Finally, the speaker and reader have been pulled so far from the words that their surface meaning is forgotten. The words themselves are transformed into another world, one that supports life beyond ours: ‘This miniature forest swayed, almost imperceptibly, like sea grass in a gentle ocean current. Other things existed in this miniature ecosystem. Half-hidden by the green filaments, most of these creatures were translucent and shaped like tiny hands embedded by the base of the palm.’25 The biologist’s vision moves through levels of plant being to finally end at an anthropomorphic creature, a return to herself. It is at this point, when her looking and the description of her looking have become protean, that the spores on the wall puff onto and into her, hastening her transformation into something else, something less her self as she knew it, as an individual, cut off from the world around her by both species and by personality, but something more imbricated with the ecosystem. As is so often the case, to borrow from James Elkins, ‘Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.’26 Through her ekphrastic envisioning, the biologist trades time and type with the fruiting bodies, her borders unravelling in its borderless expanses. The taxonomic divisions forged by her training suddenly matter less; biology, as a discipline, is predicated on such divisions: the biologist, as she is solely known, predicates her identity on such divisions. And yet, what she realises after her ekphrastic divagation from her intended path down the tunnel, is that the demarcations she had so carefully constructed all led back to one another, the ‘tiny hands embedded by the base of the palm’ waving at her from, not exactly a shared sense of humanity but an augmented one, one that reminds us that we know less than we often like to believe we do about the world around us.
‘Ecological Dislocation’, Fragmentation and Solastalgia
Failing to interrogate the way that we visualise plants can lead to what Matthew Hall names ‘ecological dislocation’, a practice of severing that falsely places us outside the lines of sight, denying our status as members of an ecosystem.27 More than that, such hubris can lead major industrialised nations to leave climate accord agreements, dismantle their environmental protection agencies and sell off vast swathes of protected land, all the while striving to further separate people with divisive words or even walls. This is the point at the heart of Ursula K. Le Guin’s under-discussed novelette ‘The Diary of the Rose’ (1974), for which she won and refused the Nebula Award. In a 2003 interview with Writer’s Chronicle, Le Guin states that ‘The Diary of the Rose’ is one of a number of stories that ‘arose out of rage and fear at the institutionalised cruelty and stupidity of national governments – abroad and at home. None of them is more than slightly exaggerated. It is hard for a story to come close to the terrible reality of government-directed punishment of dissent and government-directed torture.’28 Through the titular rose made manifest via a government-ordered mind probe, Le Guin’s protagonist finds a way around ontological limitations enforced by totalitarian holds on life.
In this curiously titled epistolary story, a psychoscopist at a National Psychology Bureau is tasked with probing into her patients’ (actually political prisoners) thoughts: she does so by viewing the way they visualise the world. The text opens with its own origin story, narrating how the psychoscopist’s supervisor had recommended she keep a diary to remind herself of observations, ‘notice errors and learn from them, and observe progress in or deviations from positive thinking, and so keep correcting’ her work.29 She marches along, a willing servant of Omelas, until she peers into the mind of Flores Sordes, an academic who had asked too many questions. Sordes first attempts to repel her advances into his mind by visualising a hyperrealistic rose. She responds with shock: ‘I have never seen any psychoscopic realisation, not even a drug-induced hallucination, so fine and vivid as that rose.’30 Sordes visualises other things, of course, but this first image is the one that sticks with the scopist. It is because of her entrance into his mind, in part due to his ability to visualise the rose as he did, that the psychoscopist realises the part she has played in toiling for a fascist regime, bent on erasing dissent and dissenters’ minds through electric shocks. She begins to see the world more multidimensionally after being confronted with the veracity of his botanical visions, her world-view irrevocably shredded: ‘The shadows of one petal on another, the velvety damp texture of the petals, the pink colour full of sunlight, the yellow central crown – I am sure the scent was there if the apparatus had olfactory pickup – it wasn’t like a mentifact but a real thing rooted in the earth, alive and growing, the strong thorny stem beneath it.’31 As she comes to identify with her patient, she comes to identify with his visualisation as well; she questions the sovereign and disciplinary power of the state that claims the power to erase his mind, and with it, his subversive powers, turning him, as we say metaphorically, vegetal.
The institutions around the psychoscopist set forth to define members of society and through those definitions, control. Her agency is so caught up with panopticonic surveillance of the lines it has drawn that it fails to see other ways of drawing them, outside their own system. Ultimately, the aptly-named Rosa identifies with the rose Sordes envisioned, a form of life unconsidered by the totalitarian state in which she feels stuck. Thus, it is into the identity of a plant that Rosa escapes, circumventing the regime’s constraints on which lives are worth living, which minds worth saving, surrounding her. The last entry in her diary before her planned incineration of it shows her transformation. She writes, ‘I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched, the winter rose.’32 The text grants writerly agency to the titular rose and, through Flores Sordes’s visions, Rosa comes to see herself as a thorn, upending the hierarchies of power by which she had been held in place and suggesting, in their place, a way of subverting the system of oppression – through a new conception of valued life. She comes to see in this reflected rose a way to move beyond the stubbornly ‘human’ and ‘civilised’ that kept her following the rules of her society. It wasn’t her glimpse of the rose that changed her, it was her processing of it, her ekphrastic epistolary encounter with it which confronted the things she took for granted: her boss’s authority, the rightness of her work, her right to violate another. Through her sudden, complete and detailed vision of a category of life we fail to recognise aesthetically or as worthy of human consideration, Rosa is able to see not just her patient in a new light, but her own inherent revolutionary possibilities. They allow her to move between the vegetal and the human, the supposedly inert and the supposedly active, to revisualise her own unexpected potential, a rose not in bloom, not yet, but full of possibility.
A similar flowering occurs in William Gibson’s ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’, his first published story, which appeared just three years after Le Guin’s ‘Diary of the Rose’; it resurfaced in his seminal collected volume Burning Chrome in 1986. In ‘Fragments’, a man named Parker contends with the emptiness left by the recent departure of a lover. He muses on jettisoned bits and bobs: a broken sandal strap, a partially wiped Assisted Sensory Perception (ASP) cassette (virtual reality tape) of herself in Greece from before she’d met him and a hologram postcard of a rose.33 No mention is made of what is written on the postcard or if it is blank, a tantalising lacuna. Here, in ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’, the protagonist finds himself, like the postcard which he runs through a shredder, shattered. He muses on fragments of his life, hologrammatically hovering over the scene. As he drifts to sleep, there is a moment of hope that his splinters will cohere, but he loses consciousness before the possibility comes to fruition:
Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he‘ll never know – stolen credit cards – a burned out suburb – planetary conjunctions of a stranger – a tank burning on a highway – a flat packet of drugs – a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
The fragmentation in form and content found here and throughout ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’ is nothing new for those familiar with Gibson’s works. Some have described his style, and the cyberpunk genre that arose from it, as a shattered vision of images ‘condensed, sharpened, creating an optical surface’ into a ‘glitterspace’.35 In an essay aptly titled ‘Literary MTV’, George Slusser names this style ‘optical prose’, a style marked by ‘a matrix of images no longer capable of connecting to form the figurative space of mythos or story’ that supports Marshall McLuhan’s notion that ‘the printed word … has succumbed to the fragmenting speed, the instantaneity and monodimensionality of the visual image.’36
Despite the legendary status of Burning Chrome, ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’ has been only scantily discussed from myriad angles, though most often related to the fragmentation of the self in cyberpunk.37 In his squib on the subject, after unearthing the short story as an early precursor to Gibson’s later use of sleep-aid technology, Neil Easterbrook beautifully comments that ‘Fragments’ ‘provokes a meditation on the fragmented self, and ends in a mournful nostalgia for a lost wholeness that cannot be regained’.38 It is that ‘mournful nostalgia for a lost wholeness’ on which I wish to hover here, though whether or not it can be regained may be up to the reader. Technocentric modernity is often paired with a sense of loss: even as the wonders of cyberspace are gained, the more earthly Edens are left behind – or shattered, ravaged in their service; rare minerals are stripped from lands, usually far from where the latest tech they land in speeds toward planned obsolescence and, probably, an increasingly toxic landfill.39 Paweł Frelik glosses ‘Fragments’ as a rare example of energy insecurity in Gibson’s work, and, indeed, it is central to the text.40 In it, the protagonist frequently experiences brown-outs, synaptic breaks between his devices and the power grid, perhaps related to the deforestation in which he had participated before moving to the city or perhaps in conjunction with the mining required to sustain his technologically advanced lifestyle, certainly in tandem with his own severed sense of self.
Elsewhere, I have discussed the turn towards so-called smart, urban spaces and the disconnection from greenery typically found in Gibson’s cyberpunk-inflected work (and his turn from this in his more recent work The Peripheral (2014)).41 In such spaces, as in many of our own, greenery has become separated from the human, banalised, domesticated; it is reined in, in gardens and parks, tamed in lawns, held in highway dividers. Perhaps nowhere in his oeuvre is the cost of this dislocation more resonant than in ‘Fragments of a Hologram Rose’; it becomes clear not only in the pre-sleep thoughts that compose the text but also through the descriptions of the nigh paradoxically-named eponymous object, the text’s shredded hologram rose. Lance Olsen almost gets to the crux of it: ‘We are never able to see the total picture of each other, the world, or even ourselves. We must learn to live with pieces in the absences of wholes.’42 Here, though, there is also the suggested possibility of unification, the visualisation of the pieces coming together synecdochically, and more: ‘Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose.’43 Part of that whole, is, of course, not only the human, not only technology, but the rest of the living and non-living world that surrounds us, including plants, here typified by a spectral rose, haunting the page: ‘he sees himself the rose’, after all. It is through the rose’s mediation and the reflections it engenders that the reader, if not the protagonist who succumbs to sleep, is left to wonder about the etymology of fragmentation in our age of the Anthropocene: are we so quick to slip into technobliss that we have lost sight of our constituent parts and the way technology can segment us from ourselves, from one another, and from other modes and means of life?
Parker comes to embody what mid-twentieth-century environmentalist Elyne Mitchell warned of in Soil and Civilization (1946): when people break ties with the ecological systems surrounding them, ‘the break in this unity is swiftly apparent in the lack of “wholeness” in the individual person.’44 They become, in other words, fragmented. More recently, the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’, which merges ‘solace’, ‘desolation’ and ‘nostalgia’, in an effort to name the anxieties surrounding climate change.45 Albrecht writes:
Solastalgia is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’46
Though his term was coined in 2005 to express anxieties spawned by climate change rather than relocation, the acid rain which Parker runs into after his departing lover and the tree stumps of his past, envisioned in the eponymous fragments, as well as his sense of dislocation in time, space and, momentarily, species, point to similar climactic effects to those we are currently experiencing more than forty years after Gibson first penned his story.
Gibson never lingers on the actual physical visuality of the rose; he does not rhapsodise its shredded corolla; the reader never discovers the varietal of the rose or its stage of bloom. The most the reader finds out is that ‘the postcard is a white light reflection hologram of a rose’ and that as Parker shreds it the ‘unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments’.47 That descriptive elision should exempt this 1977 case from inclusion in my examination, even by Heffernan’s wide definition, shared at the beginning of this essay.
But it is a ‘vivid description of a thing’, which Arnold Kemp allows per his expansive definition of ekphrasis on the SFMOMA website; moreover, the ekphrastic possibility of the rose lies not just in the rose itself but in the ‘thousand fragments’ that allow the central (only) character to muse upon his (at least somewhat) more verdant past before he entered the viciously polluted city and became mired in the ASP tapes to which he is addicted at the time of the story’s telling. Gone now are the creek beds he had run through as a youth, bent on his freedom from corporate indenture, and the tree stump where he had shed an old skin; now he has only virtual beaches and someone else’s memories of Greece. Gibson’s protagonist less successfully shakes off ‘plant blindness’ and is thus less successful in emancipating himself from his techno-urban thrall than Le Guin’s. The rose itself is even almost secondary. Almost. But while the protagonist is left to stew in his own delta waves as the ASP overtakes him, the reader is not. And the refracted rose is left hovering around them, reconnecting the (never actually severed) human and natural realms, the ‘ecological dislocation’ for a moment cohered as ‘he sees himself the rose’. For both Le Guin and Gibson, ekphrasis allows Mitchell’s ‘resident alien’, in both instances representative roses, to rise. It also allows for an expanded sense of self, as in VanderMeer’s and Blackwood’s texts, that ‘accommodates’ Kristeva’s multiplicative other as it spreads. Fragmentation becomes augmentation.
‘Ekphrasis continues to intrigue us’, as Bartsch and Elsner claim, ‘because it draws attention to the interpretive operations we feel compelled to carry out on it when we have ceased to disregard it as automatically devoid of meaning.’48 Because ekphrasis is the literalisation of an interpretation, it is a pedagogical moment in which the reader is informed how to see in step with the dominant ideologies surrounding them. However, an ekphrastic encounter can also invite the viewer to reject self-perpetuating systems of power by refracting the quotidian: through the mediated pause it provides, they may see what they had not previously observed – or had not allowed themselves to observe. When paired with speculative fiction, the interpretative operations of
ekphrasis are powerfully political, particularly when tuned to a vegetal key, reanimating that which we take for granted as safe, sessile, if not controlled then controllable. The sense of otherness, of alienness, that ekphrastic botanical narratives provoke is of especial salience in today’s world, threatened, as it is, by a sense of nature run amok: the fantasy of nature as a wild thing tameable in gardens and plantations through human domination has been (perhaps forever) cast aside as catastrophic climate change racks the planet and makes us wonder how to recover from our own ecological dislocation, our own self-induced alienation.49
Selected Bibliography
Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).
Canavan, Gerry and Kim Stanley Robinson (eds), Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014).
Chamovitz, Daniel, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3–25.
Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28/2 (Winter 2002), 369–418.
Gaard, Greta, Critical Ecofeminism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).
Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan and Patrícia Vieira (eds), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Hall, Matthew, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
Hallé, Francis, In Praise of Plants (1999) (Portland, OR and Cambridge: Timber Press, 2002).
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