geared toward securing a conception of a self-exclaimed “human” that implies whiteness, masculinity, cis-ness, and ability, a category of “Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,” asserting “the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle” (9–10). Taking a closer look at how current narratives either confirm or reject this model of a self-exclaimed “human” in the face of the nonhuman by offering materialist readings of haunting, the present collection understands itself to be an intervention in problematic conceptualizations of humanism. Given the growing demand for narratives concerning the agency of the nonhuman in current film and literature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground.

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Haunting A tenet of the Anthropocene is the acknowledgment of Nature as an active agent, the result of a radical rejection of the Enlightenment concept of agency as an attribute of human intentionality.7 Advocates of the nonhuman turn in humanities seek to develop new theories of humans intermeshed with nonhuman Nature to express, as Jane Bennett termed it, “vibrant” and “vital” and as such unpredictable and powerful qualities of nonhuman materialities. In Bennett’s theory nonhuman Nature has agency. Haunting can also be understood as an expression of the agency and vibrancy of Nature. As an active engagement with the past in the present, the classic gothic trope of haunting inevitably excavates histories within Nature, marking the animation or vibrancy in the present by doing so.8 One of the initial applications of the word haunting is found in early-­ thirteenth-­century Middle English as haunten—a verb to indicate a habit or recurring practice (“haunt” def. V. 1).9 The etymology from the Old French hanter with its meaning “to frequent, resort to, to be familiar with, 12. ct.” confirms the context of intimacy (“haunt” def. N. 2). Haunting, thus, indicates a return, a revisitation; it relates to a spatial and temporal displacement that does not necessarily rely on the human. What haunted ecologies such as forests or swamps, thus, can express better than other concepts is the agency exerted by those places without necessarily engaging the human. Most dictionaries record the act of habitual return as the defining element of haunting. In fact, it is this quality that distinguishes haunting from the related term, the uncanny. As has been pointed out in numerous interpretations of Sigmund Freud’s and Ernst Jentsch’s attempts to come closer to a definition, the uncanny is also a mode that is suspended between the familiar and the illegible.10 Uncanny, according to Freud’s reading, is the negation of heimlich, “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar” (222). In lieu of a dedicated term, unheimlich is inaccurately translated as the uncanny, but both Germanic words haunt and unheimlich share the same root with the German word heim and the English word home. They stem from the English ham—“a village, a town, a collection of dwellings” (“haunt” def. N.). While uncanny is clearly related to the concept of haunting, the later departs from the focus on human affect. Freud, in fact, never really defines the uncanny, in his much-discussed essay with the same title. Instead, he takes the reader through a list of situations that are likely to lead to an unsettling irritation, literally translated as not-homely,

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unheimlich, but also non-native, unheimisch (Freud 220). The uncanny, thus, in this most famous of all theoretical interpretations, is defined as a human affect, that which does not belong to home but seems familiar and, as such, evokes an irritation.11 If uncanny is a negation of home, a haunt is a confirmation of the same. Haunting emphasizes the return to a familiar place, perhaps home. It marks a spatial and temporal disjuncture commonly expressed in the act of trespassing the border between life and death. Rather than a negation, haunting marks an affirmation, as spaces (including bodies) are haunted by something that has once existed in the past and returns insistently in the present; it is a relational mode that connects the past with the present in filling space with life that insists on existing in spite of death. Haunting marks bodies (including landscapes) as interactive spaces where death does not mean decay. It is for this reason that current agents of haunting, our current ghosts, come to the fore the strongest in so-called natural environments, as these were often perceived as dead and now seem to come alive repeatedly in what is presented as revengeful and frightening ways. Examples analyzed in this collection demonstrate that haunting, commonly understood to be the domain of intangible spirits, is in fact often expressed in very material ways and, thus, resonates with current needs to understand the agency of materialities. As such, haunting can challenge normative identities and epistemic authority by exposing material inscriptions of human and nonhuman bodies in their environments and vice versa. The ghosts that come to the fore in the following chapters, thus, materialize in the form of microbes, mold, trees, raging oceans, or plant spores, affirming that, indeed: “Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life” (Gan et al. G2). The focus on undead space evoked through haunting can have ominous aspects, but it can also mark a recuperative narrative. The more recent popularity of representations of haunted forests in popular culture is also an expression of the current need to redefine natural environments and build meaningful connections.12 One the one hand, as Yi-fu Tuan and Elizabeth Parker have demonstrated in their studies of cultural representations of frightful forests and landscapes: “The Gothic forest […] is an archetypal site of dread in the collective imagination” (Parker 1). On the other hand, the recent resurgence of studies about root communication exemplify that forests are most often understood to be alive in ways that are yet to be understood.13 While our understanding of Nature is changing, seen from a New Materialist standpoint, haunting has always

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recognized the vitality of nonhuman environments and marked them as sites for communication through mediums. Significantly, even classic gothic tropes such as haunted houses often point to very specific material manifestation of nonhuman agency—mold in H.P.  Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” (1924/1937) or decayed trees in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). These firmly established images return with pressing urgency in current narratives that seek to explore the vitality of materiality, particularly in the context of Nature. In critical theory and philosophy, haunting has unhinged itself from the confines of the gothic mode and horror scenarios in response to the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), in which the concept of hauntology, a word with phonic similarity to ontology, came to designate ways in which seemingly overcome and terminated concepts continue to determine ideologies that replace them.14 Derrida discusses the ways that the “spectre of Communism,” mentioned by Karl Marx in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, would continue to haunt the world after what Francis Fukuyama in 1992 termed “the End of History.” Haunting, in this sense, is instrumentalized for its ability to express something nesting uncomfortably within something else. Currently, our understanding of Nature is changing. Theories of the Anthropocene highlight the necessity of revising the human past as an active agent nesting uncomfortably within a larger set of planetary materialities. Seen within this specific framework, Nature is haunted by humans, which calls for an inspection of the agents of this haunting, the ghosts, and inquiries into the reasons for their return. Yet, Nature also haunts humans. Situated often uncomfortably within the body of the human in form of microbes, plants, and animals that we eat, Nature appears within the materialist cosmology of the body. Pandemics make the consequences of not acknowledging the human body as an interactive potentially haunted environment painfully obvious. It is, thus, not surprising that hauntology found new resonance in the 2010s, particularly through the work of the British writer and critic Mark Fisher, who expanded the concept of hauntology to a new millennial experience of future in general. Fisher explains: “What haunts the digital cul-­ de-­sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate” (16). The currently omnipresent bleak outlook onto our planetary ecology is causing personal stress disorders that psychologists begin to treat under names such as “eco-anxiety” or “ecological trauma,” mainly pointing out that we

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are missing a language to talk about the fear of looming environmental disasters (Panu). In this sense, we are haunted by our lost futures. Fiction writers are facing similar language problems. Looking at the dearth of published fictional accounts of climate change in 2016 and detailing his own difficulties when attempting to grapple with the subject, Amitav Ghosh attributes to our society a “broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis” (17). He further argues that it is only within the framework of “generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the Gothic,’ ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama,’ and have now come to be called ‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction’” that writers can find the narrative means to address environmental issues (Ghosh 43). Reconnecting hauntology to its gothic and horror renderings, the present collection accentuates the capacity of these modes to express the current sense of failure to account for the lost futures on a seemingly dying planet.

Nature While gothic and horror fiction addressing issues relating to the current changing views of Nature is consequently growing in popularity, Ghosh’s assertion already exemplifies that this development comes with its own set of problems. As the cultural anthropologist Raymond Williams pointed out, Nature is one of the most difficult words in the English language to define (219). Timothy Morton even makes conceptualizations of Nature responsible for our failure to build “a proper relationship with the earth and its life-forms” (2). He, thus, calls for a discussion of an “ecology without nature” (Morton 1). In spite of its title, this collection does not depart from a desire to find new theories and vocabularies to address novel ways of understanding ecologies. Yet, there is a concomitant need for inquiries into representations of what is currently called Nature. This is even more pressing in the wake of a changing understanding of the subject. Instead of circumventing Nature altogether or offering yet more neologisms, the articles collected here systematically expose and explore ways in which more recent examples of Anglo-American film and literature either nest within normative conceptualizations of Nature or systemically reject them. Nature with a capital N marks the long and controversial cultural history of the term and a departure from a static or even definable entity. Nature certainly, as Morton will have it, “gives us the slip” (2); yet, exploring the capacity of this concept to provide an excuse for ecological devastation

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and racial discrimination could lead to the understanding necessary to circumvent it. Nature is “directly implicated in the modern world’s” violence and oppression (Moore 2). The parrot in Chiang’s story already exemplified how the quest to express the perspective of the nonhuman makes it all too easy to construct and accept an antagonist, the universal human. Lamenting what “humans” have done to its species, the parrot confirms a collective responsibility. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter has demonstrated most succinctly, far from universal, the concept “human” enables instead “a present ethnoclass Man’s overrepresentation […] as if it were that of human itself,” and as such it impedes “any present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of earthly resources” (260). In other words, lamenting the role of “the human” in current extinction narratives paradoxically strengthens the normative authority that has led to a species’ demise to begin with. It is, therefore, now, in the historical moment of time when, as Ursula K. Heise has pointed out, “the cultural meme of the end of nature” dominates discussions about the Anthropocene that a fine-tuning of the discourse around the role of the human in present ecosystems and the agenda setting around Nature as its nonhuman Other appear to be more important than ever (8). The complexity of the question—who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman—is reflected in the present collection, which, in its analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, brings together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Activating the past in the present in terms of haunting exposes the underlying racial dimension always at work in modernist conceptualizations of identity models. The present collection thus connects a traditional gothic trope—haunting—with current representations of ecosystems and nonhuman environments and their capitalist and industrial origins that contribute to what came to be known as Nature. To scrutinize Nature inevitably means to scrutinize stories of racial oppression, segregation, and exploitation. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in fact, locates the invention of race in hostile Nature. At any rate, races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was particularly hostile. What made them [savages] different from other human

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beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, […]. They were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them, they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. (Arendt 1962)

Arendt’s telling extrapolation exemplifies not only the exclusion of certain humans from humanity by way of Nature, it also demonstrates that Nature has always also been a justification for pillaging, destruction, and depredation of the nonhuman and all those not recognized as human. The authors in this collection, thus, seek to expose ways in which Ecogothic tropes encode what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson called “the resounding silence in the posthumanist, object-oriented, and new materialist literatures with respect to race” (216). Extending New Materialism to the intersection of Nature and haunting demonstrates that a reordering of temporality and spatiality in the movement “beyond” (human and life) exposes both, bodies that are occluded through the concept of Nature and an intrinsic interlocking of all materialities. Haunting, with its capacity to animate, opens fundamental questions relating to erased histories and voices buried in the debris of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene and the Ecogothic Haunted Nature follows an emerging impulse to search for the possibility of communion with the natural world—to answer the question posed by Chiang’s parrot—by expanding the scope to plants, fungi, and microbes. While most cultures can draw on rich cultural traditions of human-animal communication and transmutation (therianthropy), the same cannot be said for human-plant interaction. Even the sciences seem to have prioritized the animal over the plant, a documented prejudice that has been termed “taxonomic chauvinism” (Bonnet et al.), “zoo-centrism” (Vilkka), or “plant blindness” (Wandersee and Schussler). In recognition of this historical bias, scholars and writers have recently been growing more expansive in their approach to the scope of human-nonhuman interactions to include the world of plants. Recent academic works attest to a growing interest in plant sentience, such as Communication in Plants (2006), Plant-Thinking (2013), or Thus Spoke the Plant (2018). Books like Peter Wohlleben’s Das geheime Leben der Bäume (2015, translated from German

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as The Hidden Life of Trees) and Francis Hallé’s earlier Éloge de la Plante (1999, translated from French as In Praise of Plants) have popularized the idea of plant intelligence among a non-academic audience. These publications promote a philosophical position that attests not only to a new sensibility in culture and critical theory to the sentience of nonhuman life but also to a shift away from placing the human at the center of all things. It, thus, does not come as a surprise that there is a growing interest in current film and literature to express nonhuman sentience within gothic and horror frameworks. Crossing the relatively new academic fields of Ecocriticism and New Materialism with the framework of the traditional gothic trope of haunting locates our inquiries within the Ecogothic. In a special issue of the journal Gothic Studies, David Del Principe defines the “EcoGothic” as a “new critical field that merges the ecocritical and the Gothic towards a more inclusive, non-anthropocentric understanding of monstrosity and fear” (1). Smith and Hughes define the Ecogothic in their introduction to a volume with the same title, in terms of “how the body as a site of Gothic fear—sexual, injured, dismembered and celebrated—can be seen and positively re-membered in a literary landscape” (8). The material is central to both of these definitions. Focusing on the material within the Ecogothic has the capacity to criticize the disembodied, rational subject encoded in conceptualizations of the (hu)Man and to offer alternative depictions of entanglement in the physical world. Drawing from a long tradition that transitions from the turn of the nineteenth-century gothic tropes as established most succinctly with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the inscription of horror onto the material body, the Ecogothic in twenty-first-century narratives includes the potential to circumvent universalist modes of thinking about humans as a species. Emerging out of the Enlightenment ideal of reason and control, the gothic tradition in literature and culture has a long history of exposing eruptive and uncontrollable forces guiding human actions seeking to both question and affirm imperialist frameworks. In Anglo-American twenty-first-century film and literature that engage conceptualizations of Nature, traditional gothic tropes are, thus, yet again in demand for their long history of depicting bodies as a site of transformation and negotiation. Furthermore, the repeated focus of narratives of ecological devastation and the ensuing human transformation on dissolving, fragmentation, and disintegration finds a correlation in the dominant “negative aesthetics” of the more traditional gothic (Botting 1).15 As an already existing and helpful framework,

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the gothic is, thus, used and abused in more recent narratives, as it can be not only advantageous but also detrimental to promoting a more just inscription of humans in the web of life. This makes analyzing new Ecogothic narratives imperative. To put it in Donna Haraway’s terms: “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts” (160). Here presented theoretical renderings of haunting and haunted natural environments situate their arguments within a Capitalocene (Moore 2016) and Chthulucene (Haraway 2015) as well as within the Anthropocene (Steffen et al. 2011). All three designations are applied in non-mutually exclusive ways, as they are all understood to serve the purpose of addressing the same cause—a search for narratives to capture the imbalanced entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in insightful ways.16 The Anthropocene fails to adequately account for power relations, since all humans are implicated under the designation “anthropos.” Arguments that highlight the disproportionate ways in which the current climate change affects the more affluent Global North in comparison to the Global South align themselves with Moore’s theory of the Capitalocene and “a political economy, which rests upon an audacious accumulation strategy: Cheap nature” (Moore 2). However, the ever-growing popularity of apocalyptic scenarios that revolve around the perspective of human survival in the face of planetary disaster is better understood within the Anthropocene, for the ability of the concept to address more general but fundamental problems of our times, such as how exactly did certain communities change planetary life? Whereas a specific inquiry into ways in which human activity inscribes itself into the earth as material and particularly narratives that seek to counter the indefensible capitalist extraction of earthly resources with images of chthonic intelligence are better situated within the Chthulucene (Haraway).17 In the variety of human entanglements with nonhuman material, the individual chapters demonstrate that Nature refers to various forms of materiality, from images of mold that appears “after the humans have left” (Keetley), to robo-fauna and engineered natural environments produced within multi-billion-dollar projects of terraformed land (Duncan), to nonhuman animals that human animals eat (Estok). The ambiguity of the term Nature is, thus, at least partially reflected in the individual chapters.

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Trajectory We begin with what one of the main founders of modern bacteriology, Robert Koch (1843–1910), deemed to be the smallest and yet most dangerous enemies of humankind—microbes. Tracing the long history of antagonism between human and microbe into the twenty-first century, Davina Höll proposes a theory of the microgothic. In her analysis, telling correlations between cultural responses to early theories of microbes established in the early nineteenth century and more recent debates concerning the same issues reveal a “persistence of the microgothic.” Both periods situate the potential pathogenicity of microorganisms and the thereof resulting death of the human body as a haunting presence in modern societies. What this continuity reveals is an enduring and insistent disconnect between cultural images of the human body in Anglo-American literature and the body’s own elemental material, which, in turn, stands in the way of renegotiating Nature as an inclusive rather than an exclusive environment. This tradition, as Höll argues, continues to persist in spite of new awareness of the permeability of the human body to its environment, as she demonstrates in her microgothic interpretation of current body art. Dawn Keetley’s chapter explores mold, a little-recognized though pervasive substance throughout gothic and horror literature and film, and highlights its connection to racialized narratives of species extinction. As a cultural representation of dead matter, mold is a materialist form of haunting. Keetley’s reading of “weird incarnations of human afterlives,” as specifically manifested in a speeding fungus that spreads after death, leads to her theory of “mycelial haunting,” which is reflected in narratives that take a step beyond individual death toward species death in an increasingly warming world. Yet, taking a closer look at horror narratives such as the Osgood Perkins’ film I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), the segment “Gray Matter” in Creepshow (2019), and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” (1924) reveals that human extinction in the analyzed narratives is, in fact, code for white extinction. Species haunting reveals itself as a haunting of exclusively white bodies. Finally, tracing the appearance of mold reveals the presence of race as a haunting subtext that has often been occluded in film and fiction about global warming and overpopulation. Microbial and mycelial hauntings prefer dark and musty environments. These are the topic of the next chapter. Sladja Blazan explores haunted

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underground ecologies by demonstrating how ecohorror narratives that focus on monstrous chthonic intelligence reinscribe human bodies into earthly materialities. While both the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) and Jeff VanderMeer’s first part of The Southern Reach trilogy, titled Annihilation (2014), remain strongly influenced by the Lovecraftian concept of “cosmic dread” (Lovecraft 139), these more recent popular narratives mark significant departures from the genre-typical “cosmic outsidedness” (Joshi 1501). In contrast to narratives in which the nonhuman is illegible to the human, these narratives put the human interlocutor in conversation with earthly matter(s) and revise figurations of ecologies out of which a certain type of population has extrapolated themselves in stories they tell each other. This form of environmental assimilation within haunted ecologies where dead matter is alive stands in a long tradition of North American Indigenous storytelling. In this way, Indigenous cosmologies mediated through popular culture and presented within appropriated frameworks come to the fore in debased ways in a time that seeks to fill the void that a severing of human bodies from nonhuman environments has left gaping like a wound in the mental make-up of modern huMan-ity. Alexandra Hauke’s chapter presents ecofeminism as a corrective and curative approach intended to break down binaries between human/ Nature and Nature/culture that continue to haunt ever-new generations due to their inscription in the long tradition of the Frontier Gothic. In her reading of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novella We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and particularly its connection to the 2018 film adaptation of the text, Hauke traces the bridge between “gothic pasts” and their “present specters” thematizing the haunting qualities of frontier violence against women. In her interpretation, both film and novella comment on the colonial legacies of the frontier as source of intersectional violence located at the point where women’s bodies merge with landscapes. The topicality of gothic horrors in the current “culture of fear” that she sees exemplified in Donald Trump’s presidency is here traced back to its roots in the “frontier paradigm” and the “origin myth” of “White Americans.” The collection moves on to planetary haunting. Environmental disasters such as floods are an increasingly popular topic in gothic and horror fiction and cinema. Resonating with Rob Nixon’s study Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Johan Höglund’s chapter delineates the stark disparity with which natural disasters affect privileged people in the Global North and poor communities in the Global South.

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Employing the classic gothic distinction between terror and horror introduced by one of the first gothic novel writers, Ann Radcliffe, Höglund draws the dividing line between the experience of immanent horror on the side of disadvantaged communities and the haunting terror experienced on the affluent side. Gothic and horror, Höglund argues, are current central affective modes that disrupt this antagonism by promoting an understanding of the Capitalocene as ultimately affecting all social strata, whereby all humans are inevitably situated in and haunted by Nature. From narratives that employ images of natural disasters to convey a depiction of the human as immanently entangled with Nature, Rebecca Duncan turns the discussion to artificially generated human-nature assemblages. In her reading of futuristic visions of eco-modernist cities, exemplified most aptly by Singapore as a model for Anthropocene survival, Duncan, like the authors of the previous chapters, challenges the category of collective humanity on which the Anthropocene hinges. Her reading of the environmental history of race and gender in technonature traces how tropes of haunting are mobilized in cultural productions from the Global South both to question and reimagine extractivist and exploitative capitalist relations. In this chapter analyzed speculative tales from Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City (2018) exemplify the ability of current narratives to enact a form of haunting in respect to both technonature, and more widely, to the Anthropocene’s account of crisis. Fixing problems of the Anthropocene through terraforming and climate calibration is exposed as a seductive doxa that effectively occludes systemic exploitation of human and nonhuman resources. The current fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios in Anglo-­ American film and literature and, more specifically, post-end-of-the-world stories is overwhelming. In her contribution to this volume, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet takes a closer look at a specific subset of apocalyptic narratives by defining what she terms “the apocalyptic Ecogothic.” Two examples of narratives that imagine a global holocaust engineered by trees—the 2008 film The Happening and the graphic novel The End (2018)—exemplify ecohorror narratives that work with the premise that trees are intelligent and therefore plot to remove humans from the planet. This horror scenario, in which trees are the perpetrators, centers around both representations of haunted Nature in the “apocalyptic Ecogothic” and ways in which post-apocalyptic scenarios currently haunt ecological narratives, demonstrating that the real challenge humanity is currently facing is not the end of the world but rather failing to imagine alternative scenarios based on justice and sustainability.

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Gothic and horror have always shown a fascination with contagious illnesses. From The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826), I am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954), to Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (2014), pandemic narratives have used the mode of haunting to address the invasive return of what was believed to have died out. And yet, one of the revealing omissions, both from fictional and actual accounts of plagues and pandemics, is the centrality of animals to the pathogenic origins and the propagation of disease. The plague bacillus, like a revenant, keeps coming back even when believed to be dead. It returns to home, the human body. It haunts. In place of a summary, Simon Estok’s chapter marks this as the return of a global poltergeist, which is haunting current humanity for its ignorance of other-­than-­human materialities and their agencies in our everyday lives. In his exposure of striking parallels between images repeatedly used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and descriptions in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), it becomes obvious that transfer of genetic material among species will most likely remain at the center of gothic and horror narratives to come. Yet, the centrality of the topic is also an opportunity to acknowledge the effects of human entanglements with nonhuman actors and to expose our destructive sense of exceptionalism in all its variations. In a time when we are coming to an understanding that life itself as a category is proving to be difficult to define (Thacker 2010), inspecting whose lives matter and who and what is always already marked as dead while alive becomes imperative. Here collected essays, thus, interrogate our understandings of both the haunting and haunted materialities that we came to call Nature in current cinematic and literary reconfigurations. This is only a miniature step in the midst of the Anthropocene that is a Capitalocene that is a Plantationocene that is a Chthulucene, but unlearning the common frame of reference can make space for meaningful and more just communities and communication with transformative capacity. These are important because right now, as Joy Harjo expressed it most vividly: “We make a jumble of stories. We do not dream together” (101).

Notes 1. The umbrella term speculative fiction came to include “diverse forms of non-mimetic fiction operating across different media” including “fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction,

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ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more” (Oziewicz). 2. The term Anthropocene was first defined in Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 (17–18). It was coined to mark the geological epoch within which accelerated anthropogenic activities over the past 200 years have become a force of nature themselves. See also Zalasiewicz. 3. Speculative fiction, of course, does not depend on realistic conventions. On the contrary, Sami Schalk, for example, praises speculative fiction for the possibility to experiment with non-realist conventions to “imagine otherwise” disability, race, and gender (3). 4. In “New Empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking with Speculative Fiction About Science and Social Inquiry” Elizabeth de Freitas and Sarah E. Truman explore the narrative means of speculative fiction “to help us rethink empiricism in posthuman ecologies of the Anthropocene” highlighting the ability to “open up scientific imaginaries.” 5. Timothy Morton introduced hyperobjects to provide a term that can address “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (2013, 1), of which climate change is one example; heliotrope is the designation proposed by DeLoughrey “to address sun and radiation as an invisible yet permeable sign of the Anthropocene” (26). 6. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation (1798) immediately come to mind as early examples of gothic novels that focus on mysterious forces envisioned as diseases with lethal consequences. 7. In “The concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land,” Val Plumwood, for example, writes about the necessity to acknowledge “nature as a field of agency” (115). 8. Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ 2013 seminal collection Ecogothic is the first to define the term, followed by a special issue of the journal Gothic Studies edited by David Del Principe in 2014 with the title The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century. With its focus on American wilderness and racial Otherness, Dawn Keetley and Mathew Wynn Sivils’ edited collection Ecogothic in Nineteenth Century American Literature published in 2017 offers an important contribution to the emerging field of the Ecogothic. 9. This reference and all further references are taken from the online Oxford English Dictionary accessed on March 2, 2019. 10. In 1919 Sigmund Freud published a much-discussed essay entitled “Das Unheimliche” (translated by James Strachey as “The Uncanny”), in which he extrapolates from Ernst Jentsch’s previously published theory. 11. Nicholas Royle in his seminal study of the uncanny also highlights the “peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar” in relation to the one who is registering unsettling feelings (1).

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12. For example, The Mist (2016), Bird Box (2018), and The Rain (2020), to name only a few. 13. Suzanne Simard introduced the term “forest wisdom” to describe the elaborate arborial system in the forest that she compares to neural networks in human brains. 14. The term hauntology was first coined in Derrida’s lectures at the symposium “Whither Marxism” at UC Riverside in 1993. 15. In his introduction to Gothic Fred Botting opens his study with the statement: “A negative aesthetics informs gothic texts” (Botting 1). 16. In “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna Haraway asks the important question: “[W]hen do changes in degrees become changes in kind” (159) and comes to the conclusion that more than one name is warranted to address current environmental issues. 17. Derived from the word “chthonic” in the meaning of “subterranean,” Donna Haraway coined the term Chthulucene to contest the focus on the human within the concept of the Anthropocene.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Origin of Totalitarianism. Meridian Books, 1962. Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Signal, 2011. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Bonnet, Xavier, Richard Sine, and Olivier Lourdais. “Taxonomic Chauvinism.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 17, no. 1, 2002, pp. 1–3. Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge, 2014. Chiang, Ted. “The Great Silence.” Exhalation. Penguin, 2019, pp. 467–477. Crosby, Sara L. Beyond Ecophilia: Edgar Allan Poe and the American Tradition of Ecohorror. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 21, Issue 3, Summer 2014, pp. 513–525, https://doi.org/10.1093/ isle/isu080. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ʻAnthropocene.’” Global Change Newsletter, no. 41, 2000, 17–18. de Freitas, Elizabeth, and Sarah E.  Truman. “New Empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking with Speculative Fiction about Science and Social Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry, Aug. 2020, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1077800420943643. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

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Del Principe, David. “Introduction: The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” The Ecogothic in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by David Del Principe. Gothic Studies, special issue, volume 16, no. 1, May 2014, pp. 1–8. Estok, Simon C. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Routledge, 2018. Fisher, Mark. “What is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, Fall 2012, pp. 16–24. Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unheimliche.” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, edited by Anna Freud et al. Imago, 1947, pp. 227–68. ———, “The ‘Uncanny.’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, translated by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, volume 17, Hogarth Press, pp. 219–252. Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Nils Bubandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, G1–G14. Hallé, Francis. In Praise of Plants. Timber Press, 2002. Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitaloscene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, volume 6, no. 1, 2015, pp. 159–165. Harjo, Joy. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. Norton, 2015. “haunt, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2018, www.oed. com/view/Entry/84641. Accessed 2 March 2019. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meaning of Endangered Species. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in ‘Movement Beyond the Human.’” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 21, no. 2–3, June 2015: 215–218. Jentsch, Ernst. “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen.” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift. vol. 8, no. 22, Aug. 25, 1906, pp. 195–98 and vol. 8, no. 23, Sept. 1, 1906, pp. 203–5. Joshi, S.T. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P.  Lovecraft. vol. 2, Hippocampus Press, 2013. Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils. “Introduction.” Ecogothic in Nineteenth-­ Century American Literature, edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–20. Lovecraft, H.  P. “The Call of Cthulhu.” The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, edited by S.T. Joshi, Penguin, 1999. Moore, Jason W. “Introduction.” Anthropocene or Capitaloscene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, PM Press, 2016. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press, 2007.

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———, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Oziewicz, Marek. “Speculative Fiction.”  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. March 29, 2017. Oxford University Press. Accessed 24 Jan. 2021, 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78 Parker, Elizabeth. The Forest and the EcoGothic. Palgrave, 2020. Panu, Pihkala. 2020. “Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-­ Anxiety and Climate Anxiety.” Sustainability 12, no. 19, 2020. https://doi. org/10.3390/su12197836. Plumwood, Val. “The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land.”  Ethics and the Environment, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40339126. Accessed 31 May 2021. Rothman, Joshua. “The Weird Thoreau.” 14 January 2015. The New  Yorker. Accessed 15 Jan. 2021. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester University Press, 2003. Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” Iowa Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1978, pp. 71–86. Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ablity, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press, 2018. Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest. Knopf, 2021. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2013. Steffen, Will, Paul Crutzen, and John R.  McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio, volume 36, no. 7, 2011, pp. 614–21. Stephanou, Aspasia. Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media. Routledge, 2019. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of the Planet. Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Zero Books, 2011. ———, After Life. University of Chicago Press, 2010. Tompkins, David. “Weird Ecology: On the Southern Reach Trilogy.” 30 September 2014. Los Angeles Review of Books. Accessed 15 Jan 2021. Tuan, Yi-fu. Landscapes of Fear. Basil Blackwell, 1979. Vilkka, Leena. The Intrinsic Value of Nature. Rodopi, 1997. Wandersee, James H. and Elisabeth Schussler. “Preventing Plant Blindness.” American Biology Teacher vol. 61, no. 2, 1999, pp. 82–86. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, 1983. Wohlleben, Peter. Das geheime Leben der Bäume. Ludwig Verlag, 2015. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/41949874. Accessed 19 Jan. 2021. Zalasiewicz, Jan A. The Earth after Us. Oxford University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 2

Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature Davina Höll

The Origins of the Microgothic Microbes are the smallest units of organic life. The imagination of a micro-­ life that exists beneath the sphere of human, animal, and plant has always been present in human reason (Nicolson 169). As a strong symbol for the intricacies of terrestrial and even extraterrestrial living beings as well as for life itself, microbes often stand in for the notion of a haunting as well as haunted nature. The development of optical devices, such as the microscope, only made visible what was already present in the people’s imaginary worlds (Drews 3). In the 1670s, the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie The research of this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) graduate school 2015 “Life Sciences – Life Writing” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and by the DFG Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2124 “Controlling Microbes To Fight Infections” (CMFI) at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

D. Höll (*) Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_2

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van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) discovered “animalcules,” tiny little ‘animals’ that only became visible to the human eye at a hundredfold magnification. The first news of the existence of microorganisms, invisible to the naked eye, provoked a highly ambivalent debate that was spurred by fascination and admiration on the one hand as well as by disbelief and repulse, ridicule, or scientific pessimism on the other (Nicolson 167–72; Košenina). Until today, the invisible life of microbes evokes the double bind of fascination and horror. Years before the discovery of microorganisms, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1662) had already attributed epistemological value to all “mean and even filthy things” (Bacon 296). In his Novum organon scientiarium, published in 1620, Bacon vouched for making these ‘mean and filthy things’ the object of scientific investigation, “for whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence; and things mean and splendid exist alike” (Bacon 296). The first pictorial representations of microscopic objects that the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) published in his Micrographia in 1665 followed Bacon’s lead. The accurate as well as aesthetic etchings of minerals, parts of plants, or insects strongly influenced the perception and largely shaped the imaginations of the first microscopic investigations. They showed a minute delicacy, symmetry, and regularity of, for example, a fly’s wing or of urinary gravel that the macro forms of the microscopic objects often lacked. In 1743, British naturalist Henry Baker (1698–1774) stated in his popular standard work on microscopy, The Microscope made Easy, that the microscopic view of nature revealed “nothing […] but beauty and perfection” (Baker 297). Baker assured that it is the perfection of divine creation that unveils under the microscope. But, according to Baker, the microscope did not only praise divine perfection. It also demonstrated the imperfection of man-made creation, which the irregularity, coarseness, and asymmetry of any pencil or brush stroke proved when viewed under the microscope (292). In addition to optimistic views on the new technology, the optical revolution of the microscope also provoked highly critical reactions. For some, it seemed that not only the imperfection of human creativity but the imperfection of man himself was negotiated. The invention of the telescope had already fundamentally challenged the position of man within the natural order. The precariousness of the infinite vastness of space in the telescopic vision was now mirrored in the precariousness of the abyssal depth the microscopic view opened (Lightman 47). In addition to these

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ontological problems, even the solid materiality of the ‘closed’ human body became threatened. Already Leeuwenhoek had discovered that the human body was shared with ‘little animals’ that, for example, inhabited the human mouth (O’Malley 36). And when the microscope was directed at the human skin, it showed that the supposed borderlines of the human body were by no means as clearly demarcated as they might seem. The apparently smooth and mostly even outlines of the human frame dissolved into endless cratered landscapes when approached with the microscopic gaze. The observation that the human body seemed to be rather fluidly bounded and in this permeability not exclusive to human beings was as unbelievable as much as it was undesirable. The application of the magnificently magnifying instrument, thus, not only opened up new worlds of vision and knowledge, but it also evoked deep skepticism and outright rejection. Herman Melville exemplarily shows this in his novel Mardi and a Voyage thither (1849), when one of his protagonists states: “The microscope disgusts us” (Melville 381). From the beginning, the epistemological as well as the aesthetical values of objects magnified by the microscopic gaze were perceived highly ambiguously. Especially Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes was frequently described with attributes of the fantastic and the miraculous and the latter itself ridiculed as “fantastic who pronounced absurdities” (Nicolson 169). For a long time in scientific, social, and aesthetic discourse, the minute life forms to whom, no definite ontological nor morphological status could be ascribed, because of the lack of knowledge and magnification power, oscillated between “fairy” and “monster.” Laura Forsberg and Bernard Lightman, for example, attest the first half of the nineteenth century a thoroughly positive occupation with these fantastic microbes (Forsberg; Lightman; Keene; Seibold-Bultmann). Forsberg points out that in Great Britain there existed a surprising imaginative relationship between microscopical objects and the notion of fairies (Forsberg 639). In contrast, Lightman cites the representation of the microscopic world as the “work of some mighty genius of Oriental fable” (Lightman 46), which was postulated above all by numerous popular scientists in their works aimed primarily at a lay audience, but which also determined scientific discourses (Seibold-Bultmann). Martina King has also pointed to the aesthetic potential of microbes that were artistically explored around 1900, for example, in the Art Nouveau movement (King 106). But besides this “enchanting effect” (Forsberg 642) of microscopic discoveries, there persisted a dark, a gothic side to the notion of the world hitherto invisible.

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Already in 1838, the famous German microbiologist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1775–1876) stated in his treaty on microorganisms Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen that realm of the microcosm since its discovery has been depicted as a “monstrous ghost world” (Ehrenberg V).1 The microbe as an uncanny other that transgressed the limits of the body, knowledge, and even the imagination thus found its analogy in the notion of a monstrous apparition, a ghost.2 Thus, from the beginning, the microbial imagination was what I call a microgothic one. In the decades and centuries that followed the revelation of the invisible microworld, the idea of ghostly, monstrous microbes became extremely powerful. The notion of monsters and ghosts as the personified disturbing other, capable of violating the limits and integrity of the human body, was deeply rooted in nineteenth century’s collective consciousness and public discourse (Böhm and Sproll 37). When microbiologist pioneers such as Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) provided evidence for potential pathogenicity of microorganisms, the early established uncanny relation between microbes and harm was significantly reinforced. They showed that microorganisms were the cause of numerous major diseases at the time, such as anthrax, cholera, or tuberculosis. In the 1880s, Robert Koch’s research incorporated the knowledge about the danger of microbes as pathogens into the concept of modern bacteriology stating that microbes were the “smallest but most dangerous enemies of humankind” (Koch 660). In the popular imagination as well as (popular) scientific discourse, the ghostly microbes have become pathogenic foreign bodies (Hänseler 29), which invade the body as the inhuman other to damage and ultimately conquer it. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, despite the increase in bacteriological knowledge, the uncanny microbes had lost nothing of their threatening nature.

“All monstrous, all prodigious things”: William Heath’s “Monster Soup” The imagination of the microbes as a spectral hazard from a non-human outside that imperils the human inside has not only decisively influenced public discourse, it has also found its way into art and literature. Maybe the earliest pictorial depiction of ghostly microbes is the colored engraving created by the London caricaturist William Heath (1794/1795–1840) in

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1828. I argue, the picture that bears the significant title “Monster Soup” became an icon of the microgothic.

William Heath, Monster Soup, colored engraving, 1828

Around 1830, Heath was a leading London caricaturist (Heneage), but today he is widely underappreciated and hardly known (Mellby). However, his colored engraving became very influential, especially in connection with the depiction of cholera. Cholera was one of the major pandemic threats that ravaged the entire nineteenth century, although the first outbreak of the disease on the British Isles was yet to occur when the picture was published in 1828. It is one of the first graphic testimonies to refer to the connection between polluted water and the danger it poses to the health of its consumers. In doing so, it is an impressive example of the seismographic and even anticipatory potential of art and culture (Smeele 17) that lastingly shaped the imaginative and imaginary worlds of the nineteenth century and beyond. Heath’s caricature consisting of a double frame that shows a lady dropping her teacup in disgust while her other hand holds on to what seems to be the tube of a microscope yet at the same time bears significant resemblance to the eyepiece of a telescope. The setting refers to the context of

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microscopy, thus also evokes its contemporary parallelism of microscopy and telescopy as the new media for making the invisible visible, both of which have fundamentally shaken the human self-image in the order of things. A round section directly attached to the tube, which has been part of the fixed sign repertoire of microscopy since the publication of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, visualizes what the view through the ocular reveals. The detail shows the content of her beverage, namely, as the bottom title reads: “Microcosm. dedicated to the London Water Companies. 1. Brought forth all monstrous, all prodigious things, 2. hydras, and gorgans, and chimeras dire. (vide Milton).” Within the same frame, above the picture, the following is specified: “Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water being a correct representation of that precious stuff done out to us!!!” Following the intermedial invitation “vide Milton,” meaning “see Milton,” the viewer is drawn into the hellish world of the second book of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Here, Satan, after falling into hell, makes his way to the world of mankind to corrupt it. But before he overcomes the gate of hell and the intermediate realm to earth with the help of the guardian figures of sin, death, and chaos, he roams about the expanses of hell itself, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverts, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire. (Milton B.II, v. 624–28)

Heath thus equated the haunted nature of the Thames’ water, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was distributed to the population as drinking water by most of London’s water supply companies with the hostile habitat of the underworld. Here, all life dies but death lives and nature produces things that are so repulsive and unspeakable that they could hitherto not even have been imagined. A stronger counterargument to the often-postulated thesis of an “enchantment” of the microscopy discourse in the nineteenth century as mentioned beforehand seems hardly possible. Since the early nineteenth century, the magnification powers of microscopes were still comparatively low, so that the morphology of the still mostly invisible life forms had to be imagined more than they could be derived from actual observations. Their phenotypes were, thus, mostly inspired by other visible, more or less small, animals often perceived as

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eerie themselves. Accordingly, Heath’s caricature shows the merging images of bats, fish, beetles, crayfish, and worms, which Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) had already brought into a nightmarish synthesis. In one of his most famous paintings, the triptych The Temptation of Saint Anthony (around 1500), he depicts a variety of monstrous hybrid figures of diverse aerial and underwater life forms, some of which show astonishing similarities to the ghostly microbes of Heath. By imaginatively interweaving the microorganisms across media with the “monstrous and prodigious things” of the hellish world from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Heath strikingly visualizes the uncanny idea of microorganisms that have existed for a long time and that persisted even on the fringes of the triumphal march of modern microscopy. The frightening, until then still fantastic, assumption that ghostly microorganisms in the drinking water derived from the Thames could threaten the well-being of London’s population had been discussed before, but only at the end of the century did it become a scientific fact. In the nineteenth century, more powerful microscopes were developed, and by the end of the century, it was finally possible to reveal the world of the invisible to the human eye. But even after their “discovery,” microbes did not lose their eerie character. Skepticism about their existence persisted, and their elaborately constructed visibility remained doubted. After all, it required complicated technologies and processes; a range of nutrients, fixatives, and dyes; and the knowledge of what was to be seen, to visualize the invisible: “At a basic level, it was hard to see what Koch saw” (Whooley 150). Also, the ever-improving microscopes seemed to confirm the especially disturbing and threatening perception of microbes. The epoch-making discoveries of medical microbiology and bacteriology provided evidence of their potential danger, without emphasizing their usefulness. Indeed, the absolute necessity of their existence within the natural order was mostly left out. Old and new skepticism, the still uncanny appearance despite gradually improving visibility, as well as the intangible, but therefore no less threatening pathogenicity of microbial life manifested their ghostlike nature. Heath’s image of ghostly microbes is, thus, an early visualization of the ecogothic, a literary method and theory that is sensitive to “the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervades the relationships of humans with the nonhuman world” (Keetley and Sivils 1). Within the ecogothic, literary texts are questioned concerning their concept of nature as a “space of crisis” in which the human and non-human coexist in a mutually

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precarious relationship (Smith and Hughes 3). This central question provides information about how in literature an existential threat to human beings seems to emanate from the “inhuman other,” “as a disturbed and disturbing natural world, one in which boundaries between the human and the nonhuman become blurred” (Keetley and Sivils 11). It is often man himself who, by acting ecologically irresponsible, transforms nature into an existential threat in the first place. Ecogothic texts make extensive use of the formal vocabulary of gothic romanticism (Smith and Hughes 2) and in doing so transform nature into “haunted landscapes” (Heholt 1) turning the inhuman into a “literary monstrosity” (Del Principe 1). William Heath’s caricature “Monster Soup” is a transmedia and interdisciplinary allusive testimony to the early years of modern microscopy around the 1830s. It has a far-reaching effect as it became a “key stepping stone in tracing the alternate narratives to miasma theory” (Smeele 18) and, as I argue, in its eerie depiction of microscopic life a ‘hinge piece’ in the aesthetic discourse of epidemics. Heath’s caricature becomes, as an early example of ecogothic imagery, also the iconographic archetype of the microgothic that imagines the invisible world of microorganisms as threatening haunted nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most important modern American authors addressed these complexities in a unique literary way creating an outstanding poetical example of the uncanniness of microbial life and its interactions with the human.

“[P]rofoundly vicious, treacherous and malignant”: Mark Twain’s Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes Mark Twain (1835–1910) was “deeply concerned with epistemological questions” (Ketterer xiv) and dealt intensely with scientific discourses and technological innovations of his time (Cummings). Possessing a “reasonably impressive understanding of the contemporary scientific thought” (Hume 77), he was fascinated by the imaginative and speculative force of the world of the microcosm (Lindborg 653). Twain was familiar with contemporary microbiological literature like The Life of the Germ (1897) by the famous American bacteriologist Herbert William Conn (Weed 220). He repeatedly reflected on the intricacies of microbial life especially in connection to their actual as well as imaginative significance for humans in his notebooks, journals, and in personal conversations. His interest was

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also mirrored in a recurring literary examination into the scientific, social, and philosophical dimensions of the microbial worlds. The conclusions he drew from this intensive occupation with the realm of the invisible were grim. However, this was only the logical consequence of a deeply pessimistic understanding of nature per se that resulted in a decidedly (eco)gothic imagination, which a notebook entry from November 1895 impressively depicts: […] there is nothing kindly, nothing beneficent, nothing friendly in Nature towards any creature […] Nature’s attitude towards all life is profoundly vicious, treacherous and malignant. (Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook 255)

But mankind had no better position in Twain’s conception of the world’s order. In an entry from August 12, 1884, Twain writes: “I think we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast creature’s veins” (Twain, Notebooks & Journals III 56). The notion of the parasitical trichina prominently demonstrates the ambivalence between fascination and horror, which Twain thinks dominates the world of the microcosm. His analogy of humans with parasites not only reveals a levelling of the hierarchy of life—at the top of which man seemed to stand unchallenged—but also manifests a poor image of humanity itself. Mankind, as Twain sees it, is merely a parasitic life form that ekes out an existence unnoticed yet not unharmful in the body of a much larger organism to exploit and to destroy, according to the common parasite habitus. Even the change of perspective that Twain adopts elsewhere to explore the human-microbe relationship could not alter this dark imagination of nature’s macroworlds and microworlds. Twain’s first biographer and editor, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861–1937), gives an account of a conversation in which Twain dealt with the question of the “forces of creation” and held forth the shortcomings of the human race (Paine 1535). Twain believed that since the moment of his birth, man only tried to stand up to the numerous adversities of life, for which he is by no means equipped: “[…] he’s the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures […] a rickety sort of thing […] a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities […] always undergoing repairs” (Paine 1361). Accordingly, in Twain’s opinion, man is by no means the crown of creation; he is only a deficient vanity, at best, “a basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes” (Paine 1362). These dark imaginings of humans and microbes and their

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interactions and interdependences, which find their counterpart in the idea of nature and, thus, life itself as “profoundly vicious, treacherous and malignant,” are also typical for his late literary works. They are exceptionally executed in his microbial texts, The Great Dark (1898), “The Victims” (1902), and Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes (1905), which are not only ecogothic but in terms of their subject matter, aesthetics, and poetics decidedly microgothic. Twain’s first fictional microgothic text, The Great Dark, which he called a “bacillus dream” (Tuckey, “Introduction Which Was the Dream” 25), is in its nightmare setting a paradigmatic gothic space, a “state between sleeping and waking, or indeed, death and life” (Martin 206). It demonstrates the uncanny indissolubility of dream and reality, which is merged with the monstrous world of microbes on multiple intertwined and intra-­ textual reality levels. The second microgothic writing, the short draft “The Victims,” is another example of Twain’s deeply pessimistic worldview, in which “all living creatures are so made that they must feed upon other living things” (Tuckey, “Introduction Fables of Man” 4). It is the story of a cruel cannibalistic picnic banquet that none of the guests—ranging from microbe to man—survive. Thus, the text shows, that the actual hierarchy of the living seems to be determined by the logic of “universal cannibalism” (Tuckey, “Introduction Fables of Man” 4), a natural law for which man is no exception. The literary highlight of Twain’s intensive study of microscopy and the microcosms is revealed without question in the novel fragment Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, written in 1905 but posthumously published in 1967 (Tuckey, “Introduction Which Was the Dream”). In this text, the narratological structure of which is probably unparalleled in the history of modern literature, the narrator is a former human scientist who, due to a failed magic experiment, has been transformed into a microbe. He is named “Bkshp” but called “Huck” by the microbial co-­ inhabitants as an abbreviation of its middle name “Huxley.” The microbial protagonist now lives in the body of the vagrant “Blitzkowski,” who recently had immigrated from Hungary. However, despite his microbial appearance, Huck’s former human consciousness has partly remained and takes possession of him in frequent flashbacks. The microbial first-person narrator reports from the retrospective of 3000 years of microbial time, equivalent to about 3 weeks in human time on the challenges of being a bacterium in the body of his host, supplemented by notes added 7000 more microbial years later. Drawing from the nightmarish setting of the

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Great Dark, as well as from the predatory cannibalistic notion of “The Victims,” the text creates an uncanny ecosystem of death and decay. In the inclusive ecological model that is sustained by the hybridity of its components, humans and microbes are as dependent on each other as they are harmful to one another. The “hoary and mouldering old bald-­headed tramp” “is wonderfully ragged, incredibly dirty, […] malicious, malignant, vengeful, treacherous, […], unspeakable profane, his body is a sewer, a reek of decay, a charnel house, and contains swarming nations of all different kinds of germ vermin that have been invented for the contentment of man” (“Three Thousand Years” 436). For his microbes, he is “their world, their globe, lord of their universe, its jewel, its marvel, its miracle, its masterpiece” (“Three Thousand Years” 436), but for the narrator, a “pulpy old sepulchre” as soon as his “man-nature” (“Three Thousand Years” 437) overtakes him. The description of Blitzowski as a habitat of microbes reflects Twain’s ambiguously pessimistic understanding of nature as “vicious, treacherous and malignant” (Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook 255) and of humans on the level of microbial perception in almost identical formulation as “basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes” (Paine 1362). For while the Blitzowski cosmos is a perfect miracle for most microbes, to the human part of the microbial narrator it is just a disgusting, physically and morally corrupted cesspool and a contaminated living grave. Blitzowski becomes a veritable zombie with his body transformed into a gothic landscape. Thus, in Three Thousand Years, humans and microbes in their transgressive hybridity are both described as grotesque bodies that merge into each other’s environments. With that they ultimately become haunted natures to each other. The sinister undertone persists throughout the entire text, despite various attempts at thinking the human-microbe relationship as more positive. Twain had intensively studied, among other things, H.W.  Conn’s popular scientific standard work, The Life of the Germ, in which Conn also highlighted the useful aspects of bacteria and postulated: “Bacteria, in general, are agents for good rather than for ill” (Conn 129). But for Twain, “[t]he negative side of the adventures with microbes was more impressive” (Lindborg 656). In Three Thousand Years, the cruelly indifferent cycle of life, which permeates micro- and macrocosms equally, is an eternal cycle of infection “and endless chain of predation” (Taylor 483), in which epidemics become the driving force:

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The inexorable logic of the situation was this: there being a Man, with a Microbe to infect him, and for him to be indifferent about; and there being a Sooflasky,3 with a Swink4 to infest him and for the said Sooflsaky to be indifferent about: then it follows, for a certainty, that the Swink is similarily infested, too…and…that below that infester there is yet another infester that infests him – and so down and down and down till you strike the bottomest bottom of created life – if there is one, which is extremely doubtful. (Twain, “Three Thousand Years” 527)

Thus, Mark Twain’s Three Thousand Years, together with his other microbial writings, are key texts for the intricacies of human-non-human-­ environmental entanglements especially in the frame of epidemics. The hybridization of man and microbe that Mark Twain performs by fusing a human scientist with a bacterium already problematizes in a poetically, ethically, and epistemologically radical way which from today’s humanity’s perspective is theoretically grasped, for example, under the term “trans-­ corporeality” (Alaimo), and investigated in the life sciences through inclusive human-non-human concepts like the microbiome, the symbiont, or the holobiont. Since the problematic interaction of humanity and its human as well as non-human environments is one of the most pressing topics of the ‘One Health’5 debate, these concepts are of special interest for their possibly vital ecological and biomedical significance and thus are researched in a variety of interdisciplinary and highly funded research projects around the globe.

The Microbiome and Its Epistemological and Aesthetic Challenges in BioArt Microgothic aesthetics seemed to have been mostly absorbed in the “outbreak narrative” of the abundant contagion literature published in the last decades. As Priscilla Wald argues: Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together as they animate the landscape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance and impending disaster. (Wald)

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In this regard, especially the zombie genre perpetuates the distinct gothic notion of microbes as uncannily harmful agents of infection that may not only devastate bodies but entire societies and ultimately even the world, at least as we know it (Schweitzer 149; Abbott 81). But somehow, the microbes themselves have been lost along the way. They seem to lurk in the shadows of the disasters they bring instead of being the protagonists of their own outbreak narratives. Moreover, it might seem that within the biomedical concept of the microbiome that vouches for a peaceful, even advantageous coexistence of human and diverse non-human lifeforms, the microgothic imagination will ultimately become outdated. However, the contrary is the case. The advances in microbiome research in the last decade have raised again questions that lie at the core of both scientific and artistic investigation. It has been shown that humans share their bodies with a multitude of non-human organisms which seem to have a direct influence on our physical state as well as mental well-being and respectively ill-being. These findings do not only question how human and non-­ human life forms interact or how our outer environments are connected with the environments within, but they also question what it means to be human at all (Morar and Bohannan). The original ambivalence of fascination and fear in the face of a ubiquitous inter-, intra-, and extracorporeal microbial world is powerfully reinforced by the challenges of the necessity to think of new concepts regarding the human self (Rees et  al.) and of interhuman and non-human entanglements, especially in the face of multifariously intertwined massive global crises such as climate change and an assumed post-antibiotic era. However, these encompassing demands ask for multifaceted collaborations in which science, politics, society, and the arts jointly strive for answers. A cogent example of that fruitful collaboration is BioArt. Although art and science have been deeply entangled ever since, BioArt is a comparatively young artistic movement where the borderlines of both fields are purposely crossed. Between laboratories and artist’s studios, scientifically trained artists and/or artistically interested scientists take innovative ideas to the extreme and beyond. In doing so, they mutually investigate the “shadows of our understanding” of biotechnological progress (Bello 9). Artists and scientists work together using biotechnological techniques and tools on living material to create art that lives, relies on existent life forms, or becomes a new life form. Through these productive processes and by reflecting on them, BioArt seeks to demonstrate, critique, and sometimes disrupt the visions of biotechnology. BioArt even produces novel

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knowledge that fruitfully feeds back into scientific discourse. In the last decades, the intricacies of microbes, humans, and their shared environments have become a major theme of BioArt (Hauser 193). In BioArt approaches to the world of the unseen, microbes become an essential part of the artistic process of knowledge production as well as of the scientific processes of art production. Making microbes objects, media, and agents of these processes, BioArt decidedly points to the uncanny void of the still widely unknown yet interconnected realms of the micro- and macrocosms. In doing so, BioArt often envisions these realms as haunted and haunting natures and, thus, perpetuates if not reinvents the microgothic. This ‘new’ microgothic of BioArt enquires into the epistemological and (anti-)aesthetic challenges that microbes pose as the exemplary analysis of the artworks and theoretical reflections of Anna Dumitriu (*1969) will show in the following.

“And I held it in my hand, the most terrifying of all ills”: Anna Dumitriu’s The Bacterial Sublime Anna Dumitriu is an internationally renowned British artist and a pioneer of BioArt, especially in the context of microbiome research. During her time as an artist-in-residence in the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, she became particularly interested in working with highly pathogenic bacteria. In her artistic practice, she thus explores the aesthetic, cultural, and societal impacts of some of the most dangerous microorganisms. In doing so she also asks for the ethical implications of her and other works of BioArt6 and thus ultimately renders the artist as an “infective agent” transmitting art into science and science into art (Rapp and de Lutz). Scientifically trained in microbiology and engaged with microbial pathogens for more than 15 years, she is permitted access to the highest security level laboratories in the United Kingdom. Dumitriu’s artistic preoccupation with not only highly hazardous but also highly culturally charged microorganisms such as the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis or the Mycobacterium tuberculosis influenced the theoretical concept of what she calls the “bacterial sublime” (Dumitriu, The Bacterial Sublime). Her concept is based predominantly on Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). She draws especially from Burke’s view on the microscopic world that he had added in the second edition of his Enquiry:

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so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise; when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense, when we push out discoveries yet downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and in the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme littleness from the very vast itself. (Burke 128)

Thus, Dumitriu sees the “bacterial sublime” as a combination of “terror and awe as we reflect on the impact of these minute life forms, whose complex behaviors we are only now beginning to understand” (Dumitriu, The Bacterial Sublime). Processing the “fact that more bacteria are living on the ends of our fingers than there are people in the world and more bacterial cells in our bodies than human ones” ultimately leads us, according to Dumitriu, to “the delightful horror, Burke described” (Dumitriu, “Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0” 37–38). As a BioArtist Dumitriu normally makes use of a wide range of materials and techniques to merge, for example, living matter, textiles, historical artifacts, and digital media, into complex provocative as well as compelling, often interactive installations, performances, and entire exhibitions. However, in the face of the first encounter with the bacterial sublime in a BSL 3 lab, she “was unable to create any practical artworks using the organisms that could leave the lab” (The Bacterial Sublime). Instead, language became the sole means to transform the tremendous experience into art. In a paper she presented at the 2012 “Mutamorphosis Conference,” she relates her first encounter with the bacterial sublime: Finally we turned up a tree-lined avenue, laid out to military precision […] Inside they told me stories of the past […] The stories should have been frightening, but they were funny, somehow comforting […] My mind strained at the edges of its ability to hold this information, it should have been terror that I felt, but it was fascination, a kind of thrill […] all my dexterity was lost […] And I held it in my hands, the most terrifying of all ills […] I tried to commune with the organism, with the enormity of what I was doing, but could only hold that sublime thought it [sic!] my mind for a few seconds at a time. (The Bacterial Sublime)

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Although Dumitriu tentatively labelled the excerpt above as a “written description of the experience” (The Bacterial Sublime), it shows a decided literaricity. The announced lab report is a remarkable document of Life Writing that tries to come to terms with an artist’s lived experience of seeking “the aesthetic sensation of the sublime” (The Bacterial Sublime) and the limitations of this quest. Syntax and rhythm of her sentences evoke an almost hymnic tune—“And I held it in my hand, the most terrifying of all ills” (The Bacterial Sublime)—that underpins the experiences’ gravity and marks the poeticity of her “written description” (The Bacterial Sublime). Zooming in from an icy landscape to the sterile laboratory environment, displaying her intellectual thriving for and her bodily reaction to the encounter with the bacterial sublime, and juxtaposing historical accounts and intertextual references with the contemporary normalities of cutting-edge science settings in her narrative, she finally admits the ephemeral of the sublime. In doing so, Dumitriu effectively demonstrates the various layers of ambiguity in the face of her venture of encountering the bacterial sublime and gives the narrative a decidedly gothic undertone. Although “the modern procedures of the lab, the way…[her] inquiry was structured” (The Bacterial Sublime) did not permit the genuine sublime experience she was hoping for, at the end of her account she acknowledges that “some sense of the ‘bacterial sublime’ is still within me every time I step inside a microbiology lab” (The Bacterial Sublime). The latency of the threat, even more, due to its potential to become manifest renders the laboratory haunted by the (microbial) nature that it seemingly had contained, sterilized, and controlled and nature haunted by the vastness of deadly (microbial) threats known and yet to become known. The artist who has worked with the most dangerous microorganisms known so far for years is haunted by their, however elusive, sublimity. Her personal and artistic engagement with the “monstrous forms of life” (The Bacterial Sublime) thus becomes a gothic one. Since Dumitriu’s experience—which she shares with most laboratory-based BioArtists—is not direct but mediated through a laboratory setting and shielded by the barriers of Petri dishes, protective gloves, goggles, and suits, it is a genuinely sublime, a bacterial sublime experience. As the sublime has always been an integral part of the gothic (Milbank 236), Dumitriu’s bacterial sublime becomes emblematic for the new, twenty-first-century microgothic.

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Conclusion: The Persistence of the Microgothic The new microgothic builds upon the uncanny imagination that unseen micro life has always evoked, and I argue that through the processes of knowledge production, and the ever-advancing visualization of the invisible, the uncanniness of the micro life is not weakened but revived and even extended. Due to new hygiene regimen, the effective application of disinfectants, as well as the discovery and extensive administration of antibiotics in the first half of the twentieth century, for a short period, the potentially deadly threats caused by microbes seemed to gradually lose their force. The end of infectious diseases seemed within reach (Lederberg 287). Consequently, it appeared that the dread of disastrous infectious diseases caused by maliciously uncanny imagined microbes would fade by and by and the growing knowledge of the microbe’s beneficial properties would ultimately replace the microgothic imagination of these fascinating and mysterious invisible agents. However, the apparently “magic bullets” of disinfectants and antibiotics too soon became less and less effective. Now, twenty-first-century lived experience teaches us that in the face of the fatal combination of ever-increasing antibiotic resistances and new emerging infectious diseases not only challenges the future of rethinking human-­ non-­ human relationships but also the future of being human per se. Encountering microbes in that way also implies encountering human death individual as well as collective. The WHO states that “[a]ntibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today” (“Antibiotic Resistance”). Alternative suitable means of answering to the challenges of infectious diseases long believed to have been defeated, as well as the new emerging ones, like the current COVID-19 pandemic, are desperately searched for yet hard to find. In the face of a feared apocalyptic post-antibiotic era (Ironstone 331), or an “antibiotic winter” (Blaser 185), microbes are again envisioned as “invisible enemies” against whom war is to be declared.7 The “science fiction” of the pre-bacteriological era that had imagined microbes as invisible invaders that threaten the integrity and intactness of the human body became a scientific fact by the end of the nineteenth century. However, this factuality did not come with any kind of certainty nor did it offer any notion of supremacy. On the contrary: twenty-first-century microbiology teaches us that our bodies are porous and permeable to our non-human environments; that the human body is “home to hundreds of species of bacteria, protists, fungi, and viruses”; that “our microbiome

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may include three times more microbial cells than human cells”; and that “we are at least from the standpoint of DNA, more microbial than human” (Morar and Bohannan 150). In doing so, the current findings of microbiome research question the very understanding of the concept of being human. Anxieties and fears that are deeply connected with the notion of the human body that is permeable to environmental influences and simultaneously influences the environment by its permeability again evoke a genuinely gothic perception of the human-non-human entanglements. Invisible yet essential interchange render the shared environments of humans and non-humans as mutually haunted by each other’s traces of existence. Thus, despite committed attempts to conceptualize the relationship between humans and microbes more holistically and therewith to cast it in a more positive light, the microgothic persists. However, in its genuine twenty-first-century theoretical, aesthetical, and poetical disguise, it still echoes the fascination and horror of the earliest days of microbial imagination.

Notes 1. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. I employ the ghost rather as a “conceptual metaphor […] pointing to the tangibly ambigous” (Blanco and Peeren 9) than as an entity as such. This allows for a rich imagery of the ghost including monstrous figurations. 3. Microbial term for “microbe.” 4. Microbial term microbial microbes that inhabit human microbes. 5. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach  – working at the local, regional, national, and global levels – with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment” (“One Health”). In doing so One Health especially focuses on food safety, zoonoses (diseases that can spread between animals and humans, such as COVID-19), and antibiotic resistance (“One Health”). 6. See Dumitriu, “Art as a Meta-Discipline”; Fawcett and Dumitriu; Dumitriu, “Trust Me, I’m an Artist”. 7. French President Emmanuel Macron declared “Nous sommes en guerre” in his speech to the nation in March. US “wartime” President Donald Trump, by calling SARS-CoV-2 a “China virus”, highlighted the xenophobic dimension of military metaphors in the context of epidemics (Craig 3).

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Works Cited Abbott, Stacey. Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010. “Antibiotic Resistance.” WHO Antibiotic Resistance. Accessed 31 July 2020. Bacon, Francis. The Novum Organon: Or, A True Guide to the Interpretation of Nature. Translated by George William Kitchin, University Press, 1855. Baker, Henry. The Microscope Made Easy. R. Dodsley, 1743. Bello, Monica. “Foreword.” Art as We Don’t Know It., edited by Erich Berger et al., School of Art and Design, 2020, pp. 8–9. Blaser, Martin J. Missing Microbes: How Killing Bacteria Creates Modern Plagues. Oneworld Publications, 2018. Böhm, Alexandra, and Monika Sproll. “Ein ‘Schlag ans Herz’ des Empire - William Heaths Karikatur ‘Monster Soup.’” Fremde Figuren. Alterisierungen in Kunst, Wissenschaft Und Anthropologie Um 1800, edited by Alexandra Böhm and Monika Sproll, Königshausen & Neumann, 2008, pp. 27–40. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 2nd ed., R. and J. Dodsley, 1759. Conn, Herbert William. The Life of the Germ. D. Appleton and Company, 1904. Craig, David. “Pandemic and Its Metaphors: Sontag Revisited in the COVID-19 Era.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, July 2020, p. 136754942093840. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1177/1367549420938403. Cummings, Sherwood. Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind. Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Drews, Gerhart. Bakterien  – ihre Entdeckung und Bedeutung für Natur und Mensch. 2., überarb. und aktualisierte Aufl., Springer Spektrum, 2015. Dumitriu, Anna. “Art as a Meta-Discipline: Ethically Exploring the Frontiers of Science and Biotechnology.” Technoetic Arts, vol. 14, no. 1, June 2016, pp. 105–12, doi:https://doi.org/10.1386/tear.14.1-­2.105_1. ———. “Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0: Investigating the Sublime in Bacterial and Digital Communication.” Technoetic Arts, vol. 11, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 27–46, doi:10.1386/tear.11.1.27_1. ———. The Bacterial Sublime. 2012, https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/ the-bacterial-sublime/. ———. “Trust Me, I’m an Artist: Building Opportunities for Art and Science Collaboration through an Understanding of Ethics.” Leonardo, vol. 51, no. 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 83–84, doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01481. Ehrenberg, Christian Gottfried. Die Infusionsthierchen Als Vollkommene Organismen. Ein Blick in Das Tiefere Organische Leben Der Natur. Voss, 1838.

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Fawcett, Nicola J., and Anna Dumitriu. “Bacteria on Display—Can We, and Should We? Artistically Exploring the Ethics of Public Engagement with Science in Microbiology.” FEMS Microbiology Letters, vol. 365, no. 11, June 2018, doi:10.1093/femsle/fny101. Forsberg. “Nature’s Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy.” Victorian Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 2015, pp.  638–66, d ­ oi:10.2979/ victorianstudies.57.4.03. Hänseler, Marianne. Metaphern unter dem Mikroskop: die epistemische Rolle von Metaphorik in den Wissenschaften und in Robert Kochs Bakteriologie. Chronos, 2009. Hauser, Jens. “Rehabilitating Bacteria: An Epistemological Art/Science Interface.” Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Empathy, and Agency in 21st-­ Century Media Arts, Leuven University Press, 2020, pp. 193–211. Heholt, Ruth. “Introduction: Unstable Landscapes: Affect, Representation and a Multiplicity of Hauntings.” Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016, pp. 1–20. Heneage, Simon. “Heath, William [Pseud. Paul Pry].” The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.  C. G.  Matthew and B.  Harrison, Oxford University Press, 23 Sept. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/66123. Hume, Beverly A. “Twain’s Satire on Scientists: Three Thousand Years among the Microbes.” Essays in Arts and Sciences, vol. 26, Oct. 1997, pp. 71–84. Ironstone, Penelope. “Me, My Self, and the Multitude: Microbiopolitics of the Human Microbiome.” European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 22, no. 3, Aug. 2019, pp. 325–41, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431018811330. Keene, Melanie. Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain. Oxford University Press, 2015. Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils. “Introduction.” Ecogothic in Nineteenth-­ Century American Literature, edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–20. Ketterer, David. The Science Fiction of Mark Twain. Archon Books, 1984. King, Martina. “Anarchist and Aphrodite: On the Literary History of Germs.” Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, edited by Thomas Rütten and Martina King, De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 101–30. Koch, Robert. “Über Bakteriologische Forschung. ” Gesammelte Werke von Robert Koch, edited by Julius Schwalbe, Georg Thieme, 1912, pp. 650–60. Košenina, Alexander. “Schönheit im Detail oder im Ganzen? Mikroskop und Guckkasten als Werkzeuge und Metaphern der Poesie.” Das Schöne soll Sein: Aisthesis in der deutschen Literatur. Festschrift für Wolfgang F. Bender, edited by Peter Heßelmann, Aisthesis, 2001, pp. 101–27. Lederberg, J. “Infectious History.” Science, vol. 288, no. 5464, Apr. 2000, pp. 287–93, doi:https://doi.org/10.1126/science.288.5464.287.

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Lightman, Bernard. “The Microscopic World.” Victorian Review, vol. 36, no. 2, 2010, pp. 46–49, doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2010.0006. Lindborg, Henry J. “A Cosmic Tramp: Samuel Clemens’s Three Thousand Years among the Microbes.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, vol. 44, no. 4, Jan. 1973, pp. 652–57. Martin, Philipp W. “Nightmare.” The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 206–07. Mellby, Julie. The Most Underappreciated of the British Caricaturists: William Heath. 2010, https://www.princeton.edu/~graphicarts/2010/01/the_ most_underappreciated_of_t.html. Melville, Herman. Mardi and a Voyage Thither. Edited by Herman Hayford, Northwestern University Press, 1970. Milbank, Alison. “The Sublime.” The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey Roberts, 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 235–40. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler, Rev. 2nd ed, Longman, 2007. Morar, Nicolae, and Brendan J. M. Bohannan. “The Conceptual Ecology of the Human Microbiome.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 94, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 149–75, doi:10.1086/703582. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Science and Imagination. Archon Books, 1976. O’Malley, Maureen. Philosophy of Microbiology. Cambridge University Press, 2014. “One Health.” Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, 17 Nov. 2020. “———.” World Health Organization, 21 Sept. 2017, https://www.who.int/ news-room/q-a-detail/one-health. Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain - A Biography - The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Harper and Brothers, 1912. Rapp, Regine, and Christian de Lutz. “The Bacterial Sublime. Reflections on the Art of Anna Dumitriu, a Unique ‘infective Agent’ in the Culture of Scientific Investigation.” [Micro]Biologies: The Bacterial Sublime Exhibition Catalogue for Art Laboratory Berlin, edited by Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz, 2014. Rees, Tobias, et  al. “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self.” PLOS Biology, vol. 16, no. 2, Feb. 2018, pp.  1–7, doi:10.1371/journal. pbio.2005358. Schweitzer, Dahlia. Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World. Rutgers University Press, 2018. Seibold-Bultmann, Ursula. “Monster Soup: The Microscope and Victorian Fantasy.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 25, no. 3, Mar. 2000, pp. 211–19, doi:https://doi.org/10.1179/030801800679242. Smeele, Wietske. “Grounding Miasma, or Anticipating the Germ Theory of Disease in Victorian Cholera Satire.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 49, no. 2, 2016, pp. 15–27, doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/ mml.2016.0046. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2013.

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Taylor, Matthew A. “Life’s Returns: Hylozoism, Again.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 135, no. 3, May 2020, pp. 474–91, doi:10.1632/pmla.2020.135.3.474. Tuckey, John Sutton. “Introduction Fables of Man.” Mark Twain’s Fables of Man, edited by John Sutton Tuckey, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 1–32. ———. “Introduction Which Was the Dream.” Mark Twain’s Which Was the Dream? And Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, edited by John Sutton Tuckey et al., 3. printing, Univ. of California Press, 1968, pp. 1–32. Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Notebook. Harper and Brothers, 1935. ———. The Mark Twain Papers. [...] Vol. 3: Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals (1883–1891). Edited by Frederick Anderson and Walter Blair, Univ. of California Press, 1979. ———. “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes.” Mark Twain’s Which Was the Dream? And Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, edited by John Sutton Tuckey and Walter Blair, 3. printing, Univ. of California Press, 1968, pp. 433–533. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke University Press, 2008. Weed, Kym. “Microbial Perspectives: Mark Twain’s Imaginative Experiment in Ethics.” Literature and Medicine, vol. 37, no. 1, 2019, pp. 219–40, doi:https:// doi.org/10.1353/lm.2019.0008. Whooley, Owen. Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 3

Black Mold, White Extinction: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” Dawn Keetley

Black mold suddenly seems everywhere: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011); Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015); Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016); Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017); Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017); Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018); Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the Third Floor (2019); the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story); and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020). These twenty-first-century fictions about black mold are part of an ongoing and broader “fungal weird” that began with Edgar Allan’s Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and continued with Charlotte Perkins

D. Keetley (*) English Department, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_3

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Gilman’s 1892 story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907) and its 1963 film adaptation Matango, as well as his “The Derelict” (1912); H.  P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” (1924); Harry Adam Knight’s The Fungus (1985); and Brian Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies” (1989). The fungal weird has also extended into the twenty-first century in the 2012 short story collection, Fungi; the video game The Last of Us (2013); M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014); Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014) and Alex Garland’s 2018 film adaptation, Aliya Whiteley’s novel The Beauty (2018); and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Mexican Gothic (2020)—to name just a few. Much has been written about the defining characteristics of the “weird” tradition, and a significant critical consensus has emerged. The weird lives just beyond the limits of human experience and knowledge, offering flashes of a world beyond. This world, despite escaping known natural laws, is not supernatural but thoroughly material; indeed, the difference between the “natural” and “supernatural” is blurred to the point of indistinction, forming what Emily Alder describes as “borderland natural-yet-­ unnatural phenomena” (5).1 The world of the weird has, moreover, always been there, imperceptible—liable to drive those who catch sight of it insane (as in so many of H. P. Lovecraft’s tales). The weird is quite distinct from the gothic in that, as Jonathan Newell aptly puts it, while the gothic focuses “on the human past and the human mind,” the weird centers the non-human (12). The weird should also be demarcated from the “uncanny,” as it is not rendered strange through repression but is irreducibly strange in itself and for itself; it is not a residue or a vestige, a memory, or a recovered trace of anything human; it is, again, thoroughly non-­ human. Indeed, China Miéville has written that the monsters of the weird, which he terms “abcanny,” are the antitheses of the uncanny; they are instead “teratological expressions of that unrepresentable and unknowable, the evasion of meaning” (“On Monsters” 381). In sum, the weird is composed of matter, an unrecognized “nature” that has long persisted alongside humans but has rarely been descried; it is profoundly disruptive of the familiar world and horrifying to those who glimpse it. Weird writers, Newell elaborates, propose a “form of reality difficult to cognize, one radically distinct from the human mind and from an anthropocentric viewpoint” (12).2 More so than the supernatural, the uncanny, or the gothic, the weird dislodges what Eileen Joy calls the “psychic-cultural-historical order” that literary and film criticism is typically dedicated to exploring (29). The weird shifts the anthropocentric frame.

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This chapter is concerned with weird hauntings, weird incarnations of human afterlives. A specifically weird haunting depicts the post-death state, typically spectral and ethereal, as entirely tangible matter. As Alder puts it, weird tales are “concerned with rather materialist ‘ghosts’” (6). Miéville has pointed out how the spiritual is disavowed in Lovecraft’s “world-saturating Weird”: there is only the “strangeness of the physical world itself” (“Weird” 510), which consists of what Lovecraft describes as “infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis” (“Notes”). Death is certainly a state that has remained inscrutably on the other side of a seemingly impassable boundary. Yet, in what many believe to be the ineffable “supernatural” post-death realm, we may persist not as ethereal “ghosts” but as matter we do not as yet understand. The fungal weird, I argue, figures its characters’ deaths, and what follows, as such a material state, specifically as a spreading fungus—a mycelial haunting, if you will. The texts I focus on here—Osgood Perkins’ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, Creepshow’s “Gray Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”— all represent the post-death state through black mold. But these stories are not only about individual death. Narratives featuring black mold are distinctively able to tell stories about species death in a warming world. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent proliferation of stories about black mold is no doubt driven by contemporary anxieties about the uncertain fate of humans on a warming planet: after all, black mold spreads where and when humans are not—in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.” In a further turn, though, I argue that these stories are not in fact species stories, despite the seemingly inclusive “us” of the “world without us.” Centering the blackness of black mold serves to highlight how what seems to be a story about human extinction (and a species post-death survival of some sort) is in fact a white story. The “world without us” is often actually the “world without whites.” Stories of black mold serve as anxious stories not of species death but of white death in the face of a spreading and racialized “darkness.” In fact, I argue that these stories do not only take up anthropogenic anxieties about global warming; they also worry about overpopulation, specifically the rising numbers of non-whites—the approaching tipping point in the USA, for instance, when a majority white population will shift to majority Black and brown. Black mold thus accrues a multiplicity of meanings in

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these texts of the fungal weird. It is a very material post-death state; it is the end of the “human”; and it materializes anthropogenic fears about the extinction of the white race.

Black Mold and Post-Death Existence Molds work particularly well to figure a post-death existence. One of the distinctive characteristics of molds, as of the fungal kingdom generally, is that, like death, they are still only dimly understood. Scientists guess that “more than 90% of the estimated 3.8 million fungi in the world are currently unknown” (Briggs; see also Sheldrake 3). As Helen Briggs puts it, scientists believe that there are thousands of different fungi in a given soil sample, “many of which are unknown and hidden—so-called ‘dark taxa.’” Like death, inscrutable fungi are associated with darkness. As Merlin Sheldrake points out, physicists have described 95 percent of the universe as “dark matter” and “dark energy” because “we don’t know anything about them.” Microbial life is similarly unknown and can thus, Sheldrake claims, be deemed “biological dark matter, or dark life” (17). Serving as an apt metaphor for death, “dark matter” fungi can equally helpfully figure an as-yet impenetrable post-death state, one that is centered not on the spirit but on matter—that is, an afterlife as the metamorphosis of dying and dead flesh into other dimly understood forms of life. After all, as a bio-degrader, mold grows across dead matter and converts it to life (Kenner). It is thus associated with the return from the dead. Creeping across what is dying, molds are essential to “the process whereby nutrients never leave the realm of living things, but simply get used again and again” (“Moulds”). Mold embodies a notion, in short, of the afterlife as a state in which the dead actually “never leave the realm of living things.” The post-­ death state is matter mutated into different matter. In their material depictions of death and post-death, stories of the fungal weird featuring mold inevitably challenge conceptions of life as well. Specifically, they unsettle conventional notions of the “human” as an exceptional species, its boundaries clearly demarcated. Sheldrake points out that “[y]ou carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells” and that the microbial sciences have thoroughly debunked the idea that “we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end.” We are not individuals, Sheldrake continues, but “ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes” (16–17). Biologist Margaret McFall-Ngai similarly affirms that humans are “not what we

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thought”—that “every ‘I’ is also a ‘we’” and that we are “more microbe than human” (M51–52). Johan Höglund has described this human and non-human assemblage specifically in terms of fungi in an article on M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, arguing that the human is part fungal community or “mycobiome.” I Am the Pretty Thing, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter,” and other stories of black mold suggest that while becoming overspread by creeping mold may signal human “death” in one sense (the death of the “person” or the “individual”), it is at the same time a continuation of life in another form. Death is not an abrupt alien takeover but a continuation of a “multispecies” assemblage that persists from life through death. Important instances of the recent fungal weird, both Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House are about hauntings as encroaching black mold, shaping a post-death state for their characters that figures death as a continuation of (a kind of) life. In I Am the Pretty Thing, a hospice nurse named Lily Saylor moves into the home of horror writer Iris Blum, who has end-stage dementia. Before long, Lily sees a ghostly woman haunting a particular place in the house, a place where she spots slowly spreading black mold. It is gradually revealed that the ghostly woman Lily sees is Polly Parsons, who features in Iris Blum’s best-known novel, The Lady in the Walls—except this novel may in fact be a true account of the house’s original owner. Polly’s husband built the house for her in the early nineteenth century, but then both of them disappeared the day after their wedding. (Lily glimpses a scene that suggests Polly’s husband bludgeoned her to death and hid her in the walls.) Throughout the film, the identities of Lily, Polly, and the protagonist of Blum’s The Lady in the Walls become blurred—a merging effected primarily through a dissolutive overspreading mold. The merging of the women in Perkins’ film, linked by mold, centers the inevitability of death and rot and is most evident in a scene just under halfway through the film. When Lily finally takes The Lady in the Walls down from the bookcase and opens it to the first page, Polly and Lily become woven together quite literally through the words on the page. The chapter begins by describing Polly’s birth and her mother’s death, and though the novel is written in the third person, the film shows us Polly narrating the words. Polly’s narration ends with her intoning, “But now I am dead. And, yes, I left the world just as I came into it. I am wearing nothing but blood.” After these words, the text in Blum’s novel weirdly

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shifts from Polly to Lily: “She [Polly] is wearing nothing but blood. Lily notices her own finger. Strange. The tip seems stained with a single dark spot.” Lily then closes the book and touches the photograph of Iris Blum on the cover; she pulls her finger away and looks at the black spot on it (enacting the words of the novel). Lily rubs the spot, but it persists. Lily then goes into the kitchen, and, as she is washing some blackberries, she notices a dark spot on her white arm; it grows and bubbles—just like the mold on the white wall of the house (Fig. 3.1). The film thus ties Lily to the dead Polly, represented by the black mold that spreads across the wall and then across Lily, signs of decay and death. And just as Polly speaks from beyond death—“But now I am dead”—so too will Lily: “This is how I rot.” Like Polly, Lily will die in the house and become a “ghost” figured as the lingering of matter—of mold-speckled walls, paper, and flesh. The film ends with shots of both Lily’s and Iris’s dead bodies in the house, dark stains spreading like mold.3 Indeed, the entire trajectory of I Am the Pretty Thing is toward death, but it is a death that seems already present at the beginning of the film and that cohabits with human life—a spreading black mold that suggests there is a current of life as a kind of “dark matter” that persists. Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House also offers a vision of the post-death state as matter that survives from life through death. Indeed, a character in the series, Steven Crain, offers a gloss on what we typically call the “supernatural” that resonates with definitions of the weird, saying that

Fig. 3.1  Mold and then bubbles spread over Lily’s arms, just as on the wall

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Fig. 3.2  The red room overrun with black mold (ep. 10)

there is no such thing as ghosts, only “natural phenomena that we understand and natural phenomena that we don’t” (ep. 1). Like I Am the Pretty Thing, Haunting represents post-death, a natural phenomenon that we don’t understand, as mold.4 Mold is mentioned only once in Shirley Jackson’s 1959 source novel—when the group first ventures into the library and Eleanor Vance stops at the door, “overwhelmed with the cold air of mold and earth which rushed at her” (75). In Flanagan’s series on the other hand, Hugh Crain discovers “veins of mold” spreading over the basement walls in episode seven, and from then on mold is central to the story, marking one of the distinctive characteristics of the adaptation (Fig. 3.2). The final episode takes place almost entirely in the red room— the most haunted room in the house and the origin and epicenter of the mold; the episode features repeated interspersed shots of its moldy walls and both living and dead characters, all of whom are covered with what looks like a black mold. “I’m not gone,” the dead Nell Crain tells her siblings, as black patches of rot appear to overspread both her and the walls—just as it does with Lily in I Am the Pretty Thing. While I Am the Pretty Thing at first offers glimpses of a conventional ghost (Polly), ethereal and white, Haunting renders any conventional ghosts intentionally indiscernible: indeed, popular media articles abounded pointing out the “hidden ghosts” (see, for instance, Tallerico). While the “ghosts” are hidden in the corners of the frame, black mold overruns the mise-en-scène in Haunting. Where there are dead and dying, there is mold (Fig. 3.3).

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Fig. 3.3  One of the dead in Haunting, covered, like the walls, with black mold (ep. 10)

White Post-Death Neither I Am the Pretty Thing nor Haunting explicitly references race, but what stands in for “human” in both—in life, death, and post-death— is actually white. Richard Dyer has urged that we make whiteness visible, not least by exploring its association with death. He argues that the “idea of whites as both themselves dead and as bringers of death is commonly hinted at in horror literature and film” and that horror is infused with anxiety about “whiteness as non-existence” (210–11). I Am the Pretty Thing and Haunting are indeed pervaded with a dread of white death and non-existence. And while the creeping of black mold over white characters marks a post-death survival in and as non-human life, this survival is tellingly figured as an overspreading blackness. Both I Am the Pretty Thing and Haunting, then, signal anxieties about white death in particular. In I Am the Pretty Thing, white mothers die (Polly’s mother), white mothers-to-be die (Polly on her wedding day), and the white and childless Iris and Lily die. The whiteness of these deaths of mothers and mothers-who-never-were—the death of white reproductivity, in other words—is foregrounded in the film. On the first page of The Lady in the Walls, for instance, we read that Lily is not required to wear white, but she always does. Outside the pages of the novel, Lily does indeed always wear white, matching the overwhelming whiteness of the

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other characters and the house and its walls. Indeed, in a comment apropos of nothing, Lily says in voiceover right after the scene in which black mold bubbles over her arms, “I am as white as a sail.” Lily’s whiteness, like a sail, is emphasized in that her last name is, not coincidentally, Saylor. The voiceover continues, moreover: “I tell this often to myself. I tell myself that nothing gets on me.” Lily wants to preserve her unstained whiteness—a whiteness associated, through both herself and Polly, with “prettiness,” a whiteness mirrored in an almost exclusively white mise-en-scène. But everything white dies and rots, and blackness encroaches. Even the snow turns black, Lily says in a voiceover at the end. Blackness is “the spot that spreads.” Like I Am the Pretty Thing, Haunting also centers latent anxieties about an extinction that is implicitly white. While Haunting’s mise-en-scène is often black (mold), its characters are not. There is only one Black character in The Haunting of Hill House—Arthur Vance, who marries Nell Crain. Not only does Arthur die, but it is a final death; he does not linger in Hill House in a post-death material state, which seems reserved only for white characters. Moreover, in marrying Nell, he marries the one Crain child who is fated to die, whose suicide by hanging has been predicted from the very beginning of the series. Nell is the “bent-neck lady” whom she sees as a child, thinking it is a ghost; this vision is her future self, and so the union of Nell and Arthur, one of dangerous miscegenation and dark futurity, has always been doomed. Their children, dark children, will never be born. White mothers and children may die in Haunting, as they do in I Am the Pretty Thing, vitiating white reproductive futurity; they survive, however, in other (material) forms of “haunting.”

Climate Crisis, Extinction Fears So why are we suddenly seeing the spread of narratives in which black mold proliferates as the sign of both death and a (white) material afterlife? In large part, it is because an increasingly evident climate crisis is ushering in a more thinkable story of human extinction. As Roy Scranton writes in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, we are now confronting that most philosophical of questions: how to die. “The greatest challenge we face,” he continues, is “understanding that this civilization is already dead” (21, 23). Many are now contemplating the demise of what Thacker calls the “world-for-us” (4–5). Instead, a “world-without-us” is coming increasingly to the fore, a world that “cannot co-exist with the human

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world-for-us.” This “world-without-us” is “the subtraction of the human from the world,” and it lies in a “nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific” (Thacker 5–6). Black mold embodies this “nebulous zone” in that it spreads over, merges, consumes, decomposes, and composes; it is the perfect metaphor for the encroachment of a world that is both “impersonal” and “horrific.” Black mold has become a central trope of human extinction in all kinds of imaginings of a “world-without-us.” In his 2007 book, The World Without Us, Weisman proclaims that “On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over.” Specifically, “invisible spores” will “penetrate” our “temperature-tuned interior[s],” which will “explode[e] in sudden outbursts of mold” (17–18). Weisman adds that mold will voraciously consume the exteriors of our built environment—walls, floors, and roofs (19). The artifacts of western civilization will not escape mold’s ravages: “fungi discolor and dissolve paintings in the Metropolitan beyond recognition” (45). In the History Channel series Life After People (2009–10), mold repeatedly decomposes what humans have created. In the season one episode, “Waters of Death” (2009), the narrator calls black mold a “microscopic predator” that will demolish buildings within mere decades. These apocalyptic texts featuring “predatory” black mold are multiplying because human annihilation is more conceivable in the face of dire warnings about escalating global warming: mold flourishes in wetness and warmth. As James Hamblin writes in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey (which hit Texas and Louisiana), “the significance of mold in human lives is expected to increase with rising sea levels and catastrophic weather events.” Flooding will become more common, he continues, “at least partly due to the warming of the ocean.” Black mold will increasingly invade where humans were, serving as a dread-inducing marker of incipient human vanishing. Small wonder that black mold is trespassing on our fictional texts too. Both I Am the Pretty Thing and The Haunting of Hill House include in their narratives references to excessive moisture and heat, signaling that their narratives about extinction and post-death are triggered in part at least by global warming. In Haunting, the episode in which mold is discovered in the basement is directly preceded by a furious and freakish storm that dumps enormous amounts of rain on the house. Hugh Crain and the caretaker have an extended conversation about how the black mold may be the result of water damage from the storm (ep. 7). And at the end of I Am the Pretty Thing, after Lily is dead and rotting in the

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house, she describes in voiceover how the winter was “unseasonably warm.” She continues that “it rained too much in the spring and the fruit hung heavy” and that the “sun in the summer months was unseasonably hot.” Her rotting, like the rotting fruit earlier, is directly connected to unusual heat and moisture. That textual markers of global warming are woven into plots about the death and post-death state of white characters serves as a reminder that concepts like climate crisis and “Anthropocene” are often normalized as “human” when in fact the effects of such phenomena on people of different races, economic classes, and geographical locations are profoundly uneven. In his article about the deadly lingering aftereffects of black mold in a post-Harvey Houston and post-Katrina New Orleans, Hamblin ends with the stark warning that “[m]old will mark the divide between people who can afford to escape it and people for whom the storm doesn’t end.”5 Speculations about the end of the “human” in the Anthropocene obscure the fact that different humans experience the Anthropocene in vastly different ways and, indeed, in disparate moments throughout history. As Kathryn Yusoff has written: “If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to Black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism” (xviii). There have already been, as Yusoff indicates in the very title of her book, “A Billion Black Anthropocenes”—many anthropogenic catastrophes, even endings, for Black and brown people. The Anthropocene, in other words, is not a monolith—and there is not one apocalyptic ending, not one extinction event, for one singular “human” species. The notion that multiple anthropogenic events affect communities (and people within communities) unevenly is raised in Shudder’s Creepshow segment “Gray Matter” (2019). Like I Am the Pretty Thing and The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter” depicts a fungal post-death “haunting” in the context of extreme heat and moisture. The segment adapts Stephen King’s 1973 short story, and King’s story, in turn, is clearly influenced by earlier instances of the fungal weird, notably William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict.” King’s story, like Hodgson’s stories, are apocalyptic visions of humans and their built environments subsumed by a living, spreading fungus. In the Creepshow adaptation of “Gray Matter,” Richie Grenadine is slowly taken over by a black mold that creeps over his home and body until he becomes a

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veritable fungal monster. The segment also centers on three older characters—the local general store owner (Dixie), the police chief, and the doctor—gathered together at a store as a hurricane approaches and who discover Richie’s fate when his desperate young son comes to the store for beer, and for help. When Chief and Doc venture to Richie’s home, they find his monstrous transformed fungal body, exponentially growing and, as the conclusion suggests, poised to take over the world. As Dixie says, they have six days until: “The end. The end of everything.” It is not, however, the end of “everything,” merely the end of everything recognizably human, since the human-mold hybrid is clearly living and sentient. Richie is surviving in some non-human form, as will those whom he consumes. Like I Am the Pretty Thing and Haunting, “Gray Matter” embeds its story of the human transformed into the fungal in a moment that evokes climate crisis. King’s original story is set in Maine and opens with a blizzard (105). The Creepshow adaptation, on the other hand, takes place further south, in the Carolinas, and the apocalyptic storm is a category four hurricane. Dixie, Doc, and Chief reminisce about Hazel, “the last category four in the region,” which was the worst hurricane of 1954. By shifting from blizzard to hurricane, winter to summer, Creepshow’s “Gray Matter” taps into distinctly twenty-first-century anxieties about global warming and increasing numbers of catastrophic storms (see Berardelli). But this is not the only anxiety that pervades the segment: Creepshow’s “Gray Matter” also centers population growth and decline, a concern absent from King’s story. The opening of the segment, the comic strip frame distinctive to the original Creepshow as well as to Shudder’s reboot, consists of a news announcer’s voiceover describing both the impending “devastating” hurricane and the exponential growth of the world’s population: “The world population has reached a grand total of 3.8 billion . . . doubling its total over the last 30 years” (Fig. 3.4). This preoccupation with exponential increase is mirrored at the end of the segment when Dixie is tapping furiously on her calculator to work out how long it will take the rapidly dividing moldy mass that was once Richie to consume the world. Among other things, then, the segment draws a narrative arc from an exploding world population through the rampant spread of mold to the impending elimination of humans. An exponentially growing human population cedes to a more effectively proliferating fungus, layering a quite different story about human extinction, one tied to overpopulation, onto the story of escalating global warming and intensifying storms.

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Fig. 3.4  The opening panel of “Gray Matter,” juxtaposing a hurricane and population anxiety

In the middle of the segment, however, there is a countervailing story about the protracted decline of a small town and its inhabitants. The town is a ghost town, presumably in part because of the storm, but the storm has in fact only accelerated an ongoing process. As Doc says, “Times have come and gone. This town’s practically dead.” Chief adds that the storm “just might be the last nail in the coffin.” That Richie in particular is targeted by a mold that will render him extinct also seems significant in that Richie has long inhabited the margins. A factory worker who started drinking when his wife died, Richie was finally fired for drinking on the job and descended still further into hopelessness, finally doing nothing but sitting in his armchair, drinking beer, and watching soap operas—a poor unemployed desperate man in a dying small town. Richie and his town are white (with the exception of Doc, who is the lone visibly non-­ white person in the town). The mold that takes over Richie’s (white) house and (white) body, while it eventually becomes a swelling dark gray mass, begins as black mold—on his body and his walls. Creepshow’s “Gray Matter” thus taps into an anxiety about overpopulation and extinction that is racialized. Subsuming the small almost exclusively white town, the dark mass—still exponentially growing at the end of the segment (amplifying the warning at the beginning about a doubling population)—depicts, I argue, the anthropogenic fear of whites overrun by Black and brown bodies.

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Black Growth, White Extinction If I Am the Pretty Thing, The Haunting of Hill House, and “Gray Matter” exhibit the fear of white extinction in a warming world, “Gray Matter” also orients us to the role overpopulation plays in this fear of extinction. And anxieties of overpopulation are inseparable from white dread of growing numbers of dark people, for which black mold (spreading wildly, consuming as it spreads) is a particularly effective metaphor.6 To read black mold as signifying racially Black is to recognize the ongoing and not-so-­ hidden racism of the discourse of overpopulation, whether it be predictions about the population explosion in India and Africa or about dark-skinned migrants and their children tipping the racial balance in the USA and western Europe.7 One of the most influential environmentalist books of the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling The Population Bomb, is prefaced with a telling personal anecdote about how Ehrlich came to understand the population explosion “emotionally” when on a family vacation in Delhi.8 He describes driving in a taxi through a “crowded slum area” where “the streets seemed alive with people. […] People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. […] People, people, people, people.” Ehrlich comments that the scene had a “hellish aspect” and that he and his family were “frankly, frightened.” Since that night, he concludes, “I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.” The “hellish” feel of overpopulation is one in which white people—“overprivileged tourists,” as Ehrlich admits—are crowded by dark masses (Preface, n.p). The darkness of black mold in fungal weird fiction represents not only the unknown, not only death, then, but those swarms of “dark” people who are threatening white annihilation. Black mold signals not only a metaphysical blackness but a political, explicitly racial, darkness, which threatens to subsume majority white populations. In this particular racialized anxiety, contemporary fictions about black mold demonstrate a strong narrative continuity with some influential early texts in the fungal weird tradition. These earlier texts also expressed anxiety about extinction, an anxiety that was even more overtly racialized. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for instance, is at once the story of a house overspread by a “tangled web-work” of “[m]inute fungi” (319) and of a sick and dying white family; it is a story about what Gillian Brown has called the “inexorability of extinction” (332). Critics have located the story’s anxiety about extinction, however, specifically within the context of

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southern slavery and the dreaded demise of a white slave-owning aristocracy in the face of slave revolts and a Black population growing in power (see Dougherty 29).9 Fifty or so years later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” also weaves together spreading fungus and fears of white extinction. The story features a narrator confined to her room and increasingly obsessed with the pattern of her wallpaper, which she compares to a fungus: “The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions” (51). There are always, she writes later, “new shoots on the fungus” (54)—ever more “waddling fungus growths” (57). Drawing on Susan Lanser’s groundbreaking reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper” as racial allegory, Asha Nadkarni has argued that Gilman’s story represents the threat of immigrant others, “constantly multiplying and breeding.” In her nonfiction, Gilman described (especially Asian) immigrants as “‘accumulating swarms’” of “‘uncongenial material,’” as she worried not only about their swelling numbers but about “Anglo-American ‘race suicide’” (Nadkarni 222). Gilman’s story about a white woman who struggles with childbirth, then, depicts fears of white extinction in the face of yellow “swarms” figured in the multiplying fungal growths on the wallpaper. H.  P. Lovecraft’s 1924 “The Shunned House,” about a house “haunted” by vaporous black matter in its cellar, draws on both Poe and Gilman in its representation of black mold, “uncongenial material,” as the sign of white dread about encroaching dark masses.10 As in I Am the Pretty Thing and The Haunting of Hill House, the shunned house is a place where white people sicken and die and, specifically, white children die or are never born. Lovecraft’s story makes more explicit than these later fictions, how the fungal weird gives form to fears specifically of white extinction. “The Shunned House” follows the narrator and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, as they venture into the cellar of a house, which is based on a real house (135 Benefit Street) in Providence, Rhode Island, to try to explain and exorcise its “dampness and fungous growth” (98). The house has a long history of its inhabitants sickening and dying, although it was “never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any real sense ‘haunted’” (99). Instead, it is “unhealthy” (98), primarily because of the “dank, humid cellar,” which was “the most terrible part of the house” (100).11 Many people—children and adults—died in the house, until it was finally decreed uninhabitable and abandoned. The narrator and his uncle change the fatal history of the house, though, venturing down into the “musty

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and fungus-cursed cellar” one night to investigate (112). During the course of the night, the uncle is overrun with a black vaporous slime (just like Richie Grenadine in “Gray Matter”). The narrator survives, digging up the moldy earth and pouring “sulphuric acid” in the pit to expel whatever was inhabiting the cellar (122).

Black Mold, Black Slavery The scant criticism on “The Shunned House” has placed it in a tradition of a lingering New England belief in vampires, about which Lovecraft certainly knew and which he directly references in the story (104).12 “The Shunned House” contains a more buried history, however, more obliquely present in the text. The dark cellar and the black moldy earth—the entire noisome and literally fatal atmosphere of the house—all represent, I argue, slavery in colonial Providence: “The Shunned House” is a story of the white fear of being overwhelmed by Black others transported to US soil by the slave trade. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, Rhode Island was home to New England’s largest enslaved population. In 1755, 11.5 percent of Rhode Islanders were Black, nearly all slaves (John Brown). A reading of “The Shunned House” as a story of the colonial slave trade rests on the narrator’s description of the history of the house, drawn from his uncle’s meticulous records. The narrator reports that the man who built the house in 1763 was William Harris, a “substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade,” who had spent a significant portion of the years between 1755 and his death in 1765 in Martinique (102–3). The West India trade was part of what was called the “triangle trade,” which circulated rum, molasses, and slaves between Rhode Island, Africa, and the Caribbean (Rappleye 12, 61). Providence was born as a commercial force in the eighteenth century through this trade, and the success of the triangle trade meant that Rhode Islanders “were the principal American slave traders during the 1700s” (John Brown). In evoking the “West India trade,” Lovecraft thus plants a clue that the man who built the Shunned House was deeply involved in the business of slavery. Lovecraft goes further, though, in linking the history of the Shunned House to slavery. The narrator explains that the firm of “Nicholas Brown & Co.” made William Harris master of the brig Prudence, a venture that gave Harris the money to be able “to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his marriage” (102). The Prudence was a real ship that was used at least once, in 1783, in Providence’s slave trade.13 While the

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1783 slave voyage of the Prudence was not (as in Lovecraft’s story) under the auspices of Nicholas Brown & Co., the Brown brothers’ company had indeed financed a slaving voyage a little earlier, in 1764–1765—the ill-­ fated voyage of the Sally. One of the Brown brothers who had been involved in the expedition of the Sally, Moses Brown, had subsequently become an ardent abolitionist, and when he heard in 1783 that his friends were planning on financing the slave voyage of the Prudence, he wrote them a letter urging them not to. Had the Sally never sailed, he wrote, “I should have been preserved from an Evil, which has given me the most uneasiness, and has left the greatest impression and stain upon my own mind of any, if not all my other conduct in life” (Moses Brown). Nicholas Brown & Co.’s foray into the slave trade with the Sally in 1764–1765 was, as Moses Brown later made clear, indeed a horrifying venture. In weaving “Nicholas Brown & Co.” and the Prudence into his story, Lovecraft thus invokes this venture and its attendant horrors. While William Harris’s association with the West India trade, Martinique, Nicholas Brown & Co., and the Prudence all serve to connect the Shunned House to slavery, it is the mirroring of key events in the house’s early history with what happened on the Sally’s voyage that really binds the Shunned House to the horrors of the slave trade. The narrator tells us that the house was built in 1763 and that in the following five years seven people died in the house, most of them between 1763 and 1765, including a stillborn baby, two children, two servants, and William Harris himself. These deaths happen at the same time as the disastrous expedition in 1764–1765 of the slave ship Sally.14 Of the 167 people the Sally picked up from the African coast, 109 died on the voyage back to Providence. Many of the Africans on the Sally “Sickened & Dyed” of unidentified illness or starved to death (Voyage)—eerily echoing the ineffable disease and the “wasting-away or decline” that killed the inhabitants of the Shunned House (103). While whites were dying in the Shunned House (ostensibly because of the black fungal matter and tainted atmosphere in the cellar), African men, women, and children were dying in the stifling black hold of the Sally (Rappleye 70).15 The white deaths in the Shunned House and the African deaths on the Sally are, in other words, uncannily parallel—that is, the “haunted” cellar is aligned with the equally although differently “haunted” ship’s hold. Indeed, the way that the cellar is described evokes the horrors of the hold of a slave ship—that “dank, humid cellar,” which “exerted the strongest repulsion” and emitted a “bad odour” and where the “vague, shifting deposit of mould” and the “fungous growths”

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sometimes seemed to take the form of “a doubled-up human figure” (100). To push this parallel a bit further, the slippage in the story between white deaths in the fungus-cursed house and Black deaths in the slave ship’s hold suggests that the slave trade, embodied in the particular and very real expedition of the Sally, is cursing the white children, the white future, of Providence. As the narrator says, “Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half” (103). Whites die and white children are never born in the Shunned House, then, at the same time that Providence’s most notable businessmen were running a slave ship in which over one hundred Africans died in the choking black hold of the ship. Given Lovecraft’s notoriously racist views, he most likely did not intend his story to convey an anti-slavery message (although it can be read that way). More compatible with Lovecraft’s avowed views is a reading of the story as figuring the horrors that follow in the wake of the slave trade’s importing Africans to his beloved Providence.16 Most of the Africans in the Sally might have died—but that did not halt the slave trade in Providence. Indeed, in letters and stories, Lovecraft uses the language of mold’s spread, as in “The Shunned House,” to describe the encroachment on white spaces of all kinds of dark bodies—an encroachment bound up with (white) death. He writes of “swarms of Mediterranean & Asiatic vermin that now ooze & creep over all the landscape.” Dark bodies are what he calls, elsewhere, “material . . . putrescence”—just like what “haunts” the moldy cellar of the Shunned House (Reinert 258–59; see also 269). Sophus Reinert has, in other contexts, described the “perfect analogy” between Lovecraft’s “choice of words to describe immigrants and the monsters haunting his contemporary short stories” (259). In Lovecraft’s fiction of the fungal weird, his project of rendering visible that alien cosmos beyond human perception—the strange fungal shapes in the cellar of the Shunned House, the “dark matter” that surrounds known human life—cannot be untangled from racism.17 *** On the surface, the contemporary weird texts I’ve discussed here center anxieties about human extinction in the twenty-first century, specifically species extinction in the face of global warming. They also do some work to assuage such fears by highlighting the non-human matter that already pervades the human—the human as “mycobiome”—thereby hinting at the possibility of life after extinction, of a non-human post-death

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“haunting” that is a continuation of life in some form. In this “world-­ without-­us,” the singular and exceptional human is thoroughly decentered. As David Wallace-Wells has written of the seismic shift ushered in by the Anthropocene and its attendant climate crisis: “those who have imbibed several centuries of Western triumphalism tend to see the story of human civilization as an inevitable conquest of the earth, rather than the saga of an insecure culture, like mold, growing haphazardly and unsurely upon it. That fragility, which pervades everything humans might do on this planet, is the great existential insight of global warming” (34; emphasis added). Mold represents human insecurity and death, species extinction, and the world-without-us—all new ways of being that are attendant upon the Anthropocene. Mold, in Wallace-Wells’ analogy, represents human vulnerability. But fictions of the fungal weird also use mold to suggest the persistence of human life in some form. What also runs through fictions of the fungal weird, however, is a racist inheritance that was more explicit in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century texts. Looking at these earlier fictions reveals how an ostensible fear of human extinction can actually mask a fear of white extinction. And instead of humans becoming mold, becoming fungus, we have white characters striving to contain, control, and expel a black mold that is equated with black flesh, with Black people. Race has frequently been occluded in fiction and film about global warming and overpopulation, reduced to a mere haunting subtext, but it must be (not least because it always has been) an integral part of all the stories we tell about the causes and the consequences of human impact on the climate and the environment.

Notes 1. The principal distinction Alder makes is that the weird characterizes “its ‘otherworldly phenomena’ as real, not supernatural” (10). See generally Alder 10–12. 2. For discussions of the weird, see Joshi, Weird Tale 1–11; Miéville, “Weird Fiction”; Fisher 10–11, 15–25; Joy; Machin 1–46; Alder 1–42; Newell 9–23. 3. Only one character survives the film, the lawyer Mr. Waxcap. While waxcaps are fairly common fungi, they are declining precipitously in Europe as the unimproved grassland in which they flourish vanishes. As a result of habitat destruction, almost all of European waxcap species are on the list of threatened fungi (Griffith, Easton, and Jones). Mr. Waxcap may survive at the end of the film, then, but his very name portends extinction.

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4. For a discussion of the role of mold in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, see Keetley 107–17. 5. See also Kenner, who discusses the vulnerability of the poor in Philadelphia to black mold. 6. The 2011 story “The Black Mould” by Mark Samuels features a black mold that blindly, indifferently, devours planet after planet, universe after universe. 7. For an excellent discussion of shifting population growth in western Europe and the USA, along with white anxiety about that shift, see Kaufmann. 8. For a discussion of Ehrlich’s contribution to the discourse of overpopulation and environmentalism, see Robertson (126–51). It is important to note that Ehrlich was active in the US Civil Rights Movement (Robertson 130–32). 9. In this reading, Roderick Usher’s ballad, “The Haunted Palace,” with its “hideous throng” rushing out (327), is a figurative slave revolt (Dougherty 29–31), prefiguring the collapse of house and family at the end of the story. 10. Mold features so prominently in Lovecraft’s story that it has been read as a story of environmental horror, ahead of its time. Robert Rath argues that “The Shunned House” is a frighteningly realistic story about basement mold, zeroing “in on the micro-pollutants that make an individual property unlivable.” 11. In a fascinating passage in “The Shunned House,” the narrator says that he and his uncle did not believe so much in vampires and werewolves, both evoked in this story, as they do in a vast universe of matter which no one as yet understands, elaborating the central project of the weird to illuminate the material nature of “hauntings.” As the narrator writes, “scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.” Both men, the narrator continues, believe in “certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter” (113). 12. For a discussion of “The Shunned House” in relation to New England belief in vampirism, see Ringel, Evans (116), and Sturgis. 13. For more about the Prudence, the Nightingales, and the slave trade in Rhode Island generally, see Melish. 14. For information about the voyage of the Sally, see Voyage and Rappleye 53–76. 15. See Sharpe for an extended discussion of how the notion of the hold of the slave ship, and the long wake it has left, gets repeated: “to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding. To be ‘in’ the wake . . . might provide another way of theorizing, in/for/from what Frank Wilderson refers

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to as ‘stay[ing] in the hold of the ship’” (13–14). I would argue that we see this repetition in Lovecraft’s story. 16. Lovecraft’s racism is, of course, well-known. Evans discusses Lovecraft’s stories as expressions of his “worries about cultural loss and miscegenation” (100) and the “vanishing Anglo-Saxon virtues” (112). See also, more generally, Houellebecq, Mayer, Eil, Simmons, Weinstock and Miéville, House, and Joshi, “Why.” 17. As Miéville has put it, Lovecraft’s “antihumanism,” his larger project of dismantling anthropocentrism, is “predicated on murderous race hatred” (Weinstock and Miéville 241).

Works Cited Alder, Emily. Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Berardelli, Jeff. “How Climate Change Is Making Hurricanes More Dangerous.” Yale Climate Connections, 8 July 2019, yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/ how-­climate-­change-­is-­making-­hurricanes-­more-­dangerous/. Accessed 3 Aug. 2020. Briggs, Helen. “The Secret Life of Fungi: Ten Fascinating Facts.” BBC News, 12 Sept. 2018, bbc.com/news/science-­environment-­45486844. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020. Brown, Gillian. “The Poetics of Extinction.” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, 330–44. Brown, Moses. “Brown, Moses, to John Clark and Joseph Nightingale: August 26, 1783.” 1783. Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library, repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:303521/. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020. Dougherty, Stephen. “Dreaming the Races: Biology and National Fantasy in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Henry Street, vol. 7, no. 1, 1998, pp. 17–39. Dyer, Richard. White. 1997. Routledge, 2017. Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb. Sierra Club, 1968. Eil, Philip. “The Ghost That Haunts American Literature: The Genius and the Repugnance of H. P. Lovecraft.” Salon, 22 Nov. 2015, salon.com/2015/11/ 22/the_ghosts_that_haunts_american_literature_the_genius_the_repugnance_ of_h_p_lovecraft/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020. Evans, Tim. “A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 42, no. 1, 2005, pp. 99–135. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow Wallpaper, Bedford Cultural Edition, edited by Dale M.  Bauer, Bedford Books, 1998, pp. 41–59.

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“Gray Matter.” Creepshow, season 1, episode 1, 26 Sept. 2019, Shudder. Griffith, Gareth W., Gary L. Easton, and Andrew W. Jones. “Ecology and Diversity of Waxcap (Hygrocybe spp.) Fungi.” Botanical Journal of Scotland, vol. 54, no. 1, 2002, pp. 7–22. Hamblin, James. “The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold.” The Atlantic, 30 Aug. 2017, theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/mold-­ city/538224/. Accessed 20 July 2020. The Haunting of Hill House. Directed by Mike Flanagan. Netflix, 2016. Höglund, Johan. “The Anthropocene Within: Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge.” Gothic in the Anthropocene: Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth, edited by Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund, and Johan Höglund, U of Minnesota P, forthcoming. Houellebecq, Michel. H.  P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. House, Wes. “We Can’t Ignore H. P. Lovecraft’s White Supremacy.” LitHub, 26 Sept. 2017, lithub.com/we-­cant-­ignore-­h-­p-­lovecrafts-­white-­supremacy/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2020. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Directed by Osgood Perkins, Netflix, 2016. Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. 1959. Penguin, 2006. John Brown and the Colonial Economy of Slavery. The Rhode Island Historical Society, n.d. Joshi, S. T. The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft. U of Texas P, 1990. ———. “Why Michel Houellebecq Is Wrong about Lovecraft’s Racism.” Lovecraft Annual, vol. 12, 2018, pp. 43–50. Joy, Elaine A. “Weird Reading.” Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism, vol. IV, 2013, pp. 28–34. Kaufmann, Eric. Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Abrams Press, 2019. Keetley, Dawn. “Mike Flanagan’s Mold-Centric The Haunting of Hill House.” The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., McFarland, 2020, pp. 107–17. Kenner, Ali. “Mold.” An Anthropogenic Table of Elements, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 27 June 2019. culanth.org/fieldsights/mold. Accessed 20 July 2020. King, Stephen. “Gray Matter.” Night Shift, Signet, 1979, pp. 105–16. Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Feminist Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 1989, pp. 415–41. Lovecraft, H.  P. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.” 1937. The H.  P. Lovecraft Archive, hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx. Accessed 11 Aug. 2020.

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———. “The Shunned House.” H. P. Lovecraft: Tales. Library of America, 2005, pp. 97–124. Machin, James. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Mayer, Jed. “Race, Species, and Others: H. P. Lovecraft and the Animal.” The Age of Lovecraft, edited by Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. 117–32. McFall-Ngai, Margaret. “Noticing Microbial Worlds: The Postmodern Synthesis in Biology.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. M51–69. Melish, Joanne Pope. “Black Labor at Nightingale-Brown House.” John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, brown.edu/academics/public-­humanities/about/history/black-­labor-­nightingale-­brown-­ house. Accessed 11 Aug. 2020. Miéville, China. “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 377–92. ———. “Weird Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, Routledge, 2009, pp. 510–15. “Moulds.” Psilosopedium, en.psilosophy.info/moulds.html. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020. Nadkarni, Asha. “Reproducing Feminism in Jasmine and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Feminist Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. 218–44. Newell, Jonathan. A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, U of Wales P, 2020. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, Library of America, 1996, pp. 317–36. Rappleye, Charles. Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, Simon & Schuster, 2006. Rath, Robert. “H. P. Lovecraft, Master of Environmental Horror.” Slate, 30 Oct. 2015, slate.com/technology/2015/10/h-­p-­lovecraft-­and-­the-­environmental­horror-­of-­the-­21st-­century.html. Accessed 9 Aug. 2020. Reinert, Sophus A. “The Economy of Fear: H.  P. Lovecraft on Eugenics, Economics, and the Great Depression.” Horror Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2015, pp. 255–82. Ringel, Faye. “Some Strange New England Mortuary Practices: Lovecraft Was Right.” Lovecraft Studies, vol. 29, 1993, pp. 13–18. Robertson, Thomas. The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism, Rutgers UP, 2012. Samuels, Mark. “The Black Mould.” The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales, Kindle, ed., Chômu Press, 2011.

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Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, City Light Books, 2015. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Random House, 2020. Simmons, David. “‘A Certain Resemblance’: Abject Hybridity in H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Fiction.” New Critical Essays on H.  P. Lovecraft, edited by David Simmons, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 13–30. Sturgis, Amy H. “‘Some Lingering Influence in the Shunned House’: H. P. Lovecraft’s Three Invitations to Dark Tourism.” Virtual Dark Tourism: Ghost Roads, edited by Kathryn N.  McDaniel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 21–39. Tallerico, Brian. “The Haunting of Hill House: All the Hidden Ghosts You Missed.” Vulture, 22 Oct. 2018, vulture.com/2018/10/the-­haunting-­of-­hill-­house-­ hidden-­ghosts.html. Accessed 8 Aug. 2020. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of the Planet. Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Zero Books, 2011. Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally. Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library, cds.library.brown.edu/projects/sally/timeline.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020. Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, Tim Duggan Books, 2019. “Waters of Death.” Life After People, season 1, episode 10, 23 June 2009. The History Channel. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, and China Miéville. “Afterword: Interview with China Miéville.” The Age of Lovecraft, edited by Carl H.  Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. 231–44. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. Picador, 2007. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. U of Minnesota P, 2018.

CHAPTER 4

Vegetomorphism: Exploring the Material Within the Aesthetics of the EcoGothic in Stranger Things and Annihilation Sladja Blazan

“Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here.” —Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Earthly Beings

The Vegetation Belt Near the end of Sartre’s La Nausée (1938) the main protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, sits on a park bench when he suddenly spots the root of a chestnut tree. He stares at the root “plunged into the ground” just under his feet as fear creeps up his body: “I was sitting, slightly bent, my head bowed, alone in front of that black, knotty mass, which was utterly crude and frightened me” (Sartre 182). Speculating about the strong affect this sight has provoked in him, he concludes that it is the root’s very existence that caused the dread in him. The root exists in an independent and non-­ relational way; it is unintelligible to the observer. Indeed, this realization,

S. Blazan (*) English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_4

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placed strategically at the end of a long introspective philosophical meandering on the narrator’s otherwise affectless being-in-the-world, stirs everything up. If the root exists without context, then so does Roquentin himself. This much discussed passage has been analyzed under various existential aspects, securing Sartre’s text a central place in phenomenology (Rolls and Rechniewski, Robert Solomon). Yet, in spite of passages like the following, little attention has been paid to the narrator’s focus on the materiality of his environment: “The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half way up; the bark, black and blistered, looked like boiled leather. The soft sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain flowed into my ears and made a nest there, filling them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid smell” (Sartre 183).1 Leveling his own physicality with everything else around him, Roquentin begins to grasp the flat ontology of the world. His existential Angst has an addressee: I am afraid of towns. But you mustn’t leave them. If you go too far, you come up to the Vegetation Belt. The Vegetation has crawled for mile after mile towards the towns. It is waiting. When the town dies, the Vegetation will invade it, it will clamber over the stones, it will grip them, search them, burst them open with its long black pincers; it will blind the holes and hang its green paws everywhere. […], you must never go out alone into that great mass of hair waiting at their gates; you must let it undulate and crack all by itself. (Sartre 221–2)

I quote this passage in its entirety because it succinctly expresses an image of “Vegetation” as a sovereign power that will eventually survive the human. “When the town dies, the Vegetation will invade it.” What’s more, the Vegetation’s lurking in the background of the cities, as if waiting for the right moment to enter and take over the distinctly human habitat, gives this passage a decisively ecogothic quality. From a materialist standpoint, these passages accumulate to much more than just a central literary example of phenomenology; they pay tribute to a sense of transcorporeality that is here situated at the intersection of the root and the narrator’s body. It is the anticipation of a possible disintegration of the human body within the natural environment, even if it is only the inconsequentiality and insignificance of the same, that led to Roquetin’s pronounced dread. Sartre’s text from 1938 identifies the root of a chestnut tree as the source of this affect.

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The repulsion expressed in the above passage is an exemplary instance of ecophobia that in Simon Estok’s definition circumscribes an anxious fear of natural environments that defines current social structures in Western cultures (Estok 2). In what follows, I will analyze two recent popular narratives that center on the notion of Vegetation threatening to disrupt and eventually eradicate the quotidian existence of middle-class US Americans. I will demonstrate how these narratives move the perspective away from the anthropocentric notion of ecophobia as is expressed in Sartre’s example in depicting not humans haunted by Nature but Nature haunted by human pasts. Analyzing more recent representations of ominous natural environments in the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) and Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014) will exemplify how more-than-human ecogothic and ecohorror re-configurations of earth revisit longstanding and foundational anthropocentric narratives of existential dread turning them into environmental narratives that focus on intersubjectivity and transcorporeality with the potential of decentering the role of the human. As such they borrow more from Indigenous storytelling than has been acknowledged so far, which is demonstrated in comparisons with Koyukon representations of forests or Coast Salish stories about evil plants. The Monstrous Root The popular Netflix series produced by Matt and Ross Duffer (better known as the Duffer brothers) under the title Stranger Things (2016–) depicts an ecological catastrophe that erupts after a government-run company working on a secret mission that involves earth extraction mistakenly cracks open a portal to a parallel dimension.2 This portal is set under the earth in the subterranean tunnel structure dug by the company known as Hawkins Laboratory, which sets large parts of the series below ground. The fantastic underground ecology that consequently begins to leak into the quotidian life is referred to as the Upside Down, and it is presented as a rhizosphere, a dark world of vines, roots, and tendrils stretching along tunnels under the seemingly peaceful town. Suggesting an inversion, a narrative tension emerges between these two antagonistic spaces lying above and below. Unlike classic fantasy settings, the Upside Down is not an entrance into another dimension that can be exited. Instead, it is a parallel reality that certain characters are drawn into, turning their own environments into the Upside Down.

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The audience is granted a closer look at the subterraneous region, when Nancy Wheeler enters the rhizomatic underworld through the opening of a hollow tree (S1E5). Reminiscent of classic gothic renderings, she steps into a dark and gloomy forest at night and discovers a crack in the tree that seems to glow inside. This setting, however, does not mark a break but rather a connecting point with the world as we know it. While Nancy Wheeler explores the Upside Down, her friend, Jonathan Buyers, is looking for her in the forest, with the two dimensions sonically connected. He can hear her screams and finally manages to rescue her by locating the sound, reaching into and pulling her hand out of the opening in the hollow tree. The arboreal portal is significant as it establishes an endemic relation between the two dimensions in the forest and the only point of orientation for characters seeking to explore them. Robert Macfarland opens his celebrated study Underland with the statement: “The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree” (4). Stranger Things complicates this structure by marking the tree as an entry into the Upside Down. As a story of a town that is haunted by its underground vegetation, which literally enters the bodies of the inhabitants, the series brings the “underland” above ground and seeks to draw all that lives above down under. This is exemplified in vines and tendrils that slither above the ground in their predatory search for vegetal, animal, or human victims, all of whom they entangle with the tentacular tendrils and sedate with a black substance that is sprayed in the victim’s faces if they come close enough. Sedated, the victims slowly lose consciousness and eventually morph into the structure that surrounds them. The first season focuses on the disappearance of a young boy, Will Buyers, who “is good at hiding” and, thus, manages to escape the predatory creatures (S1, E2). He could, thus, provide some information about the strange happenings in this otherwise peaceful town. The doctor who treats Will upon his rescue presents a theory that the parallel world has released “some kind of a virus which is causing this neurological disorder.” It is a virus that is “essentially hijacking” the victim’s body in order to “duplicate” and to “spread” (S2 E6), which eventually turns the body into a host. Yet, to the doctor’s wonder, the virus communicates between those infected: “It has some sort of a hive intelligence. And it’s connecting all the hosts” (S2 E6). After pumpkin patches begin to rot and diseased sheep flocks begin to die, the inhabitants realize that the root system under their town is infected and the virus is spreading to all the plants, the crops, and the trees (S2, E3; S2, E4). This assumption is confirmed when the town’s

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Chief of Police, Hopper, enters the mucosal, writhing, living tunnel system and as a consequence upon inhaling the spores is left sedated and rotting, just like the pumpkins and the sheep in the episode before. Under the control of some kind of a chthonic intelligence, the mobile slithering vegetation appears to be collecting human, animal, and plant bodies by entangling them with the many tendrils and tentacles, pulling them underground and sedating them. The predatory underground vegetation is, thus, consuming the bodies of all that lives and turning them into itself. If left long enough in the lethal embrace, the rhizomatic structure enters the bodies through orifices and slowly begins the process of material transformation. In the first season, the viewers only glimpse what is thoroughly explored in the second: the dark subterranean world of flora and fauna in Stranger Things is under the control of a sentient monstrous root-like structure. As the doctor’s virus interpretation suggested, the giant root functions like an inversion of the Tree of Life. A concept found in numerous religions and mythologies, this inverted Tree of Life does not present a symbol of knowledge as it does in the Christian tradition. Instead, it comes closer to various Indigenous versions of the concept in which the image stands for an entity that connects all life.3 In this version the tree/root is evil. Don J. Durzan traces the Indigenous idea of “the tree of life” as far back as 1536 to the Iroquois cultures (1). As in many other depictions, this Iroqouis version mimics a neural and arborescent network that unifies all members of its community. This type of network has a central place in other Native cosmologies as well, such as in the Ojibway tradition, for example, where it is known as the “Midewatik” and it represents “the world of the plant beings” (Johnston 109). Images of sentient plant networks have, thus, been present in North American cultures at least since the sixteenth century and most likely much longer. The root-like structure referred to as “the shadow monster” in Stranger Things is not a direct reference to this tradition, but its functions as the brain of the nervous system, in that it controls all life-form underground, is at least reminiscent of various Indigenous concepts. As life above the ground appears to have severed itself from its root structure, it is left to innocent and perhaps rooted children to decode the happenings in their town and convince the adults to take earthly matters seriously. Like the classic Tree of Life, the root-like monster connects all plants, animals, fungi, and microbes, through which it gains control over the inhabitants who deem themselves separate from this ecology. In this way, this neural network exposes the

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Fig. 4.1  A demogorgon surrounded by spores in the Upside Down

intrinsic inscription of humans into animal and vegetal habitats and into the earth itself. The connection between plant, animal, and human is embodied in the series’ most striking creatures, the demogorgons. These are monsters that populate the subterraneous tunnels and have the appearance of a cross between human, animal, and plant (Fig. 4.1). With a head that looks like a bud when closed and like a flower with six petals when open, this creature devours humans. Yet, the fragile border between it and human is demonstrated in a scene in which a young demogorgon befriends a child and is placated with a candy bar (S2, E9). The children call these monstrous creatures “demogorgons,” borrowing the terminology from their favorite role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which allows them to develop a theory of their intelligence and speculate about their intentions. What doesn’t make sense otherwise becomes obvious through the prism of a fantasy game and opens the question as to other inter-relational models that require active management. As fantasy-detectives, the child-protagonists resolve the enigma of the haunted town by world-building logic. Yet, what their gaming strategy reveals is a much more complicated structure that is beyond their understanding. In the end, viewers are left with larger looming questions: What is the toxic material that was released in the power plant? What is the secret mission hidden from the inhabitants of the small town? How does it relate

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to the rotting underground ecology? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen convincingly argued that a monster is “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment” and that “the monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” (4). The monster always escapes, he explains, only to return in another time, place, or sequel. Accordingly, in Stranger Things hints are placed along the way that no solution will be final. So what are the fears and desires that this monster is addressing? The demogorgon is a pagan chthonic spirit “that never developed into a typical anthropomorphic Greco-Roman divinity” and has been known since the writings of Lactantius (c. 250–c. 325). A first full description of a demogorgon can be found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum genitilium (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods): “Those who make the earth the mother of all things, as Theodontius maintains, prefer to name the divine mind intermingled with it Demogorgon” (Boccaccio trsl. by and qtd. in Solomon, Jon 35). Boccaccio describes the demogorgon as a divine chthonic intelligence, “surrounded everywhere by clouds and gloom and accompanied by the greatest majesty of darkness”; furthermore, it is characterized by a “slimy pallor and relentless humidity, exhaling an earthy, foul, and fetid odor” (Boccaccio trsl. by and qtd. in Solomon, Jon 37). These descriptions correspond with the underground realm depicted in the series. The narrative, thus, traces the dangerous awakening of a chthonic monstrous being by a ruthless government company that in the next step activates an ecological neural system that seems to be absorbing all that lives. In the words of Lucas, one of the child characters: “We are talking about the destruction of our world as we know it” (S2, E8). In the documentary Beyond Stranger Things, one of the directors explains his aim to create a “hive mind that connects everything” in the manner of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. “It’s something often from another dimension that you don’t understand what its intentions are. It’s beyond human comprehension” (S2, E8). This affect has far-reaching and disquieting implications that go beyond the simple defeat of the source of evil. Like the existential dread in Sartre’s Nausea, Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” depends on the ultimate unknowability of the Other and consequently causes dread and horror. Yet, in Stranger Things a geologic subjectivity reveals telling connecting points with human, animal, and plant biotopes suggesting an intrinsic entanglement rather than opacity. Indeed, even Lovecraft’s carefully designed “cosmic horror” has had a surprising comeback in the age of the Anthropocene for its quality of circumscribing a fear of the unknown that is profound because it seems unsolvable.4 The dread of the unknown is shimmering through as the dread of the unknown

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Fig. 4.2  Will Buyers rotting in the Upside Down with a tendril inside his body and on his face

Nature. In a gothic turn, humans inscribed in Nature become unknown to themselves. Stranger Things combines classic images of “plant horror” in slithering vines and gothic haunting in form of possessed bodies into an ecological nightmare from which there is no escape. The ecogothic setting centered on animated root structure haunting the residents of a small town is invasively present in very material ways within human bodies. When Will Buyers is found rotting in the Upside Down, a tendril has to be pulled out of his body that entered it through the mouth (Fig. 4.2). But even after removal, his body remains infected. Upon recovering, he spits out an actual piece of the tendril out of his mouth into the bathroom sink, the presence of which turns this room into the Upside Down and effectively turns the fantastic into a material presence. Coming from below, the virus/power physically incorporates the inhabitants with the underground ecology fusing both into one by literally turning the upside down. The initially established separation between above and below the ground is exposed as a contingency, always already in danger of transformation. Nature—illustrated with images of a forest, flocks of sheep, and pumpkin fields—is haunted by an evil power that threatens to include the humans in its deadly embrace, effectively erasing the dividing line between the two. This fusion of Nature and culture, however, is exposed in grotesque monstrous forms.

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Timothy Morton recently proposed that “the ecological thought” must be a process of unlearning the dualisms of outside and inside and us and them (17–19). This and related scholarship are symptomatic for a time that in ever more pressing ways draws to our attention that human bodies are to a large degree nonhuman material. Ecohorror embodiments such as the demogorgon in Stranger Things push towards an even more imperative response to Morton’s call. Shall we embrace the demogorgon as human? The current ecological crisis including a pandemic caused by a zoonotic virus succinctly exposes the lethal effects of not taking such entanglements into consideration. It is with the aesthetics of gothic (dark subterranean tunnels and haunted humans) and horror (predatory monsters) that Stranger Things addresses the environment in our bodies. Its presence inside the bodies of the town inhabitants enables a possession that threatens to turn the whole town into a rotten/evil ecology. Granted, the Duffer brothers might not have intended to grapple with ecological questions; yet, their insistence on providing a collection of cultural references drawing from canonical 1980s cinematic horror through comics, music, and role-playing games, in fact, brings to light the continuity of representations of undefined nonhuman agency within human bodies in gothic horror and science fiction.5 Far from an escapist thrill, these narratives confirm an attentiveness to the dangers of imagining the human as impervious to nonhuman entanglements. Stranger Things, thus, demonstrates how cultural representations of Nature haunting humans can be a fertile frame to negotiate the missing interlacing of human history and earth history as a geomorphic force. Root-seeking, indeed, as Wampole confirms in her study, “is often symptomatic of a general sense of ecological alienation. It is the evidence of a species—wide guilt about our self-extraction from the Earth as system” (7). When asked to describe his infection, Will Buyers answers: “I don’t know. It’s almost like a feeling” (S2, E4). This “feeling” or rather “speculative fabulation” (Haraway 10) does not only mark an ecological Angst quickly spreading among the series’ mostly young viewers; it also and most importantly unhinges this ecology from a phenomenological impression of the human subject, exposing its dependent materiality.

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Human Phytographia and Vegetomorphism In a classic ecohorror style, Stranger Things instrumentalized tentacular root monsters to sedate plants, animals, and humans and take over their habitat. The series confirms Agnes Scherer’s description of a “typical ‘monster plant’” as one that “grows rapidly, often menacingly so; it walks around and chases its human victims with snatching arms like a predator; it often sucks their blood or eats them, […] and sometimes it even wants to merge with the human body” (31). Yet, it also circumscribed scenes of entanglement within which the root-like structure emerged within possessed human bodies, turning them into the evil force themselves. In what follows, I will analyze a narrative that works with a similar premise but begins where typically plant horror ends and finally challenges the evil interpretation of human plant entanglements. Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, published in 2014 as the first part of Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, sets off in a moment when the natural environment had already taken over at least a small part of the earth and an expedition entered the area for research purposes. The scientific team brings together a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and the narrator, who is a biologist. The reader soon learns that only a few members of prior expeditions, all sent by the big corporation called “The Southern Reach,” have returned, and even they were permanently altered in indefinable ways. From this ecohorror setting, the narrative tension grows with the unusual perspective of the narrator, who seems to accept her fate: to be incorporated by the environment in Area X. Indeed, the narrative traces the final steps of a scientist advancing towards accepting all the implications of a radical human material entanglement with natural environments. What’s more, like the biologist herself, the reader is left to wonder if this horror scenario is not a rather progressive development. At the outset, the scientists enter an abandoned part of the country, a flourishing “transitional environment” that encompasses a black pine forest, a swamp, marsh flats, and an ocean (VanderMeer 8). While seemingly spectacular, VanderMeer himself explains that the descriptions of nature were informed by his walks in North Florida, while the expedition was modeled after “expeditions into the real world” such as the more recent exploration of the so-called Forbidden Zone in Kekexili (China’s largest uninhabited piece of land).6 The setting is grounded in realism, yet a sense of haunting is perceptible as the environment seems animated, and the scientists are disconcerted by a continuous feeling of being observed

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(VanderMeer 21, 94). Jacques Derrida describes being watched by something that cannot be seen as “the wizor effect,” which, according to his theory, is an essential quality of haunting: “This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-syncronizes, it recalls us to anachrony” (Derrida 6). Yet again, VanderMeer himself grounds this hauntedness when explaining his intention to create the undefined feeling of an anxious rush that seems to overcome one when hiking alone in the forest. Yet, the environment that seems eerily alive, is, indeed, watching. Reminiscent of original Romantic settings, one will find gloomy landscapes spread out in front of terrified characters, who try to make sense of it. A powerful unexplained moaning stemming from somewhere in the forest that always occurs at dusk contributes to the feeling that the forest is alive. From a certain perspective “all you saw was the black water, the grey of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning” (4). From this outset the narrative turns into biotech horror, whereas the initiator is not “The Southern Reach” company but the environment itself. In a pre-shadowing description of the forest near the base camp, the narrator proposes that it was not the dangerous animals or poisonous snakes her team was afraid of, but the “eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-­ tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock” (4). This haunting presence of the past in the present moment is intensified when it becomes obvious that the inhabitants might have never left this area, as the narrator begins to suspect that the moaning, indeed, might be partially human. Area X, as the region is called, is a mutagenic environment. As such it is able to cause permanent changes in an organism’s genes. It is, thus, potentially possible that the prior inhabitants have literally merged with the plants and animals they were surrounded with. Various settings suggest as much. In one the biologist watches a pair of otters: “At one point, they glanced up and I had a strange sensation that they could see me watching them” (VanderMeer 21); in another one “strange eyes of the dolphins” appear human (VanderMeer 94). Area X is haunted by its former human inhabitants but not in the sense of the past interrupting the present; the past is the present. The vegetation, upon analysis, is found to contain human tissue. This temporal and structural collapse suggests that the environment in Area X is alive in different ways than traditional haunted ecogothic settings would suggest. Rather than something dead

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that turns out to be alive, the ecology is haunted by “a death that would not mean being dead” (VanderMeer 24). Dying does not equal decay, it is a form of transmutation. While speculative in this text, trans-species gene transfer does occur in natural environments. During this process one DNA is incorporated into the new organisms’ chromosome, which changes the properties of the receiving organism. More recently, the method known as CRISPR, a DNA editing technology in wide use, is enabling scientists and amateurs to experiment with exactly this type of interspecies breeding, causing a lot of outrage because of its ethical implications (Newson and Wrigley). Similarly, the biologist-narrator in Annihilation sums up her impression of Area X as an “ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that [she] could not fully take it all in” (VanderMeer 29). Instead, as the reader slowly realizes, the environment will take her in. As in current debates surrounding DNA editing technology, it remains undecided how to ethically account for such procedures. The biologist decides to embrace it. Similarly, the scientists Amábile-Cuevas et al. even propose that what has been termed the “horizontal gene transfer” that is “a gene flow between unrelated organisms” might be “a cornerstone of evolution” (Amábile-Cuevas 332). So is the biologist’s responsiveness and acceptance toward the idea of merging with her environment an evolutionary step forward? If being haunted is the feeling of being observed by the unknown, Annihilation suggests that all natural environments appear haunted from the perspective of a scientific experiment. Ultimately, haunted Nature, in this narrative, challenges the external role of the human observer in existing and functioning ecosystems. In her refusal to be a subject confronting the object-world, the biologist facilitates a new recognition of her own inscription into the environment that now is watching her. The ecogothic aesthetics that focuses on the unknown is helpful for understanding the complex role of ecosystems as it engages natural environments as antagonists. The oscillation between the supernatural and realism is reflected in the perspective of the biologist-­narrator, who repeatedly describes herself as highly attentive to ecologies that had not been acknowledged as alive even before entering Area X (VanderMeer 8). She is consequently continually observing and looking for life where it was not expected. To make this point, the text is interspersed with episodes from the biologist’s life before she entered the expedition. Her memories demonstrate that she has always been able to recognize what she calls “functioning ecosystem[s]” where they had not been recognized or acknowledged as such before. The

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prime example is a dilapidated pool that that she had observed already as a child in her backyard. Upon the family’s move to another house, she wonders: “Would the new owners see the beauty and the importance of leaving it as is, or would they destroy it, create unthinking slaughter in honour of the pool’s real function” (VanderMeer 31)? The environmental concern exemplified with the human unwillingness to see the “microworld of the pool” in order to follow “their own selfish needs” is spread throughout the narrative (VanderMeer 30). From the perspective of this narrator, the whole world is a slaughterhouse and living on it is ecohorror. Entering Area X puts her in a much-desired closer communion with her environment and, thus, exposes the alienation in scientific taxonomy and observation, her profession. Yet, other than in Sartre’s example, the inability to understand creates a feeling of freedom: “And if I keep looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth” (VanderMeer 116). Annihilation is, indeed, suggesting that intersubjectivity and transcorporeality is not optional. The narrative opens up the concept of environments to nonhuman interlocutors by replacing the human figure of sovereignty with something that looks like a plant on the wall and is described as “a type of fungi or eukaryotic organism” and “a miniature forest” (VanderMeer 17). This “miniature ecosystem” shaped “like tiny hands” is invasive, perhaps even defensive; it sedates anybody who comes close enough to inspect it (VanderMeer 17). A nodule in the plant or root or fungi opens in the moment when a character looks closer trying to find an explanation for what she or he is seeing. As if using the moment of physical intimacy as a chance, the plants spray spores into the face of the curious observer (VanderMeer 17). The biologist’s scientific interpretation does not help the understanding much. Upon coming closer to the plant, she recognizes letters and these “‘are made from fruiting bodies’” (VanderMeer 17). In fact, the wall appears to be “breathing,” and it is “not made of stone but of living tissue” (VanderMeer 27). It is shaped in form of letters, writing actual words the meaning of which is difficult to decipher. Patricia Vieira writes about “phytographia” as “the appellation of an encounter between writings on plants and the writing of plants, which inscribe themselves in human texts” (225). Here, however, a human plant is writing actual letters on the wall. This human phytographia is as close as VanderMeer allows his narrative to get to the monstrous. The wall plant consists of human tissues, while

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the biologist herself diagnoses a commencing mutation of her body that she assumes to be caused through inhaling the spores. Rather than anthropomorphism, this alteration of humans with altered nonhuman parts turns out to be a vegetomorphism. As in Stranger Things, it is spores that activate a process within which the monstrous begins to grow inside the human characters. Yet, while in the Netflix series the monster can be shut out and exorcized, even if it will inevitably return, no such promise nor desire is recognizable in Annihilation. “I am not returning home,” is the last sentence (VanderMeer 128). Instead of a return to an initial order, Annihilation asks the question of what comes after the human. Area X proposes a radical interlocking, an intersubjectivity that fuses the human with the nonhuman in ways that make them indistinguishable. In the end, the biologist eventually abandons the expedition and walks off embracing her partial humanity. Abandoning her field notes, she concludes that to “to remain human seems somehow pathetic” and would, in fact, mean “doing harm” to herself (128). The reader, on the other hand, still pathetically human, has to stay behind: “Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast” (VanderMeer 128). The narrator celebrates her new in-humanity, a freedom (from observing/science) that she acquired by giving in to Area X. This feeling is established in contrast to her long history of personal alienation from her previous expeditions: “It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it would overwhelm my scientific objectivity” (21). Annihilation, thus, immerses the reader in imagining future radical interspecies intra-actions and questioning transmutation as avoidable. What if mutagenic changes that occur between unrelated species were progressive and advantageous, simply exposing that all life on earth is radically and physically relational? Engaging in such speculative thinking, the text advances an ecohorror narrative towards an environmentally engaged text. For this reason, a journalist in The New Yorker claimed the Southern Reach had “transcended” its genre and dubbed VanderMeer “The Weird Thoreau” (Rothman). The reviewer in The Los Angeles Review of Books acknowledged VanderMeer’s genre influences but also placed him in “the American naturalist tradition running from Thoreau to Rachel Carson to Annie Dillard” (Tompkins). Finola Anne Prendergast dubbed the text “a slender novel of the ecological uncanny” (334). Yet, other than these examples, Annihilation inscribes itself in the tradition of ecological narrative through the modes of the weird and the ecogothic. It is this quality that allows the narrative to develop a speculative environment that literally

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incorporates rather than excludes the human and calls for parallel genealogies of thought that underscore subjectivity’s interdependency and porosity as well as co-dependent knowledge production. In doing so, the text does not “transcend” its genre; rather, it concretely demonstrates the applicability of the speculative modes of the weird and the ecogothic to questions of the Anthropocene.7 In Annihilation, the narrative form is that of introspective fieldnote writing. This mix of genres puts scientific observation itself under close inspection. In his rather personal study of fieldwork notebooks, the anthropologist Michael Taussig writes about the necessity “to kindle the mystique pertaining to documents that blend inner and outer worlds” (Taussig xi). Realizing that “proof is elusive when it comes to human affairs,” he moves on to rehearse his own experience of not being able to scientifically express some of the most important results of his field trips (Taussig xi). In conclusion, Taussig calls for his readers to look behind the façade of anthropological notebooks and fieldwork diaries. In Annihilation the reader is presented with a similar conundrum in fictional form, except that the narrator as a biologist demonstrates how and why the same is true for affairs that are not exclusively human. In fact, the radical material entanglement of all bodies puts the human perspective in general into question. “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-­ contained existence,” explains Karen Barad in her study Meeting the Universe. As in Barad’s proposal, the biologist feels complete “through and as part of [her] intra-relating” (Barad ix). This inability to separate between “inner and outer worlds” is central to the narrative and granted expression on various levels. The text opens with the sentence: “The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats” (VanderMeer 3). The confusion about a tower that “plunges into the earth” is only partially lifted, when the narrator explains that only she saw a tower, while everybody else was referring to it as “a tunnel” (9). About prior scientists entering Area X, she writes: “They, too, discovered what only I call the Tower” (VanderMeer 107). Later, she finds an entry about “the Tower” in one of the old fieldwork notebooks: “None of us were geared to climb down in there.” And she herself tries to understand why her team did not want to “go down into the Tower” (VanderMeer 107). Her ability to recognize the radical entanglement secures her survival; acknowledging the “fractured mass” that surrounds her (VanderMeer

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117), she allows herself to become a fragment. As all other members are dead at the end of the expedition, the text suggests that acknowledging one’s material inscriptions into environments is not a voluntary matter. While the demarcation line between above and below was only endangered in the Upside Down, in Annihilation it is erased as a point of orientation. There are no portals to be closed and no holes to be climbed out of. Area X is a zone that keeps expanding, insinuating that at one point it might encapsulate the entire earth. In the end, we are left with the same question the biologist was confronted with in her childhood. Are we going to acknowledge the world around us and leave it to flourish, or are we going to “create unthinking slaughter” in our belief that the world is there for functions that serve our purposes? The aesthetics of the ecogothic is put in the service of this concern. Classic gothic settings are unpredictable, potentially dangerous, enveloped in darkness, and described as something that can be entered and escaped. From an ecogothic perspective, the environment is all that but not the human enters the environment, the environment enters the human. Not only is escape not possible, biological transformation, rather than changes in attitude, pushes forward material aspects of environmental haunting. Where many classic gothic and horror narratives would see protagonists undergo spiritual journeys, their narrative arcs defined by shifts in attitude or perspective, in Area X the changes are biological. The narrative breaks down the boundaries between human and Nature by literally breaking down the physical boundaries between them.8 In other words, the sovereignty of the organism is surrendered. The environment was not simply watching the scientists, it was busily absorbing them. It is an act of re-worlding through imagining multispecies communities that forcefully consume the human. Yet, the destabilization on the molecular level leads to a stabilization on the psychological: “The terrible thing, the thought I cannot dislodge after all I have seen, is that I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing” (VanderMeer 127).

Indigenous Roots of Chthonic Monsters in Popular Culture The anthropologist Tim Ingold, following various scholars such as Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, or Rosi Braidotti, argued that our point of departure for social analysis should be the “the whole-­ organism-­ in-­ its-­ environment” rather than the autonomous subject confronting the world

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as a domain that is exterior (Ingold 13).9 Yet, what if the “whole organism” is the environment, as the narrator in Annihilation inevitably concludes: “We were descending into an organism” (italics in original, VanderMeer 28). Depictions of haunted Nature in Stranger Things and particularly in Annihilation are calling for an inversion of Ingold’s proposal, offering instead narratives of the organism as environment. Here, scenes that depict human characters transforming into plants or animals are ecogothic renderings of an elemental material entanglement of human bodies with their environments. In their understanding of the earth via physical transformation, these frameworks are rather reminiscent of Indigenous conceptualizations of earthly relations. Particularly the “PlaceThought” theory of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe cosmologies described by Vanessa Watts resonates with the desire to connect the mind with the earth in these narratives: “Place-Thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (Watts 21). Human characters haunted by Nature in more recent texts extend themselves to a radical corporeal intimacy. Rather than existential dread, this haunting is an expression of a longing for meaningful connections. Both, the Duffer brothers and VanderMeer report being influenced by Lovecraft. But Lovecraft himself, as one of the very few US American popular writers who insistently pushed forward the agency of the nonhuman in his oeuvre, might have been borrowing more from Native cosmologies common to his country than he was willing to admit. Marc Beherec demonstrated how heavily Lovecraft relied on Aztec mythology and James Goho documented numerous references to Indigenous North American people in Lovecraft’s writing. Both of these scholars are taking only first steps in unveiling Lovecraft’s not yet acknowledged Indigenous resources. Lovecraft’s fictional characters repeatedly reference “Indian” influences. In the short story “The Whisperer in Darkness,” the narrator admits that “ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales” (Lovecraft). Of all the theories attempting to explain “the Old Ones”—divinities that reside inside the earth or oceans and are central to Lovecraft’s oeuvre—the narrator explains that “Indian” comes closest to its final resolution (Lovecraft). American Indigenous cultures haunt the gothic settings of these tales as

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much as they haunt narratives influenced by them, such as Stranger Things and Annihilation. In his study of the Koyukon point of view on the boreal forest in what is today the US state of Alaska, the anthropologist Richard Nelson describes the forest as a vibrant environment that watches; walking in the woods is “moving through a forest of eyes” to the Koyukon communities (Nelson). These descriptions come very close to the forest that is watching in Annihilation. While tentacular monsters that inhabit subterranean regions can be found in various Indigenous cultures throughout the North American continent, a possible correspondence can be found in Iroquois mythology. There the Oh-do-was are creatures that inhabit the dark space underground, which is imagined as a space with forests and animals (Smith). Or much closer to “the shadow monster,” in Ho Chunk culture (based in Wisconsin), one can find evil water spirits (wakjexi šišik) that act as spirits of vengeance and occasionally night-spirits (Hok’áwas máni ̨na), shadows that point at people who consequently would not live to see the morning. Much more importantly, these shadows sometimes control the growth of intoxicating plants from roots (Birmingham). Seeping and crawling effects are important elements in corresponding stories. Nanom-keea-po-da is an Abenaki earthquake spirit that inhabits the underground. The artist Roger Fernandez (Kawasa), a member of the Lower Elwha Band of the S’Klallam from the Port Angeles area of Washington state, who seeks to preserve Indigenous stories through his work, retells a Coast Salish story about a murderous blackberry plant: Blackberry grew bigger and as he grew he began to grab animals and people as they walked by him. He would wrap his vines around them and stab them with his thorns and kill and devour them. Blackberry got bigger and bigger. He was bigger than a tree. He was growing because he was eating the beings he captured and killed. (Fernandes)

Telling correspondences with the giant root monster in Stranger Things are most likely not intended but demonstrate the insufficiently acknowledged reliance of current US American popular culture on Indigenous North American philosophies. The rich repertoire of stories of Indigenous chthonic monsters that dwell in subterranean spaces and are in control of the plant world has been part of North American popular culture throughout the twentieth century and not only through cultural appropriation but also through active inscription. Stories of therianthropy and human plant

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hybrids exist in all Indigenous North American cultures. As Christian Michael Gonzales convincingly argues in a different context: “Natives thus embedded or ‘planted’ Indigeneity into the cultural structures that the settler state supposed would erode Native cultures and eventually erase Indigenous people” (3).10 Confirming his assessment, both the Duffer brothers and VanderMeer work immersed in a cultural environment that borrows (or steals) heavily from Indigenous storytelling. Acknowledging Native American mythology as constitutive rather than a corrective to US American popular culture effectively opposes stereotypical images of the “ecological Indian”11 and Indigenous people(s) as advocates of a transparent and authentic spirituality rooted in Nature. Exploring the rich cultural history of Indigenous spirits and monsters and acknowledging its steady if occluded presence in US American mainstream culture can expose not only the complex relationships between colonial history and environmental degradation, but also the intellectual entanglements in stories that we tell each other. Addressing inscriptions of Indigeneity in depictions of chthonic monsters awakened by earth extraction or human bodies merging with their environments, thus, is also a small step in decolonizing the naturalized production of “Man” as a scholarly imperative. Yet, steeped in a history of colonization, this process is obfuscated by furthering stories of cultural appropriation. Watts asserts the dangers inscribed in the currently noticeable need for Indigenous philosophies: These types of historical Indigenous events […] are increasingly becoming not only accepted by Western frameworks of understanding, but sought after in terms of non-oppressive and provocative or interesting interfaces of accessing the real. This traces Indigenous peoples not only as epistemologically distinct but also as a gateway for non-Indigenous thinkers to re-­imagine their world. (Watts 26)

Now that non-Indigenous cultures are compelled by environmental forces to acknowledge their intrinsic inscription in shared ecologies, ecohorror and ecogothic narratives are in danger of turning into new spaces of cultural appropriation. Recognizing Indigenous North American mythology and philosophies as generative conceptions for much of contemporary US American popular culture is a small step in the imperative acknowledgment that “the resources of the earth do not belong to humankind, rather, humans belong to the earth” (Henare 202); but it is an

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important step in recognizing that our current geological epoch is haunted most of all by the ghosts of an imperialist ontology. Until this history of the “huMan” is granted due recognition, it will be impossible to identify which “stories that we tell” have transformative potentiality and can facilitate hope and which stories serve only to affirm the status quo that has led to ecosickness and environmental grief as the new norm to begin with.

Notes 1. Randy Laist recently published the first reading of Sartre’s La Nausée as an encounter with a plant and suggested that “the text can be read as a work of plant horror” (165). 2. Stranger Things has received widespread critical acclaim and public popularity since its release in 2016; the IMDb entry counts 205 nominations and 72 wins (“Stranger Things: Awards”). 3. Dougles Estes study The Tree of Life does not mention any Indigenous concepts in spite of its omnipresence. This omission exemplifies the structural exclusion of Indigenous images and influences from large parts of scholarship on popular culture. 4. Philip Eil writes in The Atlantic about “the unlikely reanimation of H.P.  Lovecraft” in 2015. In Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman celebrates Lovecraft as a “writer of gaps between objects and their qualities” who understood that neither language nor the human mind has the capacity to comprehend the world (3). 5. The series appeal to a large degree relates to its successful sampling of diverse 1980s mainstream and subculture markers that conglomerate in a unique and convincing display of nostalgia paired with state-of-the-art special effects. See, for example, Hoffmann 2017 or Tallerico 2017. For an overview see the edited collection of essays Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia edited by Kevin Wetmore (2018). 6. This expedition was initiated by the Tibetan Plateau Research and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Jeff VanderMeer himself offers some annotations to his text on the mcdbooks website (VanderMeer, Annihilation). 7. The insistence on familiar but illegible and strange environments positions the text within the aesthetics of the weird. In Mark Fischer’s definition, the weird does not relate to the supernatural but rather produces a feeling that something is inherently “wrong” (Fischer 15). The many ways in which the genre of the weird relates to emerging ecologies of the Anthropocene is described in Mayer 2018, 239. 8. The cinematic adaptation of Annihilation takes this point to a visual level. The film directed by Alex Garland and produced in 2018 shows Tessa Thompson playing the astrophysicist Josie Radek. At one point she notices

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that something that resembles a plant is shimmering under the skin of her arm. A close-up reveals that a plant is, indeed, spreading its branches under her skin. After inflicting scars on her body, she makes space for the plants to literary bloom out of her skin. 9. For a survey of the various new materialisms, see Coole and Frost 2010 and Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2010. 10. For example None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer is a full book length by Benjamin J. Robertson that engages in Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction’s applicability to questions of the Anthropocene. In spite of the author’s recognition of the “possibility of other norms” that may facilitate a move beyond the tenets of “Western thought” (2), Indigenous philosophies are not part of his research corpus. 11. In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History Shepard Krech convincingly argues that the theory of Indigenous peoples living in harmony with their natural environment is a colonial hegemonial myth.

Works Cited Amábile-Cuevas, Carlos F., and Marina E.  Chicurel. “Horizontal Gene Transfer.”  American Scientist, vol. 81, no. 4, 1993, pp.  332–341. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29774969. Accessed 4 Dec. 2020. Beherec, Marc, A. “The Racist and La Raze: H. P. Lovecraft’s Aztec Mythos.” The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America from H.P.  Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko, edited by Amy H.  Sturgis and David D.  Oberhelman. Mythopoetic Press, 2009, pp. 25-37. Birmingham, Robert A. Spirits of Earth: The Effigy Mound Landscape of Madison and the Four Lakes, University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ub-­w uerzburg/detail.action? docID=3444981. Bonnet, Xavier, Richard Shine, and Olivier Lourdais. “Taxonomic Chauvinism.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 17, no. 1, 2002, pp. 1–3. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Theory: Seven Theses.” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. pp. 1–72. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Duke University Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialisms: Interviews & Cartographies. University of Michigan Library, 2010. Durzan, Don J. “Arginine, Scurvy, and Cartier’s ‘Tree of Life.’” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2009, 5:5, https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-­4269-­5-­5. Duffer, Matt, and Ross Duffer [The Duffer Brothers] (dirs.). Stranger Things. Web television series, Netflix, 2016–.

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———, Beyond Stranger Things. Web television series, Netflix, 2017. Eil, Philip. “The unlikely reanimation of H.P. Lovecraft.” The Atlantic. August 20, 2015. www.theatlantic.com. Accessed 15 December 2020. Estes, Douglas. The Tree of Life. Brill, 2020. Estok, Simon C. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Routledge, 2018. Rpt. with revisions and corrections, 2020. Fernandes, Roger. “Blackberry and Wolf.” https://forterra.org/editorial/ blackberry-­and-­wolf-­folktale. Accessed 15 December 2020. Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater Books, 2016. Goho, James. “The Aboriginal in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft.” Lovecraft Annual, no. 6, 2012, pp. 54–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26868449. Accessed 29 Jan. 2021. Gonzales, Christian Michael. Native American Roots: Relationality and Indigenous Regeneration Under Empire 1770-1859. Routledge, 2020. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Harman, Graham. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Zero Books, 2012. Henare, M. “Tapu, Mana, Mauri, Hau. Wairua: A Maori Philosophy of Vitalism and The Cosmos.” Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The interbeing of Cosmology and Community, edited by J.  A. Grim. Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 197–221. Hoffmann, Alice. “Breaking Down the Many Stranger Things References You Might Have Missed.” Time, 1. November 2017, https://time.com/4978928/ stranger-­things-­movie-­references. Accessed 10 December 2020. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling & Skill. Routledge, 2000. Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. McClelland & Stewart, 1976. Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. Norton, 1999. Laist, Randy. “Sartre and the Roots of Plant Horror.” Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp.163–178. Lovecraft, H.  P. “The Whisperer in Darkness.” https://www.hplovecraft.com/ writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx. Accessed 15 January 2021. Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Norton, 2019. Mayer, Jed. “The Weird Ecologies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, issue 2, 2018, 229–243. https://doi.org/10.5621/ sciefictstud.45.2.0229. Morton, Tomothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010. Nelson, Richard. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. University of Chicago Press, 1986. Newson, Ainsley and Anthony Wrigley. “Being Human: The Ethics, Law, and Scientific Progress of Genome Editing.”  AQ: Australian Quarterly, vol. 87,

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no. 1, 2016, pp.  3–40, www.jstor.org/stable/24877806. Accessed 9 December 2020. Prendergast, Finola Anne. “Revising Nonhuman Ethics in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.”  Contemporary Literature, volume 58, no. 3, fall 2017, pp. 333–360. Rolls, Alistair and Elizabeth Rechniewski. “Uprooting the Chestnut Tree: Nausea Today.” Sartre’s Nausea: Text, Context, Intertext. Rodopi, 2005, pp. 1–28. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Trsl. by Robert Baldick, Penguin Books, 2000. Scherer, Agnes. “The Pre-cosmic Squiggle: Tendril Excesses in Early Modern Art and Science Fiction Cinema.” Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 31–54. Smith, Erminie A. Myths of the Iroquois. N.d. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BCTTNF440447859/NCCO?u=sbbpk&si d=NCCO&xid=8f9b29d9&pg=1. Accessed 28 Jan. 2021. Solomon, Jon. “Boccaccio and the Ineffable, Aniconic God Demogorgon.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 19. no. 1, 2012, pp. 31–62. Solomon, Robert C. “Meditations on Nausea: Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology.” Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre. Oxford University Press,  1 September 2006. Oxford Scholarship Online. Date Accessed 6 Jan. 2021. “Stranger Things: Awards.” IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/title/tt4574334/ awards. Accessed 15 January 2021. Tallerico, Brian. “Every major Pop Culture reference in Stranger Things 2 from A to Z.” Vulture, 2. November 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/ stranger-­things-­2-­every-­pop-­cultue-­reference-­.html. VanderMeer, Jeff. The Southern Reach Trilogy. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014. ———, “Annihilation, Annotated.” https://www.mcdbooks.com/features/ annihilation-­rap-­genius#annotations:3146739. Accessed 10 January 2021. Vieira, Patricia. “Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing.” The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Vieira. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 215–233. Vilkka, Leena. The Intrinsic Value of Nature. Rodopi, 1997. Wampole, Christy. Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Wandersee, James H. And Elisabeth E. Schussler. “Preventing Plant Blindness.” American Biology Teacher 61, no. 2, 1999, pp.  82–86, https://doi.org/ 10.2307/4450624. Wetmore, Kevin J. editor. Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series. McFarland, 2018.

CHAPTER 5

An Ecology of Abject Women: Frontier Gothicism and Ecofeminism in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle Alexandra Hauke

Introduction: Frontier Realism, Gothic Symbolism, and Ecological Feminism In recent years, a variety of scholars and critics have read the political situation of the United States in the twenty-first century as an expression of gothic sentiments, from the impending “gothic horror of Donald Trump’s election” in 2016 (C. Parker) and the comparison of the 2017 inauguration to a “Gothic nightmare” (Petri) to the idea that national-political discourse since the election has become defined by metaphors of “the monster narrative” (Williams and Prince vii). Most poignantly, in the foreword to Victoria McCollum’s edited volume Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear (2019), Kendall Phillips observes that if the current “Third Golden Age of Horror […] is the result of a major point of cultural turmoil, that turmoil has a name: Trump.” He continues that “the ascendancy of Donald J. Trump to the White House

A. Hauke (*) American Studies, University of Passau, Passau, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_5

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is more a symptom of the rising fear and anxiety that has fueled and been fueled by xenophobic, nationalist, racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant (among others) rhetoric in numerous countries” (xiv–x). The essays in McCollum’s collection show how fiction has similarly been fueled by the need to scrutinize these attitudes in manners that uncover the topicality of the gothic horrors of the current culture of fear, rooted in the long history of fearmongering in the United States ever since the inception of what Patricia Nelson Limerick calls the “frontier paradigm,” the “origin myth” of “White Americans” (322). In this essay I will draw on this idea to navigate the ways American political contexts and the gothic horrors that define them have never been exclusively contained to either storytelling or actuality but, rather, seep into and out of each other in ways that reveal the ambiguity and spectrality of as well as the blurred lines between past and present bigoted discourses. The release of the 2018 film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novella We Have Always Lived in the Castle speaks to the topicality of the frontier as both a founding myth and a current model of us-vs.-them ideologies in the United States that segregate dominant from marginalized groups and thus the Self from the Other. In his theory of American gothic, Eric Savoy famously calls this condition the “return of what is unsuccessfully repressed,” i.e., an “imperative to repetition” (4), which is a central tenet of American gothic fiction more generally. I will argue in this chapter, however, that the frontier as the first marker of segregation upon European contact in the New World does not necessarily return but has rather remained all along as the primary haunting element throughout American history, continuing to rear its horrifying head in gothic texts and political contexts of various kinds. Frontier gothicism lends itself particularly well to explore the impacts of this spectrality on current realities of inequality that have their roots in the colonialism of settler conquest and Puritanism, whose ideologies are, in turn, tethered to the frontier. Stacie Passon’s cinematic adaptation of Castle adopts the premises of Jackson’s literary source text, a fundamental piece of the gothic tradition, which, as I will argue, is implicitly and explicitly constructed around the problematics of the United States’ foundational frontier paradigm. Passon translates the text’s ongoing relevance to the Anthropocene through the application of frontier imagery to contexts additional to physical space, namely, primarily, the social realm of gender inequality. Thereby, she points towards the ways women and the environment are simultaneously subjected to processes of Othering and subsequently stripped of agency

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through colonialist measures reminiscent of frontier segregation. The film thus allows for discussions of the current urgencies and discourses of ecocriticism, on the one hand, and intersectional feminism, on the other, as ways to thematize the haunting qualities of frontier violence against women and the environment as human and non-human Others, respectively. During times of increasing activism surrounding #metoo movements, queer feminisms of color, and ecofeminist initiatives, Castle thus uncovers the origins of domineering regimes and authoritarian discourses many women are still subjected to in the present moment. As such, the film’s currency lies in its success to bridge the gap between gothic pasts and their present specters in the context of the entangled realities of women and land, allowing Savoy’s seminal ideas to be imbued with the meanings, significances, and language of twenty-first-century ecofeminist initiatives. Jackson’s final novel has received significant scholarly attention (cf. Carpenter, Downey, Muñoz González); yet the interplay between the simultaneous oppression of women and their environments, forms of stereotyping surrounding the alleged nature and biology of women, as well as the text’s roots in the violence and dualisms of the frontier have been largely overlooked, especially in Passon’s version. In this essay, I read Jackson’s Castle as well as select scenes from the 2018 film adaptation across distinctly American literary aesthetics and politics of frontier gothicism and ecofeminist criticism to carve out their interconnected haunting qualities in the twenty-first-century United States. I argue that Jackson’s narrative negotiates the ways certain binaries at the core of Western patriarchal systems, e.g., man/woman, nature/ culture, and human/nature, carry forward American foundational beliefs about the frontier as well as its ongoing manifestations and usefulness in maintaining current orders of supremacy over the environment and subordinated groups, primarily women. As such, the novel scrutinizes, first, the conceptual wickedness of witch-protagonist Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood, who serves as the novel’s principal Other, an unruly woman and a rendition of the Salem witch as a haunting agent threatening civilization’s status quo; second, the affective housewife-façade of her older sister and surrogate mother, Constance Blackwood, who exhibits an obsession with the ecologies of food and gardening as relief from her agoraphobia; third, the sisters’ status as feminized Others and their supposedly “natural” relation to the gothic forest separating Blackwood mansion from the adjacent New England town; and fourth, their struggles with conformity as single women yet their ultimate efforts to break free from

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the constraints of social expectations through frontier gothic and ecofeminist means. I show that the sisters’ arguably questionable and ambiguous self-liberation at the end of the text reveals Castle’s relationship with nature as haunted by the frontier as a historic marker of both Self vs. Other and nature vs. culture, which becomes embedded in the text’s American landscape through the juxtapositions of forest vs. town and domesticity vs. independence. Additionally, the essentialist identification of women with nature is both scrutinized and enforced in the text, a frustrating yet necessary non-resolution that speaks to continuous discriminating imagery and practices in present-day patriarchal expressions of longstanding ideals. As such, by zooming in on Merricat’s and Constance’s lives six years after a poisoning incident killed the rest of their family, with the exception of their now disabled Uncle Julian, Castle comments on the legacies of colonial structures that manifest in the frontier as a physical, cultural, psychological, ecological, and gendered marker of binary understandings of women and nature that inform contemporary narratives and politics. Rooted in the discourses of discovery and conquest of Othered individuals, the histories of witch hysteria at the core of the Salem Witch Trials, and the patriarchal teachings of Puritan ideologies, Castle questions essentialist associations of womanhood and wilderness by cutting across the interconnected systemic injustices of sexism and ecological depletion. Leslie Fiedler argues that, in the American gothic, “the heathen, unredeemed wilderness and not the decaying monuments of a dying class, nature and not society becomes the symbol of evil” (160). Reading Castle as an iteration of American frontier gothic testifies to this idea in the way both literal and figurative meanings of nature and wilderness are at the forefront of Jackson’s novel: despite the fact that Merricat’s charm ensures sympathy on behalf of the reader/spectator, her childlike wildness, affinity for earthy magic, interest in plants, and desire to transform into a supernatural creature posit her as the core problem of the society depicted in the novel. Her denial of the feminine ideal marks her as the principal protagonist of the text’s monster narrative, wherein the tomboyish, argumentative, and man-hating witch is doomed from the start because she resists what the New England villagers understand as her biological calling. Merricat’s “true nature,” the most disputed idea in the novel, is, in fact, a “haunted nature” for the ways it is subjected to and ruled by the expectations and limitations of the Puritan legacies that define the town’s ideologies: without her womanhood, Merricat seizes to matter or be respected; yet, by inhabiting the wrong kind of womanhood, she faces the same

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ostracization. As such, while class hierarchies between the Blackwoods and their neighbors serve as a catalyst of conflict in the novel, the protagonists’ gender and inability to adhere to society’s regulations exacerbate the social frontier between the groups and thus shed light on the multifaceted ways human and non-human nature is haunted in the story. Lynette Carpenter claims in this respect that, to the townspeople, “the Blackwood wealth might be an affront, but Blackwood wealth in the hands of women is a travesty” (34). Merricat’s reputation as the crazy witch with demonic powers adds insult to injury in this respect, for her presence in town stores during her weekly shopping trips elicits both fear and fascination in the villagers, i.e., double-edged reactions that speak to the American gothic’s theme of ambiguity. By foregrounding her witchhood in this way, the novel also adds to the aforementioned idea of Merricat’s haunted nature as a woman by suggesting that she, in turn, serves as a spectral agent whose symbolic signification—a personified reminder of the Salem Witch Trials—threatens the village’s stability and rigid belief systems. In addition to Merricat’s status as the radical Other in the novel, Jackson introduces Constance as the keeper of the garden, a cultivated wilderness where her duty as caretaker of Merricat, Uncle Julian, their house, and the environment intersect. As such, despite the fact that (or, rather, precisely because) Constance is unmarried, she takes on the responsibilities of the woman of the house, her daily repertoire limited to an obsession with food, cooking, and cleaning. Dara Downey has observed that, for the good housewife of the early to mid-twentieth century, “any failure to perform these tasks regularly, tirelessly, and to an increasingly high standard became the target of explicitly Gothic language and imagery.” She continues that advertisements for cleaning supplies would ask, for example, “Do you live in a haunted house? Is your house germ-­ haunted?” This rhetoric thereby “exploited housewifely guilt and the struggle to ‘fit in’ by positioning them as America’s only defense against the forces of darkness, figuratively ridding their country of ghosts by keeping it literally clean” (Downey 292). Around the same time, in 1942, Gordon Parks’ photographic rendition of “American Gothic” added to the United States’ contradictory narrative around cleaning as a status symbol for white, middle-class women taking care of private homes (like Constance), on the one hand, and as often invisible, underpaid, and taken-­ for-­granted labor in public spaces by many African American women, on the other. Ella Watson, the image’s subject, is standing in front of the Star-Spangled Banner, holding a mop and broom while looking straight

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into the camera, creating an atmosphere that symbolizes a different state of American affairs than Grant Wood’s 1930 version of the same name. Parks’ updated rendition points to a particular rift between the realities of marginalized groups, the country’s true gothicism, represented by Watson, and the fictions of the American Dream as well as the impossible promise of “E Pluribus Unum”, exemplified by the American flag in the image’s background. While Jackson’s Castle lacks discussions of race and its intersections with other identity markers such as class altogether, this particular erasure speaks volumes when read in contradistinction to the hyperbolic representation of Constance’s cleaning habits: because black, indigenous, and people of color are missing from the narrative scene, another character—Merricat—must step in to serve as “a floating signifier” representing a racialized Other so that “the continuity of that specific racial mystique is not endangered” (Däwes 332). While in Parks’ “American Gothic” that Other is the black woman, in Castle, the filthy forest-­ enthusiast Merricat, who wishes to leave Earth and live on the moon, personifies the wilderness across the historic frontier through a representation of the stereotyped woman-nature connection that later also merges with her figuration as the text’s central witch. While Constance attempts to clean the past of the nation and of the family tragedy away, Merricat as the specter of the Other keeps coming back to dirty the scene, making both housewife perfection and the denial of historical horrors impossible—a fact that speaks to Savoy’s seminal idea of the gothic as “a discursive field of return and reiteration” as well as of the “failure of repression and forgetting” (6, 4). As such, by dragging filth from the forest into the house, Merricat enables nature to become a haunting force. Further, the fact that she inhabits a female body calls to attention ecofeminist efforts to understand the connection between her wildness as human, woman, and witch, whereby her rejection of androcentric systems in the novel is expressed in her witchy allusions to the healing propensities of nature, further pointing towards the necessity to disentangle the binary separation of human/non-human ecologies that mark her. The American frontier gothic and the ecofeminist urgency to liberate women and their environments in Castle are in full effect at this point. Food and eating have become literal and figurative processes of nourishment for the sisters, with the preparation, conservation, and consumption of what Constance harvests in the garden and what Merricat buys in town serving as both necessary and sustainable actions for their lives. However,

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the obsessive maintenance of their respective roles as (house) wife and surrogate husband transforms their family estate into an ambivalent agent of protection and entrapment. While the sisters seem to thrive in what has always been a gothic castle per the novel’s title, their peace is easily disturbed by in- and external representations of the patriarchal order (Uncle Julian and their cousin Charles Blackwood, respectively). As such, while the sisters’ conjoined participation in the family murder can superficially be seen as a feminist undertaking of the deconstruction of an oppressive regime, their mental states rather account for violent vengeance without consideration of the repercussions of their actions. Merricat’s and Constance’s subsequent flight into care for different environments and ecologies—house, garden, food, woods, moon, each other—serves as an attempt to overcome the frontiers between past and present, male dominance and female oppression, and sanity and madness. The sisters’ actions at first seem to align with ecofeminist efforts to unravel the dualisms of patriarchal hegemony, whereby “what can be regarded as authentically human/masculine […] is defined as superior and in opposition to the natural, physical or biological realm. Idealized masculinity qua humanity transcends this realm, while women, nature and all else that do not conform are ‘othered’ to confirm and justify their subordination” (M. Phillips 472). Upon closer investigation, however, they actually work towards enclosing themselves in their forever home, the titular castle, far removed from civilization, instead of entering into true freedom, thereby perpetuating the very oppression they claim to despise because of a lack of other viable options for them. At the end, therefore, both sisters have become wildlings with a special bond to each other and to their domestic surroundings, stacked with innumerable jars of preserved garden harvest signifying their “natural” habitat. Because neither of them risks an attempt at overhauling the villagers’ beliefs about their respective positions as women, Merricat’s and Constance’s roles remain firmly inscribed as defying the alleged nature of women while relying on the protection of their natural surroundings, arguably becoming one with and feeding into the haunting essentialisms of Mother Nature. Examining the interplay between ecofeminism and frontier gothicism in Castle allows for an uncovering of the dualistic tendencies and invocations of the American gothic ideas of repetition and return, i.e., of the haunting qualities of an unprocessed past of violence and oppression, which speak to the ways patriarchal mastery proliferates in current US discourses. Ultimately, this approach reveals the complex and ambiguous

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interrelationships between women and the environment as well as the need to defy such restricting binaries and counter the inextricable disenfranchisement of both that still dominates debates about climate change and discrimination in the twenty-first century, whence non-human nature emerges as both haunted and haunting. No matter the path Merricat and Constance choose, neither of the sisters can account for the ideal of womanhood prescribed by the small town’s heteronormative expectations, in turn rooted in New England’s Puritan past. Both women are abjected and fall victim to stereotypes of femininity, establishing Castle as an American gothic tale of mutual domestication between the sisters, which finds resolve only in a reconfiguration yet ultimate proliferation of the frontier paradigm.

Frontier Aesthetics and Ecofeminist Politics in We Have Always Lived in the Castle Merricat’s introduction at the beginning of Castle has been named one of the best opening paragraphs in all of literature (Klein; Temple) for the way she exposes the fundamentals of her character: readers learn that she is eighteen years old, yet dislikes washing herself; they hear about her disappointment with not being born a werewolf; and they are informed about her fondness for Constance, Amanita phalloides (the death cap mushroom), and Richard Plantagenet (Jackson 1). Upon close examination, Merricat’s testimony already brings to light the gothic and environmental contexts of the novel. Her love for the death cap mushroom appears rather straightforward and suggests a fascination with death and deadly plants; indeed, Merricat continuously reveals her intrusive thoughts about her desire to kill the villagers and, especially, the men she encounters: “I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying” (8–9). Additionally, the intersection of her mentioning of the deadly plant and Constance, who is in charge of gardening, harvesting food, and cooking, exposes the inextricable link between the tripartite structure of the sisters, the significance of natural products, and the wildness of their surrounding ecologies. Lastly, Merricat’s consecutive indication of Amanita phalloides and the death of the rest of her family serves as the first instance of foreshadowing with regard to her own and Constance’s role in this fatal occurrence. Darryl Hattenhauer suggests the translation of the

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mushroom’s name as “a man-eater phallic” (177); Merricat thus rather explicitly informs readers of her omnipresent desire to erase masculine-­ identified individuals through deadly force. The meaning and importance of Richard Plantagenet is less obvious. Emily Temple argues that Merricat could be referring to a number of people, […] but she probably means the third Duke of York, whose claim to the throne […] was a primary cause of the Wars of the Roses. In 1460, the English Parliament compromised and declared that Richard would succeed to the throne after Henry VI’s death, but he was killed in battle by the Lancaster forces, and his son wound up becoming king instead.

In addition to another allusion to plant life through the war context, according to the House of Names, the family name of the Plantagenet dynasty translates to gardener “as the name was originally derived from the Old English word plant meaning plant, or young tree.” John S. Plant of the Guild of One-Name Studies supports this reading in a discussion of the nineteenth-century controversies around the royal name’s true meaning and origin, asserting that Plantagenet is part of a family of “plant-­ based names” (2) that point to “gardener” or “planter of various plants” (3). Merricat’s fascination with Richard Plantagenet thus, at first, appears like a random mental leap in her list of curious interests, especially because this figure is never mentioned again; however, associations with plants and nature as well as the Duke’s noble backgrounds expose crucial information about the novel’s gothic and ecofeminist contexts. The former is invoked through Plantagenet’s similarities to the Blackwood family’s own last name, whereby the invocation of black wood allows yet another connection to the novel’s focus on nature and wildlife. The sisters are surrounded by the woods that separate them from the village in manners similar to the frontier, Othering and segregating the humbler town from the wealthy environments of the Blackwoods. This gothic forest, which Elizabeth Parker calls the “Deep Dark Woods” and understands as “an archetypical site of dread in the collective human imagination” (1), elicits both semantic and metaphoric blackness by acting as dividing line between classes, allowing both groups to keep to their side all the while coding the other side as evil and bad. Parker continues that “landscape is commonly read as a binary space” (1), which supports the way the oppositions in Castle simultaneously understand themselves as the

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respective good party. Connecting this twofold understanding of landscape and group in-/exclusion to the dualism of civilization and nature at the core of the frontier gothic highlights how the Blackwoods and the villagers also concurrently inhabit both of these spaces. Because the groups Other each other, they see their corresponding antagonists as uncivilized. Merricat’s disdain specifically manifests in her disgust for the town as a socially and ecologically inferior space, which brings to light the way she equates anyone who is not a Blackwood with decay: it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant, and […] perhaps their slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers. (Jackson 6)

Merricat exposes her own prejudice of the town through the semantic field of nature, envisioning a process of decomposition that resembles ecological waste. The villagers, to her, are thus inevitably closer to the dark sides of nature and must succumb to its power, which she believes lies in her hands. Merricat continues that the “people of the village disliked the fact that we always had plenty of money to pay for whatever we wanted” (7); at the same time, she calls the grocery owner’s wife “greedy” (8) because of the woman’s suspicious attitudes towards the younger Blackwood sister when she shops. In truly self-righteous colonizer fashion, Merricat thus resents the villagers for resenting her and deems their attitudes unreasonable, thereby naïvely ignoring the origin of the villagers’ anger. She cannot see the role her family plays in the unequal distribution of economic resources between the Blackwoods and the villagers, relying on an us-vs.-them understanding of the world that becomes the primary legacy of frontier mentality in the novel. Most painfully, Merricat denounces the majority of her family in the most violent way—murder by poison—because of her feelings of inferiority opposite her parents; at the same time, however, she exhibits pride in her lineage, which also comes with the family’s classism. It is thus unsurprising that Merricat identifies with the English nobility of the Plantagenet dynasty, who carry a name similar in royalty to her own— at least, according to her beliefs. Beyond the forest as segregating tool, the spatial separation between the family estate and the rest of the town is soon made even more explicit:

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Blackwood Road goes in a circle around the Blackwood land and along every inch of Blackwood Road is a wire fence built by our father. Not far past the town is the big black rock which marks the entrance to the path where I unlock the gate and lock it behind me and go through the woods and am home. (4)

Readers learn later on that this entryway to the estate is additionally marked with the words “PRIVATE NO TRESPASSING” in capital letters ever since Mrs. Blackwood proclaimed that the “highway’s built for common people […] and my front door is private” (18). After the family’s passing, the sisters continue to revel in their isolation and in the fact that their parents made sure “the path is closed forever” (19). This is a crucial moment in the novel because it fundamentally changes the meaning of the American frontier: Rather than simply a dividing line, closing the gate as frontier between the upper-class Blackwoods and the “common people” suggests locking it safely in place for all eternity, enabling its dissemination through later generations. The bolted path thus emerges as a marker of the intersection of the Blackwood family’s hatred of the lowly villagers and their reliance on the surrounding forest as shield from these Others. At this point, Castle testifies to Mogen et al.’s claim that “[f]rontier gothic literature expresses how alienation and fear both subvert and continually redefine the American ideal of the future as a frontier leading each of us and our nation to ever more positive cultural and psychological transformations” (26). The Blackwood sisters suffer from imprisonment that is both self-induced and perpetuated from their parents’ anxieties about losing their privileges if they ever mingled with the villagers. The text’s title exposes its most complex meaning at this point: on the surface, it alludes to the fact that the Blackwoods have inhabited the family house for generations; further, it can be read as an indicator of the omnipresence of patriarchal hegemony, which has always kept women like Merricat and Constance locked up in gothic castles. While the environment functions as a place of refuge, freedom, and nourishment for the sisters, it is also engaged in a constant battle for the upper hand with the castle as a marker of patriarchy. In these moments, it becomes clear that nature is seen as a haunted object while simultaneously serving as a haunting agent, ever caught in the push and pull between systemic oppression and decolonizing resistance. The castle also points towards the gothic’s English origins, wherein, since Horace Walpole’s seminal work The Castle of Otranto (1764), this

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building emerged as the primary setting of the haunting horrors of domesticity and oppression. By transferring the castle to an American context while equally imprisoning its Othered inhabitants, Jackson reminds readers of the fact that the histories of disenfranchisement in the United States are always tied to the legacies of European settlers, correlating the American frontier gothic’s return of the repressed and its colonizing oppressor from overseas. This engagement with the ambiguous qualities of the woods as well as its nod to the transatlantic developments of the gothic genre and its actors establishes Castle as a truly American frontier gothic tale. Because Merricat understands herself and her sister as victims of villagers who are descendants of pioneer oppressors, she ceaselessly works towards keeping her family isolated from them, unaware that her own acts of Othering establish her as equally—if not more—separatist than the townsfolk. Merricat’s tendency to resort to vicious means testifies to the fact that, because of her economic background, she has never learned to work for her desires but to take them by force in order to threaten and keep at bay those she perceives as her inferiors or enemies. Merricat exploits every opportunity to demonstrate her power since the death of her parents, even if she is not next in line as successor. In this context, Merricat’s appreciation of the Duke of York also suggests a kind of schadenfreude: her significance to Constance, performance as family protector, and handiwork in the household prove that she has been able to rise to authority, like Plantagenet’s son, despite not being a man. Respectively, as Hattenhauer observes, the younger sister “is generally more male-identified. She plays the husband’s role by taking her sister as her partner.” He continues that she “performs the manly duties of carpentry, trading downtown, and killing people” (177), complementing Constance’s femininized role as maternal and wifely head of the house. This way, it is clear from the beginning that there is no need for male help in this ecosystem because all necessary roles have been distributed among the sisters. At the same time, the specter of Puritan idealism in the form of village gossip also continuously reminds them that a female-led household goes against nature and will only lead to even more surveillance and criticism. In addition to Merricat’s masculine-coded behavior, dress, and work, she also embodies traditionally feminine-identified categories. When the townspeople’s children confront Merricat with an already well-known chant, wherein they rhyme “you’ll poison me” with “would you like to go to sleep” and “[d]own in the boneyard ten feet deep” (16), they pinpoint

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Merricat as a murderous perpetrator with an evil reputation. The way they fear and mock her yet simultaneously engage with her out of idle curiosity invokes Barbara Creed’s seminal concept of “the monstrous-feminine,” which “speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (7). Echoing what in this paper I consider a gendered frontier, she continues that “that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject. Although the specific nature of the border changes […], the function of the monstrous remains the same—to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability” (11). While in many gothic texts, the position of the monstrous-­ feminine is occupied by mother figures, in Castle, this role is primarily played by the rebellious woman, whose disobedient nature, unruly wildness, and murderous appetites the villagers equate with witchhood. Creed asserts that “[t]here is one incontestably monstrous role […] that belongs to woman—that of the witch,” a figure that “has inspired both awe and dread” (73, 74). Merricat is Othered because of her peculiar behaviors, which suggest, as Oates points out, “a kind of simple, sympathetic magic involving ‘safeguards’” (150), which are meant to protect the sisters from male invasion through nature’s energies. Merricat nails her father’s checkbook to a tree and buries coins by the creek near the family estate, using both her monetary status and her dead family’s spectral shadow as protection from those she believes to be less cultured than her. Thus, instead of truly supernatural magic, Merricat’s self-administered power lies in drawing frontiers between her family and the rest of the world, engaging in the very practices she holds against the villagers for supposedly segregating the Blackwoods. Her desire to act as a truly supernatural creature, implied in her opening lament about missing out on being a werewolf, remains unfulfilled, for Merricat’s monstrosity lies in her defiant, vengeful humanness. As such, inhabiting the position of the monster through her role as the monstrous-feminine witch, and thus the novel’s central Other at the mercy of entangled human/non-human discriminations, Merricat emerges as a true frontier figure whose identities are constantly de- and reconstructed as she draws and redraws boundaries between herself and others, using her world’s ecologies as her language. Mogen et  al. observe that, in frontier gothic texts, the “history of the other speaks, not from the history books, but from the landscape” so that “Gothicism must abide on a frontier—whether physical or psychical […] American frontier gothic literature derives from this conflict between the inscripted history of the other, somehow immanent in the landscape of the

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frontier” (16, 17). By engaging the land’s specters in the form of the Salem witch, Merricat not only serves as a modern-day testament of the open wounds of American history, she also becomes the principal marker of the dualisms ecofeminist projects aim to dismantle. On the one hand, as I have shown above, Merricat is proof that the same person can take on varying identities, that these identifications are in constant flux, and that none of them is inherently superior: she makes similar use of her masculine- and feminine-coded traits so that her persona approaches an almost gender-neutral, non-binary, or queer position, all of which stand in opposition to the patriarchal norm she condemns. On the other, Merricat is a firm believer in the binary between good and evil as well as superior and inferior, whereby she clearly identifies men with the respective latter of these juxtapositions. Additionally, she practices favoritism of nature over culture in the sense of wilderness vs. civilization despite the fact that her privilege derives from class hierarchies introduced by the very society she rejects. Jackson hence writes Merricat as a contradictory figure who does not actively seek social and ecological democracy for both human and non-human Others because she cannot identify the ecofeminist “premise that how we treat nature and how we treat each other are inseparably linked” (Gaard 158). Merricat becomes a haunting image of the ambiguities at the core of the American frontier and the gothic through her hypocritical condemnation of yet ultimate participation in the practices of patriarchal oppression, i.e., her dualistic thinking, manipulation of Constance, and strategic (mis)use of her natural surroundings. Merricat is thus herself responsible for the continuous reconfiguration of nature as haunted and haunting, depending on what serves her in every respective moment. For this reason, Merricat goes into overdrive when her power is threatened by the arrival of cousin Charles Blackwood, who invades the sisters’ privacy in ways reminiscent of the deceased Blackwood father; thus, his patriarchal presence must be expunged. The only way this seems possible in the novel is through arson, which becomes an iteration of what Richard Slotkin has famously termed “regeneration through violence” (5). In her father’s room, at one point inhabited by Charles, Merricat lights her cousin’s newspapers on fire. The flames spread to other parts of the mansion, driving all Blackwoods, except Uncle Julian, who succumbs to the not-so-­ haphazard accident, out of the house. The incident alarms the townspeople, who come to gawk at the spectacle: “There was a long row of cars, and the village fire engine, all parked as close as they could get, and everyone

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in the village was there, looking up and watching.” Charles exclaims that “[t]hey had plenty of warning” (Jackson 103), suggesting that the sisters are responsible for their downfall because of their non-conformity with his and society’s regulations. When some of the villagers suggest to the firemen to let the house burn with the sisters in it (105), the scene becomes, according to Carpenter, “a modern confrontation between witches and witchhunters,” whereby the witchhunt can be understood “as one patriarchal response to female rebellion” (32). As such, the villagers’ desires to watch the Blackwood women meet their fatal destinies in ways similar to the Salem witches continues the novel’s engagement with the idea of regeneration through violence (Slotkin), implying that one side of the divide (between upper and lower class, between culture and nature) must perish to open up the possibility for a new beginning. Such a renaissance speaks to frontier gothic and ecofeminist visions of unprejudiced futures. In their exploration of the “revolutionary possibilities” of frontier gothic literature, Mogen et al. invoke D.H. Lawrence’s idea that “the new nucleus of a new society, the clue to a new world-epoch […] asks for the great and cruel sloughing first of all. Then it finds release into a new world, a new moral, a new landscape” (21). At the end of Castle, the top part of the Blackwood house has burned down, seemingly cleansing the space of its former energies and suggesting a vanquishing of the specters of the past. The sisters have successfully eliminated all points of contact to the outside world, remaining barricaded in their paradisiac castle, which now resembles the “fallen, cursed world created by original sin [that] was imported to New England” and that “shaped the Puritans’ experience of the landscape and the natural world they found there” (Hillard 110). The Biblical and colonial pasts have returned yet again with Constance and Merricat emerging as different versions of Eve: the former as the sublime figuration of the immaculate woman in her natural glory, the latter as the catalyst of the cultural-ecological apocalypse. Hattenhauer even adds that “they look like American Eves restored to a primitive Eden” (185), the gothic castle that emerges as the New-New World, an ecosystem eventually ruled only by the sisters. When the house fire has subsided and the villagers have left, Merricat and Constance return to their home, a new Eden, which they close off from the world with wood panels that finally allow them the privacy Merricat, in particular, has always desired. They establish a new normal by setting up camp in the kitchen, the only unscathed room, seemingly waiting for Constance to continue her duties as cook with the equally intact collection of pickled garden harvest in the

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pantry. Meanwhile, the townspeople return one by one to bring food to the sisters’ front door for fear of the witch’s vengeful wrath. Merricat and Constance ignore all attempts at reconciliation and uphold the frontier between civilization outside and their self-established, wild paradise inside, where both human and non-human nature are cherished equally. They repeatedly revel in how happy they are, their “eyes looking out through the vines” that overgrow the mansion, by this point “barely recognizable as a house” (146). The novel’s final moment of regeneration thus comes in the form of Blackwood mansion revealing its true form as “a castle,” a gothic character in itself, whose roof has burned away and now stands “turreted and open to the sky” (120). The sisters, the house, and its surroundings seem no longer ruled by the binary processes of Othering but rather newly encased by a creeping plant growing up and down the castle’s four sides, as if offering the sisters a protective embrace from Mother Nature. This closing image brings the novel’s frontier gothic and ecofeminist contexts full circle by invoking, once more, Merricat’s initial affinity for Richard Plantagenet: plant-based meanings of the royal name Plantagenet are “related to the medieval concept of ‘generation’ which, in medieval belief, was a power of man’s vegetable soul” (Plant 3). This not only points towards the healing, (re)generative powers of plant life, which comes in the form of the vines protecting the Blackwood sisters: it also indicates, if “man” is understood as the traditionally collective marker for human(ity), a central goal of ecofeminist work, namely, to deconstruct the “historical precedent which separates and sets humans above nature” (Kings 70). This premise “is also responsible for enforcing the ‘violent rupture’ between humankind and nature—which helps to render humanity ignorant of its duty towards the natural environment and the non-human other” (Kings 70). If humans thus have a vegetable soul, then ecofeminism can serve as a corrective and curative approach to break down the binaries between human/nature, nature/culture, and man/woman that continue to haunt ever new generations, foregrounding the crucial role of the planet’s ecologies: “By focusing on a return to the elements of nature— in this case the myriad possibilities that plant life can show us—humans have a means of returning to careful thought” (Gibson 5) as well as to their responsibility for the environment in times of global climate crises and other ecological hazards. More specifically, according to Prudence Gibson, because nature has been identified as inferior and thus female/ feminine—and vice versa—through abstractions such as “Mother Earth” and the fact that nature is considered “a mother, a fecund vessel, within

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which life (that is, the human) can grow,” this accountability for ecological care has primarily been awarded to women. Such a one-dimensional ascription “can be seen as delimiting and may not serve the purposes of becoming woman, of fulfilling both an independent and collective state of being. That is, constant growth” (Gibson 123) and the development of environmental spheres which, like the aforementioned Others, continue to be at once exiled and glorified in Western-centric, capitalist societies. Gibson continues that we have moved away from the vegetal world and neglected what being alive presupposes. […] it is time to speak. Speak via eco-transmissions. Speak via chemical releases. Speak via the movement of flowers across the water. Speak, irrespective of whether there is a human there to listen. So, the plant contract speaks. (127)

In Castle, Merricat and Constance enter such a contract by similarly speaking through their interactions with the natural ecologies of plant life instead of through their bodies and identities as markers of their allegedly feminine nature. This allows them to move beyond the limitations imposed on them through passed-down belief systems that have turned their home into a haunted castle until nature’s agency frees it from the constraints of its gothic past. While the younger sister has always been fond of the naturally grown elements of wilderness, the older is left tending to the cultivated parts of nature in the form of the garden, its harvests, and cooking them—even in the New-New World. While Merricat has always enjoyed lying on the uncut grass, Constance prefers the trimmed lawn and the strategically laid-out vegetable garden. When the latter is occupied perfecting their home, the former dreams of a house on the moon with a garden (for Constance) while escaping to her hiding place, a haphazardly built cocoon of bushes on the bank of the nearby river. Hattenhauer identifies Merricat’s waterside safe space as a “vaginal hideout” (177), one where she is free of any expectations and can securely slip back into the mother’s womb—be it Constance’s, her dead mother’s, or Mother Nature’s. By disconnecting from the real world and entering an imaginative realm across the universe, Merricat uncovers her desire to cross the final frontier into space, an idea that speaks to what was once the American “national fantasy […] of a New Frontier witnessing a man on the moon” (186). Merricat believes that, up there, she would be relieved of the troubles that haunt her and could live out her fantasy as Constance’s only

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receiver of attention, thus no longer needing her pseudo-supernatural abilities. While on Earth, however, she makes use of the villagers’ fear of her, rooted in the historical events of Salem, by playing the wicked witch to remain grounded, which allows her to honor her plant contract with non-human nature by nailing objects to trees and burying others by the property fence as well as beside her creek hideaway, all as protection from evil human outside forces. As such, while Merricat oftentimes suffers from her reputation as a representation of the monstrous-feminine with an affinity for places and plants as wild as her, she turns this prejudice on its head by using nature’s propensities to her advantage through magic that “appears to be self-invented, an expression of desperation and a yearning to stop time with no connection to satanic practices, still less to Satan. (Merricat is too willful a witch to align herself with a putative higher power, especially a masculine power)” (Oates 148). From this follows that her engagement with the plant contract, her care for nature in its purest forms, emerges in direct contrast to the limiting contexts of the patriarchal regime haunting her and, instead, in line with her own version of an ecofeminist care ethic, which Mary Phillips claims “is developed as a social and political as well as an individual practice necessary to bring about radical changes in our relationships in a more-than-human world” (471). From Merricat’s perspective, non-human nature was never meant to be dominated but embraced in a useful way to protect her and her loved ones; and yet, her behavior never fully permits nature to reclaim its agency because her childish human desires are far greater than the limits of this Earth allow. After the fire that leaves Blackwood mansion in ruins, Merricat’s dream has manifested in the barricaded castle as stand-in for the otherworldly privacy of the moon: “I am thinking that we are on the moon, but it is not quite as I supposed it would be” (Jackson 133). Unexpectedly, it seems Merricat’s idealism has caught up with her and the remnants of life before her figurative move to the moon continue to haunt her. The world as she knew it has not disintegrated but is rather casting its veil of societal expectations on her and her sister from outside the barred house with no roof. “I did not think that there was any way we could be vulnerable from above” (120), Merricat muses at the torn-off roof, the moon above them acting as additional fortification from outside dangers as well as a reference point for Merricat’s witchiness: early on in the novel, the younger sister wishes to “walk home across the sky” (3); later she desires a “winged horse” so she “could fly you [Constance] to the moon and back” (22).

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Her frequent invocations of flying paint a traditional picture of a witch riding a broomstick through the sky; thus, her dream of supernatural experiences manifests in her visions of witchhood as a form of rebellion against human culture and an escape into non-human nature. Thus, the figure of the witch is always inextricably linked to nature in the text, perpetuating the ways both images oscillate between haunting and being haunted. The Blackwood house’s turn towards the open sky additionally reads like a cry for fresh air post the uprooting fire and a need for sunlight to feed the plant vines covering its exterior. Gibson emphasizes that “[a]ll plants create oxygen through photosynthesis and they absorb carbon dioxide. All animals breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. […] Plants and humans breathe together” (127), emphasizing the entanglement between human and non-human nature. Constance testifies to this fact when she decides, instead of wearing Uncle Julian’s old clothes, to cover herself in leaves, encasing her vegetable soul with nature’s wild products, becoming one with the earth and plant life, and merging more and more with the castle. In this sense, it seems the sisters have found a way to transplant nature into their home, where they uphold their obsession with preparing and ingesting food to nourish their vegetable souls. They have established a self-sufficient ecosystem reminiscent of an untouched wilderness and (mostly) independent of civilized systems, a seeming return to Earth as a place where human and non-human nature coexisted in equal value, before it was dominated by capitalist exploitation and climate threats. Hillard argues that “for the Puritans the New World does function as a sort of Gothic castle. It is the wilderness” of the fallen Garden of Eden whose specter later returned in the unruly territories the settlers encountered on their voyages (112). Its presence comes back in the same way when the villagers in Castle, descendants of those same Puritans, are confronted with the sisters’ ultimate rejection of civilization and patriarchy as well as claims to their land and monstrous femininity. Inhabiting the very spaces and positions that initially Othered them through the establishment of a new frontier allows the sisters to experience “a ‘happy ending’ [that] is both ironic and literal, the consequence of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice—of others” (Oates 148). In this sense, frontier gothicism for Merricat and Constance means using and abusing the frontier paradigm as well as the dualisms at the core of Western thought to build a New-New World where they can—and must—coexist with the

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specters of the past and their present-day iterations for a lack of opportunities to fully break free from the ties that bind them. Dipping into the essentialisms of being and becoming both woman and nature ultimately enables Merricat and Constance, as well as all women, to, at least, reign over the roof-less gothic castles they have always lived in instead of succumbing to the madness in the attic, which, in Jackson’s Castle, has been expunged to make room for new skies.

Conclusion: Haunted Natures in the Twenty-First Century While Merricat’s and Constance’s cousin Charles briefly returns to Blackwood mansion after the fire in Jackson’s original version of Castle, only to then permanently flee from the scene, Stacie Passon’s 2018 film adaptation paints a vastly different picture of Charles’s final encounter with the sisters. In a violent rendition of his last visit to court Constance, the cousin in the film breaks down the house’s wooden barricades in frustrated anger, hungry for Blackwood money and Constance’s body. He enters the kitchen and jumps at Constance, seemingly ready to assault her in ways the text insinuates are reminiscent of the family father’s vicious dealings with his daughters before his death. When Constance and Charles physically struggle on the kitchen floor, with Constance screaming and trying to loosen his grip on her, Merricat swoops in and beats their cousin to death with her sister’s snow globe. Following this final exhibition of regeneration through violence, whereby the permanent banishing of the ghost of Charles stands in for the elimination of all patriarchal hauntings of the past, including the Blackwood father, the sisters bury Charles in Constance’s garden, seemingly as a sacrifice to Mother Nature, who will overgrow his body to make up for his missing vegetable soul. As such, while the last specter has been eradicated from the scene, merging human and non-human nature once again, his ongoing existence beneath the soil creates a new form of haunting through the secret of another Blackwood murder the sisters can never reveal. Castle’s end thus offers the most literal example of nature as both haunted and haunting, yet, one that relies on the simultaneous decay and fading away as well as the endless presence and memory of the patriarch. The recent release of Castle’s film adaptation and its transformed ending speak to the urgency to process more seriously the many ways colonial

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violence along and beyond the mythical frontier continues to haunt the twenty-first-century United States. The controversial ending to Passon’s Castle infuses Jackson’s text with new meanings that scrutinize the beliefs, behaviors, rights, and demands of all agents on both sides of the patriarchy-­ feminism, human-nature, and past-present divides. The frontier gothic as a quintessentially American genre shines a light on the stories embedded forever in the landscape, whose keepers must not forget to honor and care for its ecologies—both human and non-human, for they are forever entangled. From this follows that dismantling the harmful dualisms that have come to define the Anthropocene—such as human/nature, male/female, or mind/body—is as much a project of the frontier gothic, a genre that narrates the complex ambiguities that define past and present horrors of American national myths, as of ecofeminism, whose proponents continue to push for more intersectional understandings of the relationships between humans and the environment. Lastly, Jackson and Passon may have written different endings to Castle, but their stories share the same central message: until they are allowed to fully emancipate themselves, women—like all human, non-human, and more-than-human Others—will continue to live in castles, reduced to their feminine nature and understood as figures both haunted by and haunting each new patriarchal order. A return to the vegetable soul, and thus to a unification of human and non-human nature, if through violent regeneration, can thus contribute to ending systemic exploitation of both women and the environment. In the meantime, we will keep envisioning futures sans frontiers, times when we are allowed to walk across the sky, no limits above us.

Works Cited Carpenter, Lynette. “The Establishment and Preservation of Female Power in Shirley Jackson’s ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1984, pp. 32–38. Däwes, Birgit. “Terrors of Territory: Mary Rowlandson, Charles Brockden Brown, Shyamalan’s The Village, and the Haunting of the American Frontier.” ZAA, vol. 58, no. 4, 2020, pp. 319–34. Downey, Dara. “Not a Refuge Yet: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Hauntings.” A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L.  Crow, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014, pp. 290–302.

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Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Scarborough Books, 1982. Gaard, Greta. “Women, Water, Energy: An Ecofeminist Approach.” Organization & Environment, vol. 14, no. 2, 2001, pp. 157–72. Hattenhauer, Daryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. SUNY Press, 2003. Hillard, Tom J. “From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature.” Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Manchester University Press, pp. 103–19. Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 1962. Penguin, 2009. Kings, A.E. “Intersectionality and the Changing Face of Ecofeminism.” Ethics & the Environment, vol. 22, no. 1, 2017, pp.  63–87, https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/660551 Klein, Annika Barranti. “The Magic of Shirley Jackson’s Opening Paragraphs.” BookRiot, 14 Dec. 2016, https://bookriot.com/the-­magic-­of-­shirley-­jacksons­opening-­paragraphs/ Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Norton, 1988. McCollum, Victoria, editor. Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear. Routledge, 2019. Mogen, David, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Muñoz González, Esther. “Food Symbolism and Traumatic Confinement in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Complutense Journal of English Studies, vol. 26, 2018, pp. 79–93, https://doi.org/10.5209/CJES.56359 Oates, Joyce Carol. Afterword. “Shirley Jackson’s Witchcraft: We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, Penguin, 2009, pp. 147–58. Parker, Cornelia. “The Gothic Horror of Donald Trump’s Election.” The Guardian, 3 Aug. 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/ aug/03/the-­gothic-­horror-­of-­donald-­trump-­election-­cornelia-­parker Parker, Elizabeth. The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Petri, Alexandra. “Donald Trump’s Inauguration Was A Gothic Nightmare.” The Washington Post, 20 Jan. 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ compost/wp/2017/01/20/donald-­t rumps-­i nauguration-­w as-­a -­g othic-­ nightmare/ Phillips, Kendall. Forward. Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, edited by Victoria McCollum, Routledge, 2019, pp. xiv–v. Phillips, Mary. “Embodied Care and Planet Earth: Ecofeminism, Maternalism, and Postmaternalism.” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 31, no. 90, 2016, pp. 468–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2016.1278153

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Plant, John S. “Understanding the Royal Name Plantagenet: How DNA Helps.” Guild of One Name Studies, http://plant.one-­name.net/plant_and_plantagenet.pdf “Plantagenet History, Family Crest & Coat of Arms.” House of Names, 2020, https://www.houseofnames.com/plantagenet-­family-­crest Savoy, Eric. “The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic.” American Gothic: New Interventions in A National Narrative, edited by Eric Savoy and Robert K. Martin, U of Iowa P, 1998, pp. 3–19. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Temple, Emily. “A Close Reading of the Best Opening Paragraph of All Time.” Literary Hub, 15 Dec. 2017, https://lithub.com/a-­close-­reading-­of-­the-­best­opening-­paragraph-­of-­all-­time/ We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Directed by Stacie Passon, performances by Taissa Farmiga, Alexandra Daddario, Crispin Glover, and Sebastian Stan, Albyn Media, 2018. Williams, Debbie Jay, and Kalyn L. Prince. The Monstrous Discourse in the Donald Trump Campaign: Implications for National Discourse. Lexington Books, 2018.

CHAPTER 6

Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene Johan Höglund

Introduction About one third into Crawl (2019), an enormous alligator grabs hold of Haley Keller—white, middle-class, Florida University varsity swimmer— and drags her through the crawlspace underneath her parents’ old house. Outside, the Category 5 hurricane that has brought the alligators into such close proximity to the house is raging, and the crawlspace is filling with water, threatening to drown her father who is helplessly watching his daughter getting mauled. This horrible, visceral, and bloody sequence is one of Crawl’s many altercations between primeval reptiles and human beings brought on by a storm energized by the climate crisis. As I will argue in this chapter, this subterranean space and the jaws of the alligator effectively strip Haley of all her white and human privileges and violently insert her into an ecology made weird and terrible by the climate crisis. By The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_10 J. Höglund (*) Department of Languages, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2022 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_6

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collapsing the notion that humanity can exist outside ecology and the pervasive idea that economic privilege can protect against climate change, Crawl constitutes an opportunity to discuss the potential of Gothic and horror to re-imagine the impact of the climate crisis on privileged communities in the Global North. To draw attention to the pervading inequality between how affluent and poor communities across the world experience the climate crisis, the chapter eschews the popular and widely used concept Anthropocene in favor of Capitalocene. This denominator has been proposed by Jason W. Moore (2015) and Andreas Malm (2016) in order to highlight the fact that the climate crisis has not been produced by all humans equally, and that not all humans experience it in the same way. Moore and Malm argue that the engine of the climate crisis is not humanity or even industrialization as such, but capitalism supported by the network of epistemologies that legitimizes its constant pursuit of cheap resources and labor. This way of understanding what has produced the climate crisis is important for many reasons, and in this chapter I use it to enable an understanding of Crawl as a film about how a very particular demographics—the white middle class—experiences the climate crisis. The turn toward the Capitalocene as the framework for understanding the climate crisis also makes it possible to discuss how Crawl imagines the material history of the crisis, and the future of capitalism in a world transformed by climate. This eco-socialist framework is useful when trying to understand the function and importance of different types of affect in Crawl and in the Gothic horror climate change narrative widely, but also when considering the dispersed global impact of the climate emergency. Since the posthumous publication of Ann Radcliffe’s “On the Supernatural in Poetry” in 1826, Gothic studies has separated the affect of terror from that of horror. In Gothic (1996), Fred Botting theorizes these two terms in the following way: “If terror leads to an imaginative expansion of one’s sense of self, horror describes the movement of contraction and recoil. Like the dilation of the pupil in moments of excitement and fear, terror marks the uplifting thrill where horror distinguishes a contraction at the imminence and unavoidability of the threat” (10). In other words, the thrill of terror accompanies the realization that something is disturbingly and inescapably wrong (the house is haunted), while the visceral experience of horror is triggered by direct and often violent confrontation with this wrongness (what haunts the house appears before the subject with a bloody chainsaw in hand).

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The point here is that this description of two types of affect is useful not only for understanding how fear is generated in fiction, it can also be used for thinking about how the climate emergency is experienced in different parts of the world. It can be argued, I suggest, that the climate crisis is experienced mostly as a haunting terror among affluent populations in the Global North. In affluent communities, the climate crisis exists as the experience that something is precisely disturbingly and inescapably wrong, but in most cases, the violence that this crisis is producing has not affected these communities. By contrast, poor communities across the globe are increasingly encountering the climate crisis as an imminent and unavoidable horror.

(Representing) Capitalocene Violence in the Global North and South As Rob Nixon importantly observes in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), the effect that the climate emergency is having on ecology, and on the human beings that are inextricably a part of ecology, is dispersed and uneven. In the Global South, global warming, fallout from nuclear testing, poorly regulated extraction, and refinement of natural resources are making entire areas hostile to (human) life. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has observed, “catastrophic ruptures to social and ecological systems have already been experienced [in postcolonial worlds] through the violent processes of empire” so that “the apocalypse has already happened” in these spaces (7). In the more uniformly affluent Global North, the suffering is less widespread, but the lack of global environmental justice does transcend the North-South divide to erodes lives also in affluent nations. As Dorceta Taylor’s Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residental Mobility (2014) and Ingrid R.  G. Waldron’s There’s Something In The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities (2018) reveale, the climate emergency is experienced very differently also within the Global North, where poor and often black and indigenous people are the most exposed to pollution and climate violence. In other words, the climate emergency is thus already an imminent horror to many of the world’s poor communities. However, in affluent sections of the world, the detrimental effects of the climate crisis are only rarely experienced as horrific disaster. Instead, it looms much like a Gothic prophecy of coming disaster. In this way, the climate crisis can be said to be experienced as a haunting terror.

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Because the lived experiences of the climate crisis are so different, the narratives and the scholarship that they produce are similarly different. In Slow Violence, Rob Nixon discusses in some detail the horrors that oil extraction in the Niger Delta has entailed for the local Ogoni people. The violence that this industry creates is both slow and fast. Oil extraction in the Delta causes a constant slow damage to the environment and thus to local agriculture and to the people who rely on this for their sustenance. When there are accidents such as an explosion in the oil fields, people who live in the area experience a horrifically accelerated violence, encountering an ocean of crude oil moving swiftly like a great river in flood, successfully swallowing up anything that comes its way. Cassava farms, yams, palms, streams, and animals for miles on end. There is no pipeborne water and yet the streams, the only source of drinking water are coated with oil. You cannot collect a bucket of rain water for the roofs, trees and grass are all covered with oil. […] Men and women forced by hunger have to dive deep in oil to uproot already rotten yams and cassava. (Sam Bakilo Bako, quoted by Nixon, 108)

This is an image of acute precarity produced by the global oil industry in the Global South. As lived experience, this is an encounter with sheer, imminent, and unavoidable horror. To turn the attention away from the Global South to the Global North, Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016) describes a very different relationship to, and experience of, the climate crisis and the fossil fuel economy. In an often cited passage of this book, Morton describes how middle-class citizens of the Global North turn the ignition key of their car, realizing that they are not, in that moment, simply individuals starting a vehicle, but active participants in the same fossil fuel economy as the one described in Nixon’s book. When the driver turns the ignition key and drives off, they do so burdened by guilt that comes from the realization that they are contributing to the “Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet” (8). This realization may cause considerable discomfort and anxiety, but it remains, from a material perspective, a strikingly different experience from the one described by Bakilo Bako in Nixon’s book. Even as Morton’s drivers are haunted by the realization that they are “criminals” (9) causing irreversible damage to the ecosystem, they remain couched in the relative safety and comfort of the car, still mobile, structurally capable

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of escape if it comes to that. In other words, Morton does not ask his readers to imagine the sheer horror of being forced to dive through an oil spill to retrieve rotting cassava to fend off hunger, or what it is like to be stuck in a crawlspace with alligators for that matter. His request is merely that his readers recognize themselves as troubled by the understanding that they are part of a species that is causing environmental havoc. In this and other writing rooted in the lived experience of affluent communities in the Global North, the climate emergency exists not as a sheer horror, but as a haunting; a Gothic prophesy about how the sins of the fathers might finally consume us, but not a story about what it is actually like to be eaten. The representational discrepancy that separates Nixon from Morton is noticeable and important. It shows clearly how differently the climate emergency is experienced in various parts of the world and among various demographics, and it also suggests how these differences limit the way that the crisis can be represented and understood. Some people clearly lack the resources to protect themselves from climate violence, to relocate, or to repair homes, habitats, and bodies eroded by the climate crisis. Others are still mostly shielded from the detrimental effects of the crisis. However, as the temperature on this planet continues to rise and resources become more scarce, this situation may change. Vandana Shiva argues in Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Crisis (2008) that in “the short term, we can continue to extend the profits and consumerism of the privileged by further dispossessing the poor. But tomorrow even the rich and the powerful will not be immune from Gaia’s revenge and the revenge of the billions of dispossessed” (7–8). Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009) that “the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital” is likely to be further accentuated as the climate crisis worsen. Like Shiva, he acknowledges that “some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others” (221) but adds, again like Shiva, that “the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged” (221). In other words, when the ice caps melt and the storms and flooding increase, capitalism itself will collapse. At that stage, there will be no lifeboats and no refuge for anyone. Those who are rich and privileged in this present moment will drown and starve with everyone else. While this may seem to be a logical assumption, Chakrabarty’s understanding of how the climate crisis will affect privileged communities has not been universally embraced. In a widely cited essay named “The

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Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) disagree with Chakrabarty’s claim that “scientists” have “discovered” that human beings are the “geological agents” that have produced the current crisis (Chakrabarty 218). They also strongly object to the notion that those privileged by capitalism will eventually find themselves without refuge, and instead argue that for “the foreseeable future – indeed, as long as there are human societies on Earth – there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged. If climate change represents a form of apocalypse, it is not universal, but uneven and combined” (66).1 It is due to this unevenness that Malm and Hornborg find the concept of the Anthropocene problematic. Arguing that the concept falsely lays the blame of the climate crisis on all human beings, they argue that it “cannot serve as a basis for challenging the vested interest of business-as-­ usual” (67). In this way, the Anthropocene is “inimical to action” (67). In other words, the attempt to halt and undo the climate crisis must rest on a proper understanding, and a correct naming, of the engine that has produced it and is driving it. Thus, Malm and Hornborg, as well as Moore (2014), turn to the concept “Capitalocene”. However, the notion that the privileges engendered by capitalism will constitute protection from the slow violence of the climate crisis “as long as there are human societies on earth” may also dissuade from action. If what the world’s privileged communities need to worry about is not the horror of being swept away by extensive flooding, but the prospect of fretting about the climate crisis from within their climate controlled cars as they relocate to a gated community further away from environmental havoc, what is their incentive for altering the business-as-usual? In this way, Malm and Hornborg’s observation that the privileged may always have a way out evinces a certain lack of imagination that may in itself be inimical to action. It cannot be taken for granted that audiences in the Global North will be goaded into action by imaginaries that place them in situations where climate disasters actually rob them of life and limb, but the possibility should not be dismissed either. The debate that Chakrabarty and Malm and Hornborg have triggered suggests that it is important to consider how the dispersed and uneven crisis that the climate emergency is provoking is most effectively narrated in the Global North. As Nixon points out in Slow Violence, to confront slow violence, it is necessary to:

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plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To ­intervene representationally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency. (10)

There is a diverse cultural apparatus at work that attempts to precisely intervene representationally, as Nixon puts it. A central component of this apparatus is what has been termed climate fiction or climate change fiction.2 Indeed, if Slow Violence is partially a call to engage in the representation of the climate crisis as dispersed and uneven, yet of universal importance, climate fiction provides part of the response. Horror and Gothic inform this fiction in crucial ways via the specific types of affect at their disposal. Thus, as I will argue, they are unusually well suited to address the prevalence of slow violence and the disagreement on the futures that capitalism and its privileged communities may be moving toward.

Gothic and Horror in the Capitalocene: Crawl To imagine how the climate crisis will impact global society, it may be necessary for authors to move beyond the realist novel. Indeed, as a number of critics, including Adam Trexler in Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (2015) and Amitav Ghosh in the Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), have argued, the realist paradigm does not easily lend itself to telling stories about catastrophic climate change. Ghosh argues that the same Enlightenment epistemologies that structured European history also produced a certain type of fiction. The realist novel, he argues, was born “through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday” (23). Now that the world is becoming weird and improbable, the realist register does not suffice. It has become necessary to make use of genres and modes more capable of representing the type of uncanny catastrophe that climate change is already creating in the Global South. The genres and modes that are suitable to address the climate crisis, Ghosh argues, are unconventional. Once “known by names such as ‘the Gothic,’ ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama,’” they are now referred to as

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“‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction’” (24). Often lumped together as speculative fiction today, these genres can, and very frequently do, imagine future worlds where climate violence has become endemic also among privileged communities in the Global North. In particular, science fiction appears to be well adapted to imagine such futures. By definition, science fiction takes place during a different time and envisions how things may have changed as time has passed. A problem with science fiction, however, is that it defers the transformation it describes. Like Shiva, Chakrabarty, Malm, and Hornborg, it speculates about a future that is not yet here. Gothic horror is different in this respect. If the many mash-ups that mix genres and modes are disregarded for the moment, it is fair to say that whereas science fiction is primarily interested in the relationship between the present and the future, Gothic and horror explore the relationship between the past and the present. Because of this, and as the analysis of Crawl will illustrate, Gothic and horror are able to imagine ways in which affluent populations in the Global North encounter climate violence not in a deferred future, but in the present. This is an aspect that the screenwriters of Crawl, Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, have stressed in interviews: “This [Crawl] could have been a sci-fi movie, but we wanted it to have real characters battling a real adversary.” Thus, they argue, the film portrays “a real scenario that could happen tomorrow” (Swinson 2019). Crawl was directed by Alexandre Aja and premiered in 2019 to mostly positive reviews. Aja is no stranger to (remaking) horror films.3 His breakthrough was the bloody Haut Tension (2003), often used as an example of the violent New French Extremity movement. Aja’s first English-language film was the dark cannibal horror The Hills Have Eyes (2006). This remake follows Wes Craven’s original movie but relocates the action of the movie from Nevada to New Mexico and the area where the first nuclear bomb was exploded. In geological scholarship, this event has been perceived as a “golden spike”: verifiable geological evidence that the planet has entered what these researchers term the Anthropocene.4 The horrors that take place in Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes are thus directly related to the enormous ecological damage caused by atomic weapons. Consequently, the cannibals of the movie are not the inbred social rejects that haunt the Nevada desert in the original, but humans mutated by radiation released by nuclear weapons testing. Crawl is set in Florida rather than in the New Mexico desert, but this is also an area that has seen its share of ecological disasters. As observed by

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Miles Surrey (2019), the film relies on the combination of a series of conditions and tropes that are strongly tied to this state. As partly a tropical territory surrounded by sea, it is especially vulnerable to what has been termed hurricanes supercharged by climate change.5 Because of its warm climate, it is also home to several species of dangerous wildlife, including poisonous snakes, spiders, and, as in the film, alligators, allowing for an especially vivid and visceral  confrontation between privileged humanity and an ecology out of joint. Florida is furthermore a socially and politically liminal state. As one of the most important swing states, it helped Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012, but brought Trump to office in 2016. Like many southern states, it houses inordinately wealthy and mostly white communities, but is also inhabited by significantly more impoverished, and mostly Hispanic or Black groups, including an estimated 675,000 undocumented immigrants. Of its 21 million inhabitants, almost 3 million live in poverty.6 Crawl is not, however and importantly, primarily a film about those who are structurally unable to escape the violence of the climate crisis. In the opening shot we see Haley Keller getting ready for the final lap in a swim relay. Her face is tense and focused, and her swim cap reads “Gators,” the name that the University of Florida uses for many of their athletic teams. As we learn from flashbacks that accompany Haley’s failed attempt to win the relay, her father has always encouraged her swimming, instilling in her the notion that she is an “apex predator.” Right after the race, Haley gets a phone call from her sister who, toddler on her hip, asks her if she has heard from their father Dave. A category 5 hurricane is approaching Florida, and Dave lives in the area that is being evacuated. The sisters do not seem hostile toward each other, but there is palpable tension between them: a tension that, the audience eventually understands, is rooted in their parent’s divorce. Against her sister’s advice, Haley gets into the car to check on her father. From this introduction, we understand that Haley is quite firmly couched in middle-class life. She attends a highly ranked university, possibly on a sports scholarship; she drives a reasonably new and competent car; her father, the audience gleans from a vehicle that appears in the film, runs his own construction company; and their mother is in Paris with the “prince charming” that has taken their father’s place after the divorce. Haley may not be rich, but she does belong to the stratum of Florida residents that has the means of transportation, health, job, and property insurance, as well as the know-how to skirt even a level 5 hurricane. In this

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way, Haley and her father do belong to the privileged that Malm and Hornborg supply with lifeboats. Thus, this is not a story about the poor who cannot escape either slow or fast climate violence. It is, when focusing on Haley and her father, very much a depiction of how the privileged suffer the violence of capitalogenic climate change.7 When Haley gets out on the freeway, the rain and the wind are already making streets difficult to navigate. Haley drives past a sign advertising an alligator farm, foreshadowing the horror she is soon to encounter. Also, the camera lingers for a few seconds on a shark figurine on Haley’s dashboard (Fig. 6.1). This clearly references an infamous scene from the film Sharknado where the male protagonist is swallowed by a shark thrown from an absurdly supercharged tornado. Indeed, the film frequently references a number of classic animal horror movies and can be considered as part of the distinct subgenre Alligator or Crocodile Horror and that includes notable films such as Alligator (1980), Lake Placid (1999), Black Water (2007), and Rogue (2007). In recent years, crocodiles and alligators have been featured also in Brad Payton’s game-based film Rampage (2018) and Alex Garland’s New Weird Annihilation (2018), which is based on the first installment of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Many of these films also connect relentless violence performed by reptilian predators on human beings to the climate crisis and to capitalist agendas. When Haley reaches her father’s apartment (a run-down flat that signals his inability to move on after the divorce rather than his financial status), she finds only the abandoned family dog around. She guesses that her

Fig. 6.1  Dashboard

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father may have gone to board up the old for-sale family house before the coming storm. Accompanied by the dog, she drives further into the storm, through the rain and the rising water. Her tenacity is rewarded when she finds her father’s pickup truck parked outside the family home. Haley’s arrival and entry into the family house initiates the first and notably Gothic segment of the movie. In the wind, rain, and darkness of the storm, the old family home is strongly reminiscent of a long tradition of haunted houses encountered in American Gothic, from the collapsing manor in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) to the Harrisville farmhouse of The Conjuring (2013) (Fig. 6.2). When Haley enters the eerily quiet house, the sense that it is haunted only increases. She explores empty hallways, gray walls, and abandoned living rooms without encountering her father. Reluctantly, prompted by the family dog, she realizes that she must explore the house’s underground section: an unlit, already wet, low-ceilinged crawlspace that can be entered through two doors that open like a maw into the underworld. This crawlspace is doubly symbolic and doubly haunted in the film. According to Gaston Bachelard’s model of the oneiric house, the cellar is where the subconscious hides, and to venture into this space is to encounter the agonizing memories and mental detritus that have been suppressed into this part of the mind.8 It is not surprising that this is where Haley encounters her father and where she must begin to confront a family history warped by her parent’s divorce. At the same time, the cellar is also the

Fig. 6.2  The family home

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part of the house that is literally in touch with the earth and thus with nature. Rats scurry across a floor that is half concrete and half soil and leaves. Because the ceiling is very low, Haley cannot stand upright and must walk on all fours like an animal to navigate the cramped space. In this way, what haunts this liminal section is also the realization that the human-­ nature divide is illusory. The crawlspace as territory forces Haley not only to touch the earth of which she is, despite all her privileges, a part; she must also become like an animal (Fig. 6.3). Crawling through the cellar in this way, Haley finds her father, unconscious and seriously injured in a section barred by pipes. She begins her rescue effort by dragging him toward the stairs and is only a couple of meters away from them  when the first alligator of the movie suddenly rushes at her, in the process demolishing the stairs and the easy escape to safety. The athletic Haley manages to retreat with her wounded father. The alligators are not merely predatory reptiles in the film, but a way for the narrative to accelerate and amplify the violence of the storm. As Nixon has proposed, climate violence is often “slow” in the sense that it is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Slow violence is thus difficult to represent, which is one reason why the realist novel struggles to depict it. Gothic and horror are able to accelerate this violence. The alligator that the storm brings in its wake functions as a metonymy for climate violence, making it visible and visceral to the audience. Just like the storm,

Fig. 6.3  The crawlspace

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the alligators are relentless and voracious and appear to have been supercharged. When Haley ventures out to retrieve her dropped phone and call for help, one of them clamps down on her calf and drags her away. It is at this moment that the film shifts its affective focus away from Gothic terror to straightforward horror. Haley is no longer haunted by the climate crisis. She is not in her car fretting about the impact that turning the key might have on the environment or even worrying about what creatures might be hiding underneath the house. She is clamped in the jaws of a prehistoric predator let loose by the storm and energized by the climate crisis. The threat that climate violence constitutes has become imminent and unavoidable. Haley is fortunate enough to find a screwdriver on the muddy ground and survives by sticking it into the eye of the alligator. She flees into another section of the crawlspace that the alligators cannot reach, but she has become separated from her father and has lost the phone with which she hoped to engineer their rescue. Then, through a small opening in the crawlspace wall, she can spot three people who are in the process of looting the gas station across the street. These three people are white and clearly marked as working class by their dilapidated boat, their dialects, their haircuts, dress, and, indeed, by their need to loot the gas station of its ATM machine, cheap sunglasses, and lukewarm hot dogs. Haley gestures desperately to get their attention only to see them attacked, torn to pieces, and consumed by another pack of alligators in the film’s most deadly and violent section. This sequence serves not only to increase tension and release another jolt of abject horror, it also cements the notion that the storm, and therefore the violence that the alligators perform, is not natural but rather an event brought on by fossil fuel capitalism. The name of the gas station, “Bannon’s,” is pregnant with meaning in this respect (Fig. 6.4). As there is no gas station franchise in the United States called “Bannon’s,” it is difficult not to read the name as a direct reference to former White House strategist Steve Bannon. As the most famous Bannon alive, chief advisor of Donald Trump’s 2016 election effort, co-founder of the populist and Trump-supportive Breitbart News, and board member of Cambridge Analytica, Bannon was instrumental in getting Trump elected and also in the US departure from the Paris Climate Agreement.9 By placing the most violent sequence of the plot at the gas station, the film clearly identifies fossil fuel capitalism as an important reason why  the alligator-­ infested storm is upon the community. In this way, the film furtively agrees with Malm and other scholars’ understanding of the climate crisis as

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Fig. 6.4  Bannon’s gas station

produced by (fossil fuel) capitalism rather than by humanity as such. By naming the gas station Bannon’s, the film links climate violence to the Trump administration’s reinvestment in fossil fuel energy such as coal and oil, and it’s destructive dismantling of national and global initiatives to slow global warming. There is an irony at work here too, since white working-class and middle-class voters in swing-state Florida were instrumental in bringing Trump to power. As representatives of these groups, rather than as individuals, Haley, her father, and the three white looters are reaping what they sowed. In the crawlspace, the water keeps rising and Haley and her father must get out to survive. With the help of a shovel and a gun taken from a dead body found in another portion of the crawlspace, they kill the two alligators that keep them trapped. Exiting the crawl space and entering the street outside, they spot the boat on which the looters arrived. This is their best hope of escaping the storm and the alligators: a Malmian lifeboat of sorts. Haley jumps into the water and somehow manages to outswim the reptiles that pursue her. She returns to her father and they get ready to leave the street when sirens cut through the wind and the rain. The levies that keep the ocean from flooding the area during storms have broken. An enormous wave crashes over the gas station; grips debris, alligators, and the boat with Haley and her father in it; and throws everything into the family house via a first story window (Fig. 6.5). In the first segment of the movie, nature and the violence of the climate crisis only had access to the liminal crawlspace underneath the actual living quarters of the house, but here all of the house has become a part of

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Fig. 6.5  Nature has entered the living room

earth’s disturbed ecology. The human-nature divide established by enlightenment thinking and debunked by recent ecocriticism  thus collapses. The water and the alligators now have access to the living room and to all other sections of what used to be an exclusive human space. The presence of the enormous reptiles in the family kitchen, in the living room, on the stairs, and in the bathroom is supremely uncanny. These familiar domestic spaces have become the hunting grounds of reptiles that date back to the Miocene period. Deprived of the lifeboat that could have brought them back to safety, Haley and her father must again confront the violence of the climate crisis, a crisis that has now let itself into their old home. They climb higher and higher in the house as the water and the alligators it contains keep rising. Haley’s father loses half an arm to an alligator and Haley is mauled by another that crashes through the window of her old second-story bedroom. It is a miracle that they reach the roof of the building. It is on the roof that the film ends. Suddenly, and against all odds, a helicopter appears and Haley turns smiling to her father, with a road flare in hand. But we never see the couple airlifted to safety.

Conclusion Crawl is not a film that takes itself too seriously. Aja clearly wants his audience to both shudder and laugh, and he bends logic and nature to suit his purposes. The scenario that plays out is not, despite the assurances of the screenwriters, very likely since alligators, unlike crocodiles, rarely attack humans. Even so, and partly because of its speculative nature, the film is

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able to critically explore both the notion that humanity somehow exists outside of ecology, and the assumption that some categories of humanity need not fear the climate crisis as there will always be lifeboats available for those who are white, English-speaking, and reasonably well-off. The storm, the rising water, and the voracious and relentless alligators that invade first the flooded streets and backyards, then the crawlspaces underneath houses, and finally gas stations and actual homes, make the notion that any segment of humanity can exist outside or apart from ecology impossible to uphold. When the borders that keep nature and the house apart collapse, the traditional oneiric model also collapses. In the first stage of the film, the crawlspace is where Haley must confront the suppressed notion that the human is also an animal and as such always and forever a part of ecology. In the film’s finale, what has been suppressed to the liminal space that separates the house from the earth rises into the entire structure, invading all the mundane, orderly human spaces it contains, even the small attic. The ecology that enters the house has furthermore been made destructive by a fossil fuel capitalism of which Haley and her father is a part. To escape its immediate detrimental consequences, Haley and her father must climb higher and higher until they find themselves sitting on the very roof of the structure; utterly exposed to the elements. Of course, the notion that houses isolate humans from ecology was always a fantasy. Ecology is always and forever folded into the bodies of humans, in the form of the oxygen we breathe, the food and water we consume, and the trillion of microbes that inhabit our skin and our guts and that turn humans into discrete ecosystems in their own right. Nominally human spaces are thus always conditional, their maintenance contingent on humanity not collapsing the balance of the ecosystem. Because this balance has been upset by a capitalism rooted, as argued by Moore, in early colonialism and then energized by widespread use of fossil fuel energy, houses struggle to keep up the pretence of shielding humans from ecology. Alligators will swim through the living room. The arrival of the helicopter at the very end of the film appears to sabotage this particular reading. Haley and her father are deprived of their first lifeboat, but then provided with a second when the helicopter appears to spot them on the roof of the house, lowering a cradle that may be their salvation. Thus, even as the film narrates the horror of the Capitalocene, it appears to lend its sympathies to the Anthropos. If the couple fly to safety, the film reforms into another story that pits humanity against nature and

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allows the human to escape the clutches of ecology. However, because we never see the couple actually climbing into the cradle, the ending remains ambiguous. Aja has interestingly stated that in a never-filmed ending, an alligator jumps out of the water to grab the father and daughter as they are pulled from the roof by the helicopter.10 This is the moment that lurks after the final scene of the movie: not a triumphant return to fossil fuel civilization, but a final merger with an ecology made incredibly violent by the climate crisis. With this dark ending in place, the film is not about humanity against nature, but about humanity in a damaged and vengeful natural world. From this perspective, the film tells a story about how capitalist modernity is powerless to wrest humanity out of the grip of the climate crisis. Even the white and privileged citizens of the Global North will eventually be deprived of lifeboats. This, obviously, does not change the drastically uneven reality that Nixon outlines in Slow Violence, nor does it resolve the question on which Chakrabarty and Malm and Hornborg disagree. Most of those privileged in the Global North easily escape drowning and attacks from alligators, and Crawl is a Hollywood horror film rather than a proper historical and sociological inquiry into the climate crisis. Even so, the film does provide imaginative and representational tools that make it possible to consider both presents and futures where the privileged experience global warming not simply as an anxiety arising from the realization that they contribute to global warming by turning their car keys. The fact that this violence is accelerated and made absurdly imminent and visceral through the use of Gothic and horror does not detract from its usefulness as a narrative about the climate crisis in the Global North. It is precisely the use of the speculative register, and of Gothic and horror in particular, that enables the movie to locate unthinkable violence to the present moment rather than to a haunting future that is forever on its way. In Crawl, the collapse of ecology and of (local) capitalist modernity is not a haunting prophecy; it is a violent confrontation taking place in the present moment. Crawl even identifies some of the reasons why this violence occurs via its inclusion of alligator farms and the “Bannon’s” gas station looted by the white working class. In this way, Gothic and horror are central affective modes that help conjure an understanding of the Capitalocene as ultimately affecting all social strata and of the human as located, always and forever, in nature. Such understanding may or may not be a platform that enables climate crisis action, but it is similarly unlikely to prevent it.

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Notes 1. Interestingly, Malm and Hornberg here indirectly subscribe to the same model that Timothy Morton introduces in Dark Ecology: Human environmental scientist and scholars (in the fossil fuel reliant Global North) are like detectives that discover that they are also the culprits of the crime they are investigating, but they are not conceived of as also the potential victims of the crime they have committed and investigated. For a similar discussion of the tension that exists between Chakrabarty and Malm and Hornborg, see Höglund (2020). 2. For a useful discussion of these two concepts, see Andersen (2019). 3. Aja has also remade Korean horror film Into the Mirror (2003) as Mirrors (2008) and the American Piranha (1978) as Piranha 3D (2010). 4. In the widely cited article, “When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-­ twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal” (2015), Zalasiewicz et al. influentially suggest that the Anthropocene “be defined to begin historically at the moment of detonation of the Trinity A-bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico” (200). While Jason W.  Moore locates the beginning of the Capitalocene to the early colonial era, rather than to the detonation of the first atomic bomb, this does not take away from the understanding of Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes as a film that uses horror to talk about the climate crisis. 5. See, for instance, Trenberth et al. (2018). 6. See American Immigration Council (2020) and Unites States Census Bureau (Undated). 7. In an interview done after the script to Crawl had found a producer in Sam Raimi, screenwriters Michael and Shawn Rasmussen describe protagonist Haley as “a grad student” and other “people” as “working class.” See Swinson (2019). 8. See Bachelard (1964). 9. See Mehling and Vihma for a discussion of Bannon’s influence before the election and on the decision to leave the Paris Climate Agreement. 10. See Bibbiani (2019) for a discussion of this scripted but never-­filmed ending.

Works Cited Alligator. Directed by Lewis Teague, Group 1 Films, 1980. Andersen, Gregers. Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2019. Annihilation. Directed by Alex Garland, Paramount Pictures, 2018. American Immigration Council. “Immigrants in Florida. Fact Sheet.” 6 June 2020 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-­florida. Accessed 20 July 2020.

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Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Orion Press, 1964. Bibbiani, William. “Alexandre Aja Reveals the MUCH Darker Ending They Wrote for ‘Crawl’.” Bloody Disgusting. 15 July 2019. https://bloody-­disgusting. com/interviews/3572601/spoilers-­a lexandre-­a ja-­r eveals-­m uch-­d arker-­ ending-­wrote-­crawl-­exclusive/. Accessed 20 July 2020. Black Water. Directed by David Nerlich and Andrew Traucki, AV Pictures, 2007. Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge, 1996. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press, 2019. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unknowable. Chicago University Press, 2016. Haut Tension. Directed by Alexandre Aja, EuropaCorp, 2003. Höglund, Johan. “Challenging Ecoprecarity in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker Trilogy.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 56, no. 4, 2020, pp. 447–459. Taylor and Francis Online, doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.202 0.1764202. Accessed 20 July 2020. Lake Placid. Directed by Steve Miner, 20th Century Fox, 1999. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016. Malm, Andreas and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 62–69. Sage Journals: doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613516291. Accessed 20 July 2020. Mehling, Michael and Antto Vihma. “‘Mourning for America’ – Donald Trump’s Climate Change Policy.” The Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Helsinki, September 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=3051901. Accessed 20 July 2020. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia UP, 2016. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839. In Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales. Oxford UP, 2008. Rampage. Directed by Brad Peyton, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2018. Rogue. Directed by Greg McLean, Dimension Films, 2007. Sharknado. Directed by Anthony C. Ferrante, The Asylum, 2013. Shiva, Vandana. Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Crisis. South End Press, 2008.

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Surrey, Miles. “The Most Florida Things About ‘Crawl’.” The Ringer, 15 July. 2019, theringer.com/movies/2019/7/15/20692276/crawl-­alligator-­movie-­ florida. Accessed 20 July 2020. Swinson, Brock. “’Home Invasion with Alligators’ Michael & Shawn Rasmussen Talk ‘Crawl’.” Creative Screenwriting, 2. September 2019, creativescreenwriting.com/home-­i nvasion-­w ith-­a lligators-­m ichael-­s hawn-­r asmussen-­t alk-­ crawl/. Accessed 20 July 2020. Taylor, Dorceta. E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residental Mobility. NYU Press, 2014. The Conjuring. Directed by James Wan, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Alexandre Aja, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006. Trenberth, Kevin E. et al. 2018. ”Hurricane Harvey Links to Ocean Heat Content and Climate Change Adaptation.” Earth’s Future, vol. 6, pp. 730–744. Wiley, doi: epdf/10.1029/2018EF000825. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Unites States Census Bureau. “Quick Facts Florida” Undated. census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/FL/IPE120218. Accessed 20 July 2020. Waldron, Ingrid R. G. There’s Something in The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities. Fernwood Publishing, 2018. Zalasiewicz, Jan et  al. “When did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-twentieth Century Boundary Level is Stratigraphically Optimal.” Quaternary International, vol. 383, no. 5, 2015, pp.  196–203. Science Direct, doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045. Accessed 20 July 2020.

Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the ­copyright holder.

CHAPTER 7

Haunted Technonature: Anthropocene Coloniality in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City Rebecca Duncan

Singapore and Anthropocene Hegemony An established strand of cultural ecocriticism has remarked upon the ghostliness that pervades our era of planetary emergency. These are accounts, importantly, that position themselves in the Anthropocene: the age in which, ostensibly, humans collectively have become a geological force. They note that under such conditions, the socio-ecological paradigm inherited from Enlightenment epistemology—that model which places humans and nature in binary opposition1—is losing its descriptive efficacy and coming to appear instead an inadequate and repressive construct. Accordingly, and like the Freudian subject, this conception of nature is vulnerable to disturbing returns: it is haunted, in other words, by the unacknowledged relationality for which it provides no representational

R. Duncan (*) Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_7

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room. Demonstrating this line of argumentation, Amitav Ghosh notes the phantomatic character of apparently “radically nonhuman” extreme weather events (32), in which it is nonetheless possible to dimly discern the residues of human causality. In a similar vein, Elaine Gan and her co-­ authors argue that, as it turns our attention to the “histories through which ecologies are made and unmade” (1), unfolding crisis makes newly visible the spectral pasts that inevitably cling to landscapes of all kinds. Human activity here acquires the “quality of ghosts”: “it travels into water and soil; it gets inside plants and animals; we cannot see it even as we learn to find its traces” (2). Haunting, in both of these analyses, broadly follows the dynamics of Freud’s uncanny, and this model also provides the framework for this chapter, though—as we will see—my discussion is concerned with a different site of repression and return. For Ghosh, and for Gan and her co-­ authors, what haunts is a liminal awareness of humanity’s entanglement with the rest nature, an indeterminacy for which the Enlightenment’s socio-ecological dualism cannot account. Indeed, Ghosh argues that a more general crisis of representation has been inaugurated by the onset of climate breakdown. In the Anthropocene, he writes, “we are confronted … with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era” (33). Influentially, it is to the “outhouses” of literary fiction that Ghosh turns in his search for this new imaginary (66). He identifies in speculative genres—usually taken to include gothic, horror, science fiction, and the weird—a vocabulary that, unconstrained by realism, is flexible enough to accommodate a hitherto suppressed Anthropocene vision of humanity as imbricated in the rest of nature. The chapter that follows here also engages with speculative fiction’s capacity to haunt entrenched and exclusionary conceptions of nature. However, it takes a different approach. Though the notion of the Anthropocene has achieved a degree of critical hegemony in the two decades since Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term (17), the material reality of unfolding planetary crisis suggests that this narrative itself is not immune to unsettling phantomatic returns. Specifically problematic, in this sense, is the category of collective humanity on which the concept of the Anthropocene hinges. I will elaborate on this point more fully below, but for now it will suffice to note that planetary emergency is not evenly distributed across “the anthropos” generally, but instead disproportionately affects women, the poor, and people of color.

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Summarizing an argument made by postcolonial scholars across a number of disciplines,2 Jason W. Moore describes “[t]he climate crisis [a]s a geohistorical moment that systemically combines greenhouse gas pollution with the climate class divide, class patriarchy, and climate apartheid” (“Capitalocene” 54). Moore’s point is that deleterious transformations to the biosphere are clearly not the effect of a human collective, but are instead bound up with a history of racialized and gendered power. The universalizing vocabulary of the Anthropocene is ill-equipped to deal with such complexity, and—as Moore points out—this failure results in a narrative of crisis that at its worst risks “blaming the victims of exploitation, violence, and poverty” (50). From this perspective, the emergencies of the present demand more than a new vocabulary in which the Enlightenment binary of human and nature is unraveled to capture an Anthropocene condition. What is required, Moore’s analysis suggests, is an approach that excavates how these categories have been mobilized across the history of modernity to classify certain (racialized, classed, and gendered) lives as less than human, within a formation of power that continues to benefit from their expendability. Because it remains occluded in the Anthropocene account of biospheric transformation, and because this account—as I will show—feeds uneasily into a logic of human and ecological degradation, the environmental history of race and gender precisely haunts now routinely accepted narratives of anthropogenic nature, unsettling these, and insisting they be reconfigured in the interest of justice. Across this chapter, I will examine how this haunting of Anthropocene discourse takes shape in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City (2018), a collection of speculative tales in which the author engages with climate emergency from the vantage of his native Singapore. This context is especially suggestive in respect to the tension I have identified between Anthropocene hegemony and a history of racialized and gendered environmental injustice. The nation occupies a perhaps unique position in that it is defined, on the one hand, by its status as a former colony, and is celebrated, on the other, as an example of sustainable urbanism. Singapore is frequently represented in the global imaginary as what Matthew Schneider-Mayerson calls an “an eco-modernist paradise” (171). This vision of the small island nation as a futuristic yet verdant conurbation of glass, steel, and curated green space is coupled in the first instance to its economic success: Singapore developed rapidly across the late-twentieth-century, “climb[ing] out of Third World poverty to become an affluent modern city state within a generation” (Ng Weng Hoong, 7). In the second instance, the country’s green

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credentials have to do also with a facility for environmental management, which has been honed in part to address the challenges of accommodating a highly urbanized and growing population on a limited landmass with few resources. As well as being a Garden City, renowned for its effulgent urban greenery, the metropolis is partially built on land reclaimed from the ocean; it is further fortified against rising sea levels by terraformed embankments, and in possession of one of the most advanced freshwater management systems in the world. Schneider-Mayerson designates this pervasive environmental engineering Singapore’s “artificial technonature” (166) and notes—importantly—that it is largely responsible for the city-­ state’s increasing international reputation as model “for survival in the Anthropocene” (170). Indeed, this perspective on Singapore’s “ability to manipulate and engineer nature” (169) is representative of the Anthropocene account of crisis more widely: in a world where humans generally have the capacity to engender climate breakdown, human intervention seems also to enable the reversal of this trajectory. Ng’s narratives, populated as we shall see by speculative reimaginings of Singapore technonature, invoke this salvific Anthropocene vision of the city-state. At the same time, however, these tales also witness an alternative account of the island’s historical present, which registers both its colonial past and the active legacy of colonialism in the contemporary moment. As Lion City charts connections between these strands of Singaporean reality, it unsettles the narrative in which the nation exemplifies a route out of climate emergency, and by extension also calls into question the wider Anthropocene account of climate crisis and resolution. Ng mobilizes the speculative to reveal that ecological engineering in present-day Singapore is inextricable from a colonial history of human and environmental management, and from the formations of power to which this history is currently giving rise. The narrative thus draws on the speculative not to capture the human-and-nature entanglement that characterizes an Anthropocene condition, but as a lexicon in which to articulate what the narrative of anthropogenesis screens out. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) formulation of “critical irrealism” (83),3 and on Moore’s conception of the capitalist “world-ecology” (Capitalism 2–5), I suggest that, as they retrieve a racialized and gendered history of planetary emergency, Lion City’s speculative tales enact a form of haunting in respect to both Singaporean technonature and the Anthropocene account of crisis more widely.

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Uncanny Technonature This haunting strategy is visible from the outset. “Lion City,” the eponymous introductory tale to Ng’s collection, follows an intense romance between the office-worker narrator and a free-spirited zookeeper with whom he is in love. Early on, the reader discovers that, though the zoo in question appears to be “a piece of wild left over from before the skyscrapers,” it is in fact entirely free of animal life (Ng). When the lovers sneak late at night into a shadowy warehouse, it is so the tale’s paramour can reveal she is less a keeper than a chief engineer, tasked with manufacturing convincing robo-fauna from “wire mesh, cable spaghetti and the like” (Ng). The scenario represents an extra-human biosphere brought entirely under human control and in this way invokes actually existing Singapore technonature. In particular, the zoo, with its cultivated jungle wilderness and fabricated fauna, bears the imprint of Singapore’s celebrated “Gardens by the Bay”: a multi-million-dollar eco-development, and exercise—precisely—in the artificial production of nature. Gardens by the Bay is built on terraformed land and boasts, among its key features, giant twin conservatories calibrated to mimic Mediterranean and tropical climates, and a towering grove of vertical gardens, or “Supertrees,” constructed from concrete and metal.4 As a spectacle of geoengineering, climate control and ecosystem management, Gardens by the Bay showcases that capacity for environmental manipulation that has rendered Singapore a model for Anthropocene survival in the way Schneider-Mayerson suggests. Indeed, Ng’s narrative gestures to this vision of the city: the zookeeper refers to a period in the recent past when there were still visitors who had “grown up around animals,” and this observation relates to the massive species loss that is one characteristic of actually unfolding emergency. Mirroring the city-state itself, the tale’s technonature thus acts, at the level of plot, as a mode of redressing an Anthropocene reality. Further though, Ng’s story also appears—at least initially—to stage the kind of formal response to the Anthropocene condition that Ghosh describes in his analysis of speculative fiction. On this account, we will recall, speculative forms possess a flexibility that is adequate to a world where humans are thoroughly entangled in the rest of nature, and Ng’s own speculative vocabulary is, in one sense, legible in this way: As the robo-fauna envision the absorption of the extra-­ human biosphere into the category of human activity, so the human itself is complicated in the narrative. Despite her unruly joie de vivre, the

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keeper—who “like[s] punk rock bands, graffiti art, the spiciest … Indian food” (Ng)—turns out not to belong to the category of humanity in any straightforward sense. Caught out one night with her skin peeled back and “the mess of circuitry in her cheeks’ exposed” (Ng), she is revealed to be as artificial as her charges. This is not a comfortable moment. The narrator’s unmasked lover is disturbing: her skin hangs in shreds, and she looks out with a “lidless” gaze, that—in an ominous nod to James Cameron’s infamous androids— “glowed iron-red in the flame” (Ng). Ng’s speculative imaginary here shifts into a dystopian register, which is picked up and augmented elsewhere in the collection. In “Port,” for example, a mysterious rash (the possible effect of air pollution) causes plug-socket-like holes to open up all over the human body. The biotech network that emerges once individuals begin using these to interface—or “plex” in the tale’s terminology (Ng)— is vividly uneasy, while at the same time explicitly undermining any distinction between hardware, human, and animal. Mrs. Tan, herself not afflicted by the new disease, describes an encounter with a cluster of “plexers” as follows: She thought for a moment that […] a giant insect has broken into her home and woven a nest from the bodies of those present. But as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see the guests […] were simply plexing, only in a more complex configuration that anything she had hitherto witnessed. […] They had become one organism. One holy beast. (Ng)

The scene is a sinister non-anthropocentric tableau and thus seems initially to resonate with Ghosh’s discussion of haunted nature to which I have begun to draw attention above. What Ghosh has termed the “environmental uncanny” names an unsettling apprehension of human-nature entanglement (32), and though Ng’s description of the plexing bodies shares these characteristics, they are not—as in Ghosh’s formulation—the phantomatic side effect of a dualist socio-ecological paradigm. After all, Lion City’s speculative vocabulary is witness to a contemporary Singapore in which, as Schneider-Mayerson puts it, “the line between the built and the natural environment becomes blurred beyond recognition” (168). The android keeper, the networked bodies in “Port”: these can be viewed as darkly doubling the city-state’s technonature, and so if they are uncanny, this is not because they dramatize a hitherto suppressed imbrication. Instead, the text suggests that the entanglement of humanity

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and nature itself admits of some hidden substrate, which, once brought “into the open” as Freud has it (132), renders monstrous the Singapore model for survival in the Anthropocene. Spectacles of geoengineering as terraforming, environmental planning, and climate calibration: Ng’s uncanny visions replicate and thus haunt these anthropogenic natures, which—unsettled—come to appear not salvific, but ominous and threatening. Rather than treating speculative fiction as a vocabulary for narrating the transforming biosphere, Ng thus mobilizes its non-anthropocentric possibilities self-consciously, precisely to interrogate an Anthropocene conception of human-nature relationality. Across the rest of this chapter, I will examine how this interrogation proceeds in a selection of tales where Anthropocene thinking is shown to drive—rather than redress—unfolding environmental degradation, and which suggest, too, that this socio-­ ecological paradigm functions to obscure histories of systemic violence. I will go on to argue that Ng’s text deploys the speculative specifically to excavate these histories; at this juncture, however, I turn back to Singaporean environmental management, and to the colonial formations of power both past and present from which this is inseparable.

Singapore, Crisis, and Environmental Management It is important that Singapore’s emergence as a blueprint for endurance in the Anthropocene depends in part on the discourse of crisis that has shaped the national imaginary since independence. Within this narrative, British colonial withdrawal in 1963 and the postcolony’s subsequent exit from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 are both framed, Ien Ang and Jon Stratton note, as “deeply involuntary” eventualities (73), which thrust Singapore—a small island with few resources and no remaining indigenous population—into a brutal “struggle for survival” (74). The challenges represented by impending climate breakdown have, with relative ease, been integrated into this existing rhetoric of emergency (Schneider-­ Mayerson 173), which, generally, has been mobilized by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) to mandate the state’s meticulous organization of the Singapore environment, but also of the island’s diverse population. Crucially, the “survival” toward which Singapore’s struggle is oriented is synonymous in the official imaginary with “economic viability” (Ang and Stratton 74). State controls are targeted at, and further authenticated by, an imperative to development, and—given the relative lack of resources

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on the island itself—attracting foreign capital has been central to the pursuit of this agenda. Geoengineering plays a very literal role in this respect, since reclaimed Singaporean land now houses industrial complexes belonging to a number of multinational corporations. On a different scale, environmental management has also, since the early days of independence, been mobilized in the cultivation of a world-facing Singapore identity. As Schneider-Mayerson notes, the “Garden City” is the deliberate result of a “greening program,” overseen by the first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who—self-identifying as the nation’s “Chief Gardener”—“recognized the role that greenery could play as a signifier of stability, prosperity and control” (170–1). The calibration of green space within the city plays another, related role in the constitution of Singapore nationhood, however. While this, too, can be linked to state’s economic objectives, it has to do with management of the internal citizen population, which is non-indigenous and ethnically diverse, and the unity of which is thus—within the national crisis-­ narrative—constantly threatened by the possibility of intercultural conflict (Chua 74). Avoiding such unrest, and the threat it might pose to productivity and investor confidence, is concomitantly a governmental priority. Chua Beng Huat notes an “injunction” to “harmony” that authorizes what he refers to as the PAP’s “constant policing of racial boundaries” (74): post-independence Singapore has been governed according to an official policy of “multiracialism” called the “CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others) scheme”. Under this, “every Singaporean is officially racially typed at birth” (60), and the government, acting as a “neutral umpire … oversees and maintains racial peace and racial equality” (61). Returning to the urban environment, Joshua Comaroff identifies in the management of Singapore’s greenery not only a shrewd national marketing strategy, but also a horticultural expression of this multiracial harmony-­ politics. The urban flora is, he notes, not “an ecological unity” but more accurately a “crypto-ecological fantasy,” composed through the curated combination of diverse forms of vegetation. “These, like the Singaporean population, are a motley assemblage of largely foreign species,” and their coherence is similarly held to require “a constant gardener, the administrative care of the larger state” (Comaroff 61–2).

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Coloniality and the Capitalocene It is clear, then, that the management of the environment in Singapore is inseparable from the management of people, and further that both processes cannot be understood outside the framework of a developmental agenda. This tripartite conjunction—of population, environment, and economics—resonates suggestively with Moore’s conception of capitalism as a “way organizing nature,” where “nature” designates not only the extra-human biosphere, but also human life (Capitalism 2). Moore’s thesis, elaborated under the sign of world-ecology, proposes that nature, conceived via the socio-ecological dualism, does not exist as a self-evident entity. Rather, “Nature”—capitalized to reflect its nominalized status—is made materially extant by capital, which mobilizes a scientific tradition consolidated during Europe’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment, to construct territories that, because they ostensibly lie outside of Human society, might be seized “cheaply”—at little or no cost—for the ends of profit (2). Further, because Enlightenment epistemology co-develops with geohistorical identities—with hetero-patriarchal categories of gender and sexuality, with colonial categories of race5—domains of “Cheap Nature” produced under capital have historically included not only “the trees and soils and rivers,” but also “most humans.” “Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, [and] nearly all women”: from the vantage of Enlightenment science, and the colonial/hetero-patriarchal institutions from which this is inseparable, “these humans were not Human at all. They were regarded as part of Nature … and treated accordingly” (“The Rise of Cheap Nature” 79). This picture of socio-ecological relations refines—and indeed challenges—the vision offered by Anthropocene thinking. It is not, on Moore’s account, the action of humanity generally that has shaped the earth’s systems into their current state of collapse. Rather, the “Capitalocene” (Capitalism 77) is structured by what the decolonial thinker Aníbal Quijano influentially calls the “coloniality of power” (“Coloniality” 533): an alliance between capital and Eurocentric knowledge that—into the present—systematically allocates states of exploitability and expendability on the tacit presumption that some humans are closer to nature, and that nature is itself an object.6 The degradation of the extra-human biosphere, in other words, cannot be considered outside a history in which certain categories of identity—gender, sexuality, race, class—are imposed to legitimate the degradation of human life.

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Singapore attests to this inextricability, most obviously because intersecting strategies for human and environmental management in the contemporary city-state are directly rooted in British rule. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the island’s indigenous ecology was repeatedly reinvented to serve colonial trading interests in Southeast Asia. After plantations of gambier and pepper exhausted the soil’s carrying capacity, these were replaced first by Lalang grass, and then by rubber and agriculture (Schneider-Mayerson 170).7 The totalizing control over the extra-human biosphere exercised after independence by the PAP should be seen, Schneider-Mayerson notes, as “accelerat[ing]” colonial environmental engineering (170), rather than breaking with these processes, and a similar connection is visible at the level of population management. Though its explicit objective is racial equality, Singapore’s CMIO scheme is inherited, as Daniel P.  S. Goh observes, from a colonial paradigm in which the invented categories of “Chinese,” “Malay,” and “Indian” were used in the way Moore and Quijano both note to allocate forms of paid and semi/ un-paid work across the urban and rural sectors of the economy (238). Ongoing coloniality is also visible beyond urban greenery and ethnic taxonomy, however. The logic of objectification that connects human and environmental degradation in Singapore’s colonial period emerges in the present as extractivism and racialized exploitation, and—as was the case under that earlier regime—its function in both these permutations is capitalist accumulation. For example, Singapore’s post-independence prosperity has to a great extent been ensured by the island’s role in the global petroeconomy, of which it is an important industrial arm. Ng Weng Hoong writes: Through the make-or-break years of the 1960s and 1970s, oil refining injected into the young nation much-needed heavy industrialisation investments, self-belief and an instant pool of First World management, professional and engineering talents. The refineries’ owners and operators, Shell, BP, Mobil, Esso, Chevron and Amoco … gave Singapore instant credibility on the investment circuit and confidence about its long-term viability in a geopolitically turbulent region. (8)

Today, as Schneider-Mayerson notes, terraformed Singapore land houses “the third-largest complex of petrochemical refineries in the world” (176). Further, if outputs from the bunker fuel operation in the city’s port were

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officially factored into Singapore’s emissions profile, this “would be approximately five times higher than the United States” (174). The pursuit of foreign investment is also manifest in Singapore’s controversial migrant labor policy, which can be understood as reformulating the gradations of exploitable life schematized during the colonial period via stratifications of race. To depress the costs of production in the city-­ state, Singapore draws “guest workers” from less-affluent neighboring countries (all nations, notably, at specific risk from global heating). “Malaysian female factory workers, Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers, [and] Thai and South Asian male construction and heavy industry workers” (Chua 68): these and other participants in the migrant system are employed under radically deregulated, and thus acutely precarious, conditions. As Chua points out, guest workers are, by law, only retainable on a short-term contractual basis “without any security or permanence”; they “are not covered by national labour legislation,” meaning “the government bears no responsibility at all for the[ir] welfare”; and further, they are forbidden from gaining access to Singaporean citizens’ rights through marriage (68). In a mutation of formal colonial policy, what legitimates such treatment is, Chua argues, a racialized principle, which is today refracted through the national discourse around economic viability. It is a notion of Singapore’s own “development,” he writes, that “ha[s] positioned ‘Singaporeans’ as “superior” to those ‘Malays,’ ‘Indians’ and ‘Chinese’ from ‘underdeveloped’ Indonesia, South Asia, and the People’s Republic of China” (Chua 69). All of this sheds new light on contemporary Singapore technonature, from urban greenery to large-scale terraforming. These feats of environmental management cannot be considered outside capital/coloniality as a set of active socio-ecological relations. Yoked into the so-called struggle for economic survival in multiple ways, technonature is inseparable, from deleterious transformations to the biosphere, and from the systematic exploitation and exposure of certain human lives. The point shifts into sharp focus on considering that Gardens by the Bay—that harbinger of a climate-controlled future—should appear in a nation whose development continues to be underwritten in important ways by the fuel economy. Noteworthy, too, as Joanne Leow emphasizes, is the fact that the whole mega-project was built using “exploited foreign labour” (870), a point that might be made in respect to the nation’s curated and engineered environment more generally (Schneider-Mayerson 178).

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If Singapore represents a model for survival in the age of climate emergency, then it bears asking whose survival such a model guarantees, and for how long. These questions resonate beyond the city-state, though Singapore—almost seamlessly conjoining colonial and contemporary socio-ecological protocols—illuminates what is at stake with particular clarity. Across its history and into the present, the island reveals the coloniality of anthropogenic natures, and in this way unsettles the wider Anthropocene narrative in which both planetary crisis and its possible amelioration are figured as the effects of collective human action.

Haunting the Anthropocene I have suggested, returning to Lion City, that Ng’s text haunts Singapore’s technonature, reimaging this in uncanny visions that imply there is more to environmental engineering than meets the eye. But the collection also moves beyond mere suggestion. In “Port,” for example, the biotech network of plexing bodies both shadows artificial ecologies in actually existing Singapore and interrogates the very notion of anthropogenesis as this emerges in Anthropocene thinking. It is noteworthy, in this latter sense, that plexing is presented in the tale in explicitly universal terms. To join the insectile agglomeration is—one participant reveals—to interface with “[t]he entire world” (Ng). The hybrid plexing organism is thus clearly an Anthropocene image: the human collective, mobilizing technology joins together to create a new and totalizing human-nature assemblage. And yet, the tale also immediately undercuts this vision. “The entire world” to which the plexer refers is not universal, but conspicuously excludes Mrs. Tan and everyone else whose body remains port-free. This is especially significant, further, because it is Mrs. Tan who, in very material ways, performs the historically feminized domestic labor that allows plexing to take place. While her husband and his friends use the Tans’ home to plug themselves in, she is to be found “diligently ploughing through the … wet market … until her arms could carry no more. Much of what she purchased was for her guests” (Ng). At the narrative’s climax, with her living room festooned in cables and bodies, Mrs. Tan sets about cooking a great feast, to which the plexers help themselves on awaking, automatically and without acknowledgment. Noting her relegation, she reflects that her husband “was having the time of his life. But it was only his life. She could no longer claim any part of it” (Ng).

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This whole scenario enacts a metacritique of non-anthropocentric discourse, offering an image of the Anthropocene only to reveal that certain humans do not figure in its iteration of collective humanity. As it excavates the gendered division of labour sustaining the plexing organism, furthermore, Ng’s tale also suggests that an Anthropocene imaginary can in fact be mobilised to perpetuate the exploitation of certain lives on the grounds that these are less fully human than others. T. J. Demos sheds light on this possibility in his own interrogation of anthropogenesis, noting how the concept “tends to reinforce the … position that ‘we’ have indeed mastered nature” (28). Thus, even as it seems to reconfigure the Enlightenment dualism, the Anthropocene narrative of humanity imbricated with nature precisely replicates this binary, and with it the logic underpinning the racialized and hetero-patriarchal coloniality of power. “Port” engages directly with this ambivalence by highlighting its gendered effects. However, the tale also gestures toward the broader systems of exploitation on which—as Leow and Schneider-Mayerson observe—actually existing Singapore technonature depends: while it refers most immediately to the mysterious rash that drives the tale’s plot, Ng’s title also invokes the city of Singapore itself, which is after all one of the busiest ports in the world. Thus, in “Port,” the universalizing Anthropocene narrative screens out a socio-ecological history shaped by coloniality and as a result is shown to enable coloniality’s persistence and—by extension—the persistence of its corrosive human and extra-human effects. The same form of strategic obfuscation is made more clearly visible still in “Lion City,” when, at the tale’s end, it is revealed that Singapore technonature—incarnated by the robo-fauna—is precisely an anthropogenic veneer, which overlays a deleterious human and environmental organization. In a scenario that doubles the unmasking of the zookeeper, the narrator divulges that he himself is not human in any conventional sense, but instead the lion of the tale’s title, in hiding in artificial human form: “For the first time in years, maybe decades, my skin came off. I padded out on my four paws … tail waving back and forth” (Ng). As a result of this disclosure, the status of the zoo shifts: rather than a response to species loss, the tale’s anthropogenic creatures come to represent wider developments that are in fact responsible for the absence of animal life. Here, it is important that the zoo is quite explicitly linked to post-­ independence Singapore’s so-called struggle for survival and symbolizes this agenda in a way that foregrounds the crucial role played by environmental engineering in securing foreign capital. “[B]ack then … we were

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all so hungry to succeed” (Ng), the keeper says when asked about the origins of the tale’s artificial animals: “we were willing to tear everything down … and stack up these towers of glass and steel” (Ng). And it is precisely these developments that, in the lion-narrator’s account, catalyze what the tale has presented as a mass extinction: “When the cities grew, us animals didn’t just disappear,” he explains. Clothed in human form, animals have instead “been living alongside men for centuries tilling their fields, fortifying their fortresses, fighting their wars” (Ng). The vision with which the narrative leaves us thus extends and fleshes out the strategy of critical haunting, which begins—as in “Port” —with an uncanny rendition of Singapore’s artificial ecologies. Symbolized by the robo-zoo, the modern city-state ultimately appears as a technonatural mirage, which both is sustained by, and conceals, a hidden history of socio-ecological exploitation that—centuries old—reaches back into Singapore’s formally colonial past.

Irrealist Aetiologies From the above it is clear that both “Port” and “Lion City” unsettle eco-­ utopian accounts of Singapore’s engineered natures, and by extension that they also call into question the wider Anthropocene narrative of unfolding planetary crisis within which such accounts operate. Ng’s collection thus mobilizes a speculative lexicon not—as in Ghosh’s analysis—to represent humanity’s imbrications with the extra-human biosphere, but rather to excavate the systemic processes undergirding a present in which the very discourse of anthropogenesis participates, as Demos argues, in ongoing socio-ecological degradations. Speculative poetics in the collection are thus interrogative and diagnostic; their function is to aetiologize a moment of emergency from the vantage of contemporary Singapore. Indeed, Lion City can be viewed as tacitly responding to Moore’s assertion that “the Anthropocene argument” cannot explain “[h]ow humans become a geological force” (“Capitalocene” 82) over a history that is characterized by “naturalized inequalities, alienation and violence” (82). To the extent that it is engaged to shed light on precisely this history, Ng’s speculative vocabulary becomes legible as an example of what the WReC— who also draw on Moore—have called “critical irrealism” (Deckard et al. 83). On this account, irrealist forms (of which speculative genre is one example) emerge in moments like the present when the established patterning of socio-ecological relationships is thrown into crisis. Like

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folkloric discourses that tend to proliferate in societies newly incorporated into the world ecology,8 non-mimetic narratives in the present register a sense of estrangement from a once-familiar world. Further, though, irrealism also operates interpretatively, to explain disorientating socio-­ecological shifts. While this function exists in folklore “on the level of the political unconscious” (Deckard et al. 105), it is often deployed self-consciously in contemporary fiction to “articulate powerful critiques of actually existing reality” (Deckard et al. 83) by mapping out the systems human and extra-­ human exploitation that drive current emergency. Already visible as a critical engagement with Anthropocene discourse in “Port” and “Lion City,” this aetiologizing strategy comes to the fore elsewhere in Ng’s collection in narratives that mobilize the speculative to meticulously lay bare interconnected systems of human and environmental degradation. These are tales that haunt the Anthropocene account of climate emergency as they present visions of a contemporary Singapore shaped by the coloniality of power. The tale entitled “A Day at Terminal Aleph,” for example, engages with the nation’s immigration policy, which forms a crucial part of the post-independence pursuit of foreign capital as we have seen. As well as the precariously employed guest workers, however, the state also seeks to attract foreign professionals, who (quite unlike their supposedly low-skilled counterparts) are actively “encouraged to settle as permanent residents” (Low 101). In “Terminal Aleph,” this spectrum of privilege is interrogated through a reimagining of Singapore’s airport, where—according to the tale—there is a secret gate (“Terminal Aleph”) through which a transnational pantheon of deities passes on a daily basis. “[W]e are beloved by the Gods,” manager Bhuvaneswarya Rajamanickam explains: “This is how the country has fared so well …. This is how we shall escape the effects of climate change” (Ng). At least to begin with, then, the deities represent the corporate capital that has stabilized Singapore’s post-independence economy, and—consequently—also ensured the nation’s status as a model for survival in an age of climate and cognate emergencies. What has attracted the divine investors, importantly, is the city-state’s “standard of service” (Ng). On the one hand, this includes a lavish airport reception; on the other, however, it involves an institutional willingness to treat certain lives as expendable: “It’s easy,” the narrative voice relates, “for the airport to pull folks … off planes, sometimes travelling under false passports, sometimes with bags of cocaine sealed into their rectums” (Ng). In a critical nod to Singapore’s notorious intractability on the issue of refugees and stateless people, these

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undocumented or trafficked migrants become divine sacrifices, routinely slaughtered in a purpose-built “abattoir” (Ng). And there are other casualties, too: the airport staff are mostly guest workers whose precarious circumstances the narrative first emphasizes (by noting long hours and low wages), and then translates into scenes of direct bodily threat. A young concierge is sexually assaulted and murdered by a Celtic god—who is subsequently discovered surrounded by her body parts “eating a slice of pizza”—and before the narrative begins a cleaner is accidentally “eaten by the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea” (Ng). The tale relays these details with a deadpan casualness that, though darkly humorous, is also subtly chilling in its strategic normalization of radical violence. As it draws attention to the states of disproportionate vulnerability woven into the fabric of daily Singaporean life, “Terminal Aleph” also underscores the racialized principle that organizes their distribution. Midway through the text, we are introduced to a minor North African deity, who—it turns out—cannot pay his bill. He is subsequently drugged by airport security and sent to the abattoir to join those mortals whose desperation or poverty renders them similarly expendable. The scenario invokes the differential treatment accorded to guest workers and wealthier so-called skilled professionals under Singapore immigration law, but it also more generally echoes Chua’s comment that a discourse of economic development mediates assumptions regarding racial superiority in the contemporary national imaginary. The point is rendered more explicit still when Bhuva explains the significance of the airport and its ability to harvest the blessings of a corporate pantheon: “Because of this Terminal, we are now the Anointed Ones. We are the Chosen Race” (Ng). In a strategy that demonstrates the WReC’s assessment of irrealist forms, “Terminal Aleph” thus mobilizes a speculative vocabulary precisely to map out the systems of racialized precarity that underpin what the narrative has explicitly identified as Singapore’s capacity to withstand transformations to the planetary biosphere. Further, though, the tale also connects its divine reimagining of foreign investment to these same ecological shifts: it is not insignificant, in this sense, that the story takes place in Singapore’s airport, a setting that metonymically refers to the nation’s wider, ongoing involvement in the fossil fuel economy. The reader is prompted to recall that a substantial portion of the foreign capital invested in the city-state since independence has come from petroleum giants, such as Shell and ExxonMobil (Scheider-Mayerson 176). The manner in which the gods arrive in Singapore is specifically noteworthy in this sense: “the

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rain starts pelting down, bringing with it fragments of ice, locusts, frogs and dumbstruck fish … [T]wo columns form, one made of smoke and the other of fire” (Ng). The scene has the quality of an extreme weather event, and—unfolding on airport tarmac—thus suggests the fallout, both from the nation’s involvement in global oil and from its gross contribution to planetary emissions more generally. The city that will, in Bhuva’s words, supposedly “escape climate change” (Ng) is, thus, shown to remain beholden to the very racialized and reifying logic of coloniality that drives the unfolding emergency. The consequences of this violent and contradictory survival strategy are examined in “SIN”: a supernaturalized account of climate migrancy and a meditation—as the title suggests—on issues of culpability. The tale concerns Southeast Asia’s infamous transboundary haze: the dense smog that periodically affects Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and which occurs when “smoke from forest fires and open burning combines with local air pollution over cities” (Forsyth 77). Ng’s story begins when, after an especially bad year, the haze clears to reveal that it has brought with it “strange passengers” (Ng). These include “ancient men, withered down to nothing but skin and skeleton,” “graceful women, half their bodies flayed, exposing a mess of yellow tissue” (Ng), and a range of other fanged, horned, and fork-tongued beings. The creatures are from Hell—it turns out—but they are peaceful and have arrived in Singapore in search of a new, more inhabitable place to settle. The tale gives us a sense of their previous home by enumerating the newcomers’ remarkable capabilities: “Some had gills,” we learn; others “could walk through fire and endure temperatures approaching zero on the Kelvin scale” (Ng). Variously underwater, extremely hot or extremely cold, Hell provides a vision of climate breakdown, and the narrative’s visitors, fleeing such inhospitable conditions, become climate refugees. This scenario addresses, in speculative form, the uneven distribution of climate vulnerability across Southeast Asia, a region that generally stands to suffer intensely from the effects of global heating. Though Singapore itself is at risk from rising sea levels, its anticipatory terraformed fortifications—built, as Comaroff notes with material imported from its neighbors (“Built on Sand” n.p.)—mean that it is in a significantly stronger position than, for example, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Bangladesh. It is the plight of these nations that “SIN” invokes, firstly in its suggestion of a nearby climate Hell, but also in its representation of Singapore’s response to those fleeing this unlivable place: the visitors are turned away, in an

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echo of the city-state’s refugee policy (Schneider-Mayerson 178). This decision is taken “for the sake of social harmony” (Ng), a reference to the CMIO scheme, which—through its strict policing of racial boundaries— separates Singaporean identity from the identity of those people whose Chinese, Malay, or Indian heritage is not derived from the island’s population. It is thus because of their perceived racial difference—their non-­ Singaporean heritage—that the newcomers are forced to return to their flooded, freezing, and burning former home. This scenario resonates beyond the Singaporean context: across the globe, as Moore points out, “[t]he most violent and deadly biophysical results of … [climate crisis] are now visited upon … women, neo-colonial populations, [and] people of colour” (“Capitalocene” 54). If the logic of coloniality drives planetary emergency, identifying lives and environments for exploitation or exhaustion, then it also governs how emergency is allocated. Viewed in these terms, the refusal to provide refuge comes to appear less an effort to preserve cultural equilibrium than it does an active and racialized condemnation of certain lives to a condition of existential threat. In “SIN,” however, this moment of violence is not without consequence: the haze returns to transport the unwelcome visitors back to their old home, but—unlike before—it does not lift. This, it seems, is a kind of retributive act, and indeed the tale’s title reads both as an invocation of guilt, and as an ominous abbreviation for “Singapore” itself. We are reminded once again of city-state’s entanglement in the emissions-heavy fossil fuel economy, and—consequently—of the nation’s role in the global heating that will disproportionately affect its poorer neighbors. Indeed, the transboundary haze, an especially dramatic example of atmospheric pollution generally, is also associated with Singapore specifically because of the state’s significant investment in Indonesian palm-oil plantations, the burning of which is substantially responsible for the smog (Forsyth 84). If there is something like a climate hell that lies just beyond the terraformed borders of a more secure Singaporean reality, then—“SIN” suggests—Singapore is not innocent in the creation of this unlivable space. The situation is made more complex still, as Schneider-Mayerson observes, by the fact that the countries suffering disproportionately as a result of already rising temperatures and sea levels are precisely those from which Singapore draws, not only the aggregate used in terraforming, but also the guest workers who build the nation’s artificial islands, tend to its curated greenery, and maintain its spectacles of technonature (178). The nation’s refugee policy, yoked in

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“SIN” to the polluted air, thus appears inseparable from its participation in the production of uninhabitable environments, but also from the related, racialized systems via which certain humans come to be deemed more exploitable—less human—than others. Read alongside each other, these two tales— “SIN” and “A Day at Terminal Aleph” —enact a thorough interrogation of the discourse in which Singapore appears a blueprint for endurance in the age of planetary crisis. Explicitly thematizing this narrative, “Terminal Aleph” suggests that the city-state’s survival rests on a willingness to provide foreign capital with lives cheapened to the point of disposability and links this strategy to the extractivist logic that transforms extra-human nature into a resource to be plundered. “SIN” likewise undermines eco-utopian representations of Singapore by suggesting a structural connection between the island’s relative stability and socio-ecological decimation in neighboring countries. Singapore’s position here appears the product of uneven and racialized intraregional relationships, which allow the city-state to bolster itself through cheap access to foreign labor and materials, while also enabling the offshoring of these processes’ human and extra-human costs. If Singapore stands out in Southeast Asia as exceptionally crisis-ready, then— the narrative implies—this status comes at the expense of lives and environments in other nations. The vision of survival that emerges from this pair of narratives is thus violent, exclusionary, and—importantly— avowedly temporary. In both tales, the racialized logic via which climate security is distributed is shown to be inextricable from the logic that renders extra-human nature legible to corrosive capitalist appropriation. The scenario with which “SIN” closes is especially telling in this respect. Following on from the refugees’ relegation to their hellish former home, the permanent return of the haze clearly asserts that unless the coloniality of privilege and precarity is addressed, biospheric collapse—already underway throughout Singapore’s neighbors—is an inevitable global reality.

Decolonizing Emergency Across the selection of tales from Lion City discussed in this chapter, Ng mobilizes the speculative in the way WReC suggest in their commentary on irrealist fiction: as a lexicon in which to make visible the tangled systems of socio-ecological violence underpinning the condition of emergency that unevenly characterizes our planetary present. Though, as Moore has argued, the logic of coloniality drives and distributes biospheric

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transformation on a global scale, Singapore is specifically noteworthy in this context as, on the one hand, a celebrated pioneer of climate survival and, on the other, a society in which the social and environmental legacies of formal colonialism remain vividly active. Ng’s collection situates itself between these two dimensions of the island’s history and—mapping their points of connection—enacts a sustained critique of Singapore technonature by exposing the extent to which, in all its forms, this remains rooted in racialized conceptions of exploitable or expendable life, and in the extractivist paradigms of extra-human nature from which these conceptions are derived. In this way, Lion City emphasizes and interrogates the coloniality of environmental management in Singapore specifically; however, it also by extension functions critically in respect to Anthropocene narratives, which offer strategies such as terraforming or climate calibration as routes out of crisis. As we have seen, Ng summons the discourse of anthropogenesis, only to reveal how a vision in which all humans collectively reshape the extra-human biosphere fails to account for the plight of those people to whom the privileged status of humanity has never fully accrued. As “Port” demonstrates especially clearly, the notion of “the Anthropocene” screens out this history of hetero-patriarchal and racialized violence, and so can be mobilized—as the tales considered each show in distinct ways—to perpetuate such formations of power. Here, to conclude, we might return to speculative haunting and its critical potential in the age of impending climate breakdown. While critics such as Ghosh have noted that non-mimetic fictional forms lend themselves to a mode of Anthropocene haunting—registering a repressed interconnection between humans and extra-human nature—Ng’s collection mobilizes the speculative differently. Substantially more than a vocabulary for representing broadly anthropogenic biospheric shifts, speculative forms in Lion City are deployed to examine how racialized categories of human and nature have been imposed over the history of capital to construct states of exploitability or expendability. As it mobilizes its irrealist aesthetic to aetiologize planetary crises, excavating relationships between biospheric breakdown and human degradation, the collection itself thus precisely haunts the Anthropocene narrative. It invokes the violent histories suppressed by the category of collective human action, with the effect that accounts of emergency derived from this category appear—like the sinister unskinned zookeeper or the insectile assemblage of plugged-in bodies—ominous and threatening. All of this implies, finally, that any meaningful attempt to chart pathways out of planetary crisis must begin

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by decolonizing the narrative of crisis itself, so that this no longer feeds back into the coloniality of power. And Lion City, by retrieving an obscured history of biospheric transformation—a history in which this is racialized, gendered, and unevenly distributed—takes up this imperative, thus orientating itself toward a future in which climate security is also climate justice.

Notes 1. The Enlightenment model of human and nature is formatively outlined by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, especially pp. 1–35. 2. See, for example, Vishwas Satgar’s “The Climate Crisis and Systemic Alternatives” and Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene.” 3. Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdonald, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry and Stephen Shapiro author Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature as the Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 4. For an insightful analysis of Gardens by the Bay, see Joanne Leow “Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore.” 5. See, in particular, Aníbal Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America”, but also Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” 6. Quijano elaborates further on how categories of race and nature are related in Eurocentric epistemology in the article “Coloniality and Modernity/ Rationality,” especially pp. 172–3. 7. Here, Schneider-Mayerson is drawing on Timothy Barnard and Corinne Heng’s “A City in a Garden,” which provides a more detailed discussion of this history. 8. For an illuminating analysis of the relation between this phenomenon and (gothic) speculative fiction, see Stephen Shapiro’s “Transvaal/Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity.”

Works Cited Ang, Ien and Jon Stratton. “The Singapore Way of Multiculturalism: Western Concepts/Asian Cultures.” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, vol. 10, no. 1, 1995, pp. 65–89. Barnard, Timothy B. and Corinne Heng. “A City in a Garden.” Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore, edited by Timothy B.  Barnard, NUS Press, 2014, pp. 281–306.

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Chua, Beng Huat. “Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control.” Race & Class, vol. 44, no. 3, 2003, pp. 58–77. Comaroff, Joshua. “Ghostly Topographies: Landscape and Biopower in Modern Singapore.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 14, 2007, pp. 56–73. Comaroff, Joshua. “Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk.” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 39, 2014, http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/ issues/39/built-­on-­sand-­singapore-­and-­the-­new-­state-­of-­risk. Accessed 31 December 2020. Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” Global Change Newsletter, vol. 41, 2000, pp. 17–18. Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Sternberg Press, 2017. Deckard et  al. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Liverpool University Press, 2015. Forsyth, Tim. “Public concerns about Transboundary Haze: A Comparison of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 25, 2014, pp. 76–86. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, Penguin, 2003. Gan, Elaine et al. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene”. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing et al, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 1–14. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago University Press, 2016. Goh, Daniel P.  S. “From Colonial Pluralism to Postcolonial Multiculturalism: Race State Formation and the Question of Cultural Diversity in Malaysia and Singapore.” Sociology Compass, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 232–252. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W.  Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, 2002. Leow, Joanne. “Reading New Asian Tropicalities in Contemporary Singapore.” Positions, vol. 28, no. 4, 2020, pp. 869–904. Low, Linda. “The Political Economy of Migrant Worker Policy in Singapore.” Asia Pacific Business Review, vol. 8, no. 4, 2002, pp. 95–118. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. Moore, Jason W. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism. Edited by Jason W. Moore, PM Press, 2016, pp. 78–115. Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene and Planetary Justice.” Maize, 2019, https:// j a s o n w m o o r e . c o m / w p -­c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 0 1 9 / 0 7 / M o o r e -­T h e -­ Capitalocene-­and-­Planetary-­Justice-­2019-­Maize.pdf. Accessed 29 June 2020.

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Ng, Weng Hoong. Singapore, the Energy Economy: From the First Refinery to the end of Cheap Oil, 1960–2010. Routledge, 2011. Ng, Yi-Sheng. Lion City: Stories. Kindle ed., Epigram, 2018. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533–580. Quijano, Aníbal . “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, vol 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 168–178. Satgar, Vishwas. “The Climate Crisis and Systemic Alternatives.” The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, edited by Vishwas Satgar, Wits University Press, 2018, pp. 1–28. Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew. “Some Islands will Rise: Singapore in the Anthropocene.” Resilience, vol. 4, nos. 2–3, 2017, pp. 166–184. Shapiro, Stephen. “Transvaal/Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity.” Gothic Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2008, pp. 29–47. Vergès, Françoise. “Racial Capitalocene.” Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Verso, 2017, pp. 72–82. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3 no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.

CHAPTER 8

Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees, Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

We are currently in a moment of radical coming to consciousness of our fragility on earth. Warnings of climate catastrophe and the irreversible degradation of our natural environment, sounded regularly since at least Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, have reached a crescendo that most people in the developed world, apart from climate crisis deniers, take seriously. Climate anxiety and climate despair stalk activists and ordinary citizens alike. Not since the atomic era of the 1950s has the shadow of global apocalypse loomed so large in people’s imagination, except that now there is no economic golden age, no post-war boom, no presumption of progress and optimism about the future to temper the apocalyptic anxiety. We live in an age which expects its children and grandchildren to live in a far worse world than we have known. Hand in hand with this eco-pessimism is a fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios, and more specifically, post-end-of-the-world scenarios. Like deer caught in the headlights of

A. S. Monnet (*) English Department, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_8

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climate crisis knowledge, we seem paralyzed to act, yet drawn to narratives of our demise and tales of worlds, usually nightmarish, sometimes Edenic, that might follow the end of the world as we know it. In this chapter, I want to look at a specific subset of these apocalyptic narratives, namely the “apocalyptic ecogothic.” A film and a graphic novel, both of which imagine a global holocaust engineered by trees, will exemplify my argument that ecogothic stories have evolved in recent years, away from a conventional monstrous-nature paradigm to a more ecologically informed model of human-nonhuman entanglement. The 2008 20th Century Fox film-production by M. Night Shyamalan The Happening and the 2018 graphic novel The End by hugely popular Swiss author Philippe Chappuis, known professionally as Zep,1 are both explicitly environmental narratives. The first text is a hybrid tale of ecological speculation and B-movie horror, while the more recent The End ventures into post-­ apocalyptic fantasy and thereby reveals how thoroughly haunted we are by our theological history and political unconscious even when we try to imagine a new world. This chapter is structured into two movements. In the first I examine the two narratives for the way they portray nature and plant intelligence with the help of various meanings of the word “haunting.” Here I explore the question of agency and ontology in relation to the notion of trees as conscious actors and/or sentient beings and argue that these recent narratives represent a significant departure from earlier ecogothic paradigms as they move toward a more science-centered ecological model, especially the most recent text. In the second part of the chapter, I will consider the problem of apocalypse narratives in ecological fiction and specifically how this meme represents another kind of haunting, that of our cultural past lingering into our present and future in subtle and sometimes invisible, but nevertheless insidious, ways. Post-apocalypse scenarios are currently haunting ecological narratives to the exclusion of almost any other imaginable plot and are preventing us from being able to act intelligently on the knowledge emerging from science and the empirical data about the climate and pollution crises on the ground. Although apocalyptic stories of planetary disaster may have offered a useful rhetorical tool in the early days of the environmental movement, it is time to rethink their central place in this project. Not only are they no longer effective motivators for ecological transition, but they are also too often haunted by retrograde gender and race politics, as I will demonstrate later in this chapter.

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Intelligent Trees and Haunted Nature The commonsense use of the term “haunting” refers to a place or object possessed by a spirit or ghost. The word is also often used figuratively to signify the inability to forget the past or leave it behind. In recent years, the term has been taken up and developed by scholars into a field called “hauntology,” a play on words with the term “ontology,” to signal a postmodern approach to the question of identity, persistence, and being. Originally used by Jacques Derrida as a way to speak of Marx’s continuing influence into the present, hauntology has been taken up by other scholars as a way of figuring the enduring presence (and absence) of the past (cf. Derrida’s Spectres of Marx). Sladja Blazan explains in the introduction to this collection that the word “haunting” comes from a Middle English term “haunten,” meaning to frequent, habitually engage in or resort to. So, one of the first ways in which we can think about haunting and nature is through the environmental impact we have and will continue to have on the so-called Anthropocene. Our current practices—activities that we habitually engage in—are so toxic that they will continue to produce effects on the atmosphere and biosphere well into the next millennia. In a strictly etymological sense, we are going to “haunt” nature for a very long time, perhaps even after we are gone. There is a second reason why the concept of haunting is particularly relevant for analyzing these two stories. Both loosely play off the classic trope of the “haunted woods,” seemingly alive with mysterious and usually malevolent forces. And indeed, in both, the trees are active and reactive to the presence of humans and do actually mean to harm them. However, both narratives interrogate and deconstruct the traditional meaning and agency involved in haunting. In traditional hauntings, natural spaces and objects such as trees and woods are possessed by the spirits of humans who have died. Thus, traditional haunting is the projection of human will and “energy” or spirit onto objects or beings which would otherwise remain inanimate. In the traditional view, non-haunted woods seem somewhat “dead” insofar as they are passive, quiet, seemingly “empty.” This is the modern, post-Enlightenment view of Nature that has defined it as inert matter, and consequently, as a resource to be used by humans. The two narratives I am focusing on are careful to distance themselves from this notion, insisting instead upon the autonomous agency and intelligence of nature. In other words, the living world of plants and animals is not empty and inert, acting meaningfully only when possessed by

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human spirits or ghosts, but possessing sentience and agency. As vital and intelligent beings, trees in these two stories are not so much haunted as ontologically—or hauntologically—equal to human beings. They are beings with the same ontological status as humans and operate with intelligence, discernment, and force of will. Unfortunately for the humans in the story, their will is to kill most humans on the planet. At first glance, then, both stories would seem to be straightforward instances of ecophobia, as defined by Simon Estok in his 2009 essay, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,” where he argues that “representations of nature as an opponent that hurts, hinders, threatens or kills us  – regardless of the philosophical value or disvalue of the ecosystemic functions being represented – are ecophobic” (209). His larger point is that fear of nature and a desire to control it have been ingrained in human attitudes toward “the natural world” since the “evolution of the opposable thumb,” that is, since earliest humanity (210). In short, he believes that it is hardwired into our bodies and minds as a species to want to dominate nature and worry that it will dominate us. In contrast to this tendency, Estok sees eco-­ criticism as countering with an “ecological humility” that recognizes the irrelevance of human beings to the well-being of the planet, unlike, for instance, the importance of fungi to the biosphere. Both The Happening and The End incorporate aspects of both positions—ecogothic and ecocritical—and actually enact the move from one to the other within their narrative. Both begin by evoking the conventional ecogothic premise of a mysterious and hostile Nature as threatening Other, and then gradually invite the reader or spectator to consider the trees’ actions as reasonable and necessary from the biosphere’s point of view. Slowly but surely, both texts develop their fictional stories as an accumulation of reasons for taking trees seriously as agents. The premise of The Happening, written and directed by Shyamalan, is that plants and trees are communicating with each other to release a neurotoxin that makes people kill themselves. First they stop stock-still, then they walk eerily backward for a moment, and finally they look for the closest, and often most gruesome or spectacular, way to die, such as hurling themselves off rooftops or lying down in front of lawn mowers. The main plot follows a young science teacher, Elliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg), and his wife (Zooey Deschanel), who flee Philadelphia as it becomes clear that large urban centers are being somehow targeted for what initially seem to be terrorist attacks. Along with the gradual

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revelation that it is plants and trees killing people, the film tacitly suggests that they are acting more in self-defense than in aggression. We hear in an early scene in Elliot’s high school classroom of the still mysterious disappearance of bees in hives across North America (what scientists call Colony Collapse Disorder), possibly caused by pesticides, and we see a steaming nuclear power plant looming over a suburban home in a later scene, making it clear that humans are affecting the natural world in toxic ways, indirectly explaining and justifying the trees’ actions (Fig. 8.1). Zep’s The End is also quite unsettling while being even more sympathetic to the trees that kill off most of humanity in the world of the story. The story opens much like The Happening, with two hikers in the Spanish Pyrenees suddenly falling dead one after another, then a frame showing a whole village littered with bodies on the ground. This is not explained right away, remaining mysterious like the first part of The Happening, and only later do we learn that this was the trees’ test run of a deadly airborne toxin. The main story follows a young man, a former eco-militant named Théodore, who has come to work at a remote research laboratory in Sweden, where he meets a woman scientist named Moon and her boss, a paleobotanist named Richard Frawley, based explicitly and by permission on the French botanist Francis Hallé, who is a well-known advocate of

Fig. 8.1  The Happening shows invasive human populations and pollution, such as these nuclear reactors looming over a suburban neighborhood. (Screenshot by author)

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tree intelligence and communication. Frawley has discovered that trees have a “secret codex” in their DNA which they erase when humans are near. He had stumbled upon this discovery by sequencing the genome of a prehistoric leaf preserved in a glacier, a leaf from an era before trees began to deliberately conceal their codex from humans. He also found that this extra DNA sequence, which serves as an archive of the history of the planet since its beginning (predating even the existence of trees, hence a kind of planetary memory bank), indicated a change in its chemical structure 66 million years ago. This leads Frawley to conclude that a concerted global intervention on the part of trees across the world had caused the extinction of dinosaurs. He speculated that they had stopped evolving and had become a nuisance, no longer “participating” in the “general equilibrium” of the Earth, a choice of words that clearly is meant to evoke James Lovelock’s theory of Gaia as a planetary “thermostat,” maintaining systems of life on earth in balance and “capable of self-regulation” (57–68). Frawley and the protagonist later discover that the trees have now programmed another mass extinction, that of humans, because not only are we not participating in the earth’s equilibrium, but, as Frawley observes, we’re actually creating imbalance: “nous, nous créons le déséquilibre” (The End 36). The plot initially involves some diversionary suspense while Théodore pursues a suspicion that a pharmacological company nearby is dumping toxic waste in the forest but it eventually turns out that it is the forest itself creating and stocking toxic chemicals in preparation for the mass extermination of humans. When this occurs, it happens simultaneously all over the world, leaving Théodore alone to begin a lonely journey south, where it is warmer, though a quiet, peaceful post-human landscape. He eventually meets another survivor—a young girl—and discovers a village of survivors where he will make his home. We can see from these two summaries that both films begin in a self-­ consciously ecogothic mode, presenting the death of humans as a terrifying mystery, gradually revealing that plants and trees are responsible. This falls squarely in the tradition that Dawn Keetley identifies in “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror: Or, Why are Plants Horrifying,” where she convincingly argues that plants (conventionally) represent an “absolute alterity” (6) in their lack of emotion and “indifference” (9). She argues that it is precisely their great difference from us, and their seeming lack of emotion, that makes their harm all the more horrific, citing The Happening as an instance of a horror film that relies on the presence of something “ineffable that lies outside the boundaries of known narrative structures”

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(23). While I fully agree with this characterization, and see it operating throughout classic plant horror films like The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Ruins (2008), or the British found footage horror film Hollow (2011)—which all feature plants that are both affectless and malevolent— I would argue that The Happening and The End deliberately move away from this familiar paradigm to something significantly different, more akin to the humility that Estok attributes to eco-criticism. In fact, both authors explicitly cite a desire to dislodge humans from their belief that they occupy the top rung of some planetary hierarchy and to gesture toward a more balanced, integrated, perhaps we could even call it an “animistic” or vitalist paradigm of planetary co-existence. In both cases, there is a deliberate effort to challenge the modern view of humans as qualitatively better, and more important, than any other species. In an interview with Newsweek, Shyamalan says that he always felt an affinity for “the American Indian culture and their relationship to nature.” He explains that: worshipping the sky, the earth, the rock, the bear, that relationship felt correct then as a kid and it feels correct now as an adult. It’s interesting that in all of our religions so little is said about how we should feel towards nature. It’s an interesting thing to get the hierarchy back in line with the way that it is. We’re just one of many living creatures on the planet. (my emphasis; Newsweek)

We can note the explicit desire to modify “the hierarchy” to a more horizontal model. Similarly, Zep said in an interview with a French television station in 2018 that “it’s important for us to rethink the place of humans on the planet, and to return to our place, which is not at the center.” In other words, he continued, “we are not the masters of Earth, but one of many species on earth” (Zep, Interview).2 Like Shyamalan’s point about getting the hierarchy “back in line with the way that it is,” Zep cites the notion of humans as one of “many species” and express a need for them to “return” to their “place.” Both authors use the ecogothic in order to imaginatively interrogate the idea that humans are exceptions from, or superior to, or masters of, other beings on the planet. In The Happening, this is done mainly by undermining the difference between nonhuman nature and people in subtle but unmistakable ways. First, people become like plants as a result of the airborne toxin. As mentioned before, the deaths begin by rendering humans immobile (as plants seem to be) before activating them to silently

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and unemotionally seek out self-destruction (lack of affect being another conventional attribute of plants). Moreover, the film denies its human characters the nobility and altruism that have traditionally been used to rank humans above all other animal species on the plant. Shyamalan takes pains to show people acting selfishly and aggressively, turning upon one another, almost tacitly justifying the trees’ dispassionate disposal of them. In contrast to this, the trees work in concert with a wind that volatizes the poison (as well as with the animals and insects which fall silent during the happenings), seemingly activated by human motion, but only if there is more than a handful, hence modulating their poisoning operation according to the size of the group. It appears as if the trees communicate, assess situations intelligently, adapt their actions accordingly, and even seem to spare the protagonist and his family at the end. In The End, the trees are imagined not only as intelligent beings but like planetary stewards, killing off species—in concert with the Earth (“la Terre”) itself—when they no longer contribute positively to the system. The Earth acts rationally, dispassionately, almost scientifically, having done a “test run” three months before the actual extinction event: the deaths in the Pyrenees at the beginning of the story. We learn later that these were caused by a volatile substance produced by the trees which is chemically similar to the chemical weapons used on Kurds in Syria. Hence humanity is poisoned by a compound it has already used upon itself, suggesting that the trees have a sense of poetic justice in addition to acting for the planetary common good. The fact that the trees carry out this population reduction—or rather “adjustment” (as the French verb “régler” suggests) all over the world simultaneously, which requires planning, coordination, and the externalized storage of the compound by mushrooms, also shows their great intelligence and communication abilities, as well as possibly a desire to spare humans the distress of a gradual demise. Their natural superiority is evident not only from their actions but also in the way they are drawn, such as on the cover, as larger and brighter and more detailed and complex than the human figure (Fig. 8.2). Unlike previous ecogothic narratives of killer plants, both texts are deeply indebted to a new and growing body of research on plant intelligence and communication that has emerged since the 1990s. Although this evidence is now quite robust and widely accepted, the idea of intelligent trees has been circulating in the media for over 30 years, suggesting an interest and even an eagerness or desire for confirmation that plants are smarter than previously believed. As a reminder, the “intelligent tree”

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Fig. 8.2  Cover of The End, by Zep (Philippe Chappuis). (With permission by Rue de Sèvres)

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story began as an anecdote that first appeared in 1984 when South African zoologist Wouter Van Hoven noticed a sudden spike in mortality among kudu, a large antelope, on game ranches in the Transvaal during the dry season due to a concerted rise on toxic tannin levels in acacia leaves, which the kudu normally eat without harm. Discovering that the acacia trees all produced inordinately high levels of tannin, enough to inactivate the liver enzymes of kudu, killing them within a couple of weeks, when the populations of kudu became unnaturally dense—mainly to please tourists and game hunters—and then returned to normal after the kudu stopped grazing, Van Hoven concluded that the trees were communicating with one another and temporarily stepping up tannin production in order to reduce the antelope numbers.3 The persistence and increasing fascination with this one incident in South Africa suggest there is a willingness and even desire to believe that trees are intelligent. One can see this as a frustration with the loneliness and emptiness of believing that we are the only intelligent creatures on the planet and a readiness (among some people at least) to enter into a more balanced relationship with nonhuman life on the planet. Jane Bennet has recently written about “vital materialism,” which is “the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it” and the importance of our need to cultivate this faculty (Vibrant Matter 14). We might consider this as yet another form of being haunted: this time, by our premodern and animistic past. Perhaps seeing other living beings as important and valid, their existence as ontologically and epistemologically significant as ours, is a habit from an earlier time, a lost but familiar mode of thinking and perceiving, and one that has been reawakened as we plunder the underground tombs of the prehistoric era, stealing the fossilized bones of our collective ancestors to fuel our cars and industries. Much research has emerged in recent years to confirm the proposition that plants and trees are far more capable, aware, and active than previously thought, and the kudu story is no longer the only evidence of this phenomenon. Francis Hallé, a world expert on trees, has claimed that trees can even learn and remember. Originally a skeptic, Hallé has now become the best-known French defender of plant communication and resourcefulness, not shying away from the word “intelligence,” which remains controversial in scientific circles (Lebrecque). In the English-­ speaking world, the single most important and influential book in recent years was Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015; originally in German), which represented a

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veritable paradigm shift in thinking about trees. Not only do they communicate, according to Wohlleben, often through vast underground networks of fungi and roots, but they also feel pain when cut, they make group decisions about things like acorn production, they care for their kin, they altruistically channel nutrients to ill or weak members of the community, and much more. In short, trees are sophisticated and highly social organisms. The impact of Wohlleben’s work can be felt in the difference between The Happening and The End, and in the shift from mystery to science that occurs between the first story and the second. The Happening is more like a traditional horror film. Shyamalan cites Hitchcock’s The Birds as an inspiration and specifically the fact that we never know what causes the birds to turn on people. The “happening”—as it is called in the film— remains mysterious even as it threatens to recur around the world as the film ends. Science is acknowledged but given a marginalized role in the film. Elliot, the protagonist, is a high school science teacher who discusses the collapse of the bee population with his class like an entomological whodunit. He dismisses the theory of pollution and global warming and settles on the non-explanation of the witless jock: “an act of nature and we’ll never fully understand it.” This gesture toward the unknowable, the ineffable, the scientific sublime is what Elliot finally accepts, saying “Nice answer, Jake. He’s right. Science will come up with some reason to put in the books but, in the end, it will be just a theory. I mean we will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding. To be a good scientist you must have a respectful awe for the laws of nature.” Here we see Shyamalan’s attraction to religion as a gateway for understanding the natural world at work. The invocation of mystery and “awe” tacitly evoke a supernatural paradigm, even if Elliot is discussing science. Before Wohlleben’s influential study, it made sense to frame plant intelligence in terms of mysterious and possibly mystical forces, the unknown— literally a form of haunting. Plant intelligence certainly once seemed as no less far-fetched a notion than spirits. Now, however, it is conceivable to speak of trees communicating, learning, remembering, and behaving in recognizably sentient ways without invoking mysterious forces. Accordingly, The End not only focuses its plot on researchers and scientists (and not just teachers), but it is extremely well versed in the recent discoveries about plants. Clearly familiar with Wohlleben’s work, Zep uses the German forester’s term the “wood wide web” in the dialogues among characters (The End 19). He also has the scientist based on Hallé explicitly

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recount the kudu-acacia story to Théodore as an example of tree communication (12). Between the two of them, Théodore and Frawley discover the truth of the secret codex and the trees’ plan for humanity. The trees themselves are portrayed like scientists, keeping data in genetic archives, testing substances in small controlled experiments, and finally executing a plan, the purpose of which is not so much to harm humans out of some malevolent or aggressive urge as to maintain the health of the biosphere. Whether leaning more toward mystery or more toward science, both texts push the ecogothic formula far into a new direction. Clearly aware of recent research developments, both stories attempt to imagine new ways of depicting the biosphere and especially trees as vital, active, and conscious beings. Imagining plants as “conscious” or “active” is so alien to most of our current paradigms, in which vegetation is little more than inert biomatter, that any attempt to do so might appear uncanny and frightening. Something conceived of as inert will appear unnaturally possessed by volition and sentient if it begins to appear active, that is, it will appear haunted. This is especially present in The Happening, where the events and the agents causing them (the plants and trees) are allowed to remain essentially strange, unknowable and Other. The only thing the film makes clear is that the “happening” is deliberate and purposeful. It is not a mere chemical reaction to human presence. The main “happening” in the plot, which takes place over roughly 24 hours, is synchronized in several cities across the Northeastern states of the USA, and it seems to be intended as a warning. As such, it is ignored, and at the end of the film, people have resumed their previous lives and the protagonists are planning to have a baby. A scientist speaking on television explains that “we have become a threat to the planet” and that more happenings will occur but the protagonists are not listening. Yet his words are corroborated in the last scene, where we see the same events happening in Paris. In this way, the film ends on an ominous note, itself performing the work of warning while suggesting that humans are not the only beings with agency and power on the planet.

Apocalyptic Endings and Haunted Humans Both stories, The Happening and The End, are decidedly apocalyptic. In the former, this is more subtle, as we only see people dying in a specific area of the USA (though more such events seem to be in store for humanity at the end). In The End, mass death also comes first as a local event, in

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Spain, then only later as a global one. In common parlance, an apocalypse is a destructive cataclysm, implying the end of the world. The word etymologically comes from the Greek and signifies an unveiling or revelation and is commonly associated with the New Testament, the Book of Revelations, which prophesies that God will destroy the corrupted world and raise up a new kingdom of the righteous. Although this narrative is central to Christianity, the idea of the end of the world followed by a new beginning actually dates back to the teachings of Zarathustra and occurs also in Sanskrit scriptures depicting cycles of global destruction followed by renewal (Cohn, 77–104). But the teleological model which imagines a single timeline with a catastrophe followed by an earthly paradise is uniquely Christian and has permeated Western culture for centuries. Apocalyptic thinking has been particularly popular in American culture, with the nineteenth century seeing a surge in apocalyptic movements and discourse, a phenomenon which was both religious and scientific (influenced, for instance, by the discovery of deep time). The first apocalyptic novels in English appeared at this time, including Mary Shelly’s The Last Man (1826), which imagined the population of the world killed by a pandemic. In the twentieth century, both world wars had their apocalyptic dimensions and certainly the invention of the atomic bomb awakened anxious fantasies of mass destruction (as well as the hope of survival for a lucky few). Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which can be regarded as having launched the environmental movement, portrayed an apocalyptic landscape silenced by pesticide which has killed off all the insects and birds. Since then, apocalypse has been a key trope in the rhetoric and discourse of ecologists trying to bring attention to the destruction of the natural world. As Lawrence Buell puts it, “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (285). He wrote those words in 1995, and since then the apocalypse trope has been the subject of intense debate. Many scholars have come to doubt its efficacy, and even to wonder if it may be “counter-productive” as a rhetorical strategy for the environmental movement (Adams 189). While tales of disaster and death may have initially grabbed attention and spurred discussion, the long-term effects of apocalyptic rhetoric seem to include psychic numbing, banalization, and a feeling of helplessness. These are all impediments to climate action, as discussed by Scott Slovic in Numbers and Nerves, his examination of the psychological obstacles to taking global warming seriously. In short, as

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Doug Henwood writes in his introduction to Catastrophism, appeals to catastrophe and apocalyptic doom “can be paralyzing, not mobilizing” (Henwood x). Bruno Latour has a more subtle but equally devastating critique of apocalyptic thinking, also blaming it for our collective failure to act on climate change. His critique is less about apocalyptic rhetoric and more about the way the Christian apocalypse meme permeates modern culture more generally. To ruthlessly simplify his complex and multipronged argument, Latour observes that being “modern” is experientially lived by Westerners as a condition of living in a post-apocalyptic era. The premodern is the world that has been destroyed and so, according to Latour, so-­ called modern people feel they are already living in the post-apocalyptic kingdom of the righteous. He links this up to the modern assumption that humans are not part of the natural world around them but qualitatively different from and superior to all the life and matter that surrounds them. In this supposedly “modern” view, people see themselves as fundamentally separate from Nature. Latour’s argument in Facing Gaia links apocalyptic thinking to the destructive modern worldview in which Nature is treated with contempt and/or as a limitless resource to extract and concludes that it makes people utterly unable to take the earth seriously as something vital, alive, and important. As an alternative to this paradigm, he hails the work of James Lovelock on Gaia but flags the error of taking Gaia as superorganism or divine being, a version of Mother Nature, as some of Lovelock’s readers have done (Latour 280). The problem that this mistake produces is that it makes humans into either rebellious children that need to be punished, or good children, or respectful gardeners. In none of these roles can we respond appropriately and maturely, recognizing that we and the earth are fundamentally the same: “both parties share the same fragility, the same cruelty, the same uncertainty about their fate” (Latour 281). Neither apocalyptic scenarios nor “Mother Nature” as concepts allow for the serious work of rethinking our society—both politically and scientifically— and for changing our economy and culture to stop the destruction that has already started. Although Latour is critical about the paralyzing role apocalypse has had in our overall relation to the world and in our modern “cosmology,” he is not opposed to apocalyptic rhetoric in ecological discourse. He believes that seeing Gaia as a threat may be an effective way to “make us conscious, tragically conscious of the New Climate Regime,” by which he means the

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current state of danger in which we find ourselves (Latour244). Unfortunately, I believe, Latour underestimates the power of corporate media to transform everything into spectacle and entertainment, draining it of any significant critical impact. The Hollywood blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) exemplifies how the trope of the ecological apocalypse is used and misused as a warning strategy. The film imagines the earth reaching a tipping point from global warming and its planetary thermostat being thrown off kilter, triggering several massive superstorms in the northern hemisphere which kill millions with subfreezing temperatures. Although the premise is hyperbolic, it is nevertheless plausible enough to be effective as an ecological cautionary tale, and it was initially credited with significantly raising public awareness (Reusswig and Leiserowitz 43). Nevertheless, the film squanders this opportunity by focusing almost entirely on rescuing not the earth, but the masculinity of its two white male protagonists, a father and a son. The plot devolves into the father heroically saving his son who is trapped in New York, while the son heroically saves a handful of people. The end of the film shows the family reunited, the separated mother and father probably reconciled, the US military helping to rescue survivors, the chastened remainder of the political class ready to rebuild, and astronauts in space marveling at how clear the sky on earth looks. In other words, the slate has been wiped clean, the earth’s population drastically reduced, and the white nuclear family, the US government, and its military are ready to start over on a beautifully purified planet. This may not be what the producers had in mind, but the fact that the film concludes with what seems like a happy ending is jarring and profoundly trivializing, considering the tragic loss of life that has occurred in the film. The logic here is also that of a radical culling of the human population rather than a significant change in our behavior and culture (Fig. 8.3). The endings of The Happening and The End are also problematic and, as I have been arguing, haunted by an inability to let go of old habits of thought, old racial and gender assumptions while portraying mass death as inevitable. The Happening is more self-aware and explicitly critical of the post-apocalypse renewal fantasy, but also utterly pessimistic and unable to imagine any alternative future or change. In the final scenes, everything seems back to normal, even better than before (slyly alluding to the promise of a post-apocalyptic paradise so common to the trope). The hero has saved his family and his marriage, and he’s about to be the father of two children. Yet, the very last scene suggests that more death is in store, as

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Fig. 8.3  The Day After Tomorrow ends with a clear new day, as the US military rescues survivors, and the protagonists are reunited for a post-apocalyptic “happy ending.” (Screenshot by author)

“the happening” begins again, this time in France. The final shot is of the darkening sky, and the credits roll over an accelerated image of a storm cloud roiling agitatedly. The threat is both clear and ambiguous. Clearly, humans are toxic and “nature” is acting to remove them, but there is no clue about how humans could stop being a threat in order to avoid being exterminated.4 The End also has a white male hero, and he is the only survivor of the initial cast of characters, but the ending is troubling in an entirely different way. It is troubling because it is made so attractive. Unlike the gruesome suicides of The Happening, the deaths in The End are quick, painless, and simultaneous all over the planet. As soon as Théodore realizes that everyone around him is dead, he goes into an internet café and sees webcams from around the world, showing capitals littered with bodies, a conceit that has become popular in recent years.5 Then the electricity fails and he is in the dark, represented by two pages of black with only a couple thought bubbles. Several more pages are devoted to his journey southward, to warmth, through ruined cities and landscapes where animals roam free in a kind of post-apocalyptic pastoral. Moving south through Germany and Switzerland to Italy, the protagonist arrives in a village of people who have survived and converged there from all over Europe. Théodore concludes that the Earth has given them “a second chance, to start over, humbly” (89).6 The final scenes are unmistakably Edenic. Like Théodore, all the survivors seem serene, stoic, and even grateful for this second chance.

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The first problem with this scenario is the characters’ sanguine acceptance of a global holocaust, which is part of a larger tendency in contemporary culture to feel resigned to or even welcome an apocalyptic scenario as a chance to start over. I can only imagine that most people instinctively hope or assume that they would be among the handful of survivors and not among the mass of people to die. Perhaps it is a preference for the simple drama of destruction and rebirth over the hard and tedious work of gradual political, economic, and cultural change. Whatever the reason, the apocalypse trope is too often not recognized for the horror that it is. The dream of wiping the slate clean, of purification by fire or flood, is a dangerous fantasy, and environmentalists should not succumb to its murderous seductions. The death of millions of people is a nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs, not the easy answer to environmental crisis. Secondly, the scenarios depicted in both stories do not equalize the relationship between humans and trees so much as reverse it. Perhaps human beings have used and abused their own power so ruthlessly that we fear that we will be treated as we have treated the natural world and destroyed on a mass scale. In any case, the final move of both of these texts is not to restore a balance but to swing the pendulum far the other way: instead of masters of the planet, we are the victims of a global holocaust. The earth is shown to be like an all-powerful parent or god, to which only an attitude of trusting and passive reverence is appropriate. Neither narrative imagines any kind of co-existence or evolution in our current behavior and culture. This seems to be the one unimaginable scenario: that we change our ways. One final way in which we are haunted by our cultural past involves the gender and racial unconscious of these fantasies of post-apocalyptic renewal. I have already discussed the conservative gender dynamics of The Happening, with the white nuclear family strengthened by their ordeal. Admittedly they adopt a Latinx child, but a white baby is also on the way. The gender politics of The End are even more troubling. The new Eden seems to have the old gender roles: the persons setting the table and caring for children are mainly women, the children playing soccer are all boys. The main protagonist arrives with a partner, she is a child. Far from being an innocent character choice, children are often preferred over adult women by the survivalist imagination. Adult females being rarely of any interest except as mothers and homemakers, girl children often stand in their place as more desirable partners: they are presented as more pliable and non-threatening than adult women. The alternative partner, the

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young scientist Moon, was corrupted by sexual unreliability and prior possession by another man, both of which are qualities that traditionally make women and their sexuality threatening to men. In contrast, Ute is pure, untouched, a child but on the threshold of puberty. Théodore does not adopt her as a father but as a friend, so it is easy to imagine this relationship eventually becoming romantic. Even more disturbing is The End’s racial unconscious. At a moment when the far right is gaining momentum across the globe and white nationalists have rigged the internet to lure young men into their fold, Zep’s ending looks like an alt-right fantasy. The main character is Swedish, his probable future mate (Ute) is German, and the rest of humanity that has survived (with the exception of one token French-speaking Black man) is entirely white. There is no indication that anyone on any other continent was spared. The survivalist fantasy of The End seems to be northern European people living in a southern European climate and culture. In a charitable reading, one could hope that Zep imagined more such villages scattered across the globe, but the narrative does not explicitly allude to any (or require any for its vision of Eden to be more complete). The very last scene has Théodore and Ute hiking in a nearby forest, the village in the background. Despite knowing better than anyone how the world’s human population was exterminated by trees, Théodore seems to affectionately pat a tree as he walks past it. The scene mirrors the opening panels where the two hikers in the Spanish Pyrenees are killed along with a nearby village. The village at the end seems to replace this earlier sacrifice zone, as the two Northern Europeans replace the two Spanish characters. If the explicit message of the narrative is to decenter humans and give trees and other living beings more importance, the subtext of the narrative keeps white men and white children firmly at the center while relegating everyone else to the margins or even off the map entirely.7 To conclude, as much as we are going to be haunting nature far into the future with our present practices, we are ourselves haunted far more than we realize by tenacious habits and tropes from our cultural past. Specifically, we are under the spell of the Biblical, Zoroastrian, or even arguably fascist, fantasy of purification, and regeneration by mass destruction. We seem to be in thrall to the narrative of paradise following upon apocalypse, waiting for our rightful punishment or for some population fix engineered by the planet. It is much harder to imagine actually changing things. As Greg Garrard points out in his volume Ecocriticism: “it could be argued that the real moral and political challenge of ecology may lie in

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accepting that the world is not about to end, that human beings are likely to survive even if Western-style civilisation does not” (107). A first step in this direction would be rethinking our relationship to other living beings on this planet. Traditionally, when animals and plants have been attributed intelligence and agency, they have been assumed to be malevolent, cunning, and vengeful. The two stories that I have examined in this chapter teeter on the edge between this familiar ecogothic paradigm and an emergent vision of a more balanced cohabitation. For now, our imagination tends to overcompensate and to swing to the other end of the spectrum, where we are the species dispassionately managed and destroyed. This is perhaps our guilty conscience haunting us. Nevertheless, both texts represent valuable attempts to reimagine our relationship to the living world around us, especially to the plants and trees that research is discovering are much more intelligent and active than we have been taught to believe. Maybe they can teach us how to act more intelligently ourselves.

Notes 1. Zep is the creator of the most popular French-language comic book franchise in the world, “Titeuf.” The “Titeuf” franchise includes 15 albums, has been translated into 23 languages, and has sold over 20 million copies. 2. My translation of “reprendre notre place, qui n’est pas la place centrale […] l’homme n’est pas maître de la terre … on est une des espèces présentes sur terre.” 3. One thing that often gets left out of the story is that the kudu would probably have avoided the acerbic tasting high-tannin leaves if they could, but couldn’t avoid them because of drought, overpopulation, fencing, and lack of other food. Hence one could argue that the trees did not necessarily intend to kill the kudu, just not be eaten so much. Nevertheless, even this reactivity to environmental circumstances is already clearly a sign of something that can easily be called “intelligence,” insofar as it involves manipulating conditions outside and around the organism. 4. In this reading of the ending, I disagree sharply with Joseph J. Foy’s optimistic argument that the film allows us “to draw conclusions about how to transform modern modes of living” (It Came From Planet Earth 181). 5. 28 Days Later, World War Z, and many other films come to mind. 6. My translation of “tout était à recommencer … humblement.” 7. The racial unconscious of ecogothic stories has been examined by several other scholars, including Sladja Blazan, Dawn Keetley, and Johan Höglund in this volume. See, also, Mabel Gergan, Sara Smith, and Pavithra Vasudevan’s “Earth beyond repair: race and apocalypse in collective imagination.”

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Works Cited Adams, Matthew. Ecological Crisis, Sustainability and the Psychosocial Subject: Beyond Behaviour Change. Palgrave, 2016. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Harvard University Press, 1995. Cohn, Norman. Chaos, Cosmos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. Yale University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge, 2006. Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 16 no. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 203–225. Estok, Simon C. “Theorizing the EcoGothic.” Gothic Nature, no.1, 14 Sept. 2019, pp. 34–53. Foy, Joseph J. “It Came From Planet Earth: Eco-Horror and the Politics of Environmentalism in The Happening.” Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent Through American Popular Culture, edited by Timothy M. Dale and Joseph J. Foy, The University Press of Kentucky, 2010, pp. 167–188. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New Critical Idiom Series, Routledge, 2004. ———. “Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.” SubStance 127, vol. 41, no. 1, 2012, pp. 40–60. Gergan, Mabel, Sara Smith and Pavithra Vasudevan’s “Earth beyond repair: race and apocalypse in collective imagination.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Sage Publications, 2018, pp. 1–20, https://www.academia. edu/35924022/Earth_beyond_repair_Race_and_apocalypse_in_collective_ imagination?email_work_card=view-­paper. Accessed 24 September 2020. Gilmore, Timothy. “After the Apocalypse: Wildness as Preservative in a Time of Ecological Crisis.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 24, n. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 389–413. The Happening. Dir. M. Night Shyamalan. 20th Century Fox, 2008. Henwood, Doug. Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, PM Press, 2012. Hillard, T.J. “‘Deep into That Darkness Peering’: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 16, no. 4, 2019, pp. 685–95. Hoven, Wouter van. “Trees’ secret warning system against browsers.” Custos, vol. 13, no. 5, 1984, pp. 11‐16. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climactic Regime. Polity Press, 2017.

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Lebrecque, Annie. “Francis Hallé et l’intelligence des plantes.” Quebec Science, June 21, 2018, https://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/sciences/francis-­halle-­et-­l-­ intelligence-­des-­plantes/. Accessed 7 September 2020. Livni, Ephrat. “A debate over plant consciousness is forcing us to confront the limitations of the human mind.” Quartz, June 3, 2018, https://qz. com/1294941/a-­debate-­over-­plant-­consciousness-­is-­forcing-­us-­to-­confront-­ the-­limitations-­of-­the-­human-­mind. Accessed 12 September 2020. Lovelock, James. Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine. Oxford University Press, 1991. Murray, Robin L. and Joseph Heumann. Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Keetley, D. & Sivils, M.  W. “Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic.” Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Dawn Keetley and M.W. Sivils, Routledge, 2018, pp. 1–20. Keetley, Dawn. “Six Theses on Plant; Or, Why are Plants Horrifying?” Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. McKenna, Terence. Archaic Revival. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Newsweek Staff. “Director Shyamalan on ‘The Happening.’” Newsweek, June 12, 2008, https://www.newsweek.com/director-­shyamalan-­happening-­90485. Accessed 5 September 2020. Piro, Patrick. “Francis Hallé: ‘J’ai longtemps denié l’intelligence aux plantes.’” Politis 25 July 2018, https://www.politis.fr/articles/2018/07/francis-­halle-­ jai-­longtemps-­denie-­lintelligence-­aux-­plantes-­39209/. Accessed 22 November 2020. Reusswig, Fritz, and Anthony Leiserowitz. “The International Impact of The Day After Tomorrow.” Environment, Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, vol. 47, no. 3, 2005, pp. 41–44. Slovic, Scott, and Paul Slovic, eds. Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion and Meaning in a World of Data. Oregon State University, 2015. The Day After Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Centropolis Entertainment, 2004. Williams, Jericho. “An Inscrutable Malice: The Silencing of Humanity in The Ruins and The Happening.” Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 227–271. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. Translated by Jane Billinghurst, Greystoke Books, 2016. Yam, Philip. “Acacia trees kill antelope in the Transvaal.” Scientific American, Dec. 1990, p. 28. Zep. The End. Paris: Rue de Sèvres, 2018. Zep. Interview on French language television program La Grande Librairie. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=dziQBFmmBWQ. Accessed Sept. 24, 2020.

CHAPTER 9

The Global Poltergeist: COVID-19 Hauntings Simon C. Estok

Entering the third decade of the twenty-first century, we have been soundly reminded of how very haunted humanity remains by agencies that are well beyond our control—reminded perhaps like never before of just how much a mistake it is to ignore the impacts of other-than-human materialities and their agencies on our daily lives. Little things—the genes driving pathogens, for instance—don’t go away. They evolve. Then they haunt us at every turn, and they flip everything upside down and shake it, like a global poltergeist. Environmental issues and climate change realities, which had begun to receive long-overdue mass media attention until 2020, suddenly became low on the list of priorities in the public imagination, with the staggering material realities of the COVID-19 pandemic trumping virtually everything else in our day-to-day lives. The agency of a single gene sequence would bring the airline industry to its knees, cost the world trillions of dollars in losses, infect and kill millions of people, and produce untold numbers of unknown effects—and yet somehow, we seem to have collectively forgotten that pandemics are environmental events.

S. C. Estok (*) Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_9

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Indeed, it is critical at this juncture to remember that COVID-19, like the Black Death before it, is an environmental event—one made possible in part by our changing culinary habits and the increasing global reliance on animals for resources, companionship, food, and so on. It is as though the world has become haunted by the animals people have exploited, and we do well to keep in mind that animals used for food are the core origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as they were for the swine flu and the avian flu (and their lethal subtypes). These ghosts that are riding the winds of the Anthropocene1 are genetic, and although theorizing about these matters involves navigating very heavy seas and swells and surges, we need to do it—now. But pandemic hauntings are multiple and layered, and while I don’t want to play fast and loose with the whole idea of hauntings, it is critical to understand that COVID-19 brings back many issues that perhaps we have long thought dead and buried, some of which pandemic discourse itself dangerously sidelines. One of the telling relative omissions both from fictional and actual accounts of plagues and pandemics is the centrality of animals to both the pathogenic origins and the propagation of disease. In giving only cursory attention to the animals from which the disease originates (whether rats in Albert Camus’ The Plague or bats in COVID-19), these narratives fundamentally fail to address the human/animal entanglements that have been, are, and always will be a central aspect of our existence. This is comparable to treating with a band-aid a sore caused by some deep problem, such as sepsis or cancer. Nicole Shukin worries about failures to recognize these entanglements and states that “abandonment of the hope of a mutually benefitting material coexistence with other species is possibly the most terrifying prospect of all” (220). A failure to recognize the ongoing material intercourse between human and nonhuman animals, the movement of material in and through bodies that Stacy Alaimo has called “trancorporeality,” tacitly reaffirms the exceptionality of the human,2 casting the nonhuman into a negligible space. Such a reaffirmation virtually guarantees a skewed understanding of human/nonhuman animal relations in which the nonhuman becomes the antagonist, the demonized agent of harm to the human. In Shukin’s words, while biomobility is suggestive of a radical ontological breakdown of species distinctions and distance under present conditions of global capitalism, it also brings into view new discourses and technologies seeking to secure human health through the segregation of human and animal life and finding

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in the specter of pandemic a universal rationale for institutionalizing speciesism on a hitherto unprecedented scale. (183–4)

Ignoring or downplaying human/nonhuman entanglements and transfers of genetic materials among species3 has complex causes and implications. Not recognizing zoonotic origins of disease means ignoring human/ nonhuman entanglements, ignoring the “liberal longing for interspecies intimacy [that] circulates concurrently[,] … longing for posthuman kinship” (Shukin 188, emphasis in original); but it can also result, as Shukin has noted, in extraordinary speciesism and ecophobia.4 Keith Thomas once famously commented that “it is impossible to disentangle what people of the past thought about plants and animals from what they thought about themselves” (16). These entanglements have been hierarchical in Western thinking.5 Indeed, it is ironic that while “Western society has fostered a culture of caring for animals … it has maintained humanity’s right to kill and eat them” (Stuart xvii). This paradox comes with the authority of an imagined divinity that gives men dominion over animals and women.6 Understood as a god-given right, however, the use of animals for labor, clothing, and food clearly goes against the commandment (from the same god) not to cause suffering to animals: Tza’ar ba’alei Chayim (‫)חיים בעלי צער‬, which literally refers to not causing “suffering to the owners of life”—the Talmudic tradition generally understands “owners of life” (ba’alei, ‫ )חיים בעלי‬to refer to animals. Notwithstanding our long contradictory behaviors with animals within Judeo-Christian thinking, human and nonhuman lives have been, are, and always will be interwoven, and history will repeat and haunt humanity until we learn its lessons. History is clear on the matter of zoonosis. Jared Diamond succinctly explains that “questions of the animal origins of human disease lie behind the broadest pattern of human history, and behind some of the most important issues in human health today” (197). For Diamond, disease is one of the prime movers of human society, along with war and industrialization—with which disease is intimately linked. Diamond is careful to stress that “the major killers of humanity throughout our recent history— smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera—are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals” (196–7). He goes on to explain: Naturally, we’re predisposed to think about diseases just from our own point of view: what can we do to save ourselves and to kill the microbes? Let’s

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stamp out the scoundrels, and never mind what their motives are! In life in general, though, one has to understand the enemy in order to beat him, and that’s especially true in medicine. (197–8)

There are several issues that require comment here. Firstly, microbes obviously don’t have motives in an emotional or psychological sense, but we should make no mistake about it that they are genetically motivated to reproduce—an idea that we find very troubling, in large part because it threatens our sense of individuality. But Richard Dawkins explains: Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. (44)

The genes that run the microbes, then, do have motives that really haunt humanity. The other issue that arises from Diamond’s remarks is the whole question of antagonism embedded in his comments about understanding and beating the enemy. There are some very unsavory implications here. One of these has to do with violent metaphors of control. Another has to do with violent actions of control. Both require attention. Pandemics and plagues defy control or predictability, and it is this that makes them so frightening and urgent.7 Isomorphically similar to terror attacks and, indeed, to climate change, pandemics corner us and throw down the gauntlet  in our imaginations, and this evokes fiery responses laced with military metaphors that drip machismo. Shukin discusses the “chilling resonances between a discourse of pandemic preparedness and the imperial rhetoric and machinery of the war against terrorism” (219): she presciently observes that “pandemic discourse prepares us, in other words, for a new imperial war against nature” (219). But the similarities don’t stop there. Indeed, war and disease both have been with humanity for time immemorial, and yet they continue to surprise us. This is one of the key themes of Camus’ The Plague. Despite our long history with pandemics and plagues, as with wars and social unrest, we are never really prepared for them when they come: “Pestilence is in fact very common, but we find it hard to believe in a pestilence when it descends upon us.

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There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared” (Camus 30). Pandemics, like war, moreover, offer an opportunity to imagine a demonized enemy, an opportunity we invariably seize. Demonizing people is often racist8 and demonizing the environment, ecophobic. Pandemics encourage ecophobia. The other implication from Diamond’s remarks about beating the enemy are less metaphorical. We have all heard about the wholesale slaughter of chickens and pigs and cows, euphemistically described as “culling.” The ethical indifference here to the lives of animals is disturbing and destructive in the long term. Perhaps equally dangerous is the compulsive sanitizing that attends pandemics such as COVID-19. When I wrote in 2019, for instance, I wrote about “compulsive hand sanitizing” (2) and about how it is a part of what Michael Pollan calls “germophobia” (297), also known as “microbiophobia,” “mysophobia,” “verminophobia,” “bacillophobia,” and “bacteriophobia”—all clearly falling under the rubric of ecophobia. While clearly necessary during a time such as COVID-19, obsessive hand sanitizing may, however, as I suggested, be harmful in the long run in that it kills organisms beneficial to our survival (including intestinal flora vital for digestion and microorganisms that regulate our immune system and reduce inflammation). While this is not to suggest on any level that we should discontinue hand sanitizing and good hygiene, it would be good to remember that we need microbes to live, many of the very microbes we are killing with our hand sanitizing. Post COVID-19 life will require us to revisit nature-denying behaviors that right now are helping us. One of the lessons COVID-19 is teaching us is that what is ecophobia in one time and place is survival in another. Part of what guarantees fear during a pandemic is the perception of danger in the agency of genomic material. Columbia University Assistant Professor of Medicine Siddhartha Mukherjee writes that “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science [is] the ‘gene,’ the fundamental unit of heredity, and the basic unit of all biological information” (9). He identifies two other dangerous ideas: the atom and the byte, arguing that “each represents the irreducible unit—the building block, the basic organizational unit of a larger whole: the atom, of matter; the byte (or bit), of digitized information; the gene, of heredity and biological information” (9–10). He goes on to state what we know cerebrally but not viscerally—namely, that “it is impossible to understand organismal and  cellular bjiology or jevolution—or human pathology, behavior,

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temperament, illness, race, and identity or fate—without first reckoning with the concept of the gene” (11). This of course begs the question of agency outside of genes: do we have any free will? Famed entomologist E.O. Wilson speaks directly to the question about relationships between genes and agency: […] genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function. (167)

Haruki Murakami puts it more forcefully in his epic novel 1Q84: Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers—passageways—for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we’re happy or unhappy. We’re just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them. (269)

Dawkins rhymes in more succinctly: “they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines” (25). However we word it, the thought is terrifying: our sense of agency is overblown. This is perhaps the single, most important insight of New Materialist thinking, and it has profound implications for how we think about materials and how they matter. The development of interest in the gene9 over the past hundred years is very encouraging because it may very well help to dislodge us from our destructive sense of exceptionalism, call into question our hubris in our agency, and overcome biases against less sophisticated organisms—including things that haunt us and cause deadly pandemics. One of the matters that is critical here is precisely about how bias against less complicated organisms is dangerous. To what degree do cultural matters such as class and hierarchical thinking prevent us from addressing the agency of pathogens (at least until a pandemic begins) with the same vim and vigor that we address perceived threats to national security?10 One of the ways to come at this problem is to recognize that there are common misconceptions about evolution and how it works, a point that Norwegian

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Professor of Molecular Biology Andreas Hejnol has made well. Hejnol argues that misconceptions that evolution proceeds from simple to complex and that less complex animal groups are eventually superseded remain not only in textbooks but also among zoologists. They deserve our attention because they matter: they shape our thinking about the biology of life and have consequences for what we find important to investigate. (G97)

The top/bottom metaphors (humans are at the top of the tree or ladder while bacteria and viruses are at the very bottom), Hejnol shows, “have proved particularly discouraging” to some forms of investigation (G100). More than this, however, such metaphors predispose us to underestimating pathogens, and given that one of the metaphors for comprehending human/pathogen relations is a military one (we are in a war against them), such a predisposition is particularly dangerous. No one would underestimate the deadly potentials of a hammer in the hands of a psychopathic serial killer, even though hammers are among the most ancient of human tools. A hammer is no magnetic flux generator that fires projectiles without any kind of chemical explosive, but it can kill—and dead is dead.11 We are incredibly sophisticated organisms and imagine, therefore, that we are above the far less sophisticated pathogens that threaten us and haunt our existence. We will win the war because we are better—or so the thinking goes. The reality, however, is that our survival has never been guaranteed. Because of our misconceptions about evolution and our sense of our own exceptionalism, we willingly forget our vulnerabilities when each pandemic or plague passes, and we think we have won. We do well to heed the ominous warning Camus offers: “the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely” (237). The similarities between what Camus describes and what the world lived through in 2020 are haunting. Reading The Plague during the COVID-19 pandemic is an amazing experience. If one didn’t know better, one would say that it was written in the summer of 2020. Much that occurred in the world in 2020, especially those things that are related with the COVID-19 pandemic, have been described again and again in news media as “unprecedented” and “unimaginable,” and while some of the effects certainly are difficult to imagine and others indeed unprecedented, such descriptions are misleading and seem to reflect an ignorance of history. Pandemics are hardly unique to our time. They have always been a

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part of our history. Fareed Zakaria puts it perhaps most eloquently: “We should have seen it coming. The coronavirus may be novel but plagues are not” (4). Take, for example, the following quotation: “In the spring, indeed, they expected the illness to end at any time, so no one bothered to seek any information about the duration of the epidemic because they had all convinced themselves that it would have none.” This is a line from an October 2020 New York Times article describing opinions broadly held in Mr. Trump’s administration and among his supporters. Or is it? In fact, it is not. It is from Camus (page 171, to be exact). We hear in Camus that “This plague was the ruination of tourism” (89), and we know that it is the hospitality and airline industries that have taken the biggest hit in COVID-19. Today, millions of jobs have been lost due to COVID-19; in Camus, the plague “disrupted the whole of economic life and so created quite a large number of unemployed” (136). We hear in The Plague similar debates about individuality and freedom that we are currently having to endure: “there was no longer any individual destinies, but a collective history that was the plague” (129). We see outright stupidity with “anti-­ maskers” today, and in Camus, we hear that “[s]tupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves” (30). Today, it is COVID-19 fatigue; in Camus, “the members of the health teams could no longer overcome their tiredness” (147); “the doctors and their assistants, who were undertaking exhausting tasks … had to continue this superhuman work in a regular manner” (182). Today, families are unable to visit loved ones in hospitals or attend the funerals of those who have died; in Camus, when someone dies, “of course, the family was informed, but in most cases its members could not attend, since they were in quarantine if they had been living with the sick person” (133). We see similar issues of solidarity and division and seem not to have learned from the past. For instance, Camus offers the notion that “the only way to bring people together is to send them the plague” (152). This is understandable on two levels: (1) people should come together in times of crisis, and (2) “because of the efficient impartiality which it brought to its administrations, the plague should have worked for greater equality among our fellow-citizens” (183). The reality in the novel is that “in fact it heightened the feeling of injustice in the hearts of men” (183), a sentiment that many Americans perhaps felt when Donald Trump received the best medical attention in the world for COVID-19 at the very time that so many of his fellow Americans were dying without receiving any medical attention at all. Shukin also notes that “[d]espite its persuasive

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effect of smoothing over material differences and leveling all humans within a shared state of vulnerability, pandemic speculation works … to reinscribe racial difference in the global village” (207). Indeed, it is not only the pathogens, therefore, that haunt us; it is history itself. Our refusal to reckon with pathogens as permanent co-inhabitants in the world is in part a result of our utilitarian ethics, our understanding of the rest of the world not as partners but as commodities for our use. And it is a worldview that has led to a spiralling out of control. One of the implications of global corporate capitalism is that biomobility has all sorts of possibilities unique to our point in history. Shukin explains that “[b]ecause globalization unwittingly supplies the conditions for disease to travel rapidly and because a future pandemic will by all accounts be zoonotic (animal) in origin, the species line emerges as a prominent material stress line in neoliberal culture” (184). Written in 2009, those words today are haunting. Shukin also explains that “pandemic discourse speculates in the coming of an event that threatens to precipitate the collapse of the global economy and a hard reckoning with materiality” (185) and that “interspecies exchanges that were once local or ‘place-specific’ are experienced as global in their potential effects” (183). We are currently making those hard reckonings and finding that the global effects of COVID-19 are simply too big to conceptualize. As pandemics and disease have haunted our steps, so too have the representational problems that they offer—solutions to which may, in fact, make things worse. To see the effects of the scale of responses to COVID-19—the empty airports and hazmat flight attendants, the empty playgrounds and eerie schoolyards, the bankruptcies, and the proximity of social turbulence and chaos—is soul-numbing and staggering. What is problematical (with COVID-19, with climate change, with the trajectory of our effects on the natural world) is the sheer scale of things. Scholars have sought to address scalar issues in a variety of ways: Timothy Morton with “hyperobjects,” Rob Nixon with “Slow Violence,” Dipesh Chakrabarty with “species history,” Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer with the notion of the “Anthropocene,” and others. We are, perhaps, experiencing a mere fraction of what is to come: cli-fi imagines more of it.12 The sheer size of our problems present conceptual and narrative problems,13 which may be the reason that so much of cli-fi and apocalyptic literature—including the grossly swollen filmic archive of pandemics and plagues—is science fiction. It seems that we have come a long way since Alvin Toffler complained about the low status of science fiction among the various branches of

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literature.14 Indeed, science fiction seems to have become the crown jewel of literary endeavors. Lisa Yaszek explains that literary and cultural historians describe science fiction … as the premiere narrative form of modernity because authors working in this genre extrapolate from Enlightenment ideals and industrial practices to imagine how educated people using machines and other technologies might radically change the material world. … While authors working in other literary modes can represent the past and present from new perspectives, only those allied with speculative fiction show us how intervening into the material world can change human relations and generate new futures as well. (385)

Indeed, as Ursula Heise has noted, “telling stories of entire species, on a planetary scale of space and on a geological scale of time, has been part of what has distinguished science fiction as a genre over the course of its history” (282).Yet, while science fiction may not be held in the low regard of yesteryear, Toffler’s point still seems valid in the sense that science fiction lacks the visceral gravitas of other fiction, does not move hearts and minds in the way that a Brontë, a Gustave Flaubert, a Fyodor Dostoevsky, or a Toni Morrison does. The question about why this is so is beyond the purview of this chapter, but the implications of the generic hauntings are central. The function and effect of words depends to a large degree on how they are mediated—their medium of delivery, in other words. Much of pandemic discourse is filmic, and much of this filmic material is science fiction (28 Days Later, World War Z, I am Legend, and so on), and one has to wonder just how effective this entertainment is in moving minds and hearts.15 We may agree in righteous indignation that future generations will look back at this Age of Stupid16 and wonder why we didn’t do more, but let’s face it: entertainment isn’t activism. Pandemic discourse sells as entertainment because it is a topic that we can relate with, a topic full of matters that haunt and threaten. Omission of some matters is very telling of what we really don’t want to think about too much—for instance, our material entanglements with animals or genetic materialism. What pandemic discourse does include is also very revealing. Its emphases—on a muscular stance, a military inclination, a pugnaciousness that requires an Other—holds hands with views of our past that continue to haunt us. Racism haunts pandemic discourse, and a widespread amnesia haunts humanity. From century to century, amnesia is in full play, and today we seem to have forgotten everything that happened

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in 1918 with masks, and quarantines, and individuality, and social welfare, and pandemic fatigue, and so on. Camus reminds us of some of these, but the fact that they all seem so new to the twenty-first century is haunting. And while people have spoken lucidly to offer warnings, well-being has spawned complacency, and we have all shunned the “alarmists.” Now we’re in the thick of it, and it is big. In many ways, we simply lack the narrative ability to communicate things of such size, though we try. Indeed, the hauntings of COVID-19 are bigger and more difficult to grasp and convey than pandemics of yesteryear because of their globality. The silver lining is that hauntings may have pedagogic utility. One hopes so, but only time will tell what lessons we learn.

Notes 1. I have borrowed this image from Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. In their “Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” they state that “the winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts.” 2. One of the interesting things about COVID-19 is how it has revealed our “animalistic” responses and thus called into question our sense of our own exceptionalism—and our responses to danger are natural. When danger appears, a flock of birds takes flight, a school of fish flees, a colony of mudskippers retreat to their holes, and people stay at home—we are not all that different from other animals. Our vulnerabilities reveal our affinities. 3. “Zoonosis” is the term for this transcorporeal pathogenic leap, the leap of disease from one species to another. 4. In The Ecophobia Hypothesis, I defined ecophobia as follows: The ecophobic condition exists on a spectrum and can embody fear, contempt, indifference, or lack of mindfulness (or some combination of these) towards the natural environment. While its genetic origins have functioned, in part, to preserve our species, the ecophobic condition has also greatly serviced growth economies and ideological interests. Often a product of behaviors serviceable in the past but destructive in the present, it is also sometimes a product of the perceived requirements of our seemingly exponential growth. Ecophobia exists globally on both macro and micro levels, and its manifestation is at times directly apparent and obvious but is also often deeply obscured by the clutter of habit and ignorance. (2) 5. Eastern philosophies and religions (Hinduism, Janism, Buddhism, Taoism, and others) are a different story, not the topic of this chapter.

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6. To my mind, one of the most memorable sets of images of animal hauntings that co-locates speciesism and sexism is from Li Ang’s The Butcher’s Wife. The butcher is a man who beats and rapes his wife by night and slaughters pigs by day. The narrator explicitly relates the slaughter of animals with hauntings by those very animals: “after years and years of slaughtering countless animals, he was visited every night by ghostly pigs bleating on his doorstep. Or so people said” (11). On his wedding night, he practically rapes his bride, and “her screams of pain were so loud and lasted so long, according to her neighbors, that some people who heard them above the whistling night winds took them to be the bleating of ghostly pigs” (13). Moreover, the slaughterhouse itself “had long been portrayed in local legends as haunted” (15). 7. On November 18, 2020, CNN ran an article about the relative mortality of COVID-19 in relation to suicide, vehicle accidents, stroke, heart disease, and cancer in the USA. COVID-19, as I write, has killed 250,000 people in the USA; cancer and heart disease each have killed over 600,000. What the article does not mention is that neither cancer nor heart disease arouse the sense of urgency that COVID-19 does, and among the reasons that it does so are its novelty, which paradoxically both engenders a more visceral sense of unpredictability than cancer or heart disease while also evoking a sense that it can be “beat,” while both cancer and heart disease have consistently proven unbeatable. Also, it fails to mention that pandemics display an exponential algorithm, while heart disease and suicide do not—which means that by the time of publication, the numbers of Covid-19 deaths will be exponentially higher whereas heart disease and suicide deaths will not. 8. Shukin importantly explores the various levels of racism in pandemic discourse. Her comments are shockingly insightful and prescient. She writes, for instance, about “wet markets” (the presumed source of our current pandemic) as follows: “Asian ‘wet markets’—markets selling live poultry and sometimes wild animals—are racially pathologized as zoonotic hotbeds in pandemic discourse. They deeply offend Western sensibilities by virtue of the seemingly superstitious and callous consumption of the exotic and even endangered animal life they supply” (209). Quoting Mei Zhan, Shukin explains that “identifying the Chinese with the visceral consumption of ‘wild’ animals produces the image of ‘a traditional, exotic Chinese culture out of sync with a cosmopolitan world’ (Zhan 33)” (Shukin 210). Mainstream media portrayals of “ethnic others’ unhygienic intimacy with animals in an era of globalization” (211) are precisely the ideological registers that Donald Trump tapped into with his comments about what he called “the Wuhan Virus” and “the Chinese Virus.”

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9. Judith Roof offers a very useful summary of the growth of this interest and how it touches upon and is represented in a diverse spread of cultural sites—in scientific critiques, in fiction, in literary and cultural criticism, and others. 10. While, as I noted above, Shukin does seem correct to observe the “chilling resonances between a discourse of pandemic preparedness and the imperial rhetoric and machinery of the war against terrorism” (219), these resonances clearly do not translate into equal funding: military spending far outweighs health care spending. See also Manners. 11. This example, however, is problematical, obviously because while magnetic flux generator weapons are the result of an evolution that has proceeded from simplicity to complexity, biological evolution doesn’t quite work that way. 12. Some of this paragraph appears in slightly different form in my “Detachment and division: militarization, geography, and gender in The Windup Girl.” 13. Ursula Heise poses a series of questions in this regard: If the Anthropocene indeed calls for a scaling-up of the imagination, how might that imagination translate into narrative? What characters and plot architectures would it involve? What models do existing narrative forms offer for telling the story of our climate-changed presents and futures? (279) Adam Trexler has posed very similar questions: What tropes are necessary to comprehend climate change or to articulate the possible futures faced by humanity? How can a global process, spanning millennia, be made comprehensible to human imagination, with its limited sense of place and time? What longer, historical forms aid this imagination, and what are the implications and limits of their use? (5) To address these questions means having a sufficiently broad scale—one big enough and small enough. 14. Toffler wrote in 1970 as follows: Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C.  Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults. (425)

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15. See Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s chapter “Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees, Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme” in this collection. 16. Age of Stupid is a 2009 Franny Armstrong climate change film set in 2055 looking back and asking “what happened?”

Works Cited Ang, Li. The Butcher’s Wife and Other Stories, edited and translated by Howard Goldblatt. Cheng and Tsui Company, 2002. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Trans. Robin Buss, with an Afterword by Tony Judt. Penguin, 2013. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History. Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 197–222. Crutzen, Paul and Eugene Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000), p. 17. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene, 40th Anniversary Edition. Oxford, 2016. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Norton, 1999. Estok, Simon C. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Routledge, 2018. Rpt. with revisions and corrections, 2020. Estok, Simon C. “Detachment and division: militarization, geography, and gender in The Windup Girl.” Mushroom Clouds: Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia, edited by Simon C. Estok, Iping Liang, and Shinji Iwamasa. Routledge, 2021, forthcoming. Estok, Simon C. “Ecophobia, the Agony of Water, and Misogyny.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. vol. 26. no. 2 (Spring 2019), pp. 473–85. Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. “Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. G1–G14. Heise, Ursula. “Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene.” English Literary History, vol. 86, Summer 2019, pp. 275–304. Hejnol, Andreas. “Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. U of Minnesota P, 2017, pp. G87–G102. Manners, David. “Military Spending vs Healthcare Spending.” ElectronicsWeekly. com 29 September 2020. https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/dilemmas/757095-­2020-­09/

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Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. Scribner, 2017. Murakami, H. 1Q84: a novel. Alfred Knopf, 2011. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Penguin, 2013. Roof, Judith. “Genetics.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini. Routledge, 2012, pp. 124–34. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Terms. U of Minnesota P, 2009. Stuart, Tristam. The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times. Norton, 2006. The Age of Stupid. Directed by Franny Armstrong, Spanner Films, 2009. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800. Penguin, 1983. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Bantam, 1970. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. U of Virginia P, 2015. Wilson, E. O. On human nature. Harvard UP, 1978. Yan, Holly and Daniel Wolfe. “Covid-19 has killed 250,000 people in the US. That’s 10 times the deaths from car crashes in a year.” CNN https://www. cnn.com/2020/11/18/health/covid-­19-­deaths-­us-­250k-­trnd/index.html Yaszek, Lisa. “Science Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini. Routledge, 2012, pp. 385–95. Zakaria, Fareed. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Norton, 2020. Zhan, Mei. “Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham’s Pajamas: Unruly Bodies after SARS.” American Anthropologist, vol. 107, no. 1, Mar 2005, pp. 31–42.

Correction To: Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene Johan Höglund

Correction to: Chapter 6 in: S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_6 The original version of chapter 6 “Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene” was previously published non-­ open access. The chapter has now been changed to open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and the copyright holder updated to ‘The Author(s)’. The chapter has been updated with these changes.

The updated versions of the chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­81869-­2_6

© The Author(s) 2022 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_10

C1

Index1

A Annihilation, 13, 44, 67–86, 86n8 Anthropocene, 1–4, 6, 8–11, 14, 15, 16n2, 16n4, 16n5, 17n17, 53, 61, 73, 81, 86n7, 87n10, 92, 111, 116, 120, 122, 132n4, 135–155, 161, 182, 189, 191n1, 193n13 Apocalypse, 105, 117, 120, 159–177 The apocalyptic ecogothic, 14 B The bacterial sublime, 35, 36 Body art, 12 C Capitalism, 3, 53, 116, 119–121, 127, 128, 130, 143, 182, 189

Capitalocene, 9–11, 14, 15, 115–131, 137, 143–146, 148, 152 Chthonic intelligence, 11, 13, 71, 73 Chthulucene, 9–11, 15, 17n17 Climate anxiety, 159 Climate change, 3, 7, 8, 11, 16n5, 33, 98, 116, 120, 121, 123, 124, 149, 151, 172, 181, 184, 189, 193n13, 194n16 Climate justice, 155 Coast Salish, 84 COVID-19, 15, 37, 38n5, 181–191 Crawl, 115, 116, 121–129, 131 D Decolonization, 3 Demogorgon, 72, 73, 75 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 17n14, 77, 161 Dumitriu, Anna, 34–36

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2

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INDEX

E Ecofeminism, 13, 91–111 Ecogothic, 9–11, 14, 16n8, 27–30, 67–86, 160, 162, 164–166, 170, 177, 177n7 Ecohorror, 13, 14, 69, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85 Ecophobia, 69, 162, 183, 185, 191n4 The End, 14, 160, 162–167, 169, 170, 173–176 Entanglement, 2, 10, 11, 15, 32, 33, 38, 73, 75, 76, 81, 83, 109, 136, 138, 140, 152, 160, 182, 183, 190 Extinction fears, 51–55 F Fairy, 2, 16n1, 23, 61n3 Forest, 4, 5, 17n13, 70, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81, 84, 93, 94, 96, 99–101, 151, 164, 176 G Ghosh, Amitav, 7, 121, 136, 139, 140, 148, 154 Ghost, 2, 3, 5, 6, 16n1, 24, 38n2, 45, 48, 49, 51, 55, 86, 95, 110, 136, 161, 162, 182, 191n1 Globalization, 3, 189, 192n8 Gothic, 2–8, 10–15, 15n1, 16n6, 17n15, 23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 38, 44, 70, 74, 75, 82, 83, 91–107, 109–111, 116, 117, 119, 121–129, 131, 136, 155n8 “Gray Matter” in Creepshow, 12, 43–61 H The Happening, 14, 160, 162–165, 169, 170, 173–175

Haunting, 1–15, 21, 34, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53, 60, 61, 62n11, 74–77, 82, 83, 92, 93, 96–98, 101, 102, 104, 108–111, 119, 131, 136–139, 146–148, 154, 160, 161, 169, 176, 177, 181–191 The Haunting of Hill House, 12, 43–61 Haunting terror, 14, 117 Hauntology, 6, 7, 17n14, 161 Horror, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 12–15, 15n1, 22, 29, 35, 38, 47, 50, 59, 60, 62n10, 73–78, 82, 86n1, 91, 92, 96, 102, 111, 115–131, 136, 160, 164, 165, 169, 175 Human and nonhuman, 2, 5, 11, 14, 27, 28, 33, 47, 93, 95, 104, 106, 109–111, 182, 183 I I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, 12, 43–61 Intelligent trees, 159–177 K Koch, Robert, 12, 24, 27 Koyukon, 84 L Lion City, 14, 135–155 M Materiality, 3–6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 23, 68, 75, 181, 189 Microbe, 5, 6, 9, 12, 21–24, 27, 29–34, 37, 38, 38n3, 38n4, 46, 71, 130, 183–185 Microgothic, 12, 21–38 Mold, 5, 6, 11, 12, 43–61, 62n4, 62n5, 62n6, 62n10

 INDEX 

Monster, 3, 23, 24, 44, 54, 60, 71–73, 75, 76, 80, 82–86, 91, 94, 103 Mother Earth, 106 N Nature, 1–15, 22, 24, 26–31, 34, 36, 44, 52, 62n11, 69, 74, 75, 82, 83, 85, 93–111, 126, 128–131, 135–139, 141, 143, 146–148, 153, 154, 155n1, 155n6, 160–162, 165, 169, 172, 174, 176, 184 Nixon, Rob, 13, 117–121, 126, 131, 189 O Overpopulation, 12, 45, 54–56, 61, 62n8, 177n3 P Pandemics, 2, 6, 15, 25, 37, 75, 171, 181–187, 189–191, 192n8, 193n10 Phytographia, 76–82 Plague, 15, 34, 182–185, 187–189 Planetarity, 3 Plant-based names, 99 Plant sentience, 9 Post-death existence, 46–50 R Roots, 4, 5, 13, 67–76, 79, 82–86, 92, 93, 169

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S Sentience, 2, 10, 162 Singapore, 14, 135–154 Slow Violence, 3, 118, 120, 121, 126, 131, 189 Speculative fiction, 1, 15n1, 16n3, 16n4, 122, 136, 139, 141, 155n8, 190 Stranger Things, 13, 67–86 T Technonature, 14, 135–155 Twain, Mark, 28–32 U Uncanny, 4, 5, 16n11, 24, 27, 30, 31, 34, 37, 44, 80, 121, 129, 136, 139–141, 146, 148, 170 Upside down, 69, 70, 72, 74, 82, 181 V Vegetomorphism, 67–86 W Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 138, 148, 150, 153 We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 13, 91–111 Z Zoonosis, 183, 191n3