6 Alternative Reproduction: Plant-time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook
‘Your gynecologist has no test for what she was pregnant with.’
– Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 491
Interrelations among human and non-human, living and non-living, organic and inorganic entities – beings, systems and bodies as strange hybrids and networks – have become paradigmatic in ecophilosophical projects that draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages, Actor-Network Theory, Timothy Morton’s ‘mesh’, Karen Barad’s ‘intraactions’ and the holobionts and ‘bodies tumbled into bodies’ described in the recent double-bodied collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.2 These pluralised, sometimes collective and always complex entities challenge the fundamental premises of Western metaphysics. If we are looking for similarly complex fictional accounts of agency, identity and time, we might begin with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which a number of human-to-plant transformations highlight other-than-human temporalities. The best known of these may be the story of Daphne, who evades – at some cost – the temporal cycles of sexuality. Daphne has always scorned marriage, begging her father not to demand grandsons. Pursued by Apollo, she is saved from rape by changing into a laurel tree. Apollo claims Daphne-as-tree for eternity: ‘… as my head is ever young, / … may you, unshorn, / wear your leaves too, forever’; her never-changing boughs, woven into wreaths, will crown his favourites.3 If Daphne’s story is about the successful suspension of sexualised temporality, the story of Myrrha, impregnated through an incestuous conjunction with her father, insists on the dyschronicity that becomes apparent when the human biological-temporal sequence of conception, gestation and parturition collides with non-human being. Far advanced in her shameful pregnancy when she changes into a tree, Myrrha must give birth even though her flesh is now fused into hard bark: ‘Nine times the moon had shown its crescent horns … / Halfway up the trunk, / the pregnant tree was swollen; all the bark / was taut with that full burden. But the pain / and pangs could not find words … / And yet the tree trunk bends and moans in labor; / the bark is wet with fallen tears.’4 Lucina, goddess of childbirth, finally takes pity and assists her to give birth, but forever after the tree’s seeping resin, Myrrha’s ‘tears’, marks this transgressive hybridity of time and being.
Following Ovid, writers of speculative fiction keep thinking across the boundaries between species, and in their work reproduction and its temporalities continue to challenge the idea that the unitary subject bound to a linear timeline is the ‘natural’ order.5 The texts I bring into conversation here, Robert Holdstock’s Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, were written decades apart (1988; 2007) in different languages (English; Korean); won different prizes (the British Science Fiction Association Award; the Man Booker International Prize); and set off different genre signals (fantasy; realist fiction). Yet they are connected by how they challenge the normative linear temporality of modernity, especially as expressed in what Lee Edelman terms ‘reproductive futurism’: our tendency to think about time in relation to the genealogies of the heteronormative family, with the child as a figure for the future.6 The protagonists in each novel step outside human-constructed models of time organised in relation to sexual reproduction, and each experiences a different temporality through an arboreal metamorphosis. The tree/human assemblages in these two novels are not chaste Daphnean figures of eternal art, but transgressively sexualised bodies, like Myrrha’s subjected to other-than-human temporalities and strange forms of reproduction, including alternative forms of conception, gestation and parturition.
At the end of this essay I’ll return to philosophical and ecocritical accounts of reproduction, but first I want to ask why writers might turn to plants to explore temporality, and what the stakes are of doing so. Michael Marder argues that what he calls ‘plant-thinking’ – a serious philosophical encounter with the vegetal – can transform how we understand what it means to be human. Aristotle’s definition of plant-being as constituted by two activities, taking in nourishment and procreating, does not ‘temporalize these capacities’.7 Plants, as distinct from humans and animals, are fixed in either a pure present or an eternal return (the plant’s ‘life cycle’) in which the acorn always already stands for the oak, and the oak in turn for the acorn. In establishing a new ‘intersection of ethics and ontology’ through plant-thinking, Marder insists that plants are not ‘like us’ – and therefore they must be recognised as worth thinking with and thinking through, while at the same time we rigorously ‘maintain and nurture, without fetishizing it, their otherness in the course of this encounter’.8 Plant-thinking is thus an anti-metaphysical and ultimately an ethical project, and recognising the otherness of vegetal temporality is a central aspect of Marder’s phyto-ontology, as it is in the novels discussed here.9 In both Lavondyss and The Vegetarian, vegetal being is marked and characterised by its own temporality, inhabiting time-scapes that lie outside human experience, including the normative events and stages of human reproductive processes. Taking these texts seriously as ecophilosophical projects, this essay explores how plant-thinking and human/arboreal assemblages enable writers to imagine time in other terms, or perhaps to imagine time on an Other’s terms, and in doing so to propose new hybridised ways of being and becoming human.
Hybridity shapes these texts at a formal level as well. In this essay, I occasionally use genre labels (fantasy, speculative fiction, parable, magical realism, the social-critique novel etc.) not to police generic borders, but to highlight the ways that new genealogies and interpretative options become available when we read fictions congenerically,10 or as members of what the science fiction and fantasy critic Brian Attebery calls a ‘fuzzy set’ – that is, as affiliated with texts that might seem to belong to other generic terrains.11 Tracing out a ‘fuzzy set’ of texts across genres for The Vegetarian, as I do here by putting Han’s contemporary novel into conversation with Holdstock’s earlier fantasy fiction and her own magical-realist short story, allows us to see that it is not only an indictment of how humans exploit animals and other humans under late capitalism. Beyond this, The Vegetarian examines our fear of and attraction to – perhaps even longing for – cross-species or even inter-kingdom intimacy, a project that clearly links it with work undertaken by both speculative fiction and post-human philosophy.
Lavondyss: Hybrid Temporalities, Shamanic Parturition
Ryhope Wood, the fictional setting for the five novels that make up Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood series, is a remnant piece of primeval British forest undisturbed since the last ice age. While on maps it appears to cover about three square miles of Herefordshire, the wood is infinitely bigger inside than outside, and contains distinct temporal zones ranging from prehistory to the present day. Those who enter the wood move non-continuously through time and encounter mythagos – figures arising from the collective unconscious of peoples who have lived in and around the wood at different times, modified by the unconscious of the individual visitor: for example, iterations of Robin Hood, Merlin, the Wild Hunt, Guinevere, male and female dryads, and the terrifying wodewose.12
The plot of the first novel, Mythago Wood, is a relatively straightforward quest narrative: Stephen Huxley follows his lost brother into the forest to bring him home; he meets a mythago of Guinevere, falls in love, loses her and returns alone to mid-twentieth-century England. In Lavondyss, the second volume of the series, Holdstock moves beyond this familiar model to imagine something more complex. To follow Farah Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantasy plot-types, if Mythago Wood offers the basic paradigm of a hero moving between two discrete zones (there-and-back-again), Lavondyss is an ‘intrusion fantasy’, in which the fantasy realm has its own agency to reach into and affect the non-fantasy world.13 Lavondyss emphasises a series of interpenetrations of the two worlds that culminates in the literal fusion of the uncanny forest with the human protagonist, setting up a powerfu
l ambiguity about the agency and autonomy of the human subject. The Wood keeps leaking into the world of the girl Tallis Keeton, so that she becomes a kind of apprentice to it before she learns how to enter it.
I propose that Lavondyss achieves the narrative structural complexity of the intrusion fantasy through the modes of temporality that are brought into play by the biological sex and normatively aligned gender role of the novel’s female protagonist. While Tallis is guided and mentored by male characters both human and mythago (figures of the lover, father, teacher, brother, son), her encounter with Ryhope Wood plays out more complexly than it does for Holdstock’s male protagonists, for whom the Wood is primarily the setting of a quest facilitated or blocked by the mythagos encountered there. Like Stephen hunting his lost brother in the first book, Tallis travels the Wood in search of her lost half-brother Harry, who after being wounded in the Second World War returned home only to disappear into the Wood with his service pistol. Yet unlike Stephen, Tallis does not simply pass through the Wood; rather, she eventually becomes the Wood, experiencing an arboreal metamorphosis that reiterates, in an accelerated and condensed rhythm punctuated by multiple cycles of pregnancy, the geotemporal and mythic cycles of the strange space of the Wood.
Because of its deliberately complex play with temporality, it is difficult to offer a concise account of Lavondyss, but I will sketch its frame before turning to its later sections.14 Named for the Welsh bard Taliesin, Tallis has always had an innate and intimate connection with the British deep past. As a child, she is initiated into the mysteries of the Wood by reading her grandfather’s posthumous letter to her, written in a book of British legends on the margins of its chapter on King Arthur. Eventually she enters the Wood and its multiple pasts and becomes the lover of a younger brother of Arthur and Mordred. In a ruined fort, she finds Harry’s service pistol half-absorbed into the stone wall of an upper room, encouraging her to travel farther into Lavondyss’s ‘unknown regions’. In short, Tallis is a shaman, whose interactions with the mythagos of the Wood have the potential to rewrite her own family’s history of genealogical loss.
In the second part of the novel, her shamanism is manifested in a terrifying account of bodily penetration by the Wood, a surreal passage that works as a sexualised mise-en-abyme of the multiple intrusions and interpenetrations of the novel’s spaces, times, and subjects. After an exhausting and fruitless journey across the Wood’s Ice Age interior, Tallis has returned to the ruined fort. At this point she sees that it is built of blocks of petrified wood, and as she watches, the stone metamorphoses back into living wood: ‘there was a fine hair on the stone, like a plant’s roots. When she touched them they quivered. The stickiness remained on her fingers. Tasting it, she discovered it to be sap. … the walls were alive with branches, running over the stone like veins.’15 The stone-walled room turns into an animated woodscape that surrounds and encloses her:
She became caged in wood. A gentle touch on her cheek, then her arm. Fingers ran through her hair, stroked her throat, gently probed her mouth … She was lifted, turned, twisted and absorbed. In the preternatural green light she watched oak and elm slide into vision, growing at a fantastic pace, their branches reaching, entwining. Hornbeam moved as smoothly as a snake, creeper twisted, ivy writhed about the mossy bark, reaching toward her, its soft and furry touch tickling as it wound about her skin.16
At first the tree-embrace is exploratory, even protective, but then the experience turns violent. Tallis is pierced, impaled, filled, and finally torn apart from within by a monstrously growing branch. In this nightmare passage, Holdstock plays with plant-time, as in time-lapse photography speeding up the slow-to-humans pace of phytological growth, accelerating the dynamic extension of the branch from budding to leafing, and graphically imagining the material power of hard wood over the soft animal body – a contrast that echoes Myrrha’s agonising experience of arboreal transformation. The branch that penetrates Tallis’s body horrifically expands within her until it emerges from her mouth, divides, twists around, and crushes her skull:
She stretched open her mouth, screamed, then spewed out the great twisting branch. It came like a hard, brown snake. It flowed from her. It divided in two, then curled back on each side of her head, bursting into bud, then leaf, to wrap around her skull. Her lips split, her jaw cracked as the branch thickened, then was still.17
Part ruptured human corpse, part living tree, Tallis remains suspended in the forest across unmeasured time, her bones rotting and flesh decaying. Only ‘the impression of her face’ remains on the branch that has absorbed her, and she eventually fuses with the entire composite being that is Mythago Wood. Yet throughout this time, she feels something distinctive fluttering within her: she is pregnant. Decades or centuries later, as the wood that has absorbed her rots, Tallis gives birth to birds: ‘the bark opened and the hardwood below parted like a wound. The black birds struggled out, a thousand of them, bright-eyed, bright-beaked, anxious to find carrion.’18 These are the birds that on her first encounter with the other world she had disturbed from the corpse of the man who would eventually become her lover; the temporal rupture she made then has now circled back to its origin through her own strange shamanic gestation.
Tallis-as-tree’s cross-species metamorphoses continue through millennia: a Neolithic-era boy makes a marker of her for his grandmother’s grave. The family burns her to honour their dead, and now as charcoal, another transformation of wood’s material forms, Tallis fuses with a female tree-being, one of a pack of male and female Holly-jacks, terrifying versions of the Green Man myth. When Holly-Tallis encounters her (future) self in human form, neither recognises the other, even as the human Tallis watches her tree self mate with another tree-creature. Impregnated, Holly-Tallis gives birth to birds, and then, looped back into the temporal moment shared with her human self, watches the scene I have described in which Tallis is enclosed, then torn apart and absorbed by the fort-turned-wood-cage, which then turns back into stone.
Later, now an indescribably old woman with hands like ‘gnarled wood’, Tallis encounters a mythago who has researched the timescapes of the Wood. 19 In an epiphanic realisation, she understands that she had been able to travel back and forth from Lavondyss because she was inhabiting plural temporalities: ‘Even as I was going to the realm, I was coming home … You said, to travel to the unknown region is often to travel home. I would be journeying in both directions.’20
Or, to put it another way, ‘She had haunted herself all her life.’21 As Tallis-Grandmother-Totem, she became the ‘spirit of the oak’, the ‘Old Silent Tree’ and the ‘Leaf-Mother’ to whom the Neolithic boy prays.22 At last she realises that the boy is the mythago of her missing half-brother Harry, that she has found and released him, and that as a result, ‘I had made the mythago of my own journey home.’23 Lavondyss closes with Tallis’s return as her childhood self to her home on the edge of Ryhope Wood, where her father has been waiting for her. Yet if this return suggests the stable arc of the quest structure, its temporal position remains plural in relation to the extended Ryhope Wood series, which, like Tallis, is still ‘journeying in both directions’. Lavondyss’s coda, set in the prehistoric deep past of the Wood, shows a young boy finding Tallis’s shamanic masks and planning to cross into the Ryhope Wood of the future.
What to make of Tallis’s arc from child-maiden to mother to crone? On the one hand, her sexualised fusion with the Wood can be seen as a feminine sexual cycle ‘naturally’ fulfilled by nubility and motherhood before accession to the compensatory wisdom of the old woman – affirming the linear temporality of reproductive futurism. Yet while Tallis apparently has children with her lover, they don’t seem to survive, and her sexuality is represented only in the Holly-Tallis tree-form. We see her give birth not to human babies but to preternatural birds. To sum up Lavondyss’s plot as a conventional affirmation that biology is destiny does not address the complex other-than-human models of reproduction that appear throughout the dizzyingly recu
rsive timecycles of Holdstock’s characters – human, quasi-human, and other-than-human. The science-fiction critic John Clute rightly calls the closing chapters of Lavondyss ‘superbly deranging and intense’, and I suggest that its most powerful effects emerge out of how Holdstock signals time’s disruption through strange reproduction, first materialising temporality and then showing its violent dislocations through Tallis’s alternative parturitions.24
The Vegetarian: the Innocent Reproduction of Plant-Soul
‘I believe that humans should be plants’.
Plants in Science Fiction Page 14