Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  Science fiction is a ready-made venue for ekphrasis’s attempt to overcome the otherness of the image in text while probing new horizons in the representation of representation. It is a perfect vehicle to explore both alien subjects and the process of descriptive alienation animating the sf imaginary, and ekphrastic sf provides an additional level of estrangement, a second level of refraction, illuminating subjects like the botanical that have so often been cast aside. In this essay, I examine a pattern of notional ekphrasis in ecological speculative fiction that shatters its human protagonists – and the assumptions that sustain them – by weirding the language and social logics depicting their encounters with the natural world. The rapid dissolution of their binary worldviews encourages speculation on what plants are, how humans see them and how we are enmeshed with them, all while positing a subject position that is augmented by a new appreciation of the vegetal. I first turn to Algernon Blackwood’s short story ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ (1912), which ruminates on possibilities of human–plant kinship alongside early twentieth-century innovations in plant intelligence and being through the lens crafted by a portrait of a tree. Then I move to Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation, where ekphrasis reveals the underlying plant nature of words and worlds, the beingness of plants beyond the surface, which in turn alters the viewer. I conclude by discussing how this act of seeing can work to ‘disenchant’ the spell, keeping us not just ‘plant blind’, to borrow phrases from Robert Hass and James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, but blind to the ramifications of that blindness, finding in the ekphrasis of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Diary of the Rose’ (1974) and William Gibson’s ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’ (1977) revolutionary potential for disrupting biopolitical structures and the ecological dislocation that so often accompanies them.4

  ‘I see it now – through his eyes’: Psychological Portraiture

  A rather traditional scene of transformation is found in Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 short story, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’. Blackwood’s text features a retired British colonial officer, his wife and a painter, known only as Sanderson, grappling with the uncanny knowability of trees, wondering if plants know, and if they can know, can they feel? If they can feel, is it possible they can have relationships with one another and with us? The answers hinge on a painting of a Lebanon cedar, a varietal famed for its role in works such as the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, where it serves as a gatekeeper to the gods. Here, it serves as a different sort of gatekeeper, as a mediator between the vegetal and human, a distinction that it simultaneously works to blur. This mediation enables the main character, Colonel Bittancy, to suddenly see in the painting a tree he had a great fondness for as a ‘comrade’ – and for his wife to express her discomfort with this alliance. Blackwood’s text uses ekphrasis as a gateway to reconsiderations of the stakes of traversing these borders. Through its ekphrastic speculations, the utopian text queries the nature of plants, psychologically as well as physiologically, leading to a revelation that puts natural taxonomies and social echelons in conjunction, dislocating sightlines of imperial power.

  The first move Blackwood makes towards ekphrastic speculation is in his choice of representative genre. I wrote ‘painting’ above because you were expecting it. If I had written ‘portrait’, you might have paused and wondered at my word choice. Portraits, both visual and verbal, tend to be reserved for humans and well-pampered pets, those with, one might say, souls. Paintings do for all else. However, Blackwood wrote specifically about a portrait of this particular cedar: the odd-on-the-surface word choice seems intentional and supports my reading of the place of ekphrasis in the text. For one, rather than describing the tree physically, Blackwood describes its psychological reflection through the portrait, springboarding into contemporaneous scientific inquiry to reconsider the impact of such findings on the already unsettled human relationship with the vegetal world. As Bittancy examines the image, ‘a curious wistful expression danced a moment through his eyes. “Yes, Sanderson has seen it as it is”.’5 Both the painter and his client see the tree as an individual, and a friendly one at that. The colonel decides to invite the artist to visit in order to ask him ‘how he saw so clearly that [the tree] stands there between this cottage and the Forest – yet somehow more in sympathy with us than with the mass of woods behind – a sort of go-between. That I never noticed before. I see it now – through his eyes.’6 Because of his new-found perspective, he comes to muse on whether a tree can be considered alive ‘in any lawful meaning of the term’ and decides to ask the artist, reasoning that ‘A man who could paint the soul of a cedar in that way must know it all.’7 The cedar is in sympathy with him and protects him from the gloaming, capitalised forest behind; it has a soul: it merits a portrait.

  Echoing nineteenth-century plant studies pioneer Gustav Fechner, who conveyed his theories of vegetal souls in his 1848 treatise, Nanna oder über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Nanna, or the Soul Life of Plants), Blackwood’s painter argues that ‘The wonder that lies hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and silence of a mere potato.’8 This mirrors many of the revelations of the Enlightenment that pushed human knowledge of the natural world, and thus humans’ own place in it, to, at times, uncomfortable new heights. Aristotle found that a soul is a sense of purpose, a rallying cause, of which plants had little, only enough to procreate and prosper (but asexually; remember, Aristotle believed in spontaneous regeneration). Continuing the 1878 findings by the German scientist Wilhelm Pfeffer on the habituation of the Mimosa pudica, or the sensitive plant, the Bengali biophysicist and botanist Jagadish Chandra Bose strove to prove that plants actively sense, explore, feel emotional and physical pain, and, crucially, adapt to their environments in ways akin to humans. Darwin, too, got into the game, theorising on plant cognition in the 1870s and 1880s.

  Such burgeoning studies of plant consciousness are (literally) drawn into Blackwood’s story by Sanderson, who counters the colonel’s wife’s religion-based contentions against plant-being, summarising many of the studies of his and our day:

  ‘But plants do breathe too, you know,’ he said. ‘They breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their environment as men and animals do. They have a nervous system too… at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells. They may have memory too. Certainly, they know definite action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological, no one has proved that it is only that, and not – psychological.’9

  The colonel goes beyond thinking through plants as living beings that have many of the same interactive systems as humans to argue that the trees communicate. The trees of England know him during the time of the story because the trees in India knew him in the time before the story began: ‘“There is communion among trees all the world over”’, he avers, citing the wind as a means of ‘“linking dropped messages and meanings from land to land like the birds”’.10 The colonel likewise serves to disseminate Blackwood’s literature review of the field of plant studies: he reads Francis Darwin’s address to the Royal Society on plant sentience to his wife, quoting Darwin’s arguments on plant consciousness at length. As the artist, the colonel and his wife discuss the possibilities of plant-being, they separately come to feel closer to vegetal life than they had before, for good or ill: ‘Each one in his own way realized – with beauty, with wonder, with alarm – that the talk had somehow brought the whole vegetable kingdom nearer to that of man. Some link had been established between the two.’11 As an effect of their consideration, the trees suddenly move from the background to sharing the foreground of their perception, in a supposed threat to human dominance.

  As Blackwood’s text implants multiple refractions – the painter’s vision is translated onto the canvas, where it moves the colonel, who then describes it to the reader – the ekphrastic process presses readers to try to imagine the tree as the colonel and the painter do (fri
endly, stalwart, brave and true) as well as to take what they know of trees and overlay the possibility that there is more than lies beneath the bark. In other words, to shift the planes of their points of view. The painting provides a liminal zone of possibility in which mimesis and notionality intersect, raising the question of what else the reader is looking at but not seeing. And if the looming notion of Nature itself, that which is not human, that which is not us, so the story goes, is up for reconsideration, it asks, why not other naturalised (but no more natural) categories?

  Take empire. The trees serve as metaphorical stand-ins for the colonised peoples the colonel had worked to ‘cultivate’ in India as part of the imperial project he had served, if one considers the way indigenous people have been reduced throughout history to what Giorgio Agamben names ‘bare life’, their humanity abjected. The text offers a scathing critique of British colonialism and potentially a satire of anxieties pertaining to reverse colonialism, not so far removed from the complicated relationship animating Wyndham’s triffids that Jerry Määttä unpacks in this volume. Beyond the metaphor, Blackwood’s text suggests that human colonisation goes beyond the human, that the effects of what Alfred Crosby termed ecological imperialism, the use of disease, animals and plants to further plans for domination of life forms other than humans, such as trees, also matters. As Jeffrey T. Nealon writes, following Foucault, ‘one might suggest that role of abjected other as having been played throughout the biopolitical era not by the animal but by the plant.’12 Given its overt references to the emerging discourse on plant-being as well as the artistic treatment of the cedar tree depicted, it is within bounds to suggest that ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ critiques the prevalent dismissal of colonised others as bare life, while using visual art (refracted through the text) to re-examine that same plant life as another colonised group whose abilities and inherent values had been underestimated in the face of an agenda of naturalised dominance. The way we see plants has far-reaching implications, this text suggests; the violence of refusing sovereignty to other lives reflects the expanse of biopower. Taken to extremes it supports the stratification of power, enforcing a ‘citizen’ vs. ‘other’ hierarchy. Through Sanderson’s paintings, Bittancy and then the viewer see beyond the frozen cultural perceptions of trees (and colonised peoples), and, through ekphrasis, extended visions of kinship, rhizomatically strung throughout the world rather than trapped within constructed borders. Bittancy himself ultimately rejects these social and species-centric strata, entering and merging with the forest, losing part of himself and gaining another, as Jessica George discusses more at length in this volume. He unmakes himself as a servant of empire and remakes himself as something else.

  Trading Time and Type: Weirding Dislocation

  As shown in ‘The Man Whom The Trees Loved’, ekphrasis often causes the reader to pause, somewhere between the page and the setting, the present and the narrative’s time, making room for the meaningful moment. Murray Krieger finds that the literary imitation of the visual stands in for ‘the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be superimposed upon literature’s turning world to “still” it’, the equivalent of a pregnant pause.13 This pausing zooms in on the object of study, allowing the viewer to describe and interact with it. In cases such as Jeff VanderMeer’s New Weird 2014 Southern Reach trilogy, it can also draw out the narratives superimposed upon the scene. In VanderMeer’s novels, the realm called Area X has been blocked off because of its instability. Its representation will not hold. This innate flux has been at the centre of a number of recent studies: Benjamin Robertson describes Area X as a place that ‘defies human attempts to understand it’, yet ‘nonetheless demands concern for and attention to the weird planet’; in this volume, Alison Sperling discusses VanderMeer’s sporous New Weird as an adaptive means of queering human corporeality to transform and expand human subjectivity.14 Herein, I focus on the instability of representation and the way the vegetal visual refuses to be pinned, labelled and controlled by verbal description, requiring evolving interaction.

  In Area X, dolphins seem to have human eyes. The land has risen. Oddities reign. Teams of researchers enter from the last bastion of civilisation, the Southern Reach outpost, but few come out. The novels follow characters named by their occupations (and preoccupations): the biologist, Control, the Director. Chief among their interests in Area X are its inverted tower and lighthouse. The tower was birthed by the landscape and spirals downward, pulsing with life and glowing with an inscription composed of protean greenery on its walls. The novel itself is the biologist’s log book, her epistolary record of her observations of Area X. She records her initial impression of the mysterious inscription, charting its morphology. The inscription, language visualised, breathlessly begins ‘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’, perhaps itself a commentary on the nature of description.15 Much of the action of the novel is centred on puzzling over these green letters. Who is writing these words? What do they mean? How do they mean? When the biologist approaches them in the first volume, Annihilation, she is caught, wanting to read on, snared by Krieger’s ‘frozen, stilled world’. She describes her compulsion in a way familiar to her audience as an urge ‘to keep reading, to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had read all there was to read’.16 Only her team-mate’s utterance of one of the most literalised imperatives to perform close reading in recent history gives the biologist pause: ‘What are they made of?’17 The biologist stops to wonder at the words: ‘Did they need to be made of anything? The illumination cast on the continuing sentence quavered and shook. Where lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning … I needed to get closer. What are they made of?’18 She presses on, flipping through typical botanical narratives (magical wilderness, ornamental, symbolic, scientific) as she investigates the inscription and what its mysterious words are made of, caught in the moment while the fruiting bodies before her, possibly no longer even plants, shift. As Robertson finds, Area X resists being read or ‘digested’ as a text: ‘Area X is something else, what has always already disrupted the processes by which borders are established between that and this, between one space or time and another space or time, between the human and whatever its other happens to be.’19

  Because every act of ekphrasis is an interpretation, by its very nature it queries the act of representation: while on the one hand providing an inhabitation of an image, on the other ekphrasis destabilises the act of representation, and points to the inadequacy of all of representation. ‘Neither verbal narrative nor graphic stasis can fully represent being; neither words nor sculpture can make absolute claims to permanence, stability, or truth’, finds James Heffernan; neither reading nor recording can either.20 When the biologist looks closely at the inscription, she sees it is more than the words that had compelled her forward: the words themselves are a world of their own. Her description of it shows its transformation. It in turn morphs her. Instead of staying verbal messages, the words on the wall of the tunnel become imagistic, things to be described; in moving from words to objects to words again, suddenly their entirety becomes something else entirely – the reader-perceiver stills, not the image. This ‘stilled’ moment of what is supposed to be a scientific record, the biologist’s field notebook, zooms in upon what is often already considered still life, the world of plants, and is reanimated, altering the view and the viewer.

  At first, the biologist assumes that the walls are coated in ‘dimly sparkling green vines’, dangerously wild and almost magical. She quickly domesticates her description into a reminiscence of a ‘floral wallpaper treatment’ from her bathroom before she realises that what she sees are not vines at all but ‘words, in cursive’, a fittingly connective script, ‘the letters raised about six inches off of the wall’.21 Her description (d)evolves from the impression of their writerly presence to at
tempts at more horticultural exactness: the letters look to be made of ‘a rich green fernlike moss’, but may be ‘a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism’, or, as they are repeatedly described, ‘fruiting bodies’.22 Her breathless record kaleidoscopes, shifting the reader’s imagined perception from the fantastic to the banal – a domestic interior, then understandable words. But then this banalisation is shaken off and the image returns to the wild. As the biologist reasons, pondering the inscription, ‘Who knew if it was actually true? It was just the closest thing to an answer.’23 Her first attempts to slot what she is seeing into a Linnaean system of taxonomy fail, leaving her with the generative yet vague description of ‘fruiting bodies’. What type of bodies? Animal? Vegetal? Alien? The reader is left unsure of how to read what is before her.

  Then, further visual description, followed by a sense of scent: ‘The curling filaments were all packed very close together and rising out from the wall. A loamy smell came from the words along with an underlying hint of rotting honey.’24 As Yogi Hendlin discusses in this volume, scent is a plane of description typically left out of a human sense of communication but central to plant communication. So, too, are pollen and spores, as well as the fertile means of non-seed-bearing plants such as mosses and ferns. The wall writing eventually inscribes the biologist with both. She notices a rotten honey smell before, and even more strongly after, the fruiting bodies on the wall ‘speak’ back to her, using volatile compounds, the language of plants.