14. Janet Browne, ‘Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants’, Isis, 80/4 (1989), 593–621, p. 594. More recent studies have debated how radical the poem’s eroticism should be understood to have been in its own time. Julia List has argued for a fairly ‘conservative’ reception among its readers, understanding ‘its imagery as consistent with prevailing views about sexuality’; see List, ‘Sometimes a Stamen Is Only a Stamen: Sexuality, Women and Darwin’s Loves of the Plants’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 32/3 (2010), 199–218. Tristanne Connolly, who pointedly does not cite List’s earlier article, also looks to contemporary reader responses, but contends that,‘[l]ike pornography, Loves accentuates visual pleasure’, insisting that we take it ‘seriously as an erotic work’; see Connolly, ‘Flowery Porn: Form and Desire in Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants’, Literature Compass, 13/10 (2016), 604–16, p. 605.
15. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, a Poem in Two Parts: Part I, Containing the Economy of Vegetation; Part II, The Loves of the Plants; with Philosophical Notes (New York: Garland, 1978), p. ii.
16. Plant sexuality as imagined in science fiction has perhaps been explored the most thoroughly in relation to Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comic series, which has attracted considerable scholarly attention; most discussions of sex and sexuality in the series focus on the hallucinogenic eroticism of the thirty-fourth issue, Rite of Spring. Most recently, and from a perspective grounded in queer theory, see Robin Alex McDonald and Dan Vena, ‘Monstrous Relationalities: The Horrors of Queer Eroticism and “Thingness” in Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s Swamp Thing’, in Keetley and Tenga, Plant Horror, pp. 197–214.
17. On the anthropophagous plant monsters of the pulps, see T. S. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23/3 (2012): 460–79, especially pp. 464–9. I now recognise that it may have been a mistake to attempt to separate eating from sex, particularly where Darwin is concerned.
18. Mark W. Chase, et al., ‘Murderous Plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin, and Modern Insights into Vegetable Carnivory’, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 161 (2009), 329–56, p. 329.
19. Boyd, Pollinators, no pagination.
20. Russ, ‘Review of The Last Starship from Earth, by John Boyd’, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (September 1969), 24.
21. John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), p. v.
22. As far as I have been able to tell, only the cover illustration for the 1972 Australian printing attempts to depict this tiered structure, which appears only modestly Dantean in the rendering.
23. On the medieval Marian moralisations of Daphne, see Miller, ‘“[I]n plauntes lyf is yhud”’.
24. Boyd, Pollinators, p. 193.
25. Boyd, Pollinators, p. 187.
26. Boyd, Pollinators, p. 193.
27. Octavia Butler, Dawn (New York: Warner Books, 1997), p. 190.
28. Despite the sizeable body of scholarship on Butler’s corpus, scholars have yet to interrogate the full complexity of sex, sexuality, sexual violence, and consent as represented in her works. For a more general overview that ranges across the novels and touches occasionally on consent, see Anca Rosu. ‘Alienating Sex: The Discourse of Sexuality in the Works of Octavia Butler’, in Sherry Ginn and Michel G. Cornelius (eds), The Sex Is Out of This World: Essays on the Carnal Side of Science Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), pp. 34–49.
29. Pat Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, in Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian Attebery (eds), The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 628–32, p. 628.
30. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 628.
31. Diana Pharaoh Francis, ‘The Colonial Feminine in Pat Murphy’s “His Vegetable Wife”, in Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (eds), Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), pp. 77–86, p. 77.
32. Francis, ‘The Colonial Feminine’, p. 79.
33. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 629.
34. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 630.
35. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 631.
36. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 632.
37. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 631.
38. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 632.
39. Murphy, ‘His Vegetable Wife’, p. 631.
40. See Elaine P. Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). An important intermediary, I think, between the perspective that emerges from Miller’s 2002 monograph on nineteenth-century German Idealism and Romanticism and Marder’s philosophical work is represented in the concept of ‘becoming-plant’ explored so incisively by Karen L. F. Houle in ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming? The Case of Becoming-Plant’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, IX.1/2 (2011), 89–116. Also, it is no coincidence that Marder’s work attracted the attention of Luce Irigaray, his correspondence with whom blossomed into the co-authored volume Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
41. Ronald Fraser, Flower Phantoms (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2013), pp. 18, 21, 17.
42. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, pp. 5, 15.
43. Anticipating the perspective adopted by Murphy in ‘His Vegetable Wife’ that links subordination of the vegetal and the feminine, Hubert also expresses an instrumentalist opinion about what women are for: ‘The function of women in the world … is to bear children’ (Fraser, Flower Phantoms, p. 30).
44. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, pp. 18, 19–20.
45. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, pp. 17, 18.
46. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, p. 24.
47. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, p. 19.
48. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, pp. 14, 10.
49. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, pp. 37, 25–6. Compare her similar reflection postulating a part of her self distinct from body or mind that might converse with the vegetable world: ‘Was it possible that the imaginations of the flowers could also go forth from them to enter into conversation with some third part of her, freed in a rare sleep of the body and mind?’ (p. 35).
50. For the most recent set of perspectives on the communicative capacities of plants, see Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan and Patrícia Vieira (eds), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), particularly the contributions by Marder and Timothy Morton.
51. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, p. 68.
52. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, pp. 47, 49.
53. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, p. 47.
54. Fraser, Flower Phantoms, p. 44.
55. Marder, ‘What Are Humans? And Who Are Plants?’, Los Angeles Review of Books, (January 2017), http://philosoplant.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=188 (last accessed 14 May 2019).
56. Marder, ‘What Are Humans?’
6. Alternative Reproduction: Plant-time and Human/Arboreal Assemblages in Holdstock and Han
1. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) (New York and London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 144.
2. Heather Anne Swanson, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt and Elaine Gan, ‘Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies’, in Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (eds), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet/Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. M10.
3. Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1993), p. 25.
4. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, pp. 345–6.
5. Ecophilosophers interested in vegetal temporality have not necessarily linked temporality to reproduction; see groundbreaking plant-studies work by Matthew Hall, Karen L. F. Houle and Jeffrey Nealon. Within the speculative-fiction canon, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle texts ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’ (19
71) and The Word for World is Forest (1972) are touchstones for imagining differences between human and vegetal temporalities, but do not directly address reproductive time.
6. See Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), which has inspired recent work on ‘queer temporalities’ challenging the normative model of time oriented to reproduction. Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) extends Edelman’s work in ecocritical terms.
7. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 94.
8. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 3.
9. The dissemination of time-lapse photography from the second decade of the twentieth century encouraged general recognition of the different-from-human temporalities of botanical processes. Against what he shows to be the failure of the Western metaphysical tradition to register plants as temporal beings, Marder argues that ‘the meaning of vegetal being is time’ (italics mine) (Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 95).
10. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 93.
11. Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 12–13.
12. Though clearly related to the Jungian archetype, Holdstock’s ‘mythago’ is a more complex concept. Arising from the collective unconscious, the mythago’s appearance and nature are modified by the individual human mind interacting with the Wood’s mythago-generating field. See W. A. Senior, ‘The Embodiment of Abstraction in the Mythago Novels’, in Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy, The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), p. 190.
13. Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
14. For a full Genettian narratological analysis of how proleptic diegetic embeddings are disguised as analeptic metadietetic embeddings in Lavondyss, see Vera Benczik, ‘Embedded narratives in Lavondyss and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness’, in Morse and Matolcsy, The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock, pp. 116–17.
15. Robert Holdstock, Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988), p. 327.
16. Holdstock, Lavondyss, p. 328.
17. Holdstock, Lavondyss, p. 328.
18. Holdstock, Lavondyss, pp. 329–30.
19. Holdstock, Lavondyss, p. 346.
20. Holdstock, Lavondyss, p. 353.
21. Holdstock, Lavondyss, p. 318.
22. Holdstock, Lavondyss, pp. 338, 339. 357.
23. Holdstock, Lavondyss, p. 353.
24. John Clute, Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews (Ann Arbor: Liverpool University Press, 1995), p. 111.
25. This passage is cited by Han as a crucial influence on her novel in almost every English-language interview addressing The Vegetarian. I have been unable to find its source in the limited English-language translations of Yi Sang’s extensive writing.
26. Han Kang, The Vegetarian (2007), trans. Deborah Smith (London: Portobello Books, 2014).
27. ‘The Fruit of My Woman’ was first published in South Korea. Han Kang, ‘The Fruit of My Woman’, trans. Deborah Smith, Granta 133 (2016), https://granta.com/the-fruit-of-my-woman (last accessed 7 August 2019).
28. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 7.
29. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 5.
30. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 7.
31. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 7.
32. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 7.
33. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 8.
34. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 8.
35. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 8.
36. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 8.
37. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 8.
38. Han, ‘The Fruit’, Section 8.
39. In her “Translator’s Note”, Deborah Smith notes that this story ‘can also be read as part of the discourse of “ecoambiguity” cutting across East Asian literatures in response to local and regional environmental crises … Nature in all its glorious fecundity is everywhere in this story, throwing into sharp relief both the sealed, sterile apartment space – and the couple’s childlessness’ (Granta 133 (2016), https://granta.com/the-fruit-of-my-woman/ (last accessed 7 August 2019)).
40. Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 237.
41. Of course, grafting does not lead to the genetic mixing in a new, third being that results from sexual reproduction. I thank Ruth Finkelstein and Giulia Pacini for their comments on the visual analogy discussed here. See Pacini’s article on the early modern connotations for grafting: ‘Grafts at Work in Late Eighteenth-Century French Discourse’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 34/2 (2010), 1–22.
42. Margaret McFall-Ngai, ‘Noticing Microbial Worlds: The Post-Modern Synthesis in Biology’, in Tsing et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, p. M55.
43. McFall-Ngai, ‘Noticing Microbial Worlds’, p. M52.
44. McFall-Ngai, ‘Noticing Microbial Worlds’, p. M55.
45. See the illustrations of post-Darwinian ‘trees of life’ in David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), and the digitised schemas in Manuel Lima’s The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014).
46. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 21ff.
47. I thank Hugh Cook, Melody Jue and Giulia Pacini and the editors of this volume for valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.
7. Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume
1. The Satya Yuga, or Golden Age, in Hindu and Vedic mythology, is the highest era of the four, in which no striving or sacrifices are necessary for attainment, similar to Plato’s ‘perfect year’ in the Timaeus. Each of the four ages – the Satya (Golden), Treta (Silver), Dwapara (Bronze) and Kali (Iron) – corresponds to a change in celestial alignments. According to Sri Yukteswar’s 1894 The Holy Science, which revised traditional understandings of the duration of each Yuga, each age lasts 2,700 years, with a 300-year ‘transition’ period between one period and the next.
2. See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
3. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
4. While as organisms, we are endowed with certain capabilities and limitations, the emphasis of Western culture since modernism on the visual, on the individual and on separation – unique both geographically and temporally (Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 33/2–3 (2010), 61–83) – is precisely what plant-becoming softens and transmogrifies (Marder, Plant-Thinking).
5. Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 321. Subsequent references to this edition of the novel will be given in brackets in the text. The novel is also available as Jitterbug Perfume (Harpenden: No Exit Press, 2001).
6. See A. Alpi and others, ‘Plant Neurobiology: No Brain, no Gain?’, Trends in Plant Science, 12/4 (2007), pp. 135–6; František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso and Dieter Volkmann (eds), Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life (New York: Springer, 2006); E. D. Brenner and others, ‘Plant Neurobiology: An Integrated View of Plant Signaling’, Trends in Plant Science, 11/8 (2006), 413–19; Anthony Trewavas, Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
7. Michael Marder and Yogi Hendlin, ‘Communication’, in Michael Marder (ed.), Grafts: Writings on Plants (Minneapolis: University of Minnesot
a Press, 2016), pp. 93–6.
8. František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso, ‘Deep Evolutionary Origins of Neurobiology: Turning the Essence of “Neural” Upside-Down’, Communicative & Integrative Biology, 2/1 (2009), 60–5, p. 60.
9. Baluška and Mancuso, ‘Deep Evolutionary Origins’, 61.
10. Brenner and others, ‘Plant Neurobiology’.
11. Compare with Marder, Plant-Thinking.
12. Michael Marshall, ‘Unique Life Form is Half Plant, Half Animal’, Zoologger, 13 January 2012, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21353-zoologger-unique-life-form-is-half-plant-half-animal (retrieved 5 December 2017).
13. This is very similar to what political theorist Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘thinking without a banister’ (Hannah Arendt, ‘Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt’, in Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), pp. 443–75, p. 473.
14. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds), Weak Thought, trans. Peter Carravetta (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
15. Vattimo quoted in Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. xii.
16. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).
17. Baluška and others, Communication in Plants; Monica Gagliano, Stefano Mancuso and Daniel Robert, ‘Towards Understanding Plant Bioacoustics, Trends in Plant Science, 17/6 (2012), 323–5; Monica Gagliano and others, ‘Out of Sight but Not out of Mind: Alternative Means of Communication in Plants’, PLOS ONE, 7/5 (2012), e37382.
18. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002).
19. Michael Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’, The New Yorker, 15 December 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant (retrieved 5 December 2017).
20. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
21. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
22. The so-called Verstehen-Erklären debates in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s are the forerunners of the Anglophone science wars. The hard sciences sought to explain the world, while the humanities and social sciences sought to understand it. Biology, however, requires both. One critique in this debate, is that the natural sciences sought explanation (Erklären) without understanding (Verstehen). For more on the Verstehen/Erklären controversy, see Karl-Otto Apel, Die Erklären:Verstehen-Kontroverse in transzendentalpragmatischer Sicht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
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