Tag Archives: Nature

Final Prompt

Lively Matter: Or the Importance of Being a “Copepod”

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There are myriad words, images, concepts, and sounds that will remain stored within my nuclear-coffer, for this has been both a very disquieting and very electrifying class. Yet, if I had to choose one single concept out of this radioactive pool of abstractions, I would choose Jane Bennett’s “vibrant-matter”, as it encompasses not only the theories of ecology, but also mirrors the aesthetic strokes of the wonderful novels we have read (i.e. Bronsky’s Baba Dunja, Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, and Christa Wolf’s Accident). Bennett takes the idea of a holistic universe and embraces it beyond science-fiction, making natural structures—both dead and alive, animate and inanimate—become the explicit intermingled organism that we have failed to observe during our walks to the park. Her thoughts on ecology make us think of a world that (in Donna Haraway’s terms) appears to be of arachnid nature; of endless and interconnected ramifications. This cannot but remind me of Darwin’s scientific thought, for his view was not severed from the realm of images and aesthetic ponderings, on the contrary, it was utterly linked to them. He truly understood what it meant to inhabit a unified and symbiotic universe:

“As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications” (Darwin 171).

Darwin’s theory is a precedent of Bennett’s conceptual view, for it presents every organism as constituted of the same stuff, hopped on an ongoing wheel of thriving and decay: the dead and broken branches occupy the same space as the fresh and vigorous buds. This is what the novels we read helped to illuminate; through their neon-allure we got to experience a world that has been plunged into a postmodern nuclear design, in which the conventions that encircled the dead and the living, the normal and the abnormal, have finally been subverted. Bronsky’s Baba Dunja, for example, is constantly reminding the reader that the realm of the dead not only pervades the realm of the living, but determines it. The future invades the past just as the past invades the future, making human timelines go berserk: “Our dead are among us, often they don’t even know they’re dead and that their bodies are rotting in the ground” (Bronsky 13). The past (the corpses, the compost) continues to drag its invisible presence towards the future[1], thus mirroring the effects of the nuclear age—a gruesome scenario that obliges us to pay attention to change and to all its wired complexities.

Interestingly, when we pay attention to this continuous motion, and to the coexistence of dead and lively matter, we-readers experience something similar to what Mark Fisher calls the “cognitive weird” (48): i.e., when “the weird” is not “directly seen or experienced”, but when “it is a cognitive effect” produced by depriving reality of certainty. What lingers is an affect that is difficult to pinpoint or differentiate[2]; a mood, one might say, that springs from seeing (although not clearly) the circular web of interdependent structures in nature. This is not unlike what Baba Dunja thinks about while sitting in her radioactive garden: “the village has a history that is intertwined with my history, like two strands of hair in the same braid” (54). Amusingly, her knowledge regarding the omnipresence of historical events and their inextricable relationship with the precious-individual-self, achieves to alienate people—indeed, humans tend to shy away from the idea that their bodies are neither fixed nor immune to being permeated by ghosts and radiation (i.e., death): “We scare people. They seem to believe that the death zone stops at the borders [they] draw on maps” (Bronsky 43).

Consequently, nuclear-age could be thought of as an x-ray of nature’s uncertain flux—through its effects we are able to connect (once again) with the moving materiality of our surroundings. As Darwin states, it would be “rash to assert that characters now increased to their utmost limit, could not, after remaining fixed for many centuries, again vary under new conditions of life” (62). Somewhat ironically, the H-bomb and the malfunction of nuclear-plants have created new conditions of life which cannot go unnoticed, for it is that very obliviousness that has given rise to their empire. Both Darwin in the nineteenth century and Bennett et al. in the twentieth century, have turned their eyes outward, i.e., beyond the tiny kingdom of the human, making visible the invisible. They have contributed to the understanding of ecology through and outside of science.

Fun fact: Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), the German zoologist, marveled at Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, keen on capturing nature’s complex organisms, worked on aesthetic depictions of their form. He, in a way, accomplished through colorful drawings what Bronsky and Tawada accomplished through literature, i.e., to create a “cognitive weird” by unweaving the cloth of beings, nonbeings, and processes that breath under a seemingly shallow reality. The drawing above shows a body of creatures called “copepods”; these are small crustaceans that inhabit both fresh and salt water and are indispensable for the maintenance of global ecology and the carbon cycle—they resemble the earth’s flora as they reduce humans’ carbon emissions while floating in their oceanic habitat. Haeckel’s illustration gives agency to the specks that are interlaced with human life, thus broadening our view of the environment and situating us along the lines of Bennett’s lively matter.

We can certainly feel disturbed by all these overwhelming connections, as well as by the changing of scales and the warping of time; however, this is precisely what I enjoyed most from our classes, for I believe that this “knowledgeable-weird-affect” has the potential to stir our imagination and ward us from a growing hubris. On an age of nuclear energy and coffee chains, the strange and the eerie can help us disrupt our classically disjoint perceptions of nature.

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Notes

[1]Nixon’s “slow violence” is a term that will inevitably come to mind every time this “invisible presence” appears.
[2]As when Baba Dunja says, “I know exactly what is happening to me, but the word of it escapes me” (Bronsky 121).

Works Cited

__Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.
__Bronsky, Alina. Baba Dunja. Europa Editions, 2015.
__Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Modern Library, 2009.
__Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2016.

Images
__Both by Ernst Haeckel.

Prompt 3

Doing the Garden—Digging the Weeds

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Reading this week’s texts was indeed hard. Writing about them seems like an even harder (if not ludicrous) task. For, as John Treat states, what prerogative do we-(foreign)-readers have in talking about such outlandish events? In the midst of irresolution —as to when and where to start writing, or if to write at all— I figured that perhaps the strange and pervasive after-effects that Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories left in my brain’s very tight and tidy web-of-ruminations, provide a productive example of the ways in which literature (fiction or otherwise) can shift how we-readers interact with unfamiliar realities, ushering us into what we might have formerly thought of as unfathomable.

For a hypochondriac such as myself, City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers defied my expectations in a very peculiar way. They certainly presented gruesome and highly disturbing imageries of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s human and non-human landscapes after the atomic-bombs were dropped; however, whilst reading, the kind of imaginative leaps that I experienced were different from those induced by non-nuclear narratives. The latter usually touch the image-based and intellectual wirings of the brain, while the former touched a kernel that triggered a lasting and physical discomfort that had to do with an irrational sense of contamination. The gap between reader and writer, between 1945 and 2019, between Japan and America, was suddenly bridged by a piece of literary fancy that weaved itself not through language, but through bodily uproar, ultimately causing the reader to develop an eerie awareness of her own organic bits, i.e. red corpuscles, hair follicles, thyroid glands.

I would call this experience a defamiliarizing one, for it not only causes dread from gore, but it twists the sense of the real and the imaginary by blurring and problematizing the line that severs the human from the non-human, and the natural from the unnatural. Freud, in the very beginning of his essay Das Unheimliche (1919), states that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1), but which has suddenly lost its recognizable and comforting quality, such as when “something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (14). Following this line of thought, we could say that nuclear-bomb literature recreates a scenario that obliges the reader to transgress its own network of certainties, thus breaking the spell of normality, custom, habit, and language —language! our rational organizer par excellence, as both Christa Wolf and John Treat recognize.

It is interesting to notice that language and other rational (technological) forms of organizing reality are the very tools that help efface humans’ reliable patterns of existence —technology carries within itself an unsolvable paradox, for it breeds both familiarity and unfamiliarity; it embodies, in the midst of disaster, what Freud called das unheimliche. There are two very striking images that help create this dreaded feeling in Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories. The first is when Ōta’s protagonist sees her mother in the cemetery: “the fence had been blown away, so I could see the whole cemetery. Mother was coming and going between cemetery and house” (184). The second is when Hayashi’s Wakako sees people drinking water from the river: “there was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs” (36). In both scenes there is an estrangement from reality caused by a disruption of predictable patterns; progress itself (science) has obliterated the distinctive traits of a controlled/civilized environment: the dead are no longer segregated from the living by a fence, they are now thrust upon each other in a space of ambiguity where the human body (and other bodies as well, such as plants and insects) is no longer sacred, but a defiled conjunction of matter. The scene of the giant centipede, on the other hand, shows a novel and uncanny form of harmony that prevents the eye from distinguishing one organism (i.e. the river) from the other (i.e. humans), thus creating an image of mutated animation in which, again, the sense of humanity as separated from the realm of the non-human or inorganic is violently reversed.

This, I believe, resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of Thing and Object, for every scattered piece of soil and every human cell alters its literal and figurative meaning under the synesthetic light of the atomic-bomb, signaling the moment in which the “Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (2). Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s scenery post-nuclear-reaction is one in which ordinary things —breakfast, stairs, trees, eyes, noses, words, roots, graves— look back at their human “protagonists”, embodying a form of life that can only be achieved through death and decay, not unlike what Wakako projects when she returns to her parents: “You’re beautiful, Waka-san. Like a wax doll… If this beauty was something she had brought home from N City, didn’t it signify death?” (29). There is an almost untraceable presence, as Freud would say, that ought to be absent: death is the unwanted and intrusive guest in the (seemingly) living body of a child.

These are not tales in which the beautiful/bright/strong/fascinating protagonists thrive and conquer the depths of cruelty; on the contrary, they are the theaters-of-truth in which (due to a link missing between common understanding and facts) nothing can be forecast[1]. This, I believe, is what profoundly shakes the reader’s imagination, for we simply cannot “bear being the victims of chance” (Wolf 79). As a result of this, our own bodies begin to look and feel different under the radioactive light of uncertainty, projecting that vulnerable glow we thought only existed in the nonhuman.

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[1] As Treat states: “It is the conspicuous lack of conventional malice and vengeance that, in part, distinguishes the start of the nuclear age. It is an age not enjoined by emotions of epics, the stuff of storytelling from the beginning of our literacy, but rather one effectively voided of them” (17).

Image: From Japanese Manga Hadashi no Gen (1973 – 1974).