The University of Würzburg,
8th-9th November, 2019
By Daphne Laut
For this month’s blog post, first year Master student of English Speaking Cultures, Daphne Laut from the University of Wűrzburg, provides us with her intriguing summary and review of the Haunted Nature symposium held in Germany in November 2019.
I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was metamorphosed to a vine,
Which crawling one and every way
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.
Methought her long small legs and thighs
I with my tendrils did surprise […]
[Herrick, Robert. “The Vine.” Trans. Array The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Vol. 1. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th Edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012. 1758. Print.]
The first verses of the poem “The Vine” by Robert Herrick (1648) tell the story of a creeping entity; something unwelcome that enters the speaker’s body and threatens with its looming touch. In his poem, Nature is inside the human, while the human is overcome with anxiety. The presentation of Nature and plants as threatening and uncanny is an enduring trope in fiction and literature, playing on the basic premise that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (Stacy Alaimo). The active role of the natural environment in our assumed human-centric lifestyles has inspired Simon C. Estok to coin the term “ecophobia” to describe Nature as a source of fear, anxiety, and worry for humans. However, what is it about Nature and the natural world that humans have to fear?
In preparation for the two-day symposium Haunted Nature, ten researchers who work in various fields pertaining to the darker sides of the more-than-human were selected and invited to Germany to share their insights and ideas by Dr. Sladja Blazan (the University of Würzburg) and Professor Sandy Alexandre (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Each shared and discussed their current research, which, though varied, was united by themes of Nature as a haunted and/or haunting space.
The symposium itself took place on the 8th-9th November 2019 at the University of Würzburg, where Dr Blazan lectures in American Literature. Students from all faculties were warmly invited to attend the “haunted presentations” and subsequent discussions inspired by these uncanny, unnerving and, most of all, exciting insights from all around the globe.
The symposium was officially opened by the two hosts, Blazan and Alexandre. Their introduction revolved around questions such as: What is this phenomenon that makes natural spaces seem especially haunted? Which elements are included in fiction to make Nature more fear-inducing, or which elements are left out in order to make our skin crawl? And how have different cultural productions embraced hauntedness and the concept of the afterlife? One of the most distinctive questions that stood out to me was: What is the agency of a haunting entity and why is it so important? According to Blazan, ghosts (a.k.a the haunting entity) act as an entity of entanglement of the past and the present and emerge as a consequence of social and environmental injustices. Every landscape, every sphere and every corner of our world is haunted by a monstrous force due to past ways of life and the mistreatment of natural spaces. Nature is a space overflowing with history and often a muted past which, though silent, we are nevertheless connected to. This presence of repressed social violence has not lost its grasp or released present society from its own continuing and overdue responsibilities. The contrary is in fact the case: this haunted past renders us as desecrators.
The first presenter of the symposium, Dawn Keetley, conducted thorough research in literary works and pop-culture media revolving around crawling mold, tentacular funghi which threatens threatening to reach out and overtake the human body – crawling, slithering and creeping – and to fusing humanity and plantlife. Keetley drew the inspiration for her paper from the omnipresence of the topic of black mold in not only literature and film, but pop culture more broadly – discussing texts such as the book series Rivers of London, the horror movie GET OUT by Jordan Peele, and the Netflix Original series The Haunting of Hill House.
Keetley was quick to connect the quite specific topic of the fungal weird to much broader literary traditions and environmental anxieties. According to her, fictional black mold is driven by the expression of anxiety of escalating climate anxieties and is also related to racial fears – most notably of white extinction, caused by the threat of “blackness” . So what is mold? It is a symbol of the distinction of humanity as it challenges the human as an exceptional species: It is more microbe than human. However, why is literature often speaking of specifically black mold? Keetley explains that the significance of the colour here reflects radicalised fears that “blackness” will eradicate “whiteness”. The genre of “the fungal weird” interestingly gives form to fears of white extinction rather than complete human extinction. Lovecraft also connected black mold to discriminatory notions, in scenarios such as dark bodies – in the form of moldy black soil – overtaking and even attacking white places. Thus, Keetley stressed the importance of deconstructing how and why black mold is increasingly present in our horror narratives.
While Keetley’s paper explored the black mold which insidiously overtakes decaying objects or bodies, Elizabeth Parker’s paper discussed the slow horror of tentacular plants and their potential to cover and overtake living bodies through their invading touch and their networking fungi-esque character. According to her, Ecohorror can be created by the mere imagery of moving – crawling, slithering and creeping – plant-life. Just like a ghost, plants portray a full alterity to humanity; they are unknown, mysterious and move in the blind spot of our vision, conjuring an uncanny unfamiliarity. Parker focused in particular on the idea of being “at one” with Nature – a status potentially achieved when green tentacularity has humankind in its grasp. Discussing Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, she presented various – and nearly always horrifying – visions of Human-Nature-Hybridity and interestingly explored the different implications when it comes to the question of gender and these “unions”. She concluded that, in order to become “one” with Nature, a sort of death is always inevitable. The troubles that humanity has will eventually reach out to us – crawling, slithering, creeping – and haunt us all.
Both Sandy Alexandre and Elmar Schenkel focused in their papers on the effect of time and place in connection to a haunting event. Alexandre introduced Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “optical unconscious” and explored how it relates to the connection between people of Afro-Amercian descent and places in Nature. Schenkel‘s focus remained more on the actual notion of time-traveling and how it affects the different ways in which humanity experiences “hauntedness”. (Simultaneously, bicycles somehow became irrevocably tainted, as Schenkel juxtaposed and compared their invention to the discovery of radio-activity. He illustrated a picture of our dynamic, fast-paced society where the introduction of new concepts to our supersential world happens too quickly for our human brains). One of the most memorable messages from both papers was the knowledge that haunting natural spaces stem from time not being in tune – or in balance – anymore… The rupture between time and space creates a fear that makes your skin crawl…
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet posed the question early on in her paper: “What if Nature takes revenge after humanity messed with its laws…ground mother Earth to dust?” The growing fear and worry that comes with this thought is the concept of “ecophobia”. Monnet introduced two pieces of fiction, The Happening (2008) and The End (2018). Both deal with the subject of the revenge of Nature – through plant agency and intelligence – and confront us with different EcoGothic-Apocalypse scenarios. According to her, the depiction of catastrophes and the aftermath thereof oversimplifies human issues. People inevitably revert to traditional structures with specific roles. As such, an apocalypse planned by Nature could be interpreted as a reset button being pressed in order to keep the planet alive and to regain balance.
Elisabeth Scherer, in her paper, discussed the fascinating Japanese figure of the ubume. The ubume is a ghost that carries her deceased child in her arms and represents the fear in relation to other genders in the Japanese social order but also the public anxieties that arise for women that suffer from a miscarriage. During the description of the ubume character, Scherer drew a picture of an emerging monstrous – almost animalistic – female that is threatening and so foreign to humankind, revealing extremely complex and questionable terrors. In recent decades, the ubume, the ghost that carries her stillborn and cries for the loss of her child, has been incorporated in fiction, anime and art, increasingly featuring in popular culture. The ubume transforms the natural process of pregnancy and reinterprets it up to a point at which women are oppressed by the status of being spiritually dead or demonised.
Leading the symposium further into the direction of EcoFeminsim, Alexandra Hauke illustrated her new perspectives on social equality and the context it shares with the significance of natural surroundings. She focused in particular on the American EcoFeminist Gothic novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, and its recent film adaptation from 2018, in which the tropes of Otherness (and its acceptance), the pressure of domesticity, and the return to wilderness are all reinforced by the bond between women and Nature.
The emerging notion of female empowerment due to the juxtaposition of an artificially constructed culture and the wild image of Nature accounts for different realizations of feminist ideas, which all contrast against the pubic expectation. One of the most important tropes within Shirley Jackson’s novel is the garden that extends the distance between the mansions and the village, which Hauke argues symbolises the female enablement of the two protagonists. It is a symbol for their independence and cultivated nature and grants them access to different versions of power.
Retrieved from: A forest displays a complete alterity to the humanmade artificially created garden. According to Catrin Gersdorf (University of Würzburg), forests are the quintessence of Nature. During the presentation of her paper, Gersdorf emphasised the exploitation of Nature and the restructuring and reinvention of the garden. She defined the latter as an earthly paradise with ghosts of the forest; thus, gardens are ghosts of the arboreal past. The inconvenient truth, however, is the fact that human buildings, structures, and economic greed are detrimental to the forest. The forest will keep haunting modernity and will be, thus, kept in the mind of present day society. Due to changing mindsets and awareness of society today there is hope for change considering the treatment of forests. Destructive modern society is aware of the violence it puts on natural spaces. Hence, their emerging ecological consciousness enables to envision the bigger picture. Progress can only be made on the backs of the entities that are enslaved – may they be human or non-human.
Justin D. Edwards and Johan Höglund both focused in their papers on the era of the Anthropocene as it is handled as a subject of satire, criticism and as a medium to convey the harrowing notion of terror in fiction. The Anthropcene – or: The Era of Man – marks a new age, where humanity is not a mere pawn in the development of Earth, but a geological force for change. Fictional material falling into the genre of the Anthropocene offers options for criticism of everything from livestock animal horror to broader fears of climate change. Both presenters delved deeply into the anxieties concerning the collapse of our carefully sculpted human society and examined how Gothic Horror can ponder future destruction and violent confrontations between humanity, animals, and Nature. Höglund clearly pointed out that Gothic narratives and fiction addresses and creates tropes of the extreme and the obscene in which flying sharks, gory images of a sheep-human-hybrid, and the demonisation of human institutions find an impactful place. Both presenters stressed the versatility of horror and Gothic elements in animal revenge stories, in which the boundaries between humans, Nature, and culture get blurred. As a plant-based eater myself, I noticed with a little smile that the vegan snacks which were offered during the breaks gained a little more popularity among the audience…while the images of monstrous cows and gene-manipulated sheep have probably spoiled the appetite for a cookie covered with dairy milk chocolate.
At the end of the two days, after listening to how natural phenomena can be read through the lens of eco-anxiety, anthropogenic, violent eco-horror or EcoFeminism, one can surely say that the audience felt “re-leafed” that humanity is slowly “branching out” and gaining more awareness that if we clean up after ourselves there will not be a reason to fear wetting our “p[l]ants!”
Copyright 2020 Daphne Laut