Table of Contents

- Anna Kérchy

Introduction

- Kathleen McCracken

‘For Us To Live A Star Must Die’

- Enikő Bollobás

The Fantastic as Performative:Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce Performing the Unreal

- Kendra Reynolds

“We’re All The Same, Under The Skin”: Michel Faber’s Ecofeminist Web of Equality

- Éva Federmayer

The Genesis of the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

- Gergely Nagy

A God Like the Animals: the Mythological Subject in Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune

- Daniel Nyikos

“Growing grey and brittle”: The Horror of Abjection in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”

- Péter Kristóf Makai

“One sentence disguising a multitude of horrors”: Humankind Sentenced to Life in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy

- András Molnár

“Everything Was Crawling within Itself”: Posthumanism in the New Weird Stuff of Thomas Ligotti’s Short Fiction

- Florian Zitzelsberger

“No one can sing who has smog in his throat”: Voices of Environmentalism and Ecological Awareness in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax

- Chengcheng You

Picturing a Posthuman Identity: Personhood, Affect and Companionship Ethics in Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing

- András Fodor

Space or place? Posthumanist Revisions of Absence and Presence in China Miéville’s The City and The City

- Korinna Csetényi

“The monsters are us”: Mad Scientists and Mutated Beasts in Contemporary Natural Horror Fiction

- Edit Újvári

The Iconographic Motif of the Hellmouth, the Man-Eating Beast and Giger’s Alien Figure

- Alina Gabriela Mihalache

Rhinos Go on Stage: Animal Allegory Behind and Beyond the Iron Curtain

- András Bernáth

The Challenge of the Old Mole:A Key Problem in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Its Reception

- Contributors’ biographies

- Notes

POSTHUMANISM IN FANTASTIC FICTION

Edited by

Anna Kérchy

c 2018 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

General editors: Réka M. Cristian & Zoltán Dragon

c Anna Kérchy

ISBN: 978-615-5423-47-5 (.mobi); 978-615-5423-46-8 (.epub);

978-615-5423-45-1 (PoD)

Cover image: Zsófia Jakab. Swan Maiden. Oil on canvas. 50 x 70 cm, 2016.

Book design: Zoltán Dragon

AMERICANA eBooks is a division of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies,

University of Szeged, Hungary.

http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu

C

This book is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 – Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licene. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.hu

ANNA KÉRCHY

INTRODUCTION

Posthumanism in Fantastic Fiction is a collection of interdisciplinary studies by established and emerging international scholars devoted to the discussion of literary redefinitions of the human subject’s place in the world, with a focus on fantasies which challenge anthropocentric epistemology and Cartesian dualism to redraw the boundaries between the human, the animal, the technological, the natural environment, and the ‘inanimate’ object world. Uniquely, the present volume of the Americana e-book series is published simultaneously with a special issue of Americana e-journal that explores a similar theme under the title Interspecies Dialogues in Postmillennial Filmic Fantasies. As the editor of both publications, I heartily recommend these twin-texts to the attention of all interested readers.

In both volumes, interdisciplinary non-anthropocentric enquiries map the place of animals, plants, things, and machines in the fantastic imagination with the aim to rethink the notions of humanity, personhood, or agency inclusive of non-human life forms and non-living things. The aim is to understand animals, plants, and other creatures of the non-anthropoid natural lifeworld or object-reality both as symbolically-charged topoi upon whom human bêtises, anxieties, and desires are projected in fictionalized forms, and ‘beings-in-themselves’ independent of the human knowledge produced about them. We seek to explore how interspecies dialogues can create egalitarian relations between humans and all living beings who have been posited on the marginalized, stigmatized pole of the nature-culture divide, as Donna Haraway (2007) opined. Following Jacques Derrida (2002) we explore how interactions with an animal existence empty of textual traces affect the speaking human subject through trans/verbal means, and celebrate with Michael Marder (2013) plants’ unique capacity to deconstruct human metaphysics by undoing binary oppositions such as self and other, body and soul, life and death, surface and depth, the one and the many. Some essays tackle what Jane Bennett (2010) means by the notion of “thing power,” and insist on the materiality of the human and the animation of matter always already pulsing with life, ready to “produce effects dramatic and subtle,” making a difference in the web of interrelationships constituting our shared enworlded existence. The articles combine methodological apparatuses and theoretical insights of critical animal-, plant-, thing- studies and posthumanist philosophy with literary theories of the fantastic narrative mode to scrutinize an impressive range of literary fantasy subgenres including postmodern science-fiction dystopia, ecohorror, mythopoeia, (new) weird fiction, environmentalist picturebook, and proto-modern ghost story.

Ideas related to alterity, abjection, altruism, mimicry, metamorphosis, violence, vulnerability, and intimacy are problematized beyond the humanist parameters to reframe perspectives on strangeness and domestication, humanism and bestiality, subjectivity and objectification. We explore both the symbolic legacy, the psychic-, material- reality and the performative powers of non-human entities to ask how representations of animals/plants/things shape our understanding of humans, and speculate how non-human entities may ‘experience’ humans. We venture to think in terms of a posthumanist identity politics while we scrutinize how animals/plants/things/machines allow us to address metaphysical, philosophical, ethical, legal, technological concerns.

Enikő Bollobás studies ontological uncertainty, an ultimate experience of posthumanism’s cultural Zeitgeist, as a narratological device, a rhetorical effect produced by the systematic blurring of the boundaries between the real and the fantastic, categories which surface as intertwined and undistinguishable because both of them prove to be performative constructs. Parallel readings of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger (1898/1916) and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) justify philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s claim about “the literature of the impossible” creating alternative realities solely by the power of language, allowing the “irreality function” to liberate humans from the burden of having to adapt their selves to reality, and from constituting themselves as a reality. Bollobás’ reading of the fantastic performative agency invites a comparison with Karen Barad’s posthumanist reinterpretation of performativity that understands matter in terms of intra-activity and regards “agency” not as a human privilege but rather the “enactment of iterative changes” across macro/microscopic levels of matter (2003, 826).

Kendra Reynolds traces the “ecofeminist web of equality” grounded in the interconnectivity of companion species in Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin (2000) with the aim to highlight how a “strategic essentialist” identification of Women and Nature can function as a liberatory means to explore an alternative (empathic, spiritualistic) consciousness beyond the rationalism that upholds oppressive frameworks. The novel breaks down patriarchy’s dualistic hegemonic structure constructed to rationalize the subordination of women, non-human animals, and the natural landscape. The heroine is an extraterrestrial surgically trapped inside a female human body, whose exploitation as a woman is linked to the abuse of “vodsels” (animals to the protagonist but humans to us) at an alien meat factory. After the darkly satirical disruption of the human/animal binary, the tragic but liberating conclusion ends with an ecospiritualist epiphany about the equality of all things as small but essential players in nature’s grandiose design.

Éva Federmayer’s ecocritical interpretation of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) explores how the interactions of the human and the non-human spheres in the novel create a storyworld in which characters operate according to the logic of the historically- and ecologically-inscribed narrative space, as configurations of the Anthropocene, that is as agents of a larger story of human animals. Federmayer argues that notions of the wild and wilderness are reconsidered in this revisiting of the “fall from Eden” story set in colonial America transitioning to black slavery, with an eye to the relationship between the gendered human animal and her/his natural environment endowed with the role of an actant in the unfolding of dramas shaped by the delicate balance of human-to-non-human interdependence and cooperation or the lack thereof. The article concludes that A Mercy “intimates that the prospect of earthly survival and well-being is staked on a new relationship with humans and non-humans, that of radical coexistence with the stranger.”

Gergely Nagy’s analysis of “a god like the animals” and the mythological subject in Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune (1981) argues that the sci-fi classic Dune books use theology not as the narrative device of “magic,” but as a discourse of culture that molds subjects but can also be manipulated by charismatic political-, religious leaders. Leto II becomes the infamous “God Emperor” by entering into a symbiotic relationship with the small “sandtrout” of Arrakis, who slowly dissolve his human form, turning it into a sandworm (the only source of spice, and the symbols of the ultimate deity in the native religion). Hence, a human character using the discourse of the sacred undergoes a humanimal transformation to gain a “multiple subjectivity” by changing the (natural) evolutionary scale, and eventually grows to perform the functions of deities. The human-sandworm hybrid Leto’s animal body is central in his representation as a theological centre.

Daniel Nyikos studies weird fiction, a genre permeated by an inexplicable dread provoked by the suspension or defeat of fixed laws of Nature, focusing on the horror of abjection in a seminal text by H. P. Lovecraft, the master of weird fiction. He argues that in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927) the weird tale’s protagonist, a non-human material that defies all human categories and changes all things it touches to brittle, grey matter comes to represent the blurring of the essential divisions between animate and inanimate, between human and animal and plant, between understanding and ignorance. With the breaking down of the cognitive categories and the ideological boundaries shaping the world as we understand it, human subjects experience a troubling abjectification in Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical sense. The disintegration of the bodies afflicted by this designifying entity from beyond our world coincides with the shattering of readers’ conventional strategies of meaning formation.

Péter Kristóf Makai adopts Timothy Morton’s (2007) dark ecological notion of the mesh denoting the infinite connections and infinitesimal differences of all living and non-living things to demonstrate how the genre of New Weird fiction invites us to radically reshuffle our notions of temporality, agency, and the biosphere. He argues that Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) emblematizes a current impasse in our thinking at a time of a postmillennial epistemological crisis when hyperobjects like climate change and the resulting environmental disasters take a terrible toll on the human mind stuck in an evolutionary paradigm that is incapable of dealing with the complexities of chaotic phenomena, and urges us to consider “thinking-with(in)-the-mesh,” an alien mode of cognition we may adapt to in due course.

András Molnár opines that the increasing popularity of new weird fiction can be explained by contemporary horror writers’ strategic recycling of Lovecraft’s classic blending of supernatural, mythical, and scientific tropes with central themes of transgressing taboos and challenging natural categories, while confronting the Uncanny unimaginable. After an overview of Lovecraft’s rise to prominence, and a catalogue of the major research trends of Lovecraft-studies, he analyzes Thomas Ligotti’s seminal new weird short story “Nethescurial” (1991). The paper argues that Ligotti’s fantasy text lends itself easily to a posthumanist reading, as it describes a world governed by a nonhuman agency very similar to the “thing-power” explained by Jane Bennett’s philosophical views on object oriented ontology.

András Fodor adopts Patricia García’s theoretical distinction between “place” and “space” to explore posthumanist revisions of fantastic topographical and narratological transgressions in China Miéville’s novel The City and The City (2009), a hybrid fusion of weird fiction, urban fantasy, and noir police procedural. The story takes place in a world where two cities share the same geographical area but are perceived by their citizens as different states with individual cultures and mutually incompatible existences. Their separation is guaranteed by a liminal realm and secret power structure called Breach, a Foucauldian heterotopic region located both in-between and within the two cities, a tertiary ‘inside-outside,’ a ‘cross-hatched area’ where cities overlap so that places appear in both and citizens exist alongside one another albeit invisible for each other. Throughout the investigation, Inspector Borlú’s notions of borders, spaces, identities, and ideologies come to stand trial until his avatar acquired in Breach gifts him with a posthuman perspective apt to transcend the space/place binary.

Florian Zitzelsberger explores ecopolitical layers of a children’s classic by showing how Dr Seuss’ picturebook The Lorax (1971) becomes a didactic instrument of raising environmental awareness in early readers. He untangles a complex web of intertextual allusions – ranging from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a sixties’ science bestseller denouncing the industrial use of pesticides, to Romantic notions of nature like the material sublime or the Transcendentalist notion of the Oversoul – and argues that Seuss’ story interweaves these to ‘translate’ for juvenile audiences challenging topics like preservation, destruction, extinction, responsibility and activism. Child readers’ engagement is further augmented by self-reflective narrative techniques like metalepsis that dissipates the borders between the intradiegetic and the extratextual world.

Chengcheng You studies the picturing of technologically enhanced posthuman creatures in a comparative analysis of a modern and a postmodern picturebook: Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery (1926) and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2004). In these object-oriented narratives she uncovers similarities, like attributing personhood to a thing to induce child readers’ affective involvement, as well as a symptomatic pictorial shift from romanticizing the machine to celebrating a cyborgized republic grounded in companionship ethics. You opines that these books encapsulate the social-political, and the aesthetical, iconotextual poetical transformative powers of what Kimberley Reynolds called “radical children’s literature” apt to “envisage and engage young readers with possibilities for new worlds and new world orders.”

Korinna Csetényi maps the topoi of mutated/mutating nature and the ‘making of monstrosity’ in contemporary eco-horror fiction. Her case-studies ranging from H.G. Wells’ sci-fi and Stephen King’s horror classics to postmillenial animal horror cinema explore the ambiguous representation of humans as a species endangered by ‘things going wrong’ in their natural environment and as “mad-scientists” who place their hunger for knowledge before their empathy for fellow creatures and are responsible for the imbalance of the natural status quo and/or the impending ecological catastrophe. Nature-horror depicts scientists as over-reacher characters, science is viewed ambiguously as an object of wonder and fear, while animals-turned-monstrous are never depicted as inherently evil creatures but rather serve as a pretext to criticize humans’ irresponsible or immoral behavior.

Edit Újvári offers an iconographic analysis of medieval representations of the Hellmouth with the aim to reveal how biblical, mythological, and folkloric traditions have influenced Swiss surrealist artist Giger’s famous monster, the Alien figure made popular by Ridley Scott’s iconic space horror movie series. Her cultural/art historical overview reveals that the bestial antagonist of a science fiction story set in a posthuman future re-embodies traditional iconographic motifs coupled with postmillenial zooethical dilemmas which underly the archaic instinctual dread of the beast embodied by a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species threatening with invading, devouring, annihilating human life forms.

Alina Gabriela Mihalache compares the different symbolical significations various 1960s’ theatrical stage adaptations behind and beyond the Iron Curtain have attributed to Ionesco’s absurd play Rhinoceros (1959) consensually interpreted as an animal allegory on the de-humanizing, mind-numbing effects of Fascist ideology. While for Americans the zoo story’s non-realistic conflict provided a metadramatic pretext for revisioning archetypes on a modern stage, audience responses in the Communist blocks abounded in subversive political implications while they reinvigorated post-war theatrical language’s anti-establishment tendencies. Mihalache’s comparative interpretation of American, Canadian, Polish, and Romanian stage productions sheds light on individual differences and common points, as the vitality of animal-being ‘pumps blood’ into the abstractness of ideological thinking.

András Bernáth contends that the brief references to animals in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, easy to miss in a play famous for its unique complexity, function not only as rhetorical figures which heighten Shakespeare’s uniquely powerful dramatic poetry, but also as metanarrative devices which highlight the difficulties of interpretation, humans’ ultimate need and inevitable failure to make meaningful distinctions throughout attempts to comprehend earthly and otherworldly realities. The study explains why the “olde Mole,” as Hamlet refers to the Ghost in the Cellarage Scene, presents a major challenge to the protagonist and to readers as a mysterious character invested with spiritual, religious, political significations. The mole – surpassing the figure of the Ghost commonly identified with Hamlet’s father – may represent a demonic spirit from Hell, as well as blindness and ignorance, and eventually a paradoxical knowledge of uncertainty.

Treading in the footsteps of literary theorist Rosemary Jackson (1998), who defended the fantasy genre against charges of escapism and claimed that the border crossings fictionalized in “the literature of subversion” are symptomatic of a particular era’s unconscious drives, desires, dreads, and socio-cultural anxieties, the essays in this collection demonstrate that weird tales of posthuman transition dwell in unfamiliar places but engage with social crisis and cultural angst symptomatic of the crisis of the Anthropocene.

The volume has been enhanced by contemporary art work revisiting the same dilemmas of the anthropocene the corpus of theoretical essays does. Kathleen McCracken’s poem, “For Us to Live a Star Must Die,” seems to be a perfect motto for a volume on posthumanism and/in human fantasy. It encapsulates the idea of the interrelatedness of all beings and things on a planetry scale, foregrounding the intersections of the personal, the political, and the ecological dimensions, where we stand united by the collective experience of entropy and empathy. Zsófia Jakab’s painting, a visionary evocation of fairy-tale metamorphosis, portrays a Swan Maiden fused in an embrace with the skeletal remains of a bird, fading back into or surfacing from a foggy landscape that might have been called into being in her/their dreams. It is difficult to tell apart the animate from the inanimate or the figure from the background, to draw clearcut boundaries between the human, the animal, and the landscape, all fleshy white –awaiting to be filled with meanings or totally indifferent to interpretive consciousness’ creative endeavours… Both artists have kindly offered permission to reproduce their work in the present collection.[1]

With these thoughts in mind, I wish to thank editors-in-chief Réka Cristian and Zoltán Dragon for encouraging me to simultaneously proceed with the e-journal and the e-book project. I am especially grateful to Zoltán Dragon for technologically providing the framework and the space for the material (and for sharing his inspirational photographs on Facebook). I wish to express my gratitude to Daniel Nyikos for his invaluable help with the copy-editing. Special thanks go to my animal companions, Jellybean the rabbit who relentlessly chewed on my computer cable during the editorial process, Onegin the cat whose grin shall stay forever behind, and a flock of chattering parrots who make phone conversations ever so difficult but also brighten up my days.

WORKS CITED

Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.“ Signs. 28.3. 801-831.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The animal that therefore I am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2 (Winter): 369-418.

Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jackson, Rosemary. 1998. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge.

Jakab, Zsófia. Artist’s Website. www.cargocollective.com/melankolia

Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.

McCracken, Kathleen. 2015. Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New & Selected Poems. 1978-2014. Duple autorretrato com espelho: Poems novos & selecionados. 1978-2014. Trans. José Roberto O´Shea. São Paulo: Editora Ex Machina.

Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

KATHLEEN MCCRACKEN

‘FOR US TO LIVE A STAR MUST DIE’

He might be right, the English physicist.

So much luminous intelligence

such exuberant good looks

seem hard to argue with

but what if he’s missed the point

of time’s arrow and its tendency to chaos,

all that down to the ground sound

evidence the planet’s earthworks

are bent on listing, tilting

drifting westward into sandflats?

What if none of it’s about

straight lines

and my father who died last year

on the cusp of summer

the brightest solstice day in history

(who we buried under lilies

his breast pocket a small nest

where our cut hair

brushes one last talisman

a pewter biplane, circa 1929)

could it be that he’s not dead at all

but moving through me faster

than the measured light that’s said

to travel ever outbound?

And when you kiss the crush

of strawberries from my lips

is it something more than carbon

something closer to the circulating

fleet and living heat of stars

you taste?

ENIKŐ BOLLOBÁS

THE FANTASTIC AS PERFORMATIVE:

MARK TWAIN AND AMBROSE BIERCE PERFORMING THE UNREAL

In Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” alternative realities are created solely by the power of language. The real and the unreal, whether fantastic or imagined, are intertwined and undistinguishable because both are performative constructs. Since the real is as much created as is the fantastic (as in the case of The Mysterious Stranger) and the fantastic is as real as the reality of here and now (as in the case of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), the boundaries between the real and the fantastic are regularly transgressed with ease to and fro, allowing for an ontological instability, which makes these late 19th century-early 20th century texts very modern.

Both texts are works of fantasy, satisfying the most important requirements of the genre. They both belong in the realm of the literature of the impossible, offering, as Gary Wolfe writes of the fantastic, “a clean break with reality; settings and characters may be analogous with the ‘real’ world, […] but the rules that govern fantasy worlds are not necessarily consistent with our notion of reality” (72). Both are moved by what Gaston Bachelard names the “irreality function”: the function that liberates the person from having to adapt ourselves to reality, from constituting ourselves as a reality” (13-14). A Tolkienian “Secondary “World” is created in both texts, complete with its own laws different from those of the real world; but inside, what is related “is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world” (37). As such, they both offer a break with the acknowledged order. In fact, such a break happens in connection with both worlds, the real and the unreal or fantastic alike, invoking, as Brian Attenbery claims, “wonder by making the impossible seem familiar and the familiar new and strange” (3). This sense of wonder permeates both texts in the form of the uncertainty (Todorov 25), hesitation (Todorov 44), and astonishment (Rabkin 5) of protagonists and readers alike: the characters as well as the reader wonder whether the experience is caused by an illusion of the senses, or the “apparently supernatural event” (Todorov 25) is indeed happening.

Yet not only are these texts fantasies, or “game[s] of the impossible,” as W.R. Irwin famously calls the fantastic (qtd. in Fredericks 37), but are language games as well, games with their own rules, accepted by all involved. As such, they exhibit traits of the performative, the type which I call logocentric or strong performative and the one I label discursive.

Logocentrism is the term which Jacques Derrida uses for the position that the stability of language—as well as systems of thought in general—rests on external anchors: the authority of the transcendental signified (“God”), or the signified which pre-exists, and has an independent existence from, the signifier. Identifying logocentrism as “the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for [the] signified” (1976, 49) permeating Western thought, Derrida claims that it posits a “necessity of relationship between . . . signifiers and signified . . . between the order of phonic signifiers and the content of the signifieds” (44). Applied to the performative, this logocentric way of thinking allows for words to indeed make present, by bringing about, the signified evoked by the performative utterance. In this case the performative will indeed be validated from the outside: by its power to bring about “things” external to language—things “out there.”

The foundational moment of logocentrism, when God creates by the logos, exploits performative power, the power of the word, in a rather obvious manner. Tying the signifier to the signified, the word brings about presence in the world “out there.” Indeed, the narrative of origin related at the very beginning of Genesis abounds in instances when words make things, and saying and doing are one: “Let there be light,”[2] “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,” or “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen. 1: 3, 6, 26). This “Ur-performative” is evoked emphatically at the beginning of the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1: 1). Commonly referred to as word magic or the power of words, and variably termed in speech act theory as illocutionary acts (108), acts of “originary performativity” (Derrida 1994, 36–37), “linguistic magic” (Fotion 51), or “performative sorcery” (Loxley 51), these are cases with a strong performative force, where the word as a vehicle of creation is used to produce some new reality. Man’s whole existence rests on the power of God’s word: “man lives from every word that proceeds from the mouth of the lord” (Deut. 8:3).

God creates the world by virtue of his own agency; as the Almighty, he is the absolute Agent or Subject, whose position in the sentence is fixed by Divine Law. This Law, conveyed in the Decalogos or Decalogue and reinscribed in subsequent laws, forbids man to refer to Him by the name or give his visual representation. When Moses asks his name, he says, “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:14) (in other translations, “I AM THAT I AM”). And when Moses rephrases his question, asking really for a nominal form to be used in the object position in a sentence, God replies, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:14). In other words, there is no way to put God in the object position: his name cannot be referred to with a nominal, only by reiterating his subjecthood or self-existence, “I AM.” In this text, it is indeed, as Émile Benveniste claims of subjectivity in general, “in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality which is that of the being” (729; emphasis in original). God’s subjectivity is truly a property of language: “‘[e]go’ is he who says ‘ego’” (729; emphasis in original). In other words: God’s ego comes about discursively and performatively: by uttering the performative ego: “I AM.” This self-performing constitutes the kind of performativity different from the logocentric one: where words do not bring about things but other words, or discourse, and turn the utterer of the words into a subject with agency, who is capable of making things (if only within the realm of discourse).

Both types of performative participate in bringing about the fantastic in the two texts: the strong and the discursive types alike. What the boys experience as real in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger is created in a logocentric fashion: by word and will. As such, this text could be read as an instance of strong performativity: Satan makes clay figures, which then come to life. But by making clay figures come to life, Satan constructs himself as creator too, as an extended arm of the Almighty. Moreover, in the final twist to the story, Satan the deconstructor moves the events into mere discourse when admitting to the boys that all this is a dream. Yet here he constructs himself as an even more powerful creator and knower, an agent in the discourse of dreams.

Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” could also be read as an instance of strong performativity: Farquhar sets himself free by the power of his will. His self-construction, however, occurs in discourse as well: it is by imagining his return home that he constructs himself as a free man. In the final twist added to this story, the events are here moved into the discourse of dream as the dying man imagines his escape.

PERFORMING CULTURAL SUBJUNCTIVITY IN MARK TWAIN’S THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

Set in Austria in 1702 and narrated by the young boy Theodor Fischer, Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger recounts the adventures and miracles, as well as trials, of the mysterious visit of an angel called Satan. Satan becomes the companion and idol of Theodor, provoking in the boy a passionate devotion he had not known earlier. Satan is a magical phenomenon. He seems to “prove” in so many ways that where he comes from is indeed that other world, best understood as a duplicate of this one. He tells about life in heaven in very human terms when, for example, he describes the nursery he grew up in together with the other angels. Satan gives a dramatic performance of his supernatural powers when, in order to convince the boys about the true nature of the human race, he sets up his “theatre” (137) where he shows them—“with a thought” (134)—what has happened since the Garden of Eden. “To kill,” he says, “being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history, but only the Christian Civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of” (137). He turns lives around, but usually not for what the boys would consider the better. He makes old Wilhelm “happy” by taking his sanity away (“No sane man can be happy, for him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is” [164]), while at another time he changes the “life-scheme” of their friend Fischer, whereby he will live to be ninety—except now he will go to hell, not heaven (131). Most of all, he is a man of contradictions. On the one hand, he is a Christ-like figure—he evokes the youthful Jesus of Apocrypha when making clay birds come alive (see Gibson 16) or when the crowd, which demands that Satan be killed (“Kill him, kill him!”), is pacified by the argument, “What is the use to kill the boy. . . . whatever power he has, he gets from his master” (295). On the other hand, he conveys the darkest vision possible of the pitiful, limited, trivial human race. He compares the difference between the human being and himself to the “difference between a drop of water and the sea, a rushlight and the sun, the difference between the infinitely trivial and the infinitely sublime!” (319). This difference, he insists, results from the fact that only the race he belongs to is capable of truly creating something out of nothing—out of thought. By the performative power of logos, that is.

With my race it is different; we have no limits of any kind, we comprehend all things. . . . A man originates nothing in his head, he merely observes exterior things, and combines them in his head—puts several observed things together and draws a conclusion. His mind is merely a machine, that is all. . . . a man’s mind cannot create—a god’s can, and my race can. This is the difference. We need no contributed materials, we create them—out of thought. All things that exist were made out of thought—and out of nothing else. (331–333; emphasis in original)

Satan gives ample demonstrations of his the illocutionary force of his strong performative: he reads people’s minds, controls their will, performs miracles of all kinds, becomes visible or invisible as he pleases (and allows the boys to borrow these powers for some time, too), can thin out like a soap bubble and vanish, makes Duplicates of everyone in the town, and gives illustrated history, psychology, and theology lessons to his friend. Some of these tricks enchant Theodor, others overpower him with utter gloom. Such is, for example, the Assembly of the Dead, which Theodor watches for hours and hours in darkness and empty silence, “as if the world was holding its breath” (401).

This text is a virtuoso performance of boundary crossings; the characters move easily between worlds, events, and people, created or brought about purely by the power of will and word. As a portal-quest fantasy, to apply Farah Mendelsohn’s typology (2 ff.), this piece of short fiction abides by several basic principles of the sub-genre. First, not only is it about transition, but it incorporates two transitions: the first into the world narrated and constructed by Satan, the second into the non-world he presents with the final dénouement. Both transitions are characterized by the denial of “the taken for granted,” the positioning of “both protagonist and reader as naïve,” and the reliance on a “moral universe” (2, 5). As a reversed traveler’s tale, it presents a situation where it is not the protagonist who travels but a traveler arrives to where the protagonist is, who spends time with the protagonist(s). As such, it is a club narrative, complete with an “uninterruptable and incontestable” storyteller (6) in the “role of sage, magician, or guide” (5 ff) and a group of isolated listeners who construct “fantasyland” by accepting what they hear as “received truth” (7). It has two clearly identifiable narrators, Theodor and Satan, where the former is “the narrator of the microcosm (the world within a world),” or the “point of view character,” while the latter is the “narrator of the macrocosm, […] who ‘stories’ the world for us” with “fragments of prophecy” (8).

The narrated events contradict the “ground rules” (Rabkin 7) of the extra-textual world in that angels do not come for leisurely visits to Earth, they do not entertain young boys by showing their tricks, and they are not really called Satan. Here the perspective informed by these ground rules is turned around, reversed, provoking amazement and wonder in the boys. Yet they see no problem accepting the existence of supernatural forces—indeed, they rather see their abstract religious knowledge put into practice by the visitor.

The hesitation which, according to Todorov, “sustains [the] life” of the fantastic (Todorov 31) comes later only, when Satan reveals that all he said earlier is untrue and that all is but a dream. This is the uncanny turn in the story (of “the supernatural explained” [Todorov 41]), where the illocutionary act turns into perlocutionary, provoking hesitation and even astonishment in both character and reader. Not only is it, to use Rabkin’s terminology, “not-expected” or “dis-expected,” but actually, indeed, “anti-expected” (8-10), which is the true marker of the fantastic. This reversal is structural in the sense that here it is perspective that changes: not only are the boys’ (religious) beliefs shaken, but their whole existence is doubted. In other words, Satan’s reversal of perspective brings about not only an epistemological but an ontological uncertainty. As he tells the boys when saying goodbye,

“Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”

“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”

“And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence, I am but a dream—your dream, creature of your imagination. (403–405)

This is the uncanny “conclusion” to the book, whereby Twain performs the double gesture of withdrawing both the certainty of this world and the promise of the other. Nothing can be taken for granted, even though both worlds were shown to and ascertained by the senses—“no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell” (405).

Satan acts in the spirit of what is known in philosophy as “Moore’s paradox,” when, after making a most credible reality for the boy, he withdraws his own belief in it. After the model of the paradox described by the English philosopher G. E. Moore, “The cat is on the mat but I do not believe it is” (qtd. in Loxley 36), Satan could be saying, “I have created a world for you, my friends, using my powers as a supernatural being, but I do not believe I have it, or that it is a world, or indeed that I am a supernatural being.” In the game of make-believe he first suspends the “as if” of imagination, only to more shockingly re-impose it in the conclusion of the story. With this gesture of Satan, Mark Twain recalls the waving and then breaking of the wand of another grand magician, Shakespeare, through Prospero in The Tempest, saying:

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with sleep. (IV, 1)

The revels are ended for Twain too; his actors were also all spirits, who melted into thin air. Life here too is “rounded with sleep.”

Satan is, then, engaged in the “as if” language game of imagining and pretending, a game, to use Victor Turner’s phrase, of the “subjunctive mood,” concerned with “wish, desire, possibility or hypothesis” (1982, 83) Indeed, he presents a vision best captured as subjunctive cultural performance that toys with the possibility of alternative worlds created by performative powers. The function of his performance, as is the function of all performances of cultural subjunctivity according to Turner, is to provide the individuals “with passage from one basic human state or status . . . to another” (1984, 21). Satan’s liminal game of make-believe does this crossing of thresholds twice, actually: first when the border between natural and supernatural dimensions is crossed (when little people are created, for example) and second when the reality of the real is questioned at the end.

According to Mark Twain’s conclusion, then, the two worlds are alike in being equally dreamed, imagined, or, we could say, performatively constructed: what was considered real also belongs to the unreal. Linguistically and philosophically, they show little difference: reference is such that language does not differentiate between the real and the unreal.

It is here that Twain abandons the strong performative as an illocutionary act, trading it for the perlocutionary act of bringing about amazement, wonder, and shock. This shock comes from the recognition that humankind is locked into a discourse, the discourse of dream. As such, this type of performativity is discursive, where words will only make texts, or other discursive worlds.

For up to this point, the real and the unreal are positioned as polar opposites, making the transfer from one to the other through metalepsis. But this seeming metalepsis will turn out to be intextexuality: the shift between two textual worlds. As a particular case of intertextuality, both worlds prove to be fictional and textual; thus the metaleptic leap that the boys believe they can take will be no more than an intertextual leap from one to another fictional world. Ultimately, reality loses its ontological grounding: it turns out that it is this physical world that does not exist, or rather that it has been has been swallowed by or collapsed into the constructed-performed world of dream and imagination.

Rorty’s test concerning the ability of being referred to (1982, 117) can be performed on both the real world and the unreal: the world discursively constructed from thought and language. Although the world created by a fictional character, by Satan/Satan in this instance, is at least two removes away from the reader’s immediate reality; claims about all three levels can be equally “true.” To the skeptic’s question posed by Rorty—“how would it be different if everything were a dream? How would it be different if it were all made up? How would it be different if there were nothing there to be represented?” (1982, 129)—Mark Twain gives an answer much like Rorty: it would not be (is not) different. Truth is discursively constructed, constructed in language and by language (“truth cannot be out there” [1982, 5]): “whether a sentence has sense,” Rorty claims, “may be dependent upon whether another sentence is true” (1982, 129). In other words, truth is not validated by external reality—for, indeed, there is nothing outside the text. Only the text exists for Twain too: the creative faculty, the dream (“and you the maker of it” [405]). Hence the imperative: “Dream other dreams, and better!” (404).

While the claim that the mind makes the real is wholly familiar in the symbolist tradition, here in The Mysterious Stranger it is not a poetic artifact that the mind makes, but reality itself. Yet this is a reality within the mind, a reality that is part of the mind, or, as J. Hillis Miller puts it in connection with Wallace Stevens, a reality which is “the figment of the mind” (256). Discursive performativity functions within the mind, bringing about such figments that give the illusion of reality only, but are actually unreal.

THE UNREALITY OF DEATH PERFORMED IN AMBROSE BIERCE’S “AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE”

Bierce’s most popular piece, the Civil War story written in 1891, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” presents elaborate boundary crossings between the “reality” of the fictional characters and the imagined world of the protagonist, now two removes away from what Rorty calls our “plain ordinary spatio-temporal existence” (1982, 118). Here borders between lived and imagined, outer and inner are repeatedly transgressed, while internal monologue is presented as the narration of external events. I see the piece as a special case of descriptive pause, where the object of description is purely internal. As the portrayal of a dying man’s last moments, it is also an early example of psychological realism, offering, unbeknownst to the reader until the very end, a narrative transition between life and death. In addition, it can be considered a critique of gendered and racialized cultural spheres.

An Alabama planter who is a civilian at war-time, Peyton Farquhar lives between the social spheres of the war and women of the home; but his in-betweenness ends as he becomes feminized when approaching the home through fantasy and imagination. Moreover, his last moments are extended into an elaborate escape narrative reversing the traditional racialized roles of master and slave. Running for his life, Farquhar, the Southern white planter, is now put into the position of the black slave, going through the same experience as the escaping slaves. First he falls victim to the scheming of the Northern scout, later he is hunted down—if only in his imagination—by the enemy: in both cases he is made into an object, whose body is foregrounded. In between these two series of objectification and corporealization, he makes himself into a subject who takes control—if only, again, in his imagination.

Depicting his last moments while being executed by the Yankees, the narrative follows Farquhar’s imaginary escape and return home, to his wife and plantation, with moments of pain and suffering finally leading to a few idyllic moments, which abruptly end in death. The story is a feat of fantasy fiction, presenting both the real of the fictional narrative and the level above this fantasized reality in naturalistic detail.

As an immersive fantasy, to apply Mendelsohn’s typology again (59 ff.), Bierce’s story also “presents the fantastic without comment as the norm for both the protagonist and for the reader: we sit on the protagonist’s shoulder and while we have access to his eyes and ears, we are not provided with an explanatory narrative” (xx). Mendelsohn calls this feature of the immersive fantasy “syntactic bootstrapping,” the “reversal of information feed—show first, tell later” (83). We find here an “irony of mimesis,” where the fantasy is “sealed”: “it cannot, within the confines of the story, be questioned” (xx). In this fantasy world, “no magic occurs” (xxi), for “once the fantasy becomes assumed, it acquires a scientific cohesion all of its own” (xx). The extended world built in an immersive fantasy is therefore totally plausible, livable, taken for granted, one whose fantastic quality is achieved through perspective. “The point of world-building is to create something that can be existed in,” Mendelsohn writes (71).

Bierce proves himself a true naturalist in his very matter-of-fact description of the scene of execution, describing the preparations and the whole machinery of war in a detached voice.

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. (33)

The man “engaged in being hanged,” the corporealized patient suffering these preparations, is the object of narrative as well as visual attention; the narrative voice shows no emotions, only admits that the man did not look like a villain:

He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. (34)

Turning to the man to be executed, the narration ceases to focus on external events but enters the mind of the protagonist. This is the moment when—we recognize later—the real is replaced by the unreal. We follow Farquhar’s gaze from his seeing position wandering “to the swirling water of the stream,” the “piece of dancing driftwood [that] caught his attention,” and finally to his thoughts fixed upon his wife and children (34). Indeed, this is where the real story begins, after the sergeant steps aside—and after the last detour giving the reader the background of how Farquhar was tricked by the Northern scout.

In section III we are finally taken inside Farquhar’s mind, and death will be portrayed as a spiritual process, a movement in time in several stages. Slowly he will gain control to set himself free and get away from the scene of execution. His power of thought is restored. Farquhar is able to give meaning to what he feels. Perception is becoming inner, registering psychological processes. This is followed by having first his vision restored and then coming into a full possession of his senses. Now, as one of the finest passages indicates, his perception is heightened.

He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf—saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass . . . A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water. (37–38)

He notices the soldiers who, from his perspective, look grotesque. Efforts are multiplied on both sides: he sees and feels everything better as they start shooting at him. Finally, he manages to escape, thrown out of the stream by a vortex. Taking in all the physical sensations around him, and weeping in delight, he feels as if he was born again—probably into another world where a “strange, roseate light” shone through the trees “and the wind made in their branches the music of Æolian harps” (39). Now he springs to his feet, and his last moments before death follow the trajectory of an escape narrative, except here it is the white planter who is being hunted, not the slave. In addition, his desire for the home seems to act as a marker of femininity, appropriated by the man seeking refuge in the feminine sphere. In the final stage of his flight, after crossing all the possible boundaries—social, psychological, historical, as well as those of gender and race—the inner and the outer suddenly coincide as his neck is broken and he dies.

Two parallel worlds are presented here: the possible world, in which the hero is hanged, and the impossible, into which he escapes through the illocutionary force of the strong performative. The unreal looks as real as the former, with its very ordinary physical location where extraordinary things happen to the hero. Moreover, this world exhibits a high degree of consistency, thus satisfying the requirement of the fantastic posed by Attebery: “reader and writer are committed to maintaining the illusion for the entire course of the fiction” (2). Yet this commitment cannot be interpreted as Tolkien’s “Secondary Belief” (37), for the reader does not yet know that the narrative world is not the primary world actually experienced by the protagonist. This secondary world looks so true that, as Tolkien claims, “it accords with the laws of that [primary] world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside” (37). These two worlds clash because the former is the real, while the latter is the unreal or imagined. However, not even in the latter world do the related events contradict the laws of nature; here “the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described,” as Todorov defines the genre of the uncanny (41).

Until the very end, the reader cannot doubt the truthfulness of the escape narrative; the reader can have no idea that the narration has departed from reality and dived into the mind of the man, since the very same techniques are used for depicting the imagined as for the real. Uncertainty emerges in the reader only because, as the story progresses, certain signals point to the fantastic improbability of the escape narrative. Everything is possible in this world: ducking bullets, diving into a deep river from the gallows, freeing hands and feet from a deadly rope, swimming with fish. This is indeed a world into which heroes of the fantastic want to escape: a world which Rabkin defines as having “no entanglements” (49). Slowly, “from some affective apprehension of the impossible,” as Wolfe puts it (71), or the perlocutionary force of the performative, the reader realizes that we are in the realm of the fantastic, or the realm of the imagination, as brought about performatively.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that both texts exhibit both versions of performativity: the logocentric or strong performative, on the one hand, and the discursive performative, on the other.

Without the surprise twist concluding both stories, both could be read simply as instances of strong performativity: Satan makes clay figures which then come to life, while Farquhar sets himself free by the power of his will. But in the final twist to the Twain piece, when he admits to the boys that all this is a dream, Satan the deconstructor moves the events into mere discourse; at the same time, he constructs himself as a powerful creator of discourse, who is capable of controlling dreams even. In the final twist added to the Bierce story, as Farquhar dies, the events are here too moved into the discourse of dream as the dying man constructs himself into a living man. Recognition is indeed shocking in both cases, and the main reason for this shock lies in the ways these authors play with performativity.

WORKS CITED

Attebery, Brian. 1980. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature—From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Austin, J. L. 1962. How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1971. The Poetics of Reverie—Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Trans. Daniel Russell. Boston: Beacon Press.

Benveniste, Émile. 1986. “Subjectivity in Language.” in Critical Theory Since 1965. eds, Hazard Adams, Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 728–732.

Bierce, Ambrose. 1994. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Civil War Stories. New York: Dover Publications. 33-40.

Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge.

Fotion, Nich. 2000. John Searle. Teddington: Acumen.

Fredericks, S.C. 1978. “Problems of Fantasy.” Science Fiction Studies 5/1: 33-44.

Gibson, William M. 1969. “Introduction.” in Mark Twain. The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. ed. William M. Gibson. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1-34.

Loxley, James. 2007. Performativity. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge.

Mendelsohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Miller, J. Hillis. 1996. Poets of Reality. Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

New Geneva Study Bible: New King James Version. 1995. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Rabkin, Eric S. 1976. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: New York University Press.

Tolkien, J.R.R. 1969. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3-83.

Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

Turner, Victor. 1984. “Liminality and the Performative Genres.” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle. Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. 19-41.

Twain, Mark. 1969. The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. ed. William M. Gibson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolfe, Gary K. 2011. Evaporating Genres. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

KENDRA REYNOLDS

“WE’RE ALL THE SAME, UNDER THE SKIN”: MICHEL FABER’S ECOFEMINIST WEB OF EQUALITY

Despite being coined in the 1970s, ecofeminism still remains an obscure and rare topic in academic discussion in spite of the growing interest in environmental politics and concerns over climate change. This is due to the charges of essentialism hurled at the concept since its inception, with feminists reluctant to embrace the links between women and nature as subordinated entities due to this dualism’s role in upholding women’s inferior status. However, this paper aims to carve out a space for ecofeminism, pointing out instead how literature can embrace this duality of women/nature as a means of liberation rather than disempowerment. Instead of avoiding the link altogether and allowing it to remain unchallenged, this paper highlights how writers such as Michel Faber adopt an ecofeminist standpoint, using literature (and in this case magical realism) as a means to explore and exploit the liberating potential of the essentialist aspects on a symbolic level, rather than holding them up as absolute fact, and to offer an alternative consciousness beyond the rationalism that upholds oppressive frameworks.

An exploration of ecofeminist strands in Faber’s novel Under the Skin (2000) includes a discussion of the breakdown of patriarchy’s dualistic hegemonic structure which it constructs to rationalise the subordination of women, non-human animals, and the natural landscape. Instead, by showing how his non-human heroine’s oppression as a woman is linked to the oppression of “vodsels” (animals to Isserley but humans to us) at the meat factory of Albach Farm, Faber shatters society’s artificial hierarchical order by weaving an ecofeminist web in showing the true interconnectivity of all things. Along with the breakdown of the human/animal binary, Faber also uses spiritual ecofeminist ideas in his depiction of Isserley’s connection to the natural world around her. It is through nature that she is able to get beyond the artificial vodsel (human) body her boss has surgically trapped her inside in order to do her job of capturing unsuspecting vodsel produce on the highways, and that she can gain access to her true nature and selfhood beyond social and physical restrictions. It is this web that ultimately brings the novel to its tragic but liberating conclusion, as it points towards the equality of all things as small but essential players in nature’s grand design. Ultimately, this paper illustrates the role that ecofeminism could play in tackling not just one, but all forms of oppression, whether we be a woman, a plant, or an animal.

THE WOMEN AND NATURE DUALITY: HISTORY AND REPRESENTATION

Women and nature (including non-human animals) have been both linked and exploited for centuries, with the treatment of the two being shaped by the ideologies of different societies according to their shifting values. For example, the scientific revolution caused nature and women to be viewed as passive objects to be controlled, dissected, and understood, whilst the Enlightenment period emphasized the Cartesian mind and body division, resulting in the rationality/culture/male and nature/unruly/female dichotomies. Writing about attitudes towards gender and the environment, Monique M. La Rocque also provides the example of the Decadent period of the late nineteenth-century (in this case focusing on J.K. Huysmans’s 1884 novel A Rebours), stating that it is “fraught with anti-women and anti-nature sentiments” (94). Ecocritic Val Plumwood supplies an apt summation of these problems when she states:

There are a number of striking initial parallels between the treatment of women and that of nature […] For instance the traditional role of both women and nature has been conceived as an instrumental one. Both have been valued in terms of their usefulness to others (e.g. to males in the case of women and to humans in the case of nature) who are taken as valuable in and for themselves. Similarly in both cases there has been an attempt to impose a sharp separation on a natural continuum, in the one case between the characteristics of the sexes, and in the other case between the characteristics of humans and non-human animals, so that the distance between each side is maximized in a polarity. (120)

Unfortunately, this subordination of women and posthuman nature has not changed over time: our society continues to be rife with such ideologies. As Barbara Bennett states:

Violence against nature and violence against animals inevitably leads to violence against women. Animals and women were both once sacred in early societies that believed animals were gods (or sent by gods) and worshipped women for their ability to create life. But once nature loses its sanctity in a society’s mythology – as it has in both our society and the society [Faber] depicts – it becomes easy to abuse and exploit it. (50)

In essence, women, animals, and the natural environment have been historically and similarly oppressed.

Due to the disempowerment of women through their alignment with nature, feminists have generally fought against the linkage of the two in order to combat the naturalisation of female oppression; it has often ‘fated’ them to a subordinate state. As Alaimo points out:

Feminism has long struggled with the historically tenacious entanglement of “woman” and “nature”. Mother earth, earth mothers, natural women, wild women, fertile fields, barren grounds, virgin lands, raped earths, a “woman in the shape of a monster/a monster in the shape of a woman,” the repulsively breeding aliens of horror films – these creatures portray nature as female and women as not exactly human […] European cultures have long imagined nature as feminine. By the sixteenth-century, pastorals depicted nature as mother and bride who could soothe the anxieties of men distraught by the demands of the urban world, comforting them with nurturing, “subordinate”, and “essentially passive” female natures. (2)

Although it will be studied at length later, Faber’s novel depicts this struggle in its heroine Isserley, as she attempts to ‘fit in’ to a male-dominated workspace by rejecting her true nature or femaleness: “It was dawn. The physical world did not exist for her, apart from the ribbon of grey tarmac on which she was driving. Nature was a distraction. She refused to be distracted.” (197) Like feminists, then, Isserley initially creates a severe divide in order to sever herself from nature and its disempowering associations entirely. As Alaimo states:

Given that “woman” has been defined in much of Western thought as that which is mired in “nature,” it is no wonder that feminist theory has struggled to extricate her from this quicksand. By attempting to disentangle “woman” from the web of associations that bind her to “nature,” however, nature is kept at bay – repelled – rather than redefined. It is not only ironic but deeply problematic that the aggressive, intellectual “flight from the feminine” that motivated Cartesian rationalism has been followed by feminist flights from all that Descartes attempted to transcend – “impure” matter, bodies, and nature. The recent rage to purge feminism of all vestiges of “essentialism,” for example, is one of the most striking instances of feminist theory’s flight from nature. Working within rather than against predominant dualisms, many important feminist arguments and concepts necessitate a rigid opposition between nature and culture. (4)

Avoiding nature denies women yet another space and leaves the dangerous misogynistic dualisms to continue existing without critique or challenge. This paper suggests, however, that Faber’s novel works subversively with nature in order to rewrite it too as a powerful and feminist space, liberating not only women but animals and non-human life-forms as well. Nature, in effect, becomes a source of liberation rather than disempowerment. As we shall see, Isserley’s awakening mirrors the shift of feminist thought in recognising the potential that exists for women and animals in embracing and inhabiting the natural world once again: “’It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me’ […] It was almost cruelly poignant but delightful too, the way Amlis seemed to regard her as the custodian of an entire world, as if it belonged to her. Which, perhaps, it did.” (Faber 224 & 239) Hence, as my paper will illustrate, there are clear benefits of, and a necessity for, an ecofeminist perspective within academic discourse, and, most importantly, ecofeminism necessitates the liberation of not only women, but also the subordinated posthuman world.

THE “MOVEMENT TO END ALL FORMS OF OPPRESSION:” ECOFEMINISM’S ORIGINS AND DEFINITIONS

Ecofeminism is still a relatively new and untapped academic field, though, as Greta Gaard notes, “the current interest in ‘place studies’ seems to have pre-empted earlier concerns about bioregionalism and ‘the nature of home’ that have been foundational issues in ecofeminism” (2010). The roots of ecofeminism, however, can be found in the work of French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne, who coined the term in her 1974 book Le Féminisme ou la mort, which was then followed up with Écologie-Féminisme: Révolution ou mutation? in 1978; a book that directly confronted the joint oppression of women and the environment. D’Eaubonne’s main argument hinged on overpopulation and the problematic symbolism of men planting seeds in both women and the earth as a means of claiming ownership over each. Her work coincided with protests in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s in the form of the antimilitarist action movement and protests against nuclear power and weaponry, which consisted largely of female protesters. This in turn initiated the emergence of American ecofeminism in the latter 1980s (Sturgeon 1997).  One of these activists, Ynestra King, even held up ecofeminism as the “third wave of the women’s movement” and, as Sturgeon notes, this indicates “her sense, at one time, that this most recent manifestation of feminist activity was large and vital enough to parallel the first-wave nineteenth-century women’s movement and the second-wave women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s” (Sturgeon 23). Certainly, I contest that ecofeminism is an emerging and prolific trend that many of the feminist theories in both popular culture and literary texts, such as Under the Skin, convey through their use of nature and of their characters’ engagement with the natural world.

Whilst the roots of the theory are relatively clear, finding an adequate definition of ‘ecofeminism’ is more problematic since it defies any rigid classifications. As Catherine Villanueva Gardner attests:

it would be a mistake to begin by trying to state the ecofeminist ethical perspective. Because ecofeminism entails both a feminist and an environmentalist ethic and because it engages in theoretical philosophy analysing issues that are of central practical importance, ecofeminism contains a wide range of diverse thought. Moreover, a search for the perspective implies that there is a single ecofeminist approach or at least one that may be sought. (192)

For the purposes of this paper, however, it is necessary to garner some working definitions of the term itself. It is widely acknowledged that ecofeminism recognises, in addition to the traditional view of the world as anthropocentric (human-centred), that it is also androcentric, defined by Debarati Bandyopadhyay as “putting not all human beings, but man only at the centre of the universe, with nature, women, children and all other life-forms at his disposal” (3). Sturgeon provides the following definition:

Most simply put, ecofeminism is a movement that makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms; more precisely it articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorise injustices based on gender, race, and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment (23).

This plurality of injustices and the fluidity of ecofeminism is all part of its radicalism, in that it is reacting against the simplistic dualisms created by patriarchal culture. In the words of Villanueva Gardner, “our [ecofeminism’s] initial focus must be not on offering a (simplistic) causal account of the connections between ecological destruction and the oppression of women, but on exposing and revising the oppressive conceptual framework that sanctions the joint subordination of women and nature” (192-193). This challenge to the patriarchal framework of binaries and dualistic thought is the most critical and central tenant of Faber’s ecofeminist philosophy. Faber recognises that, in the words of Villanueva Gardner:

A key feature of this conceptual framework [of the subordination of women and nature] is the dualistic classification of reality, with the disjuncts not only being seen as oppositional and exclusive (mind/body, man/woman, human/nature), but as organized on what Elizabeth Dodson Gray calls a spatial metaphor (up/down) with a lesser value attributed to the lower. Thus, body, woman, and nature are put “down” or given a lesser value. Furthermore, the assumption is that the perceived moral superiority of one group over the other justifies the oppression of the “inferior” group. (193)

Not only is patriarchy founded upon this binary system which legitimises the exploitation of those considered to be the subordinate half of the dualism – men over women for example – but our society’s entire framework of power dynamics privileges such a construction of reality, also legitimizing the privileging of culture over nature and humans over non-human animals. Thus, it is important to stress that its expansiveness and complexity means that ecofeminism is not only concerned with women and nature as isolated cases; rather, it recognises and “is also based on, the recognition that these two forms of domination are bound up with class exploitation, racism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism” and, as I argue here, anthropocentrism and speciesism (Gaard & Murphy 3). This means that it has been viewed, “at a conceptual level,” by Karen Warren, as “a movement to end all forms of oppression” (Villanueva Gardner 193).

Yet, despite the promising nature of ecofeminism, it has faced much backlash due to its apparent essentialism, especially from academic feminist theorists. For example, ecofeminism was deliberately excluded from the journal SIGNS, whose editors refused to do a special issue on it (Sturgeon 167). There are certainly key strands of ecofeminist thought that rely on naturalist tendencies. The most prominent is known as spiritual ecofeminism and, as Sturgeon notes, it is a position:

taken by feminists who are interested in constructing resources for a feminist spirituality and who have found these resources in nature-based religions: paganism, witchcraft, goddess worship, and Native American spiritual traditions. Because such nature-based religions historically contain strong images of female power and place female deities as at least equal to male deities, many persons who are searching for a feminist spirituality have felt comfortable with the appellation of “ecofeminist.” (29)

Another idea is that of women being “biologically closer to nature;” for example, the moon being linked to menstrual cycles and spiritual experiences in the wilderness, that make women sensitive to the interconnections of everything in the universe (Sturgeon 29). However, as Sturgeon states, “Essentialism is not a sin nor a permanent mark of unexamined prejudice nor an enduring implication in domination. Though it can certainly have the effect of maintaining positions of privilege, it can also have the effect of producing an ‘oppositional consciousness’,” one that Faber certainly endorses (9). In addition, there is the ecocritical perspective of women being closer to nature simply as a result of their roles in home management, for example, in which they see directly the problems and damage being inflicted upon the environment. This approach counters the essentialism of biological and spiritual ecofeminism and as Val Plumwood notes:

The argument that women have a different relation to nature need not rest on either reversal [idealization] or “essentialism”, the appeal to a quality of empathy or mysterious power shared by all women and inherent in women’s biology. Such differences may instead be seen as due to women’s different social and historical position …To the extent that women’s lives have been lived in ways which are less directly oppositional practices, qualities of care and kinds of selfhood, an ecological feminist position could and should privilege some of the practices of women over men as a source of change without being committed to any form of naturalism. (Slicer 53)

This highlights the dual nature of ecofeminist thought. On the one hand we have what Eric C. Otto calls “cultural ecofeminism” (the theories of women’s inherent spiritual and biological links to the environment) and “rationalist ecofeminism” (the historical and social links) (30). However, I adopt a combination of the two in this paper, referred to as “dialectical ecofeminism:” “a vantage point for creating a different kind of culture and politics that would integrate intuitive, spiritual, and rational forms of knowledge, embracing both science and magic insofar as they enable us to transform the nature-culture distinction and to envision and create a free, ecological society” (Otto 30). After all, literature is able to utilise the more essentialist theories of spiritual and biological ecofeminism as a symbolic gesture rather than holding them up as absolute fact – a way of creating an oppositional consciousness. Indeed, its magical and spiritual aspects undermine the very rationalism that upholds the oppressive framework that sanctions the subordination of women and the posthuman world. This dialectal approach fits well with the magical realist tensions inherent in Faber’s novel, allowing us to formulate an alternative conception of the world in which hierarchies and divisions between men and women, nature and culture, humans and animals, are dissolved.

WEAVING A WEB OF EQUALITY: MICHEL FABER’S UNDER THE SKIN

Under the Skin has been marketed as a mainstream text and, as Dillon notes, it is “the horrifying best-selling first novel of the Dutch-born, Australian-raised, Scottish-resident, contemporary novelist, Michel Faber” (134). This varied heritage perhaps constitutes a motivating factor in the creation of his protagonist, the alien outsider Isserley. Faber is a diverse author whose work cannot be neatly placed into particular categories, though critics have tended to ignore his rejection of labels. Dillon asserts, for example, that, “Despite Faber’s denial […] Under the Skin, with its story of an alien species farming humans on Earth for meat, is clearly science-fiction […] metamorphosis is effected by surgery rather than by magic or accident” (134). It is true that Isserley has been given a human body as a disguise in order to carry out her job on earth, collecting unsuspecting men in her van (who are glad of a lift from an attractive woman) for butchering, and is therefore allowed to avoid her own harsh planet. However, whilst the otherworldly effects in Jonathan Glazier’s loose film adaptation (such as alien goo that cocoons her victims in the floor of a house) shift the story closer to science-fiction aesthetics, to ignore Faber’s rejection of the label is inevitably to deny the entire point of the novel. The text is much closer to an “anti-tale” (McAra and Calvin 2011) (in its ecofeminist breakdown of the classical fairy tale’s dualistic formulas and moral framework, yet recycling metamorphosis as a prominent fairy-tale trope), or myth (in that Isserley is not an alien per se, originating instead from a dark and cruel underworld called “The Estates”), or perhaps closer again to the category of fable (in the notion of her original form being a talking wolf-like species). Even more significant, however, is the fact that in Faber’s novel Isserley is not the “alien,” humans are. Humans are known in the story as “vodsels.” As Dillon notes, it is a

third-person narrative predominantly localised through the protagonist Isserley, a member of a race of what the text calls ‘human beings’ who come from an ecologically ravaged, strictly class-divided planet. Members of Isserley’s race, while called ‘human’ actually resemble physically ‘a sort of cross between a cat, a dog, and a llama’ (135).

Faber’s story deals with big questions, namely, what it means to be human. Blurring the boundaries between humans and animals in an explicit manner, he puts us into the shoes of an outsider in order to view our own ‘humanness’ from a detached vantage point. (Glazier’s film also resembles a docudrama in some ways, expressing this with hidden cameras scanning the streets and highways of Glasgow and filming oblivious civilians.) We are indeed totally defamiliarized. This provides an important ecofeminist discourse. The unethical treatment of the “vodsels” (humans to us), harvested for meat in the Ablach farm of the novel, raises serious questions about equality, interconnectedness and empathy. As we shall see here, Faber uses ecofeminist concepts to radically level any distinctions between species and thus collapse existing hierarchies. As the novel states, “We’re all the same under the skin;” whether we be a human or an animal, a man or a woman (Faber 164). This is of course the main idea behind the story, and ultimately leads to tragedy as the protagonist becomes more and more vodsel-like, increasingly vulnerable in her sensitivity and developing consciousness. She loses the cold detachment (an instinctual and animalistic survival of the fittest mentality) that the species division and notion of difference from the vodsels provided, and can therefore no longer do her job or remain unaffected by the cruelty around her. In addition, Isserley’s sense of alienation (as an intruder on earth and as a woman in a male-dominated work-place) is eased as she discovers the beauty of the natural environment.

In this way Isserley encompasses the contemporary crisis facing us all, what ecofeminist Gaard has called

the alienation from place-attachment that is widely shared across modern cultures. “Mobility rules Modernity” [certainly Isserley spends the majority of her time travelling in her van…] producing alienation and exploitation on many levels, local to global. As an anecdote about alienation, Plumwood suggests that we “belong to the land as much as the land belongs to us”, a belonging and identity that is articulated in […] dialogical interaction (Gaard, 2015).

In essence, in the natural world Isserley finds this allusive sense of belonging. Whilst Amlis, son of the business’s owner, states that “My father would chop the planet into pieces if he thought there was profit in it” (it’s no wonder that the home planet is entirely spoiled), Isserley, in the end, develops an ecofeminist sensibility and a sense of connectedness to the natural world on earth, where she delights in “the purity of the air, the lushness of everything:” “Men and their little power games! She’d tackle these inequalities soon enough […] Isserley was part of that landscape too” (Faber 235, 242, 259 & 279).

Ecofeminism uses the metaphor of the ‘web’ extensively in its perpetuation of equality. As Gaard and Murphy assert, “Life on earth is an interconnected web, not a hierarchy” (3). This reflects the ecofeminist tenet outlined by Barbara Bennett, the belief in the “interconnectedness of all things: what happens in one part of the world, or in one life, will eventually affect others in the way that all threads reverberate from movement at any spot in a web” (5). This as an important part of Faber’s environmentalism and fits Shannon Hengen’s observations that: “The human heart also figures significantly […] as do instinctual drives. Human nature is made as much of reverence and compassion, and a capacity to forgive, to deny any part is to lessen the whole. As whole creatures we both affect and are affected by the larger environment in which we evolve” – and Faber’s work asks us to bear that interconnectedness firmly in mind (84). Embracing the theory of the web, Faber stresses that no life is more or less important than the next, bringing this paper to my discussion of the breakdown of the human/animal duality. This is the dominant trope in Under the Skin, and inevitably gestures towards, and has reverberations for, a web of oppressions, including racial, gender, and class equality. Importantly, as Gaard states, in this endeavour of breaking down constructed hierarchies, “Ecofeminists [also] strive to evolve structures that respect difference without universalizing” (Gaard 2015).

This is of course most powerfully reflected in Faber’s damning depiction of the meat industry. Vegetarianism is a dominant trait amongst ecofeminists who recognize the problematic symbolism that surrounds eating meat. Brooks-Bouson points out how insights into “the gruesome world of human cruelty and sexual predator-prey” dynamics illustrate “how the strong not only ‘abuse’ but also ‘meatify’ the weak” (12). The meat industry in the novel links the oppression of women and animals, embodied too in Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, in which she stresses how the two are linked to meat both literally and figuratively “in the language and images of our patriarchal culture” (95). Faber’s personal disgust with this exploitation of power is illustrated in his comments made in an interview with David Soyka, “the weird things we do in order to produce an endless supply of supermarket steak no longer bears much relation to farming as we like to imagine it. It has entered the realm of Sci-fi horror […] with the added horror that in this text we are their subjects” (Dillon 139-140). The “vodsels” (humans in our sense) are literally prepared and butchered at the Albach farm of the novel. They are given steroids that leave them unable to move due to the constrictions of their bulky flesh. All features are hidden in the mass of meat,

Monthling vodsels, with their quarter-tonne of stiff flesh, were not so sprightly […] It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body […] Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue. ‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried. Esswis shot it in the forehead (Faber 98 & 100).

It is only when Isserley is simultaneously treated like a lump of meat by one of the hitchers who attempts to rape her that she begins to identify with this oppression, plunging her into a deep crisis of identity as she reassesses the human and animal division. Staring at one of her potential victims she recognises “there was something deceptively human about it, which tempted her, not for the first time, to reach across the species divide and communicate” (Faber 63).

This introduces another major ecofeminist aspect in the novel’s challenge to patriarchal binaries, namely the animal/human divide, through the use of language. Just as language has been used to define and confine women, it has also been used as a means for man to mark his superiority over the non-human world. As Carey Wolfe states:

In the philosophical tradition questions of the relationship between humans, animals, and the problem of ethics have turned decisively on the problem of cognition and, even more specifically in the modern and postmodern period, on the capacity for language. It would be overly simple, but not wrong, to say that the basic formula here has been: no language, no subjectivity. This equation has in turn traditionally laid to rest, more or less, the question of our ethical obligation to creatures who, because they lack language, lack the ability to “respond” … in a two-way exchange (so the story goes) that is crucial to the ethical relationship (Dillon 134).

In essence, the divide between the species is maintained by the ability to communicate through language, and yet this is simply a patriarchal notion that there is one dominant and superior discourse, denying any other modes of expression.

Faber’s renaming of humans as “vodsels” and of Isserley’s animal-like species as humans is extremely subversive in “drawing attention to how the difference between humans and nonhuman animals is not one of possession of language, but one created by language,” as Dillon points out, adding that “In a defiant literary act of renaming, Faber removes this authority from humankind, linguistically placing us back in the ranks of animals over which we have, for so long, practiced linguistic and thus actual domination” (140). Isserley desperately tries to keep her ‘human’ status despite having sacrificed her natural body for a ‘vodsel’ one in order to go undercover for her job and she feels the painful discrimination of her own species now she is ‘other,’ along with the additional hardships she faces as a female. Trying to create some kind of power for herself, she aims to convince Amlis of her superiority over the vodsels, hiding from him that they do indeed have a language of their own. This is apparent in a powerful scene where he asks her to translate the word a vodsel is communicating to him:

Isserley watched, disturbed as the vodsel scrawled a five-letter word with great deliberation […] on the other side of the mesh.

“No-one told me they had a language”, marveled Amlis, too impressed, it seemed, to be angry. “My father always describes them as vegetables on legs.”

“It depends on what you classify as language, I guess,” said Isserley dismissively.

[…]

“But what does it mean?” persisted Amlis.

Isserley considered the message, which was M E R C Y.

[…]

She considered trying to pronounce the strange word with a contortion of her lips and a frown on her brow, as if she were being asked to reproduce a chicken’s cackle or a cow’s moo.

[…]

“It’s a scratch mark that means something to vodsels, obviously. I couldn’t tell you what it means.”

She looked straight into Amlis’s eyes, to add the power of conviction to her denial.

“Well, I can guess what it means,” he observed quietly. (Faber 171-172)

Unfortunately, Isserley also comes to recognize the meaning of the word as she tries to communicate to the opposite species herself when she becomes the victim of attempted rape. (Once again the oppression of animals is linked to the treatment of Isserley as a woman.) “Desperately she searched for the right word, the word that might make him stop. It was a word she knew, but had only ever seen written – in fact, only this morning, a vodsel had spelled it out. She’d never heard it spoken. ‘Murky,’ she pleaded” (Faber 186). As Dillon states, “The attack has demonstrated that the vodsels can affect Isserley as much as she can affect them, that there is a two-way exchange here, an ethical relationship” (147). Indeed, Isserley recognizes the radical potential in breaking down this artificial species divide, noting that “She’d have to be careful, then, never to speak it [vodsel language] in Amlis’s earshot. It would only provoke him […] In a case like this, a little knowledge was more dangerous than none at all” (174). Indeed, Faber encourages such provocation in his readers, he refuses to allow us to remain ignorant.

Having broken down the human and animal dualism then, Faber goes further in his creation of a web of interconnectivity, highlighting also our responsibility for and connections to the natural environment, that ultimate leveller of all artificial and socially-constructed hierarchies – we are all part of nature’s great plan. Indeed, it is the heroine’s reconnection with the natural world that brings about her awakening and her realization of society’s power games that kept her blind to the equality of all entities. For example, Isserley, “trapped in a cage of her own bone and muscle” after the surgery to give her a human, or in the case of the novel, a “vodsel,” body, rediscovers her true sense of self (buried beneath her cultured disguise) by “drinking in the beauty of the great uncovered world” (Faber 143, 61). It should be noted that Isserley’s body is a literal construction, as we learn that “her real teats, budding naturally from her abdomen, had been surgically removed” and they had “grafted these puffy artificial ones onto her chest. The surgeons had used pictures from a magazine sent by Esswis as a guide” (178). Faber once again emphasizes the artificiality of patriarchal ideologies, with Isserley musing that “One day she would have to tell Esswis that never, in her far-ranging travels outside his little domain of fields and fences, had she seen a female vodsel with breasts like the ones in his magazine” (178). It is through nature that Isserley comes to this recognition of the artificial power structures that have, quite literally, shaped her and kept her prejudiced and ignorant. Nature has the power to rejuvenate her, and, like magic, it releases her crippled body and mind from their cages of pain. Going out onto a cliff near the beach to do her exercises (necessary to keep her new body functional),

she assumed the correct positions, extending her arms towards the silvery horizon […] then, finally, reaching up to the stars. After a long time repeating these actions over and over, she achieved a state of half-consciousness, mesmerised by the moon and the monotony, and persisted far longer than usual, becoming so limber in the end that her movements became graceful and fluid. She might have been dancing (Faber 150-151).

Whilst there is nothing particularly fantastical about Isserley’s experiences in nature here, they are spiritual and deep, her attentions to these rituals could almost be described as religious and her connection to the ‘otherness’ of the natural world as a woman has affinities with spiritual ecofeminist ideas. Her affinity to the universe is strong here and she drifts into a semi-conscious and meditative state. Ironically, despite her hatred of her constructed and sexualized human façade, this is partly achieved through her body and its physical interactions with the environment around her. No longer trapped by it, her new ecofeminist consciousness allows her to transcend her artificial shell as she begins to formulate a new sense of self, recognizing that her body, her being, is part of the earth too. Isserley’s link to the beauty of the natural environment is perceived by Amlis who is equally as awed with the beauty of the earth in comparison to his polluted home planet:

It would be very easy to get seduced by this world, Amlis had said, when he touched her arm. It’s very, very beautiful. What had he meant? Could he have been meaning to imply that she was beautiful, too? Why else would he have touched her at that moment? […] But no, of course he hadn’t meant that. He was seeing an ocean and a snowy sky for the first time, with a mutilated cripple sweating next to him. The charms of her scarred flesh could hardly compete with a naked new world, could they? (Faber 284)

Amlis recognises that Isserley’s inner, natural self is as beautiful as the landscape she so deeply connects with. He also seems to perceive this connection and beauty as an inherent spiritual ‘goodness’ or moral compass: ‘“Take care of yourself,” he muttered, lowering himself out of the car onto the white ground. “There’s a voice inside you. Listen to what it says”’ (Faber 246). Faber hints at this earlier in the novel too: “She liked sheep more than any other animal; they had an innocence and a serene intentness about them that was worlds away from the brutish cunning and manic excitability of, say, vodsels.” Isserley, as a non-human, shares this innocence and lack of hardened social conditioning and together with the sheep, “seen in poor light, they could almost be human children” (Faber 150). The power of nature is a strength Amlis sees inside of Isserley too, it is her own kind of magic: “Nothing that happened on the ground could ever compete with the grandeur of what happened above. Amlis had glimpsed this, had stolen an incredulous look at the sky for a few hours, and then had to let it go.” (Faber 260).

Certainly, Isserley recognizes and feels the power of nature,

The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of life into perspective (Faber 61).

The use of ‘indiscriminate’ is extremely important here: as an acting “vodsel” and, moreover, a female one, she faces discrimination and unfair treatment at the hands of men. (Those she collects in her van make blatant sexual advances, misogynistic remarks, and even attempt rape, to those she works for; as the only female, she is a commodity and source of humour.) Luckily, Isserley finds comfort in nature and, like magic, it comes to her aid. Whilst she faces the uncomfortable sexism of one of her hitchers:

“Sex”, he explained flatly […] “On the brain. I can spot it a mile off. You love it, don’t you?” […] “Actually, I’m always working too hard to think about it” […] “Bullshit”’ – the religious rhetoric used to describe her response illustrates the universe’s spiritual significance for her: ‘the universe at last seemed to have heard her prayer. The hitcher’s eyes narrowed, then shut in what might have been slumber (Faber 179-180).

Most significant, however, is the ending of Faber’s novel in which Isserley crashes her car and is trapped. Isserley is obliged to protect the business (the self-destruct button having been built into her car by the business owners) so she cannot allow her real alien ‘otherness’ to be revealed beneath her “vodsel” façade. Hence, unable to stop a woman from going to get help, she must eliminate all traces of herself by blowing the vehicle up. Although tragic, Isserley is in charge of her own demise and she achieves a spiritual transcendence, no longer beholden to the men who exploit her. Whereas she recognized earlier in the novel that “what went on inside houses – mere specks under the vast sky – was insignificant” and “Nothing that happened on the ground could ever compete with the grandeur of what happened above,” on the level of the entire universe Isserley recognizes the interconnectedness of all things and literally becomes part of that higher plain (Faber 260). She lives on in the air, in particles, as a part of the landscape she loved so much; no longer an outsider, but part of the indiscriminate grand design, she has found where she belongs and trusts in the connection she has established to that space:

The aviir would blow her car, herself, and a generous scoop of earth into the smallest conceivable particles. The explosion would leave a crater in the ground as big and deep as if a meteorite had fallen there.

And she? Where would she go?

The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed she would be a part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation […] She would help wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever. All it took was the courage to press one button, and the faith that the connection had not been broken.

She reached forward a trembling hand.

“Here I come”, she said. (Faber 295-296)

This is the ultimate manifestation of Faber’s ecofeminist web of equality. Isserley reaches a state where her gender, species, and class no longer matter, a space where everything is equal, interconnected and has its own small but essential part in the workings of the universe. Hence, nature in Faber’s novel comes to the aid of the female, non-human heroine in the form of a comforting and empowering force or spirituality. This mixture of Isserley’s fantastical ‘otherness’ that allows her this affinity to a nature that seeps beyond humanity’s attempts at rationalization and control, and Faber’s overarching realist approach (Isserley’s mythical origins in the underworld of ‘The Estates’ and non-humanness being naturalized), highlights, in the words of Jeffrey A. Lockwood, that “Ecofeminists do not reject reason; they simply and convincingly advocate balance. They call for us to be fully human by attending to all of our being – feeling as well as thinking. And they understand that there is a place for passion, that even moderation must be moderated” (134). In essence, Faber’s magical realist anti-tale refutes our society’s rejection and subordination of that which is ‘other’ or seeps beyond its rationalized and limited hierarchical framework, with ecofeminism embraced as a concept that fights for collective rights: those of women, nature, and non-human animals.

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ÉVA FEDERMAYER

THE GENESIS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE: AN ECOCRITICAL READING OF TONI MORRISON’S A MERCY

PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON MORRISON, ECOCRITICISM, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy portrays early American colonies Virginia and Maryland in the 1670s as life shifts from a relatively benign colonial anarchism toward a rigid class-race-gender-property-defined system shaped by black slavery and the plundering of natural resources. Besides the novel’s palpable engagement with ecological problems that tie in with social problems, the storyworld of  Morrison’s novel yields a fascinating but also horrifying fictional mapping of  colonial America, intimating the genesis of the later emerging networks of human-induced socio-ecological catastrophes in which we are, in fact, currently and globally entangled. Her character Jacob Vaark’s obsession with building an over-ambitious third house seems to emblematize the beginning of the disproportionate occupation of environmental space and the species’ increasing ecological debt to nature that humans will incur in staggering measures in the twenty-first century, nearing the end of the Anthropocene Age.

In the forthcoming discussion, my intention is to read Morrison’s A Mercy from an ecocritical perspective: I am interested in how Morrison’s text addresses and constructs the interaction of the human and the non-human world to create a storyworld in which distinct characters operate not only according to the logic of the narrative in their local places and (semi)private or communal spaces but also as distinct configurations of the Anthropocene, that is, as agents of a larger story of human animals. Engaging with this ecocritical project, I pay close attention to the environment in which the respective characters enact their destiny within their historically and ecologically inscribed narrative space. Thus I seek to claim with ecocritics that nature is “not just the stage upon which the human story is acted out, but as an actor in the drama” (Glotfelty xxi). Hence is also the suggestion in my argument that we need to rethink the figuration of the wild and wilderness in Morrison’s colonial America transitioning to black slavery, with an eye to the relationship between the gendered human animal and her/his environment. When I suggest the principal tenet of ecological thought, that of the intrinsic relationship between the human and the non-human through a broader perception of corporeality, I seek to help rethink the constitution of human boundaries through human-to-non-human interdependence and cooperation or the lack thereof.

Attentive to the multi-layered design of the novel targeting the concatenation of ecological destiny and white colonization, I also explore the gendered and raced discourse in Morrison’s novel that hinges on the interactions of African American characters (Florens and the African blacksmith) with the human and the natural world. Along these lines, my discussion is specifically inflected by feminist ecocriticism, which has been  instrumental in exploring how the gendered human bodies, inescapably intra-acting (to use Karen Barad’s term) with natural bodies, are inscribed in culture, how nature is used as a narrative of domination, as well as how  ‟raising ethical awareness about bodily natures, and promoting an ecological-feminist discourse of hope and change” could contribute to the fundamental transformation we need at this point of time in the Anthropocene Age (Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann 2).

The conceptual framework with regard to the Anthropocene I use in my argument needs a brief explanation, thus a detour for clarity. The term Anthropocene denotes the geological epoch caused by human impact on the Earth’s eco-system amounting to the power of a geological force. The term Anthropocene used as a geological epoch marker does not imply that humans are so powerful as to be able to compete with geological-climactic forces, indeed, to be able to stop, say, a hurricane; yet they impact the Earth with a force that has already set off a series of ecological  crises that go together, as Robyn Eckersley claims in another context, with a variety of interconnected predicaments for the human animal: the crisis of representation, the crisis of survival, and the crisis of culture and character (7-20).

As of now (December 2017), there is no agreed-upon date when exactly the Anthropocene started.[3] Based on atmospheric-lithospheric evidence, it has so far been tied to the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, to the rise of agriculture about 12,000 years BP, and even to earlier human activity around 14,000-15,000 years BP. Most recently, the start of this human epoch has been associated by scientists Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin (in the 12 March 2015 issue of Nature) with the early seventeenth century, which marks the beginning of massive changes in human and environmental history, including unprecedented human population replacement, foodstuff, animal, and human commensal exchange, accidental transfer of species, and colonialism; all of this entails, they claim, the “swift ongoing, radical reorganization of life on Earth without geological precedent” (n. pag.). When concluding their argument, a corrective to Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s original proposal which set the dawn of the Anthropocene at the early eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, their voice takes a dramatically different course. Atypically for natural science publications, Lewis and Maslin’s apparent scientific neutrality gives way to their personal anxiety about the unpredictability of Anthropogenic effects on Earth triggered by the transformative power relations of colonialism intertwined with early capitalism, which began escalating on a global scale in the early seventeenth-century:

. . . the transoceanic movement of species is a clear and permanent geological change to the Earth system. . . . The Orbis spike implies that colonialism, global trade and coal brought about the Anthropocene. Broadly, this highlights social concerns, particularly the unequal power relationships between different groups of people, economic growth, the impacts of globalized trade, and our current reliance on fossil fuels. The onward effects of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas also highlight a long-term and large-scale example of human actions unleashing processes that are difficult to predict or manage.[4] (n. pag.)

Whereas Lewis and Maslin tie the start of the Anthropocene to colonization (within the context of globalization in early capitalism), American ecocritics Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic remind us (in 2009) that this very colonization – enslaving Africans, in the American case  – also mark the earliest phase of challenging devastation both in the human and the non-human environment. As they contend in their introduction to the MELUS special issue Ethnicity and Ecocriticism:

[t]he roots of the environmental movement can be traced back to the abolition movement, which revealed the connections between colonization, conquest, slavery, resource exploitation, and capital, and many of the most successful strategies of early environmentalism were borrowed from the abolition, civil rights, and women’s movements and American Indian Land Claims lawsuits (5-6).

Although readings of Toni Morrison’s works focusing on her figurations of nature/the non-human environment appeared as early as in the 1980s (such as Barbara Christian’s ‟Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison”), the expressly ecocritical discussions of her writing came out nearly two decades later. This new period of ecocriticism inspired by the intertwining issues of the environmental and the social justice movements entailed ‟the critique of the demographic homogeneity of traditional environmental movements and academic environmental studies” (Buell 115); no longer engaged with (white authored) nature writing (as in the first wave of ecocriticism), the  second wave of ecocriticism (such as Jeffrey Myers’s Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature [2005]) turned to literary works for the ethnic/racial and class inflections of the environmental imagination.

Toni Morrison’s commitment to social justice and African American culture with its focus on  places and spaces (which highlights the importance of location, dislocation, relocation, translocation, segregation,  the underground railroad, the pass for traveling slaves, trespass, transgression, racial uplift, integration, sites of belonging and collectivity in black history and identity formation), as well as the portrayal of nature in her works make her a writer particularly attractive to critics with ecocritical agendas in mind. As Wallace and Armbruster contend, her novels reveal how “our perceptions and valuations of nature are not simply ‘natural’ responses to the green world but responses that rest on underlying racial politics” (225). Furthermore, as Elizabeth Ely Tolman suggests in conclusion of her overview of critical approaches to Morrison:

An ecocritical reading of Morrison’s work demonstrates her belief in the interconnectedness of nature, religion, and African American identity. Without such an understanding, Morrison’s works seem to tell a disjointed story of disappointment and destruction; when read ecocritically, they offer hope for creating a better future. (12)

Acknowledging the relevance of this interpretation, I intend to enlarge the scope of my reading of A Mercy, however, in tune with issues of the third wave of ecocriticism, ‟which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries,” when I discuss Morrison’s black feminist novel in light of the global environment of race and ethnicity with a focus on the Anthropocene (Adamson and Slovik 6).

THE MATTER OF ORIGINS IN A MERCY

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is a slim book with an engaging design in the Knopf edition, outfitted with a seventeenth-century map from the American Antiquarian Society. It displays Lakes Erie and Ontario in the North-West and, spilling over onto the title page, Cape Hatteras in the South-East, with a large number of early colonial, mainly Native American geographical names in between. The map strikes one as the evolving “known world” of colonial America, like Edward P. Jones’s fascinating “new slave narrative” The Known World (2003) – published five  years prior to Morrison’s work – which likewise pivots around a map in the making.[5] Yet Morrison’s book design also suggests a conspicuously strange land that John Updike called in his review of A Mercy as “a dreamy wilderness” (n. pag.). The text is set in graceful Adobe Garamond deriving from Christopher Columbus’ contemporary Claude Garamond, the French type designer, punch-cutter and publisher, who, according to “A Note on the Type” at the end of the book, “gave to his letters a certain elegance of feeling of movement that won their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.” Enhanced by its visual dimension, the map and the letter, the novel’s key concerns, in my reading, suggest an ecocritical reframing of the initial conflict between (white-appropriated) land and (black-authored) writing that enfolds against the backdrop of a utopian American pastoral with its pre-racial open spaces and felicitous interactions between humans and the environment.

Demonstrating her abiding interest with myths, Morrison’s ninth novel is also inflected by origin narratives, specifically the biblical Genesis. In her exploration of the Miltonic dynamics of the Bible in Morrison’s text, Tessa Roynon claims that “Morrison’s allusions to Paradise Lost at once unpack Miltonic certainties and exploit Miltonic uncertainties and ambivalences, and, in so doing, contribute to the scrutiny of the nascent Enlightenment world-view and of the transition into constructions of ‘America’ that A Mercy enacts” (598). Interpreted as a revisionary origins narrative of America, as Valerie Babb claims, the novel “can correct the epic of Englishmen who sailed to the ‘vast and unpeopled countries of America’ and created ‘a citty [sic] upon a hill’ that would be an example of God’s grace toward the Chosen (Bradford 26; Winthrop, "Modell" 47)” (147).

Committed to her idiosyncratic, deliberately difficult, elliptical, and fragmented, multifocal writing strategy, well-known from her previous works, Morrison creates an early colonial storyworld to represent her distinct vision of a primal scene that is also conducive to eco-social complications with long-standing effects. On the one hand, Morrison is primarily interested in matters of race, bondage and freedom, as testified by an NPR interview (n. pag.) in which she recounts how she devised a fictional elaboration of capturing the historical moment when race and individuality emerged and evolved in a country where both racial division and individuality came to be salient markers of its culture. She suggests that her major objective for writing A Mercy was to tease out shifting relations leading to the concatenation of blackness and forced labor in the New World, as well as the commencement of early individuality, the latter demonstrated by the young black slave Florens’s character.

On the other hand, Morrison’s narrative – as a reinscription of the white origin narrative of America in the form of “the demonic parody of the colonial American experience for Native Americans, black Africans and black Americans” (Moore 3) – also strikes the reader with its strong statement about the beginnings of the Anthropocene. Indeed, the novel’s diegetic time, dovetailing with the specific century in which the Lewis-Maslin argument captures the start of the Anthropocene Era, comprises a transitional period in colonial America between 1682 and 1690, when early signs of the later ecological devastation (as described, for example, in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels) first begin to loom large on the horizon.

More accurately, the historical point of reference against which A Mercy’s diegetic time is defined is the Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Although this is never explicitly named yet pinpointed as a crucial juncture in Morrison’s understanding of American race relations, the hint is given as early as in the second paragraph of Chapter 2, when the omniscient narrator zooms in on the young Anglo-Dutch farmer-creditor Jacob Vaark, who is riding from Virginia to the Maryland colony in order to settle a deal with his debtor D’Ortega, the Portuguese slave trader and plantation owner. This trip situates Jacob not only on the evolving map of new white territories in the “New World” but also in time, thus intimating parallels both in his personal history and the history of the land around him:

Half a dozen years ago an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes – freedmen, slaves and indentured – had waged war against local gentry led by members of that very class. When that “people’s war” lost its hopes to the hangman, the work it had done – which included the slaughter of opposing tribes and running the Carolinas off their land – spawned a thicket of new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by granting license to any white to kill any black for any reason; by compensating owners for a slave’s maiming or death, they separated and protected all whites from all others forever. (10)

Marking a somewhat antediluvian time of race relations, the period prior to the Bacon’s Rebellion is described here as shifting toward rigidifying social relations and pivoting around the growing significance of property and race, whereby land is converted to white territories and humans to black slaves.[6]  The transitional nature of the period Morrison picks for the novel also contributes to the rhetorical rendering of the environment that intimates her African American response to “Wordsworth’s elegiac vision of the pastoral” (Sandy 35), even signifying on the great English Romantic poem, “The Ruined Cottage,” the counterpart of which emerges as Jacob’s disintegrating big house, the central ecocritical problem of the text.

NARRATIVE DYNAMICS AND HUMAN TEMPTATIONS

Beginning in medias res with Florens, a sixteen-year-old black slave girl who writes a curious book to her former lover, the novel recounts the story of a small, seventeenth-century, transnational and multiethnic community of early American immigrants, indentured servants, slaves and a free African blacksmith. Of the twelve chapters, every odd-numbered one is Florens’s first-person narrative, which she surreptitiously keeps writing as long as there is an empty surface in a room of her master Jacob’s palatial house she calls the “talking room” (160). The even-numbered third-person chapters foreground each of the other characters – Anglo-Dutch farmer-creditor Jacob Vaark, English wife Rebekka, English indentured servants Scully and Willard, Native American servant Lina, black slave Florens, and the multiracial shipwreck survivor Sorrow – who make up “a cosmopolitan community that emerges from a lack of rootedness in a place and a universalizing sense of belonging” (Cillerai 179). This loose-knit family of orphans are all powerless in one way or another, hence their story, recounting the beginning of American history, is composed of “traditionally ignored perspectives” (Babb 149) and alternative viewpoints insured by Morrison’s frequent use of Hypothetical Focalization (Peterson 10, 11).[7]

Though multifocal, the text prioritizes Florens’s continuous narrative, recurring in every other chapter to constitute the backbone of the novel. Yet it is interlaced with all the other narrative fragments, the most important being Jacob’s, which highlight the white farmer’s ambitious project to build a third house. Reading the novel from this perspective, the plot is basically structured around two temptations, Jacob’s and Florens’s, one precipitating communal and environmental destruction, the other entailing personal development.[8] Positing two young characters – a likeable, yet impressionable white farmer who succumbs to the temptation of upward social mobility and respectability by trading in rum (thus inevitably entangling himself with slavery), and a likewise likeable, yet impressionable black slave girl who submits herself to a free African man (thus inevitably further entangling herself with slavery) – the novel highlights consuming desires that materialize in two aspects of “dominion”  interlocking with the “wild” American environment.

Possession (of land and people) is arguably the capstone dilemma of the text, highlighted by the Portugese D’Ortega’s drive to exploit the slave trade and the plantation economy; Florens’s desire to be loved and possessed by the African blacksmith; and Jacob’s plunder of both human and natural resources to build his great house with the glittering iron cobras kissing at the gate’s crown (Morrison 36). The ending of A Mercy, as of any narrative (to recall Frank Kermode’s argument from The Sense of an Ending [1967]) is of particular importance in this regard. Not only clarifying the novel’s title from the end – thus highlighting the reason for the slave mother’s seemingly merciless decision to disown little Florens – minha mãe (Portugese for “my mother”) gives a structuring sense to the novel at its end by the sense of her ending. To recall Kermode’s phrase, “No longer imminent, the End is immanent” (25) is helpful here to get a better grip on the whole text, which, as it turns out, operates through minha mãe’s immanent existence throughout the book. The slave mother is not only a floating signifier of lost pleasure or a Kristevan semiotic chora for the slave daughter but also a frustrated woman griot, the repository of local wisdom and history; and is possessed of a level of literacy unparalleled among the slaves. Her words about dominion speak to the central idea of Morrison’s narrative, that of dominion:

One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes.

It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human. I stayed on my knees. In the dust where my heart will remain each night and every day until you understand what I know and long to tell you: to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Oh Florens. My love. Hear a tua mãe. (166-67; emphases mine)

The unnamed Angolan slave mother, who is herself owned, longs to teach her daughter about three types of dominion that she ranks as hard (to have power over/be responsible for another is hard), wrong (to wrench power from another is wrong), and wicked (to subject yourself willingly to another is wicked). Of the three, she calls the last the most dangerous, from which she would seek to protect her daughter if she could.

But Florens, in fact, gives dominion of herself to the free African. It is perhaps small wonder she does so. A young girl well into puberty crazed by sexual desire and still hankering after a substitute for mother-love, she becomes a “startled doe” (45) upon glimpsing the tall, dignified, young blacksmith when he appears on the Vaark property. His presence is crucial not only in his artistic ability to produce fantastic ironwork around Jacob’s new mansion so as to give its owner the signature of wealth and social status; he is also a healer with skills in herbs and love-struck women. As addressed by the narrator, he “brought one girl to womanhood and saved the life of another” (51). Assessed differently by Lina, Rebekka, Scully and Willard, Florens’s infatuation with the blacksmith is devastating, yet the African rejects her, finding the young woman wilderness manifest. This is how in Chapter 9 Florens reminisces, in short staccato sentences, their painful last conversation about ownership and wildness:

Why are you killing me I ask you.

I want you to go.

Let me explain.

No. Now.

Why? Why?

Because you are a slave.

What?

You heard me.

Sir makes me that.

I don’t mean him.

Then who?

You.

What is your meaning? I am a slave because Sir trades for me.

No. You have become one.

How?

Your head is empty and your body is wild.

I am adoring you.

And a slave to that too.

You alone own me.

Own yourself, woman, and leave us be. (141)

Wild(er)ness occurs fourteen times in the novel, eight of which relate to Florens in various contexts.[9] In the climactic last confrontation above, the blacksmith has his own distinct interpretation of “wild” to animalize his former lover. When the black man blames her for mindlessness (“Your head is empty and your body is wild”), this “hierarchical labelling of her as wild and thus ‘a slave by choice’” (Terry 142) demotes the young woman to below the level of the raccoon: after being rescued by Jacob in the wilderness, the little wild creature might well have had a mind of its own, contrary to Florens, since it “limped off, perhaps to the mother forced to abandon it . . .” (11).

Re-enacting her humiliation while writing her retrospective narrative, Florens seeks to get a grip on the last clash that has nearly crushed her, pointing out “the masculinist pride that shapes he ‘who thinks his mane is all’” (Terry 142):

I am remembering what you tell me from long ago when Sir is not dead. You say you see slaves freer than free men. One is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion. That it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild. . . . Still, there is another thing. A lion who thinks his mane is all. A shelion who does not. (160)

Herself employing a vocabulary of animals – the lion, the ass, and the shelion – Florens draws out the gendered implications of the blacksmith’s dominion over her within the context of undomesticated nature/wild(er)ness. When she concludes her writing in the “talking-room” (also her last section in Morrison’s book), she spells out her fledgling identity within the context of wilderness redefined: “See? You are correct. A minha mãe too. I am become wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last” (161). [10]

Florens is represented here as undergoing a fundamental transformation from slave “struck silly by the man” (151) to free woman, although legally remaining Rebekka’s slave. She calls herself “in full” Florens and wilderness, which Peterson interprets as her “(e)merging sense of herself as part of the environment ”(18). Contrary to this critic’s position, which seems to me inflected by an impulse to essentialize (black) woman who merges with nature – indeed, becomes nature manifest – I suggest that a more complex female transformation is enacted by Morrison’s text. When Florens applies wild(erness) in the process of renaming herself, she suggests reframing the master term that crushed her. When in her characteristic style and vocabulary – which Morrison calls “between languages” – she claims that “I am become wilderness but I am also Florens,” she seems to suggest that “I embrace my old self, labelled by you as wild(er)ness manifest, with a new confidence, in full, even against your crushing judgment, since I am Florens, indeed, identifying with wilderness with no remorse.” In so doing she recycles the term wilderness as no longer a space of absence, or, in the blacksmith’s definition, a lack of mindful control, but a blissful plenitude with a rich biodiversity of its own. When renaming herself Florens and wilderness at the same time, she also hints at her evolving identity as unoccupied and unplundered land, no longer a territory or another’s dominion.

She truly has her new looks, those of the wilderness, on her when returning from the blacksmith. When Scully and Willard glimpse her, they find her “feral” (146), using a word that relates her to a wild beast. In this sense, the indentured servants’ observation seems to be in tune with Florens’s self-definition: “I am become wilderness but I am also Florens.” In addition, feral also implies fearless when the focalization of the text foregrounds Scully and Willard’s fear of the wounded bear and their astonishment at feral Florens’s grit. In the narrator’s words, recapitulating the scene that focuses on Florens’s striking transformation: “Surely a sudden burst of sweating men out of roadside trees would have startled a human, any human, especially a female. But this one neither glanced their way nor altered her pace. Both men, breathless and still spooked from a narrow escape, leaped out of her path” (146). Furthermore, feral implies in the text not only her change from timid to fearless but, as the other dictionary meaning of the word implies, her “having escaped from domestication” (Merriam-Webster n. pag.). Though formerly longing to be owned, she eventually looks like owning herself, escaping the black man’s domesticating control and epistemic violence.

This emerging new identity, however, does not suggest the evolution of her autonomous self in the liberal sense of the word. Reminiscent of the words of Charles Johnson’s Horace Bannon in his “neo-slave narrative” The Oxherding Tale – whose definition of slavery, hence his slave-catching strategy, draws on the psychological explanation of inner slavery (“because you got to have somethin’ dead or static already inside you – an image of yoself – fo’ a real slave catcher to latch onto” [174]) – Florens recognizes her road to a new kind of agency and freedom even as a slave. Gradually letting go of her attachment to the African blacksmith, she begins to relearn her life and revision herself through writing, in a world of multiple connections. Her evolving identity even evokes Reb, the only escaped slave Bannon is unable to trap in Johnson’s book, since he is unlatched onto desire and hence cannot be pinned down. At the same time, Morrison’s heroine proudly keeps identifying herself as both Florens and wilderness, thus metaphorically also making space for herself in nature, which traditionally occurs in African American literature as a site of danger for black women.[11] Her new attitude of non-clinging is not a detaching from but a fuller engaging with her environment, including the wilderness. Her therapeutic writing all over the place she secretly occupies in Jacob’s house facilitates her new relationship to the outside world. As she claims, “these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow” (160-61).

Whereas Florens’s desire to become the blacksmith’s dominion is frustrated but her ensuing crisis boosts her inner liberation, Jacob’s desire to own a grand house is fulfilled. Yet his new home becomes unoccupied, himself only returning to it as a ghost, climbing from his grave in the night. But is Jacob Vaark’s fanciful abode with the kissing iron cobras a home at all? The logic of Morrison’s narrative suggests an answer in the negative, as witnessed by the following assessment of Jacob’s ambition:

The last few years he seemed moody, less gentle, but when he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was cheerful every waking moment. Killing trees in that number, without asking their permission, of course his efforts would stir up malfortune. Sure enough, when the house was close to completion he fell sick with nothing else on his mind. (44)

The focalization evokes the Native American Lina’s reaction to Sir’s unconscionable enterprise to build not a home but an exorbitant monument to himself. (To do justice to Jacob Vaark, as Morrison’s text also suggests, his ill-fated project may have been conceived to memorialize his victory over his earlier poverty in the Old World and to tackle the humiliation he suffered from the class arrogance of the D’Ortegas in their Maryland plantation.) Indeed, Lina’s unswerving resentment of Jacob outstretching his ecologically legitimate resources is also shared by Morrison, since it is Lina’s eco-thinking that resounds in the pages of the book. Lina’s perspective on white “Europes” clearly revises the story of an “empty” continent, as well as the moral foundations of white conquest and claim for land. Her attitude to land, air, sky, plants, animals and people represents the ecocentric alternative to the choices Jacob and Rebekka make in dealing with the environment when minding fowl, planting corn, drying fish or attending to babies.

Lina is a model of adaptation and self-invention. Having survived smallpox, the loss of her family and people, sexual abuse and desertion, Presbyterian hypocrisy and the weird rules of “Europes,” she learns to make herself in the world by combining her Indian lore with white skills, also vowing never to betray anyone she cherishes. She is servant, midwife, and friend to Rebekka, helpmate to Jacob and mother to the young black slave girl. Besides, Lina is also a great story-teller, sharing her wisdom of the world with Florens about the culture shock she has undergone since the white man’s appearance, which ruptured her world. Her story of the white traveler, the mother eagle (whose wounded body is still falling from the sky), and the eggs (hatching even without their mother) not only situates Africans and Native Americans on a land turning hostile to them but also accounts for the reason for this hostility, thus defining their own script of life:

One day a traveler climbs a mountain nearby. He stands at its summit admiring all he sees below him. The turquoise lake, the eternal hemlocks, the starlings sailing into clouds cut by rainbow. The traveler laughs at the beauty saying, “This is perfect. This is mine.” And the word swells, booming like thunder into valleys, over acres of primrose and mallow. Creatures come out of caves wondering what it means. Mine. Mine. Mine. (62)

Resonating with the slave mother minha mãe’s (undeliverable) teaching to her daughter about “dominion,” Lina also focuses the pivotal dilemma of the novel, which further enhances her significance in the text. It is no exaggeration to claim that Lina (together with the other “ecological Indians” in the plot) fleshes out Morrison’s ecocentric voice that is repeatedly articulated in the novel to diagnose the deepening social and ecological disturbances surfacing  in the transitional era of colonial America, whose symptom is Jacob’s new house.[12]

DEFORESTATION, SLAVERY, AND THE ECO-SOCIAL CONUNDRUM REVISITED

Pursuing ecocritical concerns in Lina’s way, the novel consistently draws out the inherent interconnectedness of trees and humans, suggesting, as Wardi says, that “[t]rees are, in fact, sounded throughout the novel as a measure of home, place and self,” evidenced by Florens and Lina’s shelter, Sorrow’s ship masts, Florens’s forest love nest, Sorrow/Twin’s refuge, and “Jacob’s home cut out of a wilderness of forest, ‘sixty cultivated acres out of one hundred and twenty woodland’”(32). Along these lines, Terry aptly recognizes the novel’s ecocritically crucial turning point when indicating the dismal concatenation of the natural and the social: “The building of his third house marks a shift from the sensitivity towards the environment and other residents shown previously” (134).

Early signs of this change intimating Jacob’s gradual submission to the temptation of D’Ortega’s magnificent house and the diabolical economy of slavery are the increasing number of gifts to his wife Rebekka that she, however, finds useless, “even whimsical” (88). Rebekka’s rising anxiety indicates the sense of danger, which she immediately stifles when she has reason to rejoice over her husband’s unusually prolonged presence on the farm. No longer away from her on his long trips to attend to his “new arrangements,” he fully commits himself to building his third house. Though Rebekka notices an incongruity between desire and use value when assessing the new house as “something befitting not a farmer, not even a trader, but a squire” (88), her support in exchange for his love and intimacy remains adamant.

Notwithstanding all the passion, vitality, art, ingenuity, and effort the construction of the house generates in the little community (save Lina), the emerging project turns out to be the “symbol of a troubled and troubling pastoral paradise founded on rum trade profits and the exploited ‘remote labor force in Barbados’ [33]” (Sandy 42). Suggesting the interdependence of all living things, Jacob’s exorbitant killing of trees and plundering of the natural and human environment foreshadows his own death, as Wardi observes (32); indeed, it triggers losses with hyperbolic repercussions. However successful, Jacob’s project unleashes fateful events reminiscent of the complex systems failures that result in the Pox-stricken ecological devastation of Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Talents, which renders the theme of the Anthropocene in high gear.

Instead of an emblem of human effort and ingenuity, Jacob Vaark’s majestic residence becomes a reminder of plunder and abuse, a destitute place doomed to remain uninhabited by family or friends. All of the Vaark children have died when Jacob begins the construction; Jacob himself dies of smallpox upon its near-completion; his wife Rebekka survives the lethal disease but never enters the house again; indeed, she forbids entrance to this haunted, Wordsworthian “ruined cottage.” The promising vision of subaltern cosmopolitanism, the family of uprooted orphans, falls apart, and the community is splintered by religious fanaticism, economic insecurity, and increased social discord. Thereupon the third Vaark abode gradually falls prey to forces of decay.

However, the house does not perish. Its floor and walls covered with words are enlivened with Florens’s writing, relating her narrative of temptation, dominion, and release. She literally inscribes the story of her desire in the splendid wooden structure, which is also Jacob’s desire objectified. Her words are described by Morrison as “confined” but also “expansive,” which may very well suggest the unhampered liberation of the voices “that once talked to and for themselves but have been muted by the historical record” (Babb 159). Contrary to other black female characters in Morrison who are sites of writing (such as Sethe in Beloved whose back retained visible scars of her recurrent whipping, the result of a symbolic ritual whereby her black body became encoded “to become the object of white narratives and the text on which those narratives are inserted” [Durkin 175]), Florens is no longer an object but a subject in the ascendant. Her black female text on the walls of the white master’s mansion suggests no less than Morrison’s radical revisioning, indeed, renaming the interlocking dynamics of narrative and desire through black and white bodies. It points up the astonishing paradox of the free slave who emerges in the pages of A Mercy: Florens becomes the master of her own words as well as herself in the master’s house, while writing the story of her own.[13]

While the black slave girl’s words claim the grand house and seek to fly out into the world from inside, “wilderness” is taking dominion over the house from outside: “Spiders reign in comfort here and robins make nests in peace. All manner of small life enters the windows along with the cutting wind” (158). Embodied by the house, the two grand mistakes, Florens’s and Jacob’s, are gradually reclaimed by wildlife, hosting strange non-human animals and vegetation. As if a corrective to human blunders, birds, insects, plants, microbes and fungi begin to thrive on decay, quickly taking dominion everywhere in a strange intimacy with the human world.

From the perspective of our poisoned riskscapes in a later phase of the Anthropocene, this concluding image of A Mercy – along with minha mãe’s final chapter – brings to mind the world’s biggest anthropogenic wasteland Chernobyl, now apparently a site of sumptuous “wilderness.” But while Chernobyl’s radioactive exclusion zone has morphed into a unique but also ghastly wildlife sanctuary over the years that resulted in a perverse biodiversity, Toni Morrison’s vision holds out the hope of possible, because merciful, transformation. Her novel suggests prospects of survival, indeed, healing and renewal in the late Anthropocene on condition cornucopian assumptions about endless earthly resources and  hierarchical thinking give way to compassionate engagement with human and non-human existence.

In tune with its larger ecocritical message, Morrison’s text even allows for a more subversive recognition. A Mercy intimates that the prospect of earthly survival and well-being is staked on a new relationship with humans and non-humans, that of radical coexistence with the stranger. Be that a strange little black girl or nature as an endless network of strange strangeness, irreducible alterity no longer emerges as the object of our benign acknowledgement and anthropocentric cooptation. Instead, the novel urges us to recognize, indeed welcome both blurred boundaries and intractable uniqueness to devise a new ‟necessary fiction” (to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase) of non-holistic collectivity, that of radical intimacy with the strange.[14]

Many thanks are due to Central European University Library, Budapest, a place of academic rigor and friendly ambience, without which this paper would have been impossible to write.

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GERGELY NAGY

A GOD LIKE THE ANIMALS: THE MYTHOLOGICAL SUBJECT IN FRANK HERBERT’S GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE

Frank Herbert’s achievement in science fiction rivals that of J.R.R. Tolkien’s in fantasy. Both are unique in their complexity and extraordinarily fine focus on cultural processes as well as the subjects shaping and being shaped by these. Perhaps surprisingly for an author classed as science fiction, Herbert relies heavily on the cultural discourse of the sacred, of theology. However, he always uses theology not as the narrative device of “magic,” but very strictly as a discourse of culture, showing how its interactions with other discourses mould culture and its subjects in specific ways. But he does not stop at that: although in the Dune books the sacred controls masses and history, there are individual subjects who seem to control the theological discourse too. Indeed, one of Herbert’s characteristic approaches is always to emphasise individuals (as opposed to the masses, appearing in texts like Asimov’s Foundation); in this process he works out two central characters who are crucial to his representation of the sacred and its role in history and culture.

A coherent theological discourse implies and requires a metaphysical centre that defines and governs it, and Dune makes this (these) centre(s) the main character(s) of the text. The ultimate signifier in a culture with a theologically based “pan-semiotic world view” (see Lotman 1977) is the guarantee of meaning: everything goes back to it, and every signifier and subject will receive its meaning and “subject-hood” from it. By making this centre into a character, with motivations, feelings and thoughts described in great detail, Herbert’s work is again in some sense similar to Tolkien’s – they both evolve subjects that are “above nature” (supernatural) and have nearly unlimited power to shape the fictional world. But while for Tolkien the ultimate centre is always given (the creator of the world, Ilúvatar), and his subjects of mythological magnitude (the dark lords Morgoth and Sauron) cannot ever truly occupy it (Nagy 122), Herbert’s two characters Paul Atreides and Leto Atreides II create the centre and move into it, illustrating how the theological is merely a discourse of culture that can be manipulated and ruled just like any other. Paul and Leto achieve a status greater than that of mere political/religious manipulators, with Leto II finally becoming the infamous “God Emperor” in Herbert’s fourth Dune novel. They are subjects that sit at the centre of a theologically determined web of cultural discourses, functioning as central signifiers controlling other subjects: they are mythological subjects (– at least Leto is).

While Paul and Leto II definitely start out as human characters using religious discourses, within the context of Herbert’s fictional world, they soon become more than that. The “heightened consciousness” that gives them perfect control of their bodies (something Paul gets from his upbringing) is supplemented by their “multiple subjectivity”: through the all-important substance of the spice “melange” (found only on the planet Arrakis), they acquire the memories and sense experiences of all their ancestors, becoming something like an embodiment of history itself. Paul, the main character of the first two volumes (Dune and Dune Messiah), declines to go further; Leto II, his son, however, entering into a symbiotic relationship with the small “sandtrout” of Arrakis (creatures which ultimately turn into the huge sandworms that are the only source of spice, and are also the symbols of the ultimate deity in the native religion), grows to embody not only history but also religion. In this process, he undergoes a very long transformation as the sandtrout slowly dissolve his human form, turning it into a sandworm. Leto as a mythological subject is therefore inseparable from the idea and the very physical form of the sandworm of Arrakis. In this paper, I will examine this conjunction: how exactly the transformation, the voluntary hybridization that Leto undertakes, contributes to his representation as a true “mythological subject,” and enables him to perform the functions of deities. We will see that apart from physical aspects (the sandworm body allows an exceptionally long lifespan and makes Leto effectively invulnerable), the religious symbolism connected to the sandworm makes it possible for Leto to use religious discourses in a much more literal way than his father could. Eventually, he manipulates the cultural context and its major discourses to produce results and changes on a (natural) evolutionary scale, and reinforces these by mythic structures and plots turned into historical realities. It is only as a human-sandworm hybrid that Leto can produce these effects; the animal body is unquestionably central in his representation as a theological centre.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MYTHOLOGICAL SUBJECT IN DUNE

Herbert’s fictional universe is an extraordinarily complex one, with its main concern (somewhat similarly to Asimov’s) being history and its formative forces. Placed some 24 centuries after the present day, after a fictional crusade against computers (the “Butlerian Jihad”), the cultural discourses predominant in this world are ones that science fiction is usually preoccupied with, with the notable exception of technology. Religion is treated at some length in the Appendices to the first Dune novel (“Appendix II: The Religion of Dune,” D[15] 500-508), showing that Herbert imagined a highly ecumenical and idiosyncratic religious situation, resulting from the merger of major world religions with offshoots and original, ancient traditions reasserting themselves. Based on the “common belief that there exists a Divine Essence in the universe” (D 502), planets and systems evolve their own versions of this amalgamation of historical religions. One of the directions is the sisterhood of the Bene Gesserit, whose extreme training gives a heightened consciousness and a nearly total control of the body. Though officially not a religious organization, their “training, … symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were almost wholly religious” (D 501). The sisters are engaged in a millennia-long project of selectively breeding the “Kwisatz Haderach,” a male who might master the sisterhood’s thus-far exclusively female skills. The sisterhood also routinely tempers with local religions to produce beliefs that their members can exploit in an emergency, planting prophecies that can easily be fulfilled by someone in the know. The so-called “Missionaria Protectiva,” “that black arm of superstition” (D 504) engineers religions to their needs (cf. GE 217). Herbert’s universe is thus rather nebulous in terms of religion, and what enables him to focus his story on this discourse of culture is its microcosm, the planet Arrakis.

Arrakis (Dune) serves as the laboratory of subjects and humans, mythological and otherwise. In the first Dune novel (Dune, 1965), the main character, Paul Atreides, strives to revenge his father, the Duke Leto Atreides, who had been forced to accept the desert planet from the galactic Emperor as his fief. This is part of a plot to assassinate Leto (which succeeds) and destroy House Atreides (which does not). Leto is a consummate statesman and inspiring leader with a strong grasp on the discourses of society and culture. His son, Paul, (after his father’s death, the Duke in exile) is raised as a “mentat” (the human equivalent of a computer, trained to think in terms of data and computational tasks), quick to pick up whatever his father teaches him and supplements this with his own powers. From childhood, he had had a certain power of prescience, which blooms into unforeseen dimensions thanks to the spice-saturated diet in Arrakis (the spice is noted for strengthening prescient skills). But his mother, the Lady Jessica, also provided him with the heightened consciousness and the extreme control over his body derived from her own Bene Gesserit upbringing. Paul is also believed to be the Bene Gesserit’s Kwisatz Haderach: in a ritual, he demonstrates the ultimate control over his body and the mystical insights he had gained by voluntarily changing the molecular structure of a deadly poison in his body and surviving, thus gaining the ability only the sisterhood’s “Reverend Mothers” command: an access to the memories and sense perceptions of his ancestors. But Paul has his ancestral memories both from the male and the female side, and thus transcends the Reverend Mothers, who only have access to their female ancestors. Equipped thus, Paul rises to lead the native Fremen of Arrakis and wrestles the sovereignty from the Galactic Emperor.

While Leto is concerned with the economic, military, ecological (“planetological”), and political discourses and difficulties he faces in Arrakis, Paul uses the religious discourse to govern all of these. Indeed, much of Dune is about how Paul is accepted by and rises to power among the Fremen after his father’s death. What enables him to do this is partly a functional slot in Fremen religion which he is perfect to fulfil (“Mahdi,” “Lisan-al-Gaib”), constructed earlier by the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva: this is Paul’s entrance into Fremen religion, and to acceptance. Eventually by his understanding of the forces of the Empire, his mentat skills, his strengthened prescience, and the fanatical faith he inspires in the Fremen, Paul comes out victorious: an Emperor who commands not so much by political, military, or economic means but by religious authority. In the first volume, Herbert establishes the theological discourse as dominant while preserving the complexity and importance of the others, and constructs Paul as a subject of more than earthly power and authority, whose influence over his subjects is so overbearing he himself is scared of the consequences. But despite all this, Paul never becomes a proper “mythological subject,” since, realising the extreme violence unleashed by his religious jihad, he turns against it in the subsequent books, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, and becomes the voice of critique.

The struggle to achieve the dominance of the theological discourse and to establish themselves as centre imply different strategies and understandings of the theological for Paul and Leto II. After Paul’s backing out, Leto’s transformation into a “pre-worm” (GE 15) literalizes the Fremen religion and incorporates his father’s critique: he becomes not a “Messiah” or a hero, but a god. In his empire, all the cultural discourses that Paul had engaged with turn into aspects of very tight control (cf. Bene Gesserit report, GE 70-78) allowed by his occupying the central position. While Paul simply stepped into the pre-engineered theological position constructed by the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva, Leto oversteps this to create an authentic position for himself. By adapting and embodying the Fremen’s religious symbol, “Shai-Hulud the Worm,” he really becomes the centre that Paul had declined to be. His authenticity is, of course, frequently questioned by various characters and very effectively highlights the question of what exactly a god is in human culture. Leto’s actions are seen as ultimately “human” in the sense that they are all “possible” for a human of his powers (the multiple subject with comprehensive prescience, something that is at least possible, if not very common, in Herbert’s fiction); but these actions differentiate him radically from humanity, and enable him a control over history and culture that performs the functions of the theological centre. Leto controls his empire by controlling discourses and meanings to an unprecedented degree, performing the ideological function of a true “mythological subject.”

THE SANDWORM AS RELIGIOUS SYMBOL AND AS LETO’S BODY

As readers (and the Atreides) learn in the first Dune novel, the giant sandworm of Arrakis is the central symbol of the native religion: this is Leto’s road to the sacred. Called “Shai-hulud,” “the Maker,” “the Old Man of the Desert,” “Old Father Eternity,” and “Grandfather of the Desert,” this monstrous creature is “the earth deity of Fremen hearth superstitions” (D 529). The Dune Encyclopedia supported (but not authorized) by Herbert says that the word “Shai-hulud” is used to “denote the worm personified; in the form ‘shai-hulud’ (without capitals) to denote the sandworm as a mere creature; as ‘Shai-Hulud,’ with full capitalization, to denote the Fremen tribal god” (DE 623). The name most frequently applied is ‘Maker’: the sandworm is the ‘maker’ of spice, but also of the desert (its life cycle is closely related to the production of both spice and sand). At the same time, in religious imagery the huge creature is also linked with Leviathan (DE 622-24) and thus to the original Christian conception of Satan: there was a ‘common and nigh universal (if seldom expressed) belief that worship of Shai-Hulud was the same as worshipping Shaitan’, ‘an unmitigated evil force of nature’ (DE 624). And with good reason: the sandworms of Arrakis grow to “lengths exceeding 400 meters and [are] close to 100 meters at the widest point” (DE 618). “Barring atomics, I know of no explosive powerful enough to destroy a large worm entirely” (D 116), as the imperial planetologist sums up. It is the “larval form” (DE 619) of this monster, the tiny sand creature called the sandtrout, that Leto II enters into a symbiotic relationship with, which over time transforms him entirely.

This transformation is, firstly, corporeal. At the end of the third volume, Children of Dune, Leto is seen covering his whole body (except his face) with sandtrout (CD 329-31), which act as they do in the sand: they extract and encompass water. Leto’s later memoir mentions “the sandtrout cilia probing my flesh, encapsulating the water of my body within their placental barriers” (GE 15), and describes the end result at the beginning of God Emperor of Dune, several centuries later, as

rather gross. I am what could be called a pre-worm. My body is about 7 meters long and somewhat more than 2 meters in diameter, ribbed for most of its length, with my Atreides face positioned man-height at one end, the arms and hands (still quite recognizable as human) just below (GE 15).

More sandworm than human after millennia of transformation, Leto is, as evidenced by his face, still Atreides; but he has unified not merely in his person, but in his body the political and religious leadership of the empire. “I am a metamorphic vector of the holy sandworm – Shai-hulud! I am your God!” (GE 161), he yells at the departing ambassador of the planet Tleilax, in all his godly splendour and rage.

Leto’s transformation also changes some of the religious applications of the sandworm. After the centuries, Fremen traditions are only remembered faintly and in a museum framework: Moneo, Leto’s majordomo says “Well, that’s [Shai-hulud] what they called the Worm in the Fremen days” (GE 17) as if it was not commonplace knowledge, and there are “Museum Fremen” who perform traditional rituals without any understanding of their original significance. Leto’s transformation also plays out the name “Maker,” as it makes him into the embodiment of the religious symbol, and endows him with the characteristics of the sandworm. He is thus able to achieve the transformation of the entire planet into a garden world, with only a very limited desert area and no sandworms apart from himself. “This planet is the child of the worm,” he says to the rebel Siona, Moneo’s daughter, “and I am that worm” (GE 325). In other words, Leto appropriates and monopolizes the symbol and everything that comes with it: he is the key to any further spice and the return of the sandworms. “Without sandtrout to bring this world back to desert, Shai-hulud will not emerge” (GE 143), as he says, alluding to the very real threat that if he dies away from water, no sandworms and no spice will ever result (GE 20). But he is also very keenly aware of all the tensions hidden in this symbol: “When I am gone,” he says, “they must call me Shaitan, the Emperor of Gehenna” (GE 257; he already predicted he will be called “the missionary of shaitan” in Children of Dune: CD 349), referring both to the binarism of the original Fremen deity (and its own religious history) and the role he intends to play in culture and history.

Taking the form of the Fremen religious symbol is only one part of what makes Leto a true mythological subject: the other is his very special subjectivity. By his spice-induced multiple subjectivity and extreme prescience, Leto also embodies history, with an unimaginable amount of incontrovertible primary evidence for historical processes and patterns at his fingertips. “He is billions upon billions of people united in that one body” (GE 297), as Moneo explains; “Think of me as something closer to a colony creature” (GE 171) is Leto’s own way of putting it.[16] The extracts from Leto’s journals that preface the chapters of God Emperor of Dune frequently give details about his use of this multiple subjectivity as the ultimate historian. Timothy O’Reilly argues that “In Dune, heightened awareness is a spectrum along which many different kinds of knowledge have a place” (O’Reilly, ch. 3),[17] and Leto’s attitude to servants, rebels and his journal alike show how his position (and power) comes with knowledge not available to other humans. With this, Leto can engineer history just as the Bene Gesserit could manipulate religions: one instance of this is the way he let the Fremen recognise (or establish) him as their Supreme Deity. As he explains to his bride, the new Ixian ambassador Hwi Noree,

My godhood began when I told my Fremen I no longer could give the death-water to the tribes… the water would be consecrated to a Supreme Deity, left nameless. … I, as delegate of this nameless deity, held loose control of that precious water for almost three hundred years. … When it came time to consecrate my sister’s water, I performed a miracle. The voices of all the Atreides spoke from Ghani’s urn. Thus, my Fremen discovered that I was their Supreme Deity (GE 218).

By such historical-religious manipulation, Leto, having subsumed the form of the ultimate religious symbol, is a subject who truly transcends society and history: the centre that emanates and assigns meaning. He authenticated the theological position that his father found inauthentic, while taking on and improving on Paul’s function as a ruler from a theological position. Paul had been a prophet and a messiah: Leto has become a god.

But not everyone thinks this position is really authentically theological. Leto himself frequently admits to friends and confidantes that his position is, ultimately, not ‘true’. “Lord, are you telling me that you are not really a god?,” Hwi asks, and Leto evades the direct answer: “I am telling you that I do not play hide and seek with death” (GE 218). His new Commander of the Guard, Duncan Idaho, an old friend brought back from death as a “ghola,” asks him bluntly whether his “secret” is that “you’re not God?;” and to him Leto says quite directly, “Not in that ultimate sense” (GE 93). “My monotheism dominates, but the original pantheon remains” (GE 217), he admits: and this is seen in how his loyal subject, Moneo, the rebel Siona, and later Duncan strive to make distinctions that enable them to grasp Leto’s position and either support or subvert it. While the rebels distinguish the human tyrant from Shai-hulud, the original and authentic Fremen religious symbol, Moneo differentiates Leto as God Emperor from the “Worm” that is inhuman but still sacred. Siona maintains a rigid distinction between the old “Shai-hulud” of Fremen religion and whatever Leto had become: she pointedly “pray[s] to Shai-hulud, who lives in the sand” (GE 10), and directly defies Moneo, claiming that Leto “is not Shai-hulud” (GE 17). Moneo has a more refined distinction: “they are two separate beings,” he argues, “Leto the Emperor and The Worm Who Is God” (GE 18); “The Worm is God. Leto lives in the bosom of God” (GE 17). The rebels loathe Leto’s loss of humanity, and do not even consider that his theological position can be authentic; Moneo (and Leto’s fanatical guard, the Fish Speakers) sees Leto’s hybrid, non-human subjectivity as truly transcending his subjects, a religious mystery to be served and possibly understood.

The actual fact is that some sort of distinction does exist. The narrator frequently explains that “the worm-flesh had a will of its own” and that “For Leto, there were only two requirements—a real threat that his worm-body could sense, and the release of that body” (GE 29). He himself reflects on this when he tells Moneo that “Part of me dwells forever underground without thought. … That part reacts. It does things without a care for knowing or logic” (GE 124). O’Reilly’s remark that “the Worm also represents the unconscious, the mystery of life” (O’Reilly, ch. 4) seems warranted, and posits an instinct-driven, animal unconscious together with Leto’s special subjectivity, beastly reaction together with new forms of knowledge. All of this problematizes the double nature of the sandworm body (as an inhuman monster and as a symbol for the deity) and Leto’s relation to it. For the rebels, Shai-hulud (the authentic theological centre) is merely an abstraction, and Leto’s literalisation of the symbol is nothing but monstrous, even making him less than human. For Moneo, the actual Worm is in some mystical way god: for him, “that uncontrollable presence [is] the Holy Presence which could kill without warning” (GE, 119) – Moneo does find the monstrous body and its irrational behaviour something “holy”.[18] One of the contested points about Leto is exactly this: that his hybridization made him non-human.

Whether it made him into a monster or an authentic mythological subject is a critical question that contenders of the debate (Siona, Moneo, and Leto himself) circle around. While the rebels, most importantly Duncan, frequently discount Leto’s humanity (“You’re not even human any more!”, GE 21), Leto himself always speaks in terms of having some humanity left. He mentions his “lost humanity” (GE 106, 287, cf. also 262), but agrees with Siona “that I am a monster in many human eyes” (GE 286), and tells Hwi that “what [he] was has become only this face” (GE 393). Leto’s human face set in the sandworm body is also often remarked upon: the narrator mentions “the intensely human effect of his features in that alien frame” (GE 221) and that for Duncan “It was difficult avoiding the thought that Leto’s face was an obscenity, a last bit of humanity trapped in something alien” (GE 23). Leto explains this “trappedness” to Duncan as “the feeling that somewhere inside this changeling form of mine there exists an adult human body with all the necessary functions” (GE 156), but ultimately even he distances himself from humanity: “I am no longer one of you. I am alone” (GE 290), he says to Siona, and also calls himself “the ultimate alien” (GE 162; elsewhere qualified as “I am both leader and outsider,” GE 382). Yet he is “revealed as a sentimentalist … capable of love” (GE 35, something he knows well enough: see GE 95, 141), shown in his relationship with Hwi Noree. The rebels tend to emphasise how Leto’s transformation only conferred upon him the physical form of the worm, not its religious meaning. For Duncan, Leto is “no longer Atreides, not even human… not so much a living creature as a brute fact of nature, opaque and impenetrable, all of his experiences sealed off within him” (GE 400). For Moneo, the irrational actions of the Worm signify transcending the human. For the rebels, it is a descent into the bestial.

So Leto’s status as a mythological subject is both made possible and cast into doubt by his transformation into the ultimate religious symbol. The problem is partly what faced Paul too: whether it is possible to occupy such a position for a human and still remain authentic. Leto’s solution is becoming something other than human: the ultimate Other (“I am no longer one of you”, GE 290, cf. 162) that elevates him above all human discourses. But he still remains within the human signifying system by being a subject that produces language and meaning: Herbert consistently focuses not on Leto’s political or even historical influence, but on how he explains these to individual characters, producing a text that is mostly dialogue. Leto’s critics argue that the authentic theological position is one that is always already given to the subject: one does not become a god, but is a god from the beginning. Leto, however, seems to claim that one can step into such a position, construct it through the discourses available to (a very limited number of) humans. The ultimate question appears to be whether the theological is something ‘real’ or only a ‘constructed’ discourse of culture, whether god is an ‘ontic’ reality or merely an ‘ontological’ construct. Paul’s solution was to refuse to offer grounds for uncritical religious mysticism, while Leto chose to literalize the theological, point out that it is always a discourse, and thereby foster a critical attitude to it. Herbert, of course, does not resolve the question, but shows the (quite fantastic) effects that becoming a mythological subject has on Leto and the (slightly less fantastic) functions he is able to perform this way in culture and history.

WHAT LETO’S BODY ENABLES

Apart from the extreme longevity, the sharpened senses and nearly complete physical invulnerability, the worm-body and what it means enables Leto to work miracles in several senses. He has his father’s control over the discourses of culture, but his longevity yields more than that: it allows him to think not merely in historical but evolutionary terms, and mould his subjects into shapes his historical vision dictates. It is here that Leto is truly revealed as a mythological subject, since he is not only controlling meanings (like any political or religious leader) but the subjects that produce those meanings, along with the cultural discourses and the historical perspective that shape those subjects. His own metaphor for this role is the predator, notably an animal image. But he only uses that to describe his function; in more philosophical moments he uses more theoretically charged language: “I am the only reality and, as you differ from me, you lose reality” (GE 198). A metaphysical centre is the totality of meaning: all signification proceeds from it, and consequently, all other subjects are defined and even created by it. Without the centre, these lose their meaning (cf. Nagy 128-9). It is one of Leto’s miracles that this is in fact not the end he has in mind, merely the means. Leto very consciously works evil to achieve good (cf. O’Reilly ch. 7).

Leto’s engineering of history is made possible by his control of all discourses of culture, and with a purpose he refers to as the “Golden Path.” This term emerged in Children of Dune (CD 72) and becomes central in God Emperor, meaning “the survival of humankind” (GE 13). Leto’s extreme prescience showed him futures that could only be avoided by his asserting control over humanity on a mythological scale. As an “immanent God, [he] sprawl[s] at the central node of the ‘pattern of patterns’ (GE 226) he has set up” (Fjellman 58), and produces “Leto’s Peace:” “an enforced tranquillity which humankind knew only for the briefest periods before my ascendancy” (GE 14). He also makes a point of providing a record: his preoccupation with past and present historians is telling. There is an account of the “execution of the nine historians who disappeared into his Citadel” (GE 70, first mentioned 61) that Leto acknowledges to be true, because the historians “lied pretentiously” (GE 70). He is also rumoured to have written “pseudonymous histories, some of them quite famous” (he admits that this is true: GE 215): a certain “Noah Arkwright” is mentioned as an example, whose works and biography (“I wrote that account, too”) were apparently required reading for Hwi Noree. Leto’s greatest preoccupation with the historical record is, however, his Journals. Many chapters are prefaced by the historical observations and pronouncements excerpted from this text, part of which the rebel Siona steals from him, and the rest of which are only discovered long after his death. “I assure you that I am the book of fate” (GE 3), he says, making himself into another metaphor of history, the book. In the journals, Leto’s grand pronouncements about history and his own place in it sometimes nearly turn into self-parody for their pomposity and exaggerated mysticism; indeed the reader often wonders whether Michel Foucault himself might not be there in Leto’s multiple subjectivity (although as Foucault had no children, he cannot possibly be Leto’s ancestor). “There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge” (GE 110) – Foucault’s idea about the inherent power any knowledge-producing position generates is of course magnified to superhuman size in Leto. He is the ultimate archaeologist of knowledge, since to him the past is available directly, and not merely as discourse; and it is exactly this why he is preoccupied with the historical record, pointing attention to the fact that history and metahistory are both only discourses which are subject to the limits of language. “The linear progression of events is imposed by the observer” (GE 276), he says.

This is why Leto insists on acting not in historical but in evolutionary terms. History might be in the eyes of the historiographer, but evolution produces changes. In O’Reilly’s words, “Herbert’s books portray and test the human ability to consciously adapt” (O’Reilly ch. 1), and Leto merges the themes of control and adaptation when he assumes control of adaptation. He explains in his journal that

the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the prey… Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces (GE 353).

Leto’s inhumanity and animal body in fact come handy here, because they strengthen his image as a “force of nature” (cf. GE 400): the sandworm is literally a predator. Leto also takes over the Bene Gesserit breeding program which had produced Paul as the Kwisatz Haderach, with a vindictive anger towards the Bene Gesserit, who are nearly as loathed as the shape-changing Tleilaxu. The Bene Gesserit nevertheless watch him closely and even notice that “the God Emperor views himself as a predator in the natural sense” (GE 71) – gods prey on their subjects (the reason why Leto mentions religions in the above quotation). Leto’s own breeding program is in the service of his Golden Path: since humanity needs to adapt to (or against) him and his prescience, his product, Siona needs to be able to “fade from the prescient view at times” (GE 39; the Bene Gesserit also notice this: 114). Leto as “absolute tyrant” gives people peace and “absolute assurances,” but this comes “at the price of absolute control” (O’Reilly ch. 7): as mythological centre, exercising total control on history, Leto embodies discourses and forces humans have historically been trying to assert control against. He does not only play Shaitan’s advocate but Shaitan himself.

Apart from Leto’s own breeding programme and evolutionary pretensions, it does seem like the entire book is concerned with new kinds of human and new subjectivities. The textual framework of God Emperor of Dune (the museum presentation of Leto’s discovered journals) points attention to his peculiar subjectivity, but there certainly are others: the Tleilaxu produce the ghola Duncan Idaho, and the Ixians Hwi Noree. While the Tleilaxu themselves, and certainly their Face Dancers, are universally loathed (“they aren’t human!,” bursts out even the gentle Hwi: GE 217), Leto uses them to provide for him newer and newer copies of Duncan Idaho. Gholas, copies of human beings ‘grown’ from the cells of someone already dead, first appeared in Dune Messiah; Leto relies on the serially revived Duncans for reasons of his own. The newest Duncan, like Leto, recalls feeling “at first an alien in his own flesh” (GE 44) and fears he is only “a palimpsest upon which the Tleilaxu could write almost anything they wished” (GE 45). But his later exploits inspire wonder even in Nayla, the God Emperor’s fanatical follower: “she no longer thought of him as quite human. He was something else, a demiurge who stood next to God” (GE 410). Hwi Noree, the new Ixian ambassador, is also an experimental human: “not exactly a ghola, and not even a clone… a cellular restructuring” (GE 230) based on an earlier Ixian ambassador, Leto’s favourite companion Malky (on such good terms with the God Emperor that he calls him “old worm,” GE 378-9). Leto is quick to see through the Ixian plan: Hwi is “the essential god-trap” (GE 291), a woman for whom Leto feels great attraction and who he is sure can understand him completely. Siona is adapted to Leto’s world in that she cannot be seen in prescient visions, the Duncan’s jealousy over Hwi (a woman he falls in love with but cannot have) makes him realise Leto’s ‘inhumanity’ and help destroy him, and Hwi is explicitly tailored to infatuate the God Emperor. The respective roles the Duncan, Hwi and Siona play in Leto’s downfall are in themselves evidence that his efforts to produce (or produce a culture which produces) new kinds of human who can effectively oppose him are successful.

Leto’s body and its integrated animal and religious meanings therefore enable him to act as a true mythological subject: transcending but still immanent in the world. The animal body allows him to exploit religious symbolism and think and act in a historical perspective and scale that is decidedly evolutionary in length. As emperor he oppresses his subjects for a very definite historical reason; as mythological subject, he shapes his subjects into forms of new subjectivities, with new forms of knowledge and new skills, all in the service of the “Golden Path,” the survival of humanity. “I create a field without a self or center” (GE 308), he says in his journal: eventually, the Golden Path requires that he himself be removed and remembered quite differently. But alongside all that, there is another aspect of Leto’s taking up the form of the deity: he can not only play god but play out myths.

WHAT LETO’S BODY PLAYS OUT

By transforming bodily into the Fremen symbol of god and literalizing the central symbols of the (already dominant) religious discourse, Leto enables himself to perform myth. He appropriates the old god Shai-hulud’s name and function of ‘making’: as the last sandworm, the only possible source of all future spice and the greatest hoarder and giver of what remains of the old stockpiles, he exercises control over aspects of the empire’s economic discourse and the remnant religious discourse. The Spacing Guild and its monopoly on space travel (and therefore trade and military deployment) are dependent on Leto’s doling out his spice, as Guild navigators need the substance to guide their ships through space. The Bene Gesserit also depend on Leto, for they require the spice for their ritual of making Reverend Mothers. But the spice is also a geriatric substance, allowing Leto a control of his whole population’s health and life expectancy. These fields of positive control create opposing effects too, as the Guild work together with the technologically advanced planet of Ix to develop a substitute technology to the Guild Navigators; but Leto also fosters this by giving Ix projects of his own. Both the Guild and the Bene Gesserit work together with the rebels to decipher Leto’s stolen journals, which (both the theft and the cooperation) Leto engineered in the first place. He thus controls even the backlash of his control. But these are only aspects of how his transformation gives him unprecedented control over the other discourses. What is most important is how he is empowered as a “mythmaker” (GE 247).

Playing out ambiguous patterns is one of Leto’s ways to step into the position of the mythological centre. His inhumanity and wormly irrationality are seen by the rebels as proof of his inauthenticity (see above), but by transcending the Kwisatz Haderach that Paul was, he truly presents the image of an androgynous god, going beyond gender divisions. Even the Kwisatz Haderach is a fusion of male and female, the male that can survive and supplement the Reverend Mothers’ female insights; Leto goes further and employs images that oscillate between the two poles. “I am both father and mother to my people” (GE 222), he says in his journal, and claims the whole of humanity as his “only child” (GE 68, italics in the original). His ultimate metaphor of his activities is, however, gendered strongly female: “I am pregnant with my Empire. I’ll die giving birth to it” (GE 94). As we will see, Leto retains a male identity for ritual purposes, and in his own identity; but his metaphors show he is very aware of the ambiguity. He also exploits his perceived inhumanity to the extreme by assigning it a religious function: the effect of his Atreides face embedded in the sandworm body makes it “difficult avoiding the thought that Leto’s face was an obscenity, a last bit of humanity trapped in something alien” (GE 23), but Moneo reports that this effect is known and used by Leto, who “says he has created a holy obscenity” (GE 102; in Leto’s own words: 82). He insists that this has a function in his religion: “The defiling of the god is an ancient human tradition” (GE 262) – yet another detail where Leto controls even the backlash against him. Incorporating into his godly image the unavoidable opposition, the incitement against the god, he himself points the way of criticism, and teaches the historic lesson that any position of authority is (and should be) assailable. Morality does not proceed from authority, but neither is it in mere opposition to authority. You will have to come up with more complex arguments than that, he says.

But the loss of humanity can also be seen as personal loss to Leto, in other words, as sacrifice. Sacrificial deities abound in traditional religions, and perhaps this is the pattern that Leto performs most authentically, exactly because of his loss of humanity. His many remarks on “how sweet these last few sips of humanity are” (GE 262) and his desperate thought to reverse “this terrible metamorphosis” for Hwi’s sake (GE 181) show he is acutely aware of this. While Siona “sneer[s]” (GE 293) at the idea that Leto sacrificed anything, Hwi understands this even before meeting Leto: “he saw in our future something that only such a sacrifice would prevent” (GE 61), she tells the Ixian committee, and Leto sees there is “no mistaking the deep sadness in her for the humanity Leto had sacrificed” (GE, 156). There are of course two points of view on this: that Leto made this sacrifice to ensure humanity’s survival through the Golden Path (as he insists), and that he did it to acquire hitherto unknown power (as Siona chooses to read it). He also takes upon himself the often violent opposition that we saw he invites against himself as a “holy obscenity”: “you know how violence seeks me out,” he tells the Duncan. “That is one of my functions” (GE 201). For godlike control, one is supposed to pay a godlike price and take what comes with the role.

One of those things is responsibility, which we already saw Leto claim for himself. He explains this in some detail to the Bene Gesserit emissaries: “Gods need take no responsibility for anything except genesis. Gods accept everything and thus accept nothing” (GE 128). The creation that he refers to can easily be equated with Leto’s ultimate goals: the Golden Path’s guarantee of the survival of humanity, the new types of human (Siona, who can fade from even Leto’s prescient vision, the Duncan, who still dares to oppose him, or Hwi, who is constructed to trap him), new types of knowledge, meaning, and subjectivities. Leto performs the godly act of creation continuously for all his reign: “Genesis does not stop,” he says to Hwi. “Your god continues creating you” (GE 235), much in the vein of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the continuous creation. He also very explicitly takes responsibility for everything he does, making it a special point to record his thoughts in his journals for posterity (along with contriving for Siona to steal some of these, from which the rebels can better understand him). “I am all of God that need be seen. I am the word become a miracle,” as Moneo reports his words (GE 338). Leto uses and bends the Christian idea of the ‘word become flesh’, something that works well with performing the pattern of sacrifice too (and he also adds to this the function of forgiveness: “Of course I forgive you. That is your God’s function,” GE 161). The God Emperor’s living myths adapt a lot from Christian patterns, just as his journal entries often take on the language of decidedly Foucauldian theory too (see e.g. GE 343).

Leto also performs further adaptations of Christian patterns in which god is shown in community with the worshippers. At the feast of “Siaynoq” (“Sharing”), a heavily gendered ritual, Leto ceremonially affirms his commitment to his exclusively female royal guard, the Fish Speakers, asking them “Do you keep my faith?” (GE 207), “Do you walk the Golden Path?,” and ultimately, “Do we share?” (GE 208). The Fish Speakers give the ceremonially scripted answers, and finally reinforce Leto’s godly status: ‘“Who is Shai-hulud?’ Leto asked. Again, that deep murmur. ‘You, Lord.”’ (GE 208-9). At the start of the ritual, Leto addressed the women as “My beloveds” and “My brides” (GE 203), “keepers of my faith,” and declared “I love you as I love no others” (GE 204). He is playing on the Christian teaching of the church as the bride of Christ in using the metaphor of marriage to emphasise community between a corporeally present godhead (here explicitly gendered male) and his exclusively female top worshippers. When, however, he actually takes a bride, Hwi Noree, he even jokes on the absurdity of the idea: “We will be Worm and wife” (GE 258), he tells Hwi, and insists on using “the Old Fremen ritual” (GE 266), with “a stillsuit and robe of a Fremen bride, real ones” (GE 267). The pattern being performed here is perhaps that of monks’ and especially nuns’ commitment to god as symbolised in marriage. This is the pattern Leto plays out literally, while in Siaynoq he simply creates a community ritual.

Leto’s greatest and final miracle is, however, his death, where he performs yet another aspect of sacrifice. When the rebels set up the ambush that leads to Leto’s death, the fanatical Fish Speaker, Nayla, whom the God Emperor had ordered to obey Siona in everything, perceives the situation as ripe with religious meaning. Nayla sees the attack will certainly succeed –“unless He performs a miracle! … Siona had set the stage for a Holy Miracle” (GE 410, italics in the original). But Leto doesn’t, and he plunges into the Idaho River (named for the original of the Duncan Idaho ghola who is attacking him) when the bridge he is travelling across is cut by a laser beam. On contact with water,

Shattered spangles of what had been his skin exploded away from him, a rain of silver all around him darting away into the river… – the scale-glitter of sandtrout leaving him to begin their own colony lives. … Leto marvelled that he could remain conscious, that he had a body to feel. (GE 414-15).

The sandtrout will now chase down water, turn Arrakis back into desert, and ultimately bring back the great sandworms and the spice; but, as Leto had earlier explained to Hwi, each sandtrout and worm will also “carry some of my awareness locked away within it, lost and helpless… A little pearl of my awareness will go with every sandworm and every sandtrout – knowing yet unable to move a single cell, aware in an endless dream” (GE 219; see also his earlier account to Moneo, 121). Leto’s sacrifice will never end: in a sense he will live forever, very much less articulate and powerful – a humbled god. This is the final stage of his transformation: “the division and subdivision of a blind deity” (GE 219), but which he had earlier also called “a seed of resurrection” (GE 236). Leto thus performs sacrifice to the full, since his personal sacrifice will never end, fulfils  the pattern of the sacrificially dying deity, and hints that this could also be read as the story of the resurrected god. All of this in the interest of creating (genesis) a new type of humanity that can handle even its gods if they get out of hand. In the book’s closure, we learn that much later a “Holy Reservation of the Divided God” (GE 422) is set up on Arrakis (the name by then worn down to Rakis).

Leto’s bodily transformation into the Fremen religious symbol of the sandworm thus enables him to do more than present himself as the deity, and usurp the position of the theological centre. He really does turn into a mythological subject who can think and rule in terms of evolutionary and mythical patterns, and produce subjects who are both physically and mentally different from earlier humans. Leto’s Peace can be seen as oppression and the Golden Path as “damned;” but the God Emperor does perform genesis in his predatory rule. He creates a situation where he can be overthrown and dispensed with, even in historical perspective. The mythological subject achieved its grand goal of producing subjects who can stand up against its totality of meaning and still produce meanings of their own.

CONCLUSION: HOW THE GOD’S KILLED

It seems that eventually Herbert’s fictional world can have its Nietzsche to say that god is dead. God Emperor of Dune encompasses only a very limited time of the actual story, some big action scenes and mythical patterns but mostly dialogue, and its text presents a fascinating amalgam of religious mysticism, philosophy and contemporary (1980s) theory. But as O’Reilly writes about the first Dune book, “the layering of the many ideas within Dune succeeds because the ideas are seen as the shaping experiences of one man’s life” (O’Reilly ch. 2) – in God Emperor, we see everything through the eyes and consciousness of Leto II, the God Emperor, and this offers unique insights into Herbert’s mythological considerations. Leto’s hybrid subjectivity is shown and argued to be transcending his human subjects in many ways. Symbolically, he embodies and literalizes the Fremen tribal god, but, with the help of his prescience and his multiple consciousness, he really achieves a control over historical processes and individual human subjects that truly merits being called ‘mythological’. Yet he remains a character, a signifier and a producer of meanings and language. He very emphatically narrates his own story (a voice that Herbert’s trademark sensitive focalisation preserves even in the outside narrator’s text), and shapes all others’.

At the beginning of this paper, I compared Leto to Sauron, Tolkien’s representation of a truly transcendent mythological subject; but by now I hope the differences have also become evident. While Sauron is a crude discourse of power, Othering everything else and depriving subjects of (their) meaning, and fails exactly because he is not a true totality (usurping an inauthentic position) (Nagy 128), Leto works to paradoxically produce meaning beyond the totality, or construct subjects who are able to do so. Both Tolkien and Herbert are interested in how power works and what it does to subjects. Tolkien’s answer seems to be pessimistic and claim that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Shippey 115), and his strategies to deal with this representation are derived from earlier, mostly medieval models. Herbert, however, is more optimistic, possibly because he is working in a traditionally future-oriented mode, that of science fiction. Sauron’s position is really inauthentic, and that is why he does not succeed; he remains a subject partly because he has to be signified in other people’s text. Tolkien is also writing from the other side, the subjects opposing Sauron, and they need to signify him; but Leto signifies himself copiously in journals, dialogues and action, and Herbert’s text is ultimately centred on him. Leto is also successful in what he intends to do: an “emperor who wants to be overthrown” (as Michael Drout once remarked to me in conversation) and after millennia of moulding his subjects, manages to produce some that resist his oppressive discourse. Signification cannot be fully controlled, not even by the gods; and it seems Herbert’s point is exactly that not even subjects of a mythological order can ever fully control human culture and society.

WORKS CITED

Fjellman, Stephen M. 1986. “Prescience and Power: God Emperor of Dune and the Intellectuals.” Science Fiction Studies 13.1: 50-63.

Herbert, Frank. 1965. Dune. [= D] New York: Berkley Books.

Herbert, Frank. 1976. Children of Dune. [= CD] New York: Ace Books.

Herbert, Frank. 1981. God Emperor of Dune. [= GE] New York: Ace Books.

Lotman, Yuri. 1977. “Problems in the typology of culture.” in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology. ed. Daniel P. Lucid. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press: 213-21.

McNelly, Willis E. 1984. The Dune Encyclopedia. [= DE] New York: Berkley Books.

Nagy, Gergely. 2013. “A Body of Myth: Representing Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.” in The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium. Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality. ed. Cristopher Vacarro. Jefferson: MacFarland: 119-130.

O’Reilly, Timothy. 1981. Frank Herbert. New York: Frederick Ungar. Out of print, available at http://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html , date of access: 24 September, 2017.

Shippey, Tom. 2001. J.R.R. Tolkien. Author of the Century. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.

DANIEL NYIKOS

“GROWING GREY AND BRITTLE”:

THE HORROR OF ABJECTION IN H. P. LOVECRAFT’S “THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE”

Semiotics shows that the signifying system through which we understand the world is based in difference. As Jacques Derrida writes,

Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences. Such a play, then—différance—is no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general. (286)

Thus, essential divisions between animate and inanimate, between human and animal and plant, between understanding and ignorance form some of the strongest and most important bases of the ideology that shapes the world as we understand it, which also shapes our sense of ourselves and the very idea that we exist. All of this, even the existence of the self, therefore rests upon the necessity of there being differences that we can understand in a world that we can know. H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” dramatizes the threat that even this most basic of truths could be shaken. In the events of the story, a material that defies all human categories comes to Earth and devastates a farmstead by changing all things it touches to brittle, grey matter. As David Simmons illustrates regarding other Lovecraft stories, this abject effect breaks down the sense of self; in “The Colour Out of Space,” it literally deconstructs the body of the self itself, as bodies of those afflicted by this designifying entity from beyond our world literally disintegrate, while readers’ conventional strategies of meaning formation are shattered.

In a recent article, David Simmons (2013) argues that the effect created by the horrors encountered by the characters in H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories should not be read as sublime, as they have been, but according to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. Simmons explains that the sublime, both for Burke and Kant, leads to an elevation of the one who is experiencing a simultaneously ravishing and terrifying phenomenon, a reaffirmation of the ineffable imagination of the human being (who is able to recognize the fragility of his physicality because of the magnificence of his mental capacities), while in Lovecraft the unspeakable disruption created by contact with cosmic horror has the opposite effect: it profoundly destabilizes the imagined place of humanity in the cosmos and questions the empowering potential of cognitive agency. The abject violates the boundaries that secure the perceived superiority of all that secures Lovecraft’s white, male, academic protagonists as the preeminent authorities in their world. According to Kristeva’s poststructuralist psychoanalytical reading, the encounter with the abject – a thing or being reminiscent of the “me that is not me” – simultaneously brings into being and opposes the “I”, the self: “Even before things for him are – hence before they are signifiable – he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject” (6). The encounter with the abject threatens to remind the subject of the act of expelling that separated it from the mother’s body and created the self, a memory that is normally repressed. Kristeva describes this act of the creation of the self: “that trifle [vomiting] turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that ‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amidst the violence of sobs, of vomit” (3 emphasis in original). By expelling food from itself, the preverbal infant discovers that there is a world beyond itself, and thus discovers its own separate existence. The abject brings this to light and renders the borders of the self ambiguous in an experience both fascinating and frightening. As Kristeva explains, “the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (2): her dizzying array of examples range from children’s shoes in Auschwitz to the maternal corpse and skin on the surface of milk.

In Lovecraft, being exposed to the unspeakable truths of the universe, a universe in which the human construct is meaningless and worthless, produces a powerful effect of shock, horror, and alienation that is profoundly abject. Though this threat seems to come from outside – from the vastness of space, from the unknown depths of the ocean – this moment of cosmic horror is fundamentally a reenactment of the primal trauma of abjection. This process promises to lead to the abjection of self Kristeva warns about: “The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being” (5).  Just as the human experiences a traumatic break from its privileged place in the cosmos in Lovecraft, the infant experiences a trauma by separating from the mother’s body, through which trauma the self is separated from the totality of being and creates the Other. James Kneale (2006) directly associates the theme of cosmic horror with thresholds: “Lovecraft’s fiction is explicitly concerned with thresholds, with metaphors of contact and transgression” (113). We can see abjection in this fear of “invasion and contamination... and transmission” (113), recalling the creation of the first border, ambiguous and vulnerable. Thus, cosmic horror recreates the first abject experience that brings the self into existence. Through this process, the division between the internal and the external, the self and the Other become violated and break down. Through the reminder of the act of creating the self by separating the “I” from the “not I”, the self is reminded of its vulnerability and instability, threatening to be overwhelmed by the vastness of the Other that it has itself created.

Simmons particularly focuses on the trauma this vastness inflicts on race in “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn” and “Under the Pyramids,” demonstrating how both stories fracture the concept of white male supremacy using abject miscegenation and the abject mother. According to Simmons, miscegenation is abject because, by combining races in a single body, the ambiguity and permeability of the separation between the races is exposed. In a similar way, the monstrous mother is a source of the abjection through its ability to produce young that threaten the separation that creates the self. These offspring reveal that the self, despite the abject act of delimiting an “I” and “not I,” is not inherently divided from the Other. In “Arthur Jermyn,” the “white ape” princess produces an ape/human hybrid, which ultimately proves to be the ancestor of the protagonist. It is significant that the “white ape” tribe is situated in Africa and is thus associated with blackness. Thus, whiteness as well as humanity is revealed to be vulnerable, and the male is threatened by a power it can never possess: the transgressive power of the mother to create ambiguity by giving birth to abject hybrids. It is rewarding to apply this line of thinking to “The Colour Out of Space,” demonstrating how the destabilizing effect of the uncategorizable material from space produces an abject effect that spreads to every kind of matter, breaking down every semiotic division on which the ideological superiority of Lovecraft – and, by extension, privileged white male Americans – is based.

Simmons’s article demonstrates how the abject functions in Lovecraft as a place of anxiety. It shows that Lovecraft flattened the concept of African identity to an aesthetic Other signified by its difference from his own identity, becoming a “self-reflexive expression of Lovecraft’s deep-seated anxieties concerning his own American nationality and subjectivity” (13). While recognizing the potential limitations of this approach, Simmons situates Lovecraft in the tradition of the Gothic and draws on the broad field of criticism that situates the confrontation with abjection as the key element of Gothic horror (ex. Kim 2014, López 2016, Ilott and Buckley 2016). For Lovecraft, these horrors were based in the fragility of his own identity.

Simmons explains that, rather than entering into a debate about the origin and nature of Lovecraft’s racism, he seeks to understand the use of the Other in Lovecraft’s work, arguing that Lovecraft’s “prejudiced comments belie a deeper and considerably more multifaceted engagement with concepts of the non-Western Other, a stance that is attracted to that which it is simultaneously repulsed by” (18). Simmons demonstrates that the racial abjection in Lovecraft’s stories stems from a latent avowal of the anxiety that, after all, the distinction between white and non-white people is artificial – essentially, that it is a semiotic rather than a genetic division. Despite the horror that this causes for the characters, they are never able to completely deny this destabilizing truth:

While his protagonists recurrently encounter non-Western peoples and their cultures, ostensibly rendered ‘abject’ by their inhumanity and lack of civilization, these self-same protagonists are more often than not unable to exercise any sense of dominion over those they meet. Instead, they find their sense of identity fragmented by their at least partial realization of an essential communality between all peoples. Such a repeated patterning implies a degree of ideological tension: the admission of an essential racial and biological universality within humanity tempered by a reluctance to suggest any measure of approval concerning the issue. (19)

For example, Simmons identifies the source of horror in “Arthur Jermyn” as the protagonist’s realization that he is descended from the abject near-human female figure of the “white ape.”

Through Lovecraft’s writings, Simmons argues, he sought to externalize and control the abject, displacing it through what Kristeva calls “verbal play” (Kristeva 16). Simmons writes that Lovecraft’s approach contrasts with one most writers take: according to Kristeva’s model, “The writer is able to externalize what he or she considers abject by creating objects of repulsion in the text that can then be dealt with in a more considered and effectual manner” (24). Lovecraft, however, does not seek to “deal with” them: he allows their abject influence to remain open and disturbing. In “Under the Pyramids,” Harry Houdini seeks for an Egypt he imagines to be authentic, one which was shaped in his imagination by Western fictions and which will allow him to solidify his own self-image as a Westerner. He arrives to find an Egypt already partially Westernized, ironically in an attempt to make Egypt more accessible as an object for Western consumers. The horror of the secrets that Houdini experiences under the pyramid, however, destabilizes Houdini’s complacent view of the universe. He witnesses hideous monstrosities inside the pyramid of Giza feeding an abomination that is revealed to be the model for the Great Sphinx; thus, a thing Houdini thought he understood – the Sphinx – proves to be both alien and horribly familiar. These revelations about humanity’s position in the cosmos produce the destabilizing effect of the abject: “Houdini is unable to gain control of the abject events he has witnessed because he cannot confidently place them in any one established narrative” (27). In other words, his system of signification has proved to be inadequate, and there is no way to repair this gap. The abject cannot be reabsorbed into the self because the self is no longer stable and separate.

This effect is reversed and magnified in “The Colour Out of Space,” in which the abject seems to physically insert itself into the material body as well as the signifying system, with horrific results. The abject effect in “The Colour Out of Space” is created by the arrival of a substance from beyond the planet, a substance that cannot be categorized by any understood difference: it cannot be classed in any known category of matter and defies all established laws about matter’s behavior. This material not only falls outside the system of categorization that exists but invalidates its very existence. Rather than an explicitly racial or biological challenge as in other stories, it is an elemental challenge, undermining the human conception of reality itself.

The substance baffles the attempts by scientists to understand it. This effect is clearly abject, as described by Kristeva: “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (16). The color[19] out of space seems to offer a material that can be measured by scientific instruments, but by doing so it only further breaks down the validity of these processes themselves. It turns the Western process of understanding against itself and destroys it.

When the material arrives in a meteorite of an unknown origin, scientists from the fictional Miskatonic University arrive to study it, to classify it according to their understanding of the cosmos or to expand their understanding to fit this new substance. They can ultimately do neither. The scientists’ attempt to run tests on it is described in great detail, demonstrating the concerted endeavors the experts use to try to find some way to categorize the substance: “It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and shewing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe” (Lovecraft 174). The description of the tests is demonstratively exhaustive: if there were a means for science to classify this material, the text seems to say, it would have been found by such thorough, modern, and varied methods. The mention of the “well-ordered laboratory” demonstrates the fundamental function of the abject in this scene: the “clean and proper” (Kristeva 108) laboratory, a tool for establishing a narrative with hard boundaries and delineations, is thwarted and trumped by the abject substance. Simmons argues that this rational narrative, which has at its core the concept that everything can be measured, quantified, and understood by human means, is key to the Western ability to resist the abject disintegrative force of chaos: “In these stories, the West lies precariously balanced between civilization and the chaos that would be born again if the Other were able to get a foothold” (Simmons 27). The loss of that narrative upsets not only civilization itself but the very fabric of the reality crafted by human signification.

The characters in the story approach but do not fully grasp this abject realization that the material from space brings, trying to repress the knowledge that their tools – including their ideological apparatus – are insufficient. They are left grasping at unsolutions, still attempting to categorize the substance with their own tools and understanding, but this only underlines their failure: “when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown” (174). In this “breathless talk,” there is the horrifyingly compelling force of the abject: it forces itself into the narrative and demands to be engaged with. The thoroughness of these tests further emphasizes that “...at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws” (176). Their inability to quantify and identify this material, to incorporate it into the semiotic system, inspires in them a cosmic horror of a place where their understanding of reality fails: “in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity” (177). This is the most significant effect of the color out of space: not only is it abject, but it renders everything else abject as well, ungrounded and horrifying.

Kristeva explains that the abject, once a source of fascination and attraction, becomes repellant, and it makes others repellant, too:

Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame (8).

This filthiness and shame touches the academics at the university, but its full force descends on the place where the abject entity is most present, where it literally disintegrates all matter, from plant life to human, and renders it “grey and brittle.”

The description of the color as a message is particularly telling: it is abject but not indecipherable, and as the people of the New England area that comes to be known as the “blasted heath” struggle to grasp its meaning, their world literally loses the distinction between types of matter even as the semiotic distinctions between them break down. The skunk cabbages that grow on the farm are altered, becoming strange and unidentifiable to all of the senses: “Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented” (179). The universe itself takes on an unnatural and unhealthy aspect in their minds due to the change this abject force creates in matter that felt familiar and known: “all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world” (179), implying that the whole world has become diseased. This information is imparted to the narrator by Ammi Pierce, a local farmer and the sole source of information about the events that took place years before. Ammi lives close enough to the blasted heath to know the inhabitants personally but not close enough to be physically affected—or so it seems. It is he who witnesses firsthand the disintegration of the Gardner family into “grey and brittle” masses that forms the apex of the plot.

Just as the material from space proves unidentifiable to science, the greyness that it infects matter with defeats signification. It is a neutral color-without-color, between white and black, defying definition. Its association with sickness, decay, and burning can be felt in the description of the heath as “blasted” in the story; while no literal blasting took place, its destructive effect mirrors that of a blast. Grey, as it has no place on the color wheel, could be said to be beyond the human understanding of hues—it, like the color out of space, transgresses and unbalances the conventional definition of color. The greyness that characterizes the victims of the color out of space also removes from them the privilege of their race. Simmons connects Lovecraft’s anxieties about the threat of abjection to deny the usually white, male, Anglo-Saxon protagonists of his stories their whiteness; Simmons writes that the effect of the substance on people “implies a degree of ideological tension: the admission of an essential racial and biological universality within humanity tempered by a reluctance to suggest any measure of approval concerning the issue” (19) and demonstrates how hybridity in stories such as “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family” make ambiguous the division between white and non-white as well as between human and non-human. The hybrid of human and ape is neither human nor ape but an ambiguous, indescribable abject, an in-between that is neither and both. In a similar way, by turning humans and all other matter grey, the color out of space removes from them the single most important marker of ideological racial superiority: the color of their skin, making them undefinable in terms of race just as it did in terms of species and even organic nature. This is an essentially semiotic change. The victim, once the process has taken hold, cannot be said to be anything.

Vivian Ralickas lays out the shape of this abject effect on language and the individual. She associates it with the crisis of modernity, when previous systems of signification were dethroned, with no visible successor. Part of this crisis is in the cracks that were appearing around the identities Lovecraft clung to. As she writes:

If no language exists to contextualize modernity in Lovecraft's fiction, then what is left to articulate but the shock of alienation? In realizing that its ‘clean and proper’ body is always already defiled, the Lovecraftian subject discovers that all of its safeguards—culture, tradition, race, ancestry, language—are forfeited. ‘Cosmic horror’ therefore unveils to the subject that it is simultaneously abject and abjected by the same universe in whose center it was erroneously placed by the efforts of humanism. (391)

And, indeed, the threat of modernity can well be felt in the story, as the threat arrives from space, an unknown zone just starting to be explored and identified by science. In combining this new perceived threat with the traditional American stereotype of the uncanny and evil backwoods, Lovecraft highlights a threat that modern progress threatens to unleash: the narrator comes to the blasted heath to survey for a new reservoir which threatens to spread the tainted water from the heath to the city of Arkham itself. The narrator, although hoping the reservoir will destroy the farmstead once and for all, reflects, “nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham” (Lovecraft 2002, 173). As knowledge of the abject substance spreads to Arkham through the scientists, so too does its taint.

The word “brittle” is also important, used to describe everything from the plant life to the humans who are touched by the substance that moves around the farm. At first, only the plants seem affected: “And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and distorted...” (182). Next, it affects the animals: “The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations” (183). In the brittleness of matter touched by this abject force, we see revealed the fragility of the sense of self in the Freudian sense, which posits that narcissism is the foundation of the ego. Freud explains that the narcissistic attitude is “not a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature (Freud  17-18). According to Freud, some degree of narcissism is necessary for a creature to be able to act in its own self-interest, which it must do to survive. As described by Kristeva, “Abjection, with a meaning broadened to take in subjective diachrony, is a precondition of narcissism. It is coexistent with it and causes it to be permanently brittle” (13). When, inevitably, the Gardner family living on the farm also becomes grey and brittle and ultimately succumbs, this abject disturbance comes to its full effect. The need for narcissism is demonstrated through what occurs when it is lost, as the Gardners grow listless and passive when they are infected: they return to a state like the one they were in when the first abjection in infanthood by which the child expels the mother took place. They lose the ability to care for themselves, only howling nonsensically in a state that recalls the preverbal trauma of abjection.

The abject affects language as well, as it becomes impossible to verbalize what it represents. Kristeva shows that the corpse is the ultimate source of the abject, the most powerful means of attacking the “I”: “In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away” (4). The body itself, the most basic signifier of self, becomes abjected. These dead bodies of the Gardner family become so hideous to the narrator, their meaning so repulsive, that he can no longer refer to them in anything but abject terms: he calls the dying woman a “blasphemous monstrosity” (187), a “horror” (187), and in many cases “it” (188). The use of passive voice and the lack of objects also show how the subject of the victims has become transgressed, for example in the statement “There was a dry brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off” (188). This disintegration is prefigured in the failure of language to represent the effect: “the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns” (181).

The thing that has become of Nabby Gardner proves to violate not only the distinction between human and animal but also that between life and death: “But the terrible thing about this horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble” (187). Even as it disintegrates into pieces that are not even organic, let alone human, Nabby continues to exhibit the traits of life. She—or it—continues to move perceptibly, communicating the horror of its existence to its observer. Just as Nabby is unable to even express the abject thing that infects her, she herself ultimately loses all markers of signification: she is rendered an abject and unnameable “thing” with no name, race, or sex. When the victims are ultimately described, they are undifferentiated, only given as “four monstrous sets of fragments” (192). The narrator finds it too horrible to describe them even as something that was once human, alive, even organic.

The mention of blasphemy, damnation, and what the color out of space implies about the continuity of a Christian framework is key to this scene, as well as to the story. Just as the abject material breaks down the divisions essential to satisfying scientific imagination at Miskatonic University, it also attacks the religious ideology that is the basis of the worldview of the rural farmers. In the telling, Ammi Pierce attempts to cling to the familiar narrative of good and evil, of heaven and hell, and to place the horribly inhuman human that Nabby has been transformed into this simple framework. This proves impossible, however; Ammi’s imagination finds itself incapable of categorizing the effects of the color out of space as such: the events “must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord’s ways so far as he knew” (185). He can think of no reason to imagine the Gardners would be rightfully damned, though there is the suggestion in “as far as he knew” that even this part of his understanding of the world has come free from its moorings.

Even beyond this complete breakdown in Ammi, the story suggests what effect the weight of the abject disintegration would have on the self if it came to those truly capable of understanding it. The scientists are too secure in their faith in their methods to be entirely disturbed, and the farmers are too simple-minded. As the narrator reminds us, “Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him” (187). Here, the narrator foregrounds another source of horror in the response of the spectators to the abject disintegration of those around them. The sensitive response – indeed, the human response – would be to suffer an immediate breakdown in one’s own signifying ability and the complete failure of sanity that this comes with. Kristeva describes this very threat of the abject: “A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me” (2). Perhaps, then, the miasmal substance that plagues the Gardner farm would not need to directly contact the individual to cause disintegration: in the breaking down of the ordering system itself, the self and the world around it would collapse back into each other, reversing the prime function of abjection to separate the “I” from the “not I.” This effect later appears in the person of the narrator.

Indeed, this effect is demonstrated by the double narrator frame of the story, as Ammi tells his tale to the unnamed narrator. As a “stolid farmer,” Ammi demonstrates a monstrous lack of imagination, simply failing to fully comprehend the monumental designifying signification of what he has witnessed, though he is nevertheless shaken deeply.

With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase (187).

Tellingly, not only what he has seen sears itself into his mind, but the very mundane details of the staircase around him stand out as a source of horror: “Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow steps—and merciful heaven! . . . the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike!” (187). It is important to remember that these descriptions are given to us by the unnamed narrator, not Ammi, and represent the narrator’s interpretation of the events – including the narrator’s own utterances of horror. In the glow that now issues from even the house itself, the insidious infection of the abject material can be detected. It has now touched even the most familiar material, transforming what was known and secure into another source of horror and abjection not only for Ammi but for the narrator as well.

This transformation of the familiar demonstrates the ultimate effect of the material that came down from space in the story. What was known and categorized becomes not only unknown but unknowable. The body and its own world become strange and foreign. Kristeva describes this effect of the abject thus: “... one can understand that it [the abject] is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject” (5). This effect can be seen most keenly in the suggestion about the effect that lingers in the story. Not only is there the suggestion of uncleanness in the water, but the narrator worries about the end of Ammi Pierce, who plays the role of narrator to the narrator: “I would hate to think of him as the gray, twisted, brittle, monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep” (199). This response is then performed by the reader, furthering the mirroring effect of the uncanny, an effect modeled by the multiple narrators and the effect Ammi’s story has on the unnamed main narrator. Donald Burleson (2016) writes that these “powerful closing lines” show that the story “is never really finished” (158): the threat of disintegration spreads as more and more become exposed to the effect of the unearthly element. Thus, the color’s effects seem to spread to the rest of humanity, ready to destroy all differences upon which the fragile world is based, including race, sex, and humanity itself. To Lovecraft, mourning the demise of his white, Anglo-Saxon family’s fortunes, the collapse of their importance brought with it a deeper horror: that the very existence of those things that made his family once so influential is supremely fragile.

Perhaps the only way to escape annihilation by this designifying knowledge is to escape into what the narrator chooses at the end of the short story: “Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know—that is all” (198). Those familiar with Kristeva, however, perceive the ultimate threat of the story: that the narrator and the reader, now fascinated, will also succumb to the lure of the color out of space and thus to its disintegrative influence. As the dying Nahum Gardner says, words recalled by the narrator at the end of the story, “it beats down your mind an’ then gits ye ... can’t git away . . . draws ye... it come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professors said so . . . he was right . . .” (189). As shown in “The Colour Out of Space,” there are no essential differences between humans, animals, plants, or even inert matter, and the horror of this lack of boundary is exposed by the matter from space that defies all of these categories. As Kristeva reminds us, “One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones” (9). In Kristeva, the abject prevents the self from collapse by maintaining the signifying system, and Lovecraft reminds us just how brittle that system is as we fall into its destruction.

WORKS CITED

Burleson, Donald R. 2016. H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Revised and updated electronic edition. New York: Hippocampus Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 2004. “Différance.” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell. 278-299.

Freud, Sigmund. 1986. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” in Essential Papers on Narcissism, ed. Andrew P. Morrison. New York: New York UP.

Ilott, Sarah and Chloe Buckley. 2016. “’Fragmenting and Becoming Double’: Supplementary Twins and Abject Bodies in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51. 3: 402-415.

Kneale, James. 2006. “From Beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the Place of Horror.” Cultural Geographies. 13: 106-126.

Kim, Hyejin. 2014. “Gothic Storytelling and Resistance in Charles W. Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman.” Orbis Literarum 69. 5: 411-438.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press.

López, María J. 2016. “The Gothic, the Abject and the Monstrous: A Revision of National Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” English Studies 97. 5: 493-509.Lovecraft, H. P. 2002. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. London: Penguin Books.

Ralickas, Vivian. 2007. “’Cosmic Horror’ and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18 (3): 364-398.

Simmons, David. 2013. “’A Certain Resemblance’: Abject Hybridity in H. P. Lovecraft’s Short Fiction.” in New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, ed. David Simmons. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 13-30.

PÉTER KRISTÓF MAKAI

“ONE SENTENCE DISGUISING A MULTITUDE OF HORRORS”: HUMANKIND SENTENCED TO LIFE IN JEFF VANDERMEER’S SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY

Doom. This is the main message of the era of the Anthropocene, the present world of global warming and climate change caused by human activity. As Roy Scranton puts it so painfully bluntly in his Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, “[w]e’re fucked. The only questions are how soon and how badly” (2015, 16). The more we know about how massively complex the world we were born into and have created is, the more we stand in awe of the sublimity of planetary ecology. No longer a nurturing Mother Earth, but not a monstrous Devouring Mother either, our Pale Blue Dot has become eerie, profoundly alien. In this era, we “no longer find ourselves capable of believing in the innocence of the sensual world that surrounds us” (Tabas 2015). This world beyond comprehension taxes our cognitive faculties and evolutionary strategies of survival to the point where madness is routine, and the knee-jerk response (cheered on by many who yearn for a simpler, knowable world) is to throw in the towel, as when President Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement on June 1, 2017.

In times like these, literature has a strange double duty to serve. At once, it needs to articulate the inconceivably interrelated nature of our co-existence with powers we have unleashed upon the world so that we may be able to act upon them, but also to present the stark and cruel inhumanity of these systems beyond language to prevent us from trivialising them. As philosopher Timothy Morton asserts, these days, the time has come for “a ‘goth’ assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology” (2007, 184-185). Further on, in his The Ecological Thought, he suggests that the interconnectedness of all beings must be the basis of all principled thinking, and uses the word mesh as an object-to-think-with that describes this fundamental relationship: “every single life form is literally familiar: we’re genetically descended from them. […] All life forms are the mesh, and so are all dead ones as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and non-living beings. [It] consists of infinite connections and infinitesimal differences” (Morton 2010, 28-30). By definition, nothing is outside of the mesh.

This modern monism warps our thinking so utterly that it is a textbook example of the Weird. In this respect, it is fitting that Morton should hearken back to the literary antecedent to this thinking, to the writings of the ‘Hermit of Providence’: “There is a horrible bliss in becoming aware of what H. P. Lovecraft calls the fact ‘that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings’” (2010, 31). Weird fiction thrives on the violation of basic, universal, innate ontological categories, it “destabilize[s] the audience’s beliefs in rigid concepts” (Nyikos 2015, 36) such as animate and inanimate, biological and artificial, substantial and insubstantial. In his essay on the subject in The Atlantic, Jeff VanderMeer acknowledges: weird fiction is a “powerful way in which to find the distance and the universality to grapple with the negation” (2014a, n.p.) of our idea that we understand the world.

Such a reading experience is humbling […]. [I]t is cathartic to seek out and tell stories that do not seek to reconcile the illogical, the contradictory, and often instinctual way in which human beings perceive the world, but instead accentuate these elements as a way of showing us as we truly are. Unruly. Unruled. Superstitious. Absurd. Subject to a thousand destabilizing fears and hopes. (2014a, n.p.)

Ontological categories for living and non-living beings (and the capacity to distinguish between them) exist in the mind on a neural level (Medin and Atran 2004). In folk biological thought, possessed by every human being “naively”, we think about living things in an essentialist manner (Gelman and Hirschfeld 1999). We remain steadfast in our notion that despite the transformations of development and aging, there is something within living beings that remains unchanging, ineffable. Weird fiction turns the whole idea on its head. In Jonathan Newell’s words, “the nonhuman seeps into the human, its tendrils inveigling their way past the porous membranes of the self. Weird fiction confronts us with […] a subject – or what remains of a subject – intertwined with forces and beings that seem utterly other” (Newell 2017, 294). It is a radically anti-essentialist genre for a radically anti-essentialist time which requires a shift in our structure of thinking, of thinking-with(in)-the-mesh.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy is one such attempt to reform our ontological and epistemological hopes for the world. The three books, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, describe an anomalous territory in Southern Florida, called Area X. Its anomaly lies within a slowly but inexorably growing border, inside which human technology and civilisation fails, where entire towns are taken over by a pristine wilderness, and people are irrevocably changed by contact with the area. It is cordoned off from the outside world by the government agency known as the Southern Reach. Its staff of scientists, parapsychologists, bureaucrats and intelligence agents are there to contain the “ecological catastrophe”, as the cover story they concoct says, and to find out what exactly causes Area X, how it works and why it behaves the way it does. Annihilation is the story of the twelfth expedition into Area X, consisting of four members, all unnamed: the psychologist, the linguist, the surveyor and the biologist, the narrator of the volume. It is a tale of their foray into this mysterious world, using their expertise to make sense of the transformation Area X has undergone, and their inevitable contact with the organisms of the land therein. Its sequel, Authority is a bureaucratic spy thriller about the Southern Reach, with a different protagonist, Control, the new director of SR, who is caught in the middle of warring factions within the organisation. It tells the story of how the twelfth expedition fared after their return, and how the organisation unravels as a result. The third book, Acceptance, is a sort of prequel, told from the perspective of multiple characters, including the biologist, the director, a lighthouse keeper and Control, in which they face the limits of their knowledge about the vast entity that shaped Area X.

Area X is a strange beast, literally. It straddles the wide stretch of categories we have tried to compartmentalise the world into. In the diegetic world, it is portrayed as a wilderness in Florida, and is certainly based on St. Marks Wildlife Refuge and portions of Apalachicola National Forest, located in Northwestern Florida, south of Tallahassee, where the panhandle meets the main peninsula. Among the many anomalies that warranted the expeditions are the sightings of strange, human-like animals, the area’s interaction with technological equipment, or the fact that the pristine wilderness within is spreading and chewing up human civilization. Also, mind-boggling structures dot the landscape, such as a lighthouse and its ghostly negative, a tunnel-like hole in the ground with a staircase (like the “initiation wells” in Quinta da Regaleira, Portugal), which the biologist cannot call anything else but a “tower”, built of “ambiguous materials” (2014b, 6-7).

Most strange of it all is how consistently the expedition speaks of this “tower” in teleological, intentional, biological terms: “We had no sense of its purpose” (2014b, 8), “the tower was breathing”[20] (41), “the tower steps kept revealing themselves” (47), “something below us is writing” (51). As they explore the tower-tunnel, they happen upon a long inscription along the wall of the tower. The words are comprised of an odd living material the biologist first thinks is “dimly sparkling green vines” (23) or a “rich green fernlike moss” (24), but is in fact a kind of fungus or “symbiotic fruiting bodies from a species unknown” (26), whose spores contaminate the body of the biologist, making her immune to hypnotic suggestions the psychologist uses to induce a state of calm and docility. The fungal, lichen-like matter forms a series of words, bafflingly, in entire intelligible English, composing a long sermon of a distinctively religious cadence that might not be entirely out of place in a modernised version of Revelations. It begins as: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…” (23). The full text of this, which I shall henceforth call The Biological Sentence, along with a possible exegesis, is provided later on.

Another symptomatic interaction between the outside world and Area X, detailed in Authority, is how the border between the two responds to experiments. In one, Southern Reach herded two thousand rabbits into the border from the outside. The resisting rabbits are “squirming atop one another as they formed sloppy rabbit pyramids in their efforts not to be pushed into the border” and then jump in and vanish (2014c, 56). Chillingly, when the video footage of the experiment was brought in for analysis, intelligence personnel found “a microsecond of transition in which a half or quarter of a rabbit might appear on the screen,” charting a “moment between there and not-there. In one still, this translated into staring at the hindquarters of about four dozen jostling rabbits, mostly in mid-leap, disembodied from their heads and torsos” (56). But alas, after disappearing, further expeditions find no trace of any rabbits in Area X. Such an invasive species should have “contaminated” Area X (57), even as Control voices his concern about the intentions of the territory: “Would whatever had created Area X have allowed that?” (57, emphasis mine). There is a definite tension and animate antagonism on the part of the anomalous territory against any human tampering.

Although people like Control (a.k.a. John Rodriguez), who aligned himself with an outdated ideal of mastery over nature, still cling to the idea that language and intentional thinking might solve the problem of what/how Area X is, the territory’s actions (for I cannot find a better word to describe how Area X interacts with humans) are trying to convince (another slip into the intentional mindset) the Southern Reach that “we are destined to understand only our own kind” (Rotherberg 2000, 159). Unlike the contamination of the biologist by Area X’s fungal writing, human contamination is easily avoided. Transformation is a one-way street (or rather, nature trail) in the Southern Reach Trilogy, yet it creates a pure hybrid of the man-made landscape.

Area X is also rife with inexplicably man-like “humanimal” hybrids. Among them are dolphins adapted to freshwater life that, once they breach, look at the biologist with “an eye that did not […] resemble a dolphin eye [but was] painfully human, almost familiar” (2014b, 97). An unsettling, particularly persistent owl appears to the biologist in Acceptance, which reminds her of his husband, lost in Area X on a previous expedition. She wonders in her moments of longing if she found her husband “in altered form”, which might have “recognize[d]” her (2014d, 170), and the text, by depicting the owl in tender moments of loyalty and helpfulness as a companion, suggests that she might be right. There is a promiscuously hair-raising hybridity that defines the living structures of Area X. Despite the lack of horses in this eldritch territory, in the animals we can find a certain centaurian quality, a productive fusion which goes beyond species boundaries. As Kirrilly Thompson notes with regard to the relationship of the horse and rider, “a rider astride a horse does not in and of itself guarantee a centaurian relation. This is made possible through the harmonization of human and animal” (Thompson 2011, 231). It is precisely this harmonisation – which we imagine to be a largely positive term – which makes Area X’s actions thoroughly disturbing and cacophonic as the biologist’s eye contact is returned by the humanimal gaze of the dolphin or the owl-husband.

One further impossible symbiosis should suffice to convince the reader that Area X is a crucible of evolution or a melting pot of disparate categories of existence. For want of a better word, the “vegemousaphone” is an anomalous object, bordering on an artistic installation that Control finds in one of the former directors’ desk drawers. It is a plant in a plant pot that shares its real estate with a dead mouse and a cell phone. The carnivorous (or technivorous? scavenging?) plant “had the look of a creature trying to escape, with a couple of limbs, finally freed, reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer” (2014c, 87), next to which lay the “desiccated corpse of a small brown mouse” with the plant “feeding on it somehow” (87), and a cell phone, with a substrate consisting of “sedimentary layers of water-damaged file folders” (88). Even though Control facetiously dismisses the thing as a “mouse powered irrigation system for data relay and biosphere maintenance” (88) the first time, the more disquieting notion gets into his head that within the paradigm of Area X, these fusions are sustainable and, indeed, preferable forms of co-existence.

Later on, in Acceptance, we realise just how spine-tingling this plant can be. When the director takes the plant into her personal care for investigation, she observes – being “obsessed with each dark green leaf” – that “looking at it from above it forms a kind of fanlike circle, but from the side the effect fades completely” (VanderMeer 2014d, 217). It appears to deflect direct observation, which reminds me of how the layperson and quantum mysticists think that conscious observation of quantum phenomena collapses the wave function, rather than just the physical measurement, a direct contact with scientific instruments. Yet, fiction can play around with facts and suggest deeper underlying truths beyond our present stage of scientific knowledge, and VanderMeer’s scene asks us to ponder how this change of perception reveals the presence of the mesh: “If biology discovers how entangled life-forms are, quantum entanglement opens a more profound interconnectedness” (Morton 2013, 42). In-universe, the plant is definitely part of the mesh as a material protuberance of the hyperobject that is Area X. Another disturbing thing about the vegemousephone is that it “will not die. […] No parasites will touch [it]. No extremes of temperature will affect it. Freeze it, it will thaw. Burn it, it’ll regenerate. The plant will not die” (VanderMeer 2014d, 217). As part of the mesh, it is no longer tied to the vulgar vagaries of biological life and Darwinian processes, it has ascended to another plane of existence with only a diminished appearance in the three-dimensional world beyond Area X.

The tower, with its Biological Sentence, Area X’s resistance to rabbits and the vegemousephone are all “representatives of the blurred realm of indiscernability between animal and vegetable” – and human constructions, I might add – “an assemblage mixing aspects of both to create something greater than either” (Smith 2015, 96). It should not come as a surprise that for such a hyperobject as Area X, all forms of life and organisation are building blocks for survival and expansion, just as bacteria seem to have evolved to eat plastics in real life (Sole et al. 2017). It is not inconceivable, though the form it might take could be strange, that later on organisms will consume other forms of human debris, like microchips, transistors, and even complete cell phones.

Yet, there is something sublime, terrifying or even horroristic about the fact that, for all the power we accredit ourselves by claiming global warming as our own, albeit defiant, errant child, the nature we have created is capable is handling itself, if not necessarily with our survival. Even in as short a literary period as thirty years, we have seen a transformation from postnatural novels of “toxic consciousness” – which “depict a society that has fouled its own nest [and polluted] the natural world [that] inevitably transmogrifies one’s experience of the earth as primal home” (Deitering 1996, 200) – to weird fiction bringing us a biohorror of our own ancillary nature, where alien territories take centre stage, transmogrifying us in return. Through this weird nature writing, we learn how to die gracefully, but we still shiver as new competitors sweep us away. This theme is explicitly addressed in Acceptance, from the title, which implies that it depicts the last stage of grieving, to several passages such as the hypnotic second-person narration of the director’s experience: “you are fading […] into the landscape like a reluctant wraith, […] and then you’re dissolving into the wind. A kind of alien regard has twinned itself to you, easily mistaken for the atoms of the air if it did not seem somehow concentrated, purposeful” (VanderMeer 2014d, 7). This is no standard distancing between the experiencing self and the narrative self. There is a palpable “unnaturalness” (Mildorf 2012, 76) to this instance of second-person narration.

In the entire trilogy, second-person narration is only to be found in the passages of the expedition’s psychologist and former director, because she is the one who understands best that we have to cede control and mastery over nature to forces beyond our ken. It is an oppressive you that at once hypnotises by its power and overwrites whatever personal experiences conventional first- or third-person storytelling might narrate. It “challenges the reader’s frames of reference, thereby ‘threaten[ing] the stability of the fictional world’ (Richardson 2006, 20)” (Ensslin and Bell 2012, 51-52). The psychologist commands the other expedition members by hypnotic suggestions, and yet the alien presence seems to be capable of much more than the old director of Southern Reach. The stability of the fictional world is never certain in VanderMeer’s trilogy, but rather always pivots between human and inhuman frames of reference. Second-person narration contaminates the secure base of agentive consciousness, of a humankind acting upon the world.

The contamination of humankind by alien forces begins with the spores entering the biologist’s body in Annihilation. When reading the biological sentence on the wall of the tower, which exudes a rich “loamy smell,” she leans in, as if “someone tricked [her] into thinking that words should be read” (VanderMeer 2014b, 24-25). The living words exhibit an uncanny agency: “a nodule in the W chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores spewed out [and] I felt something enter my nose” (25, emphasis mine). Another contaminated individual is the “maker-of-words,” the author of the Biological Sentence or, as the biologist calls it, the Crawler (91). In Acceptance, we find out that he used to be Saul Evans before his transformation, a retired preacher and lighthouse keeper near the fictional Hedley, FL, where the lighthouse is located before the territory evolves into Area X. His priestly calling is the reason why the Biological Sentence is so reminiscent of biblical passages; whatever the Crawler was mediating to the inhabitants of Earth, it was channelled through a man of the cloth.

The biologist comes into direct contact with the Crawler near the end of Annihilation. During her encounter, she feels “completely adrift, and dislocated,” as a person who could not tell stairs from ceiling,” leaning against a wall which “cave[s] in before [her] touch,” whose mind “might be filling in [the blanks] just to remove the weight of so many unknowns” (175-176). As a manifestation of a hyperobject, the Crawler instils a sense of nonlocality, phasing and interobjectivity in the biologist, that is to say, it projects experiences that irrevocably decentre her self, shatter her ego, dissolve her bodily existence as she interfaces with the hyperobject’s agent. The Crawler keeps “changing at a lightning pace, [mocking her] ability to comprehend it. […] Then it became an overwhelming hugeness” (176), whose shape “spread until it was even where it was not, or should not have been” (177). It is irreducible to any human concept, utterly protean and entirely unthinkable in an evolved mind. It can only be defined by negation. Such “commitment to irreductionism,” as Tabas (2015, par. 28) notes, is perfectly in line with weird fiction’s liberation of realism from being down-to-earth, of the “possibility of experiencing what might be described as alterioembodiment and alterioperception that occurs in Area X” (par. 32). The Crawler is the epitome of alterioembodiment, of a human-alien hybrid which infects the minds and bodies of ordinary human beings, transforming them into biological cyborgs, if such a thing is possible.

At any rate, when people come into contact with Area X and return to the world outside the border we call Earth, the primary world of the novel, they become strangely vacuous, hollow. Doppelgängers of their former selves. Upon assimilating those who venture into Area X, the territory subdues them and produces superficially human beings who resemble the original expedition members, including the biologist’s husband. When the biologist reads her husband’s diary she notices that he describes “a ghastly procession heading into the Tower,” including the biologist’s husband seeing himself, walking “so stiffly,” with a “blank look on my face”, “so clearly not me… and yet it was me” (VanderMeer 2014b, 165), as if they were zombies. These doppelgängers only look human on the outside but they are divested of any humanity, and thus, any destructive potential towards Area X. These empty subjects are examined by Southern Reach in Authority, but none of them retain much of their individuality, except for the biologist.

Yet, one cannot shake off the feeling that this docility and lack of subjectivity is not just a pacification but a kind of redemption for the human species. In order to stem the tide of transformation from human to non-human, the biologist has to hurt herself, as pain delays (but does not stop) the process (145-146). Even so, the biologist’s transformative experience “has quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion [to] know everything… anything…” (194), a uniquely scientistic impulse to overcome the world by description of cause and effect. This change thus constitutes a triumph of the weird (but not of sheer unsupported belief) over rationality. It is, I contend, a healing process.

When the biologist does return (in a way) to the primary world, tainted by Area X’s contaminants, she comes back as “Ghost Bird,” with a nickname that the doppelgänger has retained from the biologists’ memories. Nonetheless, she seems to remember much more than other expedition members, no doubt owing to her affinity to the alien territory. Even in childhood, the biologist/Ghost Bird was fascinated by the abandoned swimming pool at their childhood backyard, and later, by the tidal pools teeming with life. She sees them as “functioning ecosystems” (VanderMeer 2014b, 44) which she helps create, “easily losing [herself] in the microworld of the pool” of her youth (45). Almost from conception, she is destined to be a creative force, less of a subject than a channel for the powers of life, through which a new primordial soup for a different form of life can begin.

The powers of Area X extend far beyond that of human agency. When the eleventh expedition occurs, the thought comes to the mind of Southern Reach that the vacuous emptiness and the spitting back of the expedition members might serve a sinister purpose, “to contaminate the Southern Reach itself” (VanderMeer 2014c, 304). The domestic intelligence service has to admit that “they had been unable to conceive of a scenario in which Area X was smarter, more insidious, more resourceful” (305) than Central, the mother agency of the Southern Reach. They realise Area X is an unstoppable force that “would absorb […] buildings, roads, lakes, valleys, airports. Everything” (308). No matter how much like a euphemism the “Southern Reach environmental recovery site” (314, emphasis added) might sound, when we are fully aware of the inhumanity, indeed anti-humanity, of Area X, it is particularly poignant. After all, the environment does recover from human intervention, and changes human subjects into humanimal hybrids and hollow doppelgängers unless they are suffused by the essence of Area X.

When, at the conclusion of the second book, Control and Ghost Bird venture again to the ever-extending border of Area X, a “seditious thought” occurs to Control: “[t]here would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part” of the new territory (336). Seeing Ghost Bird and suspecting how the change will affect him, Control is unable to resist the temptation of experiencing what Area X does to human beings, or (in a more positive reading) wants to embrace the hybridity and post-humanity that comes with being transformed by the entity behind the unknowable sphere of life that has come to haunt humankind. It is, again, as if Area X is a redeemer of humanity from the awful mistakes it has made, but in order to do so, it must remake humanity in its likeness and image. Its avatar, the Crawler, is something that cannot be taken for granted, but must be “recognized [as] an organism. A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism [which] might be inexplicable” (VanderMeer 2014b, 179). An alien presence, it is almost a Christ-like figure, an exo-Jesus – but far from taking life in the flesh of just one human, it has disseminated itself through the spores of fungi, shaping the planet by extending the touch of the border to all living beings, to re-form the world as we know it.

Timothy Harman argues not only that the world is about to end, but that it has ended as a concept, even before the extinction of humankind: “World is a fragile aesthetic effect [based on a blurriness and aesthetic distance]. True planetary awareness is the creeping realization not that ‘We Are the World,’ but that we aren’t” (2013, 99; 104). Casting aside old-fashioned words such as nature or world is not a sign of weakness but a sign of recognition that we are at “the end of the human dream that reality is significant for [us] alone. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and nonhumans alike” (108). Area X offers this to Ghost Bird, to Control, and to the whole of humanity, only asking us in return to forget how we used to exist. To forget the concept of the world as an autonomous, for-humans-only territory. What a deal, huh?

Area X, as an evolution of the world is of the same ilk as deep ecologists’ vision of “an Earth becoming an animal, moving slowly and methodically out into the light” (Rotherberg 2000, 159). VanderMeer never gives us any real handle on whether the intelligence that created/is Area X would conform to our notions of animal, but it does have an anima in the diegetic universe of the novel, a soul of sorts. Light, despite being the oldest metaphorical “substance” for metaphysical systems to consider, is a surprisingly material, agentive force in the Southern Reach Trilogy, a solid yet ethereal manifestation of the alien intelligence that formed the Crawler. It is not just in the structure of the lighthouse, whose lens seems to have concentrated the powers of light into Area X, producing “things [that] came out of the sea, things like the biologist, but less kind” (VanderMeer 2014d, 240). Light remains a powerful force, but one that is antagonistic to human vision.

The chapters of Authority and Acceptance subvert the old tropes of light as a symbol of God, recognition, consciousness, awakening or awareness. The pages of Authority (VanderMeer 2014c) that follow the chapter titles are devoid of any words, but they are coloured by darker and darker shades of grey (“Incantations,” 2; “Rites,” 84; “Hauntings,” 224; and “Afterlife”, 292), whereas the pages that follow the chapters of Acceptance seem to follow a reverse pattern (with gradually lighter and lighter shades of grey for “Acceptance,” 2; “Range Light,” 10; “Fixed Light,” 154; and “Occulting Light,” 184), only to get completely dark again for the epilogue of Acceptance (332). These chapter breaks underscore that even the very condition of our vision (and, in a very tired metaphor, our understanding) is not there to serve us but to work towards their own agenda, the agenda of Area X.

The Crawler is a creature of light, and when the biologist turns her back on it, she can still feel “the light upon my back […], the music in the words [of the Crawler’s inscription]” (VanderMeer 2014b, 179). It washes over her, as if she were overwhelmed by a powerful wave crashing down on her, but as soon as she begins to step away from that awesome force, she realises that “the light had become a sea” (180). It is the sort of eerie, dark, occulting light Timothy Morton describes as “humans mediated by a luminous ocean,” in which “[t]he intensity of the hyperobject’s aesthetic trace seems unreal in its very luminosity” (Morton 2013, 109; 32). Just like a gamma particle of radiation (another of Morton’s hyperobjects), “in illuminating things, it alters things: flesh, paper, brains” (39). Its very radiance turns it into an otherworldly force of evolution, the same kind as the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The metaphorical ‘light’ of this monolithical agent of evolution is within the spores that spell doom for humankind as we know it. The sermon inscribed by the Crawler on the walls of the tower is as eloquent as it is dense, a richly symbolic text of rhythmic repetition, queer syntax and haunting message. I have composed my article in the hope that in the full knowledge of the theoretical apparatus involved, I can begin to decipher it, providing a partial exegesis. The characters try to come up with in-universe answers, but in order to make sense of it, I believe we must keep the ecocritical-philosophical stakes in mind. I claim that the text of the Biological Sentence, although interspersed with full stops, is one long revelation of the intentions of Area X and the Crawler, filtered through the language of human religiosity. It is also a sentence in the (metaphorical) legal sense, a binding utterance that performs and seals humankind’s fate at the hands of Area X. Diegetically, it condemns us to hybridity and the scary transformations of unnatural selection.

It reads in full:

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruits shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains. (VanderMeer 2014b, 2014c, 2014d, reconstructed.)

Vegetal biohorror strikes the reader with full force, fusing imagery of blossoming flowers and the Gehenna promised for the wicked of the Earth. The main agents of the passage are seeds, flowers, fruits, fire and flames. It is “nature in the active voice,” and the singular I in the text is the agent of a philosophical animism that sees “evolution as a demonstration of mind in nature, of […] the intelligence of forms, […] in the form of the species body and its adaptation […] to a particular creative ecological niche via a process of evolutionary learning” (Plumwood 2009, 113; 125). Those “forms that never were and never could be [that] writhe” are the many shapes which are the “constitutive outside” (Butler 2011 [1993], xvii) of the phylogenetic tree of life. They also writ(h)e from a particular “other place.” Those “dim-lit halls” are a Lovecraftian heterotopia (Foucault 1986) of the hyperobject’s dimensions it inhabits. They contact planet Earth at the precise location where the strangling fruit from the hand of the sinner lies, which is at the heart of Area X, in the depths of the tower. The spores are the fruiting bodies, written by Saul, the lighthouse keeper in his manifestation as the Crawler. Figuratively, the hand of the sinner could also refer to the technological agency of humankind as a poisoner of the natural world from which we came. Both literally and in the abstract sense, “the seeds of the dead” are the genetic matter of former replicators “who never saw what could have been,” foreclosing on the possibilities of alternative forms of life. They are redeemed, these wretched seeds of the Earth.

They are buried within the strangling fruit, which I read as the memetic forms of life, created by humans, which uphold an “account of agency that itself supports the hyper-separation of nature and culture” (Bastian 2009, 104). This cognitive mode strangles the full blossoming of life in its incredible vigour. The ‘I’, the agent of the sentence nourishes the seeds as it shares them with the worms so that the fruits of its labours may come to ripen. The ripening takes place in the mental space that provides fertile ground for the ecological thought, for the agency of nature. This is the mesh. The mesh “reveal[s] the revelation of the fatal softness of the earth”, the vulnerability of humankind in its present form with its cannibalistic civilisation. Fatal to humans the Earth may be, but not to life. The soil of life is soft in its adaptability, while admitting that there might be casualties of survival. Another suggestion that Area X (and if it has one, its creator) is a hyperobject comes from the part of the sermon that says “petals of a monstrous flower […] shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear,” confirming that our cognitive patterns of thought are not sufficient for properly comprehending the powers of weird nature’s monstrous flower, the queer thinking that nature in the active voice requires.

And the moment our transformation takes place, embracing the strangeness of the cognitive and social revolution of mesh thinking, “[all shall] revel in the knowledge of the strangling fruit,” because “the seeds of the dead” will forgive the previous destructive tendencies of humanity. Sadly, it might come with the erasure of humanity in favour of this new, evolved creature which will be “reanimated […]. [I]t shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing,” at least not-knowing in the sense of Bastian’s knowledge, that hyper-separation of nature and culture. Rather, they will think with the intelligence of forms that Plumwood recognises. This transformation of the human species will be complete, when the alien “fire that knows the naming of you,” that all-encompassing wisdom “acquire[s] every part of you that remains.”

Chillingly, the Biological Sentence suggests that the partial, human cognitive faculties have to go, as well as the subjectivity we have come to recognise as unique among living beings. There is a weird hope in this apocalyptic vision that the likes of Scranton and Morton claim has already come to pass in the title of their books, in this Sentence “disguising a multitude of horrors” (VanderMeer 2014d, 146). That hope, that evangelical joy, is that the joint re-formation of the biosphere, of species and thinking, which go hand in hand, might produce a more liveable habitat for what becomes of humankind.

In conclusion, I have sought to explore and explicate Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy to demonstrate that the alien powers of reconstructive, ecological thinking might appear horrendous to a humanity hell-bent on a meaning-making practice that subsumes the whole of nature under its dominion. The reason for that is that the presence of hyperobjects such as climate change and the subsequent crises in its wake take a terrible toll on the human mind stuck in an evolutionary paradigm that is incapable of dealing with the complexities of chaotic phenomena. VanderMeer’s choice to present the current impasse in our thinking in the genre of weird fiction testifies that we may not need to wholly give up on what we hold dear, that we may survive, altered, if we radically reshuffle our notions of temporality, agency and the biosphere. That thinking will be thinking with the mesh in mind. What comes of it will appear an alien form of thinking, but one we may adapt to.

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Complacency of an Orthodox Sun-Dweller.’” in Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD and London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield. 29-50.

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VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014b. Annihilation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014c. Authority. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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ANDRÁS MOLNÁR

“EVERYTHING WAS CRAWLING WITHIN ITSELF”: POSTHUMANISM IN THE NEW WEIRD STUFF OF THOMAS LIGOTTI’S SHORT FICTION

INTRODUCTION

The popularity of weird fiction has reached an unprecedented degree, and the Renaissance of the genre is unlikely to come to a halt in the near future. The reasons for this are manifold, yet one thing is sure: this increasing interest has a significant connection with the influence of H. P. Lovecraft. It would be far-fetched to suggest that the massive presence of the weird can be logically tracked back to Lovecraft’s writerly activity, but it is indubitable that a lot of authors name him as one of their most important influences. The indifference towards humanity (including the threat of its casual abolition) and the deconstruction of anthropocentrism as Lovecraftian themes par excellence seem to be more relevant in our postmillennial era than one could ever imagine in Lovecraft’s lifetime. The critical attention showed to Lovecraft continues to expand in the decades since his death, and, based on newer and newer biographies, anthologies, and articles exploring his art, fans and scholars of weird fiction may speculate that the “new weird boom” is unlikely to come to its termination soon.

But while Lovecraft seems to be on the rise, somehow other authors who embraced the bleak worldview of his stories have been neglected by contemporary criticism. While interpretations fostered by Lovecraft’s relevance abound, outstanding original authors of post-Lovecraftian horror remain largely ignored, although their works innovatively employ Lovecraft’s trademark premises. The aim of the present study is to extend the analytical categories applied to the examination of Lovecraft’s canonized corpus of fictional texts to the work of a writer who, thus far, has not received much schoarly attention. After an overview of Lovecraft’s rise to prominence, I shall catalogue the major research trends of Lovecraft studies, and then offer a comparative analysis of the master’s writings with Thomas Ligotti’s fiction, aiming to uncover how Ligotti’s fantasies are permeated by challenging insights of contemporary posthumanist theories. Ligotti’s seminal new weird short story “Nethescurial” occupies the center of my attention as a text that lends itself easily to a posthumanist reading, as it describes a world that is permeated by a nonhuman agency that is very similar to the “thing-power” as explained by Jane Bennett.

THE WEIRD AND THE NEW WEIRD

This study concerns weird fiction; therefore, some remarks on the term seem appropriate. The terms “weird fiction” or “weird tale” were conscientiously used by Lovecraft, most notably in Supernatural Horror in Literature, although it should be noted that his most important publication platform, founded in 1923, also bore the title Weird Tales. A close reading of one of Supernatural Horror in Literature’s most well-known statements brings forth two vital characteristics of the weird tale. First, it creates an “atmosphere” of “unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces” (84). This suggestion is reinforced in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” too: “[a]tmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction” (177). Second, the weird tale introduces a “suspension or defeat” of natural laws. As Lovecraft declared in a letter to August Derleth: “the crux of a weird tale is something which could not possibly happen” (434 emphases in original). The weird tale, in Lovecraft’s sense, is thus a piece of fiction that represents a suspension of known natural laws, and thereby evokes fear in the reader.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer describe two “impulses or influences” that distinguish the new weird from the weird tale as Lovecraft defined it (ix). First, the new weird mixes genres, as well as “high” and “low” literature, resulting in a diversity rather, than recurring stock elements. Second, the new weird introduces a change in perspective with regard to a monster, and instead of the aim to scare, “the starting point is the acceptance of a monster or a transformation and the story is what comes after” (x). This latter point coincides with Mark Fisher’s observation that “it would be wrong to say what the weird … [is] necessarily terrifying” (8-9). Thus, the new weird is not really a clear genre in the way “classic” weird tale was; rather, it is a set of various experimental approaches in which, while often retaining the element of fear, their weird component corresponds more to Fisher’s definition as “that which does not belong” (10 emphasis in original). Some early proponents of this wave are J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Clive Barker; some of its late representatives are China Miéville and Laird Barron. Thomas Ligotti is also considered to be a part of this current of literature.

LOVECRAFT’S PRESENCE AND INFLUENCE: TWO TRUISMS

To put the present study in context, it seems worthwhile to briefly explain two commonplace statements concerning Lovecraft’s legacy.

1. H. P. Lovecraft’s influence on contemporary culture has reached an unprecedented degree.

2. Academic research on H. P. Lovecraft’s work gained momentum and is reluctant to pass its peak.

Ad 1. The well-known history—albeit a skeletal one, due to the limitations of this paper—runs something like this. Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), a descendant of a rich and prominent Anglo-American family, lived and died in poverty. He lived all of his life in Providence (except for a two-year period in New York, from 1924 to 1926). The death of his father and his grandfather, combined with a failed investment on the part of his uncle, led to a dwindling of the family economy and the Lovecraft family’s need to live a parsimonious life. Lovecraft himself continuously failed to find long-time employment. His most constant source of self-sustainment was doing revisions and ghostwriting for clients, and contributing weird fiction to pulp magazines(most notably Weird Tales), but this meant only a meager amount of income. He was also trapped artistically in a sort of aesthetical limbo: on the one hand, he did not wish to succumb to the sensationalist expectations of pulp writing and magazine editors, but on the other hand, his chosen genre and medium were foreign to the taste of consumers of contemporary “high” literature. When he died abandoned of cancer of the small intestine on 15 March, 1937, his body of work was unknown except for a small circle of devoted friends and fans. This devotion led to the founding of Arkham House, a publisher that published Lovecraft’s works in book form. Also, Lovecraft’s fictional universe gained newer and newer followers who enlarged it with new stories and new elements (monsters, landscapes, magical books, etc.). In fact, Lovecraft and his circle of friends already exchanged fictional motives among each other, and his fiction proved singularly fit for such additions or modifications. Then, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed an emergence of a critical appraisal of Lovecraft’s heritage, courtesy of lifetime correspondents such as August Derleth or Robert Bloch. The gradual movement towards canonization was also due to a new wave of followers, most notably Ramsey Campbell, whose first collection of stories was admittedly based on and located in the Lovecraftian universe—even though he soon went on to “unify the cosmicism of Lovecraft with his own burgeoning sense of the complexities of human psychology” (Joshi 115). Even Stephen King made some appreciative remarks on his works (King 80, 117-118), and if nothing else his novella The Mist and his fairly recent novel Revival definitely reflect a degree of Lovecraftian influence. One cannot leave unnoticed the abundance of Lovecraftian anthologies published in recent years. And in the meantime, other types of cultural media also embraced the Lovecraftian heritage, ranging from films to comics to music to role playing games to video games, and possibly even more. His presence in and influence on contemporary culture has been firmly established.

Lovecraft’s writings were inhabited by a pantheon of extraterrestrial beings who live or lived on Earth. An encounter with them is fatal, and their sheer existence is a continuous and imminent threat to humankind (due to their indifferent attitude to humankind). While it would be a mistake to treat them as analogous to the deities of existing mythologies, in Lovecraft’s fiction they are sometimes worshipped as gods by various communities, and they were organized into a clear-cut fictitious mythology, the “Cthulhu Mythos,” by August Derleth, Lovecraft’s correspondent and follower. The “Cthulhu Mythos” was later discarded by Lovecraft scholarship. Besides the “gods,” Lovecraft’s recurring motifs include genealogical—even racial—degeneration, the horrors of the past, and the perils of forbidden knowledge. His most famous creation is definitely Cthulhu, the octopoid monster from “The Call of Cthulhu,” who became almost identical with Lovecraft’s legacy in the eyes of many, but other monsters and their epithetha ornans, like Azathoth the “boundless daemon-sultan” (410) or “blind idiot god”(1013), Nyarlathotep the “crawling chaos” (121), or Shub-Niggurath “the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” (683), are also characteristic of his work.

The reasons for Lovecraft’s vast influence are manifold, and I think the most important ones are the following. As Fritz Leiber states, he “shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space” (50). Lovecraft carried weird fiction to a new level by abandoning pure supernaturalism and introducing cosmic entities who follow natural laws alien to the known human world. Explaining the increasing popularity of Lovecraft, Sederholm and Weinstock point to two circumstances. First, Lovecraft was always enthusiastic in giving meticulous advice to young and beginner writers, which led to his being admired, and second, his vague “fictional universe” left “plenty of imaginative space” for followers to fill (10). The second circumstance is even more important, because it extends beyond those who knew Lovecraft in life. Lovecraft’s fiction is inclusive; it invites others to join, just like Lovecraft and his fellow writers encouraged each other to exchange their “gods.” One should add W. Scott Poole’s observation that the fact that the teenager Lovecraft ardently read pulp fiction and dime novels and played games that were similar to today’s role-playing games “locate him at the very roots of geek fandom” (75), and it becomes clear that his person and his literary heritage both resonate well to contemporary fan culture, and Sederholm and Weinstock’s cursory overview aptly demonstrates how Lovecraft’s work has been embedded into various types of media (12-25).

Ad 2. About the first fifteen years of Lovecraft’s critical reception was dominated by essays and memoirs from fans and correspondents. This state of affairs changed with the publication of Arkham House’s five volumes of Lovecraft’s selected letters from 1965 to 1976 (Joshi 1980, 23). The following upsurge in Lovecraft studies in the late 1970s was assisted by S. T. Joshi, to whom we owe meticulous biographical research, as well as various new surfaces for publications in the form of non-peer reviewed scholarly journals (Sederholm and Weinstock 3) and various edited volumes. Today H. P. Lovecraft is widely discussed in literary scholarship, with possible topics covering interminable vistas, including his personal life (Lovecraft being one of the most documented authors in history due to his expansive remaining correspondence),his literary representation of science, psychoanalytical questions, his marginal canonical position in horror or fantasy fiction, his ever-increasing influence, and even his racism, which is definitely one of the most ardently-debated points of the Lovecraft phenomenon—just to name a few.

CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN LOVECRAFT’S PHILOSOPHICAL RECEPTION

Lovecraft and Object-Oriented Ontology

One of the most significant events that proved to be formative of fairly recent Lovecraft scholarship is the emergence of a branch of philosophy which is commonly labeled “speculative realism” or “object-oriented ontology” (OOO). The central concern of this branch of philosophy is a refusal of the Kantian doctrine about the “thing-in-itself”’s inability to exist in itself, apart from the perceiving subject. Kant’s idea that the existence of objects can only be grasped in correlation with the subject is called correlationism. OOO, however, challenges this notion in a variety of ways. Meillassoux, for example, points out that correlationism is incapable of explaining how events long before the emergence of humanity could take place—despite the fact that empirical science does make statements on such events (9). Shaviro, relying on Alfred North Whitehead, emphasizes the fallacy of subordinating “what is known to our way of knowing” in spite of the fact that things precede cognition, and thus “our way of knowing is in itself a consequence” of the actual arrangement or state of things (3, emphases in original).

One representative of this thought, Graham Harman, characterized Lovecraft’s whole style with the aid of OOO’s premises. Harman stated that philosophy in general aims either to produce or eliminate what he calls “gaps,” that is, differences in quality between various aspects of reality (for example, a difference between the sum of all parts of a thing and the thing itself). He especially focused on the Kantian separation of “appearances and things-in-themselves” (2). Harman distinguished objects and their qualities, and, relying on Heidegger, Husserl, and Leibniz, he described a fourfold scheme. This scheme is based on the juxtaposition of real or sensual objects and real or sensual qualities. Following Heidegger, Harman describes real objects as objects that “withdraw into a shadowy subterranean realm that supports our conscious activity while seldom erupting into view” (Harman 2011, Chapter 3). In Harman’s interpretation, sensual objects are equivalent to Husserl’s intentional objects: they are objects that are encountered “directly in experience from the start” (Harman 2011, Chapter 2). Real qualities are qualities that can “only be known intellectually” (they are quantifiable) (Harman 2012, 31), while it is sensual qualities that are directly perceptible cognitively at a given moment (e. g. a dog seen at any given moment from various angles, engaging in various activities) (Harman 2012, 29).Harman identifies four kinds of tensions between these objects and qualities. They occur: 1) between real objects and sensual qualities, 2) between sensual objects and sensual qualities, 3) between sensual objects and real qualities, 4) between real objects and real qualities (Harman 2011, Chapter 3; Harman 2012, 32).

With this theoretical background, Harman argued that Lovecraft is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century precisely because of the philosophical implications of his style. Harman calls Lovecraft a “Husserlian-Kantian” (and even more a “Husserlian-Heideggerian”) author (Harman 2012, 5), because his prose “generates a gap between reality and its accessibility to us” (28), as well as one between sensual objects and their sensual qualities (30-31). Lovecraft’s style—more than the thematic contents of his writings—works in a way that renders some of the things appearing in his works only partly accessible to human cognition. A large portion of Harman’s book (in fact, the whole of Part Two) is dedicated to the demonstration of how Lovecraft’s style achieves this effect. Harman identifies two major stylistic devices applied by Lovecraft, which he labels “allusion” and “cubism.”

Allusion is an indication of the existence of a particular thing, but hindered by the insufficiency of language to describe it accurately (24). The failure of language, or generally human perception, to grasp reality faithfully is a frequent topic in Lovecraft scholarship (eg Langan 27, Kneale 106, Goho 14-15), but Harman integrated the theme of human representational and interpretive failure into a coherent philosophical system. The most poignant example of “allusion” in Lovecraft is the narrator’s description of his first impression of the clay bas-relief that depicts the eponymous monster in “The Call of Cthulhu.” The text indicates that the monster is more than a mixture of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,” because there is an unnameable “spirit of the thing” which the verbal description fails to grasp (Lovecraft 357).

“Cubism,” in Harman’s terminology, is an amassing of an object’s qualities to such a degree that the reader cannot form a clear mental picture of it; as a result, human senses can only perceive a metonymical part of the whole. The thing-in-itself in this case does not elude the senses but rather is obscured by its overwhelming sensual qualities (Harman 2012, 25). “The Dunwich Horror” is the archetypal example of this stylistic device: the description of Wilbur Whateley’s corpse in the museum swarms with adjectives and other characterizations (“semi-anthropomorphic,” “leathery, reticulated,” “piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes,” “thickly covered with coarse black fur,” “a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths,” “the symmetries of some cosmic geometry,” etc.) (Lovecraft 648-649).

Harman demonstrates the working of these devices in eight of Lovecraft’s late “great tales,” calling attention to the important philosophical questions they raise and the significance of Lovecraft’s use of the horror fiction genre. Lovecraft was a “writer of gaps and horror” (Harman 2012, 2), whose fiction evokes various instances of gaps between real and sensual objects and real and sensual qualities (particularly the ones that are associated with allusion and cubism). The gaps are not perceived in normal life (people take objects for granted and do not reflect on the ontological and epistemological dilemmas of the reality that surrounds them), therefore it is necessary to experience “a breakdown of the usual situation in which perceptions and meanings simply lie before us as obvious facts” (258). This means that in Harman’s viewpoint weird fiction, by introducing unusual situations and events that force the protagonists to reconsider their knowledge about reality, is an effective literary tool to highlight the tensions he elaborated. For this reason, Lovecraft’s choice of genre is of particular significance. He wrote “stories about the essence of philosophy” (33).

Lovecraft and Posthumanism

Posthumanist philosophy has been stimulated by the difficulties in perception humanity faces in a postmillennial era marked by rapid technological advancement. Cary Wolfe describes posthumanism as an episteme that comes before and after humanism: before, because it “names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being” in the biological as well as in the technological world, and after in the sense that it “names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication … is increasingly impossible to ignore,” that is, advancement brings about a point after which humanity reaches beyond the cultural and philosophical restraints and premises of humanism (xv-xvi). This observation leads not only to the reconsideration of the significance and exceptionality of the human species on earth (a dismissal of what has in the past decades been named “speciesism”), but also to efforts to explore viewpoints that differ from the human one. Rethinking the “taken-for-granted modes of human experience” enables us to “describe the human and its characteristic modes … with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on” (Wolfe xxv). This statement by Wolfe indicates another important point that is characteristic of posthumanism, namely, a radical break from the Cartesian concept of the subject. According to Badmington, this break is implied within the Cartesian premise of the distinction between body and soul, the living and the nonliving (18-19). Similarly—and reminiscent of the working of Lyotard’s postmodernism—posthumanism emerges out of the humanist premise, humanism is questioned on its own grounds, thus giving way to posthumanism (21-23).

The relationship between Lovecraft’s “cosmic indifferentism” (Joshi 1999, 29) and contemporary posthumanist philosophy is somewhat paradoxical, and deserves a detailed analysis. On the one hand, they are definitely well in line. Scholars mostly agree that one of the main novelties Lovecraft introduced in weird fiction and the source of his lasting influence is the representation of cosmic entities that ridicule any human endeavor and achievement. Cosmic indifferentism was Lovecraft’s personal view, too. Joshi points out that one of its chief origins was Lovecraft’s mechanical materialism which included two “ontological hypotheses:” that “the universe is a ‘mechanism’ governed by fixed laws,” and that “all entity is material” (1999,29). Later, this crudely mechanistic worldview was tamed a bit by Einstein’s theories of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory (31-32), but essentially, Lovecraft’s materialism persisted. This materialism, aided by evolutionary theory, led to Lovecraft’s firm conviction in the nonexistence of the human “soul.” Joshi quotes at length a letter by Lovecraft in which he argues for the absurdity of any belief in the soul (32-33). In this, Lovecraft draws a parallel between humans and animals because of their kinship rooted in evolutionary grounds. This conviction fits well posthumanism’s aims to challenge the exceptionality of the human subject, and explore alternative agencies of nonhuman subjectivities. Something similar can be observed in Lovecraft’s late stories, too, which tell the history of empires of great alien races, most notably At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time,” even though the effect is not faultless: in the well-known scene when the narrator of At the Mountains of Madness exclaims “whatever they [the Old Ones inhabiting the ruined Antarctic civilization] had been, they were men” (798), he in fact represents a humanist point of view.

On the other hand, however, I think a crucial attribute that distinguishes Lovecraftian horror from the central tenets of posthumanism is that, while posthumanism calls forth a peaceful cohabitation through the recognition of interspecies connectedness, in Lovecraft the alien that challenges anthropocentrism proves ultimately threatening and disruptive to human civilization. Even At the Mountains of Madness, cited above, brings about a superior horror in the end than the “humanized” Old Ones: this horror is generated bythe Old Ones’ creations, the shoggoths, “multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence” (771), which possess only a germ of intelligence and are inimical to their masters. It is no accident that the uncovering of heredity holds madness for the Lovecraftian protagonist (Lévy 73-78): it blurs the boundaries between the human being (and species as a whole) and the nonhuman, and this realization results in terror (Joshi 2003, 159-161; Shanks 133-134). Today’s posthumanism, however, while trying to problematize the distinctly and inherently human point of view, pursues clearly identifiable ethical goals when, for instance, it questions the distribution of rights on the basis of belonging to species (Cavalieri 69-85), and moves away “from the God toward which humanist metaphysics aspires” (MacCormack 4), towards the assertion of a “thing-power” used as a foundation for a novel theory of democracy (Bennett 94-95).

The cosmic indifferentism of Lovecraft’s prose carries no such reformist aspirations in itself. Nevertheless, recent scholarship recognized the potential that lies in his thought. In this vein, Alison Sperling made a promising attempt to reinterpret Lovecraft in the light of feminist new materialism, pointing out the way Lovecraft’s characters experience their body “as strange and alien, freakish and out-of-control, or even as imprisonment” (80)—an idea obviously heavily inspired by Dylan Trigg’s book The Thing, A Phenomenology of Horror, which develops a “post-phenomenological” account of bodily experience utilizing Lovecraft’s writings, among others (61-102). Elsewhere, Weinstock provides an overview of how the “thing-power” of characteristic objects from Gothic fiction—specifically the castle, the portrait, and the book—prevails in Lovecraft’s work, and concludes that Lovecraft’s things “exhibit agency, they intermesh with the human, they prompt reconsiderations of where the line between human and nonhuman actually falls” (76). He also points out that “the awesome plenitude of the alien everyday becomes a source of horror as … human beings are reduced to things” (76). Although I have some reservations in connection with Weinstock’s argumentation, his approach will provide an important starting point for my own analyses, too.

H. P. LOVECRAFT AND THOMAS LIGOTTI

Thomas Ligotti’s (b. 1953) debut short story collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, appeared in 1986, and its introduction was written by Ramsey Campbell. The book gained the attention of a moderate amount of horror aficionados. While he never gained wide popularity, he gradually attained the status of a cult classic, even in spite of the scant quantity of his output. His acknowledgment is indicated by the publication of the anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets (2013), which contains short stories dedicated to and written in the spirit ofLigotti. The major characteristic of Ligotti’s prose is its dreamlike quality. His stories create the impression of a nightmare that results in a blending of the natural and the supernatural into each other. The contrast between the two is “never sufficiently established,” and the supernatural cannot really intrude into the everyday world (Joshi 2001, 245). This nightmarish quality is in harmony with a singularly bleak and hopeless view of the world. Conscious life in itself is a mistake, a source of all misery and suffering on Earth. In the philosophical treatise The Conspiracy against the Human Race—introduced by a foreword by Ray Brassier, a leading figure of speculative realism—in which Ligotti expounds his antinatalist leanings; assigning a negative value to birth, he calls the evolution of consciousness the “parent of all horrors” (15).Despair is ubiquitous and inevitable once one realizes the ultimately true state of affairs, a realization which is a recurring basis of his fictional plot. The behavior and the circumstances of his characters and scenes reflect this lack of sense. The narrator and his colleagues in “Our Temporary Supervisor” assemble components for a large machine of which they do not have “the least notion”(2008, 100), the manager of an unnamed town in “The Town Manager” is a mysterious light in a ruined shed (27), the buildings the secret folk of “The Small People” erect are “crooked or unevenly sized,” because existence for them is “all chaos, nonsense, and emptiness” (2014, 69-70). The examples could go on endlessly. Characters and spaces are alike chaotic, deranged, crummy, and nonsensical.

Ligotti was well on the mark when he said that his work lacks “two crucial elements of Lovecraft’s sensibility—a sense of history and a scientific perspective on life” (Dziemianowitz 30). Ligotti was, for understandable reasons, very often questioned about Lovecraft, but this short remark captures something of the difference between the two authors. While both of them represented a bleak and hopeless world the phenomena of which defy all meaning human beings try to attribute to them, Ligotti strayed much farther from the real world. To put it in a different way: Ligotti has always attempted to represent a world of nightmares, which was inspired by visions. On the other hand, Lovecraft, in his later fiction, approached a “fantastic realist” mode, which is commonly deemed to culminate in the vast amount of scientific knowledge infused into At the Mountains of Madness. Ligotti speaks of Lovecraft’s late works in a critical tone, professing them alien to his literary aims. Instead, he praises earlier Lovecraft short stories like “The Music of Erich Zann” and “The Festival” (Ford 24). It is probably Ligotti’s obsession with the surreal and the dream-like that grounds Darrell Schweitzer’s observation in his interview with Ligotti that his stories “only resemble Lovecraft’s in the most tenuous manner, in that [Ligotti] too seem[s] to depict a bleak and uncertain universe in which human assumptions don’t apply very far,” while the overt elements so characteristic of Lovecraft are “conspicuously absent” (43). According to Cardin’s observation, Lovecraft, though evidently important for Ligotti as a writer, was even more important to him “as a human being with whom he feels a deeply personal sense of kinship” (2007, 98). Ligotti often makes it clear that in his youth he discovered in the Lovecraftian worldview what he also began to perceive, but could not express in a definite form. The young Ligotti could identify with Lovecraft’s life, character, and thoughts, which paved the way forthe prospective writer in search of his own voice. But while the art of Ligotti is a “distillation and expression in contemporary terms of what was best in Lovecraft” (Cardin 2003, 16), his style is basically different. Cardin himself indicates that Poe, Nabokov, Burroughs, and Schulz rank among the chief influences on Ligotti’s style (2007, 99), and Ligotti often elaborates the way these authors and others (among them Géza Csáth) helped him discover the literary instruments to express his sentiments (Ayad 109-116, VanderMeer 205-206).

In sum, the relationship between Lovecraft and Ligotti can be described as a mentorship: Lovecraft’s thought and personality guided the emerging author to discover weird fiction as his preferred medium, the ideal instrument of the message he wants to convey.

INSTANCES OF POSTHUMANISM IN LIGOTTI’S FICTION

Andrew Weinstock’s article entitled “Lovecraft’s Things,” provides important posthumanist insights to Lovecraft’s fiction, therefore, it is advisable to begin this section with an introduction of his main points. Weinstock explains the allure of Gothic fiction with the experience of an enchanted world in which “the line between subject and object becomes muddled and obscured,” and a deep-seated curiosity and desire emerge for “another world governed by different laws” (63). According to his argumentation, Gothic fiction provides precisely this experience by either animating lifeless things or turning living beings into inanimate things (65). The experience of reading Gothic is perfect soil for contemporary new materialisms, which bestow matter with autonomous agency. Objects behave according to their own laws, and this also implies that their existence does not in itself serve any human purposes—objects exist for themselves (70). Weinstock connects this tenet to the opposition to correlationism, and this connection shows that the central thought of posthumanism on a moral philosophical level has a similar foundation to that of OOO on an ontological and epistemological level. On such grounds, theories of things as agents and Gothic fiction constitute two sides of the same coin (71).

Weinstock chose the castle, the portrait, and the book as objects of analysis. The castle represents architectures that give space to things inimical to human welfare. The portrait stands for the representations of the human body. The book symbolizes bodies of knowledge (65). As an example for each of these in Lovecraft, he picked Exham Priory from “The Rats in the Walls,” the photograph of a ghoul in “Pickman’s Model,” and the fictitious, dreaded grimoire the Necronomicon, and attempted to demonstrate how these things operated in Lovecraft’s world as autonomous agents.

Weinstock mainly relies on Jane Bennett’s “vital materialism.” Bennett, drawing on Spinoza, points out that all things have the ability to persist in existence, and this is a common attribute of human as well as nonhuman bodies (1). Her term “thing-power” is largely similar to the Spinozan “conatus:” the thing-power is “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (7). Some pages later Bennett writes that vital materialists are interested in those moments when they “find themselves fascinated by objects,” and thus experience a “strange and incomplete commonality” with nonhuman entities (16-17). For Bennett, this experience of commonality has a moral significance: it inspires a more empathic ecological treatment of nonhumans. This is, of course, related to what was written earlier about the difference between Lovecraft and contemporary posthumanism, yet what is important here is the emphasis placed by Bennett on fascination and the relationship with the outside. Bennett was not a writer of horror fiction, but, as Weinstock’s study demonstrates, the highlighting of fascination indeed makes her theory neatly applicable for horror.

The metamorphosis of inanimate objects into animate is not Lovecraft’s invention, and since Weinstock’s study does not explain whether thing-power in Lovecraft’s work appears in a uniquely Lovecraftian way, or whether things work in Lovecraft’s fiction just the same way as they work in weird fiction in general, my articleendeavors to fill this hiatus.

I think vital materialism’s concept of thing-power is an apt instrument to take a look at some of Ligotti’s stories. One of the most frequent devices that feature in Ligotti’s prose is the figure of the puppet. An early theorization of the puppet or automaton with a human semblance comes from Ernst Jentsch, who, in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” explains the experience of the unheimlich with “psychical uncertainties” (better known as “intellectual uncertainties” due to the English translation of Freud’s essay) concerning the accuracy of one’s perception (219), and characterizes the automaton, which is seemingly animated yet inanimate, as one form of the uncanny (224)—a point debated in Freud’s “The Uncanny” (233). James Trafford describes how the figure of the puppet in Ligotti serves to demonstrate the illusory nature of the human self and consciousness. According to Trefford, the tenets of philosopher Thomas Metzinger are manifested in Ligotti’s fiction. That Ligotti is aware of Metzinger’s philosophy is illustrated by his mention in The Conspiracy against the Human Race (105). Metzinger argues that neural mechanisms create a phenomenal simulation of the self, which is transparent in the sense that phenomenal states are not experienced as phenomenal states, rather, one “looks through” such a simulation (Trafford 189-190). The self has no independent existence, it is just a fiction, and it is through this fiction that the experience of reality is finally generated. What is experienced as a self is just the workings of “specific information processing systems engaged in self-modelling,” that is, in creating a “self-model” which, however, has no correlates in the real world (187).In other words, no such thing as self exists. This scientific theory serves as a background for the understanding of Ligotti’s irrealism (204). The puppet in Ligotti’s fiction serves as a poetic expression of the phenomenal self-model and its horrifying implications. Trafford cites Metzinger, who says that scientific worldview, on certain occasions, may be harmful to mental well-being (200). This is exactly what weird fiction, and especially weird fiction in a Lovecraftian tone, is about. The puppet in this context symbolizes the nonhuman, animated processes of material life, and the nonexistence of any distinct human essence aside from these natural laws.

Perhaps one of the most direct expressions of the puppet’s significance in this relation can be read in Ligotti’s short story “The Bells Will Sound Forever.” This tale is part of a small collection of loosely interrelated stories entitled In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land. A commercial agent named Crumm visits a hostel room. There he is inexplicably attracted to the attic. In the attic, he puts on some old clown clothes, and then he experiences a vision in which he sees himself as a puppet head on a stick in his host’s hand (Teatro Grottesco 133). Even before the actual vision, Crumm, after putting on the clown’s clothes, behaves like an object: he lies down on the ground and does not move, even though he hears the chiming of some bells of inexplicable origins. The tale also involves a past rivalry between the owner of the hostel, Mrs. Pyk, and her competitor, Mrs. Glimm. The latter arranges an attack against the former, which leads to the severing of Mrs. Pyk’s left hand. The lost limb is replaced by a wooden prosthesis. After the incident, Mrs. Pyk gains “unheard-of powers” (135) that she can use to take revenge on her rival by luring her guests away and driving her out of business. She is getting closer to objectification by virtue of the artificial limb that bestows her with a deeper understanding of, and thus greater power over, the world. The subject seems incapable of getting to the core of the true nature of things, except by dreaming: in his semi-puppet state, Crumm sees a vision of himself being “a head on a stick held in the wooden hand of Mrs. Pyk” (133, emphasis omitted). Later the hostel burns to the ground, but neither Mrs. Pyk’s body, nor her wooden hand are found (136): the hidden agency that controls human beings cannot be uncovered in a conscious state; rather, one must degenerate to something of a lower state of (non)being to get closer to the truth and see an accurate vision of reality.

One of Ligotti’s most famous and most highly-praised short stories, “Nethescurial,” also features thing-power in the most direct manner. Joshi observes that this tale shows some similarities to Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu:” both are written in the form of manuscripts told by a first-person narrator, both consist of three structural units, and the plots of both focus on the existence and secret worship of some terrifying, monstrous entity (Joshi 2001, 251). Yet the two tales also differ in significant aspects.

The unnamed narrator uncovers “a rather wonderful manuscript” (Ligotti 1991, 69). From this he learns that the text’s author, who bore the alias “Barthelemew Gray,” visited a secret island called Nethescurial in search of a piece of an ancient idol that was shattered at some point of history. This piece proves to be the last one, but the assembling of the whole idol brings about some terrible personal consequences. The reading of the sheet of paper results in the narrator’s gradual derangement, too: he sees nightmares and is later haunted by unsettling visions about the hidden reality of the world.

The first thing in “Nethescurial” that, in my opinion, deserves mentioning is the nature of the “monster” introduced in the manuscript. While a comparison of “Nethescurial” with “The Call of Cthulhu” is not totally out of question, we should not overlook some essential differences. Despite language’s failure to describe him accurately, Cthulhu is an embodied monster with physical properties (as could be experienced, for instance, in the escape scene of the third part). Nethescurial is nothing of the like. The idol is a “mere representation” that nevertheless seems to possess magical or ritual qualities, because it is “the focus of a great power” (73). In this respect, it is more similar to Arthur Machen’s Pan, who is, in “The Great God Pan,” a symbol, rather than an actual god, which stands for “the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken,” because these forces “cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol” (Luckhurst 225).The narrator of “Nethescurial” refers to the cult of the mystical and ubiquitous presence as a sort of pantheism (and a bit later pandemonism). We also learn that all the islands around the world which hold a piece of the shattered idol bear the name Nethescurial, which is perhaps indicative of the fact that these pieces defile and infect their environment.

The mystical stuff that is Nethescurial unmistakably fits the vital materialist conception of the “thing.” This is already revealed by the narrator’s ruminations over the manuscript at the end of the first part: “[i]magine all of creation as a mere mask for the foulest evil, … an evil at the heart of things” (75). Of course, at this point, the veracity of this idea is offhandedly dismissed by the narrator: he argues that “such supernatural inventions are … difficult to imagine,” and the distance from such monstrosities “is usually provided by the medium of words as such, which ensnare all kinds of fantastic creatures” (76). But on the other hand, the narrator observes that there is an attraction in us towards the monsters of horrific tales, and even though we cannot believe in them in reality, we might be haunted by them, and this haunting power emanates from somewhere behind the tale (76). Here the narrator actually hit on the right spot, because it turns out that there exists an omnipresent power behind, though not the tale, but every physical object. It circulates “within all things,” unifies them “in an infinitely extensive body of evil,” and everything seems to be “a manifestation of this evil” (80). Later the narrator’s impressions worsen: he experiences everything to be “crawling within itself and making all kinds of shapes inside there, making all kinds of faces at [him].” Immediately after that, the narrator remarks in brackets that “it was really all the same face” (81). Nethescurial, in sum, is not simply a deity, but an omnipresent, hidden vitality, the thing of things with its own, unknown, indifferent agency. In the narrator’s words at the peak of his madness: “the cancerous totality of all creatures, … the oozing ichor that flows within all things” (84). This power serves as a source of vitality for everything we perceive as separate objects. It is common in “living” and non-living entities, and thus reduces the human to the basic state of anything else in the world. The narrator is forced to experience this by being alienated from everything: personal and familiar objects like food, a doorknob, a pair of shoes become alien and frightening. Even his own flesh is “squirming” (81). Vital materiality in “Nethescurial” turns out to be menacing to the embodied human subject.

Beyond the superficial parallelisms pointed out above, “The Call of Cthulhu” and “Nethescurial” have one more common attribute that deserves further investigation: both of them behave as books of forbidden knowledge (even though these texts purport to be relatively short manuscripts, rather than books). This commonality makes it reasonable to discuss them together. As things, these manuscripts demonstrate a Spinozan conatus as explained by Bennett: they possess an active impulsion to persist (2). Conatus manifests itself in the working mechanism of both short stories. The plot of these tales can be summarized with blatant simplicity: the narrator-protagonist discovers a manuscript, reads it, and goes mad (or at least drifts to the verge of madness). This is not so unusual from either Lovecraft or Ligotti. But from the viewpoint of the conative thing, it should be seen that these texts did nothing less than reproduce themselves. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Francis Wayland Thurston rummages among his uncle’s papers, performs a bit of additional research, and then has to face that “[t]he most merciful thing in the world … is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” (355), because he has “looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to [him]” (378-379). But whatever madness was creeping up on Thurston, it spared enough of his sanity for him to write down his story, so that further readers may discover it and be driven to totter on the verge of madness by the knowledge of the vast, Cyclopean city at S. Latitude 47° 9’, W. Longitude 126°43’ with its miles high-leader and his companions. With “Nethescurial,” the case is perhaps a little bit even more ironic. The narrator-protagonist takes notes of the events that befell him after reading a manuscript. In his final craze, he throws the manuscript into the fire, but it is too late, because he has already been contaminated by the evil omnipresence, and, what is more important, he has written his own manuscript, which will be found in the future by the reader. Of course, only very few readers (if any) might actually be driven mad by a piece of fiction, yet in the technique chosen by Lovecraft and Ligotti one can trace the efforts of the conative thing to persist, and by these efforts the conative thing blurs the line between fiction and reality.

CONCLUSION

It is hardly a matter of debate in our days that Thomas Ligotti is one of the most original authors of contemporary horror fiction, regardless of the meager quantity of his output. While his thought is organically connected to the work of Lovecraft, it is more than a mistake to consider him simply another of Lovecraft’s many followers who utilize various elements of the Lovecraftian Mythos. If the recent years have witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in interest in Lovecraft, the connection of seminal, immediately contemporary authors, like Ligotti, with Lovecraft’s legacy has not been fully explored yet. Ligotti’s output is particularly exciting through the lens of vital materialism: the blending of the living and the nonliving, as well as the human and the nonhuman, have an important place in his fiction due to his pessimistic philosophy epitomized by “The Bells Will Sound Forever” and “Nethescurial.”

My investigation shows that, while Lovecraft’s life and work is deservedly in the focus of academic attention, research in post-Lovecraftian fiction also yields promising results. Lovecraft’s work and thought is importantly connected to posthumanism, and the exploration of this connection has been going on for some years now. But, as my study shows, it is also important to see what relevance such connections have in fiction inspired by Lovecraft, for such investigations provide a fuller understanding of the relevance of weird fiction in postmillennial culture.

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FLORIAN ZITZELSBERGER

“NO ONE CAN SING WHO HAS SMOG IN HIS THROAT”: VOICES OF ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ECOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN DR. SEUSS’S THE LORAX

Discourses about the environment not only emphasize the beauty of nature and her worthiness of being protected but also her endangerment, pollution, and destruction. The significance of this dialectic in America is undeniable—after all, America’s nature is loaded with patriotic values and thus qua essence possesses a politicized status. That being said, it is not surprising that the environmental movement, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, gained a political impetus. The growing visibility and, accordingly, awareness of environmental issues led to an expansion of the movement into the realm of children’s literature as well. This article illustrates how Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971), one of the most prominent examples of environmentalist children’s literature, translates into ecological awareness by ascertaining to which extent the text can be considered as being discursively integrated in the American environmental movement. I argue that intertextual references to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and allusions to Romantic conceptions of nature such as the material sublime or the Transcendentalist notion of the Oversoul constitute a translation of complex discursive material into a realm approachable for children. Focusing on the themes of preservation vs. destruction, responsibility and activism, the article further establishes that The Lorax can be read as a piece of metafiction which is aimed at (social) change. By employing self-reflexive narrative techniques such as metalepsis, the text blurs the boundaries between its various narrative levels and, by implication, dissipates the border between the text and the extratextual world. In the context of the reception of children’s literature, this contributes to the implementation of ecological awareness in the reader.

Whereas often simply defined as the interrelation of co-existing texts, the scope of intertextuality can range from direct quotations from to allusions to a pre-existing text (Genette 1993, 10). It is obvious that the identification of such phenomena is only possible in the form of ex post facto assessments: one first needs to read a text and then connect it to earlier texts in order to establish a link between them both. Once such a connection is effectively made, however, intertextuality can be reframed as a process of translation. In other words, while the intertextual engagement with another text leads to the adoption of previous narrative structures and discourses (the author’s borrowing or the reader’s referencing a prior text while making sense of a new reading experience), it can be asserted that these discourses are translated into another textual form.[21]

What, then, are the central discourses in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, and where do they originate from? The story begins with a young boy who arrives “[a]t the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows”[22] and finds a pile of rocks “where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could.” The titular character of the Lorax used to live in unison with nature before he “got lifted and taken away.” The intradiegetic narrator, the Once-ler, utters:

It all started way back… such a long, long time back… Way back in the days when the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the song of the Swomee-Swans rang out in space… one morning, I came to this glorious place. And I first saw the trees! The Truffula Trees! The bright-coloured tufts of the Truffula Trees! Mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze. And, under the trees, I saw Brown Bar-ba-loots frisking about in their Bar-ba-loot suits as they played in the shade and ate Truffula Fruits. From the rippulous pond came the comfortable sound of the Humming-Fish humming while splashing around.

The image of nature that is presented here can be characterized as a state of equilibrium: every element has its place within the diegesis, and the animals live together peacefully. It does not stay that way, however. As it can already be observed in the above quotation, the Once-ler is overwhelmed by the Truffula Trees, and becomes obsessed with them rather soon. Driven by his greed and a wacky business idea — turning Truffula Trees into Thneeds, “Fine-Something[s]-That-All-People-Need”—, the Once-ler starts to exploit nature and builds a factory which, ultimately, leads to the destruction of the environment. The Lorax, who represents a preservative power, tries to stop the Once-ler but remains unsuccessful. That the diegesis is gradually converted into a state of disequilibrium by the Once-ler, ultimately takes its toll. Not only do the animals (and later also the Lorax) have to leave, the Once-ler runs out of Truffula Trees and is, subsequently, left in complete isolation. The final spark of hope is the little boy. The Once-ler gives him the last Truffula seed and begs him:

You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

The central environmental discourses that can be abstracted from the previous remarks on the plot are: 1. Preservation vs. destruction, represented by the Lorax and the Once-ler. 2. The question of (individual) responsibility, which includes the Once-ler’s guilt, whose individual malefactions have proven to influence the entire environment. 3. Activism, which is evident in the Lorax’s attempt at saving the environment and the boy’s objective to plant a new tree. As argued before, all of these discourses are nothing new but rather are deeply rooted in the tradition of American environmentalism.[23] More specifically, The Lorax draws on Rachel Carson’s famous work Silent Spring (1962), which “sparked off the beginnings of the North’s environmental movement” (Brain 1998, 146), and Transcendentalist notions of nature.

How is a children’s book possibly linked to a study about the influences of toxins and pesticides on the environment? It is fairly obvious that the Once-ler’s factory pollutes the environment the same way the chemicals described in Carson’s book do. As the Lorax assures the Oncle-ler, “You’re glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed. No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed.” Besides the water, the exhaust gases of the factory contaminate the air as well, which leads to the silencing of the Swomee-Swans—“No one can sing who has smog in his throat.” Carson uses the haunting metaphor of a Silent Spring as the title of her book and begins it with a chapter called “A Fable for Tomorrow.” On a paratextual level, it is worth noting that The Lorax also considers itself a fable. This vantage point may be used to compare both texts in terms of content and narrative structure.

As fables, both can be characterized by their relative indeterminacy of setting and time. While “A Fable for Tomorrow” is set in “a town in the heart of America” (Carson 1962, 1), The Lorax’s time and setting remain rather vague and withdraw from reality. The frame narrative is set at “the far end of town where the Grickle-Grass grows and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows,” more precisely at “the Street of the Lifted Lorax.” The place is named after something that is not there anymore. In fact, looking back is the primary narrative principle of both texts. While the narration in Carson’s fable takes place after the depicted events, The Lorax includes the narrative act in its diegesis. Retrospective narration facilitates a juxtaposition between the prosperous landscapes of a sound nature and a destroyed environment: In Carson’s text, “all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” (1962, 1), however, only until “a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change” (2). In The Lorax, the arrival of the Once-ler marks the beginning of the exploitation and destruction of nature. The Once-ler and his family run a business that is gradually chopping off all of the Truffula Trees for their Thneed production: “From outside the fields came a sickening smack of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall. The very last Truffula Tree of them all.” With the natural resources gone, the Lorax has to send away the animals who would not be able to survive in the havocked environment. Similarly, “A Fable for Tomorrow” witnesses an abandoned environment because the animals left:

Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. […] There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. […] It was a spring without voices. (Carson 1962, 2)

As the above quotation illustrates, the departure of the animals, which The Lorax represents by sending them away, can be read as a euphemistic metaphor for death. The town in Carson’s fable is likely to have “a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world” (1962, 3), which suggests that these fables and their environments — due to their ambiguous settings — may each be read as synecdoche. That is, their microcosms can potentially be expanded and interpreted as allegories that signify a concern for the entire environment. In this respect, both fables can be regarded cautionary tales that aim at “shock[ing] [their] readers into action” (Detweiler 2004, 41).

One needs to be careful with such assessments, however, since both fables are fictional texts and thus cannot be mistaken for reality. Although Carson’s Silent Spring in its entirety constitutes an empirically verifiable study that is not fictional, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” just like The Lorax, a priori possesses the status of fiction. Carson addresses this at the end of her fable:

I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know. (Carson 1962, 3)

While Carson acknowledges that her dystopian vision is not (yet) real, and serves primarily as a warning, The Lorax, which, at first impulse, would not be associated with reality at all, alludes to the after-effects of environmental pollution in the extratextual world: “I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie,” a real lake which was declared dead in the late 1960s due to massive water pollution. In the light of its intertextual engagement with Silent Spring on the levels of content, paratext, and narrative structure, The Lorax can be considered as being well aware of its connection to Carson’s book as well as its place within the environmental movement.

How does Carson’s Silent Spring, specifically “A Fable for Tomorrow,” subsequently inform the discursive manifestation of preservation vs. destruction, responsibility and activism in The Lorax? These discourses are interconnected and culminate in the character of the Lorax. He is the one who tries to preserve nature and feels responsible for his “friends,” animals and trees, and speaks up for them: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” The destruction he tries to work against is caused by the Once-ler which is, as in Silent Spring, the result of the pollution of the environment by toxins and chemicals.

“What’s more,” snapped the Lorax. (His dander was up.) “Let me say a few words about Gluppity-Glupp. Your machinery chugs on, day and night without stop making Gluppity-Glupp. Also Schloppity-Schlopp. And what do you do with this leftover goo?... I’ll show you. You dirty old Once-ler man, you!

The Lorax not only talks about the effects of environmental pollution, he also shows the Once-ler its results. The text evaluates environmental action in accordance with Silent Spring and essentially argues that action ultimately means making change. Since the “evil spell” (Carson 1962, 2) described by Carson is later identified as “[n]o witchcraft, no enemy action” but something the “people had done […] themselves” (3), it becomes clear that these very people are the only ones who can work against it. In The Lorax, the Once-ler realizes what he has done, and must face the fact that he cannot undo his gross malefactions. His prejudiced voice from the beginning, describing the Lorax as “sharpish and bossy,” is silenced by the recognition of his own failure. In the narrative frame, he explains, “I’ve sat here and worried and worried away. Through the years, while my buildings have fallen apart, I’ve worried about it with all of my heart.” In the Once-ler’s last call for action, the resignation of an entire generation of adults who now puts its hope into the following generation, signified by the little boy, resonates: “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” In the tradition of Silent Spring, which urged its audience to take action, The Lorax shows that the child “has been increasingly assigned the role of the agent of its own environmental redemption” (Lesnik-Oberstein 1998, 213). It thus addresses the important issue of the futurity of environmentalism, since it is the children who will one day have to deal with the destruction of the environment experienced in the present.

The Lorax and Silent Spring both further refer to a third text, namely John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Silent Spring uses its verses as an epigraph, already indicating the literary tradition of nature-writing the text builds upon: “The sedge is wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing” (qtd. in Carson 1962, n. p.). The Lorax, however, does not adopt it word by word but rather translates it into children’s language: “where the Grickle-grass grows […] and no birds ever sing.” While this constitutes another intertextual reference to Carson’s book, The Lorax definitely shows an awareness of the Romantic period.

But those trees! Those trees! Those Truffula Trees! All my life I’d been searching for trees such as these. The touch of their tufts was much softer than silk. And they had the sweet smell of fresh butterfly milk. I felt a great leaping of joy in my heart. I knew just what I’d do! I unloaded my cart.

After his arrival, the Once-ler is overwhelmed by the abundance of Truffula Trees and the materiality and corporeality of nature which he later exploits for the production of Thneeds. In Romanticism, the notion of the material sublime plays a vital role in the reception and (sensory) experience of nature. Onno Oerlemans defines the concept of the material sublime as follows:

The material sublime is in this instance not just a sense of awe and fear (those ‘horrid moods’) but a sudden recognition that it is possible to see at once how thought and existence are estranged from a clear awareness of the physical world, and that they are yet inexplicably rooted in it. (2004, 4)

The material sublime, which simultaneously posits itself as an affirmative and destructive element, sets the stage for a larger discourse in The Lorax: preservation vs. destruction. While the sublimity of nature is stressed and evaluated as something positive, the notion suffers a quite literal perversion in the process of “biggering” (literally becoming sublime) of the Once-ler’s factory. Growing bigger and bigger, the Once-ler’s factory gradually supersedes nature until it ultimately substitutes her. The discrepancy between the beautiful natural environment and the technological exploitation and pollution creates a rather unsteady image that is mirrored in the accompanying illustrations as well as the typeset:

And, for your information, you Lorax, I’m figgering

on biggering

and BIGGERING

and BIGGERING

and BIGGERING,

turning MORE Truffula Trees into Thneeds

Which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!

Similar to the concept of the material sublime, the text creates an atmosphere which evokes a feeling of cognitive dissonance as the Once-ler’s thoughts actually become reality. Whereas in the beginning, nature’s ideological value and her beauty are emphasized, the overall attitude toward nature shifts from preserving her to destroying her. The ambivalent depiction of the subliminal factory thus further reinforces the text’s focus on materiality and the lumbering of Truffula Trees in order to produce Thneeds. However, Thneeds turn out to have “no real use or value” (Klaassen and Klaassen 2011, 208), which therefore foregrounds the illegitimacy of the Once-ler’s destructive behavior. By implication, the text, which is informed by Romantic notions of nature that do not comprise technology such as the Once-ler’s “Super-Axe-Hacker” at all, evaluates preservation as the more logical alternative to the exploitation and (mechanical and chemical) destruction of the environment.

Besides the preservation vs. destruction dialectic, Romanticism also influences the conception of responsibility and activism in The Lorax. Transcendentalist ideas such as the ‘Oversoul,’ meaning that individuals are interconnected with one another as well as with nature and the sacred (Ross-Bryant 1990, 338), stress the importance of individual responsibility. It is precisely because “[n]ature can only be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end” (Kateb 1995, 31) that individual action influences the environment as a whole. On the one hand, this implies that destructive behavior will certainly do harm to others. For example, because of the Once-ler, all animals have to leave since their habitat has been destroyed. Another example for the scope of individual actions is the Lorax’s attempt to counteract the Once-ler. He realizes that, due to the Once-ler’s interference with nature, animals cannot live there any longer and he responsibly sends them away, and, later, he also leaves:

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance… just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance… as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants. And I’ll never forget the grim look in his face when he heisted himself and took leave of this place, through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace. And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with the one word… “UNLESS.”

The Lorax figuratively ‘transcends’ the destroyed environment, which does, however, not mean that he stops caring because, on the other hand, the scope of individual action regarding the preservation of the environment ranges just as far as destructive attitudes. The word “UNLESS” marks the very last call for action, merging thought and somatic in his bequest. What remains is not simply a pile of rocks, it constitutes a symbol of collective responsibility, re-emphasizing the interconnectedness of — and thus re-evaluating the disturbed relationship between — humans and the natural world. This is elucidated in the very end when the Once-ler realizes that “the Lorax and all of his friends may come back,” if the boy follows the Lorax’s legacy and takes action to save the environment.

As has been shown, through its intertextual references, The Lorax discursively situates itself within contemporary environmental movements (i.e. movements heavily influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) and a tradition of environmentalism informed by Romanticism and the Romantics’ writings about nature. Having established that the rather mature environmental discourses of preservation vs. destruction, responsibility and activism are translated into a children’s book, which subsequently evaluates nature as worthy of protecting, the question whether and how The Lorax’s environmentalist impetus reaches its audience still remains. Of course, the effect on the individual reader is not palpable. However, the text makes use of self-reflexive techniques that seemingly dissolve the border between the intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrative levels — in other words, these textual strategies facilitate a translation of intratextual discourses into the extratextual world, and potentially prompt ecological awareness in the reader.

In order to approximate the self-reflexive nature of The Lorax, one first needs to consider its various narrative levels.[24] The first narrative level, the extradiegetic, produces a narrative frame. The Once-ler becomes an intradiegetic narrator who tells his story, which can subsequently be classified as a metadiegetic narrative, to an intradiegetic audience, the little boy. The intradiegetic and metadiegetic levels pose as oppositional counterparts. While on the intradiegetic level, the environment is already destroyed, the metadiegetic level, as argued before, depicts a sound environment. The text presents a state of equilibrium on the metadiegetic level and a state of disequilibrium on the intradiegetic. In this regard, The Lorax follows the (narrative) structure of a fable as identified by Tzvetan Todorov. He asserts that every fable shares the same basic tripartite structure: equilibrium; disequilibrium caused by a disruptive force; reinstated equilibrium (Todorov 1972, 60). Renner further declares the fable a self-regulating system that aims at reversing transformations of the state of equilibrium (2004, 372).

The text’s narrative discourse does not present the events of the story in a chronological order. If ordered chronologically, however, The Lorax follows the transformation of the diegesis — at the time of narration, the diegesis is in a state of disequilibrium, which is further stressed by the absence of the protagonist, the Lorax. Following the classic structure of a fable, The Lorax would now restore the state of an equilibrium within the diegesis as a way to signal that the story is complete (Todorov 1972, 68). However, the text lacks the presupposed self-regulation of a fable and remains in a state of disequilibrium. That The Lorax does not provide the closure expected by its readers fosters the text’s activist impetus because this urges the reader to contest for a balanced environment. This is further sustained by the text’s self-reflexivity. While the Once-ler (as a narrator) addresses the boy (as his narratee) by saying “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better,” his call for action is centered around the rather ambiguous pronoun “you.” In fact, “you” can refer to anyone. Since The Lorax thematizes its own narratedness, it can be asserted that the text bears metafictional undercurrents. This results in a blur between the narrative levels and the Once-ler’s words seem to be metaleptically[25] outsourced into the extratextual realm. That is to say, while Dr. Seuss writes the narrator and narratee into his story, he simultaneously writes about authors and readers — in this case concerned adults and children, whom he renders responsible for taking environmental action.

According to Linda Hutcheon, in metafictional texts, “the artist reappears, not as a God-like Romantic creator, but as the inscribed maker of a social product that has the potential to participate in social change through its reader” (1980, xv). In this sense, The Lorax’s self-reflexivity, thus the gradual abandonment of borders between narrative levels as well as the text and reality, serves as a way of inducing ecological awareness in the reader. The reader becomes the one responsible for saving the environment and reinstating the equilibrium imagined in the text in the extratextual world. The boy’s objective is to save an environment (i.e. the environment as described on the metadiegetic level) he does not even know personally. Children are rendered the projection surface for the same entreaty. They are expected to evolve an attitude toward the environment that exceeds their experience.

The identification with the boy, who mirrors children and adult readers within the diegesis, is moreover ensured by the fact that the boy is the only human (or the only human-looking character, at least) in the world presented in The Lorax. All other characters as well as the animals are coded as non-human and fictional. Besides the visual representation of the characters in the illustrations of the book, their names (e.g. “Bar-ba-loots,” “Swomee-Swans”) also mark them as products of imagination. Similar to depictions of the posthuman in genres such as Sci-Fi and Fantasy, the characters in Dr. Seuss’s story “reinject the spiritual, the religious and the ‘transcendent’ into a materialist world” (Graham 2002, 9).

That is to say, Dr. Seuss’s non-human fantastic creatures use posthuman means of expressing environmental concerns that, in turn, reflect upon and re-evaluate humanness: “As the categories ‘human’, ‘nature,’ and ‘technology’ are being radically reconfigured and intermingled, their miscegenation produces creatures of many kinds who continue the enduring debates about the limits and potential of human nature” (Graham 2002, 12). Emphasizing the interconnectedness of humans and nature, The Lorax shows that humans have the potential to stand up for the environment and show responsibility (as represented by the Lorax) while simultaneously being able to destroy the environment (as represented by the Once-ler). Thus, the limits of human nature have to be seen in relation to the natural world. The question that remains and that The Lorax ultimately does not answer is whether humans can actually cause the destruction of the environment as caused by the pollution and exploitation of nature to cease. Either way, it is the little boy who has to decide whether to “[p]lant a new Truffula” and take action, a decision the readers have to make for themselves.

The Lorax’s self-reflexive engagement with its own textuality and the reader can be reframed as a process of translation. Subsequently, the discourses discussed above cross the threshold between the textual and extratextual realms. As has already been indicated, the preservation vs. destruction dialectic constitutes the main link between the meta-, intradiegetic and extratextual levels, and is entwined with discourses of responsibility and activism. On the one hand, the reader is made aware of the importance of Truffula Trees for the animals within the diegesis, providing food and shelter. On the other hand, the text shows what happens if the environment is exploited and polluted, thus warning the reader just like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The individual responsibility of the boy in the text is paralleled by the collective responsibility of its readers. If we consider the reception[26] of The Lorax as a book that adults read to children, the scope of the translation of the intratextual discourses into ecological awareness becomes even more apparent. Everything the Once-ler says to the boy, then, becomes an address to children by adults who, consciously or not, ask them to take action and save the environment.

The Lorax undeniably is a “morality tale about greed, the unlimited exploitation of the natural world, and the consequences of such uninhibited behavior” (Robbins 1996, 73). In it, many voices of environmentalism, from the Romantic period to the 1960s, from Keats to Carson, resonate — even though it is based on mature environmental discourses, The Lorax creates a world that is still approachable for children. As a metafictional and self-conscious text, it engages in a perpetual act of reproducing existing discourses, thus amplifying these voices, and projecting them at a new audience. The fact that The Lorax is a picture book for children does not obscure its strong stance on environmentalism, however.

In clear contrast to the birds in the diegesis, the Lorax (and after his leaving also the Once-ler) has no smog in his throat and quite blatantly reveals that it is the obligation of the readers — as an individual as well as a collective — to work against the destruction of the environment and save what is left of nature. In other words, the text’s self-reflexivity facilitates a translation of intratextual discursive material into the extratextual world. In this respect, The Lorax contributes to the genesis of ecological awareness in the reader. As Jonathan Bate notes, one of the primary functions of environmentalist literature is “to show the next few generations that they have the power to determine which [future] it will be” (1998, 69) they live in — and what better medium is there to initiate (environmental) change than children’s literature?

WORKS CITED

Bate, Jonathan. 1998. “Poetry and Biodiversity.” in Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature. eds. Richard Kerridge, Neil Sammells. London: Zed Books, 53-70.

Brain, Tracy. 1998. “‘Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?’ Silent Spring and Sylvia Plath.” in Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature. eds. Richard Kerridge, Neil Sammells. London: Zed Books, 146-164.

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.

Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. New York: Mariner.

Detweiler, Jane. 2004. “Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962).” in Literature and the Environment. eds. George Hart, Scott Slovic. Westport: Greenwood Press, 39-51.

Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Genette, Gérard. 1993. Palimpseste. Literatur auf zweiter Stufe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Graham, Elaine L. 2002. Representations of the Post/human. Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1980. Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen.

Kateb, George. 1995. Emerson and Self-Reliance. London: Sage Publications.

Klaassen, Johann, and Klaassen, Mari-Gretta. 2011. “Speaking for Business, Speaking for Trees. Business and Environment in The Lorax.” in Dr. Seuss and Philosophy. Oh, the Thinks You Can Think. ed. Jacob Held. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 207-218.

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin. 1998. “Children’s Literature and the Environment.” in Writing the Environment. Ecocriticism and Literature. eds. Richard Kerridge, Neil Sammells. London: Zed Books, 208-217.

Oerlemans, Onno. 2004. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto: Toronto UP.

Renner, Karl. 2004. “Grenze und Ereignis. Weiterführende Überlegungen zum Ereigniskonzept von J. M. Lotman.” in Norm—Grenze—Abweichung. Kultursemiotische Studien zu Literatur, Medien und Wirtschaft. eds. Gustav Frank, Wolfgang Lukas. Passau: Stutz, 357-381.

Robbins, William. 1996. “The Lorax Paradigm. Market Systems and Forest Communities.” in The Idea of the Forest. German and American Perspectives on the Culture and Politics of Trees. eds. Karla Schulz, Kenneth Calhoon. New York: Lang, 73-87.

Ross-Bryant, Lynn. 1990. “The Land in American Religious Experience.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58/3: 333-355.

Seuss. 1971. The Lorax. New York: Random House.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1972. “Die Grammatik der Erzählung.” in Strukturalismus als interpretatives Verfahren. ed, Helga Gallas. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 57-71.

Wolf, Werner. 2009. “Metareference across Media. The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” in Metareference across Media. Theory and Case Studies. ed. Werner Wolf. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1-88.

CHENGCHENG YOU

PICTURING A POSTHUMAN IDENTITY: PERSONHOOD, AFFECT AND COMPANIONSHIP ETHICS IN MARY LIDDELL’S LITTLE MACHINERY AND SHAUN TAN’S THE LOST THING

“Some of the most radical ideas about what the future ought to be like will be located in the books which are written for the new generation”, writes Juliet Dusinberre in her research on how children’s books engage with radical experiments in art (34). Proceeding from Dusinberre’s assumption, Kimberley Reynolds considers an ability to “envisage and engage young readers with possibilities for new worlds and new world orders” central to “the transformative power of children’s literature, both socially and aesthetically” (14). In an age gradually recognized as “digital age,” an era characterized by easy access to virtual interaction and rapid connection, changes brought by technology and new media are not only transforming traditional norms of young children as regards ways of entertainment and education, but also engendering wonder and fear in their renewed perceptions of human bodies. As the posthuman agenda is still a conundrum posed for the humanity today, it remains to be seen whether it is a vitalizing possibility of development that can “be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves” (Hayles 291), or a Frankensteinian threat, a dystopian future we are about to face.

Within this posthuman context, it is worth studying how picturebooks draw posthuman identity positions for young readers, while different visual patterns and linguistic semiosis shape their plot. In this article, I will explore how the representation of technologically enhanced embodiments allow us to relate to posthuman identity’s different forms – including  anthropomorphic manifestations of machines, cyborgs, and  hybrids. I shall argue that through a nuanced endowment of personhood and its accompanying emotive/affective structure, representations of posthuman identities in modern picturebooks, particularly in Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery (1926) and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2004), undergo a pictorial shift from romanticizing the machine to celebrating a cyborgized republic grounded in companionship ethics.

THE CUTE AND THE CREEPY IN THE UNCANNY VALLEY

As Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart note in their study of the cultural reproduction of human-animal relations in childhood, contemporary Western society’s socialization of human subjects relies on the othering of animals as pets, toys, tools, or food; as entertainment resources, educational spectacles, laboratory test-subjects, or nourishment resources. How their non-human distance from personas of self-same human origin is mapped on the conceptual map of self and other is influenced by an increasing “cultural insensibility to the processes of objectification” (21). Living animals “function as repositories of affect and sentiment, alongside products (real or representational) of (hidden) exploitation, many of which are also loaded with affective meanings (‘comfort food’, etc.)” (21). Representations of the “autonomous” animal world in fables mime human quests, as non-human entities submerge in anthropomorphic experience of joys, desires and sorrow in their pursuit of “animal dreams” – wilderness, royalty, or other human-made heroic qualities. Picturebooks may simultaneously offer idealized illustrations of animals and images of animal products (fur coat, leather shoes, or a ham-and-eggs breakfast) while hiding the real experience of animals exploited to manufacture those products. Compared to metaphorically used live animals, (animals turned) objects seem less direct vehicles to express human experience – especially in our consumer cultures where overused, worn-out, outdated (ie. duly consumed) objects end up abandoned in dustbins or trash heaps by users forgetful of their ephemeral affective charge.

The use of an inanimate object, and especially a technologically enhanced machine, without doubt, triggers an affect different from the encounter with more ‘conscious’ natural subjects, like birds or beasts. “It-narratives,” otherwise known as “novels of circulation” (Bellamy 118), a subgenre of children’s literature popular in the eighteenth century, for instance, mostly featured romanticized, fictionalized objects endowed with instrumental power which could also act as markers of social relations and emotional connections. The adventures of manufactured objects – such as a coin, a toy, a banknote, an old shoe, or a black coat – allowed them to “pass through a diverse range of hands:” “sold, lost, found, and exchanged they came into contact with very different social groups,” portraying how the rich and the poor, the sensible and the insensible, the innocent and the evil relate to the “nonhuman characters” (Bellamy 118). Object narratives of that time thematized a celebration of economic values and transactions pivotal to the urban development. Anthropomorphic objects with thinking, feeling, and speaking capacities were not endowed with an independent agency, but often substituted human figures as satirical observers of changing human relationships shaped by booming commercial transactions. Besides speaking objects, this type of narrative could feature vegetables or pets entangled in the social web, used and abused in the economic system.

Whether things can generate more mutual affective responses in human-nonhuman interactions has been recently discussed in Jane Bennett’s monograph Vibrant Matter (2009). Her concept of “thing-power” insisted on the materiality of human existence and the animation of objects pulsing with life, ready to “produce effects dramatic and subtle” (6). According to Bennett, “found objects…can become vibrant things with a certain effectivity of their own, a perhaps small but irreducible degree of independence from the words, images, and feelings they provoke in us” (xvi). An object’s “thing-power” in her coinage, fuelled by the interaction of its materiality and the human body, stimulates a special affective response in the human consciousness and an enunciation of “energetic vitality” (5) on the part of the perceived/perceiving object. Accordingly, ‘it narratives’ in the contemporary scene of writing do not only tackle metonymic or metaphorical aspects of objects, but focus on how dialogic encounters between subject and object elicits empathy for these too often muted things. Exploring the human cognitive engagement with the perceptible world – comprising animate and inanimate beings – from a nonhuman perspective holds a political potential. A special archetype of it-narratives characteristic of postmodern posthuman landscapes takes place in what Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori calls an “uncanny valley.”

Figure 1

Mori’s hypothetical graph of the “uncanny valley” illustrates a techno-science-oriented human world, in which humanoid robots, 3D computer animations, life-like dolls or other forms of embodied artificial intelligence are multiplied at an incredibly rapid pace, to provide technical assistance, intellectual aid, and emotional companions to humans. The chart shows how the degrees of verisimilitude with the human form influence human spectators’ affective attitudes. As Mori argues, humans are emotionally attracted to beings that are produced with a certain degree of human likeness, but such affection would turn to repulsion or dread at a certain point when robots resemble humans too much, or ‘appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings,’ and hence balance on the ‘familiar unfamiliar’/ ‘unfamiliar familiar’ borderline, defined by the Freudian psychoanalytical notion of the “uncanny.” This aesthetic aspect of human-nonhuman likeness informs children’s literature featuring a wide range of anthropomorphic creatures ranging from autobiographical animals, to toy narrators, and undefinable hybrids.

Personhood, with its putative capacities to think reasonably, communicate well, and take on a humanoid (relatable, loveable) appearance, can help evoke feelings of sympathy and empathy. But what if the anthropomorphic figures are monstrous, distorted, or uncanny? Mori’s chart demonstrates how we are culturally trained to associate aesthetic aspects, with personhood, a level of assumed humanity, and of expected emotional ties. This is the logic that underlies the double standard why killing anthropomorphised animals qualifies as morally problematic in contrast to consuming creatures reduced to the status of objects on being merely perceived as meat. In C.S. Lewis’s fictional universe, the common rule adopted in Narnian society is that hunting “dumb beasts” for sport or necessity of food is acceptable, but killing “talking beasts” as Trufflehunter the old badger or Aslan the mighty lion, would be equivalent with murder (in the latter case deicide). The aesthetic and ethical aspects of personhood are stake here: the Narnian talking beasts’ capability for sentience, higher-level intelligence, and human speech, reminds human audiences of their own flesh-and-blood experience, and hence turns animals into endangered (pseudo)humanoid species deserving human protection.

In his study of cross domain perceptual realities with brand mascots such as Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse, Mark Avis notes that “dehumanization might be animalistic (zoomorphism) or mechanistic (mechanomorphism)” (59). Turning a creature cute means to ascribe it with familiar, manipulatable, unthreatening qualities, to diminish its actuality (and non-human difference) as an animal or object. As Sianne Ngai adds, the cute ties in with the commodity aesthetics of postmodernity, in so far as it involves “an aestheticization and an eroticization of powerlessness” (3). However, to attribute characteristics of coldness, rigidity, and uncanny (non)similitude to objects, like cyborgs, digital pets, and robotic figures proliferating in today’s techno reality, results in the making of outlandish creatures, which might still hold residual traces of semi-anthropomorphism. While the stuffed toy animal and the industrial robot are located in an acceptable region of the “uncanny valley,” the humanoid robot, the life-like bunraku puppet, and the zombie belong to its ultimately disturbing realms, on accounts of being too-human yet fully-unhuman at once, provoking an unresolvable cognitive dissonance and affective confusion.

In her essay “The Promises of Monsters,” Donna Haraway argues that monsters have the potential to create ambiguous sites of embodiment by refusing to be “naturalized” (64-65). This observation echoes Mori’s idea of inhuman uncanniness. Jacques Derrida, in a similar vein, urges the future to prepare itself to “welcome the monstrous arrivant…to accord hospitality to that which is absolutely foreign or strange” as well as to “make it part of the household and have it assume the habits, to make us assume new habits” (386). Along these lines, a posthuman world at its best is open to a redefinition, instead of a demarcation, of cyborg-human continuum.

However, are fictional hybrid bodies, or what Derrida calls “monstrous arrivants” higher beings or lesser creatures in posthuman narratives? Are they allowed to share a moral superiority of personhood? The construction of cyborg figures in picturebooks, to a certain extent, suggests a new direction for the humanist narrative, and carries forth a new more egalitarian manifestation of anthropomorphic tendencies. Tan’s cyborg world in Tales from Outer Suburbia (2009) shows an “other country” populated with broken toys, one-eye mechanical creatures, ghostly tree figures, making up a Harawayian ‘monster nation.’ The radically different ontology of monsters reminds us of the earliest techno-hybrid creatures, such as Frank L Baum’s Tin Woodman in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery (1926), or Ted Hughes’s Iron Man (1968). These hybrid mechanoids mirror social changes to unsettle the human-machine distinction to different degrees. If once “we polish[ed] an animal mirror to look for ourselves” (Haraway 1991, 21), the cyborg replica was soon to follow as an instrument in the quest for human self-identity. In the following I shall turn to Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery, also known as “The First Picture Book for Modern Children,” to explore how sentient machines or cyborgs are visualized and textualized through anthropomorphism.

MACHINE ROMANTICISM IN THE GARDEN: MARY LIDDELL’S LITTLE MACHINERY (1926)

Mary Liddell’s picture book Little Machinery reached imminent success at the time of its publication in 1926, and although it faded quickly from store shelves, it has become recognized by children’s literary scholars as “the first picture book for modern children” that “distilled the era’s technological hopes and fears for a young audience” as Wayne State University Press’ 2009 facsimile edition put it. The opening paragraphs of Little Machinery draw a pastoral and optimistic vision of a technological figure:

Somewhere there is a Little Machinery, a magic creature. He grew up out of some pieces of a steam engine that was in a wreck, an old trolley car that couldn’t run any more, and a broken automobile. This Little Machinery would rather work than anything in the world. He does things by steam like the steam engine — Or by electricity like the electric car whichever he chooses.

And he rides merrily along on a little automobile wheel that goes by gasoline.

And the Little Machinery lives in a wood that grows beside a railroad track.

And in the wood are a lot of animals that he plays with. He makes things for them by machinery. And they love him and follow him all about, watching him work.

And all day long he puffs and clatters gaily — doing things, and making lots of steam and noise. (1-7)

To accompany the verbal narrative, the constructivism-inspired illustrations represent a mechanical boy whose body is entirely made up of cogs, gears, chains, and gadgetry, apart from a human head. He represents the “entanglement” of biological life and technological progress in modernity. Unlike the Tin Woodsman fusing flesh and tins, or the Iron Man who comes from nowhere, Little Machinery is an entirely artificial mechanical creature lacking flesh and blood organic components, “a deathless individual caught betwixt-and-between” (Op de Beeck 14), “not made of mud and [unable to] dream of returning to dust” (Haraway 2004, 9) – yet the humanoid features of this magic creature place it in Mori’s Uncanny Valley. The industrious robot figure has a symbiotic relation with its animal neighbours: Little Machinery works with “mud” and is devoted to helping his animal friends with his “magic” faculties, making birdhouses for birds and rabbit hutches for rabbits. In an uncanny way, its mechanical parts construct an anthropomorphic anatomy, and bring into being an autonomous being. Its capacity to act on its own without human intervention portrays the era’s optimistic belief in the beneficial effects of a technologically-enhanced future. The idealization of the machine is complemented by a belief in the recuperative role of nature in children’s psychic development. At the heart of machine romanticism is a revival of the Rousseauian idealization of a noble savage peasant child at home in the woods. This picturebook entirely lacks the technophobia that later prevails in science fiction addressing young audience (Applebaum 154). Instead, as op de Beeck notes, there is an “optimistic exposition” about “a powerful, generous force that serves as a boon to the environment” (44). Liddell’s optimistic fantasy about the bonding of machine and environment reflects her hope for a harmonious natural-technological status quo. Little Machinery invested with a “fabulous machine consciousness” (Op de Beeck 56) emerges as “a benevolent and equal companion to man; resulting from the effort to bring it-him-her into the family” (Schwarcz 89). This romanticized vision of the machine as a worthy companion of mankind and non-human life forms of natural reality foreshadows the Harawayian “fabricated hybrid:” a marvellous-monstrous, mechanical-organic entity, a condensed image of both imagination and material cultural reality (2004, 7-8), a cyborg creature who “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies [versus] our tools to ourselves” (2004, 39).

Instead of a senseless objectified machine, a “magic creature” made of “imagination and material reality” heralds a narrative twist of the fictionalized animate-human and inanimate-object relations. Little Machinery is more than “a simple ghosting, or echo of rising capitalism” as Zoe Jaques puts it (184): beyond metaphorical significations, it “entangles nature with culture in a mode synonymous with cyborg body” (187). Recycling useless spare parts of obsolete manmade machine devices – “some pieces of a steam engine that was in a wreck, an old trolley car that couldn’t run any more, and a broken automobile” – it qualifies as a sentient being without any malice or trauma, and “very fond of thinking” of delightful things with a mechanical mind “with wheels going round” (Liddell 60). The abandoned machine is fully human and humane, a harbinger of an enriching posthuman future.

However, in darker, more technophobic interpretations like Schwarcz’s, the “machine animism” of Little Machinery is symptomatic of frustrated “man’s concern with his place in society and with his human essence,” and mirrors a repressive tendency, an apocalyptic tone, in the face of mounting anxiety (92). In this reading the technological-animalistic relation is not that idyllic either: beavers are annoyed by the Machinery’s unasked initiatives to build a dam for them, because they “like to build dams in their own way” (32) and “the spider is shaking his fist” when learning that the Machinery can spin and weave too (46). Technological power, hence, threatens with taking the place of human labour and depriving human subjects of their privileges claimed for the ‘superior species.’

The merging of humanoid and animalistic features into the subjectivity of an artificial creature, resonates with Enlightenment philosopher Descartes’ famous dictum calling living animals “natural automata,” ie. beast-machines (283). Little Machinery invites children to recalibrate the machine-environment relations in terms of “prosthetic devices; intimate components, friendly selves” (Reader 36). The Machinery’s tireless farming, grindstoning, weaving and forging, proves him to be a “dear, clever, busy” companion of all the creatures in the garden (62).

Besides a unique portrayal of the human-machine cyborg boy figure, Little Machinery’s illustrations are distinguished by a ground-breaking metafictional quality. For instance, the Little Machinery’s scissor hands can cut through the page frame to demonstrate the sharpness of his tool; elsewhere “all the tools are hanging on the picture,” so that the mechanical boy can “screw them onto himself as he needs them” (10); and the creatures all “come flying, and running, and jumping” across picturebook page frames to find Little Machinery whenever he “blows a fine shriek on his steam whistle” (20-23). The blurring of the boundaries between machine and human/animal coincides with the synergy of word and image, the fusion of verbal and visual modalities: the verbal narrative of a “fairy tale of modernity” about an environment-friendly machine is enhanced by the illustrations which allow young readers, aspiring to be astronauts, engineers, or builders, to better understand their emerging identities in relation to mechanical objects.

Today’s audiences are reminded that not only are cyborgs humanized, but that humans are more cyborgized, too, with smart phones, apps, computerized programs, and online telepresence integrated into their everyday lived realities. Picturebooks’ representations of posthuman embodiments can facilitate children’s coming to terms with this new world, where fictive hybrids – “counterontological entities who straddle the respective domains of artefacts and living beings” (Zunshine 75) – are now becoming creatures of social reality. In the discussion that follows, I am interested in interpreting how these “counterontological entities” are construed in Shaun Tan’s picturebooks which relate posthuman creatures to a cyborgized chronotope and companionship ethics.

NEW COMPANIONSHIP ETHICS FOR A POSTHUMAN IDENTITY: SHAUN TAN’S THE LOST THING

Shaun Tan’s picturebooks invite to Mori’s “uncanny valley” where we might bump into a mechanical stranger, an abstract foreign exchange student, or an amnesia machine; borderlands beings, seeking to blend their anomalies into human society. The Lost Thing is a story about an abandoned, uncategorizable creature with “a sad, lost sort of look,” “looking out of place,” coming from nowhere and sought by no one, the protagonist Shaun discovers one day near a beach where he is looking for bottle tops for his collection. It is an enormous hybrid object that combines mechanoid and humanimal features, and resists well defined categories: a strange combination of an industrial boiler, a crab, and an octopus; described by John Stephens as “an accordion/typewriter, a banana peel/lightbulb, a dog/fish, a snake/tap and so on” (96). This liminal item emerges in the hyper industrialized urban sphere to enlighten the bleak “soulless” existence who takes the thing home and feeds him with cogs, bulbs and other mechanical “food”. The boy’s taking care of the abandoned item and his need for belonging is counterpointed by his parents’ indifference that is mocked by the ironic subtitle “A Tale for Those Who Have More Important Things to Pay Attention to.” The boy’s quest to find the right place for the lost thing is assisted by the advertisement from the Federal Department of Odds and Ends:

Are you finding that the order of Day-to-Day life is unexpectedly disrupted by unclaimed property?

Objects without names?

Troublesome artefacts of unknown origin?

Filling cabinet leftovers?

Things that just don’t belong?

Don’t panic! We’ve got a pigeon hole to stick it in.

After filling in bureaucratic forms in a depressing “tall grey building,” the boy, summoned by a voice to lead the thing to “a place for forgetting, leaving behind, smoothing over,” finds a surrealist spot full of beings who “are animal and machine and human and organic and musical instrument [who] are grounded yet they fly […] are caged but have wings [and b]uildings are permeable” (Dudek 62). The pivotal moment of recovery is also a time for separation: after escorting the lost thing there, the boy departs from it and never sees it again, although he cherishes its memory, particularly when he sees “something out of the corner of [his] eye that doesn’t fit.”

Psychological, cultural critical, symbolical interpretations have tackled the story’s engagements with contemporary social frustrations related to the indifference resulting from urbanization, consumerism, racial or and class othering; and sometimes very specific global problems like “immigrant displacement in a postcolonial multicultural state” or the dystopic vision of a “destroyed environment” (Stephen 94). David Rudd praised the sociological insights of the book that “functions as an indictment of a society that has lost its soul that is bland, grey, uncaring, and unobservant” (145). He believes that the leitmotif of the picturebook is the nostalgic search for “a sense of (be) longing,” “a sense of being, of belonging, that we imagined we once possessed (Paradisiacal, Edenic, oceanic, womb-like, and so on)” (145). Debra Dudek argues that the cyborg difference of lost thing can be fruitfully compared to the marginalization of “a racialized subject, who challenges and makes visible some of the ways in which people and institutions cannot embody the racialized other into the unified body politic” (108).

These critical interpretations make sense of the philosophical, psychological, and political meanings that “the lost thing” might symbolize for human world. Yet little attention has been devoted to the cybernetic organism per se – maybe because the whole narrative located in a dystopian, industrialized, and bureaucratized fictional universe is permeated by posthuman traits. Senseless humans programmed into a mechanical routine are juxtaposed with a minoritarian populace of cyborgs who transgress the anthropomorphic categorical norms. The interdependence of the human and the machine world is worthy of further investigation, especially in the light of the overlapping trans-species meanings of the human child-machine-animal continuum as discussed in Little Machinery.

In Tan’s The Lost Thing the experience of outlandishness is more rooted in the human-cyborg body distinction than the human-animal dichotomy. If Liddell’s machine was informed by the “enduring allure of the myth of childhood innocence and its relation to Romantic notions with regard to the role of nature in children’s lives” (Applebaum 15), Tan’s cyborgized others are not romanticized projections, but rather refer to the extradiegetic child of the posthuman metropolis who cannot find a place to belong.

In contrast with Dudek’s assertion that the cyborg world exemplifies “utopia” for the lost thing, I would suggest that this fictional space – the ‘land of lost things’ where Shaun takes back the lost thing without being able to tell if it truly belongs there – is more like our actual reality’s “other space,” that Foucault called “heterotopia,” a “counter-site,” “in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). Heterotopias may include culturally (dis)ordered spaces that “indefinitely accumulate time” (such as library, cinema, theatre) and quarantined places of deviation (prison, asylum), places of pleasures (brothel, sauna, public bath) – places that remake relations of time and space in an unsettling way. An appealing aspect of the posthuman logic encapsulated in Tan’s book is the investment of a heterotopic anti-site with a political potential: The Lost Thing’s cyborgized chronotope is a time-space construct that is welcoming enough to embrace cyborg others in the name of an interspecies solidarity.

Conforming to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the chronotope, “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (114). The cyborgization in The Lost Thing refers not just to the dark and impassive futurist/dystopian time, but also the external space. Following the boy and the lost thing through the open but inherently enclosed sites (i.e. tram, beach, domestic space, grey bureaucratic building), we arrive at “a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” in which “the heterotopia begins to function at full capacity” (Foucault 26). In this illusorily immobile place, time appears eternalized, and seems capable of holding all cyborgs of heterogeneous sizes, shapes, and configurations. In this case, the cyborgized chronotope is also synchronized with Derrida’s vision of the future with its capacity to “accord hospitality to the monstrous arrivant”. The “ut○·qiA” world runs counter to the mundane world, or in Dudek’s words, “the monolithic density of the dystopian city space” (62). In this heterotopia for urban cyborgs, the other is affirmatively experienced, and the quotidian is temporarily banished.

In urban reality, time is flowing with an amnesiac quality, as attested by a stamp on the cover page that reads: “TODAY IS THE TOMORROW YOU EXPECTED YESTERDAY.” In this self-numbing time frame, the boy confesses at the opening that he used to know a lot of interesting stories, but couldn’t remember any of those until he found the lost thing. The lost thing and its cyborg companions represent the optimistic sources of light, hope, and imagination (-- metonymically marked by the cyborg’s bright red colour, and its sharp contrast to the boy’s uniform, boring world). Just how much differentiation is a matter of social consensus parading as arbitrary observation is illustrated by the picturebook’s visual clues which incorporate mathematical terminologies, excerpts from engineering and physics textbooks, and signs, like the one saying “HOMOGENEOUS EQUATION” the boy first noticed on finding the lost thing. The impersonal landscape obscures individual people and enhances the omnipresence of undistinguishable industrial sites, buildings, signs, mechanical facilities. Only the Lost Thing stands out from the crowd and the desert of indifference and looks “out of place,” disrupting the conventionally alienating spatial organization. On the next spread, after the boy has played with the thing for hours and realized that “It was lost,” we see capitalized letters “ANTI-LOGARITHMS” and “MISCELLANEOUS DIFFERENTIATION” on the right page, suggesting the revolt against mediocrity and uniformization. These mathematical terms emerging almost on every single page by means of exegesis or subtitles, mock the dangers of homogeneity, normativity, and the consequent inequality. On the contrary, collages stand as counterpoints to dry mathematical formulas and herald a postmodernist, posthumanist heterogeneity and variability in stressing differences and resisting the hegemony of mono-speciesism or monoculture.

Furthermore, the visual focalization throughout the narrative recalls what Painter et al. categorize as “images of unmediated observation” (140). Unlike in the case of Liddell’s tireless mechanical boy, in Tan there is no direct contact illustrated between the figures and the viewers. The Lost Thing has no eyes, and can likely perceive its surroundings with its “tentacles,” and has a “weird,” displaced look, while the boy wears white glasses and hence shields himself from unimpeded contact with both the characters and the readers. The fact that the interpersonal interaction between the thing and the boy lacks visible eye contact might be a critique of the unequal power positionalities involved in patriarchal regimes of spectatorship and visibility.

But the lack of gazes also allows for the forging of a co-productive narrative space open for a multiplicity of ambiguous meanings where readers, identifying with the narrator, can act as  detached outsiders as well as participant observers. A paradoxical contact is achieved through “EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTIONS” as the narrator open-heartedly accepts otherness’ different viewpoints but can also let go and bid farewell to the thing at the threshold of an alternative, “messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” heterotopic space (Foucault 27). Putting “equal and opposite” together here alludes to the author’s hope for an idealized equilibrium between self and other that may be realized in an imaginary tomorrow-land.

However, Tan’s optimism is dubious, and very different from Liddell’s machine romanticism. The narrator’s final comments express his hesitation about the possibility of finding one’s right place: “I can’t say that the thing actually belonged in the place where it ended up. In fact, none of the things there really belonged.” In this respect, Tan’s heterotopia still functions as an infinite process of “contesting and inverting” the existing world order, with the aim to resist an absolutist sense of belonging to “somewhere.” The open-ending instead of a narrative closure places the cyborg subject in an ongoing, infinite conversation, an interspecies dialogue, by placing/leaving the lost thing amidst a plethora similar (but not identical) kinds, rather than human species who would relate to it as creepy or cute.

Like Haraway’s “contact zone,” unfolding between “extreme poles” (Reader 113) to create “world-making entanglements” (2008, 4), Tan’s cyborgized space blurs the rigid territorial divide between people and things, and lulls us to “POSITIVE INTEGRAL INDEX” and then “THE NATURE OF LIGHT” wherein miscellaneous cyborgs reside. The narrative invites an unbounded, posthumanist interpretation of the lost thing that is “just plain lost” and lacks features of a legitimate human identity: it does not own a gaze, a language capacity, or a decent name. The lost thing’s ‘creaturely existence’ is characterized by hybrid material embodiment, vulnerability, and a want of companionship. A story on the loss and reconnection of a cybernetic creature in a posthuman world, The Lost Thing redefines a technological trope to raise ethical questions about the need to recognize materiality and vulnerability as shared conditions of existence of humans and cyborgs, children and animals. As Tan explains elsewhere this picturebook is about “the story of an unwanted animal lost in a bureaucratic city” (Bird 125). This parallel between the animal and the machine other is a reason why the boy immediately embraces his kinship with the lost thing, and why their brief ‘interspecies’ encounter strikes a sympathetic chord among the metropolitans who dwell in mournful solitude.

The picturebook also comments on human society’s ruthless relation to animals: the boy’s family reacts to the creature he brings home with disgust and fear. The mother’s shriek – “Its feet are filthy…It can have all kinds of strange diseases” – reflects how the ‘thing’ is reduced to the status of a social outcast. The custody dispute in the family reveals that the creaturely companionship of the lost thing, though brightening the boy’s world, is routinely excluded from the realm of the acceptable, respectable existence as a result of a fossilized belief in human exceptionalism. Although Tan invests the lost thing with warmth, imagination, mobility, and shared vulnerability, the technological hybrid is interpreted by the adult world as a Heideggerian symbolic animal “poor in the world,” unwilling to contain it. The thing’s non-being can represent just as much socially marginalized humans, as (imaginary or real) pets acquired and neglected for their entertainment value, or posthuman others, alien in a human-dominated world. All these possible interpretations, foreground humans’ troubled existential status and the possibility to compensate for the alienation from the lifeworld by establishing ties with non-human companions.

Tan’s fantasy of a “cyborg republic” returns in his picturebook Tales from Outer Suburbia that includes an emblematic image of a human child surrounded by undefinable hybrid creatures, all reading books by each other’s side. This picture resonates with the dream of a “universal republic of childhood” Paul Hazard describes in his 1932 book Books, Children, and Men (1944) as a solidarious, supportive community of readers. Hazard believes that a universal peace may be reached through innumerable exchanges of children’s books of every nation all over the world: “smilingly the pleasant books of childhood cross all the frontiers, there is no duty to be paid on inspiration” (147). By celebrating the companionship of cyborg and human children who share the joy of reading, Tan pays respect to all beings in a world enriched by differences. His posthuman land welcomes interspecies cohabitation of imaginative children and all kinds of outlandish creatures, be they animals, machines, or things, fruitfully fused by mutual respect and affection.

Figure 2

WORKS CITED

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley,” IEEE Spectrum, 2012.

Figure 2: Tan, Shaun. Tales from Outer Suburbia (2009).

ANDRÁS FODOR

SPACE OR PLACE? POSTHUMANIST REVISIONS OF ABSENCE AND PRESENCE IN CHINA MIÉVILLE’S THE CITY AND THE CITY

China Miéville’s novel The City and The City (2009) is a hybrid fusion of weird fiction, urban fantasy, and noir police procedural. In this dystopian world, Inspector Tyador Borlú, a detective for the Extreme Crime Squad from the fictional Eastern European city of Besźél, is called to an incident. A young woman, a foreign student, has been found dead. First impressions suggest a routine case, but they are soon proved wrong. The clues lead Inspector Borlú to a situation where borders, spaces, power, and ideologies are put on trial, and even his own identity becomes threatened. The novel takes place in a world where two cities, the decaying Besźel and the prosperous Ul Qoma, share the same geographical area, but are perceived by their citizens as different states with individual cultures and mutually incompatible, exclusionary existences. While nationalists want to destroy the neighboring city, unificationists dream of dissolving the two cities into one realm. The separation of the two cities is guaranteed by the odd liminal realm and secret power structure called Breach, a Foucauldian heterotopic region located both in-between and within the two cities, a tertiary ‘inside-outside’ transcending the cities’ binary division through prerogatives which serve as a controlling mechanism over the strictly isolated two parts with which it lives in fusion. Breach is a third, ‘cross-hatched area’ where the two cities overlap. Places in Breach appear in both cities, and citizens exist alongside one another, although they remain invisible for citizens of the other city.

The dualistically ‘divided’ geographical space ontologically locates the characters inhabiting Besźel and Ul Qoma, which unite into a whole that consists of three parts: Besźel, Ul Qoma, and Breach. In order to fully understand the spatially ambiguous notion of Breach, however, vital semantic distinctions have to be made. Firstly, breach(ing) can refer to an active verb’s agency, denoting an illegal crossing of the borders between Besźel and Ul Qoma, or a self-conscious neglect of the deed of “unseeing,” an expression describing when citizens of either country are forced by the law of their home-countries not to take notice of persons who occupy the same space but are not citizens of the same city they are. Secondly, in line with its punitive dimensions, Breach also functions as an institution that protects the borders of the two cities and takes legal steps against trespassers. Breach is also a space that behaves exactly the same way, from a topographical vantage point, as Orciny, the “third, the pretend-existing” city that is “ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states” (Miéville 62) and is ruled by a “community of imaginary overlords, exiles” (62). The peculiarity of the fictitious world and the ordinary qualities of a city as such dovetail entirely; therefore, a completely new conglomerate must be explored. The paper explores this entirely new composite, the presented City: how it comes into being, in what way it helps Borlú to evolve into a post-human, and what its ontological role in the construction of space may be.

The immersive fantasy (see Mendlesohn 2008) is experienced by a homodiegetic narrator: the story is told from the point of view of Borlú whom we assume to be a reliable narrator. He is also a character-focalizer, the “vehicle of [internal] focalization,” “the agent whose perception orients the presentation” and who invites us inside the represented events (Rimmon-Kenan 76). Through his focalization, the narrative space – the storyworld made up of “the physically existing environment in which characters live and move” (Buchholz & Jahn in Ryan 2) – is constructed in a heterogeneous way. (While Borlú is in Besźel, Ul Qoma remains for him a mere potentiality, bordering on an ‘impossible/imaginary world’ prohibited by the fictitious ideologies which constituting cornerstones of the storyworld.) The novel’s world is a composite of incompatible parts. The spatial frames of the fictional reality’s actual events are divided into three irreconcilable worlds, Besźel, Ul Qoma, and Breach, which “are hierarchically organized by relations of containment” (Ryan 2) (Besźel and Ul Qoma are subspaces of Breach) as well as mutual exclusion. These worlds share the same narrative space, but occupy different fictional settings circumscribing the “socio-historico-geographical environment in which the action takes place” (Ryan 3). Spatial frames develop separately and evoke a variety of settings: Besźel and Ul Qoma, for instance, took “opposing sides in conflicts, such as during the Second World War” (Miéville 73), and fought “two brief and disastrous open wars against each other” (74), hence historically have been positioned as enemy sites. Yet with shifting scenes of action spatial frames might also flow into one another.

The “story space,” defined by Ryan as most “relevant to the plot,” “consists of all the spatial frames plus all the locations mentioned by the text” (3). In Miéville’s novel it builds a fractured space split into the familiar, contemporary world (Borlú visited some parts of our known world) and three fictitious sections (two completely different city-states and a space that is policing the other two). While the City is the ur-space, which consists of Breach, Ul Qoma, Besźel, and the disputed no man’s lands, the dissentris [sic] which are all sub-spaces of the City, Orciny is not a real sub-space, but rather a possible world that remains on the level of potentiality and is never really actualized. Detective Tyador Borlú regards Breach not as a “blending” of Besźel and Ul Qoma, but as a sovereign country on its own right; and eventually will be the one who “actualizes the City.” He learns to differentiate between its parts as distinct entities yet parts of a unified whole, and hence will acquire a posthuman identity, duly marked by a new name, Tye. A homonym for “tie”, the new name indicates a subjectivity situated in connectivity, endowed with an interpretive agency that brings into being a city transcending the binary mode of thinking.

The urban space is both isotopic and heterotopic, as Henri Lefebvre stresses in his book, The Urban Revolution. Miéville’s triad is distinguished by the unity of the three narrative spaces: Besźel, Ul Qoma, and Breach. Besźel functions as an isotopy: it denotes “places of identity, identical places, neighbouring order” (Lefebvre 128). This is the place from which Borlú perceives “the other place, the place of the other, simultaneously excluded and interwoven; distant order” (ibid.) represented by Ul Qoma and Breach. In Ul Qoma perception is hindered by ideology: the governing principles of the city-state make it in-visible, obediently understood as un-real. All of Miéville’s narrative spaces trouble the understanding of everyday space, and meet the criteria of what Patricia García calls the Fantastic of Space, with reference to “a literary phenomenon where the normal laws of physical space that rule our extratextual experience are not respected” (García 26). Since the Fantastic of Space functions as “agent of the transgression, provoking the breach of logical laws” (García 33), it provokes in Borlú an epistemological crisis that advances his detective work. He realizes that only through a certain “fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience” can he solve Mahalia Geary’s murder. A preoccupation with the outside and with the strange (Fisher 7) constitutes the very modus operandi of new weird fiction, as well as of the failed or superfluous presences of the weird and eerie states.

Although Borlú is a reliable homodiegetic narrator, his factual report on the effect of strangeness (on the implied reader) “confronts a set normative system [. . .] with a point of view or look implying a new set of norms” which construct an alienated fictitious space, as Darko Suvin opined in his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (6). Borlú has to master the space in order to overcome its strangeness and establish a metaperspectivism through which space and place can be distinguished by recognizable semantic features. He must domesticate space by becoming a post-human whose “look of estrangement is both cognitive and creative” (6) and hence can realize the City and its parts. (From a narratological perspective, the City can become a spatial frame for Borlú.) By the end of the novel, the narrator-protagonist is no longer Tyador Borlú but Tye, who has ‘earned’ his new name on account of having fully discovered the novelistic space, and having ‘actualized the City’ beyond the Lefebvrian reconciliation. However, the change only takes place from the vantage point of Tye, but not from the perspective of the reader. As the City becomes an everyday space for Tye, it loses its features of Fantastic of Space.

At the beginning of the novel Tyador Borlú is human, and not a post-human being. The detective, who is also an avatar of Breach, has the authority to see the complete complexity of the City, unlike everyone else. To find Mahalia Geary’s murderer, Borlú realizes that he must violate the laws of Breach by situating himself in the space in the city in a way that allows him to notice, observe, and understand the borderline between various parts of the lived and presented space. He understands that in order to find the suspects of Mahalia Geary’s murder, he has to situate himself differently in the space of the City. As Dylan Trigg points out in his The Memory of Place, “being-in-the-world means being placed” (4). Accordingly, Borlú must move from his homely space (Besźel) to other spaces (Ul Quoma and Breach), and experience the familiarly unfamiliar/ unfamiliarly familiar unheimlich, to confirm the spatial status of the other city-states. Understanding, in an ontological sense, the “locat[ion] in a particular place, specific to the bodily subject experiencing that place” (Trigg 7) can only be grounded in an experiential methodology. Borlú’s tactic demonstrates that even if places “are constricted by a set of frames that define their physical shape, render them mathematically measurable and allow them to be mapped or localised within a coordinate system” (García 21), people experience them in affective ways. After Borlú visits every narrative space (Besźel, Ul Quoma and Breach), he overcomes his ontological boundaries by shattering his actualized human-self and gradually metamorphosing himself into a post-human being endowed with a unique kaleidoscopic sight.

In each city-state law-abiding citizens must constantly negotiate presence and absence if they want to be recognized as inhabitants of that particular place. The sense of strangeness is conditioned by ideologies that govern the city-state, indoctrinating citizens to ‘unsee’ people from the other city even if they occupy the same place. The immersive fantasy novel forces its readers to observe and experience the strange fictitious space of The City and The City, and by inviting audiences to identify with the narrator-focalizer, allows “us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside,” as Fisher argues (10). He posits two questions in relation to the eerie which perfectly encapsulate the affective reactions of the reader of Miéville’s book: “Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” (15). According to Fisher, the dyad of presence and absence separates weird and eerie. The former one “is constituted by a presence,” whereas the latter one “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence” (103). Borlú learns to overcome the binary opposition (between presence and absence, between weird and eerie) and gains a post-human status/logic through understanding that both presence and absence are realized at once in the city-text. The experiential understanding of the fictitious space(s) of The City and The City cannot be realized, only through Tye, the post-human, the avatar of Breach, the detective.

In the transformation of human to post-human, language plays a pivotal role, as it is closely correlated and entwined with space, seeing and experiencing. Throughout the experiential understanding of the Fantastic of Space that later leads to the realization of the City, walking, breaching, and using language itself constitute vital parts of the ontological process of the discovery of the whole fictitious world of the novel. Every single city-state has its own official language with its individual meanings, concepts, and signs. A particular sign can be understood only in a particular city-state; meanings, ideas, concepts cannot be deciphered in the same way in another city-state as in their ‘home.’ Yet there is an unheimlich connection between the Besź language and the Illitan (Ul Qoman) language, which Borlú describes when highlighting their common historical phonetic origins: “the languages [Besź and Illitan] are closely related – they share a common ancestor” (Miéville 51). About his native tongue, he says: “Besź is in Besź: thirty-four letters, left to right, all sounds rendered clear and phonetic, consonants, vowels and demivowels decorated with diacritics—it looks, one often hears, like Cyrillic . . . Illitan uses Roman script.” (50) However, he underlines that:

Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still (51)

The limitation of understanding slackens as Borlú carries on with his walks and keeps constructing Ul Qoman meaning by a peripatetic experiental perception of space. It is not by chance that he speaks English, a foreign language in the novel’s fictional universe, first in Besźel, with the parents of the murdered young woman. Every language he comes in contact with loosens the grip of language a little on space, vision and contributes to his post-human development. Later in the novel, Borlú even jokes about impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger from The Terminator, repeating the catch-phrase of the movie “in an Austrian accent” – “I’ll be back” (Miéville 257). In this precise moment, he steps out of the Ul Qoman spatial frame and looks inside from the outside. With that change of perspective, Borlú’s understanding of reality starts to evolve via the proliferation of contact languages and the gradual fading of the eerie presence. Borlú reclaims the concealed alternate form of reality when he decides to understand space not in terms of the presented hyper-reality, where each and every city-state can exist independently, but via his movements in space. Consequently, the language of Breach provides the possibility for Borlú to leave behind his native tongue and home(ly) reality and become an avatar of Breach. In Breach he “heard conversation in both languages [Besź and Illitan] and a third thing, a mongrel or antique that combined them” (301). He does not precisely define this third language, though other characters refer to it throughout the novel as the “root language.” The root language is depicted as what the Besź and Illitan languages might have sounded like before their development into separate languages. Though it is forbidden in both city-states, it is known by certain communities. It marks identity and knowledge and reports about political affiliations. Therefore Borlú assumes that it is either the Unificationists who claim to have command of the root or researches whose purpose is try to make sense of the findings in the diggins of Bol Ye’an. When he asks a group of Ul Qoman Unificationists whether “anyone speak old Illitan or Besź? Root-form stuff?” (197), they reply “all of us” because they “live in the city and it’s the language of the city” (197)

After Borlú masters the language of the Breach and is successfully initiated into Breach as its avatar, Borlú’s human form is left behind. He has the power to grab by the scruff David Bowden – an archaeologist who once published a now-illegal book about Orciny called Between the City and The City – turn him, march him away and pull “him out of either town into neither, into the Breach” (363). The avatar of Breach is a post-human who understands the border between the city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma and the disputed no man’s land. The avatar is not hindered by vision, not bound by language, and not related to any other place than Breach. Moreover, the post-human possesses the knowledge of “how to walk between” Besźel and Ul Qoma, “first in one, then the other, or in either, but without the ostentation of Bowden’s extraordinary motion – a more covert equivocation” (368). The knowledge that Borlú obtains during his stay in Breach reveals the openness of the space he comes into contact with.

Yi-Fu Tuan points out his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience that “Open space has no trodden paths and signposts,” it “is a common symbol of freedom [. . .]; it suggests the future and invites action” (54). If their home city-state actually acquired an independent spatial status, subjects in Besźel and Ul Qoma would be lost without the compass of state ideology to direct them. Therefore, space implies a threat and a temptation to ideologically governed and conditioned individuals confined by the socially-constructed limits of place. In The City and The City, residents of each city-state cannot fathom the notion that what they experience as space in their everyday life is in reality a place, determined and restrained by political ideologies and cultural scripts. Patricia García argues that “the idea of ‘place’ is a human invention, constricted by ritual markings that invest it with meaning and attach to it functions and values” (20). (Just like identity provides a framework to the heterogeneous I, place delimits the infinitely changeable space.) Borlú realizes that the constricting political and ideological boundaries established and maintained by the city-states must be challenged.

As Borlú steps out of each place that represents a city-state, he discovers the freedom of the outside (the reality around and beyond the cities), in the space of Breach, without submitting to its control. His metaperspective can realize and disclose the constructed nature of the city-spaces’ places; he is an ideological marauder unwilling to subject himself to its power mechanisms. Like in the case of David Bowden who revolted against the city states’ ideological apparatuses, “Maybe it took an outsider to really see how citizens mark themselves, so as to walk between it” (Miéville 368).

As Borlú actualizes the notion of place in the City, it becomes a non-divided place, a city-state. His deeds bring space into being by means of human consciousness; intellectual manoeuvres, including ambiguous reactions like cognitive estrangement, provide the framework of the City. He alters the creed of the city-states in order to evolve it into the ideology of the City. The two city-states are unheimlich from different aspects: in Besźel Ul Qoma looms over Borlú’s home as a presence, whereas in Ul Qoma the absence of Besźel is tangible. He identifies Ul Qoma as a city-state; not so much a place, more like as a space, in Patricia García’s sense of the terms. Ul Qoma hence comes to be a Fantastic of Space and it defies the logical laws that construct the place called Besźel as an agent of transgression.

The familiarity of Besźel guarantees Borlú access to the constitutive features of place, but he can only cope with the unfamiliarity of Ul Qoma upon realizing the “ritual markings that invest it [as a place] with meaning and attach to it functions and values” (García 20). Borlú recognizes a “neon” (Miéville 171) light in Ul Qoma that reminds him of the instance when he “was lit by foreign orange light” (24) in Besźel. As Borlú leaves the Copula Hall, he immediately recognizes “these streets [in Ul Qoma that] shared the dimensions and shapes of those I knew” (162) and the twofold modus operandi of the unheimlich is initiated. They are familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and as a result, at that precise moment, the surrounding of Borlú is neither place nor space. It cannot be a place, since there are no unambiguous signs that indicate meaning, function, and value. It cannot be a space either, since it is flooded with “trodden paths and signposts” as Tuan puts it, and yet to be discovered by Borlú, it also opens a perspective and “suggests the future and invites action” (Tuan 54).

Copula Hall is a special part of the city-states existing simultaneously both in Besźel Old Town and in Ul Qoma Old Town. Copula Hall, a spatial point that hosts or rejects visitors of the state, recalls Michel Foucault’s cultural historically significant topographical category of heterotopic sites that “always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” while preventing them from being “freely accessible like a public place” (26) or fully secretive like a private one. Borlú describes Copula Hall as a liminal, heterotopic locus, as “one of the few places that has the same name in both cities,” “not a crosshatched building,” yet situated “externally in both cities; [while] internally, much of it is in both and neither” (Miéville 72). Borlú describes it as a “navel between the cities” (86), a threshold between the distant realities of the two city-states.

The process of familiarization, related to the construction of place, begins as soon as Borlú leaves his hotel to stay in Ul Qoma. He reports about his walk and the recognition that Ul Qoman presence turns into a Besźelian absence. He recognizes

the neon. All around me in knots and coils, effacing the weak lights of my far-off home. The animated yammering in Illitan. It was a busier city than Besźel at night: now I could look at the figures at business in the dark that had been unseeable shades until now. I could see the    homeless dossing down in side streets, the Ul Qoman rough sleepers that we in Besźel had had to become used to as protubs to pick our unseeing ways over and around (171).

While the freedom provided by the concept of space in Ul Qoma gradually diminishes, the concept of place related to Ul Qoma is formed experientially in opposition to the (idea of the) place of Besźel. The outsider perspective surfaces in Ul Qoma to initiate another viewpoint as soon as the protagonist commits breach.

Breach as a state always impends on the horizon of the two city-states. Borlú’s major problem, provoking a veritable ontological crisis, is that he cannot realize Breach either as space or as place and is also unable to actualize the City itself. It is only by reaching a posthuman condition that Borlú -- by learning its characteristics from his avatar-mentor, Ashil – can finally realize Breach in both of its shapes. Breach is the most outsider perspective the protagonist can achieve without effacing the totality of the narrative space. With the Suvinian “estrangement” accomplished, cognition no longer signifies the same as in the city-states. Borlú’s disorientation peaks on his leaving the premises of Breach, where he has been detained:

““Where are you?” Ashil said. [. . .]

“Are you in Besźel or Ul Qoma?”

“… Neither. I’m in Breach.”

“You’re with me here.” We moved through a crosshatched morning crowd. “In Breach.     No one knows if they’re seeing you or unseeing you. [. . .] You’re not in neither [sic]:     you’re in both” (304).

The twofold characteristics of the unheimlich start to fade away, as the detective reports that “We [Ashil and Borlú] went by foot through either city. The feeling of Besźel familiarity was replaced by some larger strangeness” (304). From the ontological point of view, presence and absence can no longer be told apart in Breach, since it evolves into space. From the vantage point of Borlú, in space there is no cognitive estrangement, the prerequisites of weird and eerie dissolve into the experientially recognized narrative space. Notwithstanding preconditions and features of space, “trodden paths and signposts” (Tuan 54), are not available in Breach for humans. They disorient city-dweller individuals because they are bound by the political ideologies that maintain the narrative space of the novel. Yet post-humans, people who at one time breached and became avatars of the Breach, can distinguish among the abundance of signs and paths and by that fabricate place from space. Therefore, they realize both presence and absence in the city-text. Borlú still admits that even the avatars of Breach “debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live” (Miéville 373). The actualization of the City comes at the point in the narrative when David Bowden meets Borlú in Copula Hall, (dis)located as a “Schrödinger’s pedestrian” as Miéville puts it (354). Bowden points out that

If you [Borlú] were in one place or the other they might come for me, but you’re not. The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules, and if they did it would work this way, the thing is that if you were to be killed by someone who no one was sure which city they were in and they weren’t sure where you were either, your body would have to lie there, rotting, forever (356).

Bowden is taken by the authorities of Breach; Borlú only could have arrested him if he had managed to actualize the City earlier. As a new conglomerate the City comes into being through the actualization of the avatars of Breach. They construct a place that functions as a space for the city-dwellers of the two city-states, yet it remains a place for the avatars who cognitively actualize all parts of the City’s narrative space. The post-human feature surpasses the cognitive estrangement of the ontological spaces (Besźel and Ul Qoma) and annuls the differentiation among the places of the narrative space. By that act, the Lefebvrian reconciliation transpires from the viewpoint of the avatars of Breach.

In the end, all parts of the City have been reconciled into one place through the (mock)Bildungsroman development of the post-human detective narrator, Tye. For him, Breach has lost its place- and space-like features, while other characters of the novel still see it as space that remains outside, ideologically speaking. The City exists for the reader and for Tye as a place only by virtue of actualizing signs of a limited availability. Borlú questions the authority of his own cognition, challenges the culturally-defined geographical notions that situate Besźel, Ul Qoma, and Breach in the narrative space as places, and, by these gestures, accelerates his progress towards a post-human spatial perception.

WORKS CITED

Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.

García, Patricia. 2015. Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature The Architectural Void. New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics. 16.1 (Spring): 22-27.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Miéville, China. 2010. The City and The City. London: Pan Books.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction.” Poetics Today. 12. 3 (Autumn): 553-576.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2014. “Space.” in The Living Handbook of Narratology. eds. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University. n. pag.

Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.

Trigg. Dylan. 2012. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Translated by Steven Hoelscher. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press

KORINNA CSETÉNYI

“THE MONSTERS ARE US”: MAD SCIENTISTS AND MUTATED BEASTS IN CONTEMPORARY NATURAL HORROR FICTION

The aim of this article is to examine the topoi of mutated/mutating nature and making monstrosity in contemporary horror fiction. Natural horror is a specific subgenre of horror fiction that features natural forces – animals, plants, environmental (geographical, meteorological) phenomena – that pose a threat to human characters. Yet this specific subcategory of horror fiction, also coined eco-horror, does not simply represent humans as endangered species threatened by ‘things going wrong’ in their natural environment, but also communicates a cautionary message to warn mankind of the fatal consequences of humans’ disturbing the natural order by pollution, overconsumption, encroachment upon indigenous species’ habitat, or technologically enhanced scientific interventions such as cross-breeding or genetic manipulation. While scientists are often cast in dubious roles as beings who place their hunger for knowledge before their empathy for fellow creatures, and science itself is viewed ambiguously, both as an object of wonder and of fear, animals, per se, are not depicted as inherently evil creatures but serve as a pretext to criticize humans’ irresponsible or immoral behavior.

The interspecies interactions I wish to concentrate upon resonate well with the hybrid category of the horror genre itself. The definition of horror fiction is notoriously challenging: it is difficult to tell if there are any decisive formal requirements, stylistic characteristics, or recurring thematic leitmotifs. Genre boundaries are rarely clear-cut, and when it comes to horror, they seem to be especially “fuzzy”[27], to borrow a term from Farah Mendlesohn: there are many overlapping features with neighboring genres such as sci-fi, fantasy, or fairy tales (xiii).

Noël Carroll, in his seminal The Philosophy of Horror, offers a definition for horror which could be a useful starting point: in his opinion, what distinguishes art-horror from natural horror (war atrocities or natural catastrophes) is the presence of the monster, an uncategorizable creature par excellence. He defines a monster as “any being not believed to exist now according to contemporary science” (1990, 27), a creature whose origin, behavior and actions are inexplicable, as “disturbances of the natural order” (16). He further postulates that the monster should provoke not only a feeling of terror, but also revulsion in the reader or viewer. Carroll relies upon anthropologist Mary Douglas’s book Purity and Danger to compile a list of repulsive features which make a monster impure, i.e. threatening because of the “violation of schemes of cultural categorization” (31).

MAKING MONSTROSITY: WEREWOLVES, FLIES, AND BIRDS

According to the Carrollian typology, interstitiality, oscillating on the borders between two different worlds, apparently belonging to both (or neither) qualifies a creature as impure. Zombies, mummies and vampires all belong here, both human and non-human, animate and inanimate, hovering, as they do, between the lands of the living and the dead. Beast-men, shapeshifters such as werewolves (violating the categorical distinction between human and wolf) and anthropomorphized animals constitute another group, since they inhabit the animal and human domains at the same time.

These monsters represent a threat not only to the characters’ physical well-being, but also to their mental health. They imply a “cognitive threat” (Carroll 1990, 34), or a cognitive dissonance, because they challenge the mind’s capacity to create order: the usual norms and established rules no longer apply, and the psyche is unable to deal with these conceptual violations or impossibilities. Hence the clichéd ending of many horror narratives, which leaves characters insane, deranged or traumatized beyond recovery after their encounters with the monster. In H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, which abounds with otherworldly creatures, we often witness this dramatic change after a horrifying confrontation: “Danforth refuses to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which […] is mainly responsible for his present breakdown” (Lovecraft 2001, 338). “Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin” (Lovecraft 1999, 168). The most famous instance of total breakdown probably belongs to Doctor Lanyon in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). When this cultured, restrained gentleman witnesses Jekyll’s transformation and the beast within is revealed in front of his eyes, offering him a “glimpse into a primitive heart of darkness” (Tropp 103), he dies from the shock he has undergone.

When considering the various techniques which writers and film-makers employ when creating monsters, the first one mentioned by Carroll is fusion, “the mixture of what is normally distinct” (1990, 33), a combination of disparate entities, such as machine-human hybrids, like the cyborgs of the Terminator (1984) movies. The disastrous combination of animal and human also belongs to this category. In the film The Fly (1986), for example, a scientist, testing his matter-transfer device, accidentally fuses his genes with that of a fly, which became trapped in the machine. The resulting creature is a figure of horror: part human, part insect, it elicits a combination of disgust and fear, but also pity in the audience.

The other possibility for creating monsters is fission, as in the case of doppelgängers and werewolves (Carroll 1990, 46). Carroll claims that the character undergoing fission experiences an internal conflict related to an identity crisis troubled by aggressive or libidinal impulses (1981, 21). He further remarks that “within our culture the horror genre is explicitly acknowledged as a vehicle for expressing psychoanalytically significant themes,” like repressed sexuality (17) or the Freudian death drive. Werewolves, as “creatures of the id” (17) lend themselves particularly easily to psychoanalytic interpretations of the “beast-in-man” theme.

The warring sides of a character (for example, the civilized vs. the beastly component of personality) might be projected onto different entities. However, a slight differentiation needs to be made, since fission has two variants (Carroll 1981, 21). Temporal fission means that the same body is occupied by two beings sequentially. Werewolves are only spatially continuous, not temporally: one is either a man or a wolf – the two identities are divided in time (like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). In the case of doubles, however, spatial fission occurs: characters are multiplied in space, and the various selves represent different aspects of the original personality (parts which are either denied or repressed). Carroll claims that “splitting as a psychic trope of denial is the root prototype for spatial fission” in horror (22). Doppelgängers from Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1989) or E.A. Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839) belong in this category.

Lastly, magnification and massification are further means to augment monsters’ horrifying potential (Carroll 1990, 49). Threat results from the enormous size of the creature or the sheer number of the group. The latter is a common feature of zombies, who defeat humans not with strength or intelligence, but with their overwhelming numbers. Horror films which feature animal antagonists also use this technique, thus rendering devastating the invasion by frogs, rats, bats, birds or cockroaches (none of these beings formidable enemies on their own).

As for the frightening effect of magnification, the giant insect movies of the 1950s provide a good illustration. Size is a significant factor in enhancing the terrible potentials of the likes of locusts, ants or spiders, because “when insects tower over humans, the natural order has been upturned” (Leskosky quoted in Tsutsui 245). Tiny, harmless creatures ascend to supremacy through the relatively simple trick of having them grow to enormous proportions. Hence, humanity’s position as a master race is challenged, and a frightening, new world dawns where people are the ones being chased and in danger of being devoured. Focusing upon the genre of disaster films, Maurice Yacowar also emphasizes the idea that, in films where animals attack people, anxiety is provoked by the “reversal of the chain of being” (278), since creatures presumed to be lacking in conscious will or collective power seem to acquire these qualities and mount organized attacks against humans as, for example, in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

MAD SCIENTISTS, BESTIAL HUBRIS

Science plays a major role in the creation of monsters in most of the examples mentioned above, therefore it is worthwhile to shed some light on human interventions in the natural order and humanity’s responsibility in creating monsters. Darryl Jones claims that science and technology are often given a bad press in gothic and horror fiction: the figure of the mad scientist is readily associated with this genre, even by people who do not often read or watch such works (54). The scientist in Mary Shelley’s landmark text of Gothic fiction, Victor Frankenstein, especially in his cinematic reincarnations, has exerted a profound influence on generations of fictional scientists. Although originally spurred on by good intentions (“what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable” [Shelley 39]), Victor brings to life a creature who will subsequently wreak havoc and destruction on unsuspecting humans. The novel foregrounds the scientist’s responsibility and those boundaries of knowledge which are not meant to be crossed.

Figure 1

Forbidden knowledge, secret texts, illicit experiments carried out with no moral considerations are all distinguishing features of the mad scientist tradition. Tampering with nature, intervening in the cycle of life or in the evolutionary process, or creating new species are all typical acts which overambitious scientists, suffering from the sin of hubris, are apt to commit with dire consequences, in one story after another.

The scientists’ presumption in playing God is a recurring motif: in the 1931 film version, Frankenstein, upon seeing the monster’s stirring to life, exclaims “now I know what it feels like to be God” while in the film Island of Lost Souls (1932), adapted from H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the doctor asks his guest: “Do you know what it means to feel like God?” Drunk with the power of giving or taking life, Moreau cannot see the erroneous ways of his conduct. He is a vivisectionist who carries out forbidden, unethical experiments and surgeries upon innocent animals in his secluded laboratory, aptly termed The House of Pain. He wants to eradicate the beastly component in animals and transform them into humans, accepting the infliction of pain and torture in the name of science. Doctor Moreau’s story is a cautionary tale of unethical scientific research, about one man’s grandiose, overweening pride leading him astray. Ultimately, his own creatures turn against him and tear him apart, exacting a terrible revenge.

One contemporary descendent of this long line of mad scientists is Doctor Louis Creed, from Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, a book unrivalled by his other works in its pessimism. In the manner of Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist interferes with the natural order (regardless of the cost), and decides to overcome death. However, his quest to circumvent the designs of Fate only results in the perverting of life.

King describes several ways in which one can react to the death of a loved one. Louis has no fear of dying: as a rational man of science, he considers death “the most natural thing in the world” (King 1984, 46). He does not believe in an afterlife since he “had pronounced two dozen people dead in his career and had never once felt the passage of a soul” (28). Maybe it is a bit ironic that his surname is “Creed”, since he is a character without any beliefs. As it has been pointed out by Douglas E. Winter, his creed is his rationality, and this trait will later cause his destruction (158). In fact, Louis’s carefully constructed objectivity and scientific rationalism are just a thin veneer which is shattered to pieces when tragedy hits home.

A truck runs over the family’s cat, Church, and Louis, afraid his daughter would not be able to handle this death, buries the animal in the nearby Micmac Indian burial ground, an area which has the uncanny power of resurrecting the dead (due to certain malevolent forces residing there). Louis, a doctor, should know better than try to cheat death. Nevertheless, his rational faculties are overruled by his curiosity and ambition.

Church does come back from the dead, but there is something awfully wrong about him: he smells of the grave and seems to have lost all the grace which usually characterizes cats, he stumbles and staggers in an awkward way. Ultimately Louis is forced to kill this creepy zombie-cat, making it die a second death. According to Winter, the death of Church symbolizes modern man’s struggle with death, a “death without God, without hope of salvation” (157). It is all the more interesting that the existential rebellion against mortality takes place through the attempt to resurrect a pet. The cat is emotionally significant for Louis (both as the inseparable animal companion of his beloved daughter, and as a creature who represents in his eyes uncontrollable wilderness despite its domestication), yet it is used, without any hesitation, as a test subject for an experiment motivated by the doctor’s epistemophilia.

And the revenant cat marks only the beginning of dark events to come. Tragedy alone lies ahead of Louis, who rebelled against the natural order by not accepting death as a basic fact of life: punishment comes when the next highway victim is his two-year-old son. His sorrow slowly consumes his entire psyche and cuts him off from any human contact; he feels “totally unplugged from his people” (King 1984, 274). Maddened by grief, he does not hesitate to employ every available means in order to get back his son. He insists upon preserving “the only kind of life he knows: the material” (Badley 50).

He disinters his son’s corpse and reburies it in the Micmac ground. The little boy comes back, the following day, a soulless zombie and slays his own mother before Louis kills him with a lethal injection. When he finds his wife’s body, Louis wraps it in a sheet and takes it up into the woods “in a state of transcendence” (Magistrale 9). King spares us the fright of seeing what creature emerges later on, but we hear it speak. The final line of the book, one of the most chilling endings ever used in horror fiction, effectively resists closure: ““Darling,” it said” (King 1984, 368). This haunting scene creates a profound sense of unease, a major characteristic of disaffirmative horror fiction, which, in Linda Holland-Toll’s view, will not give the reader the satisfaction of affirming his traditional values and doing away with the monster, once and for all (2).

Louis’s high social standing might have been one factor which contributed to his downfall, since, as a shaman of modern medicine and often performing “miracles” (saving lives), he seems to have acquired a godlike status. He is arrogant and conceited enough to defy barriers between life and death and to think that he can rule over a clearly supernatural agent. He lacks humility and “manipulates life and death” without feeling the awe of their mysteries; therefore, he is doomed to fail (Bosky 237).

It is tempting to draw a parallel with Frankenstein, which is concerned with similar topics: creating life out of dead matter, hubris leading men to assume the role of God, crossing forbidden barriers, attaining secret knowledge and discussing the “moral responsibility for interference with the natural order” (Winter 158).

THE COSMIC HORROR OF “THE MIST” AND POSTHUMAN EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS

Scientific research may ultimately lead to the collapse of an entire civilization, as in the highly technophobic King story entitled “The Mist”. It is a fine example of techno-horror: a subgenre that usually maps the relationship between humans and machines, exploring the dire consequences of irresponsible tampering with science and technology. Unwittingly unleashing deadly viruses upon mankind,[28] opening up conduits to parallel universes from which unwelcome visitors arrive to prey upon the earth or simply losing control over machines are some typical themes explored in such texts, which aim to confront human beings with their basic vulnerability.

In “The Mist”, tragedy and disorder are blamed not upon the iconic figure of the mad scientist, in “pursuit of forbidden knowledge” (Holland-Toll 157), but on the scientific community in general. A government facility, the Arrowhead Project, carries out secret experiments and research and accidentally tears a hole into the fabric of another dimension from which prehistoric beasts invade our world.[29] A huge mist descends upon the small town where the catastrophe hits and out of this whiteness lumber forth creatures of a different era. Apart from being objects of phobia, these monstrous animals serve to dethrone humanity from its complacent position at the centre of the universe and at the top of the food chain. In an ironic reversal, some people, who are trapped in a supermarket where they went to buy food, themselves end up becoming food for the monsters attacking the store.

Placing ordinary people into extraordinary situations is a recurring motif of much horror fiction: the author is thus given the chance to examine a small community and the interactions among people. As noted by Tony Magistrale, while the outside world is concealed by the mist, in the world inside the supermarket people reveal their real selves as the veneer of civilization is slowly peeled off them (89). Echoing the creatures outside, man’s bestial nature ascends and a kind of devolution takes place with people resorting to primitive behavioral patterns, as if mirroring the “primordial life forms” outside the store (90).

Edward J. Ingebretsen calls our attention to the fact that the color white has its peculiar significance in American literature: citing the example of Melville and Poe (suffice it to recall the conclusion of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym [1838]), he claims that “whiteness and inscrutability are two points of a triangle […] whose third point is the futility of interpretation” (20).  The weird phenomenon of the mist fits into this triangle perfectly. It is inscrutable, both literally and figuratively: human eyes cannot see through it, the mist hides its hellish creatures until the final moment. Its purpose, origin and exact nature are shrouded in mystery. It denotes obscurity and losing one’s way – an apt metaphor for the scientists’ moral confusion. The unnaturalness of the thick mist is emphasized: it has straight edges, which clearly show it be man-made, being the result of an experiment-gone-wrong.

Although the mist leads to the stripping away of vision (our primary mode of orientation), to counterbalance this loss, a new kind of vision is acquired by those willing to face the new reality. The protagonist remarks: “I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside. […] Terror is the widening of perspective and perception” (King 1985, 116). People are shocked into a reappraisal of their place in the universe. As pointed out by Dennis Rickard, what they must face outside, especially in its indifference to mankind, bears a similarity to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror (188). The evil represented by the beasts is impersonal, and people are forcibly reminded of their puniness. They have to accept their insignificance and vulnerability when compared to the beasts who reign over this new world.

RADIATION FEAR AND GODZILLA

The horror genre is noted for its diagnostic function, for pinpointing the overriding fears, phobias and anxieties of an era. One such universal fear which connects a spate of 1950s-1960s horror movies is radiation fear. Nuclear testing, carried out in the desert or other (supposedly) uninhabited territory might render even previously harmless creatures lethal. This is the premise of the movie Them!, from 1954, where giant ants attack humans. Their enormous size is the result of atomic testing – fear of the atom bomb and radioactive fallout was dominant in these years, giving rise to an entire subgenre of horror, fondly called the Big Bug movies (variously starring giant leeches, grasshoppers or locusts).

Figure 2

Susan Sontag, examining sci-fi films in her influential “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965), comes to the conclusion that these “reflect world-wide anxieties” and one of their purposes is to allay these fears (42). As for their moral message, they strive to highlight the difference between the proper and “mad, obsessional” use of science, which theme is shared with classic 1930s horror films such as Frankenstein or Island of Lost Souls (45). She points out that our attitude towards science and scientists is characterized by ambiguity: sometimes science is looked upon as magic, but we all know that there is black magic, also, not just white. In the same way, we admire and fear the scientist, who can be treated “both as satanist and savior” (46).

Among the various anxieties and concerns of her society, Sontag attaches great importance to nuclear fears, stating that “mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars” (46). According to her, the majority of sci-fi films attest to this and they “attempt to exorcise” this all-pervasive fear (46). The prospect of the whole-scale annihilation of the human race was not a far-fetched idea for people living under the shadow of the atom bomb.

Maybe the most famous and notorious among the filmic creatures affected by radiation is the giant lizard Godzilla. It should come as no surprise that this 1954 film about a fifty-metres-tall fire-breathing monster with radioactive footprints comes from Japan. As explicitly stated in the movie, Godzilla is “a product of the atomic bomb that still haunts many of us Japanese”. According to Peter H. Brothers, this film, where the monster’s roar was made to sound like air-raid sirens and its footsteps sound like bombs falling, is a “virtual re-creation of the Japanese military and civilian experience of the final months of World War II” (37). Many scenes call to mind actual footage of cities devastated by bombings and the images of hospitals overflowing with patients suffering from radiation burns were so convincing that an American film critic remarked: “they look suspiciously like actual films taken after the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan. They are uncomfortable views” (37).

Figure 3

Brothers claims that although the titular hero is Godzilla, the film actually focuses more upon people than upon a dinosaur, its implicit theme being “the psychological recovery of a people trying to rebuild their cities, their culture, and their lives threatened by radioactive fallout” (36). The monster, in his interpretation, is “a metaphor for the growing fears of a nation living in the shadow of doomsday” (36) and of “man’s tampering with science” (37).

Godzilla is a prehistoric beast, a two-million-year old monster, which miraculously survived to the present day. Supposedly, it lived peacefully under the ocean, but a nuclear explosion seems to have removed it from its surroundings, drastically changing its natural habitat. The creature has absorbed a massive dose of radiation, and now it is an unstoppable force, a destructive power almost as lethal as the atomic bombs themselves. It lays waste to Tokyo, smashing everything in its path.

Curiously enough, science is also presented in the role of a savior in this film. Serizawa, a young research scientist, reveals that he has discovered a source of energy hitherto unknown, which he calls the Oxygen Destroyer. He claims it could destroy mankind since it has the power to annihilate all life forms. At first, he refuses to use it against Godzilla, fearing that politicians or world leaders would later use it as a new super-weapon, bringing about horrible destruction. Then, seeing the helplessness of humans during their confrontations with Godzilla and how ineffectual their weapons prove to be, he changes his mind. He burns all the documentation of his discovery and volunteers to take the Oxygen Destroyer to the depth of the ocean, where Godzilla resides. Once there, he sets off the device, ensuring the destruction of the beast. However, when the crew of his ship attempts to bring him to the surface, he cuts off his airline, thereby dooming himself to the same fate as Godzilla. This heroic gesture, sacrificing his own life, is primarily motivated by his fear and distrust of humanity: he fears that if he stays alive, he might be asked to construct another weapon or to reveal its “recipe”. Although he burnt the papers detailing its construction, there is still a place where it is hidden: his mind. Afraid of being forced or tortured to tell the secret, he kills himself to prevent his weapon from getting into the wrong hands. This kind of responsible, selfless behavior is rarely found among fictional scientists, who usually put selfish concerns before the welfare of humanity.

Godzilla is recognized as “cinema’s first antinuclear film” (Brothers 40), the monster symbolically representing “the dangers of man’s tampering with atomic and nuclear power” (40). It is not merely a monster movie, employing terrifying images to shock its audiences and depict the lethal nature of the beast. Director Ishirô Honda strove to focus on humans, not the monster, choosing to show their reactions, decisions, and coping mechanisms as they deal with the crisis. He was particularly interested in detailing the pain and suffering experienced by Serizawa, who ranks as one of the finest scientist characters of this genre. Brothers compares him to Frankenstein, claiming that, while the latter intentionally created life, Serizawa “unintentionally invented a new kind of death” (39), which led to a serious moral dilemma, turning him into a brooding, gloomy, Byronic sort of hero. To quote Brothers, “Godzilla is a story about real people with genuine emotions and the purgation of a man’s soul, a tortured scientist trying to come to terms with his invention of a terrible device” (39). He describes the suicide scene as Serizawa’s redemption (38), his solution for finding a way out of his desperation.

As for the movie’s antagonist, Brothers claims that Godzilla is indeed a “tragic hero, not a villain but a victim of man’s tampering with forbidden Promethean knowledge” (38). The monster seems to exist in a state of utter confusion, lashing out in rage in reaction to its sudden change of environment, being on the defensive for the most part. In an interesting parallel, Brothers compares him to the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz (1939), claiming that both are “enormous, unreasoning, and unstoppable” (38). While it is certainly true that both forces are natural and represent the terrifying power of Mother Nature, the significant difference is that in the Japanese film the humans disrupt the natural order. People are culpable in Godzilla, it might even be argued they are responsible for bringing destruction upon their own heads. Had it not been for their careless atomic experimentation, the monster would never have vented its wrath on them.

A REPTILIAN RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

Recycling the same theme, but using a ‘less prehistoric’ reptile, the 1980 horror film Alligator introduces a monster lurking in the Chicago sewers as the result of a combination of forces, not just the misguided ambition of one man. Respectful of traditions, the film keeps the iconic image of the scientist abusing nature to acquire knowledge: a pharmaceutical company is conducting research into a growth-hormone by illegally experimenting with test animals. Killing them off quite rapidly, they dispose of the carcasses via a corrupt pet shop owner, who delivered them the puppies in the first place. The tainted meat is thrown into the sewer system, where it becomes the staple food of an alligator residing there. How did an alligator get there in the first place?

The film starts with a family on holiday in Florida, where they purchase a baby alligator as a pet for their daughter. Once back home in Chicago, the father flushes the hatchling down the toilet: the film even elicits sympathy for the poor creature caught in eddies of water, whirling helplessly downward until it drops into the sewers. Twelve years pass, and the pet gator has grown to be a giant predator, thanks to its diet on hormone-filled dog meat.

In a reproduction of the classic Freudian “return of the repressed” theory, Ramon (the name given by the little girl to her pet) one day emerges from the sewers and goes on a murderous rampage. During the investigation, a policeman’s suspicions are raised and he confronts the pharmaceutical company, but, owing to collusion between its CEO, the mayor and the police chief, he is fired when he becomes a threat. So, in this film, unethical behavior is extended to include or implicate more people than just a single scientist, and financial motivations, greed, power play and political machinations all come to the fore, as further examples of immoral behavior which ultimately lead to tragic events. As pointed out by Craig Ian Mann, Ramon, as a figure representing the repressed rage of the disenfranchised masses, emerges from its lair to exact vengeance (113). In a morbid way, he is actually climbing the social ladder when it comes to choosing his victims: first he devours a sewer worker (a member of the working class), then a shop owner and a policeman (representing the middle class), saving for the last none other than the corrupt rich (Mann 122). In the grand finale, he crashes the wedding of the daughter of the pharmaceutical company’s CEO to the research scientist, where Ramon kills off the scientist, the CEO, and the mayor in quick succession.

Although later destroyed by the dismissed, lone hero policeman, Ramon showed that people cannot be absolved of all those sins they commit against nature or the animal world. Abiding by tradition, the film concludes with the arrival of a new baby alligator down into the sewer system, signaling an unending cycle of oppression and violence, calling for non-human revenge.

As Alligator and the various examples discussed above demonstrate science plays a major role in horror fiction: although it sometimes acts as a redeeming force, eventually saving the day, its primary function is to stage how human ambition provokes a crisis in the natural equilibrium of peaceful interspecies cohabitation in the first place.  Either through the working of a lone individual (the stereotypical mad scientist), or through the collaborative effort of an organization (be it a research facility or a pharmaceutical company), humans, in the name of science, release unknown powers, stumble upon secret knowledge, or intentionally interfere with life forms and the order of nature, posing a direct, ecological threat to the environment, and endangering mankind.

The horrific beasts in these cases are “just” the unfortunate results of these actions, the villainous creatures resulting from misdirected scientific endeavors. The true culprits, most of the time, are people: as formulated by Holland-Toll, one shocking message delivered by horror fiction is the recognition that the “monsters-r-us” (251).

WORKS CITED

Badley, Linda. 1996. Writing Horror and the  Body. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Bosky, Bernadette Lynn. 1988. “The Mind’s a Monkey: Character and Psychology in Stephen King’s Recent Fiction.” in Kingdom of Fear, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller. Kent: New English Library. 217-251.

Brothers, Peter H. 2011. “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: How the Bomb Became a Beast Called Godzilla.” Cineaste (Summer): 36-40.

Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.

Carroll, Noël. 1981. “Nightmare and the Horror Film. The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings.” Film Quarterly, 34. 3. (Spring): 16-25.

Gregersdotter, Katarina; Höglund, Johan; Hållén, Nicklas, eds. 2015. Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Holland-Toll, Linda J. 2001. As American as Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Ingebretsen, Edward J. 1998. “Cotton Mather and Stephen King: Writing/Righting the Body Politic.” in Imagining The Worst, edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson. Connecticut: Greenwood Press. 11-30.

Jones, Darryl. 2002. Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. New York: Hodder.

King, Stephen. 1984. Pet Sematary. London: Book Club Associates.

King, Stephen. 1985. “The Mist.” In Skeleton Crew, 24-154. New York: Signet.

King, Stephen. 1989. The Dark Half. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

King, Stephen. 1991. The Stand. New York: Signet.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. 1999. “The Call of Cthulhu.” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. London: Penguin Books. 139-169.

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. 2001. “The Dunwich Horror.” in The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. London: Penguin Books. 206-245.

Magistrale, Tony. 1992. Stephen King, The Second Decade. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Mann, Craig Ian. 2015. “America, Down the Toilet: Urban Legends, American Society and Alligator.” in Animal Horror Cinema. eds. Katarina Gregersdotter et al. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 110-125.

Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1945. “William Wilson.” in The Portable Poe, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern. New York: The Viking Press. 57-82.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1994. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rickard, Dennis. 1981. “Horror Without Limits: Looking into THE MIST.” in Reign of Fear, edited by Don Herron. London: Pan Books. 177-192.

Shelley, Mary. 1994. Frankenstein. London: Penguin Books.

Sontag, Susan. 1965. “The Imagination of Disaster.” Commentary. (October): 42-48.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2002. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. London: Penguin Books.

Tropp, Martin. 1990. Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818-1918). Jefferson: McFarland Classics.

Tsutsui, William M. 2007. “Looking Straight at “Them!” Understanding the Big Bug Movies of the 1950s.” Environmental History 12 (April): 237-53.

Wells, Herbert George. 2005. The Island of Doctor Moreau. London: Penguin Books.

Winter, Douglas E. 1989. The Art of Darkness. Great Britain: New English Library.

Yacowar, Maurice. 2003. “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre.” in Film Genre Reader III, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press. 277-295.

Filmography

Cameron, James. 1984. Terminator. Hemdale.

Cronenberg, David, dir. 1986. The Fly. SLM Production Group.

Douglas, Gordon, dir. 1954. Them! Warner Bros.

Duffer, Matt and Ross, creators. 2016. Stranger Things. 21 Laps Entertainment.

Fleming, Victor, dir. 1939. The Wizard of Oz. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1963. The Birds. Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions.

Honda, Ishirô, dir. 1954. Godzilla. Toho Film Co.

Kenton, Erle C, dir. 1932. Island of Lost Souls. Paramount Pictures.

Teague, Lewis, dir. 1980. Alligator. Alligator Inc.

Whale, James, dir. 1931. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures.

List of Figures

Figure 1: Whale, James, dir. 1931. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures.

Figure 2: Douglas, Gordon, dir. 1954. Them! Warner Bros.

Figure 3: Honda, Ishirô, dir. 1954. Godzilla. Toho Film Co.

EDIT ÚJVÁRI

THE ICONOGRAPHIC MOTIF OF THE HELLMOUTH, THE MAN-EATING BEAST AND GIGER’S ALIEN FIGURE

“Giger’s art digs down into our psyches

and touches our very deepest primal instincts and fears”

Ridley Scott

“This is the place where God’s every plant and beast

pullulates through its appalling feast,

chewing its neighbors raw.”

Sándor Weöres De Profundis

ALIEN AND ATAVISTIC FEARS

The poster of the 2017 film Alien: Covenant depicts an infernal scene: bestial fiends attack humans, while the humanoid-reptilian hybrid of an alien towers over a mass of writhing bodies and arms. But why exactly are these figures so evocative, in director Ridley Scott’s words, of “our very deepest primal instincts and fears”? And just how much does the key antagonist of a science fiction story set in a post-human future embody traditional elements? In my paper, I aim to explore the mythological and iconographic traditions and zoological stakes displayed by the Alien series’ bestial, xenomorphic creature. I focus on the original Alien monster-character: its predatory nature, its bodily and behavioral characteristics, and its reproductive cycle. I examine the beliefs and knowledges inherited from myths and zoological experiences besides the archaic instinctual dread of the life-threatening beast, and ask which earlier motifs does the horror-figure, embodying our fears, synthesize?

The figure created by the Swiss surrealist artist Hans Rudi Giger rose to fame with the 1979 Ridley Scott movie. The title character of the movie, a bloodthirsty creature attacking humans, recycles mythical and iconographic traditions, such as the monster from hell and the figure of the devil in Christianity. Consequently, the archetypal fear the Alien-character invokes is partly an instinctive gut-reaction and partly a culturally constructed response.

Figure 1

From a zoological point of view, the Alien is a predator, with a phallic head, a serpentine tail, and a tongue ending in projectile teeth (see Hornyik 2009; Hódosy 2011). The Alien’s reproductive cycle, as represented by the 1979 movie inspired by Giger’s design, comprises the following stages: an octopus-like embryo, also called a “face-hugger,” which jumps out of an egg, latches onto a human face, and penetrates the victim’s mouth; the chest-burster, which uses the victim’s chest as an incubator for the Alien-embryo and then erupts from the human body; and, following skin-shedding periods, the adult alien specimen, only seen in its full-grown state at the end of the movie, when it appears as a dragon- or raptor-like but essentially humanoid figure with its slim, muscular body, claws, and long tail, a sight reminiscent of medieval devil figures. Its skin shredded during the growth period also refers to the atavistic fear of the snake permeating humans’ collective unconscious. The Gigerian Alien’s reproductive cycle (Fig. 2) recycles the ancient Egyptian pictorial representation of the sky-goddess Nut, whose body envelops the earthly sphere (the earth-god Geb), and swallows the sun-god Re every night and gives birth to him every morning, as the sun motif adorned with a snake traverses Nut’s body. (Fig. 3) (The world originating from an ancient egg is a main tenet of Egyptian cosmogony [Kákosy 290, 377; Eliade 81]) In later sequels of the movies, the alien’s feminine features become more predominant, replacing previous phallic ones: in its insect-like-state it is controlled by the queen, embracing in the plotline the archetypal figure of the monstrous mother (see Creed 1993). The fear induced by Giger’s figure and Scott’s film heavily relies on images of physical violence inflicted on the human body through biting, devouring, and forceful intrusion. It foregrounds a vital instinct related to a biological threat, which indeed permeates the entire earthly biosphere – and function as an efficient trope of horror movies since it can be automatically triggered even in our safer, modern lives. It reminds us that we are part of the same ecosystem and food chain as all the entities of earthly life, the network of creatures living off of each other. From a subjective, anthropocentric viewpoint, this is a ruthless process; however, it is the undeniable basis for our physical existence.

Figure 2                             Figure 3

Although the relationship of predator and prey is a recognized element of the order of nature, still human zoologists have been horrified by what they deemed (from a human/e perspective) particularly violent cases of interspecies interrelationality surfacing in the insect world. In an 1860 letter, Charles Darwin writes of an ichneumon species with great shock: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.” (Darwin 1860) Richard Dawkins adds the following to the lines of Darwin:

His reference to the Ichneumonidae was aphoristic. (…) A female digger wasp not only lays her egg in a caterpillar (or grasshopper or bee) so that her larva can feed on it but, according to Fabre and others, she carefully guides her sting into each ganglion of the prey’s central nervous system, so as to paralyze it but not kill it. This way, the meat keeps fresh. It is not known whether the paralysis acts as a general anesthetic, or if it is like curare in just freezing the victim’s ability to move. If the latter, the prey might be aware of being eaten alive from inside but unable to move a muscle to do anything about it. This sounds savagely cruel but, as we shall see, nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. (Dawkins 95-96)

What makes this biological example particularly interesting is that the Alien, which hunts humans as prey to be devoured, also uses the human body as a host for reproduction, similarly to the ichneumon fly. (See Tschopp et al 2017) Combined with the fear of being eaten up alive, this is a most horrifying experience, yet being used as both food and incubator for another species should be regarded in a zoological-biological sense as a natural phenomenon. A process serving the continuity of life, the instinct to reproduce, is opposed with another species’ vital instinct to survive; however, as Dawkins warns, in a biological sense, this natural phenomenon should not be interpreted in terms of human moral standards.

This contradiction – between the cultured moralizing and the natural biological views – is articulated in one of the important dialogues of the Alien film when the android Ash (Ian Holm) tells Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) about his admiration for the Alien’s reproductive and survival instincts, regardless of how frightening and fatal they might seem for humankind:

Ash: “It’s a perfect organism, its structural perfection matched only by its hostility,”     he says.

“You admire it,” says Ripley.

“I admire its purity,” replies Ash, “a survivor, unclouded by notions of remorse, morality.” (Shone 2012)

The scene reminds of Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres’ description of the food chain of the biosphere in a poem entitled De profundis, which describes earthly existence as a journey to the “depth of the world”. Albeit the title invokes the beginning of the Latin version of Psalm 130 (“Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord” Psalm 130, 1), it lacks the hopeful tone of the latter. The poem is permeated by the Platonic attitude that heavily influenced European thinking: the usual opposition of the human-intellectual-spiritual heights and the animalistic-physical depths is complemented by the view that “but stone, tree, beast, man” are brothers. It is the “earth’s law” for earthly beings to live off of each other. Weöres’ poem depicts life with the literary topoi of hell used in medieval Europe: “wrestling through our own fray in the deep swamp”. However, the dialectics of eating-devouring is universal:

Half-asleep in half-darkness we slump,

wrestling through our own fray in the deep swamp,

our prison and our home:

for what are we but cannibals of each other

buying our own life with the death of a brother:

earth’s law, earth’s fee.

What are brothers but stone, tree, beast, man,

I eat my brother with gut-slithering pain,

and my brother eats me

(Weöres [1942] 1988, 39, trans. Edwin Morgan)[30]

The “earth’s law” implies the food chain, the intertwining of life and death by eating/devouring/digestion. Plant and animal creatures become food for humans, but in turn every earthly entity, including man, will serve as nutrition for the degrading organisms of the earth. This process, which also indicates the finiteness of individual existence, is a tragic life-experience that people of every era are forced to come to terms with. We endeavor to gain explanations through various interpretive systems, attempting to make sense of our existence in our world, with the help of our myths, religions, and scientific achievement.

In the figure of the Alien, the creators condensed atavistic fears dating back to the dawn of time:  they made parasitic predatoriness (regarding humans as a source of nutrition as well as reproduction) a key feature of the xenomorphic creature. Although the horror-sci-fi story is set in a technologically advanced future, the anxiety caused by the predator has numerous textual and visual predecessors in the past. The universal natural law of the food chain, which does not spare humans either, was widely thematized in the written sources of ancient cultures. Mythological figures devouring humans dead or alive were present in numerous mythological traditions (for example the simultaneously birth-giving and destructive Aztec earth-death goddess, Koatlikue; or the bloodthirsty goddess Kali), yet this paper does not aim to provide a detailed overview of them. I will only highlight elements of some myths from the textual traditions of ancient Mediterranean cultures and early medieval Germanic sources which can be linked with the traditions of the Biblical and the Western culture, most influential of Giger’s and Scott’s art. I wish to uncover the archetypical layers of the horrifying experience of being bitten, torn apart, or mauled to death.

Passing, the decay of the body, is the shared fate of earthly beings, and a natural part of the cycle of life. However, the case is different when passing is interpreted as expulsion or punishment of sinners, hence deprived of immortality, eternal life, and resurrection. The religious acceptance of the unalterable law of living and dying can be juxtaposed with an understanding of transience as punishment, inducing an unsurmountable fear represented by Christianity’s emblematic image of the mouth of hell devouring humans. In cultures preceding Christianity, however, we find different interpretations of the decaying or devoured  body.

The fear of predators stronger than humans, of being mutilated by fangs, is enough to justify the symbolic depiction of death and decay in the forms of wild carnivorous animals, metonymically marked by their menacingly gaping jaws. The razor-sharp animal fangs carrying the promise of a fatal bite became transculturally universal symbols of death and the underworld (Tánczos 38–44) over the ages as a result of the imminent danger of wild animals that constituted a lived reality of prehistoric and medieval times, as well as later periods (Hofmann 82). If the demise of the body was not caused by wild animals, decay claimed buried corpses “eaten up” by the earth itself, leaving only naked bones behind. Being consumed by “tongues of flame” meant an even more drastic ruination. The medieval iconography of the Hellmouth depicted the most horrifying aspects of being torn to pieces, devoured, swallowed, and digested, generally featuring a vivid animal symbolism, that proved to be influential on modern cinematography, and especially the horror genre – as illustrated by one of the Alien’s cardinal attributes, its canine teeth.

The iconographic topos of the mouth of hell was a characteristic trait of western medieval art: it demonstrated the horrors of the underworld and the terrible suffering and punishment of the damned with the emblematic image of a gaping mouth and sharp incisors of a bestial monster devouring humans. But where does this iconographic tradition originate from? In what specific compositions did this motif picture the awfulness of damnation and the fear of mortality over the centuries? Iconological research beginning at the end of the nineteenth century brought to light the sources, typology, and distribution of the types of the mouth of hell theme, similarly to many other motifs of Christian art (Schmidt 16–18.). Before presenting a few characteristic visual solutions, I shall explain in more general terms why the mouth of hell can be linked to medieval Biblical textual traditions, as well as deeper, archetypical components of non-Biblical traditions from antiquity (Újvári 141–163). The Alien figure gains its powerful effect by synthetizing all these features.

IMAGES OF DEATH AND DEVOURING FROM ANTIQUE AND MEDIEVAL ART

The Canaanite god of death, Mot, is a personified form of decay consuming the living. In the Ugaritic epic from the second millennium B.C. entitled Baal and Anat, the god of death, Mot, is one of the sons of El, the father of gods, a giant who consumes every living being when he opens his mouth, “One lip to the earth, one lip to the heavens; / he will stretch his tongue to the stars. / Baal must enter inside him; he must go down into his mouth”. Eliade emphasizes that Mot is the only known example of the personification of death in the mythologies of ancient, middle-eastern, Canaanite peoples (137). Mot’s words, addressed to Baal when he arrives in the underworld, express the overwhelming power of anthropomorphized death and inevitable decay: “I approached Baal the Conqueror; / I put him in my mouth like a lamb, / he was crushed like a kid in my jaws.”

Egyptian cultural beliefs in an afterlife depicted the otherworldly judgment with the figure of Ammit, the crocodile-headed, part-lion, part-hippopotamus-bodied mythical creature of the “soul-eater” (a chimeric composite of the three largest “man-eating” animals known to ancient Egyptians). If the deceased was found wanting before Osiris on the scale, Maat (Justice), the “Devourer of the Dead,” would swallow his heart placed on the scale (Tokarev 1. 454). The ancient Egyptians offered a detailed description of stages of decay and being devoured. The conservation of the body with the process of mummification offered a means to fight off the fear of death and to escape one’s disappearance from the food chain. Preserving one’s physical frame was a token of the entry to afterlife – as the dramatic prophecies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead suggest: “I do not rot, I do not putrefy, I do not become worms” (Chapter 154) and “…he will not be eaten by worms” ( Chapter 164).

Willing to forget about the reality of corpses being consumed by decomposing organisms, Greek mythology attributed the duality of beginning and end to the earth herself, personified by Gaia and her offspring, and the depths of the earth, Tartarus. Decay became intertwined with the concept of origins: “There are the sources and limits in order / of dark night and murky Tartaros” (Hesiodos Theog. 736–737). The Orphic hymn To the Earth speaks of Gaia as follows: “O Goddess, Earth, of Gods and men the source, endu’d with fertile, all destroying force”. In the Orphic hymn [XXV] To the Earth Hades, the underworld is the final resting place of the souls of all deceased, whose return is prevented by Cerberus, the bloodthirsty, three-headed dog of Hades. The motif of decay and devouring is particularly prominent in the myth of Kronos/Saturn swallowing his children, used as the metaphor for Time in European culture – emerging from the fusion of Time/Khronos devouring his creations and Kronos/Saturn jealously guarding his power from his offspring (Panofsky 1986. 450–483). Devouring can be strangely complemented by creativity, as the Orphic hymn [XII] To Kronos suggests: “Consum’d by thee all forms that hourly die, by thee restor’d, their former place supply”. However, with the rise of a differentiated concept of afterlife in antiquity, the depth of the earth came to be associated with the underworld, which served the basis for the concept of hell in medieval culture. For example, in the Aeneid, Virgil describes Tartarus as the deepest, darkest part of the underworld, which serves as the location for the penance of sacrilegious and impudently daring heroes (the Aloeids, Tityos, Salmoneus, Ixion and Pirithous) (Aeneid VI. 580–601).

During the early middle ages, the mouth of Hell theme became especially popular in areas where, besides the legacy of Christianity and antiquity, Germanic traditions survived as well, for example in ninth century Frankish and eleventh and twelfth century Anglo-Saxon art. Of the monsters of German mythology, which were influential until the early medieval era, we should mention Fenrir, the giant wolf, who devoured Odin in the battle of the gods and the monsters of the underworld (Edda, The Wise-Woman’s Prophecy 53) and who gulped down even the Sun (Vaftrudnir) (Tokarev 1. 582). As a result, in medieval pictures, the monstrous Hellmouth is often depicted as a wolf. A different monster, the dragon Nidhogg, devours his victims, too: “There Nithhogg sucked the blood of the slain, / And the wolf tore men” (The Poetic Edda, The Wise-Woman's Prophecy 39). Grendel, “a fiend out of hell” feasting on the vanquished, is a monster in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, created at the end of the sixth century and recorded in writing in the tenth century, already in the  Christian era (100). Grendel’s devouring is described with graphic violence: “Bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood /And gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body / Utterly lifeless, eaten up hand and food” (741–744). We might conclude that in German myths being consumed by mythical predators is a widespread image representing death and decay.

The relationship between the figures of German mythology and the themes of Christian images, among them the Hellmouth, is also supported by an important early-medieval source, the Venerable Bede’s historical work, written in the first half of the eighth century. Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum describes the tenets defined by Pope Gregory I in 601 and represented by his messenger, Augustine of Canterbury, the leader of the mission to Kent: namely the Gregorian tenet on the Christianization of local pagan customs, ie. “…the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may put away error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God may come with more of the sense of being at home to the familiar  places. (…) It is evidently impossible in the case of hard hearts, to cut off everything at once.” Since the mission was advised to build on the preexisting traditions, the monstrous dragons and snakes of German mythology were merged into the Christian imagery of the devil. So the entrance to hell in the shape of a dragon or a wolf’s head is partly of Biblical and partly of German mythological origin. Similarly, giants resembling the titans also became the embodiments of evil in Christianity, along with Kronos/Saturn, the god devouring his children, who also merged into the figure of the devil who swallows up evildoers (Földényi  297).

A number of verses in the primary source of Christian iconography, the Bible, can be held responsible for the legitimization and spreading of the iconic image of the Hellmouth devouring sinners. The image of the earth devouring the dead in the story of Cain and Abel is reminiscent of Middle-Eastern mythical traditions in that, following the fratricide, the earth “…opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand” (Gen 4,11). However, in the Bible, apart from the story of Abel, being consumed by the earth/grave, a monster, a dragon or a lion primarily appears as a punishment: it is neither inevitable destiny, nor the fate of the heroes fallen in battle, but it is a verdict tormenting the enemies of God, the damned. Death at the punitive mouth of hell is the binary opposite of the eternal life promised by heaven.

In the Old Testament, carnivorous death strikes down upon the Lord’s enemies, for example in the punishment of Korach, Dathan, and Abiram, who rose against Moses and Aaron: “… ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their households, and all those associated with Korah, together with their possessions” (Num 16,31–32). Psalm 106, phrased as a confession of the people, invokes the same story: “The earth opened up and swallowed Dathan; it buried the company of Abiram” (Psalm 106,17). The Lord punishes the people who turn away from him in a similar way: “Therefore Death expands its jaws, opening wide its mouth; into it will descend their nobles and masses with all their brawlers and revelers” (Is 5,14), reminiscent of the Ugaritic Mot. The prophet Jeremiah illustrates the punishment awaiting sinners with the attack of wild animals: “Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out, for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many” (Jer 5,6).

In the Old Testament, the book of Job is one of the most relevant texts concerning the iconography of the Hellmouth. Firstly, it tells about merciless death: “one who goes down to the grave does not return” (Job 7,9); and secondly, it introduces Leviathan, the imaginary aquatic monster defeated by God (Job 40,25). The description of Leviathan recurs in the depictions of Hellmouth: “Flames stream from its mouth; sparks of fire shoot out.” (Job 41,19). The horridness of death by predators is further amplified by the idea of being consumed by fire, and burning alive endlessly – major experiences predominating the Christian iconography of hell. According to the Christian theological interpretation of the defeat of the aquatic monster, similarly to the Lord, it is only Christ who is able to dominate the underworld, who “dares open the doors of its mouth” and, by harrowing hell (descending underground to rescue the righteous), save Adam and Eve from the Hellmouth “ringed about with fearsome teeth?” (Job 41,14). This passage from the Book of Job inspired one of the major pictorial topics of western Hellmouth depictions, “Christ harrowing hell”, in which the entrance to hell is depicted as the mouth of a beast opened wide, with the first parents leaving it.

The Book of Jonah provides another illustration for the Biblical depiction of the Hellmouth: the prophet cried out of the whale that devoured him as if “from deep in the realm of the dead” (Jon 2,3). This important motif of typological symbolism recurs in the gospels (Mt 12,40), attesting that Jonah devoured by the whale is a prefiguration of Christ harrowing hell. A prayer in Psalm 22 begs to be saved from Satan by being “rescue(d…) from the mouth of the lions” (Psalm 22,21). While the list of sufferings in Psalm 22 is “the bestiary of mercilessness” (Ricoeur 359), yet it also evokes the destructive power of human villains whose “throat is an open grave” (Psalm 5, 10). Psalm 69, the so-called “mourning-psalm,” describes the horridness of burial with the gaping mouth metaphor: “Do not let the floodwaters engulf me or the depths swallow me up or the pit close its mouth over me!” (Psalm 69,15).

In the New Testament, the underworld is a place reserved for sinners, the dwelling place of the devil, the dragon or ancient serpent that swallows the sinful souls who turn away from God (Rev 20,2). In the depictions of the New Testament, this textual tradition was followed: the torments of the eternally damned are represented by figures of snakes and monsters devouring humans. The destructive power of hell also appears in Revelations when Satan, in the shape of a dragon, wants to devour the newborn son of a woman (Rev 12,1–4). Even the fourth apocalyptic horseman springing out of Hell (“a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.” Rev 6,8) is sometimes depicted riding out of the open mouth of hell. The first epistle of Peter reinforces the aforementioned (Psalm 22) association of the Hellmouth with a lion’s open mouth: “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1Pet 5,8).

The second part (17–27) of the fifth century Apocrypha, the Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate), tells the story of Christ harrowing hell. In this book, the personified underworld, Hades, consumes everything in an insatiable manner. Upon hearing the news of Christ approaching, Hades says: “Perchance it is he which by the word of his command did restore to life Lazarus which was four days dead and stank and was corrupt, whom I held here dead”. This apocryphal text proved to be influential of the iconographic tradition picturing the descent of Christ to the underworld, ie. Hades with his mouth open, Satan bound, the demolished bronze gates of Hell.

The examples so far prove that those who commissioned the medieval miniaturists, sculptors, and painters had in mind an image of the Hellmouth that coincided with the contemporary Christian world view as confirmed by multiple Biblical and apocryphal texts. Huizinga describes the strength of medieval depiction and the religious thought crystallized in the pictures as follows: “The medieval spirit is yet plastic and naive: it wants to visually manifest every concept. Every thought requires an expression in image” (Huizinga 151). Besides expressing the fear of death, the image of the Hellmouth also conveyed  the central message of Christian theology: hell devours sinful souls by way of punishment, the underworld is a manifestation of evil, of complete annihilation and death, yet Christ and his followers can victoriously triumph over it (1Cor 15,26). The Hellmouth is the nightmarish symbol of ruthless and irrevocable punishment, which, like the Egyptian dead-devourer, deprives sinners of their hope of resurrection and eternal life, whilst believers are not threatened by the horror of damnation, of the eternal grave, and of being devoured. Thus, like the soul-weighing scene of Egyptian death-papyruses, the cannibalization of the souls doomed to annihilation by the dead-devourer can also be interpreted as the iconographic prefiguration of the Christian pictorial theme of the last judgment (Seibert 229).

In the Christian context, being devoured by the mouth of hell is not the inevitable end of life but the punishment of evil souls. The whole of hell, infernal monsters, and even Lucifer may swallow the damned. In Dante’s Inferno, corresponding to medieval views, Lucifer, the three-headed, bat-winged giant, stands frozen in ice in the middle of the deepest level of hell, mauling three cardinal sinners: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius with his three mouths: “In each mouth he mashed up a separate sinner / With his sharp teeth, as if they were a grinder, / And in this way he put the three through torture” (Inferno XXXIV. 55–57). Petra Hofmann emphasizes that we cannot always make a clear distinction between the figure of Satan devouring the damned and the concept of the Hellmouth as the entrance to the underworld, as Satan can be hell itself (Hofmann 86).

When characterizing medieval allegories, Umberto Eco highlights, besides the didacticism of fine art, that it was not only nature that was viewed as an allegoric display of the metaphysical but art, as well. “Universal allegorism represents the fairytale-like and visionary view of the universe”. The topics of fine art, all the elements of the created world depicted, including hell, as well as their semantic components primarily served the purpose of didactic communication (Eco 141–148).

There are pictorial depictions of the story of Jonah and the whale/sea serpent, mentioned among the biblical sources of the topic, from as early as the fourth century. One of these is a carving adorning an Early Christian ivory coffer, made around 340 (Brescia, Museo Civico). The upper band of the carving shows the scenes of Jonah being thrown into the sea and spat out by the sea serpent, which were also popular motifs in the paintings of catacombs. The simultaneous depiction of being devoured and spat out by an animal symbolized the key message of Christianity: death and subsequent resurrection (Kirschbaum II. 37–38). The whale/dragon image is a symbol of the grave and the underworld, death as “the last enemy” (1Cor 15,26), from which believers, like Jonah, were hoping to be freed (Vanyó  214).

The iconographic richness of western art, also manifest in the wide variety of Hellmouth depictions analyzed above, originates from the self-conscious stance about the prominent role of art in the church, a viewpoint already embraced by church-fathers in early medieval times, as attested by the letter of Pope Gregory I addressed to the bishop of Massilia around 600: “For the thing that writing conveys to those who read, that is what a picture shows to the illiterate; in the picture itself those who are ignorant see what they ought to follow.” (St Albans Palster) Later, the standard western viewpoint in connection with the eighth to ninth century Byzantine icon debate, outlined in the court of Charlemagne, dissociated itself both from image reverence and iconoclasm. The illustrative function of images in western Christian art resulted in more liberal visual-compositional solutions than the extremely regulated iconographic order of icon reverence in Byzantine art, restricted by the image debate in the middle of the ninth century, as prescribed by the synods and the Orthodox Church as customers. Christian art’s free-flowing iconographic fantasy is best illustrated by an apocalypse-miniature created around 1320 that depicts the terrors of hell with a multitude of monster figures, including a seven-headed dragon and a wolf, crunched between the canines of lion-like figures embodying the Hellmouth. The crowded composition is complemented by a zoomorphic devil as well as bizarre, distorted figures, multiplying the original motif. The popularity of this image type is indicated by the fact that it has survived in several variants (Schmidt 158–160).

Despite the fact that in medieval western art the iconographic symbol of Hellmouth became a characteristic motif in numerous art forms (primarily codex illustrations, then stone and woodcarvings, metal reliefs, frescoes, enamel pictures) in the early Gothic period at the end of the twelfth century, its earliest known western example can only be seen on a ninth century ivory plaque (Schapiro 257). The blossoming of late Roman art has been linked to the artistic renewal of the Cluny reform in the eleventh century. The open-mouthed monster representing the entrance to hell already appears in the depictions of the last judgment, one of the central themes of the Roman era (Toman 329, 342). The tympanum of the western main entrance (built around 1130-40) of Sainte Foy abbey in Conques-en Rouergue, is decorated by Christ in Majesty surrounded by a mandorla (Maiestas Domini, lat. ‘The Lord’s majesty’), with the whale/dragon shaped Hellmouth devouring sinners, an example of the Leviathan type underneath. This decoration follows the pattern of the Last Judgment compositions of orthodox iconography, although the extraordinarily rich, consistently-structured design results from individual artistic invention.

A variety of examples of the iconographic motif of the Hellmouth is known from eleventh-twelfth century Anglo-Saxon miniature art (Schmidt 67–72). Originally, the monastery schools of Canterbury and Winchester were influenced by the standards of Roman manuscripts in Italian-Byzantine style (Toman 400, 406). The Winchester Psalter is, artistically speaking, an exquisite piece of late Anglo-Saxon manuscript. It was created around 1150-1160 and is associated with Henry of Blois, a monk of Winchester and papal legate, who was the brother of King Stephen and a patron of art (Schmidt 79). The manuscript boasts two depictions of the Hellmouth, which were influential in the development of the image theme. One miniature composition depicts, in the lower band, the meeting of Mary Magdalene and Christ after his resurrection, while the upper band shows Christ harrowing hell, rescuing Adam and Eve. (See figure 6) The Winchester Psalter also depicts hell as the open mouth of a monster, where the devils are tormenting the souls of the damned in a myriad of diabolic ways and the Archangel Michael is locking the gate of the Hellmouth with a key. The Anglo-Saxon artist handled the iconographic tradition rather freely: he filled the whole surface with the monster’s head and open mouth, thus granting the Hellmouth the status of an independent motif. (Schmidt 79). The wolf-like monster with gaping jaws was both inspired by the Fenrir figure of Germanic myths and the Biblical image of the devil personified by the wolf carrying off sheep (Jn 10,1; Mt 7,15) (Seibert 93–94).

An artistically precious work of the late Roman era, placed as the final piece in a series of enamel pictures on the Verdun Altar, is a work made by Nicholas of Verdun for the Provost of the Augustinian order of Klosterneuburg around 1181. Following the logic of a tripartite typological composition, the picture of an open, flaming monster-mouth devouring the damned is connected to two other enamels, similar in size and shape, situated above the Hellmouth: in the middle band Christ the judge, and in the upper band the Bosom of Abraham (based on Luke 16,29), can be seen, along with the heavens surrounded by a wall, implying the heavenly Jerusalem as the counter pole of Hell.

Figure 4.

Following the twelfth century, the Hellmouth remained a common motif of Western art: it was depicted using various materials and compositional solutions (Schmidt 84). It was an indispensable compositional element of stone carvings on the last judgment gates of Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres, Amiens, Bourges, and the Hungarian legacy of late Gothic, the relief on the northern gate of the Saint Elizabeth cathedral of fifteenth-century Kassa (Košice). Iconography influenced textual tradition, surfacing in descriptions of visions of the afterlife in visionary literature (Schmidt 76) and medieval miracle and mystery plays, where the open-mouthed beast served the setting for the entrance to hell and  was used to indicate the place of damnation on the stage – as sources on the martyrdom of Saint Apollonia suggest (Lima 41; Schmidt 172).

The traditional medieval iconographic schemes of the Hellmouth adopted a partially new meaning in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries. The humanist Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, a satire on human frailties, was published in 1494 in Basel, with Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut illustrations. On two of these pictures the Hellmouth represents the punishment awaiting sinners. In the bottom right corner of composition 29, “He who judges others”, the fallible, judgmental man in a fool’s cap falls into the open mouth of a beast (Brant 94). In the illustration to No. 106, “The omission of the good deed”, in the background to the depiction of the parable of the foolish virgins (Mt 25,1–13) the flame-spouting mouth of a monster is swallowing sinners (Brant 318).

Following the decline of medieval allegorical depictions during the Renaissance, the Hellmouth remained a common iconographic motif in the period of religious disputes. For example, in his woodcut entitled The True and the False Church (cc. 1550) Lucas Cranach the Younger emphasized, in the Protestant spirit, the damnation of the elders of Catholicism. In the center of the composition, Luther is seen preaching, and on his left a giant whale is swallowing the representatives of the ranks of the Catholic clergy, while on his right we see the crucifix and the sacramental union of the Lutheran Eucharist.

Besides its archetypal and mythological roots, the Hellmouth, as a symbol of death, decay and damnation, heavily relied on Biblical sources of western medieval allegoric art, organized by the opposition of heaven and hell. The negative essence of Hell was pictured by visual indices depicting the suffering of the damned, the horrid fangs and the burning throat of the devouring monster, and the irrevocability of being devoured. The Christian fear of hell was complemented by Protestant denominations, with a sense of religious politics.

The Hellmouth could also relate to the traumatic experiences of war: earthly instead of otherworldly horrors. In an etching by Francisco Goya entitled Fierce Monster!, a giant rat-like creature is devouring the victims of the war. The enormous animal figure (picture 16) amplifies the traditional meaning inherent in the iconographic theme. The composition is the 81st piece of a series of etchings called The Disasters of War (1810-1820), which depicts the war crimes, destruction, and immeasurable suffering experienced in 1808, during the Spanish resistance against the invading Napoleonic armies. (Földényi 228) Fierce Monster! places an allegorical motif of medieval origin in a semi-realistic visual atmosphere, combining actual war-time memories with abstract Christian iconographical motifs. Semiotically speaking, this is the phenomenon of inter-iconisation (Szívós 279): the sign-producer’s intentionality is foregrounded, as the artist places a familiar motif into a new visual environment to denote a new signified in such a way that the signifier and its traditionally fixed meaning remain recognizable and identifiable. It is no accident that traditional motifs, at times evidently, at other times indirectly, have a decisive role in the newer and newer articulations of human fear.

Even if the Alien figure is not directly connected to ancient and medieval depictions of monstrous animals devouring humans, it recycles numerous characteristics of an iconographic tradition I attempted to explore in my paper. As James Kavanaugh emphasizes, reflecting on the first Scott movie:

An aesthetically effective mass-cultural production, Alien cleverly fuses a number of disparate cultural themes into a cinematic narrative that has considerable visual and emotional impact. (…) For the death of the alien, as Alien has it, is the triumphant rebirth of humanism, disguised as a powerful, progressive, and justifying feminism. (73).

The features of the Alien figure are deeply rooted in European cultural heritage, a past recycled in the futuristic environment of a science-fiction saga that combines traces of posthuman sophistication with prehumanoid horror. Carl Sagan regards as a fundamental feature of the science-fiction genre the link established between traditional mythical monsters and present-day fantasies about extraterrestrial aliens (Sagan 61–75). The demonized pornographic attributes of the Alien attacking humans evokes the accusations of medieval witch trials that abounded in images of the fornicating he-devil, the bodily torments in hell awaiting all trafficking with him – mirror images of the very real tortures executed by the witch hunters. Ridley Scott himself drew a transhistorical, intermedial comparison when he compared Giger’s intensive imagination, admittedly influencing his own cinematic monsters, to Hieronymus Bosch’s and Francis Bacon’s “powers to provoke and disturb.”  The predecessors of Scott’s Alien figure already lurk in mid-fifteenth century fantasies of the Hellmouth, such as in Hans Memling’s painterly depictions of medieval fears of the zooanthropic devil and the bestially carnivorous mouth of hell (Fig. 5).

Figure 5

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List of Figures

Figure 1: H.R. Giger at work on the Alien figure for Ridley Scott’s movie (1979)

Figure 2: H.R. Giger. Alien Hieroglyphics

Figure 3: Nut Egyptian sky-goddess from the Sarcophagus of Uresh-Nofer, Priest of the Goddess Mut (30th dynasty, 378-341 B.C.) (the Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Figure 4: The mouth of Hell. Detail of the Verdun Altar. 1181. Klosterneuburg,

Figure 5: Hans Memling. Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, detail (1485) Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg.

ALINA GABRIELA MIHALACHE

RHINOS GO ON STAGE: ANIMAL ALLEGORY BEHIND AND BEYOND THE IRON CURTAIN

In 1958, at a show at a Parisian radio station, Eugène Ionesco was reading a short story called “Rhinoceros.” In this period of his life he is still experimenting with various forms of writing other than drama. He has not yet met with the notoriety that is to come during the Sixties, after his resounding success in the famous Paris theatres. Told by a subjective first-person narrative, the text has, in this initial phase, the traits of an allegorical fiction in the style of Kafka. The reading, almost half an hour long, is only occasionally enhanced with special effects – a few rhinoceros roars are heard, emphasizing the author’s monotonous, slightly theatrical speech. The strange intrusion of animals in the middle of the city is the pretext for developing an anti-naturalistic philosophy, an absurdist existential doctrine. The paradox surrounding the syllogisms of the Logician – a character with a consistent appearance throughout the text – constitutes the core of the story: the debate on the various species of rhinoceroses (with one or two horns, African or Asian) who are conquering the city, occupying the streets, the newsrooms, the homes and the minds of the citizens. Similarly to the main characters (mon ami Jean et moi – the future iconic couple Jean-Bérenger), who, confined in their apartments, are experiencing in different ways the proliferation of these pachyderms, the program listeners must be distressed by the strange sounds that invaded their rooms, when they turn on their radios. Rhinoceros, a play in three acts, basically dramatizes this story about inadaptability, written in an existentialist vein.

Throughout the Sixties this play, developed in a form well-known today, with spectacular metamorphoses taking place and herds of rhinoceroses invading the entire stage, becomes one of the most-produced plays, despite its obvious staging difficulties. It gains almost simultaneous recognition by important directors and producers, in various countries and cultural media – Karl-Heinz Stroux in West Germany (1959), Louis Barrault in France (1960), Orson Welles in the United Kingdom (1960), Tadeusz Kantor in Poland (1961), Leo Kerz in the United States (1961), Harvey Hart in Canada (1962) and Luis Mottura in Argentina (1963). At the same time, it is perceived as a manifesto directed against official ideologies, accompanying or standing for acts of dissidence or disobedience against authoritarian policies, in various parts of the world.

As an expression of the neo-avant-garde wave, Ionesco’s play gives way to a number of artistic experiments that helped to renew the theatrical language in the Sixties, a decade that saw major breakthroughs in terms of devising the architecture of stage productions. These were the years of the performance, practiced and then theorized in the United States by Richard Schechner (whose first performance was based on another play by Ionesco), and of the happening, experimented in Poland by the assemblage artist, designer, and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. It was the time when, drawing on the interwar avant-garde, the scenic discourse began to incorporate new means of expression, by giving the words, bodies and images the same weight in the economy of overall signification. Within this experimental context, the productions from this period came up with an impressive variety of representations and symbolizations of the rhinoceros – the beast the audience is required to confront in various guises. The force and ambiguity of the animal body in stage performances has been consistently emphasized. As a general rule, the animal presence, unpredictable and instinctual, imposes a new order in the dramatic space: “With the animal onstage, reality invades into fiction, chance enters into order, nature into culture. When an animal appears onstage, it invokes a moment of crisis.” (Lichte 106) The turbulent times of the 1960s’ offered perfect ground for staging new representations of interspecies, human-animal encounters.

From the very beginning Ionesco’s text has been interpreted as a political allegory, but the polymorphism found in many productions is also derived from a technical challenge: the scenic representations of the rhinoceroses, who are bearing the core textual meaning. Much of the impact that the play has on the audiences is given by the ways the animals are corporeally, psychologically or symbolically integrated into space. The directors’ representational choices constitute a subtle indicator of the particular political or cultural environment where the show is produced.

In his later writings, the author himself emphasized that the play is symbolically constructed around an autobiographical episode from his youth spent in Bucharest, during the years when the Fascist movement was growing throughout Europe:

I have been present at mutations. I have seen people transformed beneath my eyes. It is as if I had come across the very process of metamorphosis, as if I had been present at it. I felt them becoming more and more strangers. I felt them withdrawing little by little. I felt how another soul, another mind germinated in them. They lost their personality and it was replaced by another. They became other. (Ionesco 116-117)

From the very first productions, several directors focused on the foregrounding of the topic of identity crisis that Ionesco – the Romanian author writing in French, positioned at the crossing of two cultures, and profoundly aware of his own duality –  has projected into the metaphor of the ‘rhinocerized city’. In direct connection with the image of the rhinoceros, the play engages at least two levels of symbolization: ideologically, it represents political evil, perceived in various ways from country to country; ontologically, it portrays, more than the alien, the stateless or the nationless, in search of the utopian space of humanitarianism sans frontières. In some of his conversations with the directors of this play (particularly with Jean-Louis Barrault, the director of the first Parisian production), Ionesco was insisting on the need for actors to wear masks throughout their performances. One can assume that the writer associated these facial metamorphoses with an escape from mimetic realism, a historical decontextualization, and a return into the realm of the ‘sacred theatre’ distinguished by its mimes and satyrs. But masked performance requires the actor to adopt a specific stage discourse, too. When the director Ariane Mnouchkine brought back the mask into the contemporary theatre, revitalizing this old technique, she noted: “A masked character, no matter if tragic or comic, is in a permanent state of crisis” (482). The masked actor has to permanently maintain frontality towards the audience and make use of a specific gestural code, complementary to his frozen, dehumanized mimic. Masked performance not only avoids falling into psychologization, but also prevents falling into parody or derision – two of the easy interpretative methods that were so often used in the production and reception of Ionesco’s absurd plays. The mask signals the intention to represent meaning on a scale different from the one used in our daily modern experience.

RHINOS ON THE FRENCH STAGE. A PLAYFUL PUPPETRY

For Jean-Louis Barrault, the first director of Rhinoceros in a Paris theatre, and the impersonator of the character Bérenger, the mask becomes a pretext to establish the guignol-like bluff so beloved by Ionesco. His rhinoceroses have the pose of rigid marionettes – like the ones seen by the child Ionesco on the little stage in Jardin de Luxembourg –, distorting reality like caricatures do. The shocking animalization frightens only as long as it is perceived as such; once the caricatural convention is assumed through disproportionate representation, the audience is released from fear.

In January 1960 the show premiere took place at the Odéon Théâtre, Paris, and was warmly welcome by the press and the public alike. Although the first production of the play took place one year earlier at Schauspielhaus, in Düsseldorf, Barrault’s work represents the zero degree in the history of Rhinoceros productions, to paraphrase Roland Barthes’s famous notion. The staging took most of Ionesco’s text at face value, and thus became a common reference point for other productions. The director read the play in terms of a universal, decontextualized humanism, bringing inside the space of this tragic masquerade techniques borrowed from puppetry and gag comedy. The invasion of rhinoceroses, as well as Jean’s metamorphosis from the second act, targeted a child-like imagination, with an abundance of effects created with the intensive use of stage props. The rhinocerization was given an excessive representation, due to overstatement, another typical comedic device re-signified by Barrault. Masks are complemented by hooves and horns, as a whole unleashed herd appears on stage in the second act, facing Bérenger, who is defending the remains of Paris from the animal invasion, fighting armed, in a heroic posture reminiscent of the revolutionary storming of the Bastille, as represented in a Delacroix painting. The contemporary press noticed mainly the parodic effect triggered by the redundancy of symbols from the animal world, and categorized the production as a specimen of the fantastic genre. The political allegory was relegated to a secondary status, with its message attributed to the author’s traumatic youth experiences in Bucharest: “Ionesco had actually lived through an experience of collective fanaticism, which dehumanizes beings up to the point where they become unrecognizable and repulsively ugly.”(Anonymous 2) Despite some ideological implications of Barrault’s production, the politico-historical innuendos remained vague and allusive. The French director never encourages his audience to identify with the situation on stage. At the Odéon Théâtre, Ionesco’s play only triggered innocent laughs, complemented by a philosophical reflection on the human condition.

Figure 1

RHINOS IN AMERICA. A COMMERCIAL ZOO-STORY

One year later, in January 1961, the American premiere of the Rhinoceros play took place in the stylishly fashionable house of the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. Joseph Anthony was the director, the set and lighting were designed by the producer Leo Kerz, and the costumes were the work of Michael Travis. The cast featured Zero Mostel, Elli Wallach and Anne Jackson, who were described in the local newspapers, after the first show, as “Ionesco’s comedy stars” (Taubman 3). It was not risk-free for the producer to choose this play – so different from the traditional, commercial recipe of successful Broadway productions. However, Leo Kerz – a scene designer from the Berlin studios, and a disciple of Erwin Piscator – was familiar enough with the productions of various European theatres to effectively bet his money on the avant-garde. He proudly announced his disinterest in the critical voices and his reluctance to use the press reviews to promote the show – but he brought on stage outstanding actors and achieved a fulminating success. Critics, like the New York World Telegram’s Frank Aston, ceremoniously proclaimed: “Now if everybody will kindly stand back, I’m going to lie down in this space and throw a fit of joy over Ionesco`s Rhinoceros. (…) Right now I’m in a mood to call Rhinoceros the play of the year.” (4)

During the first act, the director chose to stay true to Ionesco’s intention of expressing anxiety through gags, by presenting a collage of comical moments evocative of a college farce. The Nation’s Harold Clurman called the “Disney style” of the play’s beginning not as much ingenuous as infantile, and believed that the entire first act of the show left the impression of a sketch comedy (4). Yet, as the city was assaulted by rhinoceroses, Anthony’s staging gradually slipped into a flat, relentless realism, in total dissonance with the initial stand-up comedy atmosphere.

The director renounced of the use of stage props in the representation of rhinoceroses. No animal symbol was shown on stage, just a strange, contagious frenzy, with a sitcom flavor, engulfing the performers and audience alike. Jean/John’s metamorphosis (enacted by the famous comedian Zero Mostel), taking place right before the eyes of the audience, was purely physical and required an unusual bodily engagement, because of the use of overstated physiological reactions, in the vein of  silent movies’ technique (Figure 2 ). Throughout the play, the animals’ contagious bestiality was evoked only via corporeal details such as contortions, voice changes, mimicry, and gestures. After the initial comic effects, the performance gradually slipped into a frightening ceremonial ritual. Press reviews unanimously highlighted the sheer physicality as a primary aid in bringing the transformation onto stage. Robert Brustein praised “a great dancer’s control of movement, a great actor’s control of voice, a great mime’s control of facial expressions” (8). Critics acknowledged Zero Mostel’s outstanding performance: his “brilliant resourcefulness to make the change seem inevitable, side-splitting and terrifying” (Taubman 11), his “penchant for Rabelaisian antics of inexhaustible comic verve and inventiveness [that made] the conversion of his bonehead bourgeois into a roaring pachyderm seem masterfully easy, despite the perspiration” (Clurman 85), and his growth “from a rotund dilettante, all buttoned and slicked in the mold of fashion and the glass of form, into the ugly, snorting hulk of rhinoceros. [That made you think] you’re at the zoo.” (Kelly 12)

Figure 2

In Mostel’s performance the rhinoceros became a totem, it took on a sacred aura produced by the actor and launched a proliferation of many meanings. In the beginning of the third act, when Bérenger is anxiously waiting for his own metamorphosis, the audience witnessed a permanently delayed ritual. With this role Mostel carved his name in the history of modern theatre as “the great clown [who] refused to wear a mask” (Lamont 144), while the show represented a milestone in the process of resignifying corporeality and dissolving the traditional hierarchy of theatrical discourse.

As John McCarten observed in the New Yorker (9), the 1961 American production completely abandoned the verbatim representation of the bestiary imagined by Ionesco. The cast included fourteen actors and no rhinoceros; however, one’s feeling of being as close as possible to “the nearest thing to a rhino you’ve seen outside the Bronx Zoo” was so vivid that some critics triggered a warning: “Don’t look now, but those creatures throwing up dust and trumpeting primitively may be rhinoceroses debouching from Longacre Theatre. Or better still, look and listen, for they are comic and they are serious, too.” (Taubman 3)

The dynamic polymorphism of this type of scenic choreography binds the viewer to a visceral representation of the animal nature. Constantly paired with sitcom-like comedy John’s transformation is devoid of both psychologization and symbolization. The rhinoceros is a huge live body in compulsive movement. The joint use of these techniques often freezes the viewers’ laughter.

Leaving aside the symbolic props, as well as a series of stage clichés, Joseph Anthony had to create a ferocious pachyderm through distorted and dynamic signs, with almost photographic realism. The audience closely observed every detail of Bérenger’s dehumanization, his atavistic descent from comfortable and conformist mannerism into the unpredictable ferocity of the animal, from a well-intentioned bourgeois disciplined by ready-made judgments into a wild beast. The whole scene was transformed under the impact of his first metamorphosis. In the end, the allegorical meaning of animalization was hardly recoverable: the two flashes, man and beast – Wallach, “the last timid human”, void of any trace of the heroism the play writer invested into his character, and Mostel, with his “Gargantuan baby face” (Clurman 85) – narrowed down this duality to a single trait and trimmed the play’s significance to a primary level.

Although Kerz chose to broadly keep the scenery as specified by the playwright, the intention for localization was transparent. A metatextual hint was displayed even in the background of the café setting opening the first act – the running show poster with the cast and the theatre name reminded the audience that this is Broadway, and therefore called attention to the interchangeability of the actor-spectator pair. The delicate scenery and the background city rumor were meant to produce a continuous transfer between the street and the stage. The American audience could experience the feeling of a happening. Critic John McClain gave a sample of the perplexed audience reactions by quoting a conversation he overheard from a couple leaving the theatre after the play’s opening night:

“What did you think of it, Bertha?” – He said to the woman who was obviously his wife.

“I thought it was absolutely entrancing, she said. Did you like it?”

“Yes,” the man said. “Yes, I did. But it sort of shook me up. Do you think I really look like a rhinoceros at times?” (McClain 9)

Anthony’s staging balanced on the borderline between laughter and horror, never slipping past that boundary. After a record-high number of two hundred and forty performances, the production has been recorded in history as “a big evening in the theatre” (McClain 9), “an intelligent adventure in bizarre play going” (Watts 6), “a joyous revelation” (Taubman 3). The show brought Mostel his first Tony Award for best theatrical performance in a leading role, and unanimous recognition from both viewers and critics, while Joseph Anthony got nominated for best director of a play.

Nevertheless, for the New York audience of the Sixties, Rhinoceros remained a zoo-story, built on the popular theme of the planet confronting an apocalyptic cataclysm (in this case, rhinocerization). The one survivor of the universal transformation, Bérenger, ends up praising humanity, while watching this new world and its fauna in horror and stupefaction. Ionesco argued that Anthony’s staging was shifting the political significance of the play towards a focus onto a critique of American conformism.

A few years later, in 1974, the play was used for a new television production. In this program the director, Tom O’Horgan, cast the same Zero Mostel for the role of Jean; he broadly kept the scenic elements for interiors from Kerz’s work, but added several details with the intention to anchor the play in the current social reality’s political environment. It was the year of Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. In Jean/John’s room, the symbolic space of rhinocerization, filled with many objects reminding of the first production, a wall bed folded down accidentally to reveal the presidential portrait. In the most intense moments of his grotesque metamorphosis, Jean suddenly seemed to discover the statesman’s portrait as if for the first time; he contemplated it with obsequious flattery and kissed it, his body relaxing as his transformation was finally completed. The animalistic choreography of Jean’s non-human movements was accompanied by the characteristic sound of a rolling camera resonating in the background. Yet the noise, this time, was not so much an indication of metatextual significance, but instead alluded to the paranoid theme of social subjects’ constant surveillance by hidden eyes – with a direct reference to the political turmoil and the aura of suspicion provoked by the Watergate scandal. Ionesco’s play became the explicit pretext for the satirical representation of national politics and an instrument of ideology-criticism. Jean is of course a partisan of the right, here associated with Nixon’s politics, and Bérenger a solitary defender of the humanist values. The play’s original political message had been transformed, yet the rhinoceroses could always act as fleshly embodiments of obsessions and traumas of the particular cultural spaces they were presented in, at various moments of postwar history.

In January 1962 in Toronto, Rhinoceros’ premiere took place in an ultramodern theatre, an old casino transformed into an artistic locale. The play was directed by Harvey Hart, while the set design was the responsibility of Trevor Williams. The production raised critical attention because of its innovative use and resignification of space that could satisfy the challenging topographical requirements of a neo avant-garde play that had already been adopted by the big theatre companies and had been greeted as “an international hit”. The Civic Square Theatre offered new possibilities in scenery, good acoustics, and the design of the house provided “an excellent relationship between actor and audience”. As The Telegram’s Ronald Evans put it:

Employing an array of ingenious and obviously inexpensive flats, screens, grills, sliding risers and suspending cut-outs, all cunningly arranged and lighted, Mr. Williams has supplied the most truly creative settings seen in Toronto this year (and that includes the touring Broadway shows). (3)

For the cast the director chose only television stars – Canadian actors who were very popular for their roles in high rated series. Bérenger’s character was portrayed by Jeremy Willkin, known at that time for performing the various voices in Thunderbirds, a highly prominent production of Gerry Anderson’s in the sixties that was using the Supermarionation technique. Starring as Jean in the play, Dino Narizzano was famous for his role in the American soap opera Search for Tomorrow, a serial drama which had been aired daily on CBS since 1951. For the metamorphosis scene Narizzano employed odd sound effects, reusing a series of acoustic ranges characteristic of animated films. Narizzano was praised for his “delightful transformation scene” in which he “snorts and bellows and rushes about in a manner which you are convinced represents advanced rhinocerism” (Whittaker 4)

The show abounded in elements of theatricality, displaying, for instance, fragile characters in the vein of the “English Jakobean style of farce” (Cohen 32). Browsing for scenery details in the newspapers of that time, one can recreate the image of a noisy, choreographic show, with many overemphasized moments, but also rich in political allusions:

Director Harvey Hart succeeds in drawing out all the legitimate humor (and, perhaps, a bit more, particularly when he asks his hero to toss soliloquies straight at the audience for laughs in the now-fashionable Brecht-Littlewood mode). But he also evokes a major part of the authentic horror that London and New York missed. (…) In the final scene, when the rhinoceroses slowly draw into a menacing ring around the beleaguered Bérenger, they wind up extending their horn-arms in fascist salute. (Evans 3)

Similar to the New York production, the metamorphoses were not supported by props or technical effects. The director chose a naturalistic mode of representing rhinocerization. The vocal contortions of the actor-rhinoceroses outbid the comical effects. These amplified accents were often horrifying. Most characters, schematically displayed in the first act, were becoming truly alive only at the moment of their dehumanization. On the Toronto stage, the animals looked like extraterrestrial beings; the show was described as an extravagance, a very bizarre and disturbing production that dealt with twentieth century subjects, including mass hysteria, conformism, and alienation from an industrialized world.

RHINOS IN THE COMMUNIST BLOC. POLITICAL ALLEGORIES

Throughout the Sixties Rhinoceros was adapted to stage by numerous theatre companies in Europe. Many of these shows became emblematic as they triggered a paradigm change in the use of theatrical language, gradually evolving towards what Hans-Thies Lehmann called the postdramatic turn (dissolution of narrativity, de-hierarchization of theatrical apparatuses, imbrication of semiotic levels, etc.). The productions realized within the Eastern Bloc – in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia or Romania – displayed important differences in the expression of the play’s socio-political message, as well as in the aesthetic register they employed. Every such staging was highly symbolic and conveyed subtextual political messages.

In Ionesco’s Imperatives. The Politics of Culture, Rosette C. Lamont argues that the play’s profound meaning resides in “the opposition between two fundamental attitudes, the Eastern and the Western. They are embodied in two characters, Jean and Bérenger” (140). Jean is the prototype of the responsible Western citizen, predominated by a superiority complex rooted in his orderly, balanced lifestyle, whereas, by contrast, Bérenger represents the rejected deviant incapable of adapting to the social sphere. Lamont further comments that, by enacting this duality, the play is aimed to demystify the Western European cult of Descartes’ rationalism, which “can serve as blinders at a time of murderous violence” (145). For Ionesco, abstract thinking based on sophisticated mind games (such as the Logician’s) constituted a paradoxical step towards dehumanization, because of its lack of affective relationality. The animal, embodied irrationality unbound, as the most dangerous epidemic of the twentieth century, could only be confronted by a sensitive, relentless hypochondriac like Bérenger.

This approach to Ionesco’s play (i.e. as a meditation on “the politics of culture,” to use Lamont’s phrase) is akin to several of the productions brought to the stage behind the Iron Curtain. Probably the most spectacular one was a play realized during the winter of 1961 in Poland, at the Stary Theatre in Krakow – directed by Piotr Pawlowski, with set design by Tadeusz Kantor. The Polish production was a neo-surrealist, intense, and abysmal experiment. The staging belonged to a long history of scenic experiments developed by Kantor on the subject of death, associated with the affective memory of identity. The scenery displayed the signs of the atrocities of the Second World War and the profound despair permeating the historical period traumatized by the Holocaust. The umbrella used as a stage prop was both a heritage from the surrealist tradition and an explicit symbol of the new world with new borders; the characters’ skeletal physical appearance signified imminent death, the haunting specters of the Holocaust, while the stage was stuffed with dysfunctional devices recovered from war times. Kantor’s minimalistic scenery and costume designs allegorized the subject of the play in a dense network of signs, as the powerful human-to-animal transformation scenes illustrate (see Fig. 2). The shocking materiality of the characters, their emaciated, dehumanized silhouettes on the stage, held both referential and intertextual implications: a whole gallery of historical, theatrical, or even cartoon figures seemed to turn their back to the audience and frantically head off into rhinocerization (Fig. 3). The identities called into beings throughout this collective metamorphosis were symbolically denuded of social traits and cemented into a repetitive history. Already interested in choreographing a group as a cohesive ‘sign’ on the stage, Kantor pictured his characters aligned in a row and looking upwards as if they were spellbound – epitomizing the idea of blind and irrational aiming for unlimited powers. The inevitable, degenerative regression into bestiality was represented by the rhinoceros horn’s ominous levitation above, then descent towards the stage. For the duration of the entire performance the background setting remained unchanged: via this scenic sign, the general metamorphosis was freeze-framed for the audience under the aegis of the hypnotic effects of ideological fetishism and political fanaticism.

Figure 3

The first Romanian production was made only in 1964, at the Comedy Theatre in Bucharest, under the direction of Lucian Giurchescu and with the set designed by Dan Nemțeanu. It was the first Ionesco play staged by a Romanian company, and hence the theatricalization symbolically represented the playwright’s recovery for the local cultural space, after the censorship imposed on his writings following his definitive exile into France. The iconic couple of characters of Jean and Bérenger was portrayed by two young actors raised in the Romanian theatre school, Ion Lucian and Radu Beligan.

The “reactionary” (i. e. politically subversive) message of the production, as well as the whispered rumors surrounding it, marked a significant moment in the history of the Romanian theatre under the communist dictatorship: together with a few other experimental productions of the decade, Rhinoceros could showcase how daring artists and intellectuals could distance themselves from the official ideology of the regime. This disobedient attitude was later commonly referred to as “resistance through culture”.

Recovering the authentic reception and impact of this production is a difficult scholarly enterprise. The archive of the Comedy Theatre only preserved a few photos, whereas the local critics entirely misread the piece as a staging governed by antibourgeois communist propaganda, missing both the playwright’s and the director’s intentions. Following the production’s tour to Paris, in 1965, some reviews did justice to the play by acknowledging the sensitivity of the directorial intentions. Ionesco himself praised enthusiastically the Romanian performance of Rhinoceros, admitting in a confessional tone:

…I was impressed because it is perfectly reconstructing the medium which favored the triumph of the gregarious way of living, stupidity and brutality, because it unveils the painful phenomenon of rhinocerism spreading… The Romanian performers have created a show which is considerably different than the others, without diverting any moment from the theme of my play. (1965, 6)

Giurchescu’s production emphasized the images of fear, with all their phenomenological and affective implications, deeply felt in Romania under the communist regime’s dictatorship. The audience was confronted with precisely-detailed and realistic scenery, “more truthful than life itself” (Léon 3), that depicted the dark atmosphere of an East European city, a kind of “little Paris”. French theatre critics like J. Lemarchand or J. Gautier were welcoming the absence of stage props in representations of animal nature, pointing out the terrifying effect the beasts’ delirium was creating by remaining concealed outside of the stage space. They felt grateful because Giurchescu, unlike Barrault, “didn’t make rhinoceros parts, pointed horns, or muzzles to appear in every corner of the scene” (Lemarchand 3). They reported excitedly: “The proof is much more impressive this way: you can hear the monster, you can feel it everywhere, but you never get to see it, and this strikes you more.”(Gautier 8)

By the elimination of the animals from the stage, the rhinoceroses are turned into a menacing absent presence, manifesting itself only through fear. As this volatile fear permeates the performance space, the beasts progressively take the shape of a blind, invisible power. The scenic design brought to life by Dan Nemțeanu made use of the claustrophobic imagery of the prison world – “the squeezing ceiling, combined with the moral encircling by rhinoceroses, the long hallway fragmented by the doors of the monotonous flats – in the style of train compartments, the cage-like room, all these are defining elements” (Nadin 7) – combined with the symbolical imagery of any totalitarian despotic system.

The sound effects were the only technical means to suggest the rhinoceroses’ materialization in the performative space. As critic Nadin observed “phase by phase, within the stereophonic gallop, one could differentiate cadences, an ordering was taking place, a military rhythmization, and finally, during the Bérenger-Daisy dialogue, the resonant image of those who are marching, automated in their gestures, steps, thoughts, desires.” (7) The Romanian reviewers connected this image of a herd-like mob marching to the image of the Iron Guard, the Romanian far-right political movement of the 1930s-40s, that Ionesco himself criticized openly more than once, for instance in his letters from Paris, published in 1946 in Viața românească magazine. However, the Romanian audience of the 1960s had a closer and more vivid representation of a totalitarian system: the communist society they experienced every day.

Despite the apparent similarities with Western productions (in terms of realistic representation), the Romanian staging plunged into a denser and gloomier atmosphere. Similar to the Broadway production, Jean’s metamorphosis took place in front of the public, by using only corporeal effects. However, while Mostel overemphasized comic effects, Ion Lucian’s performance went deeper into psychologizing the transformation. The critics agreed that the emphasis on his gaze and gestures had a hallucinatory effect. The rhinoceros, a body-in-becoming, seemed more of a state of mind, filled with omnipresent tension. It expressed the emotional turmoil of the individual trapped in the vast propaganda mechanism, both victim and executioner in a closed society. The audience’s bitter laughter was the sign of the recognition of this inevitable extra-diegetic complicity, reminding of rhinocerization beyond the stage.

Figure 4

The uncertain feel of anxiety predominating the show was enhanced by Radu Beligan’s portrayal of Bérenger, stuck in the role of the latent rhinoceros, always frightened that he might undergo the same transformation. As the few remaining photos attest, the performance of his character was built on a series of negations, postponements, and contortions, permanently avoiding the frontal, face-to-face encounter with the audience, i.e. with his own conscience. The accidental survival of his humanity could only be explained as a baffling flaw in the “big fear mechanism” designed by Giurchescu. As we know today from the director and actors’ testimonies, this staging was meant to be as a (more or less) covert act of opposition to the communist regime.

A retrospective view at press reviews of the period finds them tragicomic. The mystification of literary works for propaganda purposes had been a popular practice of communist state power. A reviewer engaged in a fictitious dialogue with the main character, Bérenger, so as to convince him to get rid of the apoliticism of his solitary fight and join the real communal class struggle against the corrupted capitalism. Stepping aside and refraining from taking immediate action side by side with the “other rifles” of the masses would be just another condemnable manifestation of the bourgeoisie’s elitism and social disinterest, Vladimir Streinu opined :

Isn’t apoliticism, by showing indifference in front of the catastrophe, just another way for the bourgeois society to favor the rhinocerism? What else is the rifle you delay to take in hand than a political weapon? Would it have diminished you, or counterfeited your identity, the opportune presence of other rifles? (Sreinu 8)

Such commentaries, in line with the official communist ideology, falsified the true intentions of the works of art in question. Yet, they offered the alibi necessary for the work of art to survive and endure in the toxic cultural environment of the times, to avoid the castrating interventions of censorship. In a tacit agreement between artists, managers, producers, and (some of the) critics, the plays, which delivered a subtextual political message to the audience, became unofficial, alternative cultural landmarks under the communist regimes. However, until the political changes of 1989, their restaging by any theatrical company remained impossible. Such was the case of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in socialist Romania.

The various theatrical productions throughout the world – with each new interpretation anchored in the local social-political context, symbolically rooted in the recent historiographic background particular to each country – Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco allows us to enter a vivid intercultural dialogue that traces the evolution of performance arts into the post-dramatic theatrical expression characteristic of late twentieth and early twenty-first century modes of artistic expressions, intricately intertwining the challenging of representational confines with the questioning of the limits of humanity.

WORKS CITED

Anonymous. 1965. “Ionesco et le fantastique.” Journal de Genève. May 2.

Aston, Frank. 1961. “Ionesco’s Rhinoceros Cavorts at the Longacre.” The New York World Telegram. January 10: 4.

Bloom, Harold ed. 2003. Eugène Ionesco. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 106-137.

Brustein, Robert. 1961. “Untitled.” The New Republic. January 10: 8.

Clurman, Harold. 1961. “Theatre.” The Nation. January 28: 85

Cohen, Nathan. 1962. “The Civic Square.” Toronto Daily Star. January 3;32

Evans, Roland.1962. “Rhinoceros Gets an Excellent Production.” The Telegram, January 3:.3

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance. New York: Routledge : 101-107

Gautier, J. Jacques. 1965. ”Rhinocéros d’Ionesco par la Comédie de Bucarest.” Le Figaro. May 22-23: 6.

Ionesco, Eugène. 1971. Present Past Past Present. New York: Grove Press: 116-117.

Ionesco, Eugène. 1965. “Untitled.” Contemporanul. June 4: 6.

Kevin Kelly. 1961. “Rhinoceroses Roar Through Ionesco’s Uproarious Play”. The Boston Sunday Globe. February 19: 12.

Lamont, Rosette. 1996. Ionesco’s Imperatives. The Politics of Culture. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press: 123-148.

Léon, Georges. 1965. “Untitled.” L’Humanité. May 22: 3.

Lemarchand, Jacques. 1965. “Rhinocéros au Théâtres de Nation.” Le Figaro Littéraire. May 27: 3.

McCarten, John. 1961. “Charging Through Bogs.” The New Yorker. January 10: 9.

McClain, John. 1961. “It Wasn’t Dull!” The New York Journal-American. January 15: 9.

Mnouchkine, Ariane. 1985. Le masque. Du rire au théâtre. Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Arts du Spectacle. Paris: CNRS Editions.

Nadin, Mihai. 1964. ”Rinocerii.” Tribuna. April 30: 7.

Streinu, Vladimir. 1964. “Rinocerita sau dilema individualității.” Gazeta literară. April 19: 8.

Taubman, Howard. 1961. “Against the Herd.” The New York Times. January 10: 11.

Taubman, Howard. 1961. “Theatre. Rhinoceros.” The New York Times. January 22: 3.

Watts, Richard Jr. 1961. “Man Who Wouldn’t Be a Rhinoceros.”  The Post. January 10.

Whittaker, Herbert. 1962. “The Old Casino Outshines Production of Rhinoceros”.  The Globe and Mail. January 3: 4.

List of Figures

Figure 1. L’Odéon Théâtre de France, Paris, 1960; director: Jean-Louis Barrault, set designer: Jacques Noël, photo: E.B. Weill, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica Collection

Figure 2. Longacre Theatre, New York, 1961; director: Joseph Anthony; set and lightning designer: Leo Kerz; Friedman-Abeles Photograph Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections

Figure 3. Stary Teatr, Krakow, 1961; director: Piotr Pawlowski, set designer: Tadeusz Kantor; photo: Woyciech Plewinski; Stary Theatr Archive

Figure 4. Comedy Theatre, Bucharest, 1964; director: Lucian Giurchescu; set design: Dan Nemțeanu; Comedy Theatre Archive

ANDRÁS BERNÁTH

THE CHALLENGE OF THE OLD MOLE:

A KEY PROBLEM IN SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET AND ITS RECEPTION

There are no animals in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, merely brief references to some, which are easy to miss in a play that is famous for its unique complexity. However, a common feature of these animals is that they tend to function not only as rhetorical figures to add color and heighten Shakespeare’s uniquely powerful dramatic poetry; these references carry important connotations in their context. While each has its own significance, they tend to have a common point: to highlight the difficulties of interpretation; the outmost need as well as the failure to make certain distinctions. In this essay, after briefly highlighting some other animals, I will discuss the significance of the mole in the play and its reception. The “olde Mole”, as Hamlet refers to the Ghost in the Cellarage Scene (859; 1.5.162),[31] presents a major challenge to the protagonist as well as to anyone approaching the figure or the play as a whole. The mole highlights and elaborates the spiritual issues of the play, which concern not merely the fate of the late King Hamlet. The Prince believes that the Ghost, and his own response to its challenge, can have an impact on his fate too; therefore he makes major efforts to properly interpret this mysterious character and its message. Because of Hamlet’s prominent role, the fate of the other characters also depends on his choice of interpretation and ensuing actions. Moreover, the interpretation of the Ghost also determines that of the play, as it appears in an analysis of the reception, the play’s afterlife.

As I will demonstrate, the mole signifies two important points. First, it highlights the location and hence the origin of the Ghost. The animal living and moving under the ground calls attention to the place under the stage, which represented Hell in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Contemporary religious authorities including King James warned their readers about the dangers of evil spirits or demons. Second, the mole represents blindness; beyond physical blindness, also spiritual, as the bestiaries explain. This blindness is crucial not only with regards the mole, but the whole play and its reception. As I will also demonstrate, the spiritual complexity of Hamlet’s challenge is overlooked in the modern reception. To begin with, most commentators fail to see any difference between the Ghost and Hamlet’s deceased father. This can be noted in the commentary of Hegel, Marx, and Derrida as well as in Shakespeare criticism from Hanmer to Greenblatt, Belsey and Holderness. Therefore, in this essay I discuss not only the mole, as it appears in the play, together with its spiritual and religious connotations, but also reflect on the reception, including a key problem of the modern editions. By focusing on a neglected animal allegory, the aim is to show how the meaning of the Ghost is downplayed by modern interpretations of Shakespeare, and hence restore the play’s original complexity.

HAMLET’S CHALLENGE

Before discussing the challenge the mole presents to Hamlet, let us see some other references to animals in the play, all suggested by the protagonist himself. In the Play or Mousetrap Scene (3.2), in the turmoil after the abruptly stopped play-within-the play, the exhilarated Hamlet teases the perplexed Polonius.

Ham. Do you see yonder clowd that's almost in shape of a Camel?

Pol. By'th masse and tis, like a Camell indeed.

Ham. Mee thinks it is like a Wezell.

Pol. It is backt like a Wezell.

Ham. Or like a Whale.

Pol. Very like a Whale.            (2247-53; 3.2.77-83)

This exchange between the Prince and the King’s counsellor may seem merely as a comic relief after the tension of the playlet; a funny episode before the ensuing bloody actions, in particular before Hamlet’s imminent killing of Polonius. The three animals mentioned: the camel, the weasel and the whale function primarily as a series of similees to underscore and describe the cloud hanging over the characters and Denmark. The cloud itself thus also functions as a metaphor on a rhetorical level, even though clouds were very real over the open Globe theatre in Shakespeare’s London, as they are today, presenting a common threat to the actual performances too. But these are not only rhetorical figures to heighten the poetic language and enhance the dramatic tension; nor does Hamlet’s joke serve merely as a tool to connect the real world of the spectators to the fictitious world of the stage. Hamlet’s curious conduct and Polonius’s responses can be analyzed on various levels, for instance, also in terms of power relationships. Péter Dávidházi (esp. 149-151) calls attention to the fact that beyond the verbal game, there is also a play of power here, which displays the oppressive regime that brutally enforces meanings on the subjects. This practice can be noted not only in Hamlet’s Denmark but also in Shakespeare’s England or in modern totalitarian systems, and is all too familiar to anyone who had to experience it. Drawing on Dávidházi, András Kiséry also emphasizes that Hamlet himself exploits his position of power by mocking the submissive Polonius, who is in a subordinate position that hardly allows him to disagree with the Prince. As Kiséry puts it, “Hamlet is taking cruel, bratty pleasure in his ability to command attention and agreement” (162).

Politics does play an important role in Hamlet, but on an epistemological or semiotic level, the main point of this brief dialogue is that the different animals used to describe the shape of the cloud can remind us of the limits of interpretation. Citing this passage, Umberto Eco does not offer an interpretation of Hamlet, but illustrates a general idea of interpretation in which “it is assumed that texts can be interpreted in infinite ways” (24). However, the shape of a cloud is indeed very difficult to grasp and describe, and can certainly be compared to various animals. For this reason, this exchange perfectly illustrates the fact that an object observed and described can pose problems of interpretation. This can also apply to other elements of the play, including “Th'obseru'd of all obseruers” (1810; 3.1.154), that is, to Hamlet himself. In the dramatic context, this dialogue follows Hamlet’s similar treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, mocking their attempt of spying on him, trying to decipher his intentions (Dávidházi 144-5). But this can also apply to the significance of the playlet just seen and abandoned. Hamlet, of course, is quite confident that the play he put on is a success, at least for him. Even though the “King like not the Comedie” (l. 3.1.1542165; 3.2.293), the Prince is convinced that based on the King’s observed reaction, he is now entitled to embark on his revenge. This, however, is also arguable, as we shall see below. Beyond the immediate context, the difficulties of interpretation concern the whole play, and they are related to the mole too; which in turn is also related to the play-within-the-play.

When Hamlet first hears of the arrival of the players to Elsinore, he refers to another animal; this time to a bird, in a comment on his strange conduct. “I am but mad North North west; when the wind is Southerly, I knowe a Hauke, from a hand saw (1426; 2.2.379). Despite the obvious alliteration, telling a hawk from a hand saw is perhaps not particularly difficult; nevertheless, the point Hamlet makes to his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is that he is not quite mad. In certain cases, he is able to make proper distinctions and hence sound judgements. The reference to the hawk is thus used to highlight his sanity in his assumed madness or “Anticke disposition” (868; 1.5.172); a role or mask he decides to put on after his encounter with the Ghost. This pretense makes the interpretation of Hamlet’s character and conduct even more difficult, not only for the other characters but also for the reception. It is not always clear whether or not, or to what extent, Hamlet feigns madness in a given situation. But can Hamlet indeed make sound judgements, at least under the guise of his madness? Can he always make the necessary distinctions? Why is this issue important, and how is it related to the mole? And, considering Hamlet’s fondness of animals to highlight some important points, why does he refer to the Ghost as a mole?

When Hamlet meets the Ghost, he is absolutely certain that “it is an honest Ghost” (831; 1.5.138); his reference to Saint Patrick (829; 1.5.136) suggests that he also believes the spirit’s allusions to Purgatory as the source of its origin, despite the fact that the call on vengeance contradicts the notion of purgation and Christian ethics in general. Hamlet thus believes that the Ghost is identical to his late father, who is temporarily released from his (also only temporary) suffering to visit his son. The Prince calls the Ghost “Hamlet,/ King, father, royall Dane” (629-30; 1.4.44-5), even before it speaks. But if the Ghost is indeed Hamlet’s beloved and revered father, who deceased recently and has just described his horrible torments, why does the Prince call him a mole? “Well sayd olde Mole, can'st worke it'h earth so fast” (859; 1.5.162), Hamlet asks, highlighting the Ghost’s location and swift movement not only to the likewise amazed Horatio and the sentinels, but also to the audience and the readers. Again, the reference to the mole may seem purely a metaphor: the Ghost moves under the stage, and this evokes the parallel of the mole, the animal living and moving in the earth, under the ground. However, as in the other cases, the reference to the animal has a special significance; it presents a particular problem of interpretation and a unique challenge to Hamlet and the reception.

The primary challenge the mole presents is that it disturbs the oath of secrecy that Hamlet makes his friends swear. The Ghost’s repeated calls to swear, echoing Hamlet’s own request, do not please and confirm the Prince, but strangely disturb and actually annoy him. Therefore he decides to move away from the Ghost, so that it cannot disturb the oath from below. This move or actual escape from the Ghost is repeated several times, as the Ghost uncannily cries “Sweare” four times (859; 1.5.162 to 878; 1.5.181). Before the first cry, there is a stage direction about the Ghost’s location, which Hamlet also underscores.

Ghost cries vnder the Stage.

Ghost. Sweare.

Ham. Ha, ha, boy, say'st thou so, art thou there trupenny ?

Come on, you heare this fellowe in the Sellerige,

(845-847; 1.5.149-51)

The cellarage, under the stage, signified Hell in the vertical structure of the first Globe in its religious framework. This point is widely known by Shakespeare critics, but its significance is rarely emphasized. According to Margreta de Grazia, in her seminal essay on the “Old Mole”, “its demonic presence underground, in the theatrical pit representing the underworld, threatens to countervail, it seems, the oath taken above the ground on the holy cross of the sword” (251). In a footnote, de Grazia also refers to Harold Jenkins and his Arden edition of Hamlet “on the association of the trapdoor with the domain of devils” (ibid.). De Grazia thus refers to the theatrical Hell merely as “the underworld,” but she does note the “domain of devils” and suggests the “demonic presence” of the Ghost. Nevertheless, de Grazia does not actually identify the Ghost as a demon or a devil, but refers to the character as “the spirit of his [i.e. Hamlet’s] father”. From Hamlet’s challenge, this will take us to the challenges of criticism and also to the responsibility of editors, which will be further discussed below.

In any case, Hamlet, realizing the Ghost’s location, suddenly changes his hitherto solemn, reverent tone, and addresses the character jocularly as a boy and a truepenny, also mocking it as this fellow. But if the Ghost is indeed the spirit of his father, whom Hamlet is mourning, why does he mock him and call him by such impertinent or even insulting names? Why is Hamlet laughing at the Ghost, soon after it has so vividly described not only the murder but also the horrible suffering it involves? Here lies the real challenge of interpretation concerning the mole, which is often ignored in the modern reception. On hearing the Ghost’s first cry from below, the flabbergasted Hamlet may instantly perceive that it may not be the spirit of his father; it may be a devil that merely pretends to be the late King Hamlet, and the protagonist addresses it accordingly. This can explain Hamlet’s scornful set of phrases hurled at the character under the stage. “This fellowe” can refer to the stage devil, which was a comic role in the contemporary theatre; or it might also refer to the fellow actor of Burbage, Shakespeare himself, who is said to have played the role of the Ghost in the first Globe, thus highlighting the issue of acting, role play and pretence. It is needless to speculate whether or not this anecdote about Shakespeare is true; the main point is that Hamlet’s question is addressed not only to the guards. In the architecture of the Globe, which provides an intimate interaction with the audience particularly in the daylight performances, the actor playing Hamlet reminds everyone not only about the location of the Ghost, but also about the cunning involved. The acting can support and further underscore this point, but the reader is also adequately informed by the stage direction and the dialogue, if he is familiar with the stage conventions.

After the Ghost’s second cry, Hamlet observes: “Hic, & vbique, then weele shift our ground” (853; 1.5.156). The only Latin words of the play are uttered here: hic et ubique, that is, here and everywhere; only God and the Devil were supposed to be capable of being omnipresent, and Latin was the language used to address and dispel demons. As John Dover Wilson puts it, Hamlet “addresses the Ghost in the ‘cellarage’ as if it were a devil, a ‘familiar’ with whom he has just been holding converse.”[…] “Marcellus to his dying day will believe that he has sworn an oath thrice in the hearing of a powerful fiend” (78-82). Interestingly, however, Dover Wilson claims that the Ghost merely pretends to be a devil; we are witnessing here merely an innocent game between father and son. This, however, is very doubtful and arguable. As for the “Olde Mole”, and its erratic earthly movements, why on earth should a pious, purgatorial spirit behave like a devil, apparently confusing not only the guards but also Hamlet, his son? The alternative option, a devil pretending to be a good, purgatorial spirit in order to deceive and tempt Hamlet to his revenge, is much more plausible. Hamlet himself is deeply concerned about this, and later expresses the same doubts in a soliloquy.

The spirit that I haue seene

May be a deale , and the deale hath power

T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,

Out of my weakenes, and my melancholy,

As he is very potent with such spirits,

Abuses me to damne me.

(1638-43; 2.2.598-603)

Hamlet fears that the spirit may be a devil abusing him in a way that would involve his downfall, not only in physical terms, but also in spiritual. The Prince is afraid that his own melancholy spirit is abused by an evil spirit; that is, by the Ghost, which may not be the ghost of his father, but a disguised devil. At the end of the long Hecuba-monologue, which is often cut in the reception, Hamlet reminds the audience and the readers of what is at stake, displaying his familiarity with contemporary ghost lore and demonology.

The Prince puts on a play to “catch the conscience of the King” (1645; 2.2.605), hoping that the play representing a murder can serve not only as a trap for the King, but could also suffice as a test of the Ghost. Dover Wilson believes that the play-within-the-play and the King’s reaction to it provide adequate evidence to prove the honesty of the Ghost, and hence also its identity. Eleanor Prosser, on the other hand, argues that the King’s guilt itself does not prove that the Ghost is trustworthy. In a book-length study, Prosser (1971) provides ample evidence that in the Christian context of the play, the Ghost that demands vengeance can only be a devil, and it was widely known in the age that the devil or evil spirits in general are capable of subtle tricks. Indeed, as Shakespeare himself reminds us in Macbeth,

But 'tis strange:

And oftentimes, to winne vs to our harme,

The Instruments of Darknesse tell vs Truths,

Winne vs with honest Trifles, to betray's

In deepest consequence.

(1.2.232-6)

As Banquo reminds Macbeth, whose intention is also to kill the King, the Instruments of Darkness can tell us truths in order to betray or deceive us; this applies not only to witches, but also to evil spirits or demons, as we shall further see below. Truth in one respect does not necessarily involve truth in another; equivocation was a hot topic in the age that very much concerned King James too, and is spectacularly explored in Macbeth. Thus, King Claudius’s guilt, on which the Ghost tells the truth, does not actually confirm the Ghost’s whole story; it leaves the issues of identity and origin unsettled. So, is the Ghost indeed the spirit or ghost of Hamlet’s father? Can it be returning from Purgatory, even as it asks for vengeance? Or is it rather an evil spirit, a disguised devil from Hell that deceives and thereby destroys the protagonist and Denmark? What is the actual significance of the old mole? And what is perceived from Hamlet’s challenge in the modern reception?

THE PHILOSOPHERS’ CHALLENGE

The old mole in Hamlet has intrigued some of the most influential modern philosophers, but unlike Hamlet, they see neither the comic nor the potentially evil aspects of the character crying from the cellarage; nor, indeed, any of the ambiguities about its identity. As Margreta de Grazia demonstrates in her highly informative essay, the mole is “featured as a groundbreaking hero in two major nineteenth-century teleological narratives: Hegel’s ideational account of the progress of consciousness and Marx’s materialist account of the advance of Communism” (253). Hegel used the “old mole” as a metaphor for “both Weltgeist and Zeitgeist” (de Grazia 252), the spirit of the world and the spirit of the times. As the de Grazia shows, Hegel, in his conclusion of the History of Philosophy, exhorts the reader to follow the spirit of the times by grasping “the mole that is within [as it] forces its way on into the light of day” (Hegel 553, in de Grazia 251). According to Hegel,

All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal. […] Spirit … is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the ground so fast?) until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun … so that the earth crumbles away.”

(Hegel 546-7, in de Grazia 251-2)

As de Grazia concludes, “Hegel has substituted the spirit of the times for the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Zeitgiest for Vatergeist” (252).

Hegel does refer to the “ghost of his [Hamlet’s] father”, as does de Grazia, when referring to the relevant character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, one might ask, what if Hamlet’s suspicion about the trick of the devil is valid; what if the Ghost in Hamlet is not actually the spirit of the father, but an evil spirit or a devil from Hell? Of course, concerning Hegel, this question is purely academic; unlike Hamlet, Hegel has no doubts whatsoever about the identity of the Ghost. By the early nineteenth century, when Hegel delivered his lectures on the History of Philosophy, there were no such doubts in the reception; it was the heyday of the Age of Romanticism, when not only the Ghost was viewed as an unquestionably positive hero, but also Hamlet, whose “moral perfection” was rather forcefully argued by the Romantic critics, including William Hazlitt (1900, 74). Even so, as Hegel was intrigued by the mole in Hamlet, or, rather, by a certain interpretation of it, it may also be interesting to consider the relevance of a more complex notion of the Ghost, taking into account the related ambiguities, based on the original, early modern significance of the character.

On that ground, Hegel’s ideational account of the progress of consciousness might be ill-founded. If we consider Hamlet’s own dilemmas about the rather ambiguous Ghost or spirit, Hegel’s notions of the spirit of the world and the spirit of the time have quite a questionable literary antecedent. This may sound strange, but so does the very analogy of the mole to search for light. In any case, it may be useful to note that Hegel’s neat analogy of the mole works only if the mole or the Ghost in Hamlet is interpreted positively and literally as the spirit of Hamlet’s father. If the spirit is considered as a comic, possibly fake and evil character, as it is by Hamlet and the sentinels in the Cellarage Scene, potentially deluding and ultimately destroying Hamlet and, through him, many others in Denmark, that might lend rather undesirable connotations either to Hegel’s spirit of the world or the spirit of the times.

Hegel, of course, uses the mole only as an analogy, and de Grazia also points out that the mole as an animal is “virtually blind”, therefore it is “not the first thing that would come to mind when seeking an analogy for the spirit of history” (251). Indeed, moles live underground, and they do not actually seek and strive toward the light, but tend to avoid it. This point applies perhaps even more to Marx, who also refers to the mole of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Marx conceives of “the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer – the Revolution” (Prawer 246, in de Grazia 252). As the Grazia points out, “this mole, too, it might be said, has a spiritual double, one that manifests itself in the famous first line of the Communist Manifesto (1848)” (252): “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism” (Marx in Tucker, 473).

As for the analogy between the Ghost and the communist revolution, de Grazia cites two sentences by Marx that are particularly relevant: “the revolution made progress, forged ahead” (Marx in Tucker, 586; in de Grazia 252); but Marx thought that his century was “still journeying in purgatory” (Marx 121; in de Grazia 252). The reference to Purgatory, of course, is purely metaphorical by the atheist father of Communism, devoid of its original, religious meaning. But the reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet is clear: Marx, as most modern commentators, apparently believes that the Ghost has returned from Purgatory, and the old mole is indeed the ghost or spirit of Hamlet’s father. This strategy of interpretation may be typical of the modern reception: Marx, as many of his followers, uses the religious concepts devoid of their original meanings, but he does use them as he sees them fit to illustrate his own modern concepts and promote his ideas. Nevertheless, one might ask again, what if the Ghost in Hamlet is not actually from Purgatory, as it claims, but from Hell, as Hamlet and the sentinels, who try to bar Hamlet from following it, suspect? What if the Ghost is not the spirit of Hamlet’s father, but a disguised devil, as the Prince fears?

In so far as Marx uses Shakespeare’s work, or rather, again only an interpretation of it, merely as a tool, and the Ghost is borrowed primarily as a popular literary and dramatic character, only as a metaphor, the implications may be inconsequential. However, if we consider the enormous impact of Marx on world history, as his ideas were realised by the communist party leaders who ruled a big part of the world in the 20th century, the implications may be relevant. If Marx based his idea of Communism on a misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s work, the cost of that proved high. “Once the last stronghold of bourgeois power had been overthrown,” de Grazia cites Marx, “Europe would leap from her seat and exultantly exclaim: Well grubbed, old mole” (Marx 121, in de Grazia 253). Again, if the mole or the spirit in Hamlet is not from Purgatory, but from Hell, as Hamlet fears, Marx’s idea of the spirit of Communism also receives rather negative connotations. If Marx’s notion of the nineteenth century, “still journeying through purgatory”, albeit in a metaphorical sense, was followed by the heaven of the twentieth century, in particular after the victory of the Communist Revolution in the Soviet Union; the notion of that heaven is also arguable. As we have seen, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the mole may well be journeying through Hell; but Marx, like Hegel and most modern commentators, view the Ghost literally as the spirit of Hamlet’s father, and fail to see any problem concerning either its origin or identity.

Derrida refers not only to Marx, but also to Shakespeare in his Specters of Marx. In her thorough review, de Grazia asks, “what is Hamlet doing in a work dedicated to affirming Marx’s legacy? Why is Hamlet called in, just after the collapse of communism, to address the question, ‘Whither Marxism?’ – ‘Where is Marxism going?’” (Derrida xiii, in de Grazia 264). Unlike Hegel and Marx, Derrida refers to Shakespeare’s work, particularly to the Ghost, not only briefly; the literary references, or rather, Derrida’s quite detailed reading of the Ghost scenes, permeate his whole study, as if providing a framework and a basis for his philosophical work. In fact, in addition to a reading of Marx, Derrida also offers an analysis and interpretation of Shakespeare; as de Grazia points out, “deconstruction” […] “offers Derrida the key to secrets long held fast within Hamlet” (ibid.). Derrida is confident that, after four centuries, he is the scholar “Marcellus was perhaps anticipating” to address the Ghost (Derrida 12, in de Grazia 264).

Instead of the ontological thinking of earlier scholars, Derrida developed his “hauntology”, “the thinking of specters” (Derrida 10, in de Grazia 264).  As de Grazia explains,

Ghosts throw into doubt the fundamental twos upholding traditional thought. Neither alive nor dead, absent or present, real or unreal, they elide or exceed the binaries that organize learned inquiry. The language of the dilatory scholar at the millennial close, therefore, is not Horatio’s Latin (once used to exorcise ghosts) or any modern vulgate but Derrida’s own deconstruction (now used to maintain them). (de Grazia 264)

The Ghost thus serves as a seemingly perfect example to illustrate Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, and Derrida’s theory in turn seems the perfect tool to explain the mystery of Shakespeare’s work, in which no other scholar had succeeded in the long history of the reception. However, it can be noted, the Ghost is very real within the fictitious world of Hamlet; Horatio’s scepticism soon evaporates after encountering it, and the mysterious character influences not only modern philosophical thinking from Hegel to Derrida, but primarily Hamlet’s own thoughts and actions. And, it must further be noted, there is yet another difference or “fundamental two,” which Derrida fails to see in Shakespeare: the Ghost may be a ghost not only in the modern sense of the word; that is, referring to someone who has died recently (cf. below). In that sense, if we stretch or subvert the notion of time, like Derrida in his deconstruction, it might be argued that the Ghost is “neither alive nor dead”, but is in an intermediary position; perhaps both dead and alive at the same time. In fact, that is how it is usually imagined in the modern reception; as we shall see below, critics often refer to King Hamlet as if he had not died yet. In Shakespeare’s time, Latin was used to mark another important difference: to discern ghosts and to dispel the demons; to see whether or not a ghost is an evil ghost or spirit, that is, a disguised devil, which is very different from the ghost of a man who died recently. And this difference or two cannot really be reconciled or deconstructed: whereas the spirit or soul of a man can be considered both before and after his death, both absent and present, if the ghost is an evil spirit or devil, it cannot be the soul of a man at the same time; it is either the former or the latter.

Though he is very much interested in the Ghost, Derrida is in fact less interested in the mole. As de Grazia observes, Derrida refers to the mole “only first to dismiss it”: “not the figure of the old mole (Well said, old Mole)” (Derrida 93); then to substitute it by “porcupine”, which “exists in a post-molean, post-teleological era” (de Grazia 266). De Grazia also refers to the “questionable shape” (1.4.43) of the Ghost in Hamlet, briefly adding, “maybe his father and the law, maybe not” (ibid.). Nevertheless, none of the three philosophers elaborate on this point and consider Hamlet’s own questions or doubts. In all three studies, the mole or the Ghost in Hamlet is regarded simply as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, returning from Purgatory, and the possibility of the disguised devil from Hell is ignored. All three philosophers discuss the mole quite seriously throughout, failing to perceive the comic elements of the mole crying from the cellarage; the conventional habitat of  stage devils in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Therefore their arguments remain not only partial but also arguable. While they offer very interesting modern or postmodern interpretations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its mysterious, supernatural character, it may be useful to attempt and undertake a more complex and comprehensive reading, taking into account the ambiguities of identity, and to further consider how the Ghost may have been interpreted in Shakespeare’s own time.

THE CRITICS’ CHALLENGE – AND THE EDITORS’ RESPONSIBILITY

But how do Shakespeare critics interpret Hamlet’s challenge? In addition to Dover Wilson and Prosser, who have been mentioned above, what do they note about the Old Mole or the ambiguities of the Ghost? The above philosophers, of course, are not alone in their simplification of the Ghost as Hamlet’s deceased father: this is the general modern view of the character, even in recent criticism offering detailed studies on the subject. In this section, my intention is not so much to offer a review of criticism but to highlight some critical problems and to discuss a related problem of the modern Hamlet editions.

In the first monograph on Hamlet, Thomas Hanmer, offended by “Hamlet’s Speech upon seeing the King at Prayers”, where the Prince expresses his wish to effect the King’s damnation, suggests that Hamlet should have hoped for the King’s “Conversion, before his putting him to Death; for even with his Repentance, there was at least Purgatory for him to pass through, as we find even in a virtuous Prince, the Father of Hamlet” (Hanmer 41). Hanmer (or Stubbes, to whom this book is also attributed) thus already accepts the Ghost as Hamlet’s father, returning from Purgatory. Samuel Johnson has a very similar view: while finding Hamlet’s speech “too horrible to be read”, his only objection about the Ghost is that “the apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was required to take it” (Johnson 193). These interpretations, however, were offered already in the eighteenth century, well after Shakespeare and the Renaissance or early modern period, from which there is no real criticism on the play, merely some brief comments. By the nineteenth century, as has been mentioned above, Hamlet’s character was also regarded as morally perfect; his motivation in the Prayer Scene was dismissed as a mere excuse for his delay (Hazlitt 76). But if we fail to see and acknowledge Hamlet’s doubts on the Ghost, and we accept the character at its face value, together with its command of revenge, no wonder that Hamlet’s delay becomes the only problem of the play.

In the twentieth century, however, critics expressed objections not so much to Shakespeare, but to the partial readings of the Ages of Sensibility and Romanticism, even if partly still drawing on them. Historicist criticism also began, trying to put Shakespeare back into its original context, or at least to examine his work along with some contemporary documents. In such an approach, as I have also mentioned, Eleanor Prosser, citing substantial dramatic and theological texts, offered a monograph arguing for a disguised devil or demon. Prosser’s argument, however, has not been widely accepted; critics, while sometimes noting the Ghost’s complexity and ambiguity, still tend to view it simply as the late King Hamlet, mysteriously returning from the dead and probably from Purgatory.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Stephen Greenblatt devoted an entire monograph to the Ghost and its religious implications. But even in a book-length study, Greenblatt fails to differentiate the Ghost from the late King Hamlet, and takes it for granted that it is actually the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the title of Greenblatt’s book, Hamlet in Purgatory, “Hamlet” refers not to the title character of Shakespeare’s work, but to his late father, whose afterlife is also taken for granted, hence so is the Ghost’s theological origin, together with its identity. Even so, Greenblatt does perceive some of the problems and ambiguities concerning the character, and argues,

But the problem is that the father’s design is vengeance; vengeance, moreover, demanded by a spirit that seems to come from the place that was for Protestants the supreme emblem of the corruption of the Catholic Church. What can be made of this? The point is surely not to settle issues that Shakespeare has clearly gone out of his way to render unclear or ambiguous.

(Greenblatt 244; italics added)

Thus, according to Greenblatt, we have a highly problematic and ambiguous spirit, which is so intended by Shakespeare; but this spirit is identical to Hamlet’s father, who demands vengeance. What should we make of this? Greenblatt’s question is purely rhetorical, but perhaps we should consider differentiating the ambiguous Ghost or spirit from the father, who is already dead at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play. After all, vengeance is only the Ghost’s design, who may not be the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. If the Ghost is so ambiguous, perhaps we should take Hamlet’s concern about it seriously, and also consider the character as a possibly evil spirit, a disguised devil or demon. In fact, the two “famous” problems that Greenblatt discusses concerning the Ghost are problems only with the purgatorial concept of the character: first, in Elizabethan England, Anglicans and Protestants in general did not believe in Purgatory and the return of the dead. Second, as has been mentioned, the call on vengeance contradicts the Catholic notion of purgation itself: as Greenblatt admits, such a ghost can come only from Hell (235-7).

As for Hamlet’s and the critics’ challenge, Greenblatt also asks the question, “Does the Ghost come from Purgatory or Hell? – for many generations now audiences and readers have risen to the challenge” (240); only to dismiss it as one of the many questions of the play that are impossible to answer decisively. Yet, despite these remarks, Greenblatt discusses the Ghost as the purgatorial spirit of Hamlet’s father throughout, not showing much interest in the alternative option. It is remarkable that in a study of over three hundred pages, citing numerous theological documents, Greenblatt does not undertake such an analysis; but it follows from the fact that he does not even make the distinction between the Ghost and the father.[32] It is perhaps for this reason that in his long study on the Ghost, Greenblatt is not actually interested in the mole. Interestingly, even though he points out that “in Tudor and Stuart texts […] belief in Purgatory could be represented as a sly jest, a confidence trick” (236), Greenblatt does not perceive the comic elements of the Cellarage Scene in Shakespeare’ Hamlet.

The same problem can be noted in the work of other critics, whom I can cite here only briefly. As a response to Greenblatt, Clinton P. E. Atchley points out that the Ghost is not necessarily purgatorial; moreover, he also elaborates on the possibility of a demonic Ghost. Nevertheless, Atchley still refers to the character as “Old Hamlet’s Ghost” (Atchley 5). Catherine Belsey also rejects the idea of the purgatorial Ghost, but she also refers to the character as “Old Hamlet,” as if Hamlet’s father had not died yet (Belsey 11). More recently, Graham Holderness, discussing the religious significance of the play and arguing for a Protestant Prince Hamlet, likewise takes it for granted that the Ghost is identical to King Hamlet. According to Holderness (146), “King Hamlet complains that he went to his death without the oil of extreme unction.” Holderness, like most modern critics, fails to perceive any ambiguity about the identity of the Ghost, even though he also points out that the notion of Purgatory and Catholicism in general were rejected by the Church of England in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. While citing the Ghost’s allusions to the Catholic rites, Holderness notes neither Hamlet’s doubts about the character at the end of the Hecuba monologue, nor the jocular references to the mole in the Cellarage Scene. It seems that some philosophers are more interested in the Old Mole than the Shakespeare scholars who study the play and the Ghost itself. In any case, very few commentators perceive that the reference to the animal, along with some other elements of the play, cast major doubts on the character, particularly concerning its spiritual significance and also its identity.

The problems of identity are related to those of the designation of the character; and all these boil down to a major problem of the modern Hamlet editions. The challenges of critics and readers in general begin with the choice of text of the various Hamlet editions. Modern readers and critics tend to use the modern critical editions, which add a list of roles to the text, with various designations. Stephen Greenblatt uses his own Norton Shakespeare (1997), of which he is the general editor; this edition is based on the Oxford Shakespeare (1986). This offers a modernised version of the First Folio text, and places an additional list of “THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY” before the actual text. The first character in that list is the “GHOST of Hamlet, the late King of Denmark.” After such a list and such a designation, any doubt on the Ghost’s nature and identity is precluded.

However, there is no such a list of roles in the early editions; all we have is “Ghost” in the speech prefixes and stage directions. The modern editors thus add not only a list of roles to the text, but also various additions to the designations that can be found in the speech prefixes and stage directions. These additions are sometimes distinguished by different character types: in this case, “GHOST” is in capital letters; but the editors do not usually indicate that the additions are only their annotations, and so is the list of roles itself. These annotations may be intended to help the interpretation of Shakespeare’s work, but in case of the Ghost, they actually tend to limit it; the usual modern designations of the character impose a major and largely arbitrary limit of interpretation at the outset, involving a major simplification of the character and the play as a whole.

This may account for the problems in Greenblatt’s interpretation, as well as for those in Holderness, who uses the same edition. Other modern critics may use other modern editions, for instance, the Arden series, but this problem of the designation has been common to all for several centuries, ever since the beginning of Shakespeare criticism. The tradition of the list of roles started in the Restoration, with the Sixth Quarto (1676) edition, which was a Players’ Quarto, and also provided the list of actors along the list of roles. This edition had “Ghost of Hamlet’s father” for the first time. However, as Gary Taylor explains, the Restoration Hamlet was already very different from the Renaissance Hamlet, not only in the stage conventions and the historical context in which it was interpreted, but also in the text that was used, offering already a modern version of Shakespeare’s work (Taylor 39-51). As an editor, Taylor returned to the First Folio text, which is offered in modern spelling in the critical edition (Shakespeare 1986), and he also maintained the modern convention of the list of roles.

In my view, if we are interested in Shakespeare’s work, the original, Renaissance or early modern Hamlet, rather than in its modern versions, we have to return not only to the original texts, or the early editions, but also to the original designations of the characters. Thus, we should call this character as “Ghost”, even though we can certainly also consider and analyse the various other references to it in the play, for instance, that of the “Mole”. However, we should not take it for granted that the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is identical to the late King. One may, of course, argue for such an interpretation, but that should not be taken as a fact. It may also be useful to note that the word “ghost” itself has various meanings. In the Oxford English Dictionary, there is a reference to Hamlet at the at the entry “Ghost” (Murray)

Ghost, 8. The soul of a deceased person, spoken of as appearing in a visible form, or otherwise manifesting its presence, to the living. (Now the prevailing sense.) […] 1602 SHAKS. Ham. I. v. 126. There needs no Ghost, my Lord, come from the Graue, to tell vs this.

However, this – now prevailing sense – is already the eighth meaning of the word in the OED. This is what most modern commentators mean too, when they refer to the Ghost in Hamlet, even though the word has several other meanings. In the OED, at “Ghost, 5.”, the meaning is  “An incorporeal being; a spirit”, which can be either good or evil: “c. An evil spirit. The loath, foul, wicked ghost: the Devil” (ibid.). “Ghost”, can thus mean not only the soul of a dead person, but also a spirit, and that is how Hamlet himself refers to the character several times; as we have seen, also fearing that it may be the devil, at the end of the Hecuba monologue.

As I have mentioned above, contemporary religious authorities including King James in his Daemonologie warn their readers about the dangers of evil spirits or demons. If we are interested in the spiritual significance of Hamlet, who could be a better authority to consult than King James, who was not only the patron of Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men, but also the supreme head or governor of the Church of England, and commissioned a new Authorised Version of the Bible after his accession to the throne in 1603? James’ Daemonologie, published a few years before Hamlet, contains several parallels to Hamlet’s challenge, which are rarely noted in the reception; this work is cited neither by Greenblatt nor by Holderness, even though they discuss the religious significance of the play and quote numerous other contemporary documents. As for the significance of the mole, as I have also mentioned, according to the bestiaries, the mole represents blindness (Barber 110-1; Payne 58);[33] beyond physical blindness, also spiritual. The relevance of these and other works concerning Hamlet could be discussed in more detail in another essay, but to grasp the notions of demonic abuse or spiritual blindness in Hamlet, first we have to be able to see the difference between the Ghost and the late King Hamlet, rather than blindly accept the character as Hamlet’s father.

On Hamlet’s insistence, as we have seen, Polonius agrees that the cloud above them is “very like a Whale” (2253; 3.2.83). The Ghost is also very like the late King Hamlet; it certainly “lookes” […] “like the King” (55, 1.1.43), for it is “in the same figure like the King thats dead” (53, 1.1.41), but is not necessarily identical with him. As Hamlet claims, when the circumstances are favourable, he can tell a “Hauke, from a hand saw” (1426; 2.2.379). For a more the complete appreciation of Shakespeare’s work, we also have to make certain distinctions, which are indispensable for sound critical judgements. If we observe these points, the gravity of Hamlet’s challenge and the complexity of Shakespeare’s work may be more appreciated in further studies. Then we can start to interpret the play again. “Whose there?”, asks Barnardo at the beginning of the Second Quarto text; “VVHo's there?” asks he in the First Folio (Shakespeare 1991). We should realize that this question of identity applies not only to Francisco, the sentinel whom Barnardo is about to relieve in the middle of the dark night, but also to the questionable Ghost, whom the guards and Horatio are expecting to watch and observe. If we also realise that the Ghost may not be “King Hamlet” or “Old Hamlet”, or just “Hamlet”, as modern critics and editors suppose and tend to call it, but may also be an evil Ghost or the devil, as Hamlet fears in the Hecuba monologue, then we may start to grasp the complexity of Shakespeare’s work.

WORKS CITED

Atchley, C. P. E., 2002. “Reconsidering the Ghost in Hamlet: Cohesion or Coercion?” The Philological Review 28/2. 5-20.

Barber, Richard. 1999. Bestiary. MS Bodley 764. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.

Belsey, Catherine. 2010. “Shakespeare’s Sad Tale for Winter: Hamlet and the Tradition of Fireside Ghost Stories”. Shakespeare Quarterly 61/1 [2010], 1-27

Eco, Umberto. 1990. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dávidházi Péter. 1994. ”Teve, menyét, cethal.” Hungarológia, 5. 144-159.

De Grazia, Margreta. 1999. “Teleology, delay and the ‘Old Mole’”. Shakespeare Quarterly, 50/3, 251-267.

De Grazia, Margreta. 2007. “Hamlet” without Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2001. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hanmer, Thomas. 1736. Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet. London.

Hazlitt, William. 1900 (first published 1817). Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. London: George Bell and Sons.

Hegel, G. F. W. 1995. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson. 3 vols. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska P.

Holderness, Graham. 2016. The Faith of William Shakespeare. Oxford: Lion Books.

James VI of Scotland [later James I of England]. 1597. Daemonologie. In Forme of a Dialogue. Edinburgh.

Johnson, Samuel. 1765. ed. The Works of William Shakespeare, 8 vols. London.

Kiséry András. 2016. Hamlet's Moment. Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marx, Karl. 1969. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers.

Murray, J. A. H. 1961. ed. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Prawer, S. S. 1976. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Payne, Ann. 1990. Medieval Beasts. London: British Library.

Prosser, Eleanor. 1971 (1st edn. 1967). Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford U. P.

Shakespeare, William. 1623. Macbeth (First Folio Edition). Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.

Shakespeare, William.  1676. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As it is now Acted at His Highness the Duke of York’s Theatre. Ed. Davenant, William. London. (Q6).

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Quartos and First Folio. Eds. Paul Bertram and Bernice W. Kliman. New York: AMS Press.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ BIOGRAPHIES

András Bernáth is Senior Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Szeged. His main interests are Shakespeare’s plays and their reception: the early texts in their original historical and theatrical context and the various alterations and adaptations in the modern reception. He addressed these issues in his doctorate entitled Hamlet, the Ghost and the Model Reader: The Problems of the Reception and a Concept of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Université Catholique de Louvain, 2013), as well as numerous publications. He has presented papers at numerous international conferences, including those of the British Shakespeare Association. E-mail: bernath@jgypk.szte.hu

Enikő Bollobás is Professor of Literature of the Department of American Studies at ELTE, Budapest. She has published seven books, including two histories of American literature (Osiris), monographs on the poets Charles Olson (Twayne) and Emily Dickinson (Balassi), and investigations into such theoretical topics as free verse, subjectivity, performativity, gender, and passing (Akadémiai, Balassi, Peter Lang). Her numerous essays have come out in Hungarian and international scholarly journals, among them, American Quarterly, Arcade, Emily Dickinson Journal, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Style, Paideuma, and Word and Image. E-mail: ebollobas@gmail.com

Korinna Csetényi is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Modern Languages at the Juhász Gyula Faculty of Education, at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She defended her PhD on The Metafictional Narrativization of the Traumatized Body and Monstrous Femininity in Stephen King’s Horror Fiction at the same university. Her main academic interests are American popular fiction, Gothic and horror literature and the place of Stephen King within this genre, together with his impact on contemporary culture. E-mail: korinnac@yahoo.com

Éva Federmayer, Dr. habil., independent scholar, formerly associate professor in the department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary and in the department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. She is the author of Psychoanalysis and American Literary Criticism (1983), the editor of American Studies as Cultural Studies (2007), the editor and co-author of  Netting America: Introduction to the Culture and Literature of the United States (2006), and the co-editor of New Jazz Studies (2016). Her publications in English and Hungarian include essays on gender studies, critical race studies, African American culture and literature, cultural studies, new jazz studies, and ecocriticism. Email: federmayer.eva@gmail.com

András Fodor is a PhD student at the University of Szeged, Faculty of Arts, Doctoral School of Literature. He has been publishing reviews and short stories since 2010 in Hungarian. In 2016 he has won the JAKKendő-award for his manuscript of first collection of short stories, A mosolygó zsonglőr (The Smiling Juggler, József Attila Kör-Prae), which has been published later in the same year. His research interests are spatiality, New Weird and China Miéville. E-mail: fod.andras@gmail.com

Edit Újvári is associate professor of the Faculty of Education, University of Szeged and lecturer at the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Szeged, Faculty of Arts. She teaches courses on cultural and art history, Christian iconography, religious symbols and signs. She is the author of more than 60 publications including four monographs, the co-author of three books, and co-editor of Encyclopedia of Symbols. Her PhD focused on the Goddess motif in Sándor Weöres’ poetry. Her current research interest concerns animal symbols in Christian Iconography and semiotic analysis of visual arts and rites (see her book published with Szeged UP in 2015). E-mail: ued@jgypk.szte.hu

Anna Kérchy is an Associate Professor at the English Department of the University of Szeged, Hungary. She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Szeged, a DEA in Semiology from Université Paris VII, and a habilitation degree in literature and culture from the University of Debrecen. Her research interests include intermedial cultural representations, the post-semiotics of the embodied subject, interfacings of Victorian and postmodern fantastic imagination, gender studies, women’s art, fairy tales, and children’s/YA literature. She has authored two monographs: Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic (McFarland, 2016) and Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter: Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View (Mellen, 2008). She (co)edited collections on postmodern reinterpretations of fairy tales (2011), the literary fantastic (2010), the iconology of law and order (2012), the cultural history of Continental European freak shows (2012), an EJES special journal issue on feminist interventions into intermedial studies (2017), and a Bookbird special issue on Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literatures and Cultures (2018).  E-mail: akerchy@ieas-szeged.hu

Péter Kristóf Makai is currently the Crafoord Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, where he studies intermedial representations of evolutionary theory. Having defended his PhD thesis on autism in literary theory and fiction, he is currently a literary critic and journalist writing for Próza Nostra, Insert Coin, and Vinoport, training as a wine critic at the Borkollégium in Budapest. He has published studies on literary autism in Filológiai Közlöny and the Americana E-Journal, on fantasy fiction and games in Tolkien Studies, Blackwell’s A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien and Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales. His main research interests are game studies and ludology, science fiction and fantasy studies, themed entertainment media, postclassical narratology, cultural theory. He welcomes scholarly letters sent to peter.makai@ieas-szeged.hu

Kathleen McCracken is a Canadian poet and academic. She is the author of seven collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College (Penumbra Press, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1992, A Geography of Souls (Thistledown Press, 2002), Moonclaves (Exile Editions, 2007) and Tattoo Land (Exile Editions, 2009). A bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems, and featuring a preface by Medbh McGuckian, was published by the distinguished Brazilian press Editora Ex Machina. She is the recipient of the University of Toronto Review’s Editor’s Choice Award for Poetry, the Anne Szumigalski Editor’s Prize, several Ontario Arts Council awards and an Individual Artist Award from the Northern Ireland Arts Council. Her doctoral thesis examined the anti-parable form in the radio plays of Louis MacNeice, and after receiving a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, she was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship which enabled her to complete two years of post-doctoral research at University College, Dublin. In 1992 she took up a full-time post as Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Ulster University. She has published scholarly articles the poetry of Paul Durcan, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Derek Mahon, on the documentary films of John T. Davis, and on Native Canadian writing. E-mail: kl.mccracken@ulster.ac.uk

Alina Gabriela Mihalache is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Letters, Centre of Excellence in Image Studies.  She holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Bucharest. Her research interests include comparative cultural studies, interart studies, contemporary theatre. She authored the book Eugen Ionescu/Eugène Ionesco: From Surrealism to Postdramatism (2016) as well as  dozens of articles in  scientific and cultural magazines.  She took part in several international conferences, colloquia, and workshops in theatre, film, and literary studies. E-mail: alina_g_mihalache@hotmail.com

András Molnár holds a Juris Doctor degree and works as an assistant lecturer at the University of Szeged, Faculty of Law, and has successfully completed his course work as a PhD student at the Doctoral School of Humanities of the University of Szeged’s Faculty of Arts. His main research interests include American constitutional law and Lovecraftian weird fiction. He occasionally translates short stories from English to Hungarian. E-mail: andrasm@juris.u-szeged.hu

Gergely Nagy is an independent scholar. He wrote his dissertation on Tolkien's The Silmarillion, and published papers in various international publications on Tolkien, Malory, Chaucer, and contemporary popular music. He has been the member of the Tolkien Studies editorial board from the periodical’s inception, and in the early 2000s, he was instrumental in creating the Hungarian Tolkien Society. E-mail: bwglamorak@gmail.com

Daniel Nyikos received a PhD in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 2014. He currently teaches as a junior assistant professor at the University of Szeged, where he is also working on a second PhD looking at the ideology of empire in the works of Rudyard Kipling from a post-colonial perspective. His research interests include creative writing, Victorian and early 20th century literature, and the weird tale. Email: danielnyikos@gmail.com

Kendra Reynolds recently defended her PhD thesis at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Her research interests include feminist theory, gender studies, twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film, postmodern fairy tale retellings, anti-tales, literary revisions of corporeality, spatiality and temporality, ecofeminism, posthumanism, and YA fiction. She is a former prize winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Annual Essay Competition, with her paper “A Rude Awakening: Sleeping Beauty as a Metaphor for the Slumber of Post-Feminism” published in the Journal of International Women’s Studies. E-mail: Reynolds-K6@ulster.ac.uk

Chengcheng You is a Lecturer at the Department of Translation Studies of the Jinan University, China. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Macau. Her research interests include poetics of anthropomorphism, adaptation of Chinese classics and teen gothic. Her recent publications include chapters in Child Governance and Child Autonomy in Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2016) and New Directions in Gothic Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2017), and forthcoming articles in journals Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal and Children’s Literature in Education. Her co-authored monograph on the poetics and ethics of anthropomorphism is now under contract with Routledge. E-mail: ccyou1984@hotmail.com

Florian Zitzelsberger is currently tutor for English and American Literary Studies at the University of Passau, Germany. His research is prompted by an interest in American popular and queer culture and focuses on self-reflexivity and metareference across media, ecocriticism, coming-out narratives, and the American film musical. Among others, he has published in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies on the use of theatricality in film as a means to self-reflexively negotiate the a/politicality of both art forms. E-mail: florian.zitzelsberger1@gmail.com

Megjegyzések

[←1]

See data of original publication in Works Cited.

[←2]

Quotations are from the New Geneva Study Bible.

[←3]

For the status of the official definition of the term, see the currently running posting of Quoternary Stratigraphy online: “The 'Anthropocene' is not a formally defined geological unit within the Geological Time Scale. A proposal to formalise the 'Anthropocene' is being  developed by the 'Anthropocene' Working Group for consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy,  with a current date of 2016” (Working Group on the Anthropocene).

[←4]

The ecological footprint of the Anthropocene is gauged by many, such as Bill McKibben, as larger than nature can bear: "We had ended nature as an independent force, [. . .] our appetites and habits and desires could now be read in every cubic meter of air, in every increment on the thermometer" (qtd in Ronda, n. pag.). Having passed August 13, the Earth Overshoot Day in 2015 (which marks the limit of natural resource appropriation by humans beyond our reach after which the planet’s biosphere is incapable of fully regenerating), we have been in the red for long: with regard to the present pace and measure of anthropogenic resource plundering, by 2030 we humans would need two planets to keep going” (Osborne n. pag.).

[←5]

Neo- and new slave narratives are contemporary re-imaginings of slavery in a (post)modern setting, deriving inspiration from a classic black tradition, while voicing racial concerns of the present.  Neo-slave narratives are formally more in tune with the classic nineteenth-century slave narrative genre (such as Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale [1982]) than new slave narratives (such as Edward P. Jones’s The Known World [2007]). Although thematizing slavery, Morrison’s A Mercy seems to be neither a neo- nor a new slave narative on account of its engagement with a wider range of issues as well as viewpoints than either of these narrative forms.

[←6]

The Bacon’s Rebellion, also called the popular or people’s rebellion, drew various people, including white and black indentured servants, slaves and landed genry, into a loose coaliton in Virginia Colony against the rule of Governor William Berkeley in 1676. Though driven by various accumulated grievances and antagonizing a local Native American tribe who supported the English, the multiracial, alternative political scenario of an early cosmopolitanism that transcended even property and class concerns is the historical watershed that captured Morrison’s attention.

[←7]

James Braxton Peterson suggests that the technique of Hypothetical Focalization (the narrator’s or character’s hypotheses about what might happen or might have happened) is crucial in the novel, since it is “through the relationships between hypothetical and (regular/normal) focalization that certain ecocritical and narratological understandings emerge in close readings of Morrison’s A Mercy” (10). An early example occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2, where Hypothetical Focalization brings into view a counterfactual witness, the racoon, which is saved by Jacob, whereby his main ecocritical problem is foregrounded: he feels tender love toward small creatures in the environment but will soon be involved in the large-scale abuse of Africans in Barbados. (14).

[←8]

I am indebted to Tessa Roynon’s fascinating article, “Her Dark Materials: John Milton, Toni Morrison, and Concepts of Dominion in A Mercy” about Morrison’s dialogue with Milton on temptation, dominion or power. My argument, however, takes a different view of Florens’s mother (596) as well as seeks to follow an ecocritical discussion of A Mercy within the context of the Anthropocene.

[←9]

For the word wild(er)ness recurring in passages with Florens, see the following page numbers: 4 (wild: bad girlchild, a prospective prostitute), 5 (wilderness: dangerous natural setting exposing her vulnerability), 102 (“meadow wild with sunshine” v. Florens as a “lamb”), 141 (twice: blacksmith to Florens: “your body is wild;” “You are nothing but wilderness”), 15 (“you say I am wilderness”), 160 (“That it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild”), 161 (“I am become wilderness but I am also Florens”).

[←10]

Wild, transgressive female characters in Morrison with attributes intimating the wilderness with the potential of subverting white patriarchal and racial domination and rationality include, among others, Pilate, Hagar (in Song of Solomon),  Sula (in Sula), Sethe (in Beloved), Violet Trace (in Jazz) and, most conspicuously the ghost-girl Beloved (in Beloved). For Morrison’s transgressive women in an ecocritical context, see Aori Mori’s ‟Reclaiming the Presence of the Marginalized.”

[←11]

Kathleen R. Wallace and Karla Armbruster map out how Morrison’s novels situate African American characters in the natural world (“The Novels of Toni Morrison”). They also point out that contrary to white characters, black characters, especially in slavery times, do not relate to the wilderness as a site of refuge or transcendental experience, as white characters would in Euro-American fiction. Florens’s vulnerability, I must add, is also enhanced in the wilderness on her way to the blacksmith; although she has a pass from mistress Rebekka to make her journey relatively safe, she is exposed to multiple dangers posed by humans, animals, and nature in general.

[←12]

For the contemporary stereotype “ecological Indian” also called by Jace Weave the “ecological perfectionist,” see John Gamber’s “Environmental Ethics in Willim S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s The Council,” Joni Adamson’s “Cosmovisions: Environmental Justice, Transnational American Studies and Indigenous Literature,” and Annette Kolodny’s “Rethinking the “’Ecological Indian:’ A Penobscot Precursor.” The scene referenced above occurs when Florens is out in the social and natural wilderness on her way to the blacksmith. Weakened by fright, hunger and thirst, the black slave girl is shocked by the sudden sight of strange brown men on unsaddled horseback. Though no intercultural communication is feasible (both sides are ignorant of the other’s language and cultural codes), the Native Indian youths not only leave her unharmed but restore her soul and body with the amenities she badly needs: fresh water and human recognition.

[←13]

Reminiscent of a key element of classic nineteenth-century American slave narratives, the theme of writing is retrieved and revised by Morrison in A Mercy. Pointing out the importance of writing and literacy in slave narratives, Henry Louis Gates succinctly states: “In literacy lay true freedom for the black slave” (xii).

[←14]

For an elaboration of the concept of the radical coexistence with the stranger, see Timothy Morton’s ‟Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals.”

[←15]

For ease of reference, I will use abbreviations for the primary texts: D for Dune, CD for Children of Dune, and GE for God Emperor of Dune (these are found in the Works Cited, along with the Dune Encyclopedia, which I will refer to as DE).

[←16]

This is heavily ironic, as the shape-changing, universally loathed Face Dancers of the Tleilaxu are described by Moneo in exactly the same terms: “Their Face Dancers are mules, closer to a colony organism than to human” (GE 101).

[←17]

O’Reilly’s book Frank Herbert was published before God Emperor of Dune, but contains much that is of interest to its interpretation. The book is now out of print, but its text is available at http://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/index.html. I will refer to this book by chapter, there being no other internal division in the online text.

[←18]

A minor irony produced by this is the changed meaning of the old Fremen term “wormsign.” In the first Dune book, wormsign meant a movement in the desert sand that indicated a sandworm coming beneath the surface: “a sandwave moving toward the crawler” (D, 118). With no sandworms and hardly any desert left, in God Emperor of Dune it means the bodily signs on Leto’s worm-body by which Moneo claims to “know when Shai-hulud approaches” (GE 17). In the passage “The God Emperor’s eyes were closed and a look of brooding had come over his face. That was another of the worm signs” (GE 119, italics mine) Herbert makes it clear he uses the term deliberately.

[←19]

Lovecraft’s spelling is purposefully anachronistic, since he uses the British spelling but is himself American, but I choose to use the standard American spelling for the sake of consistency with the rest of my text.

[←20]

Emphases in quoted passages are in the original unless noted.

[←21]

In Genettian terms, the case of the reiteration of the same content in another textual form, as described above, is called transformation (Genette 1993, 16). However, the use of the more neutral term translation instead of transformation (which, following Genette, encompasses parody and travesty) provides a more abstract terminology that allows the inclusion of the pre-text’s discursive material in a new text.

[←22]

If not stated otherwise, the quotes originate from: Seuss. 1971. The Lorax. New York: Random House. The text does not provide proper pagination, which is why I refrain from indicating the page number. All emphases in original.

[←23]

If, following Judith Butler, the stabilization of discourse is characterized by performativity, the “citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (1993, 2), the discourses described above can be considered as being rooted in American environmentalism, precisely because they are repeated over and over again. The Lorax, then, is one of the reiterations that constitutes, mirrors, and reaffirms these discourses.

[←24]

Genette defines narrative levels, one of the subcategories of “voice” he introduces in his book Narrative Discourse, in distinction to the narrative act producing them: “any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed” (1980, 228; original emphasis).

[←25]

Metalepsis can be defined as a transgression of the border between logically separate narrative levels (e.g. Genette 1980, 234 and Wolf 2009, 50).

[←26]

Of course, this is not the only way The Lorax is received. By now, the book has informed many adaptations such as the 2012 animated film The Lorax, directed by Chris Renaud, or the pastiche-version of The Lorax, Michael I. Black and Marc Rosenthal’s A Child’s First Book of Trump (2016).

[←27]

Wishing to offer a comparative research into the genre of fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn utilizes the same term when characterizing the various critical definitions surrounding the object of her study: she describes them as a “fuzzy set” (xiii).

[←28]

In his postapocalyptic novel The Stand (1991), almost the entire human race is wiped out as a superflu is accidentally released from a secret biological testing site which is engaged in germ warfare research.

[←29]

The scenario of the highly popular TV series Stranger Things (2016) is very similar to the one presented here: unethical research carried out by unscrupulous scientists who have no clear grasp of the potential danger of these experiments and the accidental opening up of a portal into an alternate dimension (The Upside Down), from which a hungry predator, the Demogorgon, extrudes to prey upon people.

[←30]

„Éber-álom félhomálya rajtunk, / így vesződjük mocsár-mélyi harcunk, / honnan nincs kiút:/ hisz egymáson élősködve élünk,/ más halálán életet cserélünk:/ a föld rendje ez./ Testvér itt a kő, fa, állat, ember,/ testvért eszem lucskos gyötrelemmel,/ s testvérem megesz.” (Weöres 1981, 301-302).

[←31]

Quotations from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Second Quarto text (1604-5), from the website Hamlet Works (www.hamletworks.org), edited by Bernice W. Kliman et al. For the ease of reference, in addition to the line numbers, the conventional act-scene-line numbers are also provided from this source, even though the original Q2 edition had no such markers. For the print edition, see Shakespeare (1991); several other editions will also be cited below.

[←32]

It must be noted that when discussing “the questionable shape”, Greenblatt does mention the danger of demonic deception (Greenblatt 208-9), but he soon abandons the issue, to focus on “compulsive remembrance” (214): remembering the father whom he regards as identical to the Ghost, habitually referring to the character as “the father” (228), “his father’s ghost” (232, 234), “his father’s spirit” (233), “the spirit of the father” (242), or just “Old Hamlet” (232).

[←33]

I am grateful for this point for Éva Vígh, who called my attention to these works.