Blackwood’s 1907 story ‘The Willows’ uses the titular willow bushes to create a frightening sense of the radical alterity of nonhuman, non-animal nature, but it also begins to draw attention to the possibility that this alterity exists within the human. ‘The Willows’ relates the frightening experience undergone by its narrator and his travelling companion on a canoe voyage through a marshy stretch of the Danube. This ‘region of singular loneliness and desolation’ is dotted with small islands overgrown with ‘a vast sea of low willow-bushes’, and it is on one of these islands that the travellers make camp on a windy night.17 After a series of bizarre events around the camp, including the suggestion that the willows have moved while they weren’t looking, the travellers become convinced that the region into which they have intruded is one where the veil between worlds is thin. They have inadvertently attracted the attention of vast, inhuman forces that require a sacrifice before they will withdraw.
Anthony Camara, reading ‘The Willows’ through the lens of cosmic horror, has argued that the story shows us a nonhuman nature that is radically Other, subject to ‘strange transformations and eruptions of novelty that cause nature to exceed humans’ limited conceptions and definitions of it’.18 Blackwood, he argues, refuses clear distinctions between the natural and the supernatural: rather, nature is ‘dynamically constituted by the un-grounding operations’ of ‘incomprehensible alien forces’ that render such distinctions impossible.19 ‘The Willows’ maintains that ‘nature always has an outside that cannot be assimilated’, and in doing so, the story thinks about nature in a way that ‘gives it the full freedom that should be accorded to it – namely, the freedom to violate itself’.20 Camara ties this idea to the cosmic, to the way that ‘Blackwood’s great outdoors is continuous with an even greater outdoors, namely the starry expanses and abyssal depths of space’.21 Here I wish to explore this alterity in terms of an Otherness rather closer to home, and viewable as such in the narrative only from a human position: the radically closed-off (and thus inaccessible to humans) but radically open (to violations of known natural law) world of the plant.
The problematic status of the willow bushes, their resistance to categorisation as separate from either animal life or inorganic phenomena, is apparent throughout. In the narrator’s abundant descriptions of them within their ‘land of desolation’, the willows become one with the river, with ‘waves of leaves instead of waves of water’ and ‘green swells like the sea’.22 They are alliteratively aligned with the natural phenomena of the river and the weather, forming part of a ‘singular world of willows, winds, and waters’ in which the travellers are immediately ill at ease.23 An opposition is set up here between nonhuman nature on the one hand and the humans who intrude upon it on the other. This works both to maintain a degree of anthropocentric separation between humans and the rest of the world, and to suggest the danger of its dissolution.
The characters have ‘trespassed … upon the borders of an alien world’ where they are ‘intruders’,24 a world ‘remote from human influence’ and ‘tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows’.25 These plants possess ‘souls’ and intent, but they are quite alien, even inimical, to the souls and intentions of humans. Though the beings the narrator glimpses through the thinning of the wall between worlds are not plants, it is to the willows and their intent that his fear attaches itself. They ‘represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us’;26 they suggest ‘a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether’.27 The scenes of wild nature to which the narrator has grown accustomed on his frequent travels are not threatening in the same way because they ‘link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions.’28 The willows hold no such familiarity. The terror they induce cannot be explained simply by their geographical remoteness, then. Indeed, it is the points at which they encounter the human world, and not those where they diverge, that truly horrify. Again, these points of contact and separation both challenge and maintain anthropocentrism.
The willows, then, have their roots in a world radically different from the world inhabited by humans, but exist on the border between both. They are the intrusions of that world into ours, just as the narrator and his companion are trespassers from the human world into the alien, a narrative mirroring which suggests a kind of unsettling kinship with the plant Other. Were the strange souls of the willows to remain in their world, there would be no reason to fear them. Here they cross borders, and they also trouble categories, as all plants do. Animal imagery abounds: the willows are ‘monstrous antediluvian creatures’ and ‘gigantic sponge-like growths’.29 Refusing the rootedness of plants, they shift their positions during the night, crowding in around the tent,30 and the narrator is horrified by the notion that they move ‘of their own will’.31 We might here identify one of Harman’s ‘gaps’ between the reality of an object and its qualities, for the willows partake of the natures of both animals and inorganic phenomena, but are summed up by neither. The humans cannot fully know them.
At the same time that the willows represent an alien world, however, the radical separation – what Val Plumwood refers to as being ‘hyper-separated’ – between humans, animals and plants that has propped up ideas of human exceptionalism and supremacy is threatened with destabilisation.32 Michael Marder has argued that ‘plants are wholly other and foreign to us, so long as we have not yet encountered them, as it were, on their own turf’ (emphasis mine),33 suggesting that the ‘gap separating humans from plants may dwindle … thanks to the discovery of traces of the latter in the former, and vice versa’.34 Here, forced to encounter the willows partly ‘on their own turf’ (but never able to stand with both feet upon it), the human protagonists are confronted with both a terrifying alterity, and with the possibility that it may already be a part of the animal, and thus the human, world. The willows destabilise any solidly bounded sense of human identity, offering instead a vision of human entanglement within a world of alterity.
The inhuman forces they embody pose a physical danger to the travellers, but also a categorical danger to humanity as a whole. They undermine the constitutive distinction between human Self and animal/vegetable/natural Other that had already been called into question by evolutionary theory and the possibility of universal common descent. Plumwood has pointed to the ways in which ‘human/nature dualism [has] helped create ideals of culture and human identity that promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere of nature as the Other’.35 She has also discussed the problems posed for human exceptionalism by animal predation: it ‘threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery of the planet in which we are predators but can never ourselves be prey’, revealing instead ‘a shockingly indifferent world of necessity’ where humans have ‘no more significance than any other edible being’.36 When plants take on the role of predators, the categories we use to define ourselves are called into question further still; the firm boundaries between human, animal and plant life are blurred. We might read such blurrings as early moments in the development of a cultural consciousness of our embeddedness with nonhuman forms of life. At the present, with human-driven climate change threatening both humans and non-human species, a new way of thinking our relationship with, rather than our separation from, other species seems imperative, and reading the weird may offer us one way of attempting this.
Weird tales cannot, however, offer a truly ahuman perspective. As Eugene Thacker notes, while
we are increasingly … aware of the world in which we live as a non-human world, a world outside, one that is manifest is [sic] the effects of global climate change, natural disasters, the energy crisis and the progressive extinction of species worldwide … all these effects are linked, directly and indirectly, to our living in and living as a part of this non-human world. Hence contradiction is built into this challenge – we cannot help but to think of the world as a human world, by
virtue of the fact that it is we human beings that think it.37
The tension between our awareness of a ‘non-human world’ – what Thacker calls the ‘world-in-itself’– our embeddedness in it, and our inability to access it, manifests itself in horror.38 Horror fiction, for Thacker, cannot truly conceive of the ‘world-in-itself’ without reference to humans: it ceases to be such as soon as we enter into a relationship with it by thinking it. Rather, it imagines the ‘world-without-us’, a world defined precisely by the absence of the human and manifesting itself in ‘fissures, lapses, or lacunae’ in our experience.39 Evolutionary theory suggests that this world also exists within us, and it leaks through our perceptions without offering itself up to them.
Monstrosity and Hybridity
The interstitial, or hybrid, nature of plants, seen from a human perspective, makes visible this tension and renders them particularly unsettling. Following Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Keetley discusses how the difficulty plants pose to categories can render them monstrous. For Cohen, monsters are ‘disturbing hybrids’ that trouble categories, refusing ‘to participate in the classificatory “order of things”’.40 They imply the impossibility of a discrete and bounded human identity, for the ‘incoherent body’ of the monster ‘may well be our own’.41 Keetley argues that the effectiveness of plant horror derives in part from the way in which it ‘has long recognized the nonhuman in the human’, a ‘constitutive part of the self utterly beyond the realm (and reign) of the rational, volitional self’.42 Evolutionary theory had raised the possibility of cross-species kinship in the nineteenth century, positing that all life had a common ancestor, and weird tales play with the disturbing notion that the radically Other body of the plant may also be our own.
Jeffrey Weinstock, writing on Lovecraft, posits ‘Gothic objects’ as an important factor in the way his fiction destabilises notions of a knowable world.43 Invested with a ‘thing-power’ (a phrase borrowed from Jane Bennett) that ‘inverts and scuttles subject/object distinctions’,44 Gothic objects are ‘things that become more than things – things with depth, hidden qualities, and indeed life of a sort’.45 Plants – with their inaccessibility, their life that appears qualitatively different from human life, their blurring of the animate/inanimate distinction – may themselves be Gothic objects. Weinstock draws heavily on the work of Bennett, whose project is to question both ‘human hubris’ and the ‘image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter’ that props it up.46 Bennett argues that a close attention to the life of things can ‘highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap’.47 One way to gain a closer sense of thing-power, Bennett suggests, is to take a step back from anthropocentric ‘biographical time’.48 ‘In the long and slow time of evolution’, she writes, ‘mineral material appears as the mover and shaker, the active power, and the human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action, appear as its product.’49 Closer attention to the life of non-human nature goes hand in hand with awareness of the insignificance and contingency of human life from the nonhuman perspective of evolution, as well as its embeddedness with other forms of life and matter. Plants, too, have roots in this ‘long and slow time’, and in the shaping of the human body. Randy Laist points to the ‘pivotal role’ played by plants in human origins: plants, at the base of every food chain, are ‘the source of all life on earth’, and the ‘shape of our hands and fingers are reverse-molds of millions of years of tree branches’.50 A step back into evolutionary time, then, reveals not an inert and instrumentalised vegetal life to be exploited in the interest of human exceptionalism, but human beings as the product of an active and vibrant vegetal world.
The horror of deep time is a recurring theme in classic weird fiction, and it also characterises much of the anxiety that emerges in nineteenth-century discourses concerning evolution. Both the planet and the human species were far older than previously thought – and more worryingly, theorists of evolutionary degeneration posited the possibility that the remote, pre-human past might intrude into the present via biological atavism. These discourses were deeply imbued with racist and colonial attitudes, with non-white races being viewed as closer to the evolutionary past than white Anglo-Americans and Western Europeans. One author in whose work evolutionary time and the undoing of the human overlap is Machen, whose Little People stories embody post-Darwinian anxieties concerning human origins and the potential for degeneration. Here I’ll look at two of the best-known of these stories, the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ (originally one of the component tales of Machen’s 1895 novel, The Three Impostors), and 1904’s ‘The White People’. Both stories draw on the ‘Pygmy Theory’ posited by David MacRitchie, a product of nineteenth-century interplay between Darwinian theories of evolution (and the possibility of a ‘missing link’) and folk beliefs in fairies and dwarves. MacRitchie posed the possibility that fairy lore constituted a folk memory of a race of pre-human aboriginal Britons who had fled into the hills to escape the invading Celts, and this notion provided fertile ground for Machen’s evolutionary horror.51
The ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ gives us the story of one Professor Gregg, engaged in bizarre ethnographic studies in the hills of south Wales. Gregg discovers a race of these pre-human ancestors living beneath the hills and capable of wreaking degenerative changes on the human body with their supernatural powers. He eventually disappears, apparently taken and transformed by these beings, and his story is relayed by his assistant, Miss Lally, whom he rescued from destitution before she accompanied him on his expedition. We begin with a conventional portrayal of the dangerous city: Miss Lally, after the death of her mother, leaves her country home for London in search of work and finds herself destitute, saved from starvation only by the intervention of the kindly professor. Believing she is about to die, she wanders the ‘void streets’ of her London suburb in a daze.52 For an impoverished single woman, the capital is a threatening space; even the ‘cold, cruel ground beneath [her] feet’ seems to be against her.53 Vegetal life is present here but seems suppressed, deadened by winter or hidden in the fog. There is ‘a hard frost … thick upon the bare branches of the trees’, and they appear ‘vague’ in the dreamlike landscape.54 It is from this frightening ‘world of gloom and shadow’ that Professor Gregg plucks her.55 He reassures her that her inability to find work is not a personal failing, but a result of the ‘artificial’ conditions of urban life, the ‘subtle contrivances, mines and pitfalls’ which get in the way of anybody seeking to make her way in the city.56 In contrast, the professor’s house, where Miss Lally gains a job and a comfortable home, is ‘surrounded by pleasant lawns and orchards, and soothed by the murmur of ancient elms’.57 Trees seem to be denizens of a kinder, less ‘artificial’ but still civilised world. Plant life appears here as tamed and beneficent. When Miss Lally and the professor make their ill-fated voyage west, however, we begin to see a familiar tinge of mystery. The ‘great and ancient’ woods that surround their rented house are pleasant, appearing ‘tinged with enchantment’ – but they also hold a ‘secret’, and, in a suggestively disquieting image, Miss Lally is unable to distinguish the house from the surrounding trees.58 The threat of something greater swallowing up human civilisation remains present – and as Gregg progresses in his researches, the woods take on an ominous aspect. Miss Lally feels that she is ‘imprisoned amidst the ancient woods, shut in an olden land of mystery and dread, and as if all was long ago and forgotten by the living outside’.59 The ‘ancient’ trees, with their long lifespans, disrupt human notions of temporality – and Professor Gregg, relaying his theory of pre-human survivals, makes use of a similar device. When he becomes aware that the Little People are real, he feels as though, ‘roaming in a quiet English wood, [he] had been suddenly stricken aghast by the slimy and loathsome terror of the ichthyosaurus … or had seen the sun darkened by the pterodactyl’.60 No longer comforting, the woods become a gateway to relationships with time and evolution that threaten present-day, civilised humanity with terrifying ret
urns. The trees are not merely setting here: they are mentioned too frequently to be backgrounded, and they appear to play an active part in leading Professor Gregg to his doom, keeping the ‘secret’ of the Little People and trapping the human characters within their ahuman temporality.
A later Machen story, ‘The White People’, also gestures towards the possibility of degeneration, though on a psychological and not a physical level. Although the story is framed by a discussion of good and evil between two Londoners, Ambrose and Cotgrave, the principal action takes place in a rural area where traces of a pre-Christian religion survive. The instability of distinctions between humans, animals, plants and the inorganic world is paramount here. Ambrose introduces his theory of evil thus:
What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?61
True evil, he suggests, is not constituted in malicious acts, but in the refusal of life and matter to remain within firmly bounded categories.
Plants in Science Fiction Page 3
