The rest of the story centres around the narrative of the ‘Green Book’, presented by Ambrose in support of his argument. This is the diary of a young girl initiated into the old religion of the fairies by her nurse, and follows a journey she takes through the strange, unsettling countryside. She expresses her fear of being taken away by a threatening ‘black man’ who abducts women of the old religion in her nurse’s stories, but still pursues this path.62 Again, vegetal life is so prominent in the environment that it seems to become an active participant in the young girl’s degenerative journey.
The Green Book narrative begins with the girl’s childish expressions of glee at the secrets she knows, and these are immediately tied to arboreal life. She can only carry out the ceremonies she has learned alone in her room, or ‘in certain woods’, which she ‘must not describe … as they are secret woods’.63 On the day of her ‘singular adventure’, she starts her journey walking ‘through many bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets on the hills, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns’.64 Immediately afterwards, she passes along the bed of a dried-up stream where ‘the bushes had grown overhead till they met, so that it was quite dark’, and through ‘a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore at [her]’.65 This threatening vegetation forms a barrier through which she must pass, and in doing so, she crosses from the human world into one where distinctions between human beings and other forms of life and matter are much less clear. Coming into a clearing full of strangely shaped rocks, she is at first frightened by the thought that she will be pulled into the rock itself and trapped there, but she eventually comes to welcome the thought of becoming one with their nonhuman matter, recalling, ‘I wanted to make faces and twist myself about in the way they [the rocks] did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks.’66 By the time she leaves the clearing, she has come to welcome oneness with the vegetal, too: ‘a tall nettle stung me on my leg, and made me burn’, she writes, ‘but I didn’t mind it, and I tingled with the boughs and the thorns, but I only laughed and sang.’67 Though the obvious sense of this line is that her skin tingles from being scratched by their thorns, it is also possible to read it as saying that she tingles along with the bushes, feeling the sensations of vegetal life. And here, plant life loses its threatening aspect, becoming attractive instead. The girl finds herself on ‘a steep bank with trees hanging over it’, where ‘the ferns keep green all through the winter, when they are dead and brown upon the hill, and the ferns there have a sweet, rich smell like what oozes out of fir trees’; she visits a well that is covered with ‘bright, green, dripping moss … moss like beautiful little ferns, and like palms and fir trees … all as green as jewellery’.68 The sensual appeal here plays into the narrative of the girl’s seduction into the old religion and away from the ‘civilised’ human realm; at the same time, she begins to pay close attention to the plants around her, picking them out of the background and enumerating their qualities with rich attention to detail. Effectively, she accomplishes what Timothy Morton argues is the fundamental aspiration of environmentalism in our present moment: ‘coexistence with nonhumans’ without concepts like ‘world’ and ‘Nature’, which inevitably become backgrounded to human concerns.69 Her recognition of the plants signals her growing enmeshment with the nonhuman, and the vivid imagery that surrounds it hints, despite the story’s framing, at an attractive vision of plant kinship. Through her involvement with the old religion, she begins to descend the evolutionary scale, losing her human specificity in the process. Nonetheless, it is through her human perspective that we encounter these plants: they are foregrounded precisely because she notices them. We must acknowledge, with Thacker, that we cannot experience the vegetal world ‘in-itself’, and so the very notion of hybridity with plants brings something of the Other into the human.
The cautionary tale that follows shortly after the girl’s journey serves, in context, as a warning that the old religion’s enchantments may be dangerous. The story concerns another girl who has visited the same well, and who later appears wearing fine jewellery, though she is ‘quite poor’.70 She insists that she has no jewels: her ruby brooch and diamond necklace are ordinary stones, her emerald earrings ‘green grass’ and the golden crown she wears ‘only some yellow flowers’.71 Nonetheless, she is mistaken for a princess and married to the prince of the realm, at which point the sinister ‘black man’ appears to abduct her. Her new husband faints, and when he recovers himself, finds on the bed only ‘two knots of faded grass and a red stone, and some white stones, and some faded yellow flowers’.72 Trees again appear complicit here: when the courtiers try to get into the room to rescue the princess, they find that the wood of the door had ‘turned hard as iron’.73 The symbols of human wealth and status that she wore have revealed themselves as illusory, and it is plant material and inanimate stone that remains. There is a suggestion, then, that traces of the mineral and the vegetal remain within the human when the trappings of civilisation are removed, and that stepping back into the mythic time of the old religion may reveal their existence as more enduring and fundamental than ours. The lines between humanity, vegetal life and the earth itself begin to blur, hybridity becoming the order of the day. For all of Ambrose’s warnings, such kinships begin to look inevitable.
Consuming Plants
We find a similar entanglement between human degeneration and monstrous plant life in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Lurking Fear’ (1923), a tale clearly influenced by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and its ape-like Morlocks. The trees that populate the story leap out of its background and are entangled intimately with the atavistic transformations undergone by its human (or once human) monsters. Here, however, the trees pose a more direct existential threat to the human narrator, becoming actively aligned with the man-eating creatures he hunts. The notion that a trace of the plant remains within the human is a recurring one in critical plant studies: recall Marder’s assertion that ‘[t]he gap separating humans from plants may dwindle – though not altogether disappear – thanks to the discovery of traces of the latter in the former, and vice versa’.74 Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari relate this to the need for food: ‘humans all contain a little something of the vegetal order: the nutritive faculty is present in the human life principle.’75 Even in the act of eating them, we affirm that there is something of the plant within us; our position atop the food chain undermines itself.
As Matthew Hall suggests, monstrous plants can ‘subvert and invert the hierarchical pyramid in the natural world which sees humans at the top and plants somewhere near the bottom’,76 a possibility already implicit in the non-teleological suggestions of evolutionary theory. This is particularly true of the trope of the carnivorous plant, which ‘throw[s] the hierarchy of nature into question by eating animal matter’.77 T. S. Miller makes a similar point, arguing that ‘the mere existence of carnivorous plants challenges the conception of plants as objects intended for human and animal use’, and links this explicitly to evolutionism.78 The man-eating plant, he argues, is ‘a specifically Darwinian monster’, embodying ‘the uncomfortable truth that is universal common descent, and … not the scandal of contemplating that one’s grandfather was a monkey, but the far greater scandal of contemplating that one’s great-grandfather was more like some kind of shrub’.79 Post-Darwinian anxieties around universal common descent, as we have already seen, pervade Machen’s fiction; Lovecraft, heavily influenced by him, wove them into his own stories in even more explicit ways.
‘The Lurking Fear’ centres around the fate of the Martense family, who, having gradually withdrawn from the society of their neighbours, retreated into the tunnels beneath their ancestral mansion and, over the years, degenerated into a clan of ‘filthy whitish gorilla thing[s]’, emerging only to find victims for their cannibalistic appetites.80 This is the endpoint of the process of biological degeneration, a theory popularised by Max Nordau at the end of the nineteenth century. If humans had ascended
the biological ladder from animal origins, it posited, they might descend once more, and Lovecraft evokes this disordering of the hierarchical conception of nature for horrific effect. In the area surrounding Tempest Mountain, site of the ancestral Martense mansion, the narrator’s first warning of the unnatural – or perhaps all too natural – horror he is about to encounter comes in the form of the unnatural profusion of vegetation. Here, ‘[t]he ancient lightning-scarred trees [seem] unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish.’81 The mansion itself stands in a ‘hoary grove’ and on his flight from it, the narrator is accosted by images of ‘wild-armed titan trees’.82 The grounds of the mansion are overlooked by ‘[b]aleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness … like the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple’, and ‘polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, overnourished vegetation’.83 The proliferation of the plants, their uncontrolled growth and unbounded bodies, become frightening here, and we are reminded (by the mention of Druids) of their temporality; they have lifespans reaching back to forgotten eras of the human past. The ‘morbidly overnourished forest’ becomes almost a co-conspirator in the predations of the Martense creatures, providing cover for them to continue their attacks.84 The tunnels through which the creatures travel to carry out their attacks are sheltered by ‘a wooded southern prolongation’ of a nearby mountain, and the creatures appear to have been ‘summoned’ when one of the unsettling trees is hit by lightning, suggesting a psychic or even somatic connection between the degraded bodies of the Martenses and the warped bodies of the overfed trees.85 Before the Martense creatures are discovered, it is even suspected that the monster may be ‘a walking tree’.86 In turn, the trees themselves become almost carnivorous: when the narrator’s quest for truth leads him to the Martense graveyard, he is disturbed by the ‘deformed trees toss[ing] insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below’.87 We find here a blurring of the boundary between predator-humans and acceptable edible beings that echoes Plumwood’s sense of being-prey. At the same time, the slippage between cannibal once human beings and the corpse-eating trees that protect them renders impossible any firm distinction between humans and plants. Our place in the hierarchical relationship of human to nonhuman beings is at best untenable, at worst, illusory.
A rather different blurring of boundaries appears in Lovecraft’s later novella, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1936). This story follows the journey of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition whose members discover the pre-human city built by the primordial Old Ones, a species of highly advanced extraterrestrials who inhabited the earth before human beings. These beings combine superhuman intelligence with a morphological diversity that distresses the scientists. On examining a specimen, the expedition biologist repeatedly asserts his difficulty in deciding whether it is vegetable or animal.88 It is the ‘vegetable evidences’ he finds that cause the trouble, their appearance in a body of ‘incredibly advanced evolution’ confounding his categories.89 The teratological bodies of the Old Ones are described in great detail, but it is through the city they have left behind, with its technological and artistic accomplishments, that the explorers really get to know them. A growing sense of kinship with these aliens becomes inevitable, and on discovering the gruesome end that the last Old Ones have met, the narrator reacts with horror – and by humanising them. ‘Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn’, he writes, ‘whatever they had been, they were men!’90 The advanced development of the Old Ones neither negates nor is negated by the vegetal within them – and, we might infer, nor should human beings believe that we have transcended our vegetal origins.
Kinship with Plants?
Weird tales are certainly unsettling, and all the stories considered here use the challenge plants pose to human exceptionalism as a source of horror. Might it be possible, however, to read weird flora in a less pessimistic light, allowing for the hopeful possibility of an end to anthropocentrism, of recognising that, as Bennett puts it, ‘all bodies are kin … enmeshed in a dense network of relations’?91 Karen Houle suggests that kinship and enmeshment are integral to plant being: plants, unconstrained by human notions of supreme autonomy, may enable us to think in terms of ‘radical collectivity’, of ‘complex being-together in the world’.92 With this in mind, I return to Blackwood, and the 1912 story ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, which brings together the blurring of human boundaries occasioned by evolutionary theory and the inaccessibility of the plant in profoundly ambivalent fashion.
Told from the point of view of the titular character’s wife, Sophia Bittacy, the story touches again upon the gaps between human perception and the reality of the arboreal world – or, as Mrs Bittacy comes to know it, ‘the Vegetable Kingdom’.93 Mrs Bittacy’s husband has long been fascinated by trees. They now live in a cottage on the edge of the New Forest, to which Mr Bittacy invites his friend Arthur Sanderson, an artist with a particular gift for capturing the individuality of trees. Their discussions of the possibility of vegetable consciousness greatly disturb Mrs Bittacy. Her husband says that trees bring him a sense of ‘dim, vast living’ – a great power that is, nonetheless, obscure.94 The Vegetable Kingdom is ‘strange and mysterious’; it has a ‘vast subconscious life’ and ‘[knows] itself supreme’ away from the encroachments of human habitation.95 Even Sanderson, with his affinity for the personalities of trees, finds a degree of resistance in them. ‘I never know a tree’, he says, ‘until I’ve seen it in the night.’96 They obscure and reveal themselves at the same time. Mrs Bittacy remains acutely conscious of her inability to fully know the forest. ‘What she knew of it’, the story observes, ‘hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were, the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away.’97
She is, however, aware that the forest feels – and in doing so, it manifests its uncanny nature, breaking down boundaries between human, animal, vegetable and inorganic matter. This passage, in which Mrs Bittacy reaches the realisation that the forest will take her husband away, is the climax of the story:
She saw that jealousy was not confined to the human and animal world alone, but ran though all creation. The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest … In humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the ice.98
Mr Bittacy’s fascination with the trees is not unrequited; he experiences a ‘communion’ with the trees, ‘born … of those years he had lived in caring for them’.99 The vegetal world seems here to seek a reciprocal relation with a human – and indeed, this is what Mr Bittacy attempts to provide, relinquishing his autonomy as an individual human subject in the process. It is a ‘complex being-together’ of the kind suggested by Houle, and a relation which Katherine E. Bishop reads elsewhere in this volume as an anti-colonial and anti-hierarchical metaphor. Certainly, this eco-Gothic reading has resonance at the present moment, when finding ways to valorise, care for and live with nonhuman life may be essential to the survival of humans. In the context of its time, however, with evolutionary anxieties still current, this relationship turns horrific. Mr Bittacy becomes consumed by the forest, losing a portion of his humanity in the process. His consciousness appears to leave his body and join that of the forest; at the end of the story, he is a ‘shell, half emptied’.100 The notion of vegetable consciousness becomes horrifying not so much because of its remoteness from the ordinary human world to which Mrs Bittacy clings, but because of the risk that we may access it too closely.
‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, then, gestures towards the possibility of a positive decentralising of the human, a ‘being-together’ of humans and plants like that called for by Houle. The story remains in the register of h
orror, however, and this points towards what is perhaps the central tension of the weird mode. Hewing tightly to Mrs Bittacy’s point of view, and the psychological horror of her situation, it nonetheless gestures at alternative forms of perception experience, exemplified by the implacable vegetable consciousness of the forest and her husband’s acceptance of and fusion with it. The weird tale is a way of talking about our inability, as humans, to fully comprehend the world. As such, it removes us from the apex of creation in the same way that evolutionary theory did: the world is not ‘for-us’. That dethroning also places us into kinship with animals and, more startlingly, with plants, suggesting the possibility that we may find ways to live in care and reciprocity with nonhuman life, accepting our inextricable enmeshment in the world. At the same time, the weird requires the strange, the Other, and this renders its blurring of boundaries horrific. Recognising our kinship with plants means recognising the Other within – and our inability to know it fully. This anxiety resonates strongly with evolutionary anxieties that focus on universal common descent, and that are inflected with deeply conservative fears of hybridity and degeneration. The classic weird tale, then, may gesture at a path toward a non-anthropocentric worldview – but, retaining its anthropocentric fears, the weird mode cannot fully explore this path.
2 ‘Bloody unnatural brutes’: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids
Jerry Määttä
Until just a decade ago, very little scholarly attention had been given to John Wyndham’s breakthrough novel The Day of the Triffids.1 Published in both the UK and the US in 1951 and kept in print ever since, few sf novels have been as widely read, translated and adapted into various media. Long overlooked and undervalued by literary scholars, however, in recent years Triffids has become almost a staple reference in critical plant studies, where its portrayal of near-universal blindness has been connected to ‘plant blindness’,2 where the triffids have been seen as ‘an invasive presence that exposes and challenges the limits of anthropocentric thought’,3 and where the novel has lent itself to thinking plant politics, when seen as ‘a specific depiction of the multiagential biopolitics of plant–human relations in a post-World War II, globalizing world’.4
Plants in Science Fiction Page 4