Seen as part of the theme of the revenge of the repressed, the triffids can then, in a striking and humiliating symbol of the reversal of the roles of master and his enslaved, be seen as whipping their former masters, often depicted as masses of blind cattle, into submission – or, with the poisoned stings, more often death. This change of roles was, however, by no means new: as John Rieder has pointed out, ‘nightmarish reversals of the positions of coloniser and colonised in tales of invasion and apocalypse’ have been common since the late nineteenth century.36 Later on, they would also appear in various xenophobic propaganda, perhaps most famously in a speech by Enoch Powell in April 1968 (often called the ‘rivers of blood’ speech), where, in a vision of the near future, ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’.37 This theme of reverse colonisation becomes even more significant when seen in relation to the triffids’ role in the future economy of the novel, the fact that they were bred for profit, and the way in which triffid farming is depicted.
Commerce, Exploitation and the Venus Colonies
Beginning with the former, the major reason for farming triffids was due to their high yield of edible oil. This is described as ‘big business’ (p. 34), as one of the major problems facing the pre-apocalyptic world of the novel was food scarcity, with many resources invested in the creation of new croplands (p. 19). As with the novel’s depictions of blind people scavenging for and looting food and supplies, which would possibly have read as wish-fulfilment fantasies for UK readers still experiencing food rationing in the early 1950s, this concentration on food shortages, edible oil and even failure in the struggle against the forces of nature, is thoroughly grounded in the contemporary, colonial context of the novel. It is, for instance, highly likely that the function the triffids serve was inspired by food projects such as the disastrous Tanganyika groundnut scheme, which ran from c.1947 to 1951 and was widely discussed at the time the novel was written.38
Betraying its early Cold War context, in the novel as published by Michael Joseph in the UK in the autumn of 1951, the triffids are clearly terrestrial in origin and presented as most probably the result of Russian genetic experiments in the vein of Trofim Lysenko’s (pp. 18, 23). In the first American version of the novel, however, the abridged five-part serialisation in Collier’s from 6 January to 3 February 1951 under the title ‘Revolt of the Triffids’, the colonial context of the triffids is much more pronounced, as the triffids originate from colonies on Venus (possibly inspired by Venus flytraps).39 In fact, in an expository passage the economic interests in space exploration, off-world colonies and the bringing back of valuable resources are made fully explicit:
The research scientists learned very soon that certain vegetable products which flourished on the planets were enormously valuable, both as food and for remarkable medicinal properties.
The commercial exploitation of these products began almost immediately, and threw the world’s markets into dizzying cycles of competition.40
By introducing this set of economic and colonial parameters to the story, it is made clear that (at least in this version of the novel) the appearance of triffids and their edible oil are a result of colonial venture capitalism – and it is not difficult to draw parallels to the way in which European countries and companies established colonies in Asia, Africa and the Americas, perhaps especially in India and the West Indies. Historically, there has, of course, been a close association between large multinational companies and imperialism, going back at least to the setting up of the East India Company in 1600, and colonialism has even been described as the midwife of European capitalism.41
Indeed, central to the novel’s background treatment of the wider role of the triffids is its criticism of companies and corporations, and its depiction of their practices as invariably deceitful, secretive and motivated by greed. In the novel as published, most of this is conveyed in the few scenes detailing the fate of Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, a foreign businessman ‘of assorted Latin descent, and something South American by nationality’ (p. 21), and his dealings with the Arctic and European oil company. In the serialised US version of the novel, the character is described as an ‘enterprising Argentinian’ whose ‘name isn’t important’, and ‘who had founded a colony on Venus’, where it is implied that he had found, or at least cultivated, triffids.42 While the UK edition depicts a somewhat naive entrepreneur caught up in the interests of large multinational corporations, in the early US version his business methods are also portrayed as somewhat devious. As in the UK edition of the novel, however, he is reportedly shot down in mid-flight, although in a rocket ship en route from Venus to Earth (and, it is implied, by the Arctic and European oil company rather than by the Russians).43
In the oldest extant version of The Day of the Triffids, the mainly holograph manuscript probably written between 1946 and 1949,44 extraterrestrial colonialism and the planet Venus figure even more prominently.45 In fact, the whole subject of capitalism, colonies and triffid exploitation is much more emphasised, and it is likely that the considerable toning down of the social critique had to do with both artistic reasons and with maintaining a sense of decorum with the UK and US middle-class readerships.46 For instance, the topic of questionable corporate practices is introduced in rather vague and convoluted terms in the UK novel (p. 21), whereas the manuscript is often surprisingly explicit and even didactic, depicting businessmen as antagonistic to science and invention, and as not even refraining from murder if it helps business.47
Moreover, the whole section concerning Palanguez – in the manuscript expressly ‘an Argentinian of mixed Latin origin’48 – is significantly more focused on colonial ventures. For instance, it turns out that he
had been on board the third or fourth rocket to land successfully on Venus – and, indeed, that he held a considerable part of the shares in it. Immediately upon his return he had filed a claim to territory there with the World Court … Unlike several of the pioneers who blithely pressed their claims for exclusive possession of whole and vaguely defined continents, Umberto had the good sense to … produce a well documented & mapped application for an island roughly the size of Long Island. As a consequence the … territory had been rapidly assigned, after payment of dues, to him and his heirs in perpetuity.
The bright boys were well to the fore in the exploitation of Venus. It took them just a few weeks to uncover the most interesting local narcotics & dopes, and not much longer to start bringing them back to Earth.49
With its comparison of the acquired territory with Long Island, a conspicuous connection is made with the acquisition practices of European colonisers, but the passage also suggests echoes of the opium trade and other colonial drug enterprises (e.g. coffee and tobacco). On this Venusian island, Palanguez establishes ‘a series of plantations’, but because of the cost of exporting from Venus, he also plans triffid plantations in his home country of Argentina (itself a former colony with a history of violence against its indigenous peoples, but incidentally also where peanuts were possibly first domesticated).50
Many of these colonial aspects of the triffids were retained in the published versions of the novel, for instance in the scenes depicting (terrestrial) triffid farming. Not only are the farms sometimes called ‘plantations’ (pp. 25, 161), but their practices are somewhat reminiscent of those in the former colonies, especially in Africa and the West Indies. In order to prevent the triffids from escaping, for instance, they are ‘tethered by a chain’ to stakes not only like cattle, but like enslaved people (p. 35). According to Bill Masen, they also engage in collective breakouts: ‘If they worry at a stake hard enough and long enough, it’ll usually come in the end. The breakouts we used to get sometimes on the farms were due as a rule to their all crowding up against one section of the fence until it gave way’ (p. 91).
What is striking about the triffid farms is also their ubiquitousness, and the simultaneous ignorance of their existence among people in general – which has unpleasant echoes of both 194
0s atrocities and present-day animal keeping, but also of the economic foundations of Western affluence:
‘… Before all this began I’d have said there were only a few thousand of the things in the whole country, if anyone had asked me, but there must have been hundreds of thousands.’
‘There were,’ I said. ‘They’ll grow practically anywhere, and they were pretty profitable. There didn’t seem to be so many when they were penned up in farms and nurseries.’ (p. 218)
In a late addition to the oldest extant manuscript, introducing the idea of satellite weapons, the colonial context of the triffids is not only pronounced, but the passage also contains a much more detailed discussion of guilt than in the published novel, almost as if Bill Masen saw the exploited triffids as sentient beings rather than just a strange breed of plants:
‘The triffids were altogether our fault – not yours and mine – but the fault of our clever-clever people … We have commercially inspired meddling and shortsightedness to thank for their being here at all … But did anyone sit down to weigh the pros + cons about bringing them here? No. All … that interested them was big profits quickly, & they jumped in. In point of fact we were lucky … They might have grown into the monsters they are in their home forests – nobody knew or cared how they would do here as long as there was profit to be got from them.51
Regardless of the version of the novel, all the triffids’ traits and connections to jungles, colonies and colonial ventures and practices suggest a reading of Triffids as a story of reverse colonisation, where the dangers of the jungle arrive in imperial Britain. In fact, the triffids seem at first to be a clear case of metonymic transfer, where the exotic and highly dangerous jungle plants stand in for the – as they were perceived at the time – equally exotic and dangerous, untamed and uncivilised peoples of the tropical colonies. Rather than a simple case of metonymy, however, this similitude could also be seen as a conflation of plants and people, so that the novel engages in a dual oppression, exploitation and return of the repressed, changing our view of the triffids, and possibly plants in general, through its depiction of them as indigenous or colonised peoples. No matter how far one wants to extend the analysis, perhaps in terms of ecological imperialism or even imperial biopolitics, the connection between colonialism and vegetation was far from new to Wyndham’s authorship.
The Origin of the Species
Themes of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, captivity and exploitation abound in John Wyndham’s work. His short stories, such as ‘Worlds to Barter’ (Wonder Stories, May 1931), ‘The Venus Adventure’ (Wonder Stories, May 1932), ‘Exiles on Asperus’ (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1933), ‘Phoney Meteor’ (Amazing Stories, March 1941), ‘The Living Lies’ (New Worlds, October 1946), ‘Time to Rest’ (The Arkham Sampler, Winter 1949), ‘No Place Like Earth’ (New Worlds, Spring 1951) and ‘Dumb Martian’ (Galaxy, July 1952), often deal with colonialism, dispossession and even racism, with abused Martians and other aliens clearly coded as indigenous peoples.52 Many of his major novels can also easily be seen as comments on British imperialism, such as The Kraken Wakes (1953), which could be read as an allegory for the loss of British supremacy at sea (with the alien xenobaths standing in for German submarines), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which revolves around the sudden intrusion of a foreign culture in Middle England (and maybe even features a key to the symbolism in Wyndham’s 1950s novels in the fact that Zellaby is writing a book titled The British Twilight),53 or the posthumous Web (1979), which deals with a failed attempt at establishing a utopian colony on a Pacific island, where the last native inhabitants team up with lethal, mutated spiders to defend their traditional way of life.
One of the most interesting colonial intertexts in Wyndham’s oeuvre, however, is an early short story which can even be seen as a predecessor to The Day of the Triffids, namely the story first published in the US as ‘Spheres of Hell’ (Wonder Stories, October 1933), and later in the UK as ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’ (Tales of Wonder, July 1938). According to David Ketterer, this is the short story Vivian Beynon Harris refers to in his account of his brother John Wyndham taking ‘an old short story’ and producing Triffids. In fact, Ketterer goes as far as to describe the famous novel as ‘a direct expansion of … “The Puff-Ball Menace” with the yellow puff-balls mutated into yellow-headed triffids’.54
What is most striking about ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’ is the way in which it deals with colonialism, cultural imperialism and the return of the repressed. The story depicts a malevolent attack on England by biological weapons in the form of poisonous puff-balls, perpetrated as revenge against Western civilisation in general, and perhaps British colonialism in particular. The Fu Manchuesque motive can be deduced from the opening and closing scenes of the short story, which form a frame to the story proper (mainly taking place in Devon and Cornwall, where conceited horticulturalists and gardeners are lured into growing what is described to them as a new vegetable, and which then threatens to spread to the rest of the country with the Atlantic winds).
Both the opening and closing scenes take place in the imaginary country of Ghangistan (probably derived from Genghis Khan), with clearly orientalist depictions of its Muslim inhabitants. When the ruler, Prince Khordah, addresses his council, outlining the reasons behind his thirst for revenge, it is also hinted that Ghangistan might be a British colony:
‘What can we do? These English, and other foreigners, trifle with us. They do not so much as stir to consider our demands. We are treated like children – we, of Ghangistan, whose temples and palaces were weathered when these English hid in caves, whose ancestors reach back unbroken to the creation. We offer them war, and they laugh as one laughs at the ferocity of a cornered mouse. Here we must sit, impotent, while they pour over our country the froth and ferment of their way of life, in mockery of the wisdom of our sacred ancestors …
‘And we can do nothing. We have no big guns, no aeroplanes. We must sit by and watch our ancient race seduced from its gods, and hear the voice of wisdom drowned by the sounding emptiness of materialism.’55
The motive behind the furtive and ingenious puff-ball attack is then clearly related to the perceived cultural imperialism of Britain and Western civilisation, of materialistic ideals backed by technological weapons. The rulers of Ghangistan feel helpless and humiliated in their traditional beliefs and ways of life, which seems to call for desperate measures – when alluding to the method of the attack, the old council member Haramin actually describes what is, to a modern reader, eerily recognisable as a case of asymmetrical warfare (it is his Western-educated nephew who comes up with the plan). And at the end of the short story, after the invasion of puff-balls has been repelled, Prince Khordah also establishes that the plan to use biological weapons ‘has cost that accursed country more than did ever our wars – and we have lost nothing’.56
What ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’ shows, then, is that the very seed to Triffids clearly revolves around the issue of empire, colonialism and a revenge exacted on the civilian population of Britain. Like the triffids, the puffballs are sometimes anthropomorphised, as when they are depicted as ‘an army of vegetable invaders launching their attack to capture the land and destroy human beings’, and they also share the triffids’ cannibalistic traits, as they are described as thriving ‘equally well on decay, or on living flesh’.57 Even though they are technically fungi, the puffballs are explicitly linked to the vegetable kingdom, and through it to the already established literary trope of associating monster plants with indigenous or colonised peoples.
Conclusion
Finally, what all the traits and characteristics of the triffids – their drumming, poisonous weapons, flesh-eating habits, ambush tactics and the fact that they are bred for profit on plantations, kept in chains and revolt against the British using whips – would seem to suggest is that there is more at stake in The Day of the Triffids than just offering a vegetable version of Second World War Germans. In view of their predecessors in both previous work
s of speculative fiction in general, and John Wyndham’s oeuvre in particular, I have argued that the triffids should best be read as distorted symbols for the colonised peoples of the British empire; in the contemporary context of the novel, the first years of British decolonisation, they could perhaps even be seen as symbolic harbingers of the end of the empire itself.
As Nicholas Ruddick has noted, the ‘fundamental anxiety underlying Wyndham’s catastrophe fiction is that of being superseded’, and on a surface level this anxiety is depicted as Darwinian in nature, ‘the fear of human extinction at the hands of some more advanced or ruthless species’.58 That Wyndham was heavily influenced by Darwinism, especially through H. G. Wells, is incontestable, and one could easily argue, as Phil Gochenour has done, that all of Wyndham’s novels from the 1950s ‘deal explicitly with adaptation, survival, and species competition in moments of ecological crisis’.59 In fact, a Darwinian reading of Triffids is conveniently supplied in the novel itself (pp. 36–7, 92–3, 207–10).60
Ruddick, however, makes the case that there is something else going on as well, and that the real source for this anxiety seems to stem from
the threat of the nuclear age to the insular self, the former externalized as the alien and the latter as the still unravished, but ever more vulnerable Island of Britain. The typical Wyndham protagonist articulates the bewilderment of the average Englishman at a time when the Island’s centrality was being challenged, its dominance superseded, by forces so powerful that nothing whatever could be done to counter them. The Islanders were being asked to make the helpless recognition in the cold war period that, with political and technological hegemony lost, they had been reduced to a supporting role on the world stage.61
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