This chapter takes the many and varied toxicities of the Anthropocene as an unavoidable starting point for thinking about all forms of embodiment.12 Rather than exploring toxicity in VanderMeer’s work, which I have undertaken elsewhere, I instead want to use this chapter to explore the corporeal hybridity that VanderMeer posits as a response to or engagement with contaminated worlds.13 To do this I look specifically at significant moments of ingestion as points of contact between the toxic and the body. Of course, the toxic is not always so easily pointed to as the thing ‘out there’, but always already inside, just as Fisher wrote of the weird: ‘There is no inside except as a folding of the outside … I am an other, and I always was.’14 Weird embodiment points to certain nonhuman foldings and queer kinships, and perhaps the recognition of oneself as always and already other. Ingestion and inhalation are just two modes of intimate contact among others, two processes through which materials and bodies become in some way connected, that are at work between plants, fungi and humans in VanderMeer’s work.
VanderMeer’s novella ‘This World is Full of Monsters’ (2017) is a text that portrays a vegetal invasion of a human body through the stomach. Readers familiar with VanderMeer’s previous works will recognise in this novella a return to the vegetal and fungal takeovers that have populated many of his stories. The novels of his Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), for example, develop a harrowing and perplexing tale of a mossy, tendrilled growth snaking along the walls of an abandoned tower, contorting itself into a display of words and phrases and releasing spores that the biologist inhales in Annihilation. Borne (2017), the novel that followed the trilogy three years later, is named after an entity that has been described as an ‘amorphous plant-turned-sentient-creature’ that learns how to transform itself into exact copies of the two characters who take it into their home.15 VanderMeer’s even earlier Ambergris books – City of Saints and Madmen (2001), Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009) – demonstrate his early interest in fungal nonhumans (the mushroom-like ‘grey-caps’) outside the Animal Kingdom. Taken together, these texts demonstrate a continued interest in nonhuman plant and fungal relations and perhaps even an environmental ethics that distinctively emerges through the lens of the Weird. If VanderMeer offers vegetal and sporous fictions that consider the conditions and futures of the Anthropocene, together these texts suggest that nonhuman forms of life offer alternative ways of theorising embodiment for these times. Rather than privileging liberal-human experiences of bounded individualism and embodiment, these alternatives present hybridity, vulnerability, openness and queer body-communities as not merely symptoms of the Anthropocene, but as necessitated by it. But as VanderMeer’s fiction shows – especially through characters whose bodies merge with plants – grappling with this transformation is not purely celebratory, but is often both uncomfortable and nearly impossible to comprehend.
In a recent issue of Social and Cultural Geography about vegetal life and relations, Lesley Head and her collaborators claim that ‘The profound transformations and future uncertainties in the landscapes of the Anthropocene … require the best possible understanding of human– plant relations’.16 They suggest that in order to navigate the future, understanding the interconnectedness between humans and plants will be integral to survival and flourishing. Turning to plants in the Anthropocene is a gesture made urgent by the conditions of a changing planet as well as by shifting conceptions of what constitutes the body. Additionally, the vegetal focus across Head’s work points to the importance of inter-species world-building in the Anthropocene: many plants’ rooted networks of inter-species dependence and communication provide models of living communally and entangled with others. Deconstructing the individual via the plant is not only about revealing the boundaries of self as porous or de-centred, it also underscores how vegetal life produces forms of queer body-commons through shared atmospheres and affects.
VanderMeer has written that ‘mapping elements of the Anthropocene via weird fiction may create a greater and more visceral understanding … precisely because so many of the effects of this era are felt in and under the skin’.17 He points to the ways in which weird fiction allows one to feel the Anthropocene, to relate to its causes and effects as a kind of sensation. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have together written that weirdness is ‘as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing’, and that ‘the most keenly attuned amongst us will say “I know it when I see it”, by which they mean “I know it when I feel it”.18 The weird is not only a genre that explores questions of embodiment, it is also one that readers are meant to experience in the body. Fisher has similarly described the weird as the ‘sensation of wrongness’ – the weird object makes us ‘feel like it should not exist’. Fisher goes on to say that it is not the weird object that is wrong; ‘it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.’19 The weird genre is thus appropriate for stories concerning the Anthropocene precisely because of the epoch’s inherent weird, impossible scales of temporality, change and violence that accompany geological thinking. The weird is therefore experienced not primarily as cerebral, but as visceral; it can make things felt in the body that seemingly cannot be understood otherwise. Weird embodiment is not only represented by the hybrid, montage bodies that populate VanderMeer’s fiction; it also encompasses the inherently visceral experience of weird encounters in the Anthropocene.
As I hope to demonstrate, plants and fungi present us with radically different forms of being-in-the-world as alternatives to that of the nonhuman animal. Their temporality, their massively networked underground spatiality, their limitless proliferation and their ‘refusal to conform to the biopolitical … imperatives through which life is generally understood, valued, and organized’ make plants rich subjects through which to imagine the body and community in new ways.20 In part because they have long been impossible to categorise in scientific terms, plants have often challenged the way life is organised.21 They provoke new conversations about what constitutes sentient life, and botanists continue to discover new ways that plants communicate with other life-forms. Randy Laist has written that plants pose a ‘significant barrier to our imagination. Plants seem to inhabit a timesense, a life cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms.’22 Perhaps the radical otherness and the weirdness of vegetation, particularly as exemplified in VanderMeer’s fiction, can prompt meditation on the assumptions that underpin the concept of life itself – its contours and durations.
Pas-de-Tête
Few have explored the provocative weirdness of vegetal embodiment in a more sustained way than the philosopher Michael Marder, who asks the question that began this chapter: ‘What would it mean to write and think in a vegetal – if not a vegetative – state, having left one’s head behind or walking on one’s head?’ Against often harmful notions of the vegetative as being without consciousness, Marder retools the ‘vegetative’ to insist instead on a pairing of vegetality with animacy, agency or liveliness. In what follows, I work through this strange, somewhat anatomical question of ‘the head’ in relation to VanderMeer’s writing, and I propose that weird fiction suggests that we ‘lose our heads’ in order to reconfigure ecological consciousness. Perhaps weird fiction is exactly the place to grapple with the weirdness of vegetal embodiment and its dismissal of the head as the privileged centre of liberal-human selfhood.
Marder’s essay, ‘Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics: Learning from Plants’, begins with a beheading. It is a symbolic decapitation that follows from the French essayist and poet Francis Ponge’s curious suggestion that flowers and plants ‘have no head, pas de tête’.23 Marder arrives at Ponge through a brief but captivating account of both plants and heads in Western metaphysics from Plato to Heidegger that accounts for how vegetal life has been central to philosophical justifications of human exceptionalism. In Plato’s metaphysics, for example, Marder shows that the human may be rooted in the earth but it is in the sky where the soul i
s housed ‘“at the top of our body”… elevating us to the position … “not [of] an earthly but [of] a heavenly plant – up from the earth towards our kindred in the heaven”’.24 The head, the centre of thought and ideas, is supported by roots from which we supposedly came, and which additionally operate in order to ‘“keep upright our whole body”’.25 Twentieth-century philosophy, particularly in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, somewhat differently emphasises the vegetal conceptualisation of the soul not merely as located in the ether but as necessarily grounded in the earth below: ‘We are plants which – whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not – must with our roots rise out the earth in order to bloom in the ether and to bear fruit … man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether.’26 In Plato and Heidegger, as well as in other philosophical accounts of the relation between the vegetal and the human, Marder locates the repeated metaphor of human as plant that is focused on the locale of the head, the soul or the capacity for reason.
But Marder is not satisfied with these flawed metaphors, and here is the moment he turns to Ponge. Marder writes, ‘Rather than search for a more accurate analogue to the objectively fixed head, it is imperative … to perform a symbolic decapitation … of the old metaphysical values.’27 Ponge’s claim that plants have no head dethrones the notion of the head as the locus of the soul, as well as the idea of unidirectional growth and progress that each of the previous philosophical accounts attaches to it. Through a symbolic decapitation, the plant is understood as devoid of any single privileged locus of being, possessing instead a ‘bidirectionality of growth, striving, at once, toward light and darkness’. Marder writes that in Ponge’s conception, ‘both extremities of plants are “beheaded”; the root and the flower are neither essential, nor radically indispensable, nor do they stand for the spiritual culminations of vegetal being’.28 For Marder, vegetal being can thus radically reframe metaphysics by resituating the body according to a conceptual, temporal and spatial in medias res, a kind of liveliness radiating outward from the distributed middle. Plant bodies eschew the privileged authority of the head or centre. The middle is instead ‘often de-centered … It is this middle place, not a fictitious inaccessible origin, that holds the promise of growth and proliferation, dispersed from the moment of its germination, unable either to gather itself into a unity or to orient itself in a single direction.’29 Following Ponge, Marder writes, ‘Its “ambiguity” is in part what is attractive about the phrase “pas-de-tête”:
At the juncture between a mere inversion and a leveling of hierarchical metaphysical oppositions, pas de tête can mean ‘no head,’ or it can refer to the ‘step of the head.’ Its indeterminate, unstable meaning invokes the act of walking on one’s head, feet up, or losing one’s head altogether, something [Ponge] strives toward, following the example of plants.30
He goes on to explain that ‘[t]he head, in sum, loses its transcendental privilege’.31 The possible meanings in the passage above, taken from the concept of plants as headless beings, together suggest a ‘vegetal anti-metaphysics’ of distributed agency opposed to a humanist metaphysics that identifies the brain as a singular centre of intelligence and consciousness.
Together, Marder and Ponge provoke a reading of VanderMeer’s work that suggests we strive toward losing our heads altogether. VanderMeer’s fiction invites a surrender to the weird that requires readers to forgo their expectations about narrative; one must read without fully understanding the world or the rules of the world. As VanderMeer has noted, an experience of abandonment to the unknown is a current that runs through weird writing, and his own fiction depicts a specific form of surrender to weird forms of vegetal corporeality. In his work, plant bodies model alternative spatial and temporal orientations that help to structure possible alternative ways of imagining embodiment and difference within rapidly changing ecologies.
Queer ingestions
In ‘This World is Full of Monsters’, the narrator is an obituary writer who meets his own end late one night when a ‘story-creature’ arrives at his doorstep. The package that holds this creature is left under his welcome mat, and it assumes the form of a crawling booklet covered in ‘green fur or green moss’ and bearing large teeth: ‘It purred, and the purr grew louder and louder: a beautiful flower bud opening and opening until I was filled up. I heard the thrush and pull of the darkness, grown so mighty inside my head.’32 As he reads, the story-booklet, purring in the pleasure of anticipation, overtakes him: ‘The story gnawed its way into my belly and then the story crawled up through my body into my head.’ It invades his brain, and while he pleads for mercy, it transforms him: ‘the story-creature sprouted out of the top of my skull in a riot of wildflowers, golden rod, and rough weeds … [they] twined together and became something else and roots splayed out into me and atop my head grew a sapling.’33 He runs for the forest as the story-creature uses him and then discards his body in a thicket, where, utterly transformed, he doesn’t wake again for one hundred years.
The narrator’s transformation into a plant–human hybrid decentres normative embodied conceptions of subjectivity: the sapling atop the narrator’s head renders the head no longer the apex of the body and of reason. As Marder writes of vegetal anti-metaphysics after philosophical decapitation, ‘It is this middle place … that holds the promise of growth and proliferation, dispersed from the moment of its germination, unable either to gather itself into a unity or to orient itself in a single direction’,34 VanderMeer’s narrator thus writes that as he was becoming-plant, his ‘balance was off’ as he ran for the forest, ‘smashing into trees, backtracking, unable to know where I was or trying to wrest control from the things that wanted to control me … a hole had been left behind and my consciousness ached and jumped through the hole again and again like it led to hell or to nothing.’35 The loss of consciousness through the sapling’s takeover of the narrator’s head renders his body unruly and de-centres his mind as the locus of thought and control. He repeatedly describes how this transformation affects his stability: his balance is off, and he is unable to stabilise or orient himself. Through intimate inter-species entanglements with the vegetal, futurity destabilised and directionality multiplied, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, the narrator becomes estranged from himself.
The gaining of the vegetal body atop his head is also a loss – of control, of (merely human) consciousness, of oneself. As the narrator writes later: ‘the fortress of my body lay behind a glistening wall … even the space that had been my brain softened and spread out to coat the inside of that entire space I must call separate from the world. Namely: me.’ And yet he says, ‘But somehow it felt right.’36 It is this corporeal negotiation with the nonhuman vegetal world that has developed as a process central to VanderMeer’s fiction, and which is pointedly explored in ‘This World is Full of Monsters’. As with his other texts, especially the Ambergris and Southern Reach trilogies, this shift into something explicitly other-than (or at least more-than) human is most often a transformation into a hybridity of vegetal or fungal forms. The attitude with which narrators confront their transformations is also what marks VanderMeer’s fiction as a site of negotiation with their transformation: how do they respond? Though challenged by the violence and suffering that accompanies their change, the narrator of ‘Monsters’ ultimately claims that despite the pain, ‘somehow it felt right’. It’s unclear whether its feeling right is a matter of its inevitability or if this is a moral judgement, but he ultimately seems to accept – perhaps even to find pleasure in – his new form, even at the cost of the end of his humanity. The story suggests that the key to survival and even flourishing in catastrophic times may be to seek refuge in the vegetal; vegetal-being may entail the loss of self, but somehow, this might actually ‘feel right’. The inherent conflict of weird bodies that evoke, in Fisher’s words, sensations of ‘wrongness’, but that also ‘feel right’ seems central to weird embodiment. Becoming-with others, especially nonhuman others, is wrought w
ith difficulties and tension. VanderMeer’s work repeatedly demonstrates that to radically re-imagine forms of embodiment in a changing world can be frightening, painful and disorienting – yet also somehow, strangely, hopeful.
While ‘This World is Full of Monsters’ explores the vegetal body, VanderMeer’s work has also explored transformation through the inhalation of spores from both vegetal and fungal life. Mushrooms, moss and other alien species of plants and fungus blanket the landscapes of VanderMeer’s fiction regardless of world, planet or time period. These various and undefined low-lying, crawling, sometimes viney species in his work seem to share among them the capacity for reproduction through the release of spores, which figure as a kind of carrier of radical bodily and cognitive change.
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