Written as it was in the late 1940s, during the first years of the decolonisation of the British empire, it might, however, be even more productive to analyse Triffids in a context that has been the focus of a large body of important work in the last few decades, namely science fiction and empire, colonialism and postcolonialism.5 Indeed, it has been somewhat of a commonplace that the immense and lasting popularity of John Wyndham’s major novels was somehow connected to the fall of the British empire.6 Yet, despite frequent mentions in passing, this connection has rarely been explored through close readings of the texts.
Elsewhere, I have argued that Triffids can be read as addressing the contemporary predicament of post-war Britain with its rapid societal changes through an exploration of various ideologies and their eventual shortcomings in a world which has experienced major changes.7 The purpose of this essay is to complement that analysis through focusing on the novel’s eponymous monster plants and analysing them in relation to both the novel’s contemporary colonial context and to John Wyndham’s biography and authorship, especially the earlier versions of the novel. Besides briefly outlining the prevalence of colonial themes in Wyndham’s other works and the triffids’ relation to the Anglophone tradition of monster plants, I argue that the novel’s covertly anthropomorphised carnivorous and ambulatory plants could best be read as fragmented and distorted symbols for, or rather assemblages of metonymies denoting, the conquered and colonised peoples of the British empire coming back to haunt mainland Britain, but also that the novel could thus be seen conflating the exploitation of plants and people.
Interpreting Triffids
It has often been said that the triffids, despite the title of the novel, aren’t really its central concern, and that their main function is to act as a background menace. Roger Luckhurst, for instance, points out that the ‘triffids are merely the occasion for what propels the plot: an episodic encounter with different kinds of community in the wake of the disaster’.8 While this is mostly true, curiously little attention has been given to the triffids themselves and their manifold symbolic, metaphoric and metonymic possibilities, especially considering the fact that triffids have even found their way into colloquial speech and the OED.
Besides the rather obvious readings of the triffids as bio-engineering gone haywire, and of the novel as a Frankensteinian morality tale of hubris and nemesis and the revenge of mother nature, there have been some original attempts at interpreting its botanical scourge. These range from seeing the triffids as ‘manifestations of the fury of … female nature’ (and their funnel-like heads as vaginae dentatae)9 to Nazis in disguise (Kraut = cabbage),10 or even as symbols dramatising the ‘notion of communism as a contagion’, where ‘Britain is endangered by the results of Soviet biological experimentation’.11
More recently, studies have often focused on the fact that the triffids, with their locomotion, perception, communication, carnivory, agency, intentionality and even intelligence, challenge the Aristotelian boundaries between plants, animals and humans.12 Instead of just being a prescient exploration of plant capabilities as we currently understand them, however, I argue that the anthropomorphism of the triffids can be seen as a clear indication of their being symbols for something else than either ravaged and perverted nature or the political rivals of Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.
The story of how the flesh-eating triffids threaten mankind was first published in the US magazine Collier’s in early 1951 as ‘Revolt of the Triffids’. Taking this first American title literally I will argue that the triffids are nothing less than a symbolic working out of the theme of a return of the repressed, of the downtrodden and abused victims of imperialism and colonialism. Central to this reading is their ancestry in earlier science fiction, particularly that of H. G. Wells.
Stowaways from Mars
The influence of H. G. Wells on John Wyndham’s works in general, and The Day of the Triffids and its themes of ecology and invasive species in particular, is indisputable. Whereas some have claimed that ‘Wyndham is justifiably considered to be the truest disciple of H. G. Wells in English literature’13 or that ‘his better, late work is essentially an update of H. G. Wells’,14 others have argued that he, in Triffids, in fact ‘reran Wells (with a dash of social Darwinism)’15 or even that ‘Wyndham made virtually an entire career from knockoffs of Wells’.16 Even if this is an exaggeration, it isn’t completely untrue. In his biographical sketch of his brother’s life, Vivian Beynon Harris actually characterised the decision to write in the style of H. G. Wells as nothing less than a conscious career move, diverging ‘from space opera and mov[ing] nearer a combination of himself and H. G. Wells’.17 His debt to Wells was also readily acknowledged by Wyndham himself.18 According to an essay published in Tales of Wonder in 1939, Wyndham had discovered Wells at the age of twelve (in 1915 or 1916), in the form of The Time Machine (1895), which was to become one of his main influences.19
With its depiction of London and its surrounding countryside in panic and devastation, however, the novel by H. G. Wells that seems to have had the largest impact on Triffids is The War of the Worlds (1898).20 The similarities stretch from the plot, setting and narrative devices to particular details. Apart from the fact that both mainly confine their portrayal of a presumably global invasion to London and the Home Counties, and are told in the first person by a middle-class survivor, one striking similarity is not least the detail that the alien threat moves on three legs (or roots). In fact, even the name ‘triffid’ seems to derive from this influence – ‘trifid’ meaning ‘[s]plit or divided into three’ (from the Latin trifid-us)21 – and one of the early names for the deadly plants in the novel is in fact ‘Tripods’,22 a word used almost ten times in Wells’s novel. Furthermore, both the Martians and triffids feed off human flesh and/or blood, and it is conceivable that the vegetable threat of the triffids was inspired by the ecological imperialism of the Martian Red Weed. And although the triffids are terrestrial in origin in the UK and most subsequent editions of the novel, they were actually from Venus in the earliest published version of the story – Venus, of course, being the opposite to Mars not only in popular imagination, but in Roman mythology as well.
What is perhaps most interesting about the Wellsian influence in Triffids, however, is the way in which it provides the novel with what would seem to be an almost obvious reading. No doubt due to the clues given in the first pages of the novel, where the narrator discusses the extermination of the Tasmanians by European settlers, The War of the Worlds has frequently been read as a comment on British imperialism and colonialism. I. F. Clarke, for instance, points out that Wells had not only taken ‘the Darwinian struggle for survival, combined it with contemporary ideas of a war between peoples, and projected the results upon a planetary scale’, but also that ‘Wells stood colonial expansion on its head, presented Britain as a backward area, and gave the Martians a degree of technological achievement that made the miserable defenders of imperial Britain look rather like the unhappy Tasmanians. The theme of an interplanetary war was an ironical inversion of nineteenth-century imperialism.’23 In his analysis, Peter Fitting even discusses the novel in terms of ‘a return of the repressed’ – ‘the “guilty conscience of imperialism”, the memory of centuries of subjugation, slavery and murder’.24 With these staple readings of Wells’s novel in mind, and with what could be seen as an original reworking of the general theme of Wells’s novel – the reverse colonisation of Britain,25 and especially London, by lethal three-legged beings who feed on humans and are dead bent on putting an end to the rule of Man – it should be easy enough to see how Triffids lends itself to a related reading.
Drums, Poison, Cannibalism and Ambushes
One of the most striking ways in which the triffids are connected to colonialism is the various traits and characteristics attributed to them throughout the novel. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, discussing René Girard, monsterisation and degrading representations, has commented: ‘Monsters are never created ex nihi
lo, but through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which elements are extracted “from various forms” (including – indeed, especially – marginalized social groups) and then assembled as the monster, “which can then claim an independent identity.”’26 In The Day of the Triffids, the eponymous monster plants are clearly given traits that not only anthropomorphise them, but also make them readable as fragmented symbols for, or assemblages of metonymies of, both enslaved and indigenous jungle peoples, such as many of the colonised peoples of the tropical colonies.
Perhaps a first clue to such a reading is given when the narrator and protagonist, Bill Masen, introduces the first triffid and emphasises their exotic appearance: ‘Nowadays when everyone knows only too well what a triffid looks like it is difficult to recall how odd and somehow foreign the first ones appeared to us’ (p. 27, italics in original). From early on, triffids are also explicitly associated with jungles, as they first start moving or walking in the tropics – first in Indo-China, and then in ‘Sumatra, Borneo, Belgian Congo, Colombia, Brazil, and most places in the neighbourhood of the equator’ (pp. 28–9). Moreover, their dangerous behaviour in jungles is emphasised recurrently, for instance in a passage where the possibility of triffid intelligence is discussed: ‘“In jungle country they used to hang around near the tracks. Quite often they would surround a small village and invade it if they weren’t beaten off. They were a dangerous kind of pest in quite a lot of places”’ (pp. 201–2).
One of the most obvious jungle traits of the triffids is their ability to make drumming sounds, even communicate, by tapping their three sticks against their boles. The word ‘drum’, or ‘drumming’, is, however, only used a few times in the novel – in phrases such as ‘I stopped, listening to the staccato drumming outside’ (p. 158) – and the sounds are more often described as ’rattling’ (pp. 34–6, 159, 179, 200). Interestingly, the rhythmic noises are first linked to sexual reproduction (p. 34), just as the famous stereotype of the mating rituals of tribal peoples, but this theory is soon challenged by the triffid expert Walter Lucknor and his theory that they could in fact be ‘talking’, or at least ‘rattling out secret messages to one another’ (p. 36) – not unlike jungle drums and talking drums, but also similar to the use of drumming for secret communication on plantations in the West Indies.
In the novel, the whole graveness of the triffid threat lies in the fact that their stings are lethal, ‘capable of discharging enough poison to kill a man if it struck squarely on his unprotected skin’ (p. 32). Poison is, of course, a trait or characteristic not only associated with dangerous plants, insects and animals, but also with many indigenous peoples native to tropical areas, who have employed it for hunting or warfare, on spearheads, arrowheads, or on poisoned darts propelled through blowguns.
A further trait of the triffids that can be linked to stereotypes of so-called ‘primitive’ peoples is the fact that they are not only carnivores, but seem to prefer human flesh, which might be seen as suggestive of cannibalism. In introducing this trait, the novel is also unusually graphic, emphasising the anthropomorphic qualities of their behaviour: ‘The stinging tendril did not have the muscular power to tear firm flesh, but it had strength enough to pull shreds from a decomposing body and lift them to the cup on its stem’ (p. 34).
A final jungle trait found in the depiction of the triffids is their tendency to hide behind bushes or hedgerows (pp. 27, 121, 158, 221), silently awaiting their victims just as in then-common notions of ambushing ‘savages’. In fact, this ambush tactic is made very explicit early on, with clear parallels to the hunting and martial techniques of jungle peoples (pp. 32–3). Furthermore, these scenes appear to be connected to the ‘ur-scene’ that is sometimes said to have inspired the novel.
In addition to Vivian Beynon Harris’s and Wyndham’s own accounts of reusing an old story to create Triffids (see below), there is an alternative – or maybe complementary – genesis story that places the origin of the triffids in a rather mundane setting. According to an often-told anecdote, the idea for the triffids came from an experience of encountering very tall, menacing plants at night-time. Through the years, several variants of this story were related in various interviews, and with time the situation seems to have become remembered as increasingly intimidating.27 What the many slight variants of the same anecdote convey is not only threatening vegetation, but a scene in which this vegetation is linked with darkness, a roadside setting, sudden movement, surprise and fear – perhaps an apt condensation of an ambush.
As if drums, poison, cannibalism and ambushes weren’t enough, the connection to jungles is further strengthened by the fact that the triffids are, a few times in the novel, even described by the same derogatory word, ‘brute’, which seems to have been common in colonial times. For instance, at one point one of the blind men in Bill Masen’s party exclaims: ‘Bloody unnatural brutes … I always did hate them bastards’ (p. 121). At another, Coker has ‘seen a few of the ugly brutes about’ (p. 135), and, while surrounded at Shirning Farm, they ‘played the [flame] thrower over the besieging mob of the brutes’ (p. 204; cf. p. 205). ‘Brute’ is, of course, precisely the word used by Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), in his famous one-line addendum to his report on the process of civilising Africa: ‘“Exterminate all the brutes!”’28
Historically, the word ‘brute’ has been used to demarcate the boundary between, on the one hand, the restrained and cultured behaviour of civilised man, and, on the other, the crude, instinctive and animal-like behaviour of the uncivilised. As such it seems to have been associated with the colonised peoples of the Global south in general, and Africa in particular. In fact, as Sven Lindqvist notes, ‘Africans have been called beasts ever since the very first contacts, when Europeans described them as “rude and beastlie,” “like to brute beasts,” and “more brutish than the beasts they hunt.”’29 Interestingly, he notes that the word ‘brute’ is also used for the racially coded and cannibalistic Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine,30 the novel that introduced Wyndham to Wells, but also one that has been understood as dealing with colonialism.31
Of Monster Plants and Men
Seen from a wider perspective, the connection between monster plants and indigenous jungle peoples in Triffids is far from original. As T. S. Miller has pointed out, there is a rich tradition of carnivorous and ambulatory monster plants stretching back at least to the 1870s (and the teachings of Charles Darwin), with more than a hundred stories about vegetable monstrosities published in the early pulp magazines alone. Furthermore, there already existed a tradition of associating exotic, dangerous plants with jungles, cannibalism and indigenous peoples in general, such as in the newspaper hoaxes with the man-eating trees of Madagascar from the 1870s onwards and in short stories such as Arthur G. Stangland’s ‘The Lake of Life’ (Wonder Stories, November 1932), which takes place in Central Australia, and where the dark and hostile humanoids capturing the explorers are in fact rootless trees (see also Katherine E. Bishop’s essay in this volume).32
It is hard to tell exactly how aware Wyndham was of this tradition while writing Triffids, but as David Ketterer has demonstrated, there are several possible predecessors to Wyndham’s mobile plants in the American pulp magazines, many of which John Wyndham had probably encountered – for instance John Murray Reynolds’s ‘The Devil-Plant’ (Weird Tales, September 1928), Edmond Hamilton’s ‘The Plant Revolt’ (Weird Tales, April 1930), H. Thompson Rich’s ‘The Beast Plants’ (Argosy, 26 July 1930), Roger Wulfres’s ‘The Air-Plant Men’ (Wonder Stories, December 1930) and, perhaps most importantly, Laurence Manning’s ‘Seeds from Space’ (Wonder Stories, June 1935), which even features sentient plants that move on three roots.33
Regardless of possible influences, John Wyndham’s triffids seem to be a fairly original take on man-eating plants, as many of the earlier examples, while often ambulatory, were ‘a grossly outsized version of a real carnivorous plant species, usually possessed of some combination o
f extraordinary speed, inescapable tentacles, soporific and/or toxic exudations, parasitic seeds, and a thirst for human blood’.34 The list includes a few traits that the triffids lack, but is also short of one crucial triffid trait that further associates them with their colonial context: their whip-like stings.
Revolt of the Triffids
In his essay, T. S. Miller argues that ‘after Darwin, the man-eating plant comes to embody the uncomfortable truth that is universal common descent’, thus threatening to overturn the traditional hierarchies between humans, non-human animals and plants.35 Connecting this Darwinian challenging of hierarchies with a colonial one and the theme of reverse colonisation in Triffids is one telling detail, namely the relatively frequent references to the triffid sting as a whip. Throughout the novel, one of the verbs most often used to describe the slashing and stinging of the triffids is ’whipping’, in depictions such as ‘A long green lash whipped after them, striking one as he lay’ (p. 120), and ‘Like lightning something whipped out of the hedge on his left, and struck him’ (p. 158; see also pp. 122, 188, 204, 215). Whips are, of course, age-old symbols of an unequal, coercive relation between a slaveholder and his enslaved persons. Besides for herding or training cattle and other animals, whips were a distinguishing instrument of colonisation and commonly employed in especially the tropical colonies in order to increase productivity on the plantations, or to keep plantation workers in check. In fact, whips are even mentioned in this regard in the novel: in the private conversation with Josella Playton following Torrence’s offer, Bill Masen dismisses Torrence’s proposal with the words ‘Darling … do you really see me in the position of a seigneur, driving my serfs and villeins before me with a whip?’ (pp. 230–1)
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